He wore his beliefs on his arm, along with his hate.

He called non-whites "dirt people," and sent roses to his grandmother.

He talked about accomplishing positive results in society, then killed six people and tried to gun down a cop (hitting him at least eight times) who was helping the wounded.

Wade Michael Page, dead himself in the wake of his mass-slaying rampage at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek Sunday, appears to have been many things - Army veteran of a special unit, fired truck driver, devoted grandson, hard-metal musician, white supremacist.

But to psychiatric nurse Jennifer Dunn, the 40-year-old with the shaved head was merely the "creepy quiet" neighbor who moved into her Cudahy building three weeks ago, toting his belongings in two black plastic garbage bags.

He rarely left his one-bedroom upper, where he lived alone. His only visitor, Dunn said, was a pizza delivery guy who stopped by a couple of times.

She didn't think twice about Page's numerous tattoos - one, it turns out, was an obscure reference to white supremacist doctrine - but his manner was strange.

"He made no eye contact," she said. "That's an abnormal thing. He wasn't rude, but he was not wanting to be engaged."

Late last week, Dunn said, Page's behavior became odder still. On Friday and Saturday, he blasted aggressive music from his stereo.

"He really had the tunes cranked up," said Dunn, who lives downstairs with her two daughters.

Then, on Saturday, Page carried what appeared to be the same "two bags full of crap" to his red SUV parked in the alley. He also carried out a large cardboard box.

"He paced around the truck for about 10 minutes" and then sat behind the wheel for a long time "staring off into space," Dunn said.

One of her daughters came inside and told her mother, "the dude is acting strange."

A day later, with police SWAT teams surrounding their home and Page and six innocent victims shot dead in and around the temple, she'd find out how strange he was.

But it didn't start that way.

'We have no idea'

Sobbing Tuesday as she spoke by telephone from her home in Denver, Colo., Page's stepmother said he grew up as a "precious child" in a normal, loving family.

"Where he changed and where this came from, we have no idea," said Laura Page, who was married to Wade Michael Page's father for about two decades.

The boy was 10 when the couple married. Three years later, his birth mother died, from lupus.

Like any child losing a parent, "he was devastated," Laura Page said.

Yet, she said, her stepson was mostly happy and liked to do "normal little boy stuff" - play with his dog, fish, camp. He loved music and played his guitar often, she said.

"He was kind and gentle and loving," she said. "He was normal in every way that I can think of."

She and Page's father moved to Texas when the boy was a teenager, but he stayed in Colorado, splitting time between an aunt and his grandmother, with whom he was very close.

He rejoined his parents in Texas after graduating from high school, took a job at a convenience store and eventually joined the Army.

"He said it was one of the best things he ever did - it gave him focus, a direction," Laura Page said.

She divorced Page's father in 2001, but talked with him after Sunday's killings. The father said he had tried calling his son about three weeks ago, but never got a call back.

'Exclusive' unit

Page may have thought he found direction in the Army, but it appears that by then he was already pointed down the road that would lead to the mass shooting in Oak Creek.

He served approximately from 1992 to 1998, and was assigned to psychological operations - the specialists who analyze, develop and distribute intelligence used for information and psychological effect.

"That is very exclusive," said John Liebert, a psychiatrist who performs fitness examinations for the military and is an expert on suicidal mass murderers. "It's like going from the lobby to the 20th floor."

But Page's beliefs were starting to show.

Fred Allen Lucas, a Bloomington, Ind., man who served with Page at Fort Bragg, N.C., in a psychological operations battalion, recalled that he spoke of the need for securing a homeland for white people and referred to all non-whites as "dirt people."

"It didn't matter if they were black, Indian, Native American, Latin - he hated them all," Lucas said.

Lucas said he met Page in 1995, the same year that the killings of a black couple in Fayetteville by two members of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg revealed the presence of a white-supremacist movement among soldiers on the base.

