Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong used her mental illness to explain why she killed two of her boyfriends. She said her bipolar disorder and paranoia had heightened her fears about an abusive Bob Thomas, so she pumped six bullets into him while he was on a living room couch, unarmed. She said she was equally unstable when she blasted Jim Roden in the back with a shotgun while he was resting or sleeping on his bed. Stuffing Roden’s body into a freezer was, for her, yet another example of her untethered mind. She pleaded guilty but mentally ill, after all, in Roden’s murder, and certainly no one in that case questioned that she suffered from bipolar disorder and other forms of serious mental illness.
Diehl-Armstrong and her lawyers used her mental illness in a different way in the Pizza Bomber case, her strangest and most diabolical plot. They argued that her mental illness made her participation in the case so unlikely as to be impossible. Her paranoia, they said, made her apt to stay by herself rather than associate with others, particularly those of the ilk of Bill Rothstein and Ken Barnes. Her extreme narcissism and grandiosity, she and members of her defense team said, made Diehl-Armstrong a poor candidate for working with someone else, even someone as brilliant as Rothstein. And Diehl-Armstrong’s bipolar disorder, they said, made her so unstable, so impulsive, so prone to wild swings between depression and mania, that she lacked any capacity to concentrate and think through a plan as complex as the one that led to Brian Wells’s bombing death on August 28, 2003.
“It just doesn’t follow that someone with that type of personality would have the ability to be a planner, to deliberate. Over a long period of time,” her trial lawyer told the jury in his closing argument in the Pizza Bomber case.1 Regarding the allegation that Diehl-Armstrong was a member of a wide-ranging conspiracy, the lawyer, Douglas Sughrue, told the jury that the United States Attorney’s Office had done nothing more than show Diehl-Armstrong hung around with “bad company”—an association that, in her case, in no way could be considered a crime.2
Those arguments failed badly. On November 1, 2010, the jury in United States District Court in Erie convicted Diehl-Armstrong of all the charges against her in the Pizza Bomber case: conspiring with Ken Barnes to commit armed robbery; aiding and abetting an armed bank robbery involving a death; and aiding and abetting the use of a destructive device—the bomb—in a crime of violence. For the jury, Diehl-Armstrong’s involvement in the Pizza Bomber plot made sense, despite her mental illness and despite her claims that the evidence was deficient. Seven women and five men deliberated eleven hours and thirty minutes over two days at the end of Diehl-Armstrong’s ten-day trial in the Pizza Bomber case. They found that the government’s theory of the case—a theory that the evidence more than supported—showed that Diehl-Armstrong was voluntarily involved in the Pizza Bomber plot and knew what she was doing. No one disputed Diehl-Armstrong’s mental illness. But that mental illness did nothing, in the end, to excuse Diehl-Armstrong’s behavior in the Pizza Bomber case. The plot was bizarre and often hard to accept as being based in reality. But as the federal prosecutor in the case, Marshall Piccinini, explained to the jurors, the evidence, no matter how dark and disturbing, was undeniable: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was at the center of one of the most horrific crimes that the FBI had ever investigated.
“The evidence in this case proves that a twisted scheme was executed on August 28, 2003,” Piccinini said in his closing argument. “The evidence shows that the conspirators who concocted this scheme were arrogant, narcissistic individuals, who the evidence shows believed they were smarter than anyone else.”3 Piccinini also reminded the jury of a hard truth: that even in Erie, Pennsylvania, a group of weird and violent misfits could exist and carry out such an odd and deadly scheme. The trial, he said, revealed how a group of people sank to the “depths of human depravity” and came up with “this maniacal plan, this stupid, overworked, overblown, ridiculous plan.”4
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, Ken Barnes, Bill Rothstein, and the others involved in the Pizza Bomber plot had a name for their crew: the Fractured Intellectuals. The lead investigator, FBI Special Agent Jerry Clark, based in Erie, and his partner in the investigation, Jason Wick, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, started calling the group that name as well. Diehl-Armstrong, Rothstein, and the others were all were bright and at one time possessed much potential. But by the time they had reached late midlife—Diehl-Armstrong was fifty-four years old in August 2003, Rothstein was fifty-nine, and Barnes was fifty-one—each had become a broken criminal, because of mental illness, drug abuse, or sociopathic behavior that Piccinini, the prosecutor, said was rooted in two base elements: evil and greed. Diehl-Armstrong always claimed she distanced herself from Rothstein and Barnes. She repeatedly described Rothstein, in addition to being a “sicko,” as a jilted and jealous lover who was upset that she rejected him. She had harsher words for Barnes, whom she accused of being kind of subhuman. “It is always a bad day when I cross Ken Barnes. He is like a skunk,” she once said.5 In another moment of rage, she said, “Ken Barnes is nothing but a criminal. Someone once told me all Ken Barnes cares about is sex and money. That is not me. I am higher on the food chain than Ken Barnes.”6
The final remark captured Diehl-Armstrong’s supreme arrogance. Even as she was relegated to an existence of collecting $580 in monthly Social Security disability payments, living in dilapidated and sordid houses, and holding down no jobs except delivering newspapers while in her early fifties, Diehl-Armstrong thrived as a know-it-all and manipulative narcissist. Each of the Fractured Intellectuals had no shortage of ego. Diehl-Armstrong saw herself as one of the smartest of them all. She was like self-crowned royalty in the underworld of Erie’s crooked.
