The New York Times has posted an impressively thorough profile of accused Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear that portrays him as a violent and erratic figure who alienated neighbors, may have abused two of his wives, was accused of raping a woman at knifepoint, and posted crazed all-caps rants about hell on marijuana-related websites.
The Times piece documents Dear’s life since 1979, when he married the first of what would become three ex-wives. Two of those women, including his second wife Barbara Micheau, made accusations of physical abuse against him at various points:
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.
Dear has lived in Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina and moved recently to Colorado with a woman named Stephanie Bragg who he has been in a relationship with for several years. He was arrested in South Carolina in 1992 on charges of raping a woman who said he had initially approached her when she was working at Sears. The accuser’s husband told the Times charges were dropped when a witness refused to testify and because he and his wife were planning to move away from the area; she died in 2007. Dear claimed to have had consensual sex with the woman.
Dear’s homes in recent years have been trailers and small cabins in fairly remote areas, but he also somehow found the time and technology with which to post singles ads as well as rants on marijuana-discussion sites:
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.”
