Suspected Planned Parenthood gunman unmoored in WNC
SWANNANOA - Flitting without an anchor between two remote wooded properties in the mountains, Robert Lewis Dear Jr. kept as far from neighbors as his own actions kept them at bay.
Dear, the accused gunman in a shooting spree at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic that killed three people, owns an abandoned and trash-strewn trailer property on a wooded lot off a pastoral road here. A neighbor said one trip in the car with Dear spooked him so much he turned down an offer to do labor at Dear's other mountaintop shack in Black Mountain.
More than a year ago, James Howie, who lives up the mountain from Dear's Long Branch Road trailer, said Dear, 57, asked him to do foundation work at the property off N.C. 9. Howie drove there with Dear.
"Out of the blue when I first met him, that was what he wanted me to do, go with him and check it out," Howie said.
Howie said he was so troubled by the interaction, he turned down the work and said he was "thankful" he got back OK.
"I wouldn't ride with that fellow from here to the mailbox now," Howie said. "I was just glad to get home."
Howie said he didn't think Dear was violent, but "crazy."
"Nobody in this valley associated with him that I know of, nobody," Howie said.
"He just up and disappeared," another neighbor, Randall Haynie, said.
Dear's drab-colored trailer, set back from the winding road dotted by farms, appeared abandoned and neglected Saturday, an idle fan visible in a front window, an antique blue Volkswagen resting just past the worn porch, a Shasta camper parked adjacent, its door ajar and tethered with a black cord.
Robert Adams, who lives just below the Swannanoa trailer, said it appeared Dear had taken off abruptly about a year ago, leaving his belongings inside and the back woods strewn with trash, bottles, gas cans and other debris.
"It looks like he just left everything," Adams said of the property, which is for sale.
FBI agents Saturday were talking with neighbors on Long Branch Road.
Dear purchased the Swannanoa trailer in 2006. He bought the property in Black Mountain in 2008. He previously lived outside Charleston, South Carolina, where his encounters with law enforcement were frequent.
Trouble with the law
In 2007, Dear was living in WNC when he reported to South Carolina sheriff's deputies that his pickup truck had been stolen from property he was renting there, insinuating it had been taken by a renter.
A month later, he returned to the Palmetto State after having the tenants evicted, and told officers with the Colleton County Sheriff's Department that a refrigerator and hot water heater been stolen from the home. He also accused a renter of damaging the toilets by flushing raw chicken down the pipe, according to reports provided by the sheriff's department.
He told officers he was a self-employed art dealer.
Dear had previously lived at that home in Walterboro, about 50 miles west of Charleston, and often was visited by deputies, usually over conflicts with neighbors.
But in a report from 1997, Dear's wife called officers, telling them he had locked her out of the house. When she tried to crawl in through a window, he hit her and pushed her back out, leaving her bruised, according to a sheriff's report. She did not press charges.
A Walterboro neighbor in 2002 told deputies that Dear caused her to fear for her safety after she found him peeping into her home, and that he had been making unwanted advances on her for months.
'He stayed to himself'
Adams, the Swannanoa neighbor, said he saw Dear often riding a four-wheeler up and down the road to fetch wood and saw him attach a push lawn mower to the four-wheeler in a method of lawn mowing that he found peculiar.
"He stayed to himself; we didn't talk to him," Adams said.
Adams also said from looking at Dear's mugshot that the man looks thinner and "more haggard" than the last time he'd seen him in the mountains. He said he didn't observe anything like flags or religious markings on the property.
Dear's dogs, and failure to provide them with adequate care, caused neighbors grief, Adams said. He said Buncombe County Animal Services responded to the property "a few times a month" for complaints and said he thought Dear didn't neuter his dogs.
Lt. Randy Sorrells said the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office has had only one interaction with Dear, an animal control citation for dogs "running at large" in July 2014 at the Swannanoa property.
"I just know that's our only contact with him that I'm aware of," Sorrells said.
"The man evidently had some kinda problems that made him snap," Adams said.
A neighbor of Dear's Anderson Acres property in Black Mountain said she and her children "kept out of his way" when they'd see him coming or going on the gravel, pothole-ridden road winding up to his pale yellow shack.
"He wouldn't really speak to anybody, he wouldn't wave," said Mallory Nicoletti, 29.
She also said neighbors had complained of his dogs, saying once he left a dog tied up in front of the house for an extended period of time.
Another neighbor below Dear's property on Long Branch Road described the dogs as "vicious."
"The dogs would be coming out into the road," said Dane Hood. "He let them roam. The dogs, they were mean as hell."
"He was kind of a peculiar person," Hood added.
Nicoletti and other neighbors said they saw Dear with a woman they believed to be his girlfriend and a young man who rode a motorcycle.
The cabin up the road from her property and nestled against a wooded hill appears primitive, with a makeshift outdoor shower, and is not believed to have running water or lights. On Saturday, a cross made of twigs hung on the side of shed in front of the shack.
Next to it, just as at his Swannanoa property, a "no trespassing sign" was affixed.
Staff reporter Tonya Maxwell contributed to this report.