He was Marjorie Diehl’s one true love. She met him in the summer of 1989, when she was about two-thirds done with her probation for the gun conviction in the slaying of Bob Thomas. Diehl had turned forty years old several months earlier, in February, and, after spending nearly four years in prison, she was thinking of trying to settle down: “Time for commitment,” she recalled.1 One day, she said, she was walking across Perry Square, the park in the center of downtown Erie, when the man first spoke to her—Richard Armstrong, who would later become her husband for twenty months, before he died of a stroke, including brain hemorrhaging, in August 1992 in the couple’s house at East Seventh and Bacon streets in Erie. Eleven years later, in August 2003, in the same house, Diehl-Armstrong would fatally shoot her boyfriend Jim Roden, whose body she would help stuff in a freezer as part of the plot in the Pizza Bomber case. That murder earned Diehl-Armstrong a sinister sobriquet in prison: “Freezer Queen,”2 which went along with her unforgiving attitude toward Roden’s demise. Diehl-Armstrong came to despise Roden, who she said could never match Armstrong. Her husband’s death, she always said, saddened her the most.
“If he had not died, this wouldn’t have happened to me,” Diehl-Armstrong said of her conviction in the Pizza Bomber case, “because I would have never met that Jim Roden.”3 Of Roden, she also said, “He wouldn’t rate a pimple on Richard’s butt.”4
Armstrong, who was black, was an Erie resident who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He had a criminal past and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had tried to kill himself twenty years earlier, when he was in Cleveland; the suicide attempt led to four months of hospitalization.5 He and Diehl were both musicians; he studied and taught the trumpet while in Cleveland, and later gave trumpet lessons out of his house.6 He attended Juniata College, in central Pennsylvania, in 1972 and 1973, but never graduated. He was an apprentice to a cobbler in Cleveland, then an apprentice to his brother, who owned an auto shop in Cleveland, and he worked at a cafeteria in Cleveland. In Erie, he moved furniture for the Erie City Mission, where he also worked as a clerk, and he worked at the Salvation Army thrift shop.7 His mental problems, according to one account, were among the reasons he had held no job since 1984.8
None of this mattered to Diehl. She was smitten with Armstrong from the start, when he first talked to her in Perry Square. As Diehl-Armstrong remembered the conversation, he charmed her by immediately commenting on an aspect of her life that was so vital to her—how she looked to others, particularly men.
“Are you for real?” Diehl-Armstrong said Armstrong told her. “You look so beautiful. I can’t believe that is all natural beauty.”9
From then on, she and Armstrong were “soul mates.”10 She was dedicated to him. He was devoted to her. She said he doted on her so much that “it was crazy,”11 and that they loved each another. She held him in high regard intellectually; he concentrated on psychology courses in college, and Diehl maintained that he had a degree in psychology, despite his only two years in higher education.12 She saw him, in so many ways, as a once-in-a-lifetime find for her, a man who idolized her and who possessed what she considered the highest moral standards. “That is why I carry his name,” Diehl-Armstrong said in 2016, twenty four years after Armstrong’s death. When he died, she said, “We were getting along famously.”13
But the relationship, like most of Diehl-Armstrong’s relationships with men, was violent and volatile. Armstrong was diagnosed as psychotic.14 He was constantly irritable, angry, and suspicious, and often punched walls. He was so delusional about the presence of germs and so fearful that his food was tainted that for a time he drank bleach with meals.15 He assaulted Diehl early in their relationship, on the night of July, 17, 1989, around the time she said they met. Erie police accused Armstrong, who was then homeless, of throwing bricks at Diehl in the street, hurting her legs, and threatening to kill her, burn her car, and inflict permanent injury. He was also accused of denting and scratching her car by throwing bricks at it.16 Victims in domestic violence cases often back out of pressing charges, but not in this case. Diehl told police that she feared Armstrong. Her statements led to his arrest.
Armstrong’s behavior indicated he was unhinged. He wrote in court documents that he was on welfare and needed a public defender; he wrote on the application that he was suing what looked to be, according to his scrawl, a hospital for “2 trillion dollars.”17 A jury convicted Armstrong of simple assault, and he was sentenced on May 8, 1990, to six months to a year in the Erie County Prison. About two weeks before he received that sentence, Armstrong was again charged with assaulting Diehl. At Diehl’s insistence, police on April 27, 1990, arrested Armstrong on charges that he hit Diehl in the face and arm and threatened to mutilate her, kill her, and burn down her house.18 She and Armstrong were living apart when he assaulted her in that case; police listed his residence as a drop-in center for homeless men. Armstrong pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor of making terroristic threats and guilty to a summary charge of harassment. He was sentenced on January 8, 1991, to thirty days in the Erie County Prison and two years of probation, though the judge paroled him immediately because of the amount of time Armstrong had been in prison since his arrest for the second assault.19 The parole applied to both cases.
Less than three weeks later, on January 21, 1991, Marjorie Diehl, according to her, married Richard Armstrong. How they wed remains uncertain. Diehl-Armstrong maintained that they were married in a church service, and probate records show that Diehl-Armstrong was listed as Armstrong’s wife and administrator of his estate. But other court records show that Diehl-Armstrong and Armstrong were common-law spouses who were never legally married.20 Either way, Diehl-Armstrong considered her and Armstrong husband and wife. The newlyweds moved into her house on East Seventh Street, which had been a gift to her from her father. Harold Diehl bought the house for $18,000 in March 1988, possibly so his daughter would have a place to live once she got out of prison.
The home was often unhappy. Armstrong was forty-four years old and still subject to rage; Diehl-Armstrong was forty-one years old and at a point in her life when she was able to keep her mental illness largely under control, though a psychotic break was always a possibility. A week after the marriage, Diehl-Armstrong walked into Erie’s Saint Vincent Health Center for her first visit with a psychiatrist in some time. She had apparently been seeing other physicians, because she had been prescribed the antidepressant Prozac and the antianxiety drug BuSpar (buspirone). She reported that she was taking both medications on a regular basis, which had regulated her bipolar disorder.21 “At this time she appears to be in fair remission although still exhibits, as she always has, a certain degree of pressure of speech and also an expansiveness in her mood,” the psychiatrist wrote in the office report. “From what she tells me, it appears that there are times when she experiences on and off some depression as well. At this time I don’t see any need for any change. Even if I did, she would not as she has always done what she has chosen to rather than what she has been advised to do.”22 The psychiatrist kept her on Prozac and BuSpar and arranged to see her about every three months.
Richard Armstrong was receiving psychiatric treatment at around the same time. Though clearly troubled, as shown by his suicide attempt when he was in his twenties and his habit of drinking bleach with meals, Armstrong had never received formal psychiatric treatment until he was incarcerated at the Erie County Prison after assaulting Diehl in April 1990. The prison medical staff described his behavior as bizarre, withdrawn, and delusional, and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and paranoia.23 His behavior improved after he was prescribed the antipsychotic drug Haldol, which Diehl had taken when she was undergoing treatment at Mayview State Hospital while awaiting trial in the Bob Thomas case. Once Armstrong was paroled on January 8, 1991, he was referred to the behavioral health unit at Erie’s Hamot Medical Center. His first visit was on April 25, 1991. Diehl-Armstrong accompanied him and described his strange behavior. She said he had been delusional about being the father of children by other women. She said he believed he was a famous person. The hospital staff kept Armstrong on Haldol, and ordered him to return for psychiatric evaluations every four to eight weeks.24
Armstrong and Diehl-Armstrong often visited their psychiatrists within days of each other. On July 31, 1991, a psychiatrist at Hamot noted that Armstrong seemed more suspicious;25 a day earlier, a psychiatrist at Saint Vincent had listened to Diehl-Armstrong explain that she was becoming more stressed and anxious, partly because of arthritis and other physical ailments.26 Diehl-Armstrong stayed on Prozac and BuSpar. Armstrong stayed on Haldol.
