On the evening of April 13, 1988, Mary Ann Marker came out of the Somerset Supermarket in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, got into her car and drove home, and a man followed her. At about twenty to nine the next morning he rang the doorbell of her house in rural Brothersvalley. As she opened the inner door she turned the lock on the screen door, and he asked her for directions; she remembered him asking the way to Meyersdale, and other reports say to the Maple Festival there. She held the door shut and would not let him in. He drew a .22 pistol and shot her in the left cheek. She went down on her knees, got the inner door locked, and saw his car as he drove away.
Her description of the car was what the police had. They pursued him, there was an exchange of fire on Route 219, and he shot himself. He was Gary Allan Robbins, of Murrysville, born on May 9, 1935, a divorced door-to-door insurance salesman who had lived in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh and was a tournament bridge player. He was fifty-two; contemporary reports gave his age as fifty-three.
Two weeks after his death about two dozen investigators from Ohio, Maryland, Michigan and Pennsylvania went to the state police barracks in Greensburg to look at what troopers had taken from his car and his home. According to the Pittsburgh Press, it included three pistols, a nail-studded belt, duct tape, ropes and handcuffs. Newspaper reports of 1988 said police suspected him of dozens of murders across the four states, and described a man who tied his victims up, assaulted them and killed them.
Fred Abdalla, the sheriff of Jefferson County, Ohio, worked on the case from the evidence and from information he gathered independently in May 1988. He linked Robbins to the abduction and murder of Christine Campbell in 1987 and to the abduction and sexual assault of a woman from Butler County, Pennsylvania, and he suspected him of killing women in Michigan and Maryland. "God only knows how many women fell victim to this guy," Abdalla said. None of it was ever tested in a court. Because Robbins was dead, there was no charge, no trial and no finding of guilt in any case, and the record of what he did beyond the attack on Marker rests on the investigators' conclusions.
Mary Ann Marker was the wife of a state trooper, David Marker. For years she pushed what had happened to the back of her mind, she said in 2018, and then realized she needed professional help; her husband said it had been a struggle for the whole family. "I know God had to be with me that day," she said. "He had his hand on me or I would not be here."
In 2018 Paula Niapas, who had tracked down Marker and investigators in several states, published The Secret Life of a Bridge Player, setting out their suspicions and her own belief that Robbins committed sexual assaults and murders in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia from 1970 until his death. She called Marker the bravest person she had ever met. The span and the list of states are the author's contention, not a finding. Robbins's middle name appears as Allan in most reporting and Allen in some. He is buried at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in Pittsburgh.