Planned Parenthood Attacker

For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack

By RICHARD FAUSSET

The man she had married professed to be deeply religious. But after more than seven years with Robert L. Dear Jr., Barbara Micheau had come to see life with him as a kind of hell on earth.

By January 1993, she had had enough. In a sworn affidavit as part of her divorce case, Ms. Micheau described Mr. Dear as a serial philanderer and a problem gambler, a man who kicked her, beat her head against the floor and fathered two children with other women while they were together. He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation.

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms. Micheau said in the court document. “He says that 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.”

On Friday, according to officials, Mr. Dear entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding nine others with a semiautomatic rifle. The attack, which ended with his surrender to the police after a harrowing nationally televised standoff in the snow-dusted Western city, was a brutally violent and very public chapter in a life story whose details are not fully known.

But in court documents and interviews with people who knew Mr. Dear well, a picture emerges of an angry and occasionally violent man who seemed deeply disturbed and deeply contradictory: He was a man of religious conviction who sinned openly, a man who craved both extreme solitude and near-constant female company, a man who successfully wooed women but, some of them say, also abused them. He frequented marijuana websites, then argued with other posters, often through heated religious screeds.

“Turn to JESUS or burn in hell,” he wrote on one site on Oct. 7, 2005. “WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH, NOW YOUR SOUL IS GOING SOMEWHERE.”

A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent. Ms. Micheau, 60, said in a brief interview Tuesday that late in her marriage to Mr. Dear, he told her that he had put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston.

“He was very proud of himself that he’d gone over and jammed up their locks with glue so that they couldn’t get in,” she said.

But another ex-wife, Pamela Ross, said that he did not obsess on the subject of abortion. After his arrest, Mr. Dear said “no more baby parts” to investigators, a law enforcement official said.

One person who spoke with him extensively about his religious views said Mr. Dear, who is 57, had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing “God’s work.” In 2009, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for the privacy of the family, Mr. Dear described as “heroes” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings.

Investigators have only just begun to interview Mr. Dear’s relatives and acquaintances, and are still searching the Internet for his writings. Public information about his early years is limited.

Ms. Ross said Mr. Dear had a college degree. He spent a half-year enrolled at the University of Kentucky, and a year at the University of Louisville, according to officials at the two schools.

In December 1979 he married a woman in Louisville, Ky., listed in court records as Kimberly Ann Dear. They had a child, Matthew, in 1980. Three and a half years later, they separated. Mr. Dear moved to Charleston, S.C., which Ms. Ross said was his birthplace. He took a few fast-food management training jobs before landing a position at Santee Cooper, the South Carolina power company. Mollie Gore, a spokeswoman for the company, said he began work there in September 1984.

Mr. Dear also met the woman who would become his second wife, Barbara Ann Mescher, who now goes by her married name, Barbara Micheau. She met him at a shopping mall while she and a girlfriend were admiring a motorcycle on display. He got her number. They went out.

He told her that he was divorced, but in the 1993 affidavit, which was also reported in The Post and Courier of Charleston, she said she later learned he was still married. The divorce from his first wife was completed in September 1985, more than a year after he met Ms. Micheau.

Mr. Dear’s lawyer in Colorado did not respond to messages Tuesday.

Mr. Dear married Ms. Micheau three months later, after the divorce came through. They settled in a condominium, and later in a suburban-style house. But soon after, she said, he began to stray. In November 1986, he fathered another child, Andrew, with his first wife, Ms. Micheau said. Then in 1990, Mr. Dear had a child, Taylor, with the woman who would later become his third wife, Ms. Ross. The same year, he and Ms. Micheau had a baby together, Walker.

Ms. Micheau suspected him of other affairs, but there were other problems as well.

In 1989, he left Santee Cooper, where, she said in the affidavit, he “got in trouble a lot and played hooky a lot.” Eventually, he struck out on his own as an “artist’s representative,” selling prints to wholesale art galleries, and driving from gallery to gallery in his truck.

Tensions Over Money

But Mr. Dear, she said, racked up debt, and would not help her pay the bills or help clean the house. She said he took trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, often losing large sums of money. She said he spent his money on a new motorcycle and on an “expensive gun.” She accused him of dishonesty in his business dealings. And she said he kicked her and pulled her hair “on many occasions,” and noted other times when he hurt her physically.

