She had reached verbal fury. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong had always liked to talk, and to talk a lot, especially when she could go on and on, uninterrupted, as if on a stage. At this moment, the stage could get no bigger and the attention could get no greater.
Diehl-Armstrong was speaking into the microphone at the defense table in the middle of the most spacious courtroom at the United States District Courthouse in downtown Erie, Pennsylvania. Everyone in the packed gallery was turned toward her, which is what she liked. She was able to look at the federal judge directly, as if they were equals, which is also what she liked. The judge, Sean J. McLaughlin, had pledged, throughout her trial, to give her plenty of time to speak, and he again had shown her great patience and deference on this day, February 28, 2011—the date of her sentencing in what was known as the Pizza Bomber case or the Collar Bomb case.
Diehl-Armstrong’s victim was a forty-six-year-old pizza deliveryman by the name of Brian Wells. He had been killed nearly eight years earlier when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank near Erie. The case was beyond strange; the FBI had never seen anything like it. The case was so unusual and complex and deadly that the FBI elevated it to a priority, and labeled it Major Case 203. Wells’s assailants had sent him on a scavenger hunt in a failed attempt for him to gather clues to deactivate the bomb before it blew up. Diehl-Armstrong had a long history of suffering from bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses. She was convicted of being an accomplice in Wells’s death. She knew, as the spectators in the courtroom knew, that, at sixty-two years old, she was facing a mandatory prison sentence of life plus thirty years. Her conviction had guaranteed that punishment. But Diehl-Armstrong wanted to do whatever she could to persuade McLaughlin that she was innocent.
So she talked. And she talked.
“I’m a good, decent person,” Diehl-Armstrong said. “I’ve got the equivalent of five college degrees, and I have a master’s degree. I’m a certified teacher. I’m a music teacher. I’m a social science teacher. I worked at these jobs. I worked with the state. . . . I have a degree in sociology. I am not a bank robber. I don’t have to rob banks to get money. I am a certified guidance counselor. I almost have a doctorate, less dissertation. I am certified to counsel elementary and secondary schools. I’m not crazed. . . . I am not a crazy person.”1
“What I am trying to say,” Diehl-Armstrong continued, “is I’ve had mental problems. I haven’t made the best choices. I’ve made mistakes and I’m paying for them. What I’ve done wrong in my life, I will admit to. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take the heat for [those who] killed this guy.”2
McLaughlin broke in. “Is there anything else that you would like to tell me?”
“I would like to say . . . ,” Diehl-Armstrong said.
She started another ramble, and she declared her innocence over and over.
“Ms. Armstrong,” McLaughlin said, “you’ve got twenty seconds to wrap up.”
Diehl-Armstrong, at five feet, eight inches tall and 168 pounds, had been a forceful presence throughout her trial. Now her voice again boomed in the courtroom.
“All I’m trying to say is, Don’t count me out,” she said. “You know, there’s an old Arkansas proverb, ‘If it doesn’t come out in the wash, it will come out in the rinse.’ Someone get me a real lawyer; let the truth come out, please. To my dying breath let the real truth come out.”
“Ms. Armstrong,” McLaughlin said, “thank you very much.”3
Diehl-Armstrong grew quiet, but she seethed as she listened to the next speaker, the assistant United States attorney who prosecuted her case, Marshall Piccinini. He detailed the evidence he had presented over the ten-day trial, which had ended with Diehl-Armstrong’s conviction on November 1, 2010.
“In the end, Your Honor, there are many themes to why people become involved in criminal activity,” Piccinini said. “You see regularly crimes of opportunity, crimes of passion, crimes of greed. Crimes related to drug abuse and use. But this particular case was motivated by greed and was completely characterized by evil.
“The jurors in this case saw the depths of human depravity,” Piccinini said. “Not only did they see an evil plot, which in this twisted scheme [included sending] Brian Wells on a collision course towards his death . . . but this was an evil scheme, a plot to kill him and to jeopardize the lives of other people in the community.”4
Piccinini referred to Diehl-Armstrong’s history of mental illness.
