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The man police say is responsible for the deadly shooting in a Louisiana movie theater lived in an Alabama city once called the "wickedest city in America."
John Russel Houser, 59, was from Phenix City, Ala., a city with a population of about 32,000 in the far eastern side of the state. At one time, the city earned a very unflattering reputation for greed and corruption.
In the first part of the 20th century, the lottery was legal, and businesses that manufactured loaded dice and marked cards had sprung up around it, AL.com reported.
Lotteries, gambling and other unseemly activities were supplied by a steady supply of soldiers at nearby Fort Benning and college students at what was then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University.
By the 1950s, its notoriety was sealed.
So "wicked" was the city that in 1954 an attorney who tried to battle the corruption was shot to death outside his own law office. Albert Patterson had just been elected district attorney by a margin of 1,400 votes.
To that point, it was the only American city that had ever been placed under martial law.
"Phenix City was as wide open as Las Vegas," his son, John Patterson said in a 1992 interview with the Associated Press. "Every college kid at Auburn and every soldier at Fort Benning can tell you that."
The city didn't have very wholesome beginnings, judging by how it was first named. When it was founded in 1838, the city was called Sodom.
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