Acrowd surrounded Marjorie Diehl’s rented house in a solid middle-class Erie neighborhood on a tree-lined street called Sunset Boulevard. Neighbors and onlookers were stunned at what Erie police and officials with the Erie County Health Department were pulling out of the 672-square-foot bungalow on August 2, 1984.
Three days earlier, on July 30, 1984, police had found the dead body of Diehl’s boyfriend Bob Thomas—her first known homicide victim—shot six times and sprawled on the couple’s living room couch. Investigators had returned to the scene to secure evidence and to survey the inside of the house on August 2, 1984. The task was close to insurmountable. Marjorie Diehl, thirty-five years old and on Social Security disability for mental illness, was not only a murder suspect.
She was also a hoarder.
Stuff filled her house from the basement to the attic. The four-room place was virtually uninhabitable. The authorities’ inventory of the belongings ran for pages. One back bedroom had no furniture; a huge pile occupied the room: clothing on top, as many as six hundred wire hangers in the middle, and books and magazines and papers and garbage at the bottom.1 Police described the periodicals as “war magazines,” with titles such as Soldier of Fortune, New Breed, Eagle, and Warriors.2 Police found a book called The Shooter’s Bible.3 Photocopies of scholarly articles on mental illness were scattered throughout the house as well, confirming the suspicions of psychiatrists and psychologists that Diehl had read up on her mental disorders and had a thorough understanding of them. The titles included “Psychoses in Adult Mental Defectives, Manic Depressive Psychosis,” “A Survey of the Patients in a Large Mental Hospital,” “Medical and Social Needs of Patients in Hospitals for the Mentally Subnormal,” “Mental Deficiency and Manic-Depressive Insanity,” “Schizophrenic and Paranoid Psychoses,” and “Behavior Therapy Versus Psychoanalysis.”4 And among the newspaper clippings Diehl saved were those about the Saturday night special handgun and a man convicted of attempted murder more than a year earlier, in May 1983.5
As voluminous as they were, the papers and documents made up the house’s secondary clutter. Most prominent—to the eyes and the nose—was the food, mainly government surplus food, stored in cupboards and closets and in the attic, where the temperature had reached as high as ninety-five degrees.6 Most of the food was rotting, and the stench was overwhelming.7 Diehl had collected the food by visiting food pantries for the needy three to five times a week for the past four months, often with signed notes from her friends stating that she was authorized to pick up food for them.8 In one instance, she claimed she was the mother of three children, ten, eight, and seven years old.9 “It is very easy to double dip. It is a shame, but it happens,” the executive director of the Erie Community Food Bank, which supplied the food pantries, said as the police were clearing Diehl’s house.10
And double dip Diehl did. The widespread availability of surplus government cheese started two and one-half years earlier, on December 22, 1981, when President Ronald Reagan signed a farm bill that authorized states to distribute the food to the poor through nonprofit organizations. The cheese, to the embarrassment of the free-market-touting Reagan administration, had stockpiled because farmers could make more money by selling their cheese to the government at government-set support prices than they could by selling it in stores.11 The nationwide cheese stockpile was still growing when Reagan signed the farm bill, but in December 1981 the surplus amounted to 560 million pounds of cheese—“more than two pounds of cheese for every person in the United States,” according to one report.12 Diehl over the years made sure she got her share.
In July 1984, Erie County valued her food hoard at $9,890—the equivalent of $22,944 in 2016.13 A county official’s final inventory listed 389 pounds of USDA butter, which had been refrigerated, and 727 pounds of cheese, which had not.14 Opened pastries and pies were strewn throughout the kitchen along with moldy bread that had turned green and “was stacked up in the refrigerator and freezer,” an Erie police detective said.15 “Rats were having a heyday” in the house, one city official reported.16 Diehl also had inside the house, according to a partial list of the official inventory: 111 five-pound boxes of dried milk, 37 dozen eggs, 111 cans of tuna, 231 cans of vegetables, 61 cans of fruit, 55 packages of frozen meat and vegetables, 33 five-pound bags of flour, 36 five-pound bags of cornmeal, 180 boxes of macaroni and cheese, 44 boxes of spaghetti, 50 boxes of cornflakes, 44 boxes of pancake mix, 15 bags of matzo crackers, 93 jars of honey, 11 boxes of instant potatoes, 26 cans of beef stew, 58 bags of egg noodles, 9 pork chops, 29 boxes of Fruitful Bran, 6 boxes of Choco Crunch, 4 boxes of Cap’ n Crunch, 5 pieces of spoiled sausage, a box of Team Flakes, a container of Tang, one bottle of A.1. Steak Sauce, and a bag of shrimp.17
The police and health authorities dumped four tons of food into a garbage truck, which disposed of it. (No reports mentioned Diehl having pets in the house.) Erie’s director of police operations, Arthur Berardi, asked the county Health Department to inventory the food, and he ordered the truck to haul it away because it posed a health hazard. The packed house was so odd that Berardi left his office at City Hall to visit the scene. “There was so darn much stuff,” Berardi said. “They were stacked in the attic and on the ledges.”18 Said a police officer at the scene: “It was unreal, like a supermarket. There’s butter in the refrigerator, cheese and hundreds of other items all over the place.”19
No one in Erie had ever seen anything like Marjorie Diehl’s residence on Sunset Boulevard, but it would not be the only house that she would ruin by packing it with stuff and food in her criminal career. Even worse would be another house in Erie, where she would shoot her boyfriend Jim Roden in the back in mid-August 2003, about the same time she was helping to plan the Pizza Bomber plot. Much of what filled that house would be trash that Diehl-Armstrong was known to have picked up from the street on garbage night. Her former fiancé, Bill Rothstein, would tell the police that Diehl-Armstrong said she was compensating for her parents scrimping on toys for her when she was a child. With few playthings as a girl, she now “picks up all this crap and stuff,” Rothstein said, including, once, a dollhouse that was missing a side.20
Diehl-Armstrong later in life saw herself as a collector and as something of a connoisseur of fine items. She said she never owned junk; she owned only quality things. When questioned about her belongings at the Pizza Bomber trial, in October 2010, Diehl-Armstrong looked at photographs of the interior of one of her many houses where she had stayed throughout her life—but not the Sunset Boulevard residence—and testified about what she had stored there. Her spirits lifted as she described all the stuff in a manner that reflected her pathological grandiosity: “I had a lot of furs that were gifted to me, minks of all colors: white, yellow, every color. And then I had a black seal skin and all kind of rabbit coats. I had lots of diamonds and a lot of precious jewels.”21
“Were they cheap or expensive?” her lawyer said.