“She does have mental illness,” he said. “But when you combine this woman’s serious mental illness with regard to her personality disorder, her narcissism, her paranoia, her deception, her manipulativeness: You combine that in one person with evil and this is the type of crime that results. The combination of Marjorie Diehl and her propensity towards violence in this particular case proved deadly.”5
Piccinini asked that McLaughlin sentence Diehl-Armstrong to the mandatory life plus thirty years, “to ensure that this woman will not be in a position to kill again.”6
Diehl-Armstrong remained quiet. The recitation of her tumultuous life story was difficult to hear. Death was always around her. Even her only husband, Richard Armstrong, was dead; he collapsed from a stroke in 1992, less than two years after they had married. Her relationships with men invariably turned deadly—and in the case of Wells’s, the manner of death was more extreme than anything the FBI had ever investigated in the context of a bank robbery. McLaughlin explained why Wells’s death justified the mandatory sentence.
“Its bizarre nature, coupled with the equally bizarre and sociopathic personalities who have perpetrated it, have tended to obscure what this case is really about,” he said. “And that is that this defendant and her conspirators sent a man to his certain death and, in so doing, risked injury or death to many other people.”7
McLaughlin referred to Diehl-Armstrong’s many years of mental dysfunction. He said other people suffer from similar mental diseases that plagued Diehl-Armstrong, and that they did not act in cold blood “or seal a man’s fate by strapping a ticking time bomb to his neck.”8 Then McLaughlin reached his verbal crescendo. He, not Diehl-Armstrong, had the true power in the courtroom. He reviewed her life as she now sat in silence, almost like a stone. Her earlier efforts at persuasion, to show the judge that she really did not do it, would have never succeeded, but now their failure was complete.
“Finally,” McLaughlin said, “it is worth noting that the presentence report reflects that Ms. Armstrong was an excellent student, who graduated twelfth out of 413 students in her high school class. She then went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in sociology. As well as a master’s degree in education. All of which begs the question as to what might have been.”9
She received her sentence: life plus thirty years, with no parole. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, no matter how promising she once seemed so many years ago, was all but certain to die in prison. She left the courtroom in handcuffs, and in silence.
Prison was nothing new to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She was already incarcerated when she was indicted in the Pizza Bomber case, in July 2007. She was serving a sentence of seven to twenty years in a Pennsylvania state prison for pleading guilty but mentally ill to shooting her forty-five-year-old live-in boyfriend, James Roden, in the back at the house they shared in Erie in mid-August 2003. Roden had abused her, but their relationship had appeared to reach a degree of calm before the murder. After Roden’s death, Diehl-Armstrong helped her former fiancé, William A. Rothstein, stuff Roden’s body into a freezer in Rothstein’s garage in rural Erie County. When she stood before an Erie County judge to get sentenced for Roden’s death, Diehl-Armstrong talked, as she always did, but she acted contrite rather than defiant. She apologized for Roden’s death and thanked “everybody for trying to help me”10—a reference to her mental illness.
“I’m sorry,” said Diehl-Armstrong, then fifty-five years old. “I’m not going to be in any more trouble. I know I learned my lesson. And if I get another chance in life, I’m not going to lose it and I’m going to thank God and the people that gave it to me. I’m really going to appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. And this is the truth. I’m not a bad person.”11
Diehl-Armstrong had made similar pronouncements before. Nineteen years earlier, in July 1988, when she was known as Marjorie Diehl, she stood in a courtroom at the Erie County Courthouse for another sentencing. She had undeniably killed a man—her first known homicide victim, her boyfriend Robert Thomas, a forty-three-year-old Navy veteran of the Vietnam War. Diehl was thirty-five years old on July 30, 1984, when she shot Thomas six times as he rested on a couch in the modest house they shared in a quiet section of Erie. Diehl pleaded self-defense and claimed Thomas beat her; the contention that she was the victim of domestic abuse and mental illness would run throughout her life. Diehl spent nearly four years in prison while awaiting trial. Then she was acquitted of first-degree murder in Thomas’s death.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she said after the verdict. “I’ve done my time, and I’m not going to get into any more trouble.”12
Diehl-Armstrong lost all her appeals, including in the Pizza Bomber case, in which the federal courts turned her away again and again. In 2014, a federal magistrate judge, Martin C. Carlson, summarized Diehl-Armstrong’s criminal career in harsh terms. Her myriad “crimes reflected a stunning degree of calculated cruelty,”13 the judge wrote, and he called her “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer who denied culpability, and possessed a high potential for future violence.”14 And as if to make sure no one, including Diehl-Armstrong, missed his point, the judge listed the reasons Diehl-Armstrong deserved no reprieve. Two of the reasons were the deaths of Jim Roden and Brian Wells.