“I didn’t hang around with those unsavory guys,” she once said. “I may not be perfect, but I’ve got my standards too.”7
The Pizza Bomber plot—what Piccinini called that “stupid, overworked, overblown, ridiculous plan”—seemed destined to fail from the start. Brian Wells did not fit the profile of a bank robber. At forty-six years old, he had spent most of his adult life delivering pizzas. He was a high school dropout who liked puzzles and watching movies, particularly Jesus Christ Superstar, with his mother. He was also a recovering alcoholic known to use cocaine and frequent prostitutes, including his favorite, a woman by the name of Jessica Hoopsick, whose pimp was Ken Barnes.8
On the afternoon of August 28, 2003, Wells, a driver for Mama Mia’s Pizza-Ria, just south of Erie, took an order for two small pizzas with pepperoni and sausage. He got behind the wheel of his 1996 Chevrolet Geo Metro and delivered the pizzas to the clearing at the end of the dirt road that went past Bill Rothstein’s house at 8645 Peach Street in Summit Township. He passed Rothstein’s garage, where Jim Roden’s dead body had been inside a freezer for at least a week. Wells dropped off the pizzas at the clearing. A gun went off. Then he drove back down the dirt road. Wells was wearing something different than when he left Mama Mia’s. Now he was wearing the ticking time bomb locked around his neck. It looked like a giant handcuff.
Wells parked his Geo outside the PNC Bank branch at 7200 Peach Street, several minutes away from the clearing where he made his final delivery. He was carrying a shotgun shaped like a cane; sucking on a lollipop; and wearing an oversized white T-shirt with “GUESS Jeans” on the front, as if to convey a taunt: Guess what is going on? Guess who did this? The T-shirt concealed the bomb, which hung from his neck and rested against his chest. Wells waited on line and strolled up to the counter. He asked the teller for $250,000—an outrageous amount of money to demand during a bank robbery—and gave her a four-page demand note that looked like someone had written by tracing over typed print. “Act Now, Think Later Or You Will Die,” part of the note read. The teller put all the money in her drawer inside a canvas bag: $8,702. Wells complained that the cash was not enough, but he left the bank anyway. He walked slowly. He continued to suck on the lollipop.
Wells drove his Geo to a McDonald’s just east of the bank. He got out of the car, walked over to the drive-through sign, and picked up a rock. He removed a note that had been stuck to the bottom of the rock. He read the note, got back in his Geo and drove east. He headed toward one of the interstates that ran near Erie.
Troopers with the Pennsylvania State Police stopped Wells before he could reach his destination. Squad cars pulled over the Geo in the parking lot of an eyeglass store just east of the McDonald’s. The troopers ordered Wells out of the Geo. He sat cross-legged in the parking lot and complained that the bomb around his neck was heavy and was going to go off soon. He said his name. He said he worked for Mama Mia’s. He said black men had forced him to wear the bomb and rob the bank. The only bomb squad in the area, for the Erie police, was rushing to the scene, but was still six miles to the north and driving through heavy traffic. Wells continued to talk. He said at least three people were watching him to make sure he robbed the bank. He said the bomb had locks that, when turned with keys, could give him more time. The explosive device was made of two pipe bombs wired to two kitchen timers. Wells pleaded with the troopers to do something. He talked more about a black guy he said had overpowered him.
A camera operator for a local television station, WJET-TV, filmed Wells’s final minutes.
“He pulled a key out and started a timer,” Wells said. “I heard the thing ticking when he did it.”
“It’s gonna go off,” Wells said. “I’m not lying.”9
Brian Wells had taken the pizza delivery order at 1:15 that afternoon, and walked into the bank at 2:27 p.m. At 3:18 p.m. on August 28, 2003, the bomb around Wells’s neck exploded. It blew a hole in his chest. He died instantly, moments before the bomb squad arrived.