“They were all real and they were all expensive,” Diehl-Armstrong said.
“Were they the worst or the best?”
“They were the best.”22
Her lawyer showed her another photograph. He asked her to describe the coats pictured in it.
“I had some other coats that were like Persian lamb,” Diehl-Armstrong testified. “And I had leather coats and suede coats, blue suede; burgundy leather with lamb’s wool around the wrist and stuff. Dress coats and stuff.”
“Were they the best or the worst?” her lawyer said.
“They were top-of-the-line items,” Diehl-Armstrong said. “I had good stuff.”
“Cheap or expensive?”
“Expensive.”
“So you were a woman of means?” Diehl-Armstrong’s lawyer said.
“Definitely,” Diehl-Armstrong said. “But I was not a money-hungry type person that was a status seeker. I just happened to acquire a lot of valuable items. Although I have quite a Bohemian streak in me . . . I don’t define myself that way. In other words, I’m not into conspicuous consumption; but it just so happened, I was gifted with a lot of things that were very valuable. I was also gifted with some antiques by a boyfriend that gave me all his mother’s crystal and her fine china cabinet that was handed down for years. I just acquired a lot of stuff.”23
The closest Diehl-Armstrong came to adopting the label of “hoarder” was when she referred to herself as “like a pack rat” in 1988, when she was on trial for the death of Bob Thomas.24 She estimated police took 157,000 items from the house, including her college psychology textbooks and the articles on mental illness she said she had read for class.25
“I saved everything,” Diehl testified. “You know what the condition of my house was like. I saved everything. When I say everything, I saved all my school books. I saved all of my tests. I saved all of that stuff. I was like a pack rat, if you want to know the truth.”26
She acknowledged that the condition of her house on Sunset Boulevard was a sign of her and Thomas’s mental instability. “There’s emotional and logical things that you do for gut-reaction reasons and things you do for intellectual reasons and these are two separate issues,” Diehl testified. “My emotions were messed up. You could tell that from the house, the cheese line. We were messed up and were on the wrong track. . . . To me, it was indications that we were sick.”27
The psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Diehl-Armstrong considered her acquisition and storage of so much stuff as clear evidence of hoarding—one of the most visible symptoms of her mental illness. In many ways, Diehl-Armstrong fit the psychological profile of a hoarder, as outlined by two of the pioneers in the study of the condition, Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. Diehl-Armstrong consistently displayed activity consistent with disorders associated with hoarding: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and impulse control disorder (ICD). “Classic OCD symptoms are associated with anxiety,” Frost and Steketee have written. “The sequence begins with an unwanted intrusive thought (e.g., ‘My hands are contaminated from touching the doorknob’), followed by compulsive behavior designed to relieve the stress created by the intrusive thought (e.g., extensive hand washing or cleaning).”28 While Frost and Steketee recognize possible links between OCD and hoarding, they contend that hoarding resembles more of an ICD, which is “characterized by the inability to resist an urge or impulse even though the behavior is dangerous and harmful.”29
Diehl-Armstrong’s compulsive behavior was also on display in an obsession she had with her teeth, whose whiteness and straightness she discussed often. She said she needed her teeth repaired because of injuries she suffered in an auto accident as an adult, but, for whatever reason, her dental hygiene and the look of her teeth became topics of constant discussion for her.30 The ultimate compliment for Diehl-Armstrong, especially from men, was that she had “nice teeth” and “that million-dollar smile.”31 Her teeth were central to her concerns about her physical appearance. “The patient continues to exhibit excessive and compulsive behavior regarding cleanliness and personal hygiene,” a psychologist wrote of Diehl in 1987, when she was in a Pennsylvania state prison system awaiting trial in Thomas’s death. “For example, the patient brushes her teeth three full cycles before stopping, i.e. she applies toothpaste and brushes 32 times, rinses and then reapplies toothpaste until the ritual is complete.”32
Diehl-Armstrong’s ICD—her inability to control her impulses that resulted in harm to her—has been on display throughout her life, from her hoarding to her choice of men, many of whom had violent pasts. Her hoarding has never ceased: Whenever she has had the space and the means, Diehl-Armstrong has acquired and collected thousands of items, despite the risk to her personal health from rotting food or stacks of stuff that could collapse on her. Her houses were so packed that she could only get through them through narrow passageways, known as “goat paths.”33 She sculpted the tunnel-like routes, some as narrow as two feet wide, through the debris.34 Diehl-Armstrong hoarded even in prison, where surplus items are hard to find and any unusual or disruptive behavior can lead to sanctions from the guards. Her hoarding and other strange behavior caught the attention of a psychiatrist who visited Diehl as many as sixty-four times when she was in prison awaiting trial in the Thomas case; while in prison, Diehl was getting outside items from nuns who visited her regularly. The prison staff, the psychiatrist wrote, “indicated that it has been necessary to monitor what the patient keeps in her cell, as she tends to horde [sic] items, varying from prison stationery to free booties and nightgowns, which she gets from the nuns who, apparently, periodically provide them.”35 The psychiatrist, David B. Paul, also wrote that “the patient was described as not using sanitary napkins when menstruating, at least with perceived regularity, and a need was seen to oversee her personal hygiene.”36 Others would report that, while in prison awaiting trial in the Thomas case, she filled garbage bags with items, including newspaper clippings, that she had collected in her cell.37
The hoarding and other behavior showed that Diehl-Armstrong had lost her ability to think clearly—that her judgment, due to her mental illness, had become almost irrevocably impaired. She had lost her ability to reason, in certain instances, and acted on impulse, particularly in how she stuffed her house with food and junk. Another of her longtime psychiatrists, Robert L. Sadoff, testified about her lack of judgment in light of all the food pulled out of her house on Sunset Boulevard. The hoarding, Sadoff said in 1988, was symptomatic of Diehl’s bipolar disorder. “In the person with bipolar disorder,” Sadoff said, “when they get up in the manic phase, they are way up there to the point that they are not in touch with reality. We call them psychotic. Psychotic means not in touch with reality. So people do bizarre things.”38
Diehl’s lawyer then asked Sadoff, a forensic psychiatrist, whether bipolar disorder included an impairment of judgment. “Without question,” Sadoff said. “This is the hallmark of the illness, that a person in a manic phase says and does things that are so off the wall and you would look at them and say, ‘This person is impaired in their judgment.’”39
The lawyer showed Sadoff photos of Diehl’s house on Sunset Boulevard. The lawyer listed all the food that had been piled up in the house—the more than seven hundred pounds of cheese and the nearly four hundred pounds of butter, among the other items, many of which were kept in an attic stifling from the summer heat.
