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In the mid-1990s, Duke had drifted to the Florida Panhandle — not the spring break-filled sugar sand beaches, but the remote and wooded inland.

The ’90s were a blur of court hearings and personal conflicts.

He divorced a woman named Anita in 1995 and at some point, had a daughter. He was sued by a property management company in 1999. In 2000, he was convicted for waiting in the woods for ex-wife with a rifle, wearing a mask and a bulletproof vest. She confronted him and then tried to leave in a vehicle, and Duke shot the tires. His second wife, Rebecca, said the incident was a misunderstanding and that he went to his ex-wife’s house because the ex-wife “wouldn’t leave them alone.”

Duke’s attorney on the case, Ben Bollinger, remembered Duke as especially paranoid about the new millennium.

“He was one of these Y2k people,” he said, referring to a computer bug that some people thought was going to cause massive problems and economic chaos Jan. 1, 2000. “He was one of those believers that the world was going to turn for worst and he was stockpiling weapons, assault weapons.”

Bollinger said Duke took a plea agreement: Five years in prison followed by 10-years probation. He sought psychiatric help and took his medications as ordered and completed his probation, his lawyer said.

“He was competent but he was one of those people had a mood disorder where they could be depressed one day and all excited another day. I just remember the doctor saying he had a personality disorder,” Bollinger recalled.

While in prison, Duke filed for bankruptcy.

He was released in January 2004. About a year later, he sued the Social Security Administration, which had denied his application for disability benefits and health insurance.

“He couldn’t work. He just mentally couldn’t make the connection for eight hours a day,” said David Evans, the attorney who represented Duke.

Evans said Duke had been diagnosed by several doctors as bipolar, but didn’t have enough money to buy the needed medication. “He was clearly in need of help,” Evans said.

They filed at least five appeals to the denials.

“The judges adjudicating the claims didn’t feel the claim was significant enough,” Evans said. “All he was asking for was $500 or $600 a month and medical insurance.”

Duke withdrew the suit in 2006.

He and Rebecca had married in 1999, just before his prison sentence. She said Wednesday that Duke faithfully took his medication for his bipolar disorder, but that he was under a lot of stress — she had been fired from the school district and her final unemployment check was due this week.

Tommye Lou Richardson, the executive director of human resources for the Bay District, said Rebecca Duke was hired in September 2009 as a primary school teacher for students with special needs. She was given a 97-day probationary period, and was terminated.

“She was not performing appropriately, we thought, the principal thought, and so she was let go,” Richardson said.

She wasn’t able to go into any further detail.

Richardson said Rebecca Duke had “indicated that she felt like there was a violation of her employment rights,” though she never filed a lawsuit.

About a week ago, Clay Duke joined Facebook. Over the past several days, he added photo stills from the movie and graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” a nihilistic account of a masked man who fights against a totalitarian government. The movie’s predominant symbol — a red “V” inside of a circle — was posted several times on Duke’s page.

He also quoted the final passage from Percy Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy”: “Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth, like dew/Which in sleep had fall’n on you/Ye are many-they are few.”

Duke had no Facebook friends — although by Wednesday afternoon, thousands of people responded to his earlier postings, many of them critical of Tuesday’s shooting. Others were more sympathetic, saying that Duke was driven to madness because of the difficult economy.

Duke had written something of a suicide note in his “About Me” section:

Witnesses said the gunman walked up to a podium, spray-painted a red “V” with a circle around it before he began firing.

Bay District School board member Ginger Littleton said she hit the gunman in the arm with her purse when some of the people in the room were ordered out.

“In my mind, that was the last attempt or opportunity to divert him,” she told The Associated Press.

The gunman got angry, turned around, and she fell to the floor. The man pointed the gun at her head and said, “You stupid b—-” but he didn’t shoot her, she said. She’s not sure why.

“He had every opportunity to take me out,” she said.

Initially, officials thought that district security chief Mike Jones may have killed the gunman. But police Sgt. Jeff Becker said that after authorities reviewed videotape of the shooting, investigators determined that the gunman, identified as Clay A. Duke, fatally shot himself after being hit by shots fired by Jones.