In the winter of 1995, a little girl in Ohio would vanish while walking to school. She would not be found until two months into the following year.
Thirteen-year-old Barbara Barnes was a quiet, conscientious child who volunteered at the Salvation Army and was a favorite of her teachers at Harding Middle School in Steubenville, where she was an eighth-grader.
Apparently, Barbara had become a much more circumspect child since her father had been murdered in 1989. She rarely spoke about the crime, and kept to herself in general, not sharing a great deal about her life with her classmates.
On the morning of December 7th, Barbara was walking to school, as she did every morning, along with several other children who only lived blocks away from the school building. Apparently the girl was abducted at some point before she reached the school, though no one seemed to realize she had disappeared until about three o’clock that afternoon, when she failed to return home. Her mother had not received the several phone calls from the school administration informing her that Barbara had not shown up for classes.
But on February 22nd, a surveyor working in an area near the Pittsburgh International Airport found the partially frozen remains of the murdered teenager in a dry creek bed. She had been raped and strangled.
Initially, suspicion fell on the child’s uncle, Louis Boyce, incidentally also a person of interest in the 1989 shooting death of Barbara’s father. The child’s body was found near Boyce’s property, and he allegedly failed a polygraph test when questioned about the homicide. However, no physical evidence could be found that linked him to either crime, and he was never charged.
Authorities generally believed that Barbara had been killed by someone local to the area, and perhaps someone responsible for other, similar murders. At least one researcher has attempted to make the case that Barbara Barnes might have been slain by the same assailant who kidnapped and murdered ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic in 1989. This individual was speculated to be an Akron man by the name of Robert Anthony Buell, who murdered twelve-year-old Tina Harmon in 1981, eleven-year-old Krista Harrison in 1982, and ten-year-old Debora Kaye Smith in 1983.
Buell was executed in Lucasville, Ohio in September of 2002. It is unknown whether he was involved in the death of Barbara Barnes.
Crime Immemorial 