“These facts,” the judge wrote, “include her involvement in two calculated killings, murders marked by brutality, sadism, cruelty, and the morbid abuse of her victims, both living and dead.”15
Other than prison, only one other place was home to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She grew up, went to college, found jobs, and then killed in Erie, an industrial city of about one hundred thousand people in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, on Lake Erie and Presque Isle Bay, one of the most naturally protected harbors on the Great Lakes. Erie, known nationally for its record-setting snowfalls, is two hours equidistant from Cleveland to the west, Buffalo to the east, and Pittsburgh to the south. When Diehl-Armstrong was born, on February 26, 1949, Erie boomed as a manufacturing powerhouse, the home to plants whose well-paid blue-collar workers churned out castings and boilers and paper and washing machines and, most prominently, locomotives at the sprawling General Electric factory just to the east of town, where as many as eighteen thousand people worked in the 1940s.16 Erie was known throughout the United States for its manufacturing prowess, and at one time, in the 1920s, it was also known as the freshwater fishing capital of the world, for the hundreds of commercial fishing boats that jammed its docks.
Erie claimed a sliver of glory in American history as well. During the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s headquarters was in Erie. While sheltered in Presque Isle Bay, he and his sailors built the ships he commanded during the defeat of the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie, near what is today Put-in-Bay, Ohio, on September 10, 1813. The battle flag that Perry’s men hoisted that day—a bright blue banner emblazoned with “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” in white—was popular in Erie, and the famous phrase on the flag eventually became Erie’s unofficial motto, a saying that exuded hope against desperation: However bad things get, try not to sink. Erie needed all the help it could find by the 2000s. Diehl-Armstrong heard and repeated all the pathetic nicknames for Erie, which in its glory days was known as the “Gem City,” because of gorgeous Lake Erie and Presque Isle Bay. But as industry declined and the bay grew polluted (swimming in it was a hazard until the early 2000s), the stinging catchphrases proliferated. Diehl-Armstrong knew them all, and, as she got older and ended up in prison, she grew to despise the only city where she had ever lived. “Your whole town sucks,” she once said. “Dreary Erie. The Mistake on the Lake.”17
The negative sentiment took hold in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—the period that coincided with Diehl-Armstrong’s midlife—as Erie faced constant economic struggles. The International Paper plant, founded in 1899, closed in 2002, putting 775 people out of work.18 GE shed thousands of jobs in Erie as it built a locomotive plant in Texas, where the workers were not unionized; by 2016, the Erie GE plant was down to about 2,900 employees. The city’s rate of child poverty increased until it became one of the highest in the nation. Erie, mindful of its heritage and its past economic greatness, remained proud through the unraveling, a decline not unlike those that beset so many other Rust Belt cities, from Detroit to Cleveland to Buffalo. But many of those cities rebounded. Erie, by the late 2000s, remained mired in high unemployment, poverty, crime, and population loss, though it had also developed what remained a sparkling waterfront. Diehl-Armstrong’s deterioration in many ways mirrored that of her native city. And much like Erie tended to fixate on its glorious past, Diehl-Armstrong unfailingly held herself in a high regard, no matter how damning the evidence of collapse around her.
Marjorie Eleanor Diehl was an only child. Her special place in her household allowed her, early on, to enjoy even more of the attention that she sought throughout her life. Her mother, Agnes Eleanor Wolfenden Diehl, was also an only child, though her father, Harold Diehl, known as “Hub,” was one of nine children; he had two brothers and six sisters. Agnes Wolfenden and Harold Diehl wed in Erie on August 22, 1942. Harold was making locomotives at GE at that time. When he returned from World War II, he started on a career path in which he was a construction foreman and sold aluminum awnings door to door. He had fallen short of a high school diploma. His wife was much more accomplished in her education. She had a bachelor’s degree from Edinboro Teachers’ College, now Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, just south of Erie, and a master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh; she also did graduate work at Columbia University.19 Agnes Diehl was teaching high school when she married, and went on to teach elementary school in the Erie School District for nearly forty years, until 1980.