Diehl-Armstrong vented about men during her sessions; though for a long time, she never revealed she was married. On November 7, 1991, she told her psychiatrist that she felt “persecuted” by an unnamed mentally unstable man who she said wanted to become romantically involved with her against her wishes. She said she believed this same man had slashed the tires of her car in the middle of the night, though she had no proof he had committed the crime.27 Also at the meeting on November 7, 1991, Diehl-Armstrong said she had other worries. Facing what she said were medical bills and debts related to her criminal defense in the Bob Thomas case, she said she had filed for bankruptcy protection; the petition was docketed in United States Bankruptcy Court in Erie on October 7, 1991. Bankruptcy, her lawyer in that case wrote, “has become necessary so that the Debtor may put the various financial problems related to the criminal charges behind her and have a completely fresh start in life.”28
Diehl-Armstrong stayed on her medication. She continued to resist taking stronger antipsychotic drugs, such as lithium, because of the painful side effects, including the swelling of her legs. The psychiatrist did not argue with her, and agreed that her current hypomanic state had become stable under Prozac and BuSpar. “I am not going to make a big deal about using antipsychotic or anti-manic drugs as long as she can manage to stay out of any significant trouble,” the psychiatrist wrote following a visit with Diehl-Armstrong on January 21, 1992. “It was briefly discussed that I hoped that this [hypo]manic state did not get out of hand and she [would become] outright manic and dysfunctional. She states that she realizes that and she never has [become dysfunctional] and has managed herself in the present state.”29
In a session seven months later, on July 22, 1992, Diehl-Armstrong finally told the psychiatrist that she was married. Diehl-Armstrong was overly talkative, but her pressured speech was no more severe than usual, and she said she was starting to come out of her depression. Her psychiatrist wrote: “Today for the first time she tells me that these days she is living with her husband. She states that she has been married for two years but chose not to tell me because she feared I may not approve of the relationship.”30 The psychiatrist listened to Diehl-Armstrong describe the relationship. The office report continued:
I am not sure how realistic of a relationship it is. However, as long as it works and she feels content that has to be fine with us. I hope that she will prepare for the next round of disappointment that may occur in the realm of interpersonal experiences and functioning. A comment about her choice for interpersonal relationships. They are either all good or all bad, nothing in between. . . . This was briefly discussed with her today.31
A month later, on August 24, 1992, Richard Armstrong was dead.
Armstrong’s mental and physical health had been declining for months. In a visit to his psychiatrist on May 15, 1992, he was noted to be speaking in a more guarded fashion, and he displayed an appearance that was “poor at best”32 and showed continued guarded behavior during a visit on July 10, 1992—observations that another psychiatrist said were “consistent with chronic residual symptoms of his paranoid schizophrenia.”33 Without explanation, Armstrong withdrew from psychiatric treatment. His last visit to his psychiatrist was on July 10, 1992. A short time later, Diehl-Armstrong said, her husband came down with flu-like symptoms that persisted for two weeks before his death.34 Throughout that time, she said, he was vomiting and had diarrhea, and had stopped taking his medication for schizophrenia and for hypertension, including high blood pressure.35 She said her husband was on medication for high blood pressure to prevent strokes. One day, she recalled, “We were going out to lunch at home, we were going to go out and buy a car, we were going out to lunch and all of a sudden he just said ‘Oh,’ and he had this horrible headache. He said that it felt like something busted in his head or a sledge hammer hit him.”36
Armstrong’s collapse occurred at home on August 22, 1992, two days before his death. He complained of weakness. He or Diehl-Armstrong called an ambulance,37 which drove him to the hospital from his and Diehl-Armstrong’s house on East Seventh Street; the same crew of paramedics had been to the house previously to treat him.38 He ended up in the emergency room at Saint Vincent Health Center at around 3:20 p.m. He was conscious at first. That day, according to medical notes, Armstrong had become so weak that he fell in his living room and struck his head on a table, cutting his head and his right shoulder.39 Armstrong, who was of medium height and weighed two hundred pounds, had not gotten up from the fall. Paramedics found him sitting on the floor, propped against a couch. He said he had been dizzy that afternoon. He said he had suffered a headache for the past two days.40
The attending physician saw Armstrong at the emergency room at 3:50 p.m. Armstrong was still conscious; the doctor suspected no neurological problems. He believed that Armstrong, whom he had treated before, was suffering from a viral illness.41 Armstrong became unconscious and unresponsive at 7:30 p.m., which led the attending physician to order a CAT scan of Armstrong’s head. It revealed that Armstrong was suffering from a “cerebellar bleed”—a hemorrhage to the right side of his cerebellum in the back of his brain.42 Armstrong fell into a deep coma; he was declared brain dead. Diehl-Armstrong, when told the diagnosis, said she wanted to keep Armstrong alive because “she had serious plans of having the patient frozen in case there were medical breakthroughs in the future.”43 The hospital placed Armstrong on a ventilator. A day later, 11:05 a.m., on August 24, 1992, his heart stopped, and Richard Armstrong died.44
The Erie County Coroner’s Office was not required to do an autopsy; Armstrong died in a hospital setting rather than at home or in another place that was not a medical facility. The Erie police were never involved; no one reported that Armstrong was suspected to have died from unnatural causes. Diehl-Armstrong, troubled about her husband’s medical care, asked Saint Vincent to perform an autopsy.45 The hospital pathologist determined the cause of death was “right cerebellar infarct with marked cerebral edema”46—a stroke with marked swelling of the brain. The stroke, the autopsy found, featured a hematoma and “extensive hemorrhagic necrosis”—extensive death of brain tissue due to bleeding.47
The autopsy findings are included in a medical malpractice and wrongful death lawsuit that Diehl-Armstrong filed against Saint Vincent Health Center and several physicians in 1994. The suit claims that the defendants were negligent in failing to diagnose Armstrong’s brain hemorrhage immediately, which Diehl-Armstrong claimed would have spurred the treatment in the emergency room that would have saved her husband’s life. The defendants argued they acted properly. The full circumstances surrounding Armstrong’s death were never developed fully, and in public, at a trial. The case settled for $250,000 in November 1998, four years after Diehl-Armstrong filed the suit. Her lawyers got $75,000. She got the rest: $175,000, most likely the most money she ever had up until that time in her life. Though the case ended in a settlement, Diehl-Armstrong was the clear victor. The defendants initially offered her only $15,000 to end the suit.48 Diehl-Armstrong still was upset with her award.
“I got a quarter million dollars,” she recalled. “But I didn’t think that was that good because it should have been more. By the time I paid my lawyers, I only got $175,000. That really wasn’t much for a man’s life, at only forty-four years of age, college-educated, intelligent man.”49 She also recalled of Armstrong: “My husband was a psychologist. He was a good husband. I would be still married to him had he not had his stroke. When I met him, he had a drinking problem. Then I helped him with it and he got over it. In the beginning of our relationship we had a few problems, he was still a little abusive and stuff. I told him, ‘You know, I’m not going to put up with that.’ And he stopped the drinking; he stopped all that and we had a happy marriage. But, unfortunately . . . he had a familial tendency to strokes.”50
Diehl-Armstrong was distraught. She spoke about her loss to her psychiatrist on January 28, 1993, her first visit since Armstrong’s death. She said his death plunged her into a period of grief and left her suicidal.51 Diehl-Armstrong also spoke of Armstrong in glowing terms, which caught the attention of the psychiatrist. According to the notes: “I am aware that while they were married or immediately prior . . . they did have fairly significant interpersonal difficulties, however in today’s interview, this patient describes her deceased husband as a ‘perfect saint.’”52 The psychiatrist explained why Diehl-Armstrong thought of Armstrong in that way: “Nothing unusual for a manic depressive, who does tend to either overvalue in a very exaggerated manner or to completely undervalue, particularly the qualities in people who they are in a relationship with, and who at one point they like and at other times they don’t.”53
Diehl-Armstrong said she would love her husband until the end. She had his body cremated. That way, she told the psychiatrist, she “could live with the ashes for the rest of her life.”54
Diehl-Armstrong stayed in mourning for a while longer. She considered herself old-fashioned in her belief that a widowed woman should not date another man for at least a year after her spouse’s death, especially if the woman had been “really in love with [her] mate.”55 She said her friends wanted her to go out, but she refused. Based on her recollection, she most likely would have remained unattached for years had she not received mystical guidance from a psychic. Astrology and numerology and the occult had enthralled Diehl-Armstrong for most of her adult life, so her visiting a psychic in 1993 was unsurprising. She met the psychic at Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave just east of Erie, over the Pennsylvania line in Chautauqua County, New York. She said she made the trip to connect with the spirit of her husband, because she missed him so much. She said she had no plans to ask about her prospects with living men. But then the psychic predicted another man would soon steal her heart.
