Robert L. Sadoff had returned. Twenty-three years after the forensic psychiatrist first examined Marjorie Diehl in the Bob Thomas case, a defense lawyer called upon him once more, this time to offer his professional opinion on whether Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was mentally competent to stand trial in the Pizza Bomber case. Sadoff’s involvement with Diehl-Armstrong over so many years, and in two homicide cases, underscored how deeply ingrained her patterns of dysfunction had become. Yet again, according to Sadoff’s analysis, was Diehl-Armstrong displaying manic-depressive behavior. And yet again, Sadoff said, was that behavior preventing her from assisting in her defense. Her psyche had changed little. She still talked incessantly. She still considered herself smarter than anyone else, including her lawyer; she still portrayed herself as a victim; and, in Sadoff’s view, she still suffered from bipolar disorder and was out of control, particularly with no medication. In the Pizza Bomber case, Sadoff found, Diehl-Armstrong’s delusions had elevated to a new level. In her previous homicide cases, she at least understood that the charges were simply not going to go away. In the Pizza Bomber case, the most serious case against her, Diehl-Armstrong believed that the prosecution should just vanish.
“When I asked Marjorie what she wants, she states that she wants to go to court and wants this whole case to be discharged, because she didn’t do anything wrong,” Sadoff wrote to Thomas Patton, Diehl-Armstrong’s initial lawyer in the Pizza Bomber case, on January 15, 2008. “She wants to get it over with and be put on parole because, she says, she has been a good prisoner and has done her time.”1
Sadoff said Diehl-Armstrong was incompetent to stand trial. His opinion, though unsurprising, given his depth of knowledge of Diehl-Armstrong, triggered a legal fight whose intensity was unlike that of any other courtroom dispute over Diehl-Armstrong’s mental health. She was now indicted in an internationally known criminal case of unprecedented complexity and horror, and she was in federal court, where the United States Attorney’s Office and the FBI could rely on the government’s unlimited resources to prove their points. The government put everything about Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong under review in the Pizza Bomber case as it raised the bedrock question. It was a question that psychologists and psychiatrists, using time-tested theories and modern tools of behavioral analysis, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, had tried to answer since Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was in her early twenties: Was she really mentally ill? And why?
Diehl-Armstrong and her lawyers never raised the insanity defense in the Pizza Bomber case, just as they had never pursued it in her previous homicide cases. The focus, once again, was on whether Diehl-Armstrong was competent to stand trial. And, once again, the debate over competency centered on one issue: not whether Diehl-Armstrong was capable of understanding the legal process, which she was, but whether she was able to assist in her defense—specifically, by being able to cooperate with Patton, her lawyer. That question was nothing new to anyone who had followed Diehl-Armstrong’s tortured journeys through the criminal justice system. In each case, she fought with the lawyers who initially handled her case, claiming that they were incompetent and unworthy of representing her. She got her way in the Bob Thomas case, when her parents paid $60,000 to lawyer Leonard G. Ambrose III and his cocounsel, Michelle Hawk, to take over the defense from two public defenders; and Diehl-Armstrong got her way in the Jim Roden case, when she was able to pay a private lawyer, John Moore, $41,000 to represent her instead of the two public defenders who initially handled that case—two lawyers that Diehl-Armstrong had called “public pretenders.” Moore’s fee was paid out of the approximately $75,000 that Diehl-Armstrong had given to Bill Rothstein to help get rid of Roden’s body. Once that cash was recovered, a judge distributed it to a number of parties, including the Erie police, to reimburse the city for overtime and costs of cleaning up Diehl-Armstrong’s house on East Seventh Street. Moore got what was left over—a substantial amount of money.2
Diehl-Armstrong had no stacks of cash to pay a lawyer in the Pizza Bomber case; and, unlike in the previous cases, her father was not going to come to her financial rescue. She had to make do with whatever lawyer the federal government gave her. The situation galled her and her inflated sense of self, but it also gave her Tom Patton, a fine defense attorney who was unafraid of going up against the United States Attorney’s Office from the beginning of the case. He fought to have Jerry Clark and Jason Wick prohibited from driving Diehl-Armstrong from the state prison at Muncy to Erie. A shrewd move, but one that Diehl-Armstrong failed to appreciate. Almost from the time she met Patton, she said she could not stand him and would not cooperate with him.
She refused to listen to Patton, even when he told her to stop using the prison telephone to call the Erie Times-News to talk about the Pizza Bomber case. She had started making daily calls—sometimes two or three times a day—to reporter Ed Palattella on November 7, 2007, four months after her indictment. She called in response to a letter Palattella wrote to her. Though Diehl-Armstrong never revealed incriminating details during the telephone calls—she always insisted she was innocent—she discussed evidence and trial strategy. The FBI and United States Attorney’s Office listened to recordings of the phone calls, as Diehl-Armstrong knew they would. A recorded message at the start of each call from prison told the participants they were being taped. Diehl-Armstrong also knew the FBI and United States Attorney’s Office were allowed to listen, because no attorney-client privilege was involved. But Diehl-Armstrong made the calls, again and again, and she talked nonstop, often complaining about Patton.
“I want someone who has a little experience,” she said to Palattella in their first telephone conversation, in which she talked without a break for thirteen minutes and nine seconds. “I am a thousand percent innocent. I am trying to get extricated from this maze. I am trying to see daylight. My time is running out here. This is a very high-profile case. I think someone should do it for the publicity. I want someone who really cares for this case.”3
At the end of the conversation, which concluded only because of prison-imposed time limits for phone calls, Diehl-Armstrong sought to clear up what she thought was a misconception about her past.