The Diehls had been married six and one-half years when Marjorie was born; Agnes was thirty-two years old and Harold was thirty. They lived in the same house all their married life—a 2,016-square-foot two-family residence built in 1917 whose first owners were Marjorie Diehl’s maternal grandparents, George and Eleanor Wolfenden, from whom Marjorie and her mother took their middle names. Sometimes Diehl-Armstrong was called “Ellen,” after “Eleanor.”20
The neighborhood was filled with young families who took root after World War II, during which Harold Diehl served in the United States Coast Guard in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.21 Agnes and Harold Diehl earned a fair amount of money over the years, which they saved and invested well. When Agnes Diehl died, at age eighty-three, in July 2000, she and her husband had accumulated an estate of $1.8 million, mostly in municipal bonds.22 Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong regarded that fortune as her legacy, and, according to the FBI, ultimately she was willing to arrange to have someone kill for it.
Her parents’ dual incomes gave Marjorie Diehl a childhood of comfort and stability. Throughout grade school and high school, she lived at the same house and attended the same schools, year after year. She went to the same grade school, McKinley Elementary, where her grandfather and her mother had gone; her mother taught at McKinley for most of her career.23 And when she enrolled at Erie’s Academy High School, in 1964, as a sophomore (which was customary at the time), Marjorie Diehl followed her parents. Her father attended Academy until dropping out, and her mother graduated from Academy before heading off to college to become a teacher.24
As a girl, Diehl looked up the most not to her father and mother, but to other relatives whose standing in Erie, she believed, was higher than that of her parents. She liked to talk about her cousin, John C. Diehl, an educator with the Erie School District for forty-eight years, including thirteen as superintendent of schools, from 1922 to 1935. His death, at age eighty-seven, on August 27, 1952, was the subject of a front-page story, with a banner headline, in the Erie Daily Times. The newspaper called him the “grand old man” of Erie education, who was “widely known as a great scholar, fine teacher, accomplished administrator, devoted civic leader and warm-hearted humanitarian.”25 John Diehl attended Oberlin College and graduated from Yale University with honors. He returned to Erie and the Erie School District and never left; the school district named Diehl Elementary School after him—a fact that Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong would relate to anyone who would listen, including jurors.
John C. Diehl’s fame aside, Diehl-Armstrong as a girl identified more with her mother’s family—the Wolfendens—than her father’s. Her maternal grandparents lived in a house neighboring the Diehls; the backyards connected, and young Marjorie walked back and forth as she pleased. She said her maternal grandparents often babysat her, especially, she recalled, “when my father was out at the bars.”26 She adored her grandfather, George Wolfenden, an Erie police sergeant, and she considered him a surrogate father. She also admired her great-uncle, William Wolfenden, a shop worker who she said built houses with her grandfather when they were not working their regular jobs. If Diehl considered her parents fairly well off, she considered her grandparents rich, just as she yearned to be. Her Grandfather Wolfenden, she once recalled, “was a good man. . . . He was a builder of houses; this is where the money came into the family. Because he actually accrued all this wealth. He and his hard-working brother, who never married, who worked at Erie Meter Company longer than anyone ever did and saved and invested all this money and gave it all to my mother—supposedly for me, for my future because I was an only child.”27
Her admiration for her grandparents’ financial acumen instilled in her an understanding of money that turned into an obsession. At eight years old, an age when many girls of her generation played with dolls, Marjorie Diehl dreamed about money and became fixated on it. Her greed—an avarice that deepened and darkened as the years passed—could have originated in those joyful visits to her grandparents’ house. Diehl liked what she saw; better yet, she believed that what she saw was destined to be all hers. She was entitled to a fortune.
“My grandparents, they handled money excellently,” Diehl-Armstrong recalled. “They were wonderful people. They had a safe in their house. When I was a kid, they even showed me the money, stacked up, that they took over to Union Bank.
“They started me banking when I was a kid. I used to take their mortgage payments for them when they went out shopping or doing something. And then make or write the receipts for people. And then they would have me take the money over every Friday to the bank to deposit. They would tell me how some day that was going to be my inheritance because that’s what they were building.”28
Marjorie Diehl realized even before she was a teenager that money could make you different from other people; in her view, money could make you better. She grew up with an outsized opinion of herself as an heiress. Her neighbors were largely working class, and she considered herself above them. She got her sense of superiority, she later said, from her mother, who she said always wanted her to be at the top and apart from her peers. “I was an only child,” Diehl-Armstrong once said, “and I lived an isolated life”;29 she also said she “lived in her mind.”30 Well into her fifties and sixties, when reflecting on her childhood Diehl-Armstrong returned to the same theme: Her mother loved her, but also drove her to pursue a level of perfection that many would consider unattainable. Marjorie Diehl was very much the daughter of an intellectual mother, a woman who, in the late 1930s and 1940s, was bright and bold enough to get a college degree and then do graduate work at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Marjorie Diehl was special, as her mother was special.
