In the end, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was left without one of the things that she craved the most: money. Harold Diehl disinherited his only child.
He all but wrote Diehl-Armstrong out of his will in 2005, nine years before his death. Diehl-Armstrong learned of her disinheritance while her father was still alive and suffering from dementia. In 2010, while awaiting trial in the Pizza Bomber case, she petitioned a probate judge in Erie County to declare her father mentally incapacitated and unable to manage his financial affairs. The litigation revealed that Harold Diehl’s assets, once estimated to be $1.8 million, had dropped to $185,000 by mid-2010,1 mainly because he had given so much of his fortune away to his friends and neighbors—those good-hearted beneficiaries who he said truly cared for him but whom Diehl-Armstrong called “vultures.” The litigation also revealed that Diehl had bequeathed Diehl-Armstrong $100,000 in a will in 2000, but wrote a new will in 2005 that left her only $2,000; he left the bulk of his estate to his friends. Diehl-Armstrong claimed another will, which she said was drafted in 2008, was the most accurate: that will named her the sole beneficiary of her father’s estate. But a judge ruled the 2008 document was fraudulent. And the judge ruled the 2005 will—and its $2,000 legacy to Diehl-Armstrong—was valid.
The disinheritance was the result of the deteriorating relationship between Harold Diehl and his daughter. He changed the 2000 will after Diehl-Armstrong tried to get him removed as the administrator of his wife’s estate that same year—the attempt in which Diehl-Armstrong, in court records, called her father an abusive alcoholic who all but killed her mother. Harold Diehl’s anger at his only child, his estate lawyer said, “went beyond the fact” that she had pleaded guilty but mentally ill in one homicide and had been indicted in the Pizza Bomber case. The anger, the lawyer said, was rooted in Diehl-Armstrong’s unwarranted vitriol toward her father and the false claims she made against him in the fight over the administration of Agnes Diehl’s estate.2
“It is an unusual circumstance where neighbors are favored over a child,” the lawyer said, “but this is an unusual fact pattern.”3
Harold Diehl, who had been Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s closest living relative, died on January 8, 2014, at the Pennsylvania Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Erie. He was ninety-five years old and died in debt. He had $118,000 in his estate, but it all went to pay medical bills.4 Diehl-Armstrong did not even get the $2,000 he promised her.
Diehl-Armstrong said she was defrauded out of a fortune. She never stopped considering herself an heiress.
“God put me in this family,” she said. “I have the birthright. I have the bloodline.”5
She would never stop maintaining her innocence in the Pizza Bomber case, though she lost every appeal. The most significant post-verdict ruling came on November 15, 2012, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied her direct appeal. In a unanimous decision, the Circuit Court turned away each of Diehl-Armstrong’s contentions, which Doug Sughrue, her trial lawyer, filed on her behalf. Diehl-Armstrong claimed that Judge Sean J. McLaughlin erred by finding her competent to stand trial, by not suppressing some evidence, and by not postponing the trial to allow for Robert L. Sadoff to testify about how her mental illness, including her paranoia, would have prevented her from cooperating with Ken Barnes, Bill Rothstein, and the others in the plot that ended in Brian Wells’s death. In each instance, the Circuit Court upheld McLaughlin’s rulings and said he properly used his discretion. Regarding McLaughlin’s finding that Diehl-Armstrong was competent to stand trial, the Circuit Court wrote, “Because the Court based its opinion on reasoned expert testimony and its own observations, we cannot say that its judgment was clearly wrong.”6
Diehl-Armstrong unsuccessfully appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear her case, and she then lost another federal appeal in which she claimed Sughrue was ineffective at trial. Diehl-Armstrong represented herself in that appeal. Some of the documents she submitted were handwritten. A judge dismissed all the claims and declined to issue a certificate that would have allowed Diehl-Armstrong to appeal further; he found that she had suffered no violation of her constitutional rights. The judge wrote: “The Court has endeavored to address all the arguments in Defendant’s numerous submissions, which run the gamut in terms of legibility and coherency. After having done so, the Court concludes that there is no basis for providing her the relief she requested. Defendant’s claims were either raised and rejected on direct appeal, procedurally defaulted because they could have been raised on direct appeal, or are completely lacking in merit.”7