“I am not a man hater at all,” she said.4
In the early phone conversations, Diehl-Armstrong also clarified what would be her defense. She acknowledged that she was at incriminating places on August 28, 2003, the day Wells was killed, such as with Bill Rothstein when he called in the pizza order from the pay phone. But she said she would argue that she had no knowledge of the plot and that a jealous Rothstein manipulated her into being at the spots. She said Rothstein was angry with her because she refused his sexual advances. Diehl-Armstrong, the master manipulator, was admitting to getting played herself. Her “bad company” defense was taking shape. “I am going to get framed for life,” she said.5
“Rothstein had me around him to make it look like I was involved in the Wells case,” she said. “Rothstein was very intelligent. What Rothstein did: If he couldn’t have me, no one could.”6
At Patton’s request, Sadoff interviewed Diehl-Armstrong at the state prison at Muncy for three hours on June 19, 2007, and another three hours on October 22, 2007. Patton asked Sadoff to evalaute Diehl-Armstrong’s competence for trial. Sadoff, in his letter of January 15, 2008, said Diehl-Armstrong was incompetent—because of her inability to cooperate with Patton, a situation that Sadoff attributed to Diehl-Armstrong’s bipolar disorder and paranoia. Sadoff wrote:
Her paranoid ideation is focused sometimes on her attorney, whom she does not trust and cannot work with. She does not follow his instructions, and she often takes matters into her own hands, especially by contacting the newspapers against her attorney’s advice.
She is not able to focus in a rational manner when working with her attorney, a dyadic relationship that I have observed personally. She is not taking medication, and her manic symptoms are quite apparent. . . . As long as she continues to be manic and depressed, she does not think rationally and cannot work in a rational manner with her attorney in order to prepare a rational defense. Her symptoms of bipolar disorder go back many, many years, even to the time I saw her in 1985.7
After decades of psychiatric evaluations of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the pattern diverged on April 15, 2008. The unprecedented finding came in a report from William J. Ryan, PhD, a forensic psychologist at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. In response to Sadoff’s letter about Diehl-Armstrong’s competency, the judge in the Pizza Bomber case, Sean J. McLaughlin, on February 11, 2008, ordered Diehl-Armstrong to undergo a mental health exam to determine her competency. Diehl-Armstrong was flown from the state prison at Muncy to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, on the southeastern tip of Manhattan, just north of the ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge. She arrived on March 5, 2008. Ryan examined her the next day, and on seven other days, through April 10, 2008. In his report, filed five days later, he found that Diehl-Armstrong suffered not from bipolar disorder, but from posttraumatic stress disorder and a personality order not otherwise specified, with borderline paranoid and narcissistic traits.8 Marshall Piccinini, the assistant United States attorney on the case, characterized the diagnosis as “personality disorder or bipolar disorder in remission.”9 Either way, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not consider a personality disorder a serious mental illness, and, under federal law, “a personality disorder is not a sufficient mental illness to render an individual incompetent.”10 Ryan concluded that, despite what had been the diagnosis of ten psychologists and psychiatrists since the early 1980s, Diehl-Armstrong was not bipolar. Using the taxonomy of the DSM-IV-TR, Ryan wrote of his diagnostic impressions of Diehl-Armstrong:
Axis I: Post-traumatic stress disorder, due to her reported “long history of physical abuse”; ruled out history of bipolar I disorder, severe without psychotic features, most recent episode hypomanic.
Axis II: Personality disorder not otherwise specified (NOS), with borderline paranoid narcissistic traits.
Axis III: Medical problems: glaucoma, hypothyroidism, and hypertension.
Axis IV: Current psychological stressors: recent history of arrest and incarceration.
Axis V: Global Assessment of Functioning—on the scale from 1 to 100—was listed as a 60, due to unstable mood and thought process.11
Ryan’s analysis focused on Diehl-Armstrong’s history of manipulation. He found that Diehl-Armstrong had been diagnosed as bipolar not because she truly suffered from manic-depression, but because she had tricked and worn down mental health professionals into making that determination. As anyone knew who had listened to Diehl-Armstrong, the temptation was just to give her what she wanted so she would go away. “Ms. Armstrong has unscrupulous methods when dealing with others,” Ryan wrote in his report, in which he detailed how she had interacted with the mental health evaluators at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. “She demonstrated single-mindedness as she made one statement repeatedly and refused to answer any other questions. She would often lie and try to bully the evaluator.”12 Ryan wrote that Diehl-Armstrong told the evaluator she had been trying to get disability benefits when her mental health came up for review before. Ryan wrote that Diehl-Armstrong often would keep talking about the same issue. “After multiple interviews,” Ryan wrote, “it became clear this is Ms. Armstrong’s way of dealing with someone she views as an adversary. Her manner of talking in circles appeared to be her way of ‘hammering a point home.’”13
The contention that Diehl-Armstrong feigned mental illness to get disability benefits was a prominent theme not only in Ryan’s report. Piccinini, amplifying Ryan’s conclusions, made the same argument before Judge McLaughlin at a competency hearing for Diehl-Armstrong in United States District Court in Erie in May 2008. Piccinini said Diehl-Armstrong suffered only from a personality disorder and was competent for trial. Piccinini referred to the letter that Diehl wrote to one of her psychiatrists, Paul Francis, in the early 1980s, when she had been unable to get disability benefits: “Will you help me by documenting as best you can, that I have a ‘permanent disability’ psychologically?” Piccinini, as Ryan did, acknowledged that Diehl did win Social Security benefits in 1984, based on the finding that she was manic depressive. Piccinini questioned whether that initial landmark diagnosis was accurate; in doing so, Piccinini sought to undermine Diehl-Armstrong’s entire mental health history. Diehl-Armstrong’s mental health background, Piccinini wrote, “is accordingly tainted by Ms. Diehl’s early attempts to over-inflate the degree of her mental illness to support her efforts to obtain Social Security disability benefits.”14
Piccinini and Ryan looked for supporting evidence that Diehl-Armstrong was a malingerer and was only portraying herself as mentally ill. Piccinini had an investigator interview guards and other officials at the state prison at Muncy. “She is crazy like a fox and has a reason behind everything she says,” a lieutenant at the prison said.15 A guard reported that his experiences with Diehl-Armstrong revealed that she was “not crazy, just nasty.”16
That statement summarized the government’s position regarding Diehl-Armstrong’s competence for trial. Using Ryan’s report as his main piece of evidence, Piccinini argued that Diehl-Armstrong was difficult to get along with because she was arrogant and unpleasant, not because she was mentally ill. No one denied that Diehl-Armstrong refused to cooperate with Tom Patton; but for Piccinini, the lack of cooperation had nothing to do with Diehl-Armstrong being bipolar and everything to do with her being a person who was obstreperous, self-centered, and mean to the extreme—a person who had a personality disorder with narcissistic traits, but who was not mentally ill.
