More on the perp: contradictions, confusions, multiple children in and out of wedlock, episodes of weapons, rape and rage...
>> CHARLESTON, S.C. — 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.”
.... 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.
.... 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.”
