Mr. Dear has been described by relatives and neighbors as a loner with an antigovernment worldview and has expressed extreme anti-abortion views, say an ex-wife and others. According to one law enforcement official, Mr. Dear said “no more baby parts” after his arrest. But the authorities have not publicly ascribed a motive to the shooting.

The charges against Mr. Dear are so numerous that Mr. King waived the right to have them read aloud in court. The charges of first-degree murder could potentially carry the death penalty, which prosecutors will have the opportunity to seek after an arraignment.

There are eight first-degree murder charges in all, covering the three shooting deaths. In a news conference, Dan May, the district attorney for Colorado’s Fourth Judicial District, explained that the multiple charges stemmed from the fact that there were distinct “theories” undergirding each of those charges.

For example, three counts were filed related to the death of Jennifer Markovsky, a 35-year-old mother of two children. One of the counts alleges that Mr. Deal acted with “deliberation” when he caused her death. A second count alleges that Mr. Dear caused her death in furtherance of a burglary, for which he was also charged (prosecutors allege that he unlawfully entered the Planned Parenthood building).

A third murder charge alleges that he evinced an “attitude of universal malice manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life generally.”

Multiple counts were also filed related to the deaths of K’Arre Stewart, 29, an Iraq war veteran, and Garrett Swasey, 44, a police officer at the local campus of the University of Colorado.

Many of the other charges are counts of attempt to commit first-degree murder and first-degree assault, all of them connected to Mr. Dear’s arrival at the clinic and the subsequent attack and standoff, in which the authorities said Mr. Dear was armed with a semiautomatic rifle.