Piccinini’s theory, while raised in the context of competency, had deep ramifications; if true, the theory meant that Diehl-Armstrong’s behavior was more sinister than what anyone had previously imagined. Her mental illness, while it did nothing to excuse her violent behavior, at least provided some explanation for it: Diehl-Armstrong was a serial killer partly because illness had invaded her mind. If Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong were not mentally ill, her behavior was even more frightening. With no bipolar disorder, with no manic-depression, she was a killer solely because she wanted to be. She was evil as a matter of choice. For Patton, that scenario was impossible, based on the consistent findings of the ten psychologists and psychiatrists—excluding Ryan—who had examined Diehl-Armstrong over thirty years and found that she was severely mentally ill.
“All these prior mental health experts are wrong?” Patton said at the competency hearing. “My client is not difficult because she is just a nasty person. She is difficult because she is mentally ill.”17
The competency hearing spanned May 21–22, 2008. The main witnesses were Ryan for the government and Sadoff for the defense. Diehl-Armstrong was flown back from New York City for the hearing and did not testify, though what she said and did at the hearing was of great importance, especially her antics during the hearing’s first day of testimony, which lasted nine hours. Diehl-Armstrong maintained that she was competent, which put her in conflict with Patton, who was arguing that she was incompetent. As she had done before with so many of her lawyers, Diehl-Armstrong fought with Patton in court and spoke up frequently. “Liar, liar!” she screamed at one point, referring to testimony that she had given investigators statements that linked her to the Pizza Bomber case.18 “They are corrupt!” she shouted at Piccinini and agents Jerry Clark and Jason Wick.19 To no one in particular, she declared, “I am innocent. Period.”20 And, when the testimony focused on her previous homicide cases, in which the victims were Bob Thomas and Jim Roden, Diehl-Armstrong called out “self-defense.”21
Diehl-Armstrong had planned to make a scene, if doing so would help her cause. “Who knows?” she said before the hearing. “I’ll do whatever I want. If I feel it necessary, I will create a disturbance. If the judge is not acting right, I don’t care. I’m not going to sit there for my hanging like a Girl Scout.”22
During much of the hearing, however, she was also calm. Even when disruptive, she was still in control, which impressed Ryan. He said Diehl-Armstrong during the hearing displayed no signs of hypomania or bipolar disorder. “I see nothing remotely suggesting hypomania,” Ryan said. “There is nothing. She looks like she has a personality disorder and is competent to stand trial.”23 He described Diehl-Armstrong’s mental issues as “characterogical,” or related to personality traits, rather than symptomatic of a mental illness. He called Diehl-Armstrong a “conversational bully” who stopped attacking him with words once he told her he was going to find her competent, as she insisted she was; then, Ryan testified, “she seemed to me a different person. She was perfect.”24
Patton countered with Sadoff, who reached back thirty years to retrieve the first evidence that Diehl-Armstrong was bipolar and, without medication, incompetent. He referred to the condition of her house in the Bob Thomas case, with all the rotting surplus butter and cheese, and referred to the condition of her house in the Jim Roden case, which was not much better. Sadoff said he could not discount that evidence nor could he disregard the findings of all the others who had examined Diehl-Armstrong over her lifetime and found her to be bipolar. In some respects, Sadoff’s answers in federal court in Erie in May 2008 resembled those he had given in Erie County Court in May 1988, during Diehl’s competency hearing in the Thomas case. Sadoff again acknowledged that psychiatry, though not an exact science, nonetheless is grounded in scientific tenets, such as observation. In Diehl-Armstrong’s case, Sadoff testified before Judge McLaughlin, if ten people “from different places observe that, and I observe similar things, then to me it is a no-brainer,” referring to the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “She is bipolar. She is extremely bright. But that doesn’t take away from that fact that she is bipolar.”25 Of the condition of Diehl-Armstrong’s houses, he said, “It is the breakdown of the personality that leads to the chaos we see.”26 Even Ryan agreed, as McLaughlin later noted, that Diehl-Armstrong’s extreme hoarding in her houses “is not the type of behavior that one would expect from a person suffering from only a personality disorder and is more consistent with major mental illness.”27
During the hearing’s second day, Patton built on Sadoff’s comments with the testimony of Leonard Ambrose, who had represented Diehl-Armstrong in the Thomas case. Mainly because of Diehl-Armstrong’s endless talking and belligerent behavior, Ambrose said, the Thomas case, for him, was “the case from hell.”28 He said Diehl-Armstrong needed medication.
