Gunman in theater shooting had history of seeking vengeance

LAFAYETTE, La. -- The stranger clenched his fists and shook his head, recounting a time when he tried and failed to beat a cat to death with a steel rod.

His audience, two women lunching at a Lafayette bistro on a Saturday afternoon, sat across from him, shocked and silent.

The man in a Hawaiian-print shirt had pulled a chair up to their table minutes earlier.

He stroked their dogs and started to ramble: People spend too much money on their pets. There should be a cheaper way to euthanize an animal.

This stranger told them he once took in a stray cat and it got sick, so he bashed its head with the rod but failed to kill it.

"He was hurt that the cat lived," recalled Bonnie Barbier, who listened in horror to the bluster for 30 minutes. "It was this twisted sense that he was doing the right thing."

Days later, John Russell Houser's photograph flashed onto television screens across America as the man who opened fire in a Louisiana movie theater.

"My stomach dropped," Barbier said of the moment she saw his photo, stern and unsmiling. "That was the man from Saturday."

At the bistro, the man seemed unhinged and self-righteous, Barbier remembered. He had written letters to newspapers about conspiracies, he told her. But he was too smart for the world and had to dumb down his missives so the masses might understand them.

"I'm just sitting there thinking, 'There's something wrong with this. He's out of his mind because normal people don't talk about this kind of thing,"' she said. "He was just so odd, and I felt really weird feelings with him. Something inside was like, 'Just don't set him off. Just smile and nod."'

She and her friend found an excuse to slip away.

Houser, a mentally ill 59-year-old, terrified his own family and ranted in online forums about African-Americans, Jews and gays. He had lost his wife and his house and left behind a paper trail documenting a long history of seeking vengeance.

Five days after the chance meeting at the bistro, Houser walked into the theater, bought a ticket to the 7 p.m. showing of "Trainwreck" and picked a seat two rows from the back. Twenty minutes into the movie, he stood up in the darkness and, according to those who knew him, let loose a lifetime's reserve of rage.

Five hundred miles away 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. "He was a highly intelligent guy but mean as a snake and dangerous. I wasn't a bit surprised when I saw his picture on TV. And no one else that knew him was surprised, either."

Houser, who went by Rusty, was known as odd and eccentric in the cluster of towns near the state line between Georgia and Alabama where he lived nearly all his life.

Neighbors said he filled his in-ground pool with hundreds of koi. He 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.

But many towns have a resident crackpot. And hindsight is an inaccurate lens, Fox said.

"There's a very large haystack of people who have these characteristics, but very few needles that will indeed carry out a rampage," he said. "They're not red flags. They're yellow. The only time they turn red is after blood is spilled on them."

Mass shooters often sound a lot like Houser, he said. But thousands of men who sound a lot like Houser don't become mass shooters. Fox compared the relationship to another sort of tragedy: most planes that crash do so in bad weather. But most planes withstand storms without plunging from the sky.

By 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.

The judge questioned whether "the presence of a delusional compulsion overmastered his will to resist committing the alleged act," according to court records.

He ordered Houser be evaluated at the psychiatric unit at a Columbus hospital.

The case later was dropped. But Houser's sanity would remain in question for more than two decades.

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.

In 1996, Houser, too, ran for public office. But he was caught stealing his competitor's yard signs and backed out of the race.

Woodward said Houser was something of a "fringe member" of the party, known for spouting wild accusations.

He was often nice, then his mood would suddenly darken.

"He wasn't just depressed," Woodward said. "He was angry depressed."