Jerry Clark and the other FBI agents and police officers and ATF agents had no idea what they were dealing with. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had happened just two years earlier, so no one disregarded the thought that Wells’s death was the result of an organized assault that might be repeated soon, with other victims. But soon the investigators pursued a theory that, in many respects, was even more baffling than the prospect of a rogue state somehow targeting Erie, Pennsylvania. Clark and the other agents found notes in Wells’s car similar to the notes he left at the bank. The writings, nine pages in all, including what he showed the teller, directed him on a kind of scavenger hunt through Erie County. After he robbed the bank, Wells was supposed to have driven to no less than three other locations, where he would have found more instructions on how to get keys to deactivate the bomb. The way the device was designed, it gave Wells a total of fifty-five minutes on each kitchen timer. But one timer was never activated—Wells was supposed to have used another key for that—so Wells only had fifty-five minutes to complete a complicated route made even more complex because Wells would have been anxious and in a hurry, as he tried whatever he could to stop the bomb from exploding. Clark and others later drove the route and determined that Wells would have had no chance to finish it and stay alive. He really would not have had enough time. This sick game of death was rigged against him.
More clues surfaced in the hours after the fatal explosion. Investigators searched Wells’s house, a sparsely furnished bungalow in suburban Erie. They discovered no bomb-making materials, which would have immediately suggested that Wells was in on the plot. They did find a spiral notebook filled with the names and telephone numbers of just about everyone Wells knew. The names and telephone numbers of his friends and relatives were on the list. So were the names and numbers of two Erie women who worked as prostitutes. One of them was Jessica Hoopsick, who worked for Ken Barnes. Agents tracked down both women, who denied having anything to do with Wells’s death.
At the same time, Clark and the other investigators had to try to develop leads based on the theory of the case that their superiors found to be, at that moment, most plausible. As evidence technicians gathered the bits of the bomb for an eventual reassembly, Clark’s superiors asked him to piece together whatever he could find about the black man or men who Wells said had placed the bomb around his neck and sent him on his deadly way. The state troopers who had pulled over Wells were skeptical that searching for this unknown black man would be worthwhile. When Wells blamed a black man for his plight, one of the troopers wondered if his accusation was just another example of a white person faulting a black person for his or her problems, whether real or imagined.10
Clark too had his doubts about the theory centering on the mysterious black man, but he and other investigators conceded that they could not simply ignore the possibility that Wells had been telling the truth when he gave his fevered explanation of how he had ended up in such an unfathomable situation. When he was talking as the bomb was ticking, Wells was offering the equivalent of a deathbed confession: he had nothing to lose by telling the truth. Deathbed confessions are considered so reliable that they are admissible as evidence in court though they are hearsay and not subject to cross-examination. Who is so brazen as to lie on his or her deathbed? Why would Brian Wells lace his last words with deception?
The pursuit of that strand of the investigation soon slowed, however, as another death required the attention of Clark and most of the other federal agents, who at the height of the investigation numbered as many as seventy five; the FBI had jurisdiction because of the bank robbery. This was a major case, Major Case 203, which meant the FBI was prepared to use all of its resources to solve it as quickly as possible. Three days after Wells was killed, his close friend and fellow pizza delivery driver, a forty-three-year-old recovering alcoholic by the name of Robert Pinetti, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose at his mother’s house outside Erie, where he had been staying. An FBI agent had tried to interview Pinetti the day after Wells was killed, but Pinetti, who had reported to work to deliver pizzas, put off the agent for another day. The interview never took place. Then Pinetti, who would have been able to provide intimate information about Wells, was dead.
Then the FBI and police in the early morning of September 21, three weeks after Wells’s death, discovered the corpse of Jim Roden after Bill Rothstein, supposedly alarmed at Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s purchase of the ice crusher, got in his van the night before, drove away from his mother’s house, and called 911. He and his former fiancée soon were under arrest. The Pizza Bomber investigation appeared to have taken on yet another dimension.
The connection seemed so obvious as to be absurd. The FBI had indisputable evidence that Brian Wells’s final delivery, the delivery at which he was forced to wear a bomb, occurred at the clearing at the end of the dirt road that ran next to Rothstein’s house. And Rothstein had a body in a freezer in his garage. And the deceased, Jim Roden, had been shot to death at Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s bug-infested and junk-strewn house in Erie. This was the same Bill Rothstein known to be adept an anything involving electronics, and who taught robotics as a substitute teacher. And this was the same Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong who had shot her boyfriend to death in 1984. What would have prevented her from killing Brian Wells as well as Jim Roden, maybe as part of the same plot? And what would have prevented Bill Rothstein, the stereotypical pack rat and eccentric handyman, from assembling the collar bomb?