“You’re going to meet this other man. He’s going to come from around Cleveland,” the psychic said, according to Diehl-Armstrong. The psychic told her the man would be tall, and “he’s going to be ten years younger and he’s going to have thick red hair and a beard. He’s going to be a major love in your life.”
“I don’t really want to hear that,” Diehl-Armstrong said.
“Well, it won’t happen for nine months, but it’s going to happen,” the psychic said.56
About nine months later, Diehl-Armstrong said, she met Jim Roden. The encounter led her to declare, “I kind of believed in fate.”57
Diehl-Armstrong said she met Jim Roden in 1993 at a tavern when she was on a date with another man. Roden, a divorced alcoholic, had recently moved to Erie from Cleveland, and he sat at the end of the bar looking at Diehl-Armstrong. She thought he looked nice. He came over to her table and asked if she and her date were married. He offered to buy them drinks. He matched the psychic’s description: he was thirty-five years old, or a decade younger than Diehl-Armstrong; he was from Cleveland; he was tall, at six feet and 140 pounds with a waist size no larger than twenty-seven inches; and he had thick hair and a red beard. He was in Erie looking for work laying carpet. “I was intrigued with him. I was flattered by him, of course,” Diehl-Armstrong recalled.58
She and her date and Roden stayed at the bar until two in the morning and then went to breakfast. She liked his intensity.59 She and her date dropped off Roden at his motel, but that was not the last she saw of him. He kept calling her and showing up at her house. Diehl-Armstrong introduced him to her mother, who thought he was handsome, and Diehl-Armstrong learned more about him: how he suffered brain damage in a tractor-trailer accident years ago, and that the injury left him prone to rage. He kept pursuing her.
Eventually, a taxicab dropped off Roden at her house on East Seventh Street with all his belongings. He put everything on the front porch. He moved in. She welcomed him, and their relationship blossomed—at first.
“He was kind of like a dog that followed me home,” Diehl-Armstrong recalled. “I don’t like to put it that way; I’m not calling him a dog at that point. I called him a dog later when I got to know him.”60
Their relationship quickly turned violent. In July 1994, Erie police accused Roden of cutting Diehl-Armstrong’s thigh by pushing her into the broken glass panel of a stove door at the house on East Seventh Street. She needed six stitches. Harold Diehl posted a $250 bond for Roden. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in November 1994 to three months to a year in the Erie County Prison and a year of probation.61 Roden was already in prison at the time. In August 1994, Erie police charged him with violating a restraining order Diehl-Armstrong took out against him when he cut her thigh. She said Roden, who was then homeless, showed up at her house and threatened to kill her and burn down her house. Roden was found guilty and in September 1994 was sentenced to six months in the Erie County Prison. The case drew attention from officials at the Erie County Courthouse. On the form that accompanied Diehl-Armstrong’s claim that Roden had violated the restraining order, a court official wrote that the county probation department was familiar with her. “Marjorie Armstrong is Marjorie Diehl,” the note read. “They consider her dangerous.”62
About ten months later, Roden was in trouble again. Diehl-Armstrong in July 1995 accused him of violating another restraining order by bruising and scratching her leg and threatening “to burn down the house with her in it” and ruin the pool that was at the East Seventh Street house.63 Roden was convicted of violating that restraining order and sentenced to six months in prison. Court officials again noted the probation department’s concerns about Diehl-Armstrong, the petitioner in the case. “Probation . . . said they consider petitioner dangerous,” according to a notation in court records. “Dealings with her have been far from pleasant.”64 Once Roden got out of prison, he and Diehl-Armstrong reunited.
Their living arrangements were a ruse. Though she and Roden lived together for years in the house on East Seventh Street, Diehl-Armstrong eventually converted the attic into an apartment where Roden could live. Roden and Diehl-Armstrong built the apartment so they could tell the welfare officials that Roden was her tenant, rather than her live-in companion, so that she and Roden could both continue to get government subsidies for heating bills and other expenses. The two would have received only one subsidy if they had been living together. They wanted “to build an upstairs apartment in her house so that it would look like they had an apartment rather than it just being a one-family home,”65 one of their friends said.
Diehl-Armstrong and Roden lived in squalor. The house on East Seventh Street was a duplicate of the house on Sunset Boulevard, in terms of the junk, though the East Seventh Street also had a pool. Diehl-Armstrong’s hoarding had gone unchecked. Her obsession just moved to a new location. Calling the 1,010-square-foot residence a home might have been an exaggeration. With all the debris and garbage inside, the place was more like an indoor dump. Like she had done when she lived on Sunset Boulevard, Diehl-Armstrong navigated the inside of the house on East Seventh Street by squeezing through “goat paths.” The rooms were lined from floor to ceiling with toys, furniture, food, clothing, and junk such as an artificial Christmas tree and shopping carts. Cockroaches and other insects overran the kitchen and other rooms; feces covered the floor from Diehl-Armstrong’s seven cats, some of them feral, and two dogs—a pug named Peanut and a chow named Bandit. Bags of garbage, stuffed animals, broken furniture, and a set of box springs crowded one room. Bags of trash covered the kitchen counters and pushed against the stove; at the top of one heap teetered an upside-down baby carriage whose wheel nearly touched the ceiling.66 Water and sewage had backed up into the basement. When Erie police officers searched the house after Roden’s death, in 2003, they wore masks and white hazardous-material suits that made them look like they were prepared to blast off into outer space. The stench was overwhelming at the East Seventh Street house, just as it had been on Sunset Boulevard.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of things,” a longtime Erie police officer said after going through the East Seventh Street House. “I’ve dealt with corpses with the flesh falling off. This is worse.”67
The moon-suited police officers and detectives filled several garbage trucks with bags of rubbish hauled from the house. The police fumigated the place. The fleas still covered the junk inside.