“These foodstuffs, for all practical purposes, were rancid and had to be destroyed,” the lawyer, Leonard G. Ambrose III, said to Sadoff. “By all practical purposes, does that indicate, based upon what you note, any impairment of judgment?”
“Yes, absolute impairment of judgment,” Sadoff said. “One doesn’t hoard stuff like that and let it rot in that way if one has good judgment. That is a clear indication of her impaired judgment.”40
Hoarding perhaps gave Diehl-Armstrong a sense of control—she was in charge of collecting all the items, keeping them, and imbuing them with whatever significance she believed they deserved. A desire for control and security are reasons for hoarding.41 Another reason is desire for perfectionism, a quest well known to Diehl-Armstrong, who said she felt a constant need to please her mother. Hoarders are often highly intelligent people, like Diehl-Armstrong, and so are those who suffer, as Diehl-Armstrong did, from anorexia, another disorder linked to an unhealthy need to be perfect and a desire for control.42 Diehl, concerned about her weight, surrounded herself with food so plentiful and perishable that she could never have eaten it all. As Randy O. Frost, Gail Steketee, and their colleague David F. Tolin have written of the connection between perfectionism and hoarding:
It’s hard for many people to understand how perfectionism and compulsive hoarding can go together. After all, when most of us think of a “perfectionist,” we think of someone whose home is immaculately clean, with everything in place, and so on. But for some people, perfectionism works in a slightly different way. They become so afraid of making the wrong decision—for example, that they will accidentally throw away something useful—that the prospect of making decisions gives rise to strong feelings of anxiety and worry. As a result, the person tends to avoid the decision-making process altogether. The basic operating principle seems to be, “If I can’t be sure of doing it exactly right, I’d better not do it at all.” Paradoxically, therefore, the person’s perfectionist beliefs contribute to his or her home becoming the model of imperfection.43
The same could be said about Diehl-Armstrong’s life. In seeking perfection, and burdened with mental illness, she became a mess, a paragon of imperfection to the extreme. She became a woman who, in the words of a federal prosecutor, was characterized by evil and consumed by greed; a woman who, in the words of a federal magistrate judge, was a serial killer. Not only did Diehl-Armstrong hoard food. She also hoarded money. And she hoarded men. Her obsessions, like her mental illness, ultimately fully took hold. But they were held in check for several years, between when she was a teenager and a new college graduate trying to set out on her own.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong credited her maternal grandparents—her beloved Wolfendens, with the friendly house and the safe filled with cash—from rescuing her from her early mental illness so that she could once again function in regular society, even if just for a time. At age fourteen, and still at risk of starving herself, she went to live with the Wolfendens. The medical professionals, she said, were prepared to take severe steps when they decided that moving her in with her grandparents, and away from her parents, would only benefit her and help treat her anorexia. Otherwise, she said, she would have ended up in a hospital. “They were getting ready to force feed me,” Diehl-Armstrong recalled, “but I had to go live with my grandparents because the doctor said it was a mental thing and that my parents’ environment was causing it.”44 Her grandfather, she said, cried as he pleaded with her. “I still remember,” she said, “my grandfather told me you got to eat because I don’t want to see you dead.”45
She recalled her stay with her grandparents as something like a fairy tale. If her parents—her supposedly alcoholic and abusive father and her domineering mother—were like evil stepparents, then the Wolfendens were like her fairy godparents, who understood her and protected her and released her from her gilded cage. “At age 14,” one of her psychiatrists noted, “she lived for a while with her maternal grandparents, whom she characterized as using the ‘soft sell’ approach rather than the direct pressure which was her parents’ method.”46 She said she thanked God “that I had some decent grandparents that took care of me,”47 and she characterized her Grandfather Wolfenden as something of her ideal male. “She sees her grandfather as one of the few positive figures in her childhood and indicates that she has had good relationships with men who remind her of her grandfather,” a psychologist wrote in 1985, when Diehl was thirty-six years old and awaiting trial in the Thomas case.48 And by 2007 and 2008, when she was awaiting trial in the Pizza Bomber case, for the bombing death of Brian Wells, Diehl-Armstrong referred to her grandparents as proof that she could never have been involved in such a crime, or any crime. She knew better, she said, because her “grandfather was a police officer.”49 And she knew that she was able to stay in control, and stay out of trouble, because she was able to follow her grandmother’s advice to be careful about letting her life get out of hand: “My grandma always used to say, ‘Don’t overload your plate.’”50
Marjorie Diehl appeared to have reached a degree of mental normalcy as a teenager and young adult. She was still driven, as shown by her playing cello in the Junior Philharmonic, playing organ at what she said was her family’s Lutheran church, and participating in all kinds of clubs and activities, including Brownies and Girl Scouts, and being a majorette.51 But she also provided no reports to her psychiatrist and psychologists that she needed treatment when she was in high school and college, where, by all accounts, she excelled academically. Her high school yearbook photos reveal a well-groomed and attractive young woman who looked no different than most of the other girls in her graduating class—the Class of 1967 at Erie’s public Academy High School, which was founded in 1919 and whose first principal was Diehl’s cousin, John C. Diehl. Academy drew many students from the wealthy Glenwood area of Erie, but its student body was also made up of many students from working-class families like Marjorie Diehl’s. One of Diehl’s classmates would go on to be elected an Erie County judge and then a judge on one of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts. And, in a coincidence that Diehl-Armstrong never let anyone forget, the Erie County district attorney who prosecuted her for Jim Roden’s death, a shrewd lawyer by the name of Bradley Foulk, was two years ahead of Diehl at Academy. Foulk was a perpetually poor student, while Diehl was a straight-A student throughout grade school and high school.52