Money was tight. A 1991 income tax return, filed jointly by the couple, showed their total income as $15,526. In May of that year, according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, Mr. Dear was arrested and convicted in Charleston for the unlawful carrying of a “long blade knife” and the illegal possession of a loaded gun.

In court records, Mr. Dear admitted to engaging in “various acts of adultery,” and agreed with Ms. Micheau that “certain domestic difficulties developed” between them. In the court file, Mr. Dear did not address the more specific allegations Ms. Micheau made about his behavior.

In 1992, the couple separated. Records obtained from the North Charleston Police Department show that in November of that year, Mr. Dear was arrested as a suspect in a rape case. But the State Law Enforcement Division, which offers criminal records checks to the public, has no record of Mr. Dear’s being convicted of such a crime, meaning it is most likely that the case was dismissed.

According to the police incident report, the woman told the police that a man named Robert approached her at her job at a Sears store in a mall and asked her out on a date. She refused. The man proceeded to call her two or three times a day, she said, “saying he wanted to see her,” according to the report.

On the afternoon of Nov. 29, 1992, the woman said, the man turned up at the front door of her apartment, put a knife to her throat, forced her inside and sexually assaulted her.

The woman’s husband, Craig Melchor, was on a Navy submarine when he got word that his young wife had been attacked at knife point and raped inside their apartment. The suspect, he learned: Robert L. Dear Jr.

“I won’t forget that name,” Mr. Melchor said in an interview.

Mr. Melchor said his wife wanted to see Mr. Dear face his day in court, but the only other witness, another Navy wife, refused to testify and the Melchors were about to move to Seattle.

Prosecutors called them and said: “You’re moving West. The witness you had doesn’t want to be involved,” Mr. Melchor recalled. “And that’s that. I remember. That wasn’t right.”

They went to counseling and rape survivors’ groups, but Mr. Melchor said his wife, who died in 2007, sometimes worried that her attacker would come back and find her. He said they both had to accept that the case was out of their hands.

“We had to let go and let God take care of it,” he said.

According to the police narrative, Mr. Dear acknowledged a sexual liaison with the woman, but said that it was “consensual.”

Ms. Micheau said she did not believe the accusation. In the affidavit, she said she believed her husband had “pursued a sexual relationship” with the “approval” of the woman.

“I tried to stick with him and help him through it, but it has become impossible,” Ms. Micheau said. “He constantly criticizes everyone around him and he is very hard to please. He really does not have any friends. He does not trust anyone. He looks for a way around anything he has to do and spends a lot of time planning revenge.”

She described her husband as a man who “erupts into fury” in seconds. She said he had “emotional problems and needs counseling, which he vehemently opposed many times.”

The divorce was complete in June 1994.

By the summer of 1995, Mr. Dear had moved to Walterboro, about an hour west of Charleston, taking up residence in a double-wide trailer on a secluded one-lane road, Winding Creek Drive, that cut through the woods. Ms. Micheau complained in court documents that Mr. Dear would not tell her exactly where he lived, which concerned her because he had visitation rights with their son, Walker.

Eventually, Mr. Dear married his third wife, who today goes by Pamela Ross. They lived in the double-wide trailer, raising Taylor, their son, and Ms. Ross’s child from a previous marriage. Walker spent time there as well.

Ms. Ross struck a different tone in describing Mr. Dear. She said he had often taken her and the boys out shopping or visiting Lowcountry attractions in Hilton Head and Charleston. She said he believed strongly in the Bible, but did not seem overly zealous. He was against abortion, she said, but not obsessively so: “It was never really a topic of discussion,” she said.

A police incident report shows that in 1997, she told the police that he had locked her out of her home and that he had “hit her and pushed her out the window” when she tried to climb in. He also shoved her to the ground, she said. The report said she did not want to file charges.

In the interview, Ms. Ross said Mr. Dear would quickly apologize after doing something wrong. Still, the relationship fizzled, for reasons she did not discuss. According to court records, the couple’s divorce went through in November 2001.

