Bremer’s release raises unique concerns. According to forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, no assassin has ever been freed from custody in the United States. Bremer failed in his attempt, of course, but only narrowly. Back then he was solitary and misanthropic, brimming with anger and craving notoriety. In prison he withdrew just as he had in civilian life, behaving well enough to shave 17 and a half years off his 53-year sentence. Now that he’s been released he’ll remain under state supervision until 2025 and will be barred from attending political events; the Secret Service will likely be watching over him as well. “He wants to have a low profile and be alone and be left alone,” says David Blumberg, chairman of the Maryland Parole Commission. Whether Bremer retains any homicidal tendencies 35 years after his crime remains a mystery—especially since he refused any mental-health evaluation or treatment during his confinement. “I don’t believe he will be a danger,” says Blumberg. “But he will have to acclimate to making decisions that he hasn’t had to make since 1972.”
Blumberg describes Bremer as compliant and unobtrusive. He never caused problems and devoted himself to a quiet clerical job in the prison library—a coveted senior position that he worked hard to attain. That offered him his only real opportunity for socializing, and he became “the go-to man for help with reading, writing or comprehending,” says Blumberg. Though Bremer’s parents visited him for many years, both are now deceased. He’s estranged from his four siblings save the youngest, Roger, with whom he reconnected in the past year, according to Blumberg. Nevertheless, Blumberg says, Roger has declined to allow his brother to stay with him upon release. (Roger did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Despite Bremer’s docility, he has never expressed remorse for trying to kill Wallace, whose views on race apparently rankled him. In a 1997 written appeal after he was denied parole he disparaged the governor as a “segregationist-dinosaur” and noted repeatedly that he had “served every day of the 23-year sentence for the primary victim,” whom he declined to name. (The remaining portion of his sentence was for the other three victims.) “Can we get the Confederate flag off your Maryland license plate and be halfway fair to Arthur H. Bremer?” he wrote to the parole commission. “I got a ‘Bama lynching at my parole hearing and the Chairman is whistling ‘Dixie’.”
That unrepentant attitude disturbs the Wallace family. Though the governor, who died in 1998, eventually forgave his assailant and wrote several letters to him over the years (to which Bremer never responded), other family members weren’t as magnanimous. “I just don’t know if justice has been served when I consider how much my father suffered,” says George Wallace III, 56, who is retired. The son too reached out to Bremer with a letter he sent in the early 1990s in which he suggested a meeting. Bremer’s response, according to the account Wallace’s son says two FBI agents gave him: “He jumped up on the bars of his cell … and started making sounds like a monkey.” George Wallace III is apprehensive about Bremer’s release. “While he has complied with the laws of Maryland,” Wallace says, “is he as stable as you would want?”
That’s a legitimate worry, according to Dietz, the forensic psychiatrist. “In the absence of treatment, and where the original problem is one of personality—which is what the testimony was in the Bremer case—one does not expect for there to be improvement,” Dietz says. However, research shows that as violent offenders age, the likelihood of recidivism declines, he adds. What’s almost certain is that Bremer will have a difficult time reintegrating himself into society. People who have been locked up for decades, says Dietz, often “turn to their old social mechanisms of coping: social withdrawal, isolating themselves, figuring out whom to blame, building their anger and repeating criminal acts.”
Bremer’s personality disorders became apparent at an early age. Raised in Milwaukee by a boozing father and an emotionally distant mother, he was a loner who was regularly ridiculed by classmates. As he wrote just before his attempt on Wallace in a diary riddled with spelling errors, “No english or history text was ever as hard. no math final exam ever as difficult as waiting in the school lunch line alone, waiting to eat alone & afterward reading alone in the auditorium while 100s huddle gossipped & roared & laughed & stared at me, and planned for the weekend & laughed & laughed.” He contemplated suicide, telling one psychiatrist at the age of 11 that he “thought of killing myself every day for months at a time.” The closest Bremer came to having a girlfriend was after graduation, when he briefly dated a 15-year-old girl. Yet he drove her away by showing her pornographic pictures and bragging about the size of his genitals, she would later testify. When she broke up with him, he sank into despair, shaved his head—and bought two handguns.
At first Bremer fantasized about a spectacular suicide or mass murder. Eventually, though, he decided to assassinate a political figure, fixating initially on Richard Nixon. In early 1972, at the age of 21, he began recording his ruminations in the first of two diaries retrieved after the Wallace shooting. (The first is housed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and was viewed by NEWSWEEK; the second was read into the trial transcript.) Laced with profanity, they offer a vivid portrait of an angry, vengeful and delusional man. “I want to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFULL & DYANIMIC. A STATEMENT OF MY MANHOOD FOR THE WORLD TO SEE,” he wrote. The diaries recount Bremer’s hapless adventures on the way to a Nixon appearance in Canada. In New York he went to a massage parlor, intent on losing his virginity, but the woman refused to do anything more than fondle him. Then, before crossing the border, Bremer accidentally fired one of his guns in a motel room. His incompetence with firearms figures regularly in his diaries. “I cant hit anything at a 50 foot target range,” he wrote. “I remeber firing over 100 bullets, 99 missed the paper. Some of those hit the cieling & downed plaster & dust.” When he finally reached Canada, he never managed to get close enough to Nixon to take a shot at him. “Just another god Damn failure,” he lamented.
Bremer decided instead to pursue Wallace, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and seemed to present an easier target. (Bremer’s political leanings were ambiguous; he railed against liberal hippies as much as Southern conservatives.) After seeing the movie “A Clockwork Orange,” Bremer imagined himself as the film’s ultraviolent protagonist, Alex DeLarge. He worried that killing a governor from the South wouldn’t draw much media attention but pressed ahead anyway. Prior to the shooting he wrote, “I hope everone screams & hollers & everything!! I hope the rally goes mad!!!” When he arrived at the governor’s campaign event in Laurel, Md., on May 15, 1972, Bremer was wearing a Wallace button on his jacket. He made his way to the front of the crowd, pulled out his revolver and fired five shots, hitting Wallace and the other three victims. Months later, in the courtroom where he was convicted of attempted murder, a judge asked if he had anything to say. His response: “[The prosecutor] tells me he’d like society to be protected from someone like me. I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself.” Now that he has re-emerged, both concerns seem as relevant as ever.
