The ex-wife of the man accused of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado says he told her years ago that he once put glue in the locks at an abortion clinic when he lived in South Carolina.
Barbara Mescher Micheau of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, says 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear told her that he vandalized a Planned Parenthood clinic in Charleston, but the organization didn't have a clinic in the city then. However, another clinic offered abortions which some have assumed was run by Planned Parenthood.
Micheau says Dear never talked much about Planned Parenthood, but he was opposed to abortion. She says she wasn't surprised to hear that he was arrested in the shooting or that he had been living in remote locations without water or electricity, saying he always had survivalist ideas.
She also says Dear was often plotting revenge against people he felt had wronged him and "it didn't take much for him to feel like somebody did him wrong."
The New York Times has also been digging into Dear's background with Micheau:
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.
Micheau lost touch with him more than seven years ago, after their son turned 18 and Dear no longer came to visit him.
