The Cogir Potomac Senior Living facility in Maryland, US, where Robert Fuller, 87, was shot dead. Photo / Google Maps
More than halfway through the crime novel he wrote, Robert Fuller describes the frustration of a detective locked in a mystery.
“He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Now what?’ he said aloud.”
It has been a week since someone made their way into Fuller’s assisted-living apartment in Potomac, Maryland, police say, and fatally shot the 87-year-old millionaire in the head.
Authorities released surveillance video last weekend of a suspect walking on the facility’s grounds on the morning of February 14 around the time Fuller was killed.
The video shows the back of a slender person wearing dark pants with long dark hair flowing over a yellowish checkered shirt. Investigators hope someone will recognise the shirt or the person’s gait, produced as if they’re favouring one foot.
Detectives don’t know if the person depicted is a man or woman, was acting alone or what their motive was. “It’s the mystery of the mystery writer,” said one law enforcement officer talking about the case.
Over the last seven days, investigators have interviewed residents of the Cogir of Potomac facility, some of whom affectionally called Fuller, a Navy veteran, “the captain”. They’ve subpoenaed companies for records and collected potential evidence from Fuller’s third-floor apartment.
“We do believe Mr Fuller was targeted,” said Captain Sean Gagen, commander of the Montgomery County police department’s major crimes division.
“Somebody made a conscious decision to make their way into this facility and go to Mr Fuller’s room and shoot him.
“Why someone would target Mr Fuller is a primary focus of our investigation,” Gagen added.
“It’s a challenge from the standpoint that Mr Fuller seems like a person who didn’t have any enemies at all. It’s important for us to get a better sense of who was in his life around the time of the murder and what events were taking place. Sometimes you just never know what you will uncover.”
Fuller’s friends in Augusta, Maine, where he lived for much of his life, remain stunned.
“We’re all puzzled up here about it,” said Dave Rollins, the city’s former mayor who now serves in Maine’s House of Representatives.
“Bob was very confident, very opinionated. But I never knew him to have been nefarious, creating grudges, settling grudges. He was not in that realm at all.”
That Fuller self-published a crime novel, Unnatural Deaths, in 2009, registered to Rollins and other friends as typical of his colourful life, one defined by seemingly opposing forces often meshed together: Blunt formality, organised mischief, stubborn generosity.
The opening acknowledgments of his book captured a bit of this.
“Writing a first novel is, I imagine, like giving birth to a barbed wire-baby,” he wrote. “Like any author should, I hasten to confess that any favour which this work may find among the reading public is largely due to the help which I received.”
Fuller was born in 1938 and earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
He moved to Augusta and worked as an assistant attorney-general, according to his longtime friend Bill Bridgeo, a former city manager there.
Fuller transitioned into private practice while working a parallel career with the US Navy Reserve as a judge advocate general’s officer.
He’d sometimes arrive at social events dressed in his formal Navy whites with a ceremonial sword, inside its scabbard, attached to the hip. “He was old school,” Bridgeo said.
Fuller dove into local causes. “He would contact me fairly frequently about ideas he had, what he could do for the community,” Bridgeo said. “He had a substantial family fortune he had inherited that he drew upon to support the causes he believed in.”
Among the recipients: Hospitals, schools, scholarships, veterans, a historic fort and the YMCA.
Rollins, the former mayor, said he negotiated with Fuller over civic projects - finding him both easy to deal with and difficult to influence. “He had a wit, and he got your wit,” Rollins said. “He was an outgoing, flamboyant person.”
Deftly proud of his lineage and their extended families, Fuller commissioned a bronze statue of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, an Augusta native, to be erected outside the Kennebec County Courthouse in 2013.
He was there to watch it lowered by a crane onto a big granite cube as he tried to deflect attention. “It’s Melville Weston Fuller’s Day, not mine,” he told the Kennebec Journal.
The justice sat on a chair, greeting visitors with words inscribed in Latin for “Justice is the guardian of liberty”, according to the Journal.
The monument became part of the courthouse fabric, and during winters, someone would inevitably climb atop the justice to warm his head with a red cap, said Bridgeo.
In 2020, though, the justice’s past caught up with his statue. Melville Fuller had supported Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896, which granted more than 50 years of legal support for racial segregation and Jim Crow in the US. The Kennebec County Commissioners voted to have the statue moved.
Fuller considered fighting the move, Bridgeo said, but in his own way accepted it. Early one Sunday morning, a crane returned to the courthouse and loaded the statue into the back of a pickup truck, then the truck drove off.
“The commissioners neither limited me to daylight hours for removing the statue nor required me to give advance notice of my intention to remove it,” Fuller wrote from Potomac in a letter to the editor published by centralmaine.com. Fuller said the statue had been placed in storage.
Fuller had moved to Maryland for family reasons, according to his friends. His wife, Moira, needed care, and Moira’s daughter lived in the area, Bridgeo said. Moira died in 2023.
In the Washington area, Fuller loved visits to the Army and Navy Club near the White House.
Bridgeo remembers going there with Fuller about six years ago. His friend needed a wheelchair but otherwise seemed fine. “He was very animated,” Bridgeo said. “Mentally he was as sharp as a tack.”
The night of February 13, Fuller went to bed. At 7.34am the next morning, he was discovered unresponsive.
Paramedics and officers were called, police say, and after seeing the wound to his head thought he may have died by suicide. But they couldn’t find a gun.
Gagen, the major crimes commander, said the staff and management at Cogir of Potomac have fully co-operated, and his investigators are working long days and nights.
“We’re hopeful that when some of these records and results come back, we will have a better sense of where this case is heading,” Gagen said. “We are committed to bringing justice on behalf of Mr. Fuller.”
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