“When you were raised, Marge,” her lawyer asked her when she testified in the Pizza Bomber trial, “were you raised in poverty or were you raised with money?”
“I was always raised with a lot of money,” Diehl-Armstrong said.
“When you went to high school, were you in the bottom of your class or the top of your class?”
“Top.”
“Were you ever at the bottom of anything?” her lawyer said.
“No,” Diehl-Armstrong replied.31
Her recollection of her childhood was fairly consistent over the years, based on trial testimony, repeated interviews, and statements she gave to psychologists and psychiatrists. Diehl, as a girl, is what would today be called overcommitted. But overcommitment and its hoped-for corollary of overachievement presented paths to a life of wealth and intellectual renown that she and her mother believed was her destiny. Though Diehl-Armstrong surely exaggerated to a degree, given her grandiosity, her childhood memories conveyed a frenzied and pressured girlhood, with music as one focus. Her father testified that she started taking piano lessons when she was five years old—a recollection that fit Diehl-Armstrong’s memories.32
“I started studying at the Erie Conservatory when I was four,” she once testified. “And I took lessons all the time. And I actually got my certificate younger than anybody—had to teach music when I was twelve years old. I was very precocious. I wanted to be a concert pianist at the time, like a child prodigy. I was playing on Teens and Talents TV show; I played the minor concerto when I was only thirteen years old. I did a very good job on that. . . . And I was only thirteen, so I thought that was pretty good.”33
Diehl-Armstrong said she played cello in Erie’s Junior Philharmonic as a teenager, another detail her father verified.34 She also graduated from the Erie School of Music when she was fourteen years old.35
“Were you first chair, second chair?” Diehl-Armstrong’s lawyer asked her about her prowess with the cello.
“First chair. First chair in my high school, junior high school, and grade school. Then I would just do solos, too, for Christmas concerts and things. Then I was a church organist, when I was about sixteen years old, and a youth choir director.”
“Were you active in your church as well?”
“Yes,” Diehl-Armstrong said. “I was active in Scouts. I had over one hundred merit badges. I was nominated for God and country award. I was a good person.”36
Though Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong said she loved her parents, she also clearly resented them. Between the two of them, she often said, they inflicted a mental trauma that she believed manifested itself in her psychiatric imbalance. “My parents were fucked up,” Diehl-Armstrong said in 2012, as she served her federal prison sentence of life plus thirty years. “They left a fucking mess.”37 And in what is known to be one of her earliest psychiatric exams, in 1972, when she was twenty-three, Diehl-Armstrong told a caseworker that her parents “spoiled her as a child but then ‘turned mean.’”38 In another analysis, a psychologist wrote that Diehl-Armstrong described “both her father and mother as having manic depressive periods” and she recalled “an incident where her father went at her mother with a butcher knife and she stepped in between them.”39
Diehl-Armstrong claimed her father was an alcoholic who molested her as a girl, though she waited to make the assertion of sexual assault public in her testimony at the Pizza Bomber trial, in 2010. In the numerous interviews she had with psychologists and psychiatrists over the years, dating to as early as 1972, she never consistently accused her father of sexual assault. In 2010, on the witness stand, under oath, and trying whatever she could to win the sympathy of the jury, Diehl-Armstrong offered no hesitation before she branded her father, who was then still alive but suffering from dementia, a child molester. “He was sexually molesting me as a child and as an adolescent,” she testified. “My mother always tried to be a buffer and protect me; she was a good woman.”40 Diehl-Armstrong said she never liked her father, and that, when her mother left the house and she was alone with him, she would find refuge across the backyard, at the house of her maternal grandparents and their safe stuffed with money. All that cash provided comfort, and a kind of hope, though later in life Diehl-Armstrong recalled the wealth with regret: “That money in my family was never more than a curse,” she said.41
As much as she said she loved her mother over her father, Diehl-Armstrong considered her mother a poor influence on her as well. Looking back, she criticized what she characterized as her mother’s relentless pursuit of perfection for her, as well as what she said was her parents’ penchant to keep to themselves and to keep little Margie hidden as much as possible: “I was raised in the old style,” she said. “Children should be seen but not heard.”42 At the same time, her mother pushed her into the public arena by enrolling her in the music classes and other events. Her mother, Diehl-Armstrong said, wanted her to be a teacher, like she was, or a medical doctor; Diehl-Armstrong once pointed out to another psychiatrist “that the first letter of Marjorie and the first letter of Diehl spelled MD.”43 She said she ultimately decided to study to become a teacher to please her mother.44