Adding to the evidence was a suicide note that investigators found inside Rothstein’s wreck of house after Roden’s death. The note, which Rothstein never acted on, read:
1. This has nothing to do with the Wells case.
2. The body in the freezer in the garage is Jim Roden.
3. I did not kill him, nor participate in his death.
4. My apologies to those who cared for me or about me. I am sorry that I let them down.
5. I am sorry to leave you this mess.11
Rothstein was intelligent. Why did he feel the need, in what was like his own deathbed confession, to disavow himself of a crime for which he had not been charged? For Clark and Jason Wick, his counterpart with the ATF, Rothstein was protesting too much.
The investigation seemed ready to be closed, less than a month after Wells’s murder. “Handyman-Wells Link?” declared the front-page headline in the Erie Times-News on September 27, 2003. The FBI’s reaction to the possible connection was much more muted. “All I can say at this time,” a supervisor with the bureau said in the story, “is we have no evidence that would suggest Rothstein was associated with this crime. I don’t mean to close the door on all possibilities.”12 For the supervisor and other authorities in the FBI, Rothstein’s involvement in the Pizza Bomber case was unlikely, in part, because it seemed so obvious. In their view, Bill Rothstein was too smart to have taken part in the Wells case and then drawn attention to himself by hiding a dead body in his freezer. The Pizza Bomber case remained open. Rothstein, when questioned about what he had been doing when Wells was killed, told investigators that he and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong had been in the vineyards east of Erie, on Lake Erie, sampling wine. At first, the FBI took him at his word. The agents once again redirected most of their energy trying to find the elusive black man.
The Erie police had other uses for Rothstein. They put him up in a hotel room after Roden’s death and treated him as a star witness, the one person who could finger Diehl-Armstrong as Roden’s killer as the Erie County District Attorney’s Office prepared to prosecute the Roden case. Rothstein took the police on a tour of Diehl-Armstrong’s house, where he explained how he found Roden’s body and how he and Diehl-Armstrong cleaned up the premises; and he took police on a tour of his house, where he explained how Roden’s body ended up in the freezer. As he walked the police through the two houses, Rothstein enjoyed his moment on the stage. He chatted with the police, laughed with the police, and showed no signs of being worried. During the tour of his house, a state trooper asked him about the suicide note, and why Rothstein felt compelled to write that he had nothing to do with the Wells case. Rothstein gave a Gallic shrug. “So you wouldn’t go hog wild, saying this has to do with the Wells shit,” he said.13
Diehl-Armstrong wanted nothing to do with the police. She continued to keep to herself while at the Erie County Prison, awaiting prosecution in the Roden case. She attracted attention with her outburst after her preliminary hearing, in January 2004, when she declared to reporters that “Rothstein should be charged with the death of Brian Wells and a lot of other charges.” But her mental illness helped her maintain her silence and keep the investigators away. Jerry Clark and Jason Wick wanted to interview her for information in the Wells case. But she was off limits starting in March 2004, when Erie County Judge Shad Connelly ordered her to receive psychiatric treatment and undergo a competency examination at Mayview State Hospital, with her return to court not scheduled until September 29, 2004. While at Mayview, Diehl-Armstrong was not mentally stable enough to even consent to being interviewed. Clark and Wick could not get near her.
By the middle of 2004, Clark and Wick had become convinced, despite the beliefs of their superiors, that Diehl-Armstrong had participated somehow in the Pizza Bomber plot. They appreciated the concerns that Rothstein was too intelligent to connect himself to a crime in so obvious a fashion, but they also knew that Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong and the others were not normal. Rational behavior did not apply in this case. Clark and Wick also knew that questioning Diehl-Armstrong about the case would give them more leads. Their desire to interrogate Diehl-Armstrong intensified after Bill Rothstein died on July 27, 2004. Clark had interviewed Rothstein three days earlier in his bed at the county home, and Rothstein said he could not remember what he was doing the day Wells was killed; this contradicted his earlier statement that he and Diehl-Armstrong had been touring Erie County’s vineyards. Several hours before Rothstein died, two reporters with the Erie Times-News, Ed Palattella and Tim Hahn, interviewed Rothstein in his bed. They started asking him questions about the Wells case. He lifted one arm high above his head, and sketched in the air, with his index finger, one word: NO. “No!” Rothstein groaned to the reporters. “Nooo!”14
With Rothstein dead, and Diehl-Armstrong found to be competent in the fall of 2004, the Erie County District Attorney’s Office offered her the plea deal in Roden’s death: guilty but mentally ill to third-degree murder and other charges. The mentally ill aspect of the plea created more problems for Clark and Wick. The plea required Judge Connelly to make sure Diehl-Armstrong got mental health treatment at the start of her sentence of seven to twenty years. Connelly ordered her to begin the sentence at Mayview State Hospital, where Clark and Wick could not visit.