Her immersion in music continued at Academy, where she participated in the orchestra and an annual student talent show called Academy-on-Parade. She was also, according to the student yearbook, a hall monitor and was in the speech club and the French club. Her senior yearbook portrait shows her smiling with her black hair stylish in a pixie-like bouffant. She is wearing a pearl necklace, with a low-cut graduation gown exposing her shoulders. Diehl appears happy as she looks directly at the camera with bright eyes. She fits in with the other students, especially the girls. She appears to be contented—with herself and her place at Academy, where, she said, “I did real well. I was a commencement speaker. I was up in the upper percent of my class.”53 Throughout her life she considered her achievements in high school noteworthy, another example of how she was destined for an exceptional adulthood. As late as February 2016, when she was sixty-seven years old and serving the federal prison sentence of life plus thirty years in the Pizza Bomber case, she still spoke of her years in high school with wistfulness and pride. “I have a nice voice,” she said. “That is why they picked me as a commencement speaker.”54 She also looked healthy in high school. She was no longer anorexic. As Sadoff said when he examined a picture from Diehl’s high school graduation, she “looks like she was pretty average at this point.”55
Diehl-Armstrong’s intellectual acumen was never in doubt, in high school and then in college and graduate school. Her estimated verbal IQ was in the bright-normal range (110 to 119) to the superior range (120–129),56 and other psychological testing put her intellectual level in the superior range.57 She also maintained that she had a photographic memory and total recall, and testing showed that her recall was indeed in the superior range.58 But she said her mental illness heightened her memory when she was manic and dulled it when she was depressed. Her explanation pointed to a larger truth about her intellectual functioning: she did extremely well in the classroom and other more sterile and controlled environments, but struggled in more regular settings. “This level of intellectual functioning is being measured in a way that is ‘conflict free,’” one psychologist wrote. “That is, though she may show good memory and judgment on intellectual tasks where her emotions do not interfere, those situations where she is emotionally involved can produce confusion, poor judgment, and inadequate memory.”59
Another psychologist found that Diehl, despite her intellectual achievements and obvious intelligence, suffered from poor self-esteem and was generally helpless to succeed on her own. “In general, the patient is seen as a rather dependent individual who in spite of her educational background relies on others very heavily for support and direction in her life,” according to the psychologist’s report, from 1987, when Diehl was awaiting trial in the Thomas case. The psychologist continued:
The interpersonal relationships with significant others appear to be strained and there is some question as to whether she has ever maintained a meaningful adult relationship. She has many perfectionist strivings which stem from her overwhelming need to please others in order to gain acceptance. Although she may ostensibly appear aloof and distant her behavior is largely motivated out of insecurity and poor self image. The expectations which she and others have held for her have seldom been achieved and she therefore carries with her the identity of being a failure. Associated with this apparent lack of success in life is a strong sense of guilt and remorse.60
Diehl’s physical appearance in college masked, to a degree, the emotional turmoil that she must have been experiencing. She graduated from Academy High School, she said, as an award-winner: she took home four scholarships, various musical awards, and won four state essay contests.61 While living at home with her parents, she went on to attend what was then called Mercyhurst College, now Mercyhurst University, which the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy founded in Erie in 1926. The campus was less than two miles from the Diehls’ house. Mercyhurst started admitting men in 1969, two years after Diehl enrolled, in 1967. She graduated in 1970, a year early, with bachelor’s degrees in sociology and social work and no firm career plans, though she later desired to become a teacher, like her mother. Her initial focus, she said, was “helping people.”62 She liked to say she was the first person at Mercyhurst to finish with an honors degree in three years rather than four. And she said her course concentrations at Mercyhurst were in pre-law and pre-med, and that she later took the LSAT, the law school entrance exam, and “scored in the upper percentile.”63 She wore fashionable clothes while at Mercyhurst, based on her yearbook and other college photos, and wore her hair in a longer bouffant. Her clothes showed off a slim figure—a figure that Robert Sadoff came to believe was too thin. “She’s extremely thin in this picture, much more so than when she graduated from high school,” Sadoff once said, referring to a photograph of Diehl in college. “This would be consistent with the anorexia.”64
Diehl-Armstrong, by her own admission, remained a virgin in college.65 She said she kept to herself, but also considered herself highly attractive, based on what she said men told her. She said during the Pizza Bomber trial that men were always interested in her, and that she did not have to go out of her way to find men. But she also said she was reserved. “I was kind of weird in high school,” she said, though she said she did go to the prom.66 “I was more of an egghead,” she said. “I’m an intellectual type. I like to read and study, and I’m a lone wolf. I like to practice my music and do weird things. So that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m good for a relationship. But they would be intrigued by intelligence or turned on by certain things like that, and I would have plenty of people coming on to me and stuff.”67
