On Thursday, January 13, Governor George Wallace told a crush of supporters in the Senate chamber of the Florida legislature that he was a candidate for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. On the same day Arthur Herman Bremer, aged 21, went into the Casanova Gun Shop at 1601 West Greenfield Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and for $90 bought a snub-nosed .38-calibre revolver.

It was not the first .38 revolver Bremer had owned. He had been arrested on November 18, 1971, in a Milwaukee suburb and charged with carrying another .38 and two boxes of cartridges. But the weapon purchased at the Casanova was the one he used on May 15 to fire five shots at Wallace and crucially to alter the course of the election campaign.

When he bought his second .38 revolver, Bremer was employed as a bus boy at the Milwaukee Athletic Club. Earlier he had worked as a janitor in a local school, where he had met 15-year-old Joan Pemrich, his first and apparently only girlfriend. But in January, Pemrich left him.

“He really needed some kind of love, but it wasn’t going to be from me,” she said last week. After she had gone, Bremer shaved his head. He explained to colleagues at the athletic club that it was a mark of his desolation.

Bremer stopped appearing at work and began to wander about America in his 1968 blue Rambler. FBI agents are trying to piece together his itinerary. They hope it may explain why he should have attempted the assassination of Wallace, and whether he did so alone or with a co-conspirator.

Bremer is easily recognisable. His hair – now it has grown again – is almost as white as an albino’s, and his skin is remarkably pale. His appearance is responsible for the vague memories of his shadowy presence in the primary election campaign.

Some Wallace workers told the FBI last week that they think they remember Bremer hanging around their campaign headquarters in the Milwaukee Holiday Inn during the Wisconsin primary late in March and early in April.

Then, on April 7 and 8, Bremer stayed in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It is not common for an unemployed 21-year-old ex-bus boy to stay in the Waldorf, if only because it costs approximately $35 a night. But, on April 7, Hubert Humphrey – competing with Wallace for the nomination – was also scheduled to stay at the hotel. Humphrey changed his plans at the last minute, and the FBI is still wondering whether the timing of Bremer’s visit was entirely coincidental.

For a month, Bremer disappeared, surfacing on May 5, when he went to the Milwaukee public library and took out two books. Both were about Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles almost four years earlier. One, RFK Must Die, gives Sirhan’s detailed account of the shooting and alleges conspiracy.

A cameraman from CBS, Laurens Pierce, who had been travelling with the Wallace campaign (and filmed the assassination attempt) remembers seeing him, maybe in Maryland, the week before. By then Bremer had begun to stalk Wallace.

On May 12 and 13, Bremer drove back to Michigan, and on Saturday, May 13, he arrived at Kalamazoo, where Wallace was scheduled to speak.

He arrived early for the meeting, and as he sat waiting in his car, Bremer aroused the suspicion of a parking-lot attendant, who called the police. Bremer told them he wanted a good seat at the rally.

On Sunday and Monday Bremer drove the 550 or so miles from Kalamazoo back to the Washington suburbs. His car was ailing by now – it broke down along the way – and his cash was running out. If something was to be done, it would have to be done quickly.

By the time Bremer arrived in Laurel on Monday, May 15, he was down to his last two dollars. The one thing he wasn’t short of was guns. Apart from the .38 revolver, there was a Browning 9mm automatic in his 1968 Rambler.

And, what with the weapons, he didn’t actually need the money. That night he spent in an 8ft by 10ft cell in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore.

To get out of that would have cost $200,000 – the bail set by Clarence Goetz, a federal magistrate in Baltimore.

- Wallace survived the shooting but was paralysed from the waist down. After 35 years in jail, Bremer was released last year.

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