Gunman left warning signs

It was not unusual for Robert Pickett, an IU alumnus and Evansville accountant who fired shots outside of the White House Wednesday, to take unannounced time off of work and drive to Washington, D.C.\nClients and his employer say he often made the trip "to consult a lawyer" in his ongoing litigation with a former employer, the Internal Revenue Service. Sometimes he would disappear for weeks at a time during the tax season.\nHe has sued the IRS at least four times, said Evansville attorney Joseph Slocum, who represented him in one of the suits.\n"He was very disturbed," said Slocum, whom Pickett later sued for alleged legal malpractice. "For want of a better way to put it, I think he was more bothered by getting fired than most people would be."\nPickett, who graduated from IU in 1979 with a degree in history, found a job as an auditor at the IRS in Cincinnati in the mid-1980s. After he was fired, he moved back to his home in Evansville, where he had lived alone since his parents died, neighbors said.\nSlocum, who said he regrets taking up Pickett's case, said the IRS dismissed him because he was often late for work.\nLittle changed after his dismissal, said Greg Bachert, who employed Pickett at his downtown accounting firm. Bachert said he wasn't surprised when Pickett didn't show up for work Monday at the start of another tax-filing session, although he had not indicated anything was wrong.\nPickett had evidently planned not to return.\nJerry Liddle, circulation director of the Evansville Courier & Press, said Pickett called last Thursday to ask that the paper not be delivered starting Saturday. The customer service representative who took the call thought nothing of it, Liddle said.\n"He took 54 calls that day," he said. "And he heard nothing strange or unusual."\nBut after the news broke, Liddle went back and checked the records. He found a discrepancy.\n"He had stopped delivery before when he'd go on vacation," he said. "But he always left the time when he'd come back. This time, he just said he'd call."\nPickett purchased the revolver used in the incident earlier in the week at Casey's Pawnshop, which ran a standard background check. It turned up no previous criminal record, operations manager David Sisson said. \nThat didn't come as a shock to Pickett's neighbors, who described him as "polite" and "friendly."\n"He never struck me as the type that would ever even own a gun," neighbor Mark Jewel said. \nWhile Jewel said Pickett didn't stand out in the middle-class neighborhood, he now recognizes that the warning signs were there.\n"He kept to himself a lot," he said. "We thought he was just very quiet. We had no idea that he was having all these mental problems."\nIt turns out Pickett did have psychiatric problems.\nIn an apparent suicide note sent to the IRS, Pickett depicted himself as a mentally ill individual who had been unjustly persecuted by the IRS. \n"My death is on your hands," he wrote. "Although you were not in charge when this conspiracy began in 1985, your office has been informed of the situation many times. I have been a victim of a corrupt government."\nThe letter -- in which Pickett painted himself as a suicidal whistleblower fighting a corrupt system -- was also sent to President George W. Bush, the Courier & Press and the Cincinnati Enquirer.\nIt's not the first time Pickett took his issues to public officials.\nHe had mailed many complaints to Rep. John Hostettler's offices in Washington and Indiana, said the Congressman's spokesman, Michael Jahr.\n"Threatening is not the word I would use," Jahr said. "But the letters could probably be described as angry."\nA raid of Pickett's home turned up no other firearms, said Capt. Bill Welcher of the Evansville Police Department. Authorities removed personal items, such as software and cassette tapes, which were shipped to Secret Service labs for investigation.\nFor the moment, the Secret Service is tight-lipped about the case.\n"We can't comment on an ongoing investigation," spokesman Eric Harnischfeger said. "And we have to be respectful of the forthcoming prosecution"