John Russell Houser terrified his own family and ranted in online forums about African-Americans, Jews and gays, long before he opened fire in a Louisiana movie theater killing two women and injuring nine people last week.

Houser, a mentally ill 59-year-old, had lost his wife and his house and left behind a paper trail documenting a long history of seeking vengeance.

In Houser's hometown of Columbus, Georgia, some former neighbors say his life was a decades-long collision course with disaster.

"He's been known as a lunatic and a fool around this neck of the woods for years," said Patrick Williams, an antiques dealer who once filed a police report alleging Houser sold him a stolen iron fence at a flea market. " I wasn't a bit surprised when I saw his picture on TV. And no one else that knew him was surprised either."

Neighbors said Houser flew a Confederate flag, passed doomsday fliers around his neighborhood, pounded out angry online missives about corruption and injustice and spouted admiration for Adolf Hitler.

He fit the familiar mold of mass shooters, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, author and prominent expert on massacres. Houser was paranoid, blamed everyone but himself, alienated his family and survived in a world of self-imposed isolation.

"If you gave me a list of names, I would have picked his out as the one that done it," said Vince Woodward, who was then active in local Republican politics in Columbus.

As early as 1989, Houser imagined himself as a crusader for righteousness.

Then 34, he tried to pay a man $100 to burn down the office of a lawyer who represented a pornographic movie theater to "save the world, bring law and order," The Advocate newspaper reported, citing a court transcript.

But his intended arsonist turned out to be a police informant, and Houser was hauled into court.

A judge ordered Houser be evaluated at the psychiatric unit at a Columbus hospital, but the case was later dropped.

He soon became a regular guest on a local television show, where he held forth about the evils of abortion and women in the workplace. He was known as the black sheep of a well-regarded family. His father was the town's longtime tax commissioner.

Houser earned a degree in accounting, then went to law school. But he never took the bar exam and for a while ran a tavern instead.

In 2001, the city of LaGrange, Georgia, revoked Houser's liquor license, citing a series of convictions for selling beer to minors. Houser responded by unfurling a large banner on the side of his tavern with a swastika with the phrase "Welcome to LaGrange," the local newspaper reported.

He said at the time he was against Nazi philosophy and described the flag as an effort to mock a government willing to trample its citizens' rights. But Houser changed his mind a few years later. He wrote in online message boards that "Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism" and "decent people can retake the entire world, as Hitler proved."

In 2005, he caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and lone-wolf extremists, when he registered for former KKK leader David Duke's European-American Unity and Rights Organization conference in New Orleans.

In April 2008, Houser's 23-year-old daughter was planning to marry her fiance the following month. But Houser believed they were too young. He made "ominous as well as disturbing statements," his family wrote in seeking a court order to keep him away. His wife, Kellie Maddox Houser, wrote that she was so worried about his unraveling mental state, she removed all his guns from the house.

He stormed into his daughter's office, then to another relative's house, where police were called and intervened. Houser's wife told officers he had a history of depression and bipolar disorder. A judge agreed he should be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

Despite his history, Houser was able to walk into an Alabama pawnshop and buy a Hi-Point .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun in February 2014, just as his life began its final downward spiral.

His wife of 30 years filed for divorce in March and wrote they had been separated since 2012. Their home had gone into foreclosure when they split, and she had not been able to find him.

Norman Bone, who bought Houser's home at a 2014 foreclosure auction, said Houser poured concrete down the toilets and drains and threw paint and feces around the house. Bone said that the day Houser was evicted, he found the gas fireplace logs were removed and the gas starter tube was twisted out and ignited, which could have set the house on fire.

Then House disappeared, only to surface in Lafayette, Louisiana.

People saw him rambling around town, said Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft.

Houser drank. He talked to people about opening a two-minute oil-change service. He went to a food bank in Lake Charles, an hour's drive east. And he went to the Grand 16 movie theater several times, Craft said.

"Maybe he was testing. Maybe he was checking. Maybe he was determining, you know, is there anything that could be a soft target for him."

He settled into the back of the theater on July 18, alongside 25 people there for the movie. Then he stood silently and fired 20 times, killing two women and wounding nine people. As police cut off his escape, he put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

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Associated Press writers Claire Galofaro, Melinda Deslatte, Kim Chandler and Rebecca Santana in Lafayette, Kate Brumback in Atlanta, Jay Reeves in Birmingham and Ray Henry in Carrollton, Georgia contributed to this report. (*)

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