“I guess it didn’t get through all the layers of fleas,” a detective said of the initial fumigation. “I think the fleas ate the cockroaches.”68
Diehl-Armstrong said the items in her house were not junk. She said they were new objects, especially Beanie Babies and other stuffed animals, which she said she adored. Some people smoke, she said, and other people drink, but she collected things. “The stuff in the garbage bags was not garbage,” she said. “It was new stuff.”69 She said of what she considered her hobby of collecting: “I have my eccentricities. At least I wasn’t at bars picking up guys. It was clean and honest.”70
Diehl-Armstrong appeared stable during many of her thirty-six psychiatric visits to Saint Vincent Health Center, which occurred from one to six months apart between January 1991 and May 2003. Psychiatrists noted her behavior was calm, more or less, and that Prozac, though an antidepressant, and BuSpar, though for antianxiety, seemed to keep her mania in check. “I have not been able to understand how Prozac and Buspar [sic] control what one might consider hypomanic symptoms,” one psychiatrist wrote in 1996.71 Diehl-Armstrong still displayed pressured speech and had flights of ideas, and much of the conversations with the psychiatrists focused on her relationship with her parents and with unnamed men. She spoke with anger about some situations, but also held extended discussions about her past and what could be considered her propensity for violence. During one visit, Diehl-Armstrong explained how one man
was trying to hound or persecute her and he stopped. Then some time was spen[t] exploring the possibility of her acting out in a violent manner, in self defense. This has happened in the past. She vehemently denies and says that she is not a person of violence, that she has learned her lessons and she would not buy a gun even if someone paid her to buy one. Says that she would deal with such situations in a legal way or with the help of the police.72
Diehl-Armstrong continued to blame her problems on others, even if the accusations came in a more controlled tone. She said her father never let her grow up and be an adult, and raised concerns about her current boyfriend, presumed to be Roden, and even her deceased husband. “She believes none of these people will give her any due for worth for what she is rather than use her for her own benefits and exploitation,” one psychiatrist wrote. “States that it is very hard for her to trust them and wonders when she is going to be free of such neurotic bondage.”73 Steep depression struck more than mania, which continued to puzzle the psychiatrists, who knew how Diehl-Armstrong could be frantic. “When she feels depressed,” one psychiatrist wrote, “she feels down in the dumps and she does not [know] what is the reason, then she thinks about all of her life she wasted, but now, she is not going to cry over that. She is going to see that she will do well with whatever she has. She stated that she is not suicidal.”74
A psychiatrist changed Diehl-Armstrong’s drug treatment for the first time in years in October 1999. She continued to take Prozac (forty milligrams in the morning) and BuSpar (ten milligrams twice a day), but was also prescribed 0.5 milligrams of the sedative Klonopin (clonazepam), because of insomnia. Her prescriptions continued to change more, along with her behavior; she was diagnosed with “bipolar disorder mixed with intact cognition” (October 1999),75 and schizoaffective disorder (November 1999).76 Her thinking had become more disoriented in the spring of 2000; during one visit, she went on about how she was “fed up with this world,” including her parents and disrespectful “young kids.”77 A psychiatrist in April 2000 kept her on the Prozac, BuSpar, and Klonopin, and added Risperdal (risperidone), an antipsychotic used to treat bipolar disorder. The addition of Risperdal appeared to make Diehl-Armstrong think in a more organized manner, even if she was delusional. She told a psychiatrist in May 2000 that she was cleaning her house, without describing the house’s condition. Diehl-Armstrong said she was “putting stuff back together and everything in order so her friend can come and visit.”78 A psychiatrist kept her on all the same medications, but added Synthroid (levothyroxine sodium), a hormone replacement used to treat hypothyroidism and mood swings, both of which she had.
The cocktail of prescriptions seemed to work, for a time. Her mood swings, according to the psychiatrist’s report, had become less frequent in the summer of 2000—until an event that sent Diehl-Armstrong into mental disarray. Her mother, one of the biggest influences on her life and, in Diehl-Armstrong’s view, her psychosis, died on July 16, 2000. Diehl-Armstrong grieved. Then she raged. Agnes Diehl’s death triggered a fight over her estate that, according to the FBI, would shape Diehl-Armstrong’s behavior in the Pizza Bomber case. “My mother was a clean-living woman,” Diehl-Amstrong said. “I loved my mother. I might have had differences with her, but she was all I had.”79
Agnes Diehl was eighty-three years old when she collapsed in the bedroom of her and Harold Diehl’s house, where their only child had grown up. Agnes Diehl suffered from hypertension; the coroner ruled she died of coronary occlusion, or a blocked artery, and acute coronary thrombosis, or a blood clot in the heart.80 Death by natural causes made no sense to Diehl-Armstrong. She considered her mother’s death suspicious. She claimed her father failed to make sure her mother was taking her medication. She claimed her father was nonchalant about the death. “Harold A. Diehl told Marjorie Armstrong that he knew her mother was dying for a long time,” Diehl-Armstrong’s lawyer, Larry D’Ambrosio, declared in court papers. “During the week following her death, Harold A. Diehl asked Marjorie Armstrong on four different occasions if she was going to try to put him in jail for her mother’s death.”81
The allegations about Harold Diehl were false, based on the coroner’s report. But D’Ambrosio, at Diehl-Armstrong’s request, cited the claims in an effort to get Harold Diehl removed as the administrator of Agnes Diehl’s estate and replaced with a neutral party. Diehl-Armstrong wanted more control over the assets, which included a brokerage account valued at $150,867, which were distributed according to her mother’s will. Agnes Diehl wrote the will on the back of an envelope, and she had firm directions regarding her daughter’s share: “Remember,” it said, “make a trust fund for Marjorie with a bank person in charge.”82 Jim Roden signed on as potential witness for Diehl-Armstrong in the estate challenge, though the challenge to the administration of her mother’s estate went nowhere. The settlement of the estate initially left Harold Diehl with $84,200 and his daughter with $54,200.83
Diehl-Armstrong remained concerned about the money she did not get: When Agnes Diehl died, she and her husband held municipal bonds whose face value was $1.8 million.84 Harold Diehl was in control of those funds, and Diehl-Armstrong was worried about the fate of that money—money, as D’Ambrosio wrote in the court filing, that Diehl-Armstrong believed was hers alone. The filing referred to the Wolfendens, Diehl-Armstrong’s beloved maternal grandparents, and alluded to how they had shown her the safe in their house when she was a child. The Wolfendens, D’Ambrosio wrote, “said all the money was from her side of the family, and that they and Agnes E. Diehl all agreed it was to go to Marjorie Diehl at her mother’s death.”85 Diehl-Armstrong expressed her fears about the money to her psychiatrist at an appointment on November 15, 2000, the first after her mother’s death. She “started talking about her mother who recently died,” the psychiatrist noted, “and she thinks her father is getting quite irrational, showing very poor judgment that he is giving away money to everybody else, but not to her and she thinks her father should have [a] guardian.”86 The fear of missing out on her inheritance would haunt Diehl-Armstrong for the rest of her life.
Diehl-Armstrong’s unsuccessful challenge to remove her father as administrator upset her. So did an incident related to the estate fight, in which she tangled with a bank. Though many of Diehl-Armstrong’s over-the-top claims were untrue or distorted, her grievances often had rational underpinnings. Despite her mental illness and her medication, she remained intellectually sharp and well-read and, when competent, had a clear understanding of the law. She used her knowledge of Pennsylvania estate and inheritance regulations to argue with a branch of PNC Bank, in Erie, about access to her mother’s safe-deposit box. She claimed the bank violated state law by letting her father get into the box the day after her mother’s death without the bank making a required official inventory. Diehl-Armstrong said the access allowed her father to take what was in the box on his own. Diehl-Armstrong cited the incident in her failed attempt to get her father removed as administrator of the estate, and she wrote a letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue asking for an investigation of the PNC Bank branch, which had indeed allowed her father access to the safe-deposit box without an inventory of its contents. The letter detailed how Diehl-Armstrong and D’Ambrosio had a confrontation with the bank branch manager. Diehl-Armstrong wrote that she wanted action immediately, though nothing is known to have come of her demand. She included with the letter photocopies of the pertinent Pennsylvania estate and inheritance laws. “Please see attached laws and penalties which I thank you for enforcing,” Diehl-Armstrong wrote.87
The fight over the safe-deposit box stoked Diehl-Armstrong’s obsession with money, particularly her father’s money, and it embittered her against PNC Bank, the institution that she believed was holding that money. Diehl-Armstrong’s paranoia, a symptom of her bipolar disorder, deepened.