Looks clearly were important to Diehl-Armstrong, and she said she was bothered by the amount of weight she gained later in life, when she was in prison. “When I was young I was a model. I was good looking,” she also said during the Pizza Bomber trial. “When I was young, I was pretty doggone good looking and a model and all, if I do say so myself, not to be bragging about it or anything.”68 She said she took a level-headed approach to beauty, recalling an aphorism she said her only husband liked to tell her, “Beauty is only skin deep and a lot of them ought to be skinned.” “So I don’t put a lot of importance on judging a book by its cover or by what a person looks like,” Diehl-Armstrong then said, explaining what her husband meant. “It’s in the heart that counts with me or what a person is all about.”69 Yet she also boasted that she could charm and bed almost any man she wanted. “Sex,” she said, “has never been a worry to me.”70
When she graduated from college in 1970, Diehl was twenty-one years old—a pivotal age for her. She was twenty-one when she left her house and went out on her own. Just as twelve was a threshold age for her—and age when she started puberty—so was age twenty-one—the age when she was independent as an adult for the first time in her life. And just as she suffered anorexia during adolescence, Diehl began to suffer from major mental illness as a young adult, in the years after she had left behind her parents’ residence. Once Diehl turned twenty-one, her father once said, she was “on her own.”71 He also told the police that, once his daughter turned twenty-one, she became “her own person” and rarely visited her parents.72 Diehl described her twenty-first year as another of the “transitional points in my life.”73
Diehl said she signed up with an employment agency and worked at various secretarial jobs when she was twenty-one and in the years shortly thereafter. When she was twenty-one she also met an eccentric handy-man, electrician, and substitute teacher: Bill Rothstein—the man who, in the mid-2000s, would be accused of working with Diehl-Armstrong in the Pizza Bomber case and helping her stuff the dead body of her boyfriend Jim Roden into a freezer. Diehl-Armstrong recalled her first meeting with Rothstein with precision. Rothstein was twenty-six years old in 1970, and she remembered him as something of a catch: his parents owned Erie’s Rola Bottling Company, the home of the local soft drink Rola Cola. Diehl-Armstrong said one of her friends, worried that she was “too much of a bookworm,” introduced her to Bill Rothstein because the friend thought that he and Diehl would be a good match.74 The friend was correct. The two went roller skating on their first date, and Diehl-Armstrong recalled that she immediately swooned over Rothstein, who was six feet, two inches tall, six inches taller than Diehl. “He was built perfectly,” Diehl-Armstrong said, “like a young Elvis.”75
The two were nearly inseparable for a time. They both went to college—he studied electrical engineering at the University of Toledo, in Ohio, but never graduated—and they both liked to talk and hold themselves out as superior intellects. By now, Diehl had become immersed in a lifelong interest in astrology and voodoo, and Rothstein, like Diehl, also believed in karma and liked numerology. He would often talk about planning the best time for a date, a time when the planets aligned. While he helped his parents run the Rola Cola plant, she worked in the plant’s deli with Rothstein’s mother, selling bagels and lox for the Rothsteins, who were Jewish.76 Diehl and Rothstein got engaged in 1970. The year was easy for Diehl to remember, because, she said, “that was the year the movie came out”—Love Story, their favorite movie, in which Ryan O’Neill played Oliver Barrett IV, and Ali McGraw played his soul mate, Jennifer Cavilleri, who was dying of cancer.77 Diehl said Rothstein proposed to her by giving her twelve long-stemmed red roses, the album soundtrack to Love Story, and a diamond ring from New York City. “It was a perfect ring,” Diehl-Armstrong recalled, “it was a full carat flawless.”78
The marriage never occurred. Diehl and Rothstein lived together at his parents’ house, but they failed to make the engagement work. She claimed some of the tension grew out of Rothstein “trying to convert me to Judaism and all this.”79 Diehl-Armstrong decades later placed some of the blame on herself. When she turned twenty-one years old, she said, she started experiencing mental problems and also developed what she described as a fear of commitment. “I started to have difficulties,” she recalled. “But Bill wanted to get engaged, and other people wanted to get engaged, but I could not make that commitment. I was scared to death of making that commitment because what I had seen in my parent’s marriage. I was very commitment phobic.”80
After she split with Rothstein, Diehl met someone new shortly thereafter, in 1971. She started dating Bob Thomas, who would become her first homicide victim in 1984. Thomas was twenty-nine or thirty years old when they met at a dance at a downtown Erie bar. They dated for six or seven months, Diehl said, and saw each other several times a week. She said Thomas was the first man she had sex with.81 Thomas was separated from his wife, whom he had been accused of beating, and he was a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War with mental problems of his own. Psychiatric records showed he suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia with paranoid behavior: “three potentially explosive or violent illnesses,” as Sadoff testified at Diehl’s trial.82 By October of 1971, Diehl and Thomas had stopped seeing each other. And by 1972, Diehl had started seeking mental health treatment.83
Diehl gave various explanations for why, at twenty-three years old, she sought outpatient psychiatric care. She went to Erie’s Hamot Hospital. She once said she needed therapy because of her fear of commitment, to figure out why “I wasn’t able to trust people, why I was paranoid about this stuff and what was wrong with me.”84 She also said she visited Hamot, where she was an outpatient, because, while working as a secretary, “I was having trouble with my job and I was nervous and I was having a lot of anxiety.”85 In another explanation, Diehl said she sought treatment “to get enrichment for my life. I was not told to go. I believe in psychotherapy to learn about yourself. So I went in and I was told that I had nothing wrong with me at the time. This was in the medical report. He [the psychiatrist] said maybe passive-aggressive personality disorders, but as far as that, I find nothing wrong . . . with you.”86 And in another explanation, Diehl connected her desire for mental health treatment to her difficulties with men. “I told them I wanted to find the right marriage partner,” Diehl-Armstrong said, referring to the mental health professionals. “I was having problems with relationships and I wanted to seek analysis to, more or less voluntarily, to help me overcome my neurotic tendencies that might be hampering me finding the right marriage partner.”87