At the time, Lucas said, Page was covered with tattoos, including one that made a reference to the "14 words," a phrase used by white supremacists: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

"He criticized me for my attraction to (Latina) women," Lucas said. "He'd call me a 'race-traitor.' He said I should change my ways because I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed white guy, and I shouldn't be wasting myself on that."

Page left the Army in 1998 with a general discharge, a cut below honorable. He was ineligible for re-enlistment, Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards said Monday.

Two skinhead bands

By 2000, according to an interview Page gave two years ago, he was circulating in what the Southern Poverty Law Center called the white-power music scene.

The center said Page was a member of two racist skinhead bands -- End Apathy and Definite Hate.

End Apathy was Page's project, started in 2005.

In the interview two years ago with a website, he said he launched the band "to figure out what it would take to actually accomplish positive results in society and what is holding us back.

"A lot of what I realized at the time was that if we could figure out how to end people's apathetic ways it would be the start toward moving forward," Page is quoted as saying. "Of course after that it requires discipline, strict discipline, to stay the course in our sick society."

Photos on the band's MySpace page, which was taken down Monday, show Page playing a guitar with a stars-and-bars strap, and the "14" tattoo prominent on his shoulder.

In a picture of a band practice, a Nazi flag hangs behind the drummer.

The Southern Poverty Law Center said that in 2010 Page played at a racist music festival in Baltimore called Independent Artist Uprise.

For part of the last decade, Page lived in North Carolina.

According to the Fayetteville Observer, he worked at a Harley-Davidson dealership as a parts coordinator, but was fired after a series of clashes - one involving his displeasure at taking orders from a female co-worker.

The newspaper quoted general manager John Tew as saying that, after Page was fired, he found an application for joining the Ku Klux Klan on Page's desk.

"I threw that in the trash can," Tew was quoted as saying. "He came back looking for it. And I told him I discarded that. He got all chapped again."

Move to Wisconsin

Page worked as a truck driver for about five years, but was dismissed from that job as well, in 2010.

Last year, he lost a house, too. He had purchased a $165,000 home in the Fayetteville, N.C., area in September 2009, using a Veterans Administration loan.

Last August, with the house already vacant, Wells Fargo foreclosed. The bank took over the property in February.

By then, Page was in Wisconsin.

He moved into a South Milwaukee apartment in late 2011, joining his girlfriend, who had been living there for about two years.

Neighbors described him as a grumpy loner who occasionally pumped high-volume music through the building, worked third shift at a south side factory and disappeared on weekends, with a couple of guitars and his girlfriend in tow to play gigs with his band.

"If you were lucky, he would just say 'hi,' otherwise he would just shrug," said Dave Brown, who lived downstairs. "The less I had to do with him the better."

Page stayed in South Milwaukee only for a few months, moving out in June and getting his own place in Cudahy. He appears to have lost his job around then. Neighbors near his Cudahy apartment said he didn't appear to be working.

Page has had minor scuffles with the law, most notably a drunken driving conviction - he pleaded guilty - in Colorado in 1999.

But while he had no police record of violence, Liebert, the psychiatrist who does examinations for the military, sees in Page's past warning signs of potential trouble.

The fact that the Army essentially dropped Page after he had been selected for psychological operations team seems significant, said Liebert, who practices in Arizona and, for a time, worked at St. Francis Hospital here.

"I would want to know what happened to cause him to leave suddenly," he said.

Liebert wonders now, given Sunday's carnage, whether Page was mentally ill, and what could possibly have been going through his mind.

"He had to know that he was going to be killed," Liebert said.

***

This story was written by Rick Romell with additional reports from James B. Nelson, Karen Herzog, Don Walker, Mike Johnson, Sharif Durhams, John Diedrich, Annysa Johnson, Meg Kissinger, Raquel Rutledge, Cary Spivak, Ellen Gabler, Piet Levy, Georgia Pabst, Jesse Garza and Mark Johnson.