The younger Mr. Dear was raised in the Baptist church, Ms. Ross said. He was religious but not a regular churchgoer, not one to harp on his faith. “He believed wholeheartedly in the Bible. That’s what he always said, he read it cover to cover to cover,” she said. But he wasn’t fixated on it, she added.

He was generally conservative, but not obsessed with politics. He kept guns around the house for personal protection and hunting, and he taught their son to hunt doves, as many Southern fathers do. He believed that abortion was wrong, but it was not something that he spoke about compulsively. “It was never really a topic of discussion,” Ms. Ross said. He did not have many close friends.

Mr. Dear listened to rock music like U2. He liked to ride motorcycles. He was a jogger. He ate healthy. He lifted weights. And he was dedicated to his work. It involved striking deals with artists, mostly Southern ones, who painted Charleston street scenes, Old South plantation tableaus, magnolias, pictures of the Citadel campus. He tended to buy the rights to paintings, commission prints of 1,000 or so, and then market and sell the prints.

He was also artistically inclined, occasionally painting abstract works. He was also dedicated to his family. On the weekends, Ms. Ross said, he would ask them where they wanted to go: Shopping in Savannah? To the beach in Hilton Head? To Charleston?

“Wherever I wanted to go, he would take me,” she said.

After the divorce, Mr. Dear had asked her to stay. He eventually took custody of their son, who was 12 at the time. Mr. Dear raised him in North Carolina. Ms. Ross said she was confident that he would be a good parent and role model. And as far as she knows, he was.

They mostly lost touch over the years, but she and her new husband visited North Carolina seven or eight years ago and Mr. Dear seemed to be in good spirits. They had come to see her son. Mr. Dear invited them in and they stayed for about five minutes. She later heard, about two years ago, that he had moved to Colorado.

On Saturday morning, the man she saw on television seemed much more haggard than the man she knew. She has asked herself many times what may have gone wrong.

“Something must have happened to him when he moved away, that’s all I know, she said. “Me and our whole family are extremely devastated and heartbroken by the victims of these families, and we have no words that can ever comfort them other than to say we’re sorry for what he did.”