The notes from Diehl’s first meeting at Hamot, on August 1, 1972, show that she complained of problems with her parents, including her “alcoholic father,” problems holding down a job, and problems with men: “You can’t trust men,” she said. “They all lie.”88 The psychiatric caseworker listed the diagnostic impression that would continue to anger Diehl years later, during the Thomas trial: “a deep-seated hatred of men . . . [with] passive aggressive personality traits.”89 A psychiatrist at Hamot diagnosed her with “bipolar disorder with passive aggressive personality with hysterical features.”90 She was not placed on medication, according to the records and her testimony.91
Diehl at this point was able to cope with her mental illness and work various secretarial jobs. She also worked, in 1973, in the office of an Erie counseling center for alcoholics, where she also met with clients. She felt qualified for the job because of her bachelor’s degree in social work, but she said she could not get a job as a counselor unless she had a master’s degree. In 1973 she started attending Erie’s Gannon College, now Gannon University, also a Roman Catholic institution, and graduated in 1975 with a master’s degree in education with a focus on guidance and counseling,92 and with twenty-one credits toward a doctorate in education. She said she was also certified to be a guidance counselor for elementary and high school students, and was certified to teach social studies to high school students.93 She went on to teach American history as a substitute in the suburban Millcreek Township School District94 and taught private music lessons, but she was unable to get a job at the Erie School District, the largest school district in the region and the district where her mother the teacher was on her way to becoming something of an institution. Diehl blamed her failure to get a job at the Erie School District on her mother: “I tried [the] Erie district, but, despite the fact my mother was [there] for years and secured positions for everybody, she refused to help me get a position even though she promised she would help me if I became a counselor. And I did and she still wouldn’t help me, so I was unable to secure a position.”95
Diehl continued to live on her own. She rented an apartment in downtown Erie, in a fourteen-unit building that included lawyers’ offices. Her landlord was a lawyer, Larry D’Ambrosio, who would become her personal attorney for much of her life, and a key counselor to her in the Pizza Bomber case.96 While living in the apartment building, suffering from an unmedicated bipolar disorder and fearful of crime in downtown Erie, Diehl bought her first gun—a .25-caliber Browning automatic handgun she purchased at a local sports store in her name. She also bought a carrying case. She said she never fired the gun, and that only her boyfriend at that time—not Bob Thomas—loaded it. “I purchased it for protection,” she said.97
Diehl had a number of male acquaintances, and she was never known to complain about a lack of sexual activity. When she was in a manic phase, Diehl once told a psychiatrist, she needed “an excessive amount of sex,” and said that when those situations developed, “she falls for people she regrets later.”98 Diehl, twenty-six years old in 1975, was unable to find a job in her chosen field—teaching—and was unable to keep whatever job she could find. She worked for several months in 1975 as a social worker at the Erie County welfare office, a civil-service job in which she made $3.50 an hour, or $1.50 more than the federal minimum wage.99 Months after she lost that job, she sought psychiatric help because “I couldn’t function in my job,” she said. “I was let go and I had a breakdown. I was not able to get out of bed.”100 She believed that her mental disabilities were preventing her from working.
The professional who became her regular psychiatrist, Robert B. Callahan, MD, first met with Diehl on May 5, 1976. He found that she “had multiple depressive symptoms and was considered to be totally incapacitated for employment,” but also determined that her prospects were good for a return to “gainful employment” with psychotherapy and medication.101 Callahan diagnosed Diehl as suffering from manic-depressive disorder, depressive type, and the related cyclothymic disorder, in which a person has cyclical episodes of depression and excitement. Callahan treated Diehl in a total of thirty-eight weekly and biweekly sessions for fourteen months, until July 29, 1977. He listened as she talked compulsively about her troubled and pressured childhood, including her anorexia and her inability to live up to her mother’s expectations. Callahan noted Diehl’s “superior attitude,” but said she would also become “severely depressed,” “with severe identification problems and likewise severe covert authority problems.”102
Callahan prescribed Diehl the antidepressant Tofranil, the first known prescribed medication she took for her mental illness. Diehl “was displaying severe interpersonal relationships with family, friends and even casual acquaintances,” Callahan wrote, and often failed to take the medication as directed, mainly because of what she said were “frequent somatic complaints [or complaints about physical problems], dizziness, nausea, headaches, chest pain, flu symptoms.”103 Callahan wrote of his patient and her difficulties: “She frequently cuts down on dosage or stopped medications entirely against the recommendations of this physician. She rejected any attempts to use suggested medications on a trial basis to see if they would be more beneficial than the Tofranil.”104
When Diehl’s treatments with Callahan ended, he believed her mental state could go either way in the years ahead, depending on how Diehl handled her care. Callahan wrote:
During the 14 months I saw this patient, I felt at times she was gaining some insight into her emotional problems and that her prognosis was good for functioning in a competitive job market, but I did point out to her that I felt she had set her goals too high. At other times, I was of the opinion that even if she was successful in finding employment, her frequent “ups and downs,” her disorganized behavior, her personality affect and frequent physical complaints would result in termination rather quickly and she would regress into a severe depressive state.
In summary, I did feel that I had been moderately successful with this patient, that when therapy was terminated she definitely knew that she would be in need of further treatment and would seek help.105
For the first time since 1975, Marjorie Diehl worked a steady job in 1980. What she did nearly sent her to prison.
