BAINBRIDGE, N.Y. – The letters were each almost 2 feet tall, inked like graffiti in spray paint the color of chocolate over an entire kitchen wall.

“DEAD MAN,” they read, and inside, in the bull’s-eye of this message in the abandoned home of the mentally unsteady man Secret Service agents believe could be on a mission to assassinate the president, is a photograph of George W. Bush possibly ripped from the pages of a glossy news magazine.

It features the president with a determined look on his face and his mouth wide open, as if captured on film shouting on the stump about his upcoming re-election.

There were more messages, too: antipatriotic, confusing, ominous, contradictory, mysterious.

They are the last trails of Lawrence James Ward, the lanky, gray-haired man many here in this small upstate village north of Binghamton knew only as an aloof guitar teacher who for reasons unknown was missing his right ear and smoked too many Marlboro cigarettes. He is a man with a criminal past that includes indecent sexual proposals, a man feverishly frustrated at the state of American politics, and a man currently on the run since a warrant was issued for his arrest September 15, according to press reports.

In his home, strewn with numerous and empty packs of McDonald’s chicken nuggets, the trail of brown graffiti continues onto Ward’s linoleum kitchen floor, onto the ceiling above a kitchen table, and then to a glass sliding door.

A farewell note scribbled in marker on a dry eraser board was dated September 9, the same day Ward is reported to have given his house keys to a neighbor, telling him to take whatever he wanted from his house – that he would not be coming back – and then loaded a hunting rifle into the back of a blue sedan.

The note reads like a disturbed poem from the mind of an anarchist: “He has erected a multitude of new offices/ and sent hither a swarm of officers/ to harass the people/ and eat out their substance,” the note on the chalkboard read. It is signed “LW.”

The note is a direct citation from the Declaration of Independence, the 10th of 27 grievances inked by the founding fathers against Britain’s King George.

Neighbors down Main Street in Bainbridge, where Ward lived across from a bowling alley, were thoroughly confused.

“What a weirdo!” said Joel Spenser, who lives next door to Ward, and who expressed dismay that this village of 4,843 people had been rattled by the “gob” of Secret Service agents and police cars following reports of a nationwide manhunt for the 57-year-old Ward, a man some thought harmless – and some figured downright spooky.

“Always thought he was just one of those hippies who never grew up,” said a local carpenter, Steve Patton. “The man sort of kept to himself, very private, but then again, you got a lot of weird people around here.”

His neighbors described Ward as “strange” and some said they had called local police on Ward several times for entertaining teenage boys and offering them beer and other types of alcohol, as well as for burning his garbage in his yard.

When Ward moved into his house and started his guitar studio about two and a half years ago, next door neighbor Christina Spenser, 27, told The New York Sun she began to have immediate concerns. A number of teenage boys would enter his home alone at night, she noticed, and when they did the light in the house that was on would be in Ward’s bedroom.

Then, when Ward was removing debris from his home she noticed a piece of dry wall splattered with the words “I am a Cop Killer.”

There were also numerous contradictions: he “smoked like a chimney” but wore “anti-smoking” T-shirts. He also recently gave Ms. Spenser an audio disc, she said, where he and another man “no more than 17 years old” could be heard simulating the killings of police officers and spouting political rants. Ward told her to distribute the audio CD to children “underground, like marijuana,” she said, and she handed it over to federal authorities.

Ward also told conflicting stories about where he was from, Ms. Spencer said, sometimes suggesting he was a drifter from Texas and other times telling her that he was a former computer engineer from Connecticut worked for the NASDAQ stock exchange. He also recently divorced his wife, she said, leaving a son and daughter behind.

His wife, Judith Ward, told the Sun in a brief telephone interview from her home in Connecticut yesterday that her former husband was a “monster” and quickly blamed the former state superior court judge overhearing their divorce proceedings, Daniel Brennan Jr., for awarding Ward a windfall settlement that allowed Ward to “quit his job and run amok on escapades like this and plot to kill the president.” Ms. Ward would not answer any additional questions.

In January 2002, Mr. Brennan resigned as a judge and was sentenced to probation after he admitted to accepting a $10,000 loan from a convicted felon and former client, then attempted to hide the money from federal authorities, according to the Associated Press. Mr. Brennan did not immediately return phone calls from the Sun.

Since Ward began to teach guitar he was perceived even by some clients as odd and potentially dangerous. When Hope Ives, a 47-year-old hospital worker, began to take her 11-year-old daughter Becky to Ward for lessons she said she felt “immediately uneasy” and wouldn’t leave Becky alone with Ward during their weekly 45-minute lessons, which cost $50 a month. Once, Hope Ives began flipping through Ward’s books and stumbled upon Neo-Nazi literature.

“If I could pinpoint one thing that was off about him, I couldn’t,” Ms. Ives said. “Sometimes you just know about a person, you know?”

Becky Ives said she was nervous when she was with Ward and said she’s glad softball season started in June because she no longer had time for lessons. She said she remembers Ward getting furious when the phone would ring and that anti-Congress and anti-president signs hung in a house choked with cigarette smoke. She also remembers being disturbed by his missing right ear.

But he was a good musician, Ms. Ives said, and in the six months with him she began to read music and learn the chords to the first song Ward began to teach her. Ms. Ives was asked which song.

“America the Beautiful,” she said.