IN late November 1963, a reclusive 13-year-old boy named Artie Bremer sat transfixed before the TV screen watching the coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Suddenly there on the screen was Jack Ruby busting through a ring of bodyguards to shoot down Lee Harvey Oswald in cold blood. "I remember us watching that on TV together," recalls the boy's father, William Bremer. "Art was impressed with it. Could that have anything to do with what happened?"
Like Ruby, Bremer insinuated himself into the crowd surrounding his victim and, with no chance of escape, boldly broke through to accomplish his grim deed before the TV cameras. The difference is that Bremer, a failure at almost everything he tried, was unsuccessful even as an assassin.
The second youngest of five children, Arthur Herman Bremer was born on Aug. 21, 1950 and raised in a shabby, working-class corner of Milwaukee's South Side. According to court and various social service agency records, the Bremers were a problem family in which parental quarreling and neglect were common.
Variously described as "strange," "withdrawn," "uncommunicative" and "incredibly defensive," Artie Bremer had no close friends and rarely, if ever, acknowledged neighbors' greetings. His younger brother Roger, 18, says that Arthur, a short (5 ft. 7 in.), husky youth who lifted weights, "just stayed in all the time and had his own views. Ma got on him when he wouldn't go out. He just hated her I guess. I don't think he likes me either."
An average student with a 106 IQ, Bremer went out for the junior varsity football team when he was a sophomore at South Division High School. Though he was never more than a bench-warming, third-string guard, he stuck the season out until his mother pressed him to give up the sport. "I told him I wanted him to quit," says Sylvia Bremer, "because it seemed that someone was always picking on him. He was strong and had big muscles, but he was too quiet to give those guys who were picking on him what they deserved." Mrs. Bremer, an orphan who never attended high school, says that she is not totally convinced that her son shot George Wallace. "It's not kosher, you know? Why did those Wallace people permit him to walk into the crowds? It's their fault as much as it is Arthur's—or whoever shot him."
William Bremer Sr., 58, a truck driver who is blind in his right eye, says that "Artie may be 21 but he is still a boy." Hunched over a glass of Andeker beer in a dim South Side tavern last week, he grieved: "Oh, if only Artie'd shot me instead. I never pray, but last night I prayed and I prayed very hard." Bremer, a distraught, broken man who wore his silver-white hair in a ponytail until his wife cut it the day after the shooting, told TIME Correspondents William Friedman and Burton Pines that he also did something else he had not done in years. "I cried when this happened. I shouldn't say it, but I cried."