Diehl-Armstrong was unimpressed. At the end of the first day of testimony, she spoke of Ryan and Sadoff in yet another telephone interview with Palattella from prison. “I don’t think either of them really explained me,” she said. “But some of what they both said was true.”29 She also said that a psychic had recently communicated with her and told her she was innocent in the Pizza Bomber case. “She is right on the money,” Diehl-Armstrong said.30
Several days after the hearing, Diehl-Armstrong remained defiant as she stewed over what Ambrose, Sadoff, Ryan, and others had said about her in court. “I’m not that loony,” she said. “I did not have a house full of garbage. OK, it got a little confusing with Rothstein around and Roden’s body upstairs.”31 Then she repeated what had become something of a mantra: “I am not crazy. I am damn not crazy.”32
Judge McLaughlin’s ruling on Diehl-Armstrong’s competency, issued July 29, 2008, was foremost a legal document. Yet the fifty-nine-page decision, with its detailed and sweeping analysis of Diehl-Armstrong’s past, also represented the most comprehensive report on her mental health to date. McLaughlin found Diehl-Armstrong incompetent for trial and in need of more mental health therapy before he would again evaluate her mental state. Just as importantly, McLaughlin found that Diehl-Armstrong was indeed mentally ill, suffering from bipolar disorder, and that she had responded to some medications in the past, such as Geodon. McLaughlin relied heavily on Sadoff’s analysis, and he focused on Diehl-Armstrong’s hoarding as evidence of her psychotic thinking and irrational behavior—behavior that McLaughlin said often prevented her from cooperating with Patton. McLaughlin said Diehl-Armstrong suffered from a personality disorder, but also bipolar disorder.
One of Diehl-Armstrong’s dominant personality traits, McLaughlin wrote, was her tendency to manipulate others. Yet he said this behavior did not mean that Diehl-Armstrong was feigning mental illness, nor did it mean that her first diagnosis of manic-depression, in the course of seeking disability benefits, was fraudulent. McLaughlin wrote:
The evidence does indeed suggest that the Defendant engaged in an overt attempt in the early 1980s to highlight her mental illness as a means of obtaining disability benefits. However, it does not follow, and this Court does not believe, that the Defendant’s treating physicians thereby ceded to her demands and diagnosed bipolar disorder without any legitimate basis. Similarly, while it may have been to the Defendant’s legal advantage to highlight her mental illness as part of her defense in the Robert Thomas case, that fact does not necessarily undermine the validity of her bipolar diagnosis. . . . In short, Dr. Ryan’s diagnosis can only be accepted as accurate by concluding that every other clinician who has diagnosed the defendant with bipolar disorder did so in error. I do not find the record supports that conclusion.”33
McLaughlin found that Diehl-Armstrong’s bipolar disorder was behind the behavior that made her so hostile to Patton and thus incompetent to stand trial. Diehl-Armstrong responded to the ruling by saying she would demand a conference with McLaughlin and that she would eventually be declared competent, but would refuse to take medication. She insisted on her innocence in her new home: the 1,466-inmate women’s Federal Medical Center-Carswell, Texas, in Fort Worth, where she was sent to undergo further examinations.
“Everybody in here is guilty,” she said, “except me.”34
Back in Erie, the case against Diehl-Armstrong was tightening. Diehl-Armstrong still maintained that Rothstein framed her, and made her be at certain incriminating places as the Pizza Bomber plot unfolded. But the United States Attorney’s Office had gained a valuable witness to debunk that theory and prove Diehl-Armstrong’s firsthand knowledge and participation. On September 3, 2008, Ken Barnes, now fifty-four years old and in declining health from kidney problems, pleaded guilty to two of the three charges against him—conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and aiding and abetting the use of a destructive device in a crime of violence. As part of the plea bargain, Barnes agreed to testify against Diehl-Armstrong at trial, and Piccinini dropped the most serious charge against Barnes, aiding and abetting an armed bank robbery, which would have carried a life sentence because Brian Wells had been killed during the heist. Barnes still faced a sentence of thirty-five years to life, which meant that he was all but certain to die in federal prison.
McLaughlin sentenced Barnes on December 3, 2008. He gave him forty-five years. Barnes would be incarcerated until he was one hundred years old. Barnes apologized to members of Brian Wells’s family, who were in the courtroom. “What happened to him,” he said, referring to Wells, “was something that was not supposed to happen.”35 Piccinini and McLaughlin had little sympathy for Barnes. Piccinini said Barnes had participated “in one of the most bizarre criminal acts we have ever seen.”36 McLaughlin characterized Barnes as depraved. “The callousness and complete lack of regard for human life exhibited by this defendant is, in a word, chilling,” he said. “This case represents the unfortunate combination of the incredibly bizarre and the sadly tragic.”37
A few days after Barnes’s plea of guilty, McLaughlin issued a ruling on a second competency hearing for Diehl-Armstrong partially based on the findings of the professionals who had examined her over four months at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell. This time, McLaughlin ruled Diehl-Armstrong competent to stand trial. He issued his sixty-four-page decision on September 8, 2009. One of the key differences in their reports, as opposed to the findings of William Ryan, was that Diehl-Armstrong indeed suffered from a bipolar disorder, which, under the law, qualified as a mental illness that could render a defendant incompetent for trial. The lead examiner at Carswell, Leslie Powers, PhD, a forensic psychologist, offered this diagnosis, following the DSM-IV-TR:
Axis I: Bipolar I disorder, most recent episode hypomanic (by history).