Their fortunes changed on March 16, 2005. Diehl-Armstrong was transferred from Mayview to the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Muncy, the women’s prison in the middle of the state. Clark and Wick visited her there on April 27, 2005. They were not treating her as a suspect, so they did not read her Miranda rights. She was unmedicated. Shortly after her arrival at Mayview, in early January 2005, Diehl-Armstrong was prescribed the antipsychotic Abilify (aripiprazole), used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Diehl-Armstrong had initially refused any medication at Mayview in January 2005, but eventually agreed to take Abilify, mainly because she had not tried it before and she did not perceive any side effects.15 She soon stopped taking Abilify; she said it made her shake and rock, a phenomenon known as tardive dyskinesia. She was not known to use psychotropic drugs again.
Clark and Wick would go on to interview Diehl-Armstrong a total of eight times while she was in prison in 2005 and 2006. She was careful in each interview not to implicate herself, but she gave the investigators enough information for them to conclude that she had played a role in Brian Wells’s death. She would have been unable to know such details had she been out of the plot completely. In the first interview, on April 27, 2005, for example, Diehl-Armstrong seemed to relax and open up when Clark, knowing of her obsession with her teeth, greeted her with a bit of flattery: “Marge,” he said, “you have a million-dollar smile.”16 Diehl-Armstrong insisted that she had no part in Wells’s death, though she said Rothstein confessed to her that he was involved. She said Rothstein was lying when he told Clark that he and Diehl-Armstrong had been on a wine-tasting tour the afternoon Wells was killed.
Clark and Wick then asked about Jim Roden’s body.
“Why was Roden killed?” Clark said.
“I can’t answer that,” Diehl-Armstrong said.17
In another prison interview, on July 5, 2005, Diehl-Armstrong was more forthcoming. Her personal lawyer, Larry D’Ambrosio, who also had her power of attorney, was with her, which protected Clark and Wick against any claims that she was talking to them against her will. Diehl-Armstrong asked D’Ambrosio if she needed an immunity deal before she spoke, which was odd, given that no one had accused her of doing anything wrong. D’Ambrosio assured her that she was safe to talk, and she did. Using the passive voice, she said Roden was killed over an argument in the Pizza Bomber plot, and that Rothstein was present when he was shot. She said Roden was killed because he had threatened to reveal the bank-robbery plan to another, unnamed person. At D’Ambrosio’s prodding, Diehl-Armstrong also said that she gave Rothstein, at his request, two fairly new kitchen timers in June 2003. She said she saw Rothstein cut open shotgun shells—a key admission, because Clark and Wick knew that the explosive powder in the bomb had been made out of shot from shotgun shells. Diehl-Armstrong talked more, but suddenly stopped the interview.