Jim Roden stayed by her side. She looked past the abuse she said he inflicted on her and fashioned a role for herself as Roden’s protector, the one person who could make him better by keeping him away from alcohol. Diehl-Armstrong found the best way to keep Roden sober was to do things with him outdoors. One of their favorite hobbies was fishing. They made for an interesting couple, Diehl-Armstrong and Roden, as they cast their lines. She had wild hair and a large frame and talked nonstop, mostly with expletives. Roden, with his thin build, was less demonstrative but still capable of losing his temper. The two fished constantly from Erie’s South Pier, on one side of the channel that connects Erie’s Presque Isle Bay to Lake Erie. Diehl-Armstrong said she had enjoyed fishing since her father taught her how to fish when she was twelve years old—which she said was one of the few good things her father did for her. “He taught me to drive and he taught me to fish, that’s about all I can say,” she recalled.88 She said she had liked to fish with her dad, she had liked to boat and swim with Edwin Carey, and she liked to spend hours at the South Pier with Roden, hauling in catfish and other fish to eat and give to friends. Diehl-Armstrong described herself as a gourmet cook. She was fond of making fish dinners.89
Fishing on the South Pier is how Diehl-Armstrong met Erie resident Kenneth E. Barnes, who would become one of her main links to the Pizza Bomber plot. Barnes, who was four years older than Diehl-Armstrong, was a television repairman, computer whiz, and drug dealer whose clutter-filled house in Erie was just as bad as Diehl-Armstrong’s. Barnes and Diehl-Armstrong’s friendship was strong enough that, according to him, he once accompanied her to Lily Dale, the spiritualist enclave, where Barnes said Diehl-Armstrong wanted Barnes to meet with a medium to determine “if I was psychically in tune with her realm of reality.”90 The psychic was not there. Barnes said he and Diehl-Armstrong walked around in the woods and looked at the animals.91
By the spring and summer of 2003, Barnes had become a regular at Diehl-Armstrong’s house. He was also a handyman, and he was helping her build the upstairs apartment for Roden. The apartment and the deceptive cost-cutting rationale behind it had grown into a kind of obsession for Diehl-Armstrong by that time. Barnes listened to her talk constantly about money. Diehl-Armstrong was worried that her father was giving away her inheritance to friends and neighbors. She was correct about her father’s largesse. He did indeed go on to make gifts that included $1,000 to the mail carrier, $100,000 to one friend, $50,000 to another, and $100,000 to still another.92 “These people are vultures,” Diehl-Armstrong said of the recipients. “They are all vultures.”93 But Diehl-Armstrong was wrong that the money her father was giving away could be considered hers. Her father was still very much alive, and he was free to do what he wanted with his fortune. Whether he wanted to put his only child in his will would be his decision, though he seemed inclined not to bequeath her much, if anything. He once told the Erie police that he knew his daughter was upset with him for giving money away, but that “her elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top and she’s not dealing with a full deck.”94
Diehl-Armstrong by then had plenty of money and assets of her own, but seemed intent on getting more. She relied on Social Security disability payments for her main income. She also said she delivered newspapers—as many as six routes a day, given her mania—in the late 1990s.95 Diehl-Armstrong had amassed a small fortune. It included the $175,000 she received in the malpractice case over her husband’s death; the $54,200 she had inherited from her mother; and another $180,000 she eventually received after her mother’s death from a joint account for which Diehl-Armstrong had the right of survivorship.96 The cash added up to $409,200. Diehl-Armstrong had other assets. Her father in 2000 had deeded the house on East Seventh Street to her for free. In February 1999, she paid $65,000 in cash for a cottage in Harborcreek Township, east of Erie; the cottage was set back from a cliff that overlooks Lake Erie. Diehl-Armstrong also owned a Jeep Cherokee, a Chevrolet Camaro sports car, and a Chevrolet Blazer, and she claimed she had other automobiles, including a motor home, as well.97 Though she was often known to exaggerate about her wealth, Diehl-Armstrong, at this point in her life, really did possess financial means.
But she wanted more money. Diehl-Armstrong wanted to make sure her father’s money was left for her. She continued to complain about her father during her regular psychiatric appointments at Saint Vincent Health Center. “He is giving away his money to friends and everybody else but not to her,” according to the notes of a meeting on June 26, 2001.98 “She thinks she is the only child and the father should give all the money to her,” according to the notes of a meeting on August 1, 2001.99 And in the notes of a meeting on April 23, 2003, a psychiatrist wrote: “She talked nonstop about her father who is giving away money to everyone else but her and she was upset about that. . . . I did try calling her father. He thought that his daughter wants money, but otherwise she doesn’t need anything. He was going to give her 20% of his income, but now he is getting to the point where he does not care about his daughter. The patient was upset over that.”100 The psychiatrist increased the dosage of Diehl-Armstrong’s medications because she seemed “to be very angry, upset and delusional.”101 Diehl-Armstrong was still taking Klonopin, Synthroid, and BuSpar, but was no longer on Risperdal or Prozac. She was instead taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin (bupropion) and the antipsychotic Stelazine (trifluoperazine).102 She had previously also been on the antipsychotic Seroquel (quetiapine), but no longer had a prescription by the spring of 2003. “I was on these drugs and I was doped up, like you would drug up a cow or a horse,” she once said.103
Diehl-Armstrong was back taking BuSpar as well as Stelazine, Klonopin, and Synthroid when she visited the psychiatrist on May 21, 2003. “She was very circumstantial and tangential,” the psychiatrist noted. “It was hard to bring her back to her original thoughts. She was talking about six years ago or talking about last week; it was hard to understand. She kept talking, not making any sense.”104 The psychiatrist prescribed her a four-month supply of drugs and told her to visit again in four months. Diehl-Armstrong never kept the appointment. The visit on May 21, 2003, was the last she would have with a psychiatrist outside a prison setting.
Ken Barnes heard Diehl-Armstrong complain more than ever about her father and his money in the spring of 2003, as Barnes worked on remodeling Diehl-Armstrong’s attic into the apartment for Roden. He said she grew increasingly agitated. In the spring and summer of 2003, he would later testify, Diehl-Armstrong asked him if he wanted to help her rob a bank. Barnes said he was not interested.105 He said she had another question: “She asked me then if I would make a bomb for her or I knew how to make a bomb.”106 Barnes said he told her he knew how to make a bomb but was not interested in helping her.107 The questions kept coming. “She asked me if I would kill her father for her,” Barnes testified. “She asked me how much I’d charge.”108 Barnes said he was joking when he set a price of $250,000. He said Diehl-Armstrong told him she wanted her father dead because “he was spending her inheritance that she had from her mother. She said he was giving his money away to the church and to the neighbors; she didn’t like it because it was her money.”109 As for what bank to target in a robbery, Barnes said Diehl-Armstrong was angry at one bank in particular: PNC.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong went to the classified section in the Erie Times-News to buy the 12-gauge shotgun that she used to kill Jim Roden. The ad for the gun ran on August 2, 2003. Diehl-Armstrong showed up at the seller’s house about a week later. She smelled strongly of cat urine, looked anxious and tired, and she was carrying lots of cash, mostly $20 bills.110 She paid the asking price for the gun—$450.111 Diehl-Armstrong told the seller that she wanted the gun for home defense because of break-ins in her neighborhood. She told him how, over that Memorial Day weekend, she had reported to the Erie police that a “coked-up biker” had broken into her house shortly before four in the morning on May 30, 2003. She said she was sleeping in her nightgown on the couch in the living room, with her purse and a plastic shopping bag filled with $2,300 in cash hidden underneath the couch cushions.112 She said someone in a black jacket climbed through the window, held a knife to her chest, shouted, three times, “I’ll kill you, bitch, if you don’t give me your money,” and ran off with the cash.113 Diehl-Armstrong first told the police the thief had stolen $2,300, then the number became $2,800, and finally $133,000. Diehl-Armstrong blamed Barnes for the heist. Police never charged anyone, given Diehl-Armstrong’s mental state and her inconsistency about how much money was stolen.
Diehl-Armstrong insisted that the burglary happened. She said she needed a gun for protection. In 1984, when she bought the handgun she used to kill Bob Thomas, she said she needed it for prowlers. In August 2003, she said the threat was burglars and robbers. When she bought the handgun in 1984, Diehl-Armstrong failed to disclose her mental illness, which, if known, would have disqualified her from gun ownership. In August 2003, she bought the shotgun in a private sale, through the classified ad, and did not disclose her mental problems. She asked the seller if he was a cop, an immediate indication that she was worried about someone knowing she was buying a gun. She said nothing about her bipolar disorder when she bought the shotgun, a semiautomatic Remington Model 11-87 with a shiny walnut stock and a twenty-six-inch barrel made of high-gloss metal that glowed blue. The shotgun could hold three rounds—one in the chamber and two in the magazine. She wanted to know how to break it down, and what would happen when she fired it.