Diehl was working as a counselor for a nonprofit she created, the Erie Women’s Center, which arranged for abortions in Buffalo, New York, and which Diehl considered more of a fertility clinic.106 Erie police on April 23, 1980, charged her with criminal conspiracy and attempted theft by deception. Police said the referrals Diehl made to the clinic were her sole means of income. In a convoluted case, police accused her of falsely telling a woman on April 18, 1980, that, based on testing of the woman’s urine sample, the woman was pregnant and could have an abortion. Diehl, the police said, made an appointment for the woman for the next day, and said the abortion would cost $150. The police charged Diehl in a sting. The woman with whom she met was an undercover police officer, and the urine sample she gave to Diehl was that of a male police lieutenant.107
Diehl said she did nothing wrong. She acknowledged that she met with the woman on behalf of the Erie Women’s Center at the Erie County Library, in downtown Erie.108 Diehl said the clinic had two offices for referrals in Erie, but that she and the woman decided to meet at the library because the clinic also “wanted a central meeting place, privacy, wanted a place for people if they wanted material on health-related matters. It seemed like a logical place and, in my mind, not a sleazy place like a bar or restroom where things could be heard and private things, confidentiality, could be violated.”109 Diehl said nothing was sinister about the meeting with the woman. She said her lawyer and landlord, Larry D’Ambrosio, would vouch for her. She said the urine sample was meant to be part of an overall pregnancy screening, rather than the only part of the test, and she did not analyze the urine sample in any case. She said urine tests can be unreliable, and that males can test positive for pregnancy if a man has taken medication or has had testicular cancer “or other extreme conditions.”110
Diehl mainly blamed the police and the Erie County District Attorney’s Office. She said she had been falsely arrested. “It was entrapment,” she said. “It was an election year, Right to Life movement, and it was an abortion issue. And the district attorney is new and he is a political animal in this situation. He wanted to take advantage of it.”111
She also said working at the clinic conflicted at times with her personal beliefs. “I have never been in favor of women’s lib, per se,” she later testified. “I’m an old-fashioned type of woman in a lot of ways and I like to be treated like a lady. I am not a women’s lib type. I do believe women have every right to equal pay and freedom of choice.”112
The case ended with a beneficial arrangement for Diehl. The District Attorney’s Office accepted her into a program called Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD), for nonviolent, first-time offenders. ARD defendants are not required to plead guilty, and they get sentences of probation rather than prison. ARD defendants also get no criminal record for their case if they successfully complete their probation, which Diehl did. A county judge on November 11, 1980, sentenced her to two years of probation, to include sixty hours of community service. Diehl performed her hours at the state-run Pennsylvania Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Erie.113 The judge discharged her from ARD on November 30, 1982.
“Marjorie was an excellent volunteer, helping out with office work, activities and field trips,” a volunteer coordinator wrote to the head of the ARD program. “They were very pleased with Marjorie and said she’s the best volunteer they’ve had in some time.”114
She still was unable to work. After the criminal case led to her departure from the abortion clinic, Diehl never again held full-time employment. She continued to seek psychiatric treatment in the early 1980s, but with different psychiatrists; Callahan, with whom she had met for eighteen months, moved away, so Diehl started seeing psychiatrists affiliated with another Erie hospital, Saint Vincent Medical Center.115 She complained of gaining weight and of an alcoholic father and domineering mother. In one examination, on August 6, 1981, she was diagnosed with cyclothymic disorder with manic episodes and “fluctuations w/ depression and hyperactive states”; she remained on Tofranil.116 In a follow-up exam, in September 1981, the evaluator noted that Diehl’s mood was “very, very up,” and that she spoke of being “very unsure of myself; constantly worried about what is going to happen.”117 The evaluator wrote that Diehl’s speech was “nearly non-ending,” and that Diehl explained that she had anorexia as a child and had trouble with her parents (but no mention of sexual abuse). “She has trouble with her relationships w/men, feeling that younger men are ‘too shallow,’” the evaluator wrote. Diehl said she was still taking Tofranil. The diagnostic impression was cyclothymic disorder, with a recommendation of continued therapy and medication.118
Diehl continued to go to the psychiatrists to get mental help, but also to achieve a goal that had come to nearly consume her: to get a diagnosis that would show her mental condition was a permanent disability that made her unable to work and thus made her eligible for Social Security Supplemental Income disability benefits. To get the benefits, she asked for help from her treating psychiatrist at the time, Paul Francis, MD. She wrote to him on December 15, 1981, complaining that she was unable to get disability benefits based on her claim that she had temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ). She wrote that being on regular welfare was humiliating, and that getting disability benefits for a “permanent disability” was what she deserved. Diehl wrote to Francis:
Please fill out the enclosed form and return it to me as soon as possible. . . . I submitted the letter documenting the severe TMJ . . . problem, but was notified this was not enough. Bureaucratic requirements need to mention “permanent disability.” Obviously, they ignored the dentist’s use of “permanent disability.” I have spent a lot of time and money over the last year or so trying to get the small amount which I feel I deserve. I am really frustrated. After all I can’t even get a small rebate much less any disability from social security. . . .
Being on welfare is degrading and doesn’t really reflect my problems. Will you help me by documenting as best you can that I have a “permanent disability” psychologically? . . . I am having a lot of anxiety. My financial situation would be improved if I was to receive this little compensation, I would be much better off psychologically.119
Decades later, those statements would come back to trigger increased scrutiny of Diehl-Armstrong’s mental state.