Axis II: Personality disorder not otherwise specified (NOS), with borderline paranoid and narcissistic traits.
Axis III: Hypothyroidism and glaucoma.
Axis IV: Current psychological stressors: legal problems, lack of social support.
Axis V: Global Assessment of Functioning—on the scale from 1 to 100—was listed as a 60.38
Though Powers found Diehl-Armstrong suffered from bipolar disorder, she also concluded that Diehl-Armstrong, who remained unmedicated, “did not satisfy the criteria for a hypomanic or depressive episode during the period of the evaluation.”39 Diehl-Armstrong’s bipolar disorder, according to that analysis, was in remission. And Powers, in a part of her report that McLaughlin cited, found that Diehl-Armstrong’s behavioral problems, such as pressured speech and irritable mood—“which, in the past, had been reported as manifestations of [her] mania”—were better explained “as symptoms of [her] personality disorder.”40
McLaughlin acknowledged the findings of Sadoff and others, who continued to maintain that Diehl-Armstrong was incompetent for trial. One expert for the defense in the second competency evaluation, Frank Dattilio, a forensic psychologist, called Diehl-Armstrong “one of the most complex, difficult types of personalities that I’ve seen in my thirty years of experience.”41 But McLaughlin also found that, since the first competency hearing in the Pizza Bomber case, Diehl-Armstrong had changed, and that her current mental state was stable enough for her to be competent and cooperate with her lawyer. While Diehl-Armstrong was at the federal prison at Carswell, McLaughlin wrote, her “bipolar disorder was in a state of quiescence . . . and that the symptoms during that time did not suggest the presence of any mania.”42
McLaughlin wrote that he agreed with Sadoff, who said Diehl-Armstrong’s “mental profile is complex and that her competency involves a degree of fluidity.”43 McLaughlin also wrote:
I continue to credit past medical evidence suggesting that stress, when severe enough, may cause the Defendant to lose a degree of control over her mental state. For present purposes, however, I find by a preponderance of evidence that the Defendant has recovered to such an extent that she is able to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her and to assist properly in her own defense.44
To evaluate Diehl-Armstrong’s relationship with Tom Patton, her lawyer, McLaughlin noted how Diehl-Armstrong acted in court, during the second competency hearing on April 27, 2009. McLaughlin several times had to tell Diehl-Armstrong to calm down; at one point, when Powers was testifying, Diehl-Armstrong shouted from the defense table: “I am done with her. I don’t care what she says.”45 Though Diehl-Armstrong’s outburst was rude, McLaughlin found that it was grounded in reason: Diehl-Armstrong was upset about a genuine misstatement in Powers’s testimony. McLaughlin also noticed how Diehl-Armstrong acted when he told the deputy United States marshals in the courtroom, “One more outburst, take her out in the holding cell.”46 Diehl-Armstrong was quiet after that. McLaughlin concluded that Diehl-Armstrong knew what was happening in court, as her anger at Powers showed, and could control her behavior when she had to, as she showed when she calmed down after hearing the threat that she would go to the holding cell. Her fights with Patton, McLaughlin wrote, were more about Diehl-Armstrong’s single-mindedness than the result of delusional behavior. Diehl-Armstrong’s desired defense strategy might make no sense, but that did not mean she was out of her mind. Diehl-Armstrong’s “refusal to heed the advice of her lawyer may be unwise in the extreme,” he wrote, “but it does not necessarily demonstrate an inability to consult with her lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding.”47
McLaughlin’s handling of Diehl-Armstrong’s competency was based on common sense as much as it was on psychiatric findings. Because Diehl-Armstrong clearly had mental problems, McLaughlin would have risked getting overturned on appeal had he ruled her competent right away, especially considering her lengthy psychiatric history. By ruling her competent after a second evaluation and hearing, McLaughlin showed that he had been particularly careful in gauging Diehl-Armstrong’s mental state. The defense would have a hard time convincing an appeals court that McLaughlin had acted rashly. The judge subsequently displayed that same type of caution at a hearing on September 17, 2009, when he let Diehl-Armstrong fire Tom Patton. McLaughlin regarded Patton highly, but forcing Diehl-Armstrong to continue to use him as her lawyer, despite her hostility, would have given the defense a legitimate issue on appeal. McLaughlin cited the defendant’s “deep-seated distrust and antipathy” in removing Patton, whom he called “one of the pre-eminent defense attorneys in the area.”48 He said Patton had become “a distinct psychological stressor” for Diehl-Armstrong.49 He warned Diehl-Armstrong that she would not get another chance to pick a lawyer. He said she was entitled to a court-appointed lawyer but was not guaranteed a lawyer of her choice.
Diehl-Armstrong moved little from her chair at the defense table as Patton, now officially fired, got up to leave.
“Good luck, Marge,” he said as he walked away.50
Diehl-Armstrong liked her new court-appointed lawyer, at first. He was Douglas Sughrue, an experienced attorney from Pittsburgh. She initially praised the choice, saying it fit her horoscope. She enjoyed the attention as Sughrue brought her catalogs in prison to help pick her dress for trial, which McLaughlin scheduled for August 2010. She liked Coldwater Creek’s apparel the best. Soon, though, as had been the case with most of Diehl-Armstrong’s relationships with men, she turned on Sughrue and said he was incompetent. She said she didn’t like his courtroom style—not aggressive enough—the way he looked, and even his name: “Doug Screw-you,” was how she repeatedly referred to him in her phone calls with Palattella. Diehl-Armstrong wanted to fire Sughrue, but McLaughlin refused. “The pattern which emerges,” he said at a hearing, “is one where the defendant is never satisfied with counsel, whoever it might be, because she tends to view herself as smarter and more informed than anyone else.”
