Whispers about Arthur Bremer’s past rippled through the small Western Maryland town soon after he arrived.

But Mike McKay needed good workers for his local dry cleaning business and Bremer needed a job. It was as simple as that — and few things in Bremer’s life had been simple.

“People don’t want to be remembered for the wrong thing that they did,” McKay said. “There’s so much more to their lives.”

Bremer was a notorious criminal. He attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace, shooting him multiple times at a 1972 campaign event in Laurel. Wallace survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Since his release from prison nearly two decades ago, Bremer has been living a quiet life of near solitude in Cumberland.

Like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who recently attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, Bremer was in his early 20s and likely suffered from mental illness. Prior to the recent shooting, Crooks had searched “major depressive disorder” on his phone, according to news reports.

Bremer wrote of profound loneliness in a diary he started before the assassination attempt. The warden of the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, where Bremer served 35 years, told a local TV station that he was “a model prisoner who doesn’t have many friends.”

After his release from prison in 2007, a local charity offered Bremer housing in Cumberland. At 57, the convicted felon struggled to find work. A man of faith who believed in second chances, McKay regularly hired formerly incarcerated people.

“We’ve got a job to do,” McKay recalled telling Bremer when first he hired him. “As long as everybody’s doing what they need to be doing, the other stuff is just on a need-to-know basis.”

McKay began driving Bremer to work at 5 a.m., a routine they followed for the next 12 years.

It didn’t take long for McKay to see how decades of incarceration had shaped Bremer’s life. At work, McKay said, “there wasn’t a lot of chitchat.” Bremer diligently followed the rules, was never late and rarely called in sick.

They often had lunch together at a Chinese buffet. McKay said Bremer used a napkin to touch each spoon or tong, an old habit from the prison cafeteria to protect against germs.

Through their drives and lunches, the two developed a rapport, McKay said.

“How you doing, Art?” McKay would ask whenever Bremer got in the car.

“If I only had more money, and more love,” Bremer would reply.

In his journal, Bremer chronicled not only his plans to assassinate Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor running for president, and President Richard Nixon but also his struggles with loneliness. “An Assassin’s Diary” is riddled with erratic handwriting and 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 wrote in one entry.

His writing was an inspiration for Robert De Niro’s troubled character in “Taxi Driver,” and it illustrates what would later be identified as a common profile for publicity-seeking shooters. For example, according to a 2023 analysis of mass shootings, social isolation is “the most important external indicator leading up to [violent] attacks.”

To help prevent shootings, criminology experts urged schools and communities to actively engage with those on the outskirts, stating that even small acts such as waving hello could make a meaningful impact.

When the judge asked Bremer for final words after his guilty verdict, he replied, “Mr. Marshall [State’s Attorney Arthur A. Marshall] mentioned wanting society protected from someone like me.”

He paused.

“Looking back on my life, I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Bremer has not spoken publicly since the trial and could not be reached for comment for this article. Wallace wrote to Bremer in 1995, saying he forgave him and wanted to get to know him better. Bremer did not reply, according to news reports.

Another attempted political assassin, John Hinckley Jr., has been more open since his release from institutional psychiatric care a few years ago. The Virginia resident, who shot President Ronald Reagan, has given interviews, is trying to sell his art online, and after the Trump rally shooting wrote on social media, “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.”

Through the years, McKay said, Bremer began to develop a rhythm to his life.

After work, he’d take the bus to the local library, where he’d spend hours reading. On breaks from work and after lunch, Bremer would get ice cream any chance he could, a luxury denied to him in prison.

Bremer soon became one of McKay’s best employees, leading his company’s fire restoration cleaning division, where he hand-washed badly damaged clothes, furniture and stuffed animals.

Yet the relationship between Bremer and McKay was never supposed to be allowed.

As part of his parole, he was ordered not to leave Maryland without written permission — and to stay away from elected officials and political candidates.

So, when McKay mulled his first bid for local office a few years after hiring Bremer, he reached out to the U.S. Secret Service and the Maryland Parole Commission. His stipulation was clear. If the campaign meant severing ties with Bremer, he’d abandon the idea. The agencies agreed that the two could stay in contact.

McKay was elected to the Allegany County Commission, as a state delegate and, in 2022, as a state senator.

The demands of standing all day eventually took a toll on Bremer, who retired two years ago.

But the local Republican politician, age 55, still regularly sees Bremer, now 73. The two often cross paths during Bremer’s daily walks, and Bremer sometimes visits McKay’s local office.

They exchange texts every few weeks, sharing updates and news articles.

“He’s my friend,” McKay said. “And he just wants to be left alone to eat his ice cream.”