“If I say any more, I’m dead,” she said. “I’ve hung myself already.”18
Diehl-Armstrong could not keep her mouth shut all the time while she was in prison. Her compulsive talking and pressured speech—symptoms of her mental illness—led to her undoing. No fewer than six female inmates reported to the FBI that Diehl-Armstrong told them in prison, repeatedly, that she was involved in the Pizza Bomber plot. One inmate, Kelly Makela, took twenty-four pages of handwritten notes of her conversations with Diehl-Armstrong. Makela said she talked constantly, and quickly. “Slow down,” Makela said she once told her, “I can’t write that fast.”19 Makela and the other inmates independently told Clark and Wick what they said Diehl-Armstrong told them: that she killed Roden because he had threatened to go to the police about the Pizza Bomber plot, in which he was supposed to have been a driver; that she helped measure Brian Wells’s neck for the bomb; that Rothstein called in the final pizza order for Wells from a pay phone; and that the entire plot revolved around money and Diehl-Armstrong’s hatred of her father for dissipating what she considered her fortune. “She didn’t like her father very much,” one of the inmates reported. “She felt that he had squandered her inheritance.”20 When asked what Diehl-Armstrong said was the motive behind the plot, the inmate said: “That was money. That was all about money.”21
Clark and Wick kept interviewing Diehl-Armstrong in prison, without letting her know that they had been talking to the other inmates. In one interview, she provided Clark and Wick with information that led them to talk to someone Diehl-Armstrong had come to know well: Ken Barnes, Diehl-Armstrong’s fishing buddy. Clark and Wick spent days tracking down Barnes, whom they called “the hobo” for his penchant for walking around Erie constantly, looking for drugs and money. When he was not walking around, Barnes was selling crack at his house, which, like Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein’s, was overrun with junk. Barnes never let his two dogs—Gizmo and Peanut—out of the house, and he was so desperate for money that he heated his kitchen—the only room in the house that was warm—with a space heater hooked up to a car battery. Over a series of interviews in the summer, fall, and winter of 2005, Barnes laid out the Pizza Bomber plot. He said he knew Wells because Wells would have sex in exchange for drugs at his house with the prostitute Jessica Hoopsick. That admission connected all the major players in the case: Wells knew Barnes, who fished with Roden and Diehl-Armstrong, who was close to Rothstein. Wells, from what Barnes said, was not an unwitting pizza delivery driver, but someone the other plotters knew. Wells was part of the plan.
Barnes’s interviews unraveled the conspiracy. He said Diehl-Armstrong in the spring of 2003 had asked him to kill her father so that Diehl-Armstrong could get her inheritance of $1.8 million before he gave it all away to his friends and neighbors. Barnes said he wanted $250,000 to do the hit. Though she had a lot of money, Diehl-Armstrong did not have that much on hand. Barnes said he and Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong came up with the plan to get the $250,000 in cash by robbing a bank—a branch of PNC, which had angered Diehl-Armstrong over its handling of the safe-deposit box after her mother’s death, in 2000.
Brian Wells, who at first appeared to be an innocent victim, knew what was going on, Barnes said. He said Wells was in on the planning of the bank robbery but always thought that the bomb would be fake; in a practice session the day before the heist, Barnes said, Rothstein, with Diehl-Armstrong watching and measuring Wells’s neck, had him try on a device that was indeed phony. That all changed on August 28, 2003. Barnes said Wells, as planned, drove to the clearing near Rothstein’s house to deliver the pizzas and put on the bomb. This device, however, was heavier, and it was real. Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong were at the scene, Barnes said, and so was Robert Pinetti, Wells’s friend and coworker, who Barnes said had helped talk Wells into participating in the scheme. Also at the scene, Barnes said, was another member of the conspiracy: Floyd A. Stockton, a fifty-six-year-old fugitive on the lam from charges that he had raped a mentally disabled nineteen-year-old woman in Washington State in 2002. Stockton had been hiding out with Rothstein, one of his closest friends.
Wells tried to escape, but could not. Barnes described the scene in what would become some of the most riveting testimony in the Pizza Bomber trial. Barnes said of Brian Wells:
When he came, he brought the pizza out that they had ordered, and he set it on the hood of Bill’s van. And then Mr. Stockton came out from behind the one building that was down there, carrying this device. And he brought it up like towards Bill, and while Brian was looking at it, he got a look on his face, it was like, you know, I think at that point he realized this thing was real. Because as far as I knew, it wasn’t supposed to be. It was supposed to be just a gag to . . . get the teller to give him some money. . . . He [Brian Wells] turned to run, and when he went to run, Bill fired a pistol up in the air. At the same time, Mr. Pinetti and Mr. Stockton tackled him, Brian, and got him down on the ground and was scuffling around with him a little bit. Then they come up holding him up. By then Marjorie and Bill were over there beside, Marjorie was helping hold the device while Bill was strapping it on. And he was yelling, he didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. I walked over to him and punched him in the face, not real hard, but just light. And I regret doing that because back then I was just thinking of my own greed about getting the money, I really wasn’t concerned for his health and safety at that point.22
Barnes said his only concern was that he be able to get money and leave so he could buy crack cocaine. After Wells had the bomb locked to his neck, Barnes ate pizza with Diehl-Armstrong, and the two then drove away to act as lookouts during the bank robbery, Barnes testified.23 He said he and Diehl-Armstrong parked in a lot of an Eat’n Park restaurant, across from the road to the PNC Bank branch, and used binoculars to watch Wells drive to and from the bank in his Geo, wearing the bomb and with the cane gun and the notes. Barnes said Diehl-Armstrong saw the state police troopers stop Wells after the robbery. He said she commented: “Looks like the bank was robbed. Ha, ha.”24
Barnes’s account was consistent with information the inmates said Diehl-Armstrong had told them about the Pizza Bomber plot. More evidence from Barnes, the inmates, and others filled in details. Roden was supposed to have driven a car in the scheme and was shot because he threatened to go to the police. Pinetti overdosed on a mixture of the sedative Xanax and methadone, a combination known on the street as a “hot shot.” The dose was most likely meant to be fatal, but investigators were never able to find out who gave Pinetti the drugs.25 Wells was to have used the cane gun to intimidate the tellers if they refused to give him money. After the bank robbery, Wells was supposed to have handed off the money to Rothstein, who was waiting near the bank. And Rothstein was supposed to have given the money to Stockton, who was to have set it aside so everyone could, as Barnes said, “divvy it up later.”26 Rothstein was the mastermind. Based on what Barnes and others said, he concocted the Pizza Bomber plot, made the bomb, and came up with the plan to send Wells on the scavenger hunt after he held up the bank. If Wells was caught before the bomb went off, he was supposed to have told the police he was delivering pizzas until he was forced to wear a bomb and a rob a bank as “bomb hostage,” according to the notes he gave to the teller.27 As a hostage, Wells would not be charged, Rothstein and the others assured him.