Long before she chose a path in adulthood, Marjorie Diehl changed. Her nascent mental illness set in. She said the transformation happened when she was twelve years old, and entering puberty. She repeatedly told psychiatrists and psychologists that she started suffering from anorexia nervosa at that age, and, at one point had to be hospitalized when her weight dropped from 135 pounds to 95 or as low as 85.45 She blamed her father and her mother for the onset of the disorder; she said “she felt pressured by her upwardly mobile parents ‘to perform,’” but used the anorexia to both succumb to and rebel against their expectations, especially her mother’s.46 She said her mother seemed to love her “only when she was playing the role of child prodigy,”47 and she believed that her mother also despised her for perhaps stunting her mother’s life and marring her mother’s attractiveness. “Mother was said to be a teacher who stressed intellectual development,” a psychiatrist once wrote of an interview with Diehl-Armstrong. “Mother is also said to have blamed her varicosities and abdominal stretch marks on the patient, who was born when the mother was 32 years of age. The patient wondered aloud if they had wanted a boy.”48
Diehl-Armstrong linked sexuality to her anorexia, which she said developed just as she was maturing sexually, and earlier than most girls her age.49 She said she considered her anorexia “as a defense against the sexual advances of males.”50 She said she had reason to be wary of boys and men. Her father, if she is to be believed, was molesting her, and she said she had “many incorrect notions” of sexuality, “such as the fact that she could get pregnant if she kissed a boy.”51 One psychologist wondered whether Diehl-Armstrong had come up with a link between anorexia and sexuality and her parents’ obsession with perfection by reading psychiatric texts or if she had really experienced such problems.52 Either way, Diehl-Armstrong throughout her life talked about the anorexia in the context of a childhood in which she finally grew “petrified of competition.”53
She also likened her anorexia to attempted suicide. With her young life out of control, she said, she attempted to restore order to it by not eating and deciding that she would rather die. “When I was twelve,” she explained, in another effort at self-diagnosis, “the conditions were getting so bad with my father sexually coming on to me and my coming into puberty and stuff, I couldn’t deal with it. So I tried to starve myself to deal with the problems.”54 Looking back, she said, the sudden onset of anorexia also made sense in the context of what she considered her parents’ attempts to be social strivers, to be better than their friends and neighbors—a trait that she displayed in her adulthood, with her manic levels of narcissism. In a life that would be full of extremes, anorexia represented the first time that Diehl-Armstrong went to the edge. Anorexia, she said, continuing her self-diagnosis, “frequently hits women from affluent families that have money, who are expected to be perfect and then they’re afraid to come into their puberty or adulthood and all that, that was who I was. And I felt like, kind of a bird in a gilded cage. I really didn’t like my life. It was almost like suicide, the doctor told me, and I had to do something. It was killing me. I was going to end up like Karen Carpenter. My heart was going to stop and I was going to be dead if I didn’t do something fast.”55
One of the psychiatrists who had the most interaction with Diehl-Armstrong vouched for her explanation that she suffered from anorexia. Robert L. Sadoff, MD, of Philadelphia, had examined Diehl six times in 1988, when he testified for the defense in her trial for the killing of her boyfriend Bob Thomas. Sadoff said Diehl told him about her anorexia as a child, and he said photos of her from that time in her life, and later, showed that she had lost a noticeable amount of weight. Sadoff, based on the photos, called Diehl “plump” rather than “overweight,” but said that her appearance changed considerably. “Certainly as she got older she thinned out,” Sadoff said.56
