When a woman in Rayburn answered a knock at her door at 7:30 AM, she had no idea that an escaped inmate was on the other side of it. Even worse, the man was thought to have murdered a woman after his escape.
Fortunately, the woman recognized Robert Crissman from his picture on the news, quickly shut the door and locked it, then called 911. Dispatcher Nelda Martin took the call and managed to keep the woman calm while the police were dispatched to her house.
Meanwhile, Crisman fled in a pickup truck thought to have been stolen from the woman. Thanks to tips from the public, the police apprehended the man at 8:40 AM when he tried to ram a police vehicle after a 57-mile pursuit that ended in Boggs Township.
Crissman had visited individuals who knew him, but the authorities don’t believe they knew that he was an escaped convict.
Strangely, Crissman only had a few days left of his jail sentence when he walked away from a work supervision program. He had gone to jail for a nonviolent drug conviction and came out as a suspected murderer on the run. In the incident that led to Crissman being charged with murder, he surveyed a home as the man of the house left for work and entered just minutes later. When the man arrived home from work, he found his girlfriend dead in the bathroom.
The coroner ruled the woman’s death a homicide and said that she had been strangled. The police think that something went wrong while Crissman was there that led him to murder her. Crissman now faces charges of murder, theft, and aggravated assault.