No black men were involved. One of the enduring mysteries in the Pizza Bomber case would be why Wells, up until his final breath, said that a group of African Americans were responsible for locking the bomb to his neck. Wells, until the very end, was complicit in telling a story that he knew was not true. Clark and Wick theorized that Wells’s decision to stick to the script was made out of fear. Wells knew that Barnes, Diehl-Armstrong, and the others would be watching him, and possibly listening to him, and he was worried that they would kill him if he departed from the plan. Wells, according to this theory, also was holding on to the slight hope that the bomb really was fake, as it had been the day before. As he was on his deathbed, Wells came to the undeniable conclusion that the device was a live bomb, and that his friends had double-crossed him into wearing it. By then, Wells had no time to divert from his script—a script that he had followed because he believed his friends would kill him if he did otherwise.
As Marshall Piccinini would later tell the jury at Diehl-Armstrong’s trial, the Pizza Bomber plot was too overcomplicated to succeed. Brian Wells would have had a better chance of robbing the bank by doing what most thieves did—walk into the place, demand money, and run out. Nothing was simple in the Pizza Bomber plot. Before Rothstein became a suspect, the FBI released a behavioral profile of the person the bureau believed was behind the Pizza Bomber scheme and who wrote the notes that directed Wells on his final journey. That person, the FBI said, “is a manipulator who manipulates the actions of others. He is like a puppeteer.”28 The description fit Rothstein. Clark came to believe that Rothstein used Diehl-Armstrong’s demand for money to kill her father as an impetus to launch the Pizza Bomber plot. Rothstein was the architect. He crafted the framework, and Diehl-Armstrong acted as the catalyst to put that framework into use. Rothstein did not care whether Brian Wells lived or died. Clark came to believe that, by the summer of 2003, Rothstein knew he was dying of cancer, and he wanted to execute what he considered the perfect crime before his time on earth expired. Bill Rothstein was playing God on August 28, 2003, when he and Diehl-Armstrong and Barnes and Pinetti and Stockton joined together to hitch Brian Wells to the device that would kill him. Wells never had a chance.
The last time Jerry Clark and Jason Wick met with Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was on May 10, 2006. After listening to her Miranda rights, she took a drive with them and her lawyer, Larry D’Ambrosio, to locations that were critical to the Pizza Bomber case. She said she was at the various spots on August 28, 2003. She said she was near the clearing where Wells made his final delivery, but said she did not go all the way back to the site with Rothstein, Stockton, Barnes, and Wells. She said she parked at the Eat’n Park where Barnes said they acted as lookouts. She said she might have driven on the highway—Interstate 79, which ran to the west of Erie—after Wells was killed. This admission was crucial: Barnes had said he was driving the wrong way on I-79 with Diehl-Armstrong following the bombing, which made sense, because Wells, at the direction of the notes, was to have stopped along I-79 to gather clues to deactivate the bomb. Barnes could have been driving to or from one of those spots, to place or collect the notes. The FBI had solid evidence to back up Barnes. Another motorist was unequivocal in telling the FBI that, around the time of Wells’s death, he had seen a woman who looked like Diehl-Armstrong in a car that was driving the wrong way on I-79.