In 2005, John Hood moved to Winding Creek Drive from the Catskills region of New York and became Mr. Dear’s newest neighbor. Mr. Hood described Mr. Dear as eccentric: He liked to sit on a deck in his underwear and drink his coffee. He sometimes drove an old unlicensed Volkswagen Beetle up and down the rutted road. Mr. Hood said that the neighbors on the other side of Mr. Dear had erected a wooden fence because they sometimes saw Mr. Dear skinny-dipping in a pool.

“I didn’t make a point to get to know him,” Mr. Hood, 68, said in an interview.

The two men did interact when Mr. Hood put his pickup up for sale. Mr. Dear paid cash for it. At one point, when Mr. Dear was visiting his neighbor’s property, he suggested that Mr. Hood put a metal roof on his house “because the government satellites can see through your roof.”

Homes in the Mountains

Eventually, Mr. Dear moved to North Carolina, keeping two homes near Asheville in a stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One was a musty and weathered trailer in Swannanoa, from which he ran a business called S Prints Mountain Art Prints. The other was a yellow cabin along a steep gravel road.

At the cabin, in Black Mountain, he rarely spoke with his neighbors. When he did, it was usually because of a dispute over how he cared for animals or how fast he drove an all-terrain vehicle along the single-lane road, where children play freely and dogs roam and yelp.

In the small community, his scowl stood out.

“I know everyone on the road better than I ever knew him,” said Kara McNerney, who has lived on the street for more than 16 years.

Online, Mr. Dear appeared to lead a different sort of life. Though to his neighbors he was a recluse, he posted frequently to a web forum dedicated to cannabis and joined an adult dating site called SexyAds in the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2006.

On SexyAds, a poster using his email address and photo said he was looking for a discreet relationship and was interested in spanking. On the cannabis forum, he said he was looking for women to “party,” and rarely wrote about using the drug.

Instead, he was far more likely to write brief and emphatic messages about Jesus Christ — usually in caps lock, the online equivalent of yelling — or to post sparsely worded solicitations for female companionship in North and South Carolina. “savannah sexy women wanted. i love to party, tall, aries, male,” he wrote in August 2005.

He argued with users of the site who disagreed with his religious posts, deriding them as “slaves” and “demons” who would suffer at the end of the world. On Oct. 7, 2005, he wrote, “Every knee shall bow an every tongue will confess that JESUS IS LORD.”

Around seven years ago, Mr. Dear began dating a woman named Stephanie Bragg. For reasons that remain unclear, they moved last year to Hartsel, Colo., a hamlet perched about 65 miles west of Colorado Springs. Ringed by mountains, Hartsel calls itself the Heart of Colorado.

But Mr. Dear, it seemed, did not want to be at the heart of anything. He plunked a white trailer marked with a small cross onto five acres of empty scrub land he had bought for $6,000 and lived in near isolation with Ms. Bragg, rarely saying a word or waving hello to his new neighbors.

The move was not welcomed by some in Ms. Bragg’s family. Her former stepmother, Patricia Stutts, said Ms. Bragg’s father had expressed concern about his daughter, who is 13 years younger than Mr. Dear, moving out West with him.

“He told me Stephanie had gone to Colorado, and was living off the grid and had to go into town to make phone calls,” Ms. Stutts said. “He was very disturbed by it.”

A close relative of Ms. Bragg’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about privacy for Ms. Bragg’s family, said that Mr. Dear “always kept to himself, was a tad strange,” but that he seemed to treat Ms. Bragg well. He paid for their trips to visit family in the Carolinas and would “buy the presents and such.”

The relative said Mr. Dear and Ms. Bragg were “very religious, read the Bible often and are always talking about Scripture.” He had not shown signs of being violent, the relative said.

The relative, who spoke with Ms. Bragg in recent days, also said that before the shooting, Mr. Dear reportedly “wasn’t sleeping at all,” and had “been talking about the Devil getting in his head and such.”

The relative said Ms. Bragg had been hospitalized since a week before Thanksgiving, with an infection and pancreatitis. Mr. Dear visited her every day until the day of the shooting.

“She says she can’t believe he was capable of such things, and I think that’s what’s upsetting her most,” the relative said about Ms. Bragg. “He believed he was doing God’s will, and I’m sure he probably wanted to die in the process of carrying out what I’m sure he thought was right.”