Mental health treatment, Diehl-Armstrong said, helped her beat anorexia, at least for a time.57 This was the time of her life when she first had treatment for psychiatric problems,58 when different forces mixed in the cauldron of her mind such that, as one psychologist wrote, she “has shown the seeds of severe mental illness since early childhood.”59 Age twelve, when Diehl stood between girlhood and womanhood, between innocence and experience, was a pivotal moment in her life, the moment when those seeds of dysfunction first grew into mental disorder. Finding the causes of that mental illness would elude psychiatrists and psychologists throughout Diehl-Armstrong’s life, though she believed she knew for certain the reasons for her erratic behavior. She said her mental problems were manifestations of unpredictable parents, including a “schizy” mother—meaning schizophrenic—who was “either too overprotective or underprotective at different times.”60 “She blamed her mood swings,” a psychologist wrote, “on ‘genetics and inconsistent treatment by my parents.’”61 At the same time, a psychiatrist once wrote, “her family history is negative for seizure disorder, mental hospitalizations or suicide.”62
Diehl-Armstrong said her problems were not due to substance abuse. In May 1985, she told a psychologist that she did not use drugs or drink, but he also wrote that she admitted that “at various times she has taken amphetamine pills, marijuana, and pain pills. There may also have been some periods when she was abusing these drugs.”63 Despite her insistence that she drank no or little alcohol, she said she had “at least one relationship with a man when they got drunk every night.”64
Diehl-Armstrong derived some solace that her mental illness at least had a name: manic-depressive disorder or bipolar disorder, whose signature features include alternating periods of mania and depression. One of the symptoms of her mania was her extreme sense of self-importance, which eventually turned into grandiosity and narcissism. Early on, as one psychologist wrote, Diehl-Armstrong showed “self-aggrandizing thinking in that she exaggerated the degree to which others found her attractive and the degree to which she knew important people.”65 Another symptom of her mania was what is known as pressured speech, a trait that Diehl-Armstrong routinely displayed in abundance. Whether she was on the telephone or on the street or on the witness stand, she let the words flow like a torrent, and frequently many of the words were foul. She was aggressive when she talked that way, as if she wanted to beat down the listener with words and phrases, just as she tried to do when she testified in the Pizza Bomber case in the United States District Court in Erie. She was also diagnosed as having paranoid features, to the point that she believed most everyone was out to get her; she viewed even her lawyers “almost as persecutors.”66
Yet Diehl-Armstrong accepted her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She seemed relieved by it. She said the psychologists and psychiatrists first told her about manic-depression in the mid-1970s, when she would have been twenty-six years old. She said read about the disorder. She said she had a revelation regarding her chronic mental woes. “Everything,” she said, “fell into place.”67
She got another diagnosis early on that she would spend the rest of her life claiming was erroneous. On August 1, 1972, a psychiatric caseworker listened to Diehl, then twenty-three years old, detail the ups and downs of her life, including what she said was her fraught relationship with her parents, particularly her father. Citing Diehl’s problematic feelings toward her dad, the caseworker gave this diagnostic impression of her: “Deep seated hatred of men.”68
Diehl-Armstrong bristled whenever someone confronted her with that finding—that she was a misandrist, a woman who despised men. Usually a psychiatrist or a psychologist asked her about her antipathy toward men, but it was the subject of courtroom discussion as well. She fumed on the witness stand in August 1984 when a prosecutor questioned her about the diagnostic impression that she had a deep-seated hatred of men. The cross-examination occurred during a pretrial hearing in the case of the death of her boyfriend Bob Thomas.
“Do you recall,” the prosecutor asked her, “a discussion with the psychiatric caseworker at the time as to their diagnostic impression that you had a deep-seated hatred of men?”
“That is totally irrelevant,” Diehl-Armstrong said.
The prosecutor persisted.
“And you disagree, I take it, with the conclusion that you were suffering from a deep-seated hatred of men?”
“Absolutely, and that was from a social worker who did not know what she was doing,” Diehl said.69
She reiterated a similar position twenty-six years later, at her trial and sentencing in the Pizza Bomber case. By then she had been convicted of being part of the homicides of two other men—her boyfriend Jim Roden, shot in the back and his body stuffed in a freezer, and Brian Wells, blown up by a bomb locked around his neck. At her sentencing, an event that capped her homicidal career, Diehl-Armstrong pleaded with Judge McLaughlin to see her as she really was, rather than how she said so many others had made her out to be.
“I’m not that kind of violent, crazy person that everybody wants to perceive me as,” Diehl-Armstrong said.70