Dr. Francis issued his findings on December 22, 1981. He diagnosed Diehl with dysthymic disorder, or persistent depression, and mixed personality disorder, which could include narcissism and antisocial behavior. Francis stopped short of diagnosing Diehl with bipolar disorder—which features persistent depression and persistent mania—but he concluded her mental condition made her unfit for employment. “Persistent depression and associated symptoms over 10 years,” Francis wrote of Diehl, then thirty-two years old. “Long-standing difficulties with interpersonal relationships and severe impairments in social and occupational functioning. Personality style manifested by rigidity and hostility.”120 Francis wrote of her job prospects: “Prognosis is considered to be poor because of the chronicity of the problem and the failure to benefit in a sustained fashion from psychiatric therapy in the past. In my opinion she would be completely unable to hold down any type of work in the competitive job market.”121
The evaluation failed to help Diehl with the Social Security Administration. Francis needed to provide a more detailed report to move the case along, but he declined. He was unwilling to schedule a follow-up appointment with Diehl because of “her history of missed appointments and failure to comply with treatment recommendations.”122 Diehl still tried to get disability benefits. She met with other psychiatrists, but complained about them, as she had with Francis, because she still was unable to get a diagnosis she believed would get her benefits for a permanent disability. She said one of the psychiatrists “had failed to fill out a disability evaluation form in a manner that would qualify her for disability and public housing.”123
Diehl finally got enough information to apply for disability benefits. The government first denied the application on January 27, 1983, and continued to do so throughout the rest of the year. In a denial dated April 19, 1983, the disability claims examiner noted that Diehl’s eligibility for disability benefits, based on her earnings, ran out on June 30, 1976, shortly after Diehl received her first psychiatric treatment from Callahan on May 5, 1976. The examiner wrote that the lack of treatment in 1976 meant that Diehl could have continued to work. “You did not have any treating medical sources prior to 1976,” the examiner wrote. “Thus, the conditions would not have prevented you from working as of June 30, 1976, when your eligibility expired.”124 The examiner also wrote that “evidence in file reveals a manic disorder,” but noted that Diehl said she sought no treatment earlier in 1976 because “she didn’t trust physicians.”125 The examiner concluded: “The medical evidence indicates claimant’s impairment causes no significant loss of work-related functions prior to June 30, 1976. Therefore, claim is denied as impairment not severe prior to the date of last insured.”126
Diehl appealed. She showed her trademark persistence in seeking more records and filing for more information. In later years she would display this persistence by writing repeated and long handwritten letters to lawyers and judges and journalists. In the case of her disability claim, Diehl (who was supposed to be unable to function), did not write the letters to the government and physicians herself. She relied on a legal-aid lawyer as well as her erstwhile boyfriend and self-described paralegal, Edwin A. Carey, a World War II Army veteran who was originally from Pittsburgh and had worked at the Hammermill paper plant in Erie. Carey, who turned sixty-four in 1983, wrote handwritten letters on Diehl’s behalf, according to the case files. Diehl remained on Tofranil, although the case records also show that she sometimes failed to take her medication regularly. She was prescribed the mood-stabilizing drug lithium carbonate, but said she stopped taking it because it gave her seizures.127
Diehl won her appeal for disability benefits on January 31, 1984. An administrative law judge wrote that she was disabled as of May 5, 1976, when she first saw Callahan, and that the medical evidence established that she has “severe manic depressive disorder and cyclothymic disorder.”128 The judge wrote that he based his decision on medical records, Diehl’s testimony at a benefits hearing, and the testimony of a vocational expert, who said that Diehl was unemployable. Diehl, the judge wrote, testified about her poor work history and her mental health problems: “The claimant testified she was first treated for emotional problems as a child when she had anorexia nervosa. She finally went to a doctor who told her she had a personality disorder and had trouble getting along with people. She has memory problems. She has no hobbies and spends most of her time getting herself ready to cope with everyday living. She lives in an apartment but does not go out often. She finds most people are irritating.”129
The administrative law judge, Robert M. Ague Jr., used an expansive definition of disability for Diehl’s benefit. He found that, from the medical evidence, her mental problems—severe manic-depression and cyclothymic disorder—failed to meet the definition of a “listed impairment” under the law. But he awarded her disability benefits, citing what he found to be Diehl’s “severe depression,” despite medication; her compulsive talking; and her disorganization and “severe difficulty in interpersonal relationships.” Ague continued in his decision:
She has regressed into severe depressive states as a result of termination of employment.
Her history indicates she has responded poorly to treatment and she has been functioning poorly as far as day to day activities are concerned. In view of her high level of anxiety, agitation, depression, and impaired judgment, she has fallen into markedly restricted activities with a guarded prognosis.130
The evidence, Ague wrote, showed that Diehl was “under a disability.” “Her capacity to work at all levels is significantly compromised,” he wrote, “and the remaining work which she could be functionally . . . capable of performing, considered in combination with her age, her education and her work experience, directs that she cannot be expected to make a vocational adjustment to work which exists in significant numbers in the national economy.”131 Ague ordered the benefits retroactive to May 5, 1976, the date of Diehl’s first meeting with Callahan. At thirty-four years of age, Marjorie Diehl was, by the government’s definition, so mentally ill as to be disabled and unfit for any employment. By the time of the Pizza Bomber case, her disability benefits would be $580 a month.132
Diehl had made several major changes by the time she was awarded the disability benefits in January 1984. In the late summer of 1983, she had moved from the downtown apartment building into the bungalow on Sunset Boulevard, where she lived alone and used a federal housing subsidy to help pay her rent. Her landlord was Edwin Carey, her paralegal, who had bought the house for $28,900 on August 3, 1983. Also, by the time she was awarded the benefits, Diehl had rekindled her relationship with Bob Thomas, whom she had last dated in October 1971. They started seeing each other again in early 1984.
Diehl had encountered Thomas a number of times before then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She would run into him at the post office, where she had a box, and she would see him at a local amusement park, Waldameer, where she said Thomas drove a miniature train part-time.133 In 1979, she said, Thomas told her that his wife had divorced him, and that he was available. “Every time I used to run into him, he used to ask me to go out with him,” she said.134
They got together again one day in early February 1984. Diehl recalled that the two met as they were waiting on a line to get government cheese. Thomas was living in another area of the city, with a male friend who had also served in Vietnam. After getting their cheese, Diehl and Thomas left together in Diehl’s 1970 Ford Gran Torino 500. Diehl drove to her rented house on Sunset Boulevard. Thomas stayed overnight, and they had sex. They kept seeing each other afterward. Diehl said she loved him.135
Diehl and Thomas did a lot together. They often waited together on cheese lines. While on line, in public, Thomas occasionally beat Diehl, according to witnesses.136 Diehl also said Thomas beat her while on line.137 The accounts of the beatings later would become evidence at Marjorie Diehl’s trial for the homicide of Bob Thomas.