“If I was to shoot the gun,” she said to the seller, “if I needed to use the gun in the house, would it put a big hole in the wall?”114
The seller chuckled.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to put a big hole in the wall if you miss whoever or whatever your aiming at.”115
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Diehl-Armstrong said. “I would just shoot them in the foot to scare them.”116
Jim Roden was defenseless when Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong shot him. He was lying facedown in his single bed, in the attic apartment in the house on East Seventh Street, at about two o’clock, during a stormy morning on August 10, 2003. He might have been sleeping.117 She carried the 12-gauge Remington shotgun as she crossed through the maze of trash downstairs and climbed the fifteen stairs to the attic. She walked into the bedroom and stood five to seven feet from Roden’s bed. She fired once. The shotgun recoiled, but she was able to handle the force of the kick. She fired again. She shot Roden in the middle of the back, just below the right shoulder blade. The two wounds were nearly side by side. Roden curled in the fetal position. He died instantly as his blood covered his bed.118
Roden’s body was left unmoved for two days. The outside temperature hit highs of seventy-eight degrees; the attic must have been sweltering. Diehl-Armstrong avoided the heat and stench by living out of her car—the red Jeep Cherokee, which she filled with papers and clothes and stuffed animals and other junk; it was like her house, but on wheels. She parked it in the lot at the Walmart south of Erie. She used the Walmart bathroom to wash. She spent most of her days trying to figure out what to do with Roden’s body. She called the one person she knew who would have the expertise and the inclination to assist her in her plan, no matter how nefarious. She called her onetime fiancé, Bill Rothstein.
Though they had long ago stopped being lovers, Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein had continued to stay in touch, even if the contact was infrequent. His life, like hers, had reached something of a dead end. The two of them were so much alike in that regard: they were both highly intelligent, even brilliant, but they were also both condescending and arrogant and unwilling to accept that someone, anyone, could be smarter than they were. So Diehl-Armstrong, beset by mental illness, had embarked on a life of instability and abusive relationships. Rothstein, who never exhibited signs of mental illness, got by as a handyman, electrician, and substitute teacher who taught robotics; he was so good with his hands that a principal and the athletic director at the Erie School District hired him to do work at their houses.119 Rothstein was fifty-nine years old in the summer of 2003, unmarried and still living alone with his German shepherd in the house where he had grown up, at 8645 Peach Street, just south of Erie. He had lived there with his mother until she died in 2000, at age eighty-five. The house, like the residences of Diehl-Armstrong and Barnes, was a mess, filled with junk and papers and hardware products, such as scrap metal. The houses were in such disarray that an investigator searching for evidence in any of them would have no idea where to begin to look, which was maybe the point.
Rothstein liked the house; it resembled the house of a mad genius, which is what he held himself out to be. His physique had changed little over the years. He was still big in the summer of 2003—six feet, two inches tall; 319 pounds; and shoe size twelve EEE, a size so big that he complained he could rarely find shoes that fit. He wore the same type of clothes most every day, whether he was on a handyman job or teaching as a substitute: thick-rimmed glasses, a work shirt, denim bib overalls, and boots.120 He looked like a pig farmer.
Diehl-Armstrong’s views of Rothstein fluctuated. She never denied that she loved him when they were engaged to be married, but later in life she found herself exasperated with him. Once she was indicted in the Pizza Bomber case, she came to demonize her former fiancé. She called him “a devious piece of shit”121 and a “sicko,”122 but readily acknowledged his intellect. “Rothstein was a brilliant guy,” she recalled. “You fuck with the master, you fuck with disaster.”123 Rothstein, according to the FBI, was the mastermind behind the Pizza Bomber plot.
Diehl-Armstrong had no hesitation in turning to the master for help in getting rid of Roden’s body. As Rothstein recalled, she showed up at his house several days after Roden’s death; thirty years earlier, when she and Rothstein were engaged, she had lived in that house with him. Now she was a visitor in a panic. Diehl-Armstrong told him about Roden’s death. She said something—or so Rothstein testified—about killing Roden because he was not doing enough to help her track down the crackhead biker who broke into her house over Memorial Day weekend. She also blamed Roden for introducing her to Barnes, who she believed was responsible for the burglary.124 Rothstein said she gave him $78,000 in cash to help get rid of Roden’s body and for safekeeping; she put the number at $100,000, but said she told Rothstein she hoped to get $10,000 of it back, to go to California to get her teeth fixed.125 She also said she gave Rothstein so much cash because she had been in shock over Roden’s death.126 Whatever the amount, Rothstein, with the money in hand, said he was more than willing to participate to make Roden’s body go away.
“I wanted to help her,” he testified, “because I thought maybe this will straighten her out, because she was going to give up on guys, because she kept going around with the wrong guys she claimed, so I thought maybe I could help her out with this.”127
Rothstein also said of their relationship, “Usually I would hear from her . . . she would call up with some kind of complaint or something, and if I could help her I would, but usually I tried to avoid her as much as possible, unless I really thought I could help her.”128
Rothstein also agreed to dispose of the Remington shotgun, the murder weapon. That part was easy. He said he used a reciprocating saw to cut it up and used an acetylene torch to melt down the fragments. He said he got rid of the scraps by throwing them out his car window as he drove around Erie County early one morning. Rothstein had experience in such tactics. In 1979, he testified in an Erie County murder trial that he had unsuccessfully tried to burn the pistol that his friend had used to fatally shoot a man in a dispute over a girlfriend. The burning failed to melt the pistol, which Rothstein, testifying for the prosecution, said he threw in the trash. He had no qualms in engaging in such behavior.129
With Roden’s death and its aftermath, the past had also come full circle for Diehl-Armstrong. Here she was, nineteen years after she killed Bob Thomas, in the same situation. She had fatally shot another boyfriend while he was in what authorities said was a resting position—Thomas on the couch, Roden face down on the bed—and then offered a friend tens of thousands of dollars to help make the body disappear. As she had been after Thomas’s death, she was frantic now, over the fate of Roden. One night, in mid-August, she and Rothstein wrapped Roden’s body in a plastic tarp, hauled it out of the house on East Seventh Street, drove it in a van up to Rothstein’s house, and, in the garage, stuffed it into a working chest freezer that Rothstein had purchased for that purpose. They went back to the East Seventh Street house and scrubbed the blood-stained attic with bleach and other solvents, painted the walls, and moved out almost everything that had been in the attic, including the blood-stained mattress and box springs. Rothstein dropped all the junk off at his house, and then dumped it at the landfill—a total of 1,040 pounds, or more than a half ton. He and Diehl-Armstrong, whose houses looked like junk yards, suddenly went into a cleaning frenzy. They did all they could to erase evidence of the crime, including Roden. Rothstein said he went along with the plot to provide Diehl-Armstrong a sense of peace: If all the evidence was gone, all her worries might disappear as well. “If she didn’t have that hanging over her head,” he said, “she might be allowed to be free.”130
More than two weeks after Roden’s death, on August 28, 2003, Brian Wells was killed in the bomb blast as he tried to rob the PNC Bank branch in Summit Township, not far from Rothstein’s house. Police quickly determined that Wells, as a pizza deliveryman, had, minutes before the bank robbery, delivered two pizzas to a clearing at the end of a dirt road that ran beside Rothstein’s house at 8645 Peach Street, in Summit Township. From that site, Wells, now wearing a bomb locked to his neck, drove to the bank. When Wells drove along the dirt road, past Rothstein’s house, he also drove by Rothstein’s cluttered garage, which held the chest freezer that, at that moment, contained Jim Roden’s frozen body. Police and the FBI at the time of Wells’s death had no idea that Roden was even dead. They had no idea that Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein might be connected to the murders of both Roden and Wells. Those links would come much later.