Diehl-Armstrong scored one post-verdict legal victory. The win was largely procedural, but she took pride in it. The Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole on October 16, 2014, granted Diehl-Armstrong parole in the state sentence of seven to twenty years that she had been serving since January 2005 for the murder of Jim Roden. She had to finish that sentence before she could start serving her federal sentence of life plus thirty years in the Pizza Bomber case. Diehl-Armstrong had been denied parole for years and had even sued the parole board in federal court, claiming the denials were unwarranted. It was in rejecting that appeal, in April 2014, that United States Magistrate Martin C. Carlson referred to Diehl-Armstrong as “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.” The parole order of October 2014 released Diehl-Armstrong from state incarceration, but only so she could go to federal prison. She was transferred from Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Muncy to her new permanent home: the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, in Texas, where years earlier she had undergone mental health treatment to determine her competency. Diehl-Armstrong said she realized that winning state parole would do nothing to reduce her lifelong federal incarceration. However, she said, in federal prison, “the law library is better.”8
Ken Barnes fared somewhat better in federal prison. He got his forty-five-year sentence cut in half in June 2011. The United States Attorney’s Office requested the reduction in light of Barnes’s cooperation in the Pizza Bomber case. Even with the break, Barnes, who was fifty-seven years old in June 2011, risked dying in prison, given his poor health. He was last incarcerated at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution at Coleman, in central Florida. His sentence expires in 2027, when he will be seventy-four years old. Barnes has never publicly expressed regret about pleading guilty, testifying against Diehl-Armstrong, or getting such a lengthy sentence, even with the reduced time. He said he pleaded guilty “to be on the right side of God.”9
Diehl-Armstrong has never wavered in her disgust of Barnes.
“He is a dirt bag,” she said.10
Diehl-Armstrong continues to take no psychotropic drugs. The degree of her bipolar disorder is difficult to gauge absent personal observation, but it often seems less severe, based on her accounts. In telephone interviews, she still exhibits, at times, telltale symptoms of her manic-depression—her incessant talking and pressured speech, particularly when she is stressed. The rate of her speech nearly always speeds up when she is recounting the evidence in the Pizza Bomber case, and how she said she was framed. “It is an insane, stupid crime to begin with,” she said in mid-2016. “To me, it’s a stupid, asinine case. I will never take the blame for it because I never did it.”11
Diehl-Armstrong said her cancer is in remission. She credited continued chemotherapy and divine intervention. She has far outlasted the minimum of three years that doctors said she had to live before the start of the Pizza Bomber trial, in 2010. She said she expects to live far longer than the seven-year maximum those doctors also gave her.
“I’m not yet dead by a long shot,” she said in 2012, expressing a defiant attitude that continues to this day.12
“My health is a miracle,” she said in September 2016, in one of the latest interviews she gave before the completion of this book. “I am feeling fantastic. I am happy and pleasant and thankful to God that I am doing so well. If you didn’t tell me I had cancer, I wouldn’t know.”13
“My health is my number one priority,” she said. “It is not me. It is from God. He’s been better to me than anyone else has.”14
Still doubtful is whether Diehl-Armstrong believes her enemies—those she said abused her, framed her, and refused to help her—also deserve such charity. She has never stopped talking about fate, and how she believes her foes will get what they deserve.
“I’m sitting back,” she said, “waiting for karma to kick in.”15
For her part, Diehl-Armstrong some time ago decided how she wants posterity to understand what happened to her, how she wants posterity to realize she suffered her many problems through no fault of her own. In 2008, a year after she was indicted in the Pizza Bomber case, and while serving a sentence for the second killing of a boyfriend, she explained that she had already chosen the phrase she wants carved on her gravestone.
“My epitaph,” Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong said: “Death by legal system.”16