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.