Gary Allan Robbins was born on May 9, 1935. He lived in Squirrel Hill and later Murrysville, near Pittsburgh, and worked as a door-to-door insurance salesman. He was divorced, and a tournament bridge player.
He approached women who were alone at home, at their own front doors, with a reason for being there. Contemporary reports say he tied his victims up, assaulted them and killed them.
Fred Abdalla, the sheriff of Jefferson County, Ohio, linked him to the abduction and murder of Christine Campbell in 1987, and to the abduction and sexual assault of a woman in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Abdalla also considered him a suspect in killings in Michigan and Maryland. Published reports of 1988 say police suspected him of dozens of murders across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio and Michigan. He was never charged with any of them.
The reason for that is the reason the case ended. On the evening of April 13, 1988 he followed Mary Ann Marker home from a grocery store in Somerset County. At about twenty to nine the next morning he knocked at her door in rural Brothersvalley and asked for directions to the Maple Festival. 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, and managed to lock the interior door of the house. She got a description of his car as he drove off.
That description was what police had. They pursued him, there was an exchange of fire on Route 219 in Somerset County, and he shot himself. He was fifty-two.
Marker was the wife of a state trooper, David Marker. She said afterwards that she had pushed it to the back of her mind for some years before recognising that she needed help, and a reporter who spent years on the case called her the bravest person he had met. Sheriff Abdalla's summary of the rest was that God only knows how many women fell victim to him.
A book published in 2018, The Secret Life of a Bridge Player by Paula Niapas, sets out investigators' suspicions and the author's own belief that he was responsible for sexual assaults and murders in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia between 1970 and 1988. That span is eleven years longer at the front than the one this archive carries, and it is an author's contention rather than a finding.
Three corrections to this entry as it stood. It described him as a travelling salesman whose victims were women in houses advertised for sale, and said that presenting himself as a prospective buyer gave him a pretext to be alone with them. He sold insurance door to door, and the pretext in the one attack described in detail was asking directions. Both details appear to have come from a compressed reference-work summary rather than from the case. The entry also gave the toll as four or more and said that no victim was named anywhere; a murder victim, an assault victim and a survivor are all named above. And his name was carried as Gary Robbins; the record gives Gary Allan Robbins, and some reporting Gary Allen.