Diehl-Armstrong quickly ended the interview on May 10, 2006. She and D’Ambrosio had thought her cooperation would give her leverage with the FBI. Diehl-Armstrong would later criticize D’Ambrosio’s advice as misguided. At the same time, her trip with Clark and Wick put her at the center of attention and allowed her to spar with special agents from the FBI and ATF. She believed she had been holding her own with them, until she realized what her talking had done. “I’ve put my head in the lion’s mouth,” she said at the end of the interview.29
Diehl-Armstrong soon got an enforcer to keep her quiet. She was assigned an assistant federal public defender on September 26, 2006. Though not yet indicted, she qualified for representation because she had become the target of a criminal investigation and because she lacked the assets to hire a lawyer of her own. The assistant federal public defender, Thomas Patton, her initial lawyer, was a well-regarded attorney who was a veteran of the intricacies of federal court. He immediately shut off Diehl-Armstrong from Clark and Wick. Patton reasoned that she had spoken too much already.
The Pizza Bomber investigation proceeded. Clark and Wick gathered additional evidence. Jessica Hoopsick, the prostitute, was now cooperating and confirmed the link between her and Wells and Barnes. The FBI shortly after Wells’s death had determined that the call for the pizza delivery had come from a particular pay phone in a kiosk outside a gas station not far from Rothstein’s house. But the FBI had been unsure who had made the call. Clark and Wick got a statement from a UPS driver who said he saw Rothstein using the phone at the same time Wells received his final pizza delivery order on August 28, 2003. The UPS driver, whose family had lived near Rothstein, had recognized Rothstein at the phone kiosk and said a woman was standing next to him as he made the call. He said he recognized the woman as Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.30
The federal grand jury indictments against Diehl-Armstrong and Ken Barnes were unsealed on July 11, 2007. The two were both accused in Wells’s death. Diehl-Armstrong had become very much alone among the Fractured Intellectuals. Rothstein was dead. His friend Floyd Stockton had agreed to cooperate with the United States Attorney’s Office against Diehl-Armstrong and Barnes in exchange for immunity. Barnes had been cooperating with the FBI as well. He would be expected to testify against Diehl-Armstrong at trial, in exchange for a plea deal. Diehl-Armstrong seemed to have little room to maneuver. When she said, of her life and her legal plight, “I’m the pickle in the middle with hell on all sides,” she was correct.31 She called her indictment “the worst thing that happened in American history.”32
Patton, her lawyer, moved quickly to make sure that she continued to keep her mouth shut. On July 12, 2007, he went to court with an unusual request. He asked a federal magistrate judge to prohibit Clark and Wick from driving Diehl-Armstrong from the state prison at Muncy to Erie for her arraignment. Patton said Diehl-Armstrong’s mental condition and uncontrollable urge to speak meant that she would most likely jabber on and on during the four-and-a-half-hour car ride. Who knew what she might say?
“She is mentally ill, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder,” Patton told United States Magistrate Judge Susan Paradise Baxter. “She is almost constantly in a manic state. She is on no psychotropic medications. She cannot control herself when she’s in the manic state about speaking.”33
Diehl-Armstrong ended up waiving her right to be present at her arraignment, so she did not make the trip from Muncy to Erie. Patton nonetheless had scored a minor victory in the earliest stage of the case. His petition to the court, just a day after Diehl-Armstrong’s indictment was made public, also signaled how the defense was going to attack the government’s evidence in the long term. Diehl-Armstrong’s mental illness would be at the forefront of yet another homicide case.
Far from the courtroom, Harold Diehl put in everyday language what Patton had set forth in legal terms about his daughter’s mental state.
“She’d have a tendency to do anything that’s possible because I think her mind is a little goofed up,” Diehl, then eighty-eight years old, said when asked about the newly unsealed indictment. “I don’t think she’s completely sane.”34
The indictment alleged that the Pizza Bomber plot included Diehl-Armstrong’s solicitation of Barnes to kill Harold Diehl for what Diehl-Armstrong said was her inheritance. Diehl, interviewed on the front porch swing of his house, was asked about whether he believed that his daughter had put a hit on him.
“I wouldn’t doubt that,” he said. “I heard that years ago and I believe it. Don’t forget: Her mind is, in my estimation, not the mind of a stable person.”35
“I’ve been told she’s wanted to kill me before,” Harold Diehl also said. “She figured if she killed me . . . she’d have this house—if I got a million dollars, she’d get it. She’s got a demented mind. If she wanted a million dollars, she wouldn’t ask me for it. She’d try to kill me.
“She didn’t realize I could give it to the next-door neighbor and not her.”36