In this Nov. 30, 2015 file-pool photo, Colorado Springs shooting suspect, Robert Dear, right, appears via video before Judge Gilbert Martinez, with public defender Dan King, at the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center for this first court appearance, where he was told he faces first degree murder charges, in Colorado Springs, Colo. The man accused of killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic brought several guns, ammunition and propane tanks that he assembled around a car. To some in the community, the attack resembled an act of domestic terrorism, sparking a debate over what to call Robert Lewis Dear’s rampage even before he was taken into custody. AP FILE PHOTO
CHARLESTON, South Carolina — An ex-wife of the man charged with killing three people at a Colorado women’s health clinic that offers abortions said he vandalized an abortion clinic years earlier when he lived in South Carolina.
New court documents and interviews reveal Robert Lewis Dear as an occasionally violent, fundamentalist loner who was known to nurse a grudge.
Barbara Mescher Micheau told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Dear came home one day and told her that he put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Charleston when they were married more than 20 years ago, but it could not have been one run by the national organization. The organization did not have a clinic in the city then, but another clinic offered abortions.
“I just remembered it because I haven’t thought about him for a long time,” said Micheau, whose last contact with Dear was more than seven years ago, when their son turned 18 and Dear no longer needed to come for visits.
Micheau said Dear never talked much about Planned Parenthood, a national organization, although “obviously he was against abortion.” She also recalled that Dear “was always plotting revenge against people he felt did him wrong, and you know it didn’t take much for him to feel like somebody did him wrong.”
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The 57-year-old Dear faces state charges of first-degree murder for last Friday’s shooting. A law enforcement official has said he rambled about “no more baby parts” after his arrest. Colorado Springs police have refused to disclose a motive for the shooting.
Micheau was the second of Dear’s three wives, and in the affidavit she filed to divorce him in 1993, she described him as angry and isolated.
Micheau said Dear had no friends, according to the document. He would listen to music on headphones for hours, ignoring her. He’d vanish for gambling trips to Las Vegas or Atlantic City and suddenly explode in anger at home, kicking her and pulling her hair.
“Rob’s anger erupts into fury in a matter of seconds and is alarming,” she wrote. “You have to constantly monitor his emotional state.”
She added that he appeared devoutly religious.
“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but he does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Micheau wrote. “He says as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”
Micheau told the AP: “I was just devastated for the people he hurt and the people he killed and their children. As to whether he would do it or not, I wasn’t surprised.”
In 1992, after Dear and Micheau were separated, he was arrested in South Carolina on a charge of criminal sexual conduct after a woman said he put a knife to her neck, forced her into her apartment and sexually assaulted her. No records show how the case was ultimately handled.
Dear later moved to a white trailer marked with a cross on a desolate stretch of land in Colorado, along with a woman he met in South Carolina. He rarely waved to neighbors.
Authorities have spoken with Dear’s girlfriend, Stephanie Bragg, who couldn’t be located for comment Wednesday.