Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-08-27 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Thirty-five years ago, as he listened to the contents of his life spill across a Prince George’s County courtroom, Arthur Bremer wore what the shrinks called “a schizzy grin.” He was smiling in the face of catastrophe. We can only imagine his expression when he learned the other day that he’s finally going to be released from Maryland prison.

Bremer was, by his own account, a young man whose “fuse is about burnt.” He wrote those words a few days before he fired the gun at George Wallace. Bremer was a self-proclaimed loser from a strange, dysfunctional family who went looking to change the course of his life and, secondarily, change the course of history. He was, by his own attorney’s account, “a boy who was weird from the day he was born.”

Well, it was a weird time in America. Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan went looking for Kennedys, and James Earl Ray found Martin Luther King Jr. When Bremer found Wallace on that Laurel parking lot in 1972, it seemed merely the latest evidence of something dark and sinister that had been unleashed in the national soul.

But Bremer played his part in the drama behind that weird schizzy grin, even as he screamed his heart out to his diary every night and even as its contents were read aloud in that Upper Marlboro courtroom.

“Ask me why I did it and I’d say, ‘Nothing else to do’ ... or ‘I have to kill somebody,’ ” he wrote a week before he gunned down Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who was running for president that spring. “That’s how far gone I am.”

His court-appointed attorney, Benjamin Lipsitz of Baltimore, spotted it right away and used it to reach for an insanity plea.

“This boy,” Lipsitz told the jury, “is weird, crazy. It’s the state of Maryland versus this creep. I’m telling you, psychiatrists will write papers about him for 100 years. This boy is a real nut.”

But, as we learn now of his release this autumn, after 35 years behind bars, we wonder: How different was he from a million others out there, friendless and frustrated with their lives, and bright enough to see the dreary future and know they want no part of it?

In court that summer, both sides marched a parade of shrinks into the room — psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers — divided on Bremer’s sanity, but each talking about the grin on Bremer’s face, the defense mechanism he wore to hide himself from the world.

“It’s sometimes called a schizzy grin,” one psychiatrist testified. He said the look was familiar among schizophrenics. Other doctors called it “a silly laugh that comes up at inappropriate times.”

Then they read Bremer’s diary — 113 pages of failure at love and sex and life in general — and, horrifyingly, the courtroom flooded with laughter. “A silly laugh,” one reporter dryly noted, “that came up at an inappropriate time.”

Nobody asked Bremer about his reaction to the laughter. By this time, he’d laid his face on the defense table and hidden it in his arms.

And still the reading went on, all of it an attempt to prove him insane — including entries about Bremer’s fumbling efforts on dates. During one pause, a female reporter turned to a newspaper guy and said, “I’ve gone out with dozens of guys just like that.”

The trial lasted only a week. The judge had vacation plans he wasn’t going to interrupt. So, day after day, the proceedings started early and lasted late into the night. Some jurors sat with legs draped over the jury box. Others seemed to fight off sleep.

But it was clear — from professional testimony, from Bremer’s diary, from that weird, schizzy grin — that something beyond the facts of the case were on trial here. There was no question that Bremer fired the gun that paralyzed Wallace for the rest of his life.

The real question was: Was it a crazy man who pulled the trigger, or someone not so different from the rest of us, capable of violence because of the everyday frustrations of his life? Where was the line to be drawn between a schizoid personality — one with gaps between reality and fantasy, but able to adapt socially — and a schizophrenic person who can’t make the successful compromise?

On the last day of the trial, the jurors ordered lunch and returned with a verdict — guilty, no insanity — before they finished eating. And, for the past 35 years behind bars, Bremer in his complete silence has given us no further clues.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com