Do you know who murdered Robert Mullins? On June 27, 1977, 19-year-old Robert Mullins, a white male gas station attendant from Barrington, New Jersey, was working the pumps and minding the office at the Citgo Service Station on the northbound side of Interstate 295/Route 130 in West Deptford Township, just south of Red Bank Avenue. The station sat along a busy stretch of highway, a place where travelers pulled in for fuel and directions before merging back into the flow of traffic, and where a young worker could easily pass an entire shift largely alone with the hum of engines and the hiss of fuel lines for company. At some point during that day’s work, the routine of serving customers and handling cash was shattered by a sudden and brutal attack inside the cramped office.
Mullins was later found in that office, shot and beaten to death, his life ended in the small room where he kept the station’s records and cash drawer.
The combination of gunfire and severe blunt-force trauma suggested a ferocity that went beyond a simple confrontation, leaving investigators to reconstruct those final moments from physical evidence and whatever fragments of witness observations they could uncover along the interstate corridor. The killing turned an ordinary service station into a crime scene marked by cordoned-off pumps, patrol cars with flashing lights, and detectives moving in and out of the building while traffic continued to rush past on the highway.
The homicide quickly drew the attention of local police and the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office, which treated the case as a priority and has kept it in open status ever since. Decades later, the prosecutor’s office still lists Mullins’s death among its unsolved homicides, specifying the Citgo station’s location along Interstate 295/Route 130 and noting that he was found shot and beaten to death in the station office, while providing contact information for anyone who might hold even a small piece of information about what happened that day. Modern cold-case resources repeat these core details, describing a young attendant attacked at work in West Deptford Township on June 27, 1977, and emphasizing that the file remains active despite the passage of time.
Across all publicly available summaries, there is no indication that investigators have ever been able to name a definitive suspect in the case, nor is there any public record of an arrest or charges arising from Mullins’s murder; instead, his death is consistently categorized as an unsolved homicide. Year after year, the case persists as a quiet appeal embedded in cold-case lists and law-enforcement web pages, asking anyone who remembers an offhand admission, a suspicious presence at the station, or unexplained behavior around the time of the killing to come forward. In that way, the Citgo station where Mullins once worked is preserved in official memory not just as a highway fuel stop, but as the setting of a long-unanswered crime, with investigators still hoping that some overlooked detail or long-held secret will one day bring his killer to light.