Even Bill Rothstein had his limits. He said he started to get worried when Diehl-Armstrong became serious about cutting up Roden’s body—an idea that Rothstein said he raised with her. “In theory,” he said, “that’s the best way to do things. It’s the same way with the gun. It’s best to just chop it up in as many pieces and spread it around as [much as] possible, but that doesn’t mean I thought it had to happen.”131 He said he realized that Diehl-Armstrong really was serious about cutting up Roden’s body when the two drove to a kitchen-supply store on September 20, 2003. They went there to buy a meat grinder or an ice crusher; Diehl-Armstrong walked out with the ice crusher, but the purchase was as baffling as it was frightful. She had purchased the type of ice crusher a party host would use to break up ice cubes for cocktails; a chunk of ice deposited in a slot in the top went through a grinder and ice cubes and shards came out the side. The ice crusher cost $94.34, including tax. Diehl-Armstrong carried it to Rothstein’s van in a box.132 Who knew how much time they would need to dismember Roden’s body and run it through this ice crusher? The task seemed impossible and absurd. But the possibility that Diehl-Armstrong was committed to carrying out the task, Rothstein said, frightened him. And so, perhaps, did the possibility that the highly anxious, nervous, and, most likely, unmedicated Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong might have been preparing to gun down Bill Rothstein next, and make him her latest victim.
For whatever reason, Rothstein decided to act. He got in his van, drove away from his house, and called 911 at 8:15 p.m. on September 20.
“At 8645 Peach Street, in the garage, there is a frozen body; it’s in the freezer in the garage,” Rothstein told the operator. “There is a woman there you might want to pick up and question.”133
Rothstein gave the operator the woman’s name: Marjorie Diehl.
“Who is she to you?” the operator said.
“I helped her do stuff I shouldn’t do,” Rothstein said, “but I never killed anyone. So I just want that known.”134
Erie police arrested Diehl-Armstrong at Rothstein’s house in the early morning of September 2, 2003. Detectives charged her with homicide, aggravated assault, possession of an instrument of crime, tampering with evidence, abuse of a corpse, and criminal conspiracy to tamper with evidence and abuse a corpse. She had $4,200 in her purse and another $781 at her house on East Seventh Street.135 Unlike in the Thomas case, she was mostly quiet. After her arrest, while sitting on a bench at the state police barracks, she muttered that Jim Roden had been shot, and she said that, over the years, she had experienced “poor luck” with men.136 She said little after that, upon her incarceration without bond at the Erie County Prison, and during her contacts with the District Attorney’s Office and the Erie police, who handled the case because Roden was killed in Erie and his body moved to Summit Township. In the Thomas case, Diehl-Armstrong immediately told investigators—and then could not stop telling investigators—that she killed Thomas because he abused her. She could have made the same argument in the murder of Roden; once again, the victim had a documented history of violence toward her and the victim was dead. No direct witnesses would have existed to counter Diehl-Armstrong’s claims of self-defense if she chose to raise them. But Diehl-Armstrong, despite her inclination toward pressured speech, stayed quiet over why Roden was killed.
Diehl-Armstrong’s reputation preceded her when she arrived at the Erie County Prison in late September 2003, shortly after her arrest in Roden’s death, and she enjoyed the attention she received from the infamous Thomas case. While at the prison, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed familiar medications: Wellbutrin, Synthroid, BuSpar, and Klonopin.137
Diehl-Armstrong’s mental problems and the strange nature of her current case were well known among her fellow female inmates. One inmate recalled how she was sitting at a table with her and other inmates when Diehl-Armstrong said she did not like another prisoner, that “when she saw her in the med line, she wanted to smash her head like a watermelon and watch the seeds pop out.”138 The inmate at the table joked about why the other inmates had to be wary around Diehl-Armstrong.
“I dubbed her the Freezer Queen,” the inmate said. “I said it doesn’t pay to piss off the Freezer Queen. You end up an entrée.”
The inmate said Diehl-Armstrong pointed at her, gesturing that she found the joke funny.
“She thought it was hysterical,” the inmate recalled.139
Diehl-Armstrong still kept quiet about the details of her case. Her preliminary hearing was on January 20, 2004; a magistrate ruled that the District Attorney’s Office had presented enough evidence for the case to go to trial. The main witness was Rothstein, who showed up at the Erie County Courthouse wearing, in a rare sartorial break, a jacket and tie rather than overalls and a work shirt. He testified that he helped Diehl-Armstrong put Roden’s body in the freezer, but did not kill Roden. He said Diehl-Armstrong told him that she was the one who fired the shotgun. He explained that putting the body in a freezer was one thing, but cutting it into pieces was another.
“I couldn’t see myself cutting up a body like that,” he testified, “and I don’t think she would, and she wanted me to, she indicated she wanted me to, and I couldn’t do it.”140
The police charged Rothstein with abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, and conspiracy to abuse a corpse and tamper with evidence. He was not charged with homicide. He was to be the star witness at Diehl-Armstrong’s trial.
Though Diehl-Armstrong did not testify during the preliminary hearing, as is usually the case for defendants at such proceedings, she made a brief comment afterward. She looked straight at the television cameras as sheriff’s deputies led her out of the courtroom in handcuffs. She snarled, “Rothstein is a filthy liar. Rothstein should be charged with the death of Brian Wells and a lot of other charges.”141 She said nothing else.
Diehl-Armstrong remained at the Erie County Prison. Outside, her problems worsened. On January 9, 2004, fire destroyed her cottage on the cliff above Lake Erie. No one was home and no one was injured, but the fire burned through heaps of the treasures that Diehl-Armstrong had spread throughout the place. Garbage bags filled with debris were piled four to five feet high in the rooms and hallways. In October 2003, while looking for evidence in Roden’s death, Erie police had worn white moon suits inside the cottage. The inside was covered in animal feces, and at least two dead cats were found inside as well. The stench from the house could be smelled several blocks away.142 Now, three months later, the junk created problems for firefighters, who suspected that workers checking on the furnace might have started the blaze. The firefighters had to get out of the house rather than knock down the flames from the inside. The junk in the house put them at risk of getting trapped. The cottage was a total loss. “It’s no fault of the firefighters,” said the Pennsylvania State Police trooper who investigated the fire. “They made a quick response. But they were met with such a mess.”143
Chaos struck Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s personal affairs because of the fire. One of her recurring fears—that someone would burn down her house—had come to pass. She had no insurance on the cottage. She had hoped to sell some of her valuables in the cottage to help pay for her defense in the Roden case, but now those assets were gone. She saw the loss of the cottage as another example of the constant destruction of nice things in her life, the things she deserved. “It’s one of the best and it was big,” she said of her cottage as compared to the others in the neighborhood. “It had four bedrooms; it was very exclusive property.”144
Diehl-Armstrong’s mental state remained unstable, just as it had in the Bob Thomas case; her incarceration and the fire and the loss of her valuables had to unnerve her. At a bond hearing on February 12, 2004, Diehl-Armstrong rambled. She talked about her assets. She talked about her case. She talked about Rothstein, saying he was “shifty” and wanted to have “perverted sex” with her. She talked about the probate dispute with her father over her mother’s estate. She talked about her lawyers, who were public defenders; she called them “public pretenders.”145 A judge ruled that Diehl-Armstrong could not pay for her own lawyer. He ruled that her assets were tied up as evidence because of the allegation she used tens of thousands of dollars to pay Rothstein to dispose of Roden’s body. In between all the legal discussions about the availability of her money, Diehl-Armstrong also talked about her manic-depression.
“Severe, very severe,” she said of the extent of her mental illness, “but not violent.”146
Diehl-Armstrong’s lawyers in March 2004 asked a judge to send her to Mayview State Hospital to determine her competency to stand trial—the same place she had gone in the Bob Thomas case. For proof of Diehl-Armstrong’s mental issues, her lawyers cited her psychiatric history, the condition of her house on East Seventh Street—which the city of Erie had determined was unfit for human occupancy—and the psychotropic drugs police had found inside the house. They included Wellbutrin, BuSpar, Klonopin, Stelazine, and the sedative Librium (chlordiazepoxide).
