Killer executed 20 years after strangling girl

A man convicted of abducting an 11-year-old girl from a park 20 years ago and then raping and strangling her was executed today.

Robert Buell failed in eleventh hour appeals that were based on objections to the hypnotising of witnesses at his trial.

His execution was Ohio’s fifth in three years.

Across the United States, state and federal authorities have executed 800 inmates since the Supreme Court ended the moratorium on the death penalty in 1976.

Buell, a former Akron city planner, claimed he was innocent and that there was no eyewitness or DNA evidence connecting him to the crime. Prosecutors said fibres on the girl’s body matched fibres taken from carpet in Buell’s van.

The crime went unsolved for 15 months until a 28-year-old woman, who was abducted at gunpoint and raped and tortured at Buell’s home, escaped and ran to a neighbour’s house.