The remark upset Diehl-Armstrong.
“I don’t want to hear this!” she shouted.51
Diehl-Armstrong’s relationship with Sughrue worsened, but McLaughlin refused to let her fire him.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” she once shouted at Sughrue in court.52
She questioned his trial strategy by showcasing her knowledge of a memorable German defeat in the Second World War.
“I’m tanking like the Bismarck,” she said.53
And on another day, with the jurors out of the courtroom, she berated Sughrue, who kept a calm demeanor and responded to her tongue lashings with a wry smile.
“I want rid of you,” she told him. “You make me sick.”54
Hearing that remark, McLaughlin asked her if she wanted to leave the courtroom. She said she did.
“This is a kangaroo court,” she shouted as the marshals led her to a holding cell. “I am being railroaded.”55
Diehl-Armstrong had other problems. She was diagnosed with cancer. She had a malignant lump removed from her neck in mid-March 2010. The question became whether the cancer, which originated in her breast and spread to her lymph nodes, was terminal. Piccinini, the prosecutor, said he would not take the case to trial if Diehl-Armstrong’s death was imminent. The government and the defense waited on a second opinion, which would clarify Diehl-Armstrong’s life expectancy. The situation was not unlike what had happened with Diehl-Armstrong’s competency. The United States Attorney’s Office wanted her found competent so she could stand trial, and the United States Attorney’s Office intended to prosecute Diehl-Armstrong if she was expected to live a substantial amount of time. Diehl-Armstrong said she was taking a practical approach to the latest development in her case.
“I have fucking cancer somewhere,” she told Palattella. “We are all terminal in this world. It’s not like it makes me a bad person. We are all going to die sometime; death is part of life. But I’m not ashamed. A lot of people get cancer. I just happen to be one. It’s out of my control.”56
She said she was now focused on her health, rather than the Pizza Bomber case, “which is crazy, because before I thought about it all the time.”57 She said, no matter what happened with the cancer, she would never admit to being part of the plot that ended in Brian Wells’s death. In that regard, she was like Bill Rothstein and Wells, who, on their deathbeds, had refused to reveal the truth.
“I’m telling you that if I died today, I would never confess that,” she said. “I’m not going to say I did something that I didn’t do. This case is killing me.”58
“Don’t fear the reaper,” she also said, referring to the Blue Öyster Cult hit from 1976. “That is my favorite song.”59
The second opinion came in August 2010. Diehl-Armstrong had cancer of the glands—adenocarcinoma—that originated in a breast. Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh determined that Diehl-Armstrong, sixty-one years old, had three to seven years to live. McLaughlin agreed that such a life expectancy was adequate. He set her trial for October 2010. Diehl-Armstrong said she was looking forward to testifying. She said she rejected a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for another five years, after she finished the seven to twenty years she was still serving for Jim Roden’s death.
“I’ll tell them not only to wipe their ass with it,” she said of the plea offer, “but to shove it up their ass.”60
At this point, Diehl-Armstrong had nothing to lose. Whether her life expectancy was three years or seven years, she was dying.
“I take one day a time,” she once said. “I hope for the best and expect the worst. We are all ashes: ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”61
Diehl-Armstrong was headed to court after more than a year of some of the most thorough mental examinations she had ever experienced. And yet, like her cancer, her mental illness was a condition without a cure, a disease with no known origin. William Ryan, like so many psychologists and psychiatrists before him, noted Diehl-Armstrong’s hostility toward her parents and her claims of abuse, all of which provided him enough evidence to diagnose Diehl-Armstrong with posttraumatic stress disorder. But pinpointing the roots of her mental dysfunction remained an elusive effort. Whether anyone could truly penetrate Diehl-Armstrong’s mind was an open question, just as the scientific nature of psychiatry remained open to debate, even in the centuries following the work of Philippe Pinel, Benjamin Rush, Emil Kraepelin, and other founders of modern psychiatry. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong remained a puzzle of conflicting thoughts and ideas. She was undeniably erudite. Not only did she compare herself to Lincoln and Churchill and other historical figures; she also spoke fluently about literature and the arts. The poet Sylvia Plath could be a subject in one conversation62 and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief in another.63 To boost her spirits in prison, to help her realize that everyone had a purpose in life, she said she got inspiration from the final line of John Milton’s poem, “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”64 When she spoke of the intricacies of her father’s estate, which she comprehended better than any estate lawyer, Diehl-Armstrong used an allusion that made perfect literary sense. She said the case was like the endless probate fight in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.65
Diehl-Armstrong’s mental illness, whatever its cause, had prevented her from experiencing a promising and fulfilling life of music and academics. She could be charming and sympathetic; however, she always displayed that narcissism, that grandiosity, that exaggerated sense of importance that made her come across as mostly arrogant and condescending. Her attitude made any sympathy for her hard to maintain. Her unbridled egotism, based on what she told the psychiatrists and psychologists, most likely originated with her mother, who saw her only daughter as a precious child worthy of only the best. Somehow—whether through abuse or due to some other cause—Diehl-Armstrong’s sense of self-esteem became so oversized as to be dysfunctional. Her anorexia showed how her desire to become perfect eroded her mental health to the point that she was starving herself. Perhaps she would have turned out differently if she had received mental health treatment at that moment, at the fragile point when she matured from a girl to a troubled young woman. From then on, she seemed to pursue her dreams of perfection and self-entitlement in perverse ways, such as by hoarding rotting food or killing men she once considered ideal but soon found to be tiresome, moronic, and abusive. She thought herself gorgeous and witty, but gravitated mainly toward abusive men, maybe because they were the only kind of men who would live with her or maybe because she believed, despite her outward confidence, that she could do no better. When reality failed to deliver on her expectations, she turned to the occult—to astrology, horoscopes, and psychics—to reaffirm that she was bound for the greatness she deserved. She even said she had supernatural powers to put a spell on those who would thwart her and that those she had hexed had “dropped over dead.”66
Judging from all the mental health analyses, for Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, everything was about her. She thought herself special, but she was also insecure; she would declare that beauty was superficial, but then rail against how she looked in a mug shot. Her unbridled narcissism spawned her greed, which produced, in the view of the United States Attorney’s Office, a desire for money so extreme that she would stop at nothing to satiate it, even participating in a conspiracy in which the ultimate target was her elderly father—a conspiracy in which a man was killed by a bomb locked to his neck. As Marshall Piccinini would remark at Diehl-Armstrong’s sentencing, she presented the unique combination of mental illness and evil.