The judge, Shad Connelly, issued an order on March 22, 2004, that sent Diehl-Armstrong to Mayview for a six-month evaluation. She was admitted to Mayview on April 1, 2004. She refused medication and started rambling in her first interviews. She said she owned her own firm and consulting business. She spoke of Roden’s death, and identified no suspects by name, but clearly believed Rothstein had something to do with the murder. “The patient stated that prior to the alleged crime a friend who wants to be a boyfriend was hanging around a lot and insisting on a relation with her, but she does not love him and he wants only her money,” the examining psychiatrist wrote. “She stated that she is an independent, high functioning person who ‘has been framed’ and accused of this crime because they were jealous of her that she acquired a lot of money through her consulting business.”147 She said the police were prejudiced against her because she had killed her previous boyfriend, and that police did not believe her story then, so she saw no need to report Roden’s death because no one would have believed what she had to say. “I was very angry that my friend bought a freezer and kept the body in the freezer all this time,” she said. “That is not what I asked him to do.”148 Because she was in a mental institution when she made the comments, the authorities could not use them against her in the Roden case.
Despite her initial flight of ideas, Diehl-Armstrong soon was ready to head to trial. She continued to refuse medication for a time, saying the drugs would make her “a zombie,”149 but she eventually relented; as the examining psychiatrist, Laszlo Petras, MD, wrote, “without any antipsychotic medication or mood stabilizer, her signs and symptoms of mania appeared to increase.”150 The Mayview staff gradually discontinued her use of Wellbutrin and prescribed her Seroquel. That drug did not help, and Diehl-Armstrong complained of the side effects, so the staff put her on a drug that was new to her: the antipsychotic Geodon (ziprasidone), used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Diehl-Armstrong’s condition improved with the Geodon, the Mayview staff said, and a prescription for Klonopin aided her sleep. She also took Synthroid again, for her hypothyroidism.
With her mood stabilized, Diehl-Armstrong was calm enough to attend group sessions on legal issues while at Mayview. She said she did not think she needed medication, but said she would take her prescriptions if that is what the staff wanted her to do. Petras, the psychiatrist, evaluated Diehl-Armstrong using the fourth edition, text revision, of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR). He found her competent for trial with this diagnosis:
Axis I: “Bipolar disorder, manic phase, in partial remission”;
Axis II: None.
Axis III: Hypothyroidism, obesity, history of water retention; history of allergic reactions to some drugs;
Axis IV: Incarcerated, “pending serious charges, minimal social support.”
Axis V: About 50.151 This referred to the Global Assessment of Functioning scale, from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better the coping skills.
Petras and LuAnn Cochenour, the director of Mayview’s psychiatric forensic center, also wrote of Diehl-Armstrong:
She clearly understands the nature of the crime, although her view of it is somewhat distorted. She understands the seriousness of the charges. She understands the legal system and her options of trial by judge or jury, the possibility of plea bargaining and the need to cooperate and work with her lawyer to assist her case. Unfortunately, the patient still has not achieved full understanding of the seriousness of her mental illness throughout the years and its consequences. She still has a tendency to use defense mechanisms, which are self-defeating, including denial, projection, intellectualization and rationalization. This is interfering with her fully understanding the need for treatment and the seriousness of the consequences when she is not complying with mental health treatment in the community.152
Diehl-Armstrong was returned to Erie County, where she had a competency hearing at the county courthouse on September 8, 2004. Petras, a witness, testified about what he had written in the report: that, under the current medication, Diehl-Armstrong’s mania was in remission and she was competent to stand trial. Judge Connelly listened to Petras and reviewed Diehl-Armstrong’s mental health records back to the early 1970s. The next day, on September 9, 2004, Connelly ruled that Diehl-Armstrong was competent for trial.
Four months later, the case was over. Diehl-Armstrong arrived at the Erie County Courthouse on January 7, 2005, for a plea hearing and sentencing. The plea: guilty but mentally ill. It applied to third-degree murder and abuse of a corpse in Roden’s death. Connelly sentenced her to seven to twenty years in a state prison; the maximum sentence for third-degree murder alone was twenty to forty years. The sentence, which the District Attorney’s Office found agreeable, represented a break. Diehl-Armstrong avoided getting the maximum for third-degree murder, or an unpremeditated homicide with malice, and avoided prosecution for first-degree murder, or a premeditated homicide, a conviction for which carries a mandatory life sentence with no parole in Pennsylvania. Diehl-Armstrong got a break for a reason. Bill Rothstein, the main witness against her in the Roden case, had died in the county nursing home on July 30, 2004, at age sixty. He suffered from stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; the cancer had spread from his lymph nodes to other organs.
With Rothstein dead, the District Attorney’s Office used the plea bargain to secure a conviction. By pleading guilty but mentally ill, Diehl-Armstrong guaranteed that she would initially serve her sentence at Mayview, where she would receive additional mental health treatment, and then get moved into the regular Pennsylvania state prison system. She would also be eligible for parole after seven years, though early release seemed unlikely, given her violent past. If she served her entire maximum sentence of twenty years, Diehl-Armstrong would not be free until she was in her late seventies. The lengthy sentence, Judge Connelly said, was appropriate.
“The defendant’s background is familiar to the court, including her prior contacts with the law,” Connelly said at the sentencing. “The court is also familiar with the fact that Ms. Diehl has an education. She is intelligent, as the psychological reports indicate, with an average to superior IQ. The court is also familiar with the fact that she has had mental health problems now for well over twenty years that have been consistent and resistant to treatment.”153 He called Diehl-Armstrong “severely mentally disabled.”154
As United States District Judge Sean J. McLaughlin would do years later, at Diehl-Armstrong’s sentencing in the Pizza Bomber case, Connelly recounted how Diehl-Armstrong’s conduct had cut short the life of another—Jim Roden—and devastated the victim’s family. He said Diehl-Armstrong had “recognized her need for treatment on a continuing basis at this point,” and suggested that her mental deterioration represented another sad facet of the case. “As in cases of this nature,” Connelly said, “it’s a tragedy in several aspects, but none more so than by the fact that a life has been lost as a result of the actions of the defendant.”155
Diehl-Armstrong sobbed as she apologized and said she was not “a bad person.”156 She explained how she understood the terms of the plea, in which she agreed to plead guilty but mentally ill to killing Roden directly or as an accomplice with Rothstein. The District Attorney’s Office contended that Diehl-Armstrong shot Roden. Diehl-Armstrong, in her explanation, told the judge: “I just want to say . . . that I’m only pleading guilty to this because of the complicity clause, that I would have liked to have had the strength to stand trial and claim not guilty to these charges. And I feel badly about this, and I want to apologize to the family, his [Roden’s] relatives and friends for what happened. I’m so sorry.”157
Jim Roden’s mother, Jean Roden, said she always thought Diehl-Armstrong was “really a nice person,” based on her son’s letters home. “I don’t believe she should be on the streets,” Jean Roden said of Diehl-Armstrong. “She’s a danger to society. . . . I had no idea it would turn out like this.”158
The district attorney, Brad Foulk, who had gone to Academy High School with Diehl-Armstrong, recounted Diehl-Armstrong’s violent past, including the death of Bob Thomas. Foulk characterized Diehl-Armstrong as an unrelenting threat to Erie:
I know the court cannot take into account the acquittal [of] a number of years ago, but I think it’s important to note that the conduct she engaged in the late ’80s was almost identical to this particular conduct. And I know she’s pleading guilty but mentally ill today, and I think the psychiatric reports reflect a woman who is suffering from a mental disorder that without question, without question, if she were ever placed on the streets again she would kill another man.
Diehl-Armstrong interrupted, her voice rising in anger. “Oh, how can he say that?”159