By Jim Hannah
The Cincinnati Enquirer

CRESCENT SPRINGS - Police across the Tristate are searching for a man wanted for abducting a woman from a gas station along Interstate 75 in Tennessee before robbing her and running away in Northern Kentucky.

The 36-year-old Alabama woman, whom police are not identifying, says she was kidnapped from a Knoxville-area gas station and restaurant in the early-morning hours Monday and ordered to drive to Northern Kentucky.

She said a man with a Glock-like pistol forced himself into the passenger seat of her 1999 Ford pickup truck and ordered her to drive.

Three-and-a-half hours and 245 miles up I-75 later, the woman got off the interstate at the Buttermilk Pike exit in Northern Kentucky.

That's when the man pointed his gun at her head, took $500 from her pickup and ran toward the Crescent Springs Community Park off Buttermilk Pike near the interstate.

Police said it was unclear why the man decided to go to Crescent Springs.

The suspect is described as a white man with graying hair and a graying beard.

The woman said the man had an extremely wrinkled face.

He was wearing a dark green long-sleeve shirt, dirty and ragged dark blue pants and brown boots. He was carrying a dark-colored backpack.

After the man ran from her car, the woman drove to a gas station on Buttermilk Pike and called police about 9:30 a.m. Monday.

Crescent Springs Police Lt. Howard Russell said the woman was on her way to Huntington, Ind., where she had enrolled in a truck-driving school.

Russell said the woman was shaken by the ordeal, but unharmed.

Authorities took fingerprints from the pickup.

E-mail jhannah@enquirer.com