As for Diehl-Armstrong, she never stopped seeing herself as the victim. “I am fully aware of my flaws,” she once said. “I am fully aware of my crazy parents. One of my biggest flaws is I am a little bit gullible. I was an only child, and lived an isolated life. I lived in my mind.”67 She said the men she had killed deserved their fate and that she was no serial killer. Yet, in response to her indictment in the Pizza Bomber case, she also expressed regret. “I’m glad my mother is not alive to see this day,” she said.68
Her attempts to play the role of victim fell short in the Pizza Bomber trial, in which opening statements started at 1 p.m. on October 15, 2010. Diehl-Armstrong and Doug Sughrue, her lawyer, lost two major arguments right away. Judge McLaughlin refused to grant Diehl-Armstrong a change of venue or venire, as had happened, with a change of venire, in the Bob Thomas case. Though the Pizza Bomber case had drawn intense media coverage, McLaughlin found that much of the publicity was due to Diehl-Armstrong’s constant telephone calls to Ed Palattella at the Erie Times-News, who would write stories about what she said. In his other major pretrial ruling, McLaughlin refused to reschedule the trial to allow Robert Sadoff to testify for the defense.
Sadoff was prepared to take the stand to reprise a version of the argument he had made in the Bob Thomas case—that Diehl-Armstrong’s mental illness explained and excused how she acted—this time in the Pizza Bomber case. He was set to tell the jury that Diehl-Armstrong’s paranoia and other mental problems prevented her from actively participating in the plot. Sadoff’s approach was not without its risks for the defense. In a five-page letter to Sughrue on September 13, 2010, in which he detailed his position, Sadoff acknowledged the strength of the evidence that Diehl-Armstrong was with Bill Rothstein and Ken Barnes in crucial spots and at crucial times before and after Brian Wells was killed. But he said that Diehl-Armstrong did not willingly participate in the overall plot. Sadoff wrote:
I am aware that Diehl-Armstrong’s behavior is consistent with the allegations by the government against her. What is in dispute, however, is her state of mind, her ability to act willingly and voluntarily, knowingly aiding and abetting in this conspiracy. The government appears to be drawing conclusions about her state of mind from her behavior. In most cases, with reasonable individuals, that is a valid presumption. However, in the case of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, we are dealing with a woman who has a psychotic mental disorder called bipolar disorder, during which when she becomes manic, she is out of control, psychotic and not acting according to logic or the way non-psychotic people would react. . . . In addition, Ms. Diehl-Armstrong has a personality disorder, with borderline features and paranoid features. She is very suspicious of others, does not trust them and has great difficulty working with them. . . . In addition, she had a borderline personality disorder as part of her overall mental illness. Borderline personality disordered people see events either in black or white and very little shades of gray. They tend to focus on the extremes rather than the middle. They are also self-destructive and have difficulty with boundaries between themselves and others.69
Sadoff focused on the government’s evidence that Diehl-Armstrong killed Jim Roden and helped put his body in the freezer to silence him in the Pizza Bomber plot. He said he believed she killed Roden not as part of a cover-up, but for reasons she gave—the claims of abuse and Roden’s refusal, in her view, to find the burglars who had terrorized her over Memorial Day weekend 2003—“which are more personal.”70 Sadoff said she got entangled in the Pizza Bomber plot when she went along with putting Roden’s body in the freezer. Sadoff said she cooperated with Rothstein in that regard to achieve her singular goal: to get back the $75,000 that she had given him for safekeeping. That goal was also why Diehl-Armstrong was with Rothstein and the others when Wells was killed, Sadoff said. He said Diehl-Armstrong had no reason to participate in the bank-robbery scheme to raise money for a hit on her father because “she had money to pay for what she wished to have done.”71 Sadoff wrote:
It is my opinion that if she were told that her goals would be achieved, i.e., she would get her $75,000 and Roden’s body would be disposed of without her being detected or arrested for killing him, she would participate with the others in order to achieve her goals. She would have no particular interest in their intent to rob the bank, except to go along until her goals were achieved.
Her actions are always designed to help herself, not to participate in the conspiracy to help others. What was “reasonably foreseeable” for her was that she would get her money and be safe from arrest for killing Roden. It was not “reasonably foreseeable” for her, as she perceived it, because of the nature of her mental illness, that the bank would be robbed or Wells would be killed. In essence, she would not have been able to “foresee” the consequences of their behavior which did not benefit her. All she could focus on, because of her personality disorder and her psychotic mental illness, was her own reality, i.e., her goals would be achieved.
In summary, it is my opinion that Ms. Diehl-Armstrong could participate in the behaviors outlined by the government without forming the intent that is necessary for the conspiracy. It would appear, to the average person, that her behavior was, in fact, part of the conspiracy, but because of her mental illness and her personality disorders, she could not participate with the willful intent and foreseeability of the normal, non-psychotic individual.72
Logistics and the law influenced McLaughlin’s decision that prohibited Sughrue from calling Sadoff as a witness at trial. Sadoff was out of the country and McLaughlin would have had to delay the trial to allow Sadoff to attend. Sadoff also was apparently unable to testify via videoconference. McLaughlin on October 25, 2010, ruled that delaying the trial—the jury had already been empanelled and heard a week of evidence—would increase the risk that the jurors would be exposed to media reports about the case. He said the delay would diminish the jurors’ ability to remember the evidence that Sughrue and Marshall Piccinini had already presented.
McLaughlin also agreed with Piccinini and found that Sadoff’s testimony would have been irrelevant in any case because Diehl-Armstrong was not presenting an insanity defense. “It is not even clear that Dr. Sadoff’s opinions could be used logically to support the defendant’s stated theory,” McLaughlin said in an opinion. “The mere fact that the defendant tends to distrust other people and has a difficult time working in an agreeable and cooperative manner with others is not necessarily at odds with the allegation that she was part of the conspiracy.” To prove conspiracy, he said, the government “does not need to prove an express agreement spelling out all the details or understanding,” but only that “two or more persons in some way or manner arrived at some type of agreement, mutual understanding or meeting of the minds to try to accomplish a common goal and unlawful objective.”73
Despite Sadoff’s absence, Sughrue and Diehl-Armstrong still presented Sadoff’s basic theory of defense, but without the aura of psychiatric certainty that Sadoff’s testimony would have provided. Diehl-Armstrong and Sughrue argued that any willing participation in the Pizza Bomber plot by her made no sense, psychologically and factually. Sughrue said Diehl-Armstrong’s narcissistic personality made her a poor if not impossible candidate to have an active role in such a complex scheme that took so many others to carry out. Diehl-Armstrong, through her testimony, tried to point out that she had no reason to have been part of the conspiracy with Bill Rothstein, Ken Barnes, Floyd Stockton, Robert Pinetti, and Wells. She said she did not want her father killed, and that, even if she did, she had plenty of her own money to pay for the hit; she also said she once had plenty of valuable objects stored at her houses, which showed she was a woman of means. She said she was used to having money because she was raised with it. She said Barnes repulsed her, especially after, according to her, he helped burglarize her house over Memorial Day weekend 2003; she said she had no desire to be around Barnes after that. She said she was around Rothstein only because she wanted to get back her $75,000. She said Rothstein then framed her by having her be with him before and after Brian Wells was killed.
Through the entire, convoluted plot, Diehl-Armstrong said, she had no idea what was going on, even as she stood near Rothstein while he called in the pizza order from the pay phone. She admitted she was beside him as he made the call. But she said she did not know what was happening.
“Do you have any idea who he called, where he called or what the substance of the conversation was?” Sughrue asked Diehl-Armstrong.
“He didn’t want me to hear it,” she said. “I did hear him saying something later, though.”
“That’s what I was going to get to,” Sughrue said. “Did the phone call take long?”
“It took a little while, wasn’t a real long phone call, no,” she said.
“Did you have any conversations with Bill after the phone call was over?” Sughrue said.
“Yeah, I says, I’m getting hungry, I want to have some lunch, I haven’t had lunch yet,” Diehl-Armstrong testified. “He says, I just called in a couple pizzas; a guy that I know, that’s a friend of mine, is bringing them up from a place down on Peach Street. I said, ‘Oh, really,’ I say, Maybe I’ll come around and get a piece. He says, No, it’s for the guys. He says, You’re going to have to go somewhere else to get your lunch today.
“He says, But I will catch you later, that’s the phrase he always used, ‘I’ll catch you later,’ [when] he was real friendly with his intimate friends, he’d say, ‘I’ll catch you later,’ that was his way of saying goodbye, miss you, or something like that.”74
Diehl-Armstrong’s explanation stretched belief. Here was someone who, throughout her life, held herself out as superior to most everyone else, who prided herself in her independence and intelligence, and now she was testifying that she had no idea what Bill Rothstein was doing at the pay phone. By that logic, Diehl-Armstrong was admitting that, despite her stellar intellect and her assertiveness, she had allowed herself to be hoodwinked by a group of men headed by the likes of Bill Rothstein and Ken Barnes. She also strained credibility when she said she was not with Ken Barnes that day. In his testimony, Jerry Clark detailed how Diehl-Armstrong had shown him where she was when Wells was killed, and one of the spots was the parking lot of the Eat’n Park restaurant, where Barnes had said he and Diehl-Armstrong acted as lookouts. Clark also testified that he asked Diehl-Armstrong whether she had been driving with Barnes the wrong way on Interstate 79. Clark testified that Diehl-Armstrong “again denied being with Mr. Barnes that day. But [she] said her vision is not good, that someone possibly could have been with her in her vehicle without her knowing it.”75 Diehl-Armstrong’s explanation, as Clark conveyed it, seemed ridiculous: She was saying she had no idea who was with her in a car because she could not see well enough. During her testimony, Diehl-Armstrong claimed that Clark was lying; she said most everyone else who testified against her lied as well.
Her garrulousness hurt her case. All the statements she gave to the FBI, before Tom Patton became her lawyer and quieted her, worked against Diehl-Armstrong. Her constant chattering—about egg timers, about Rothstein, about where she had been on August 28, 2003—strengthened the government’s case. When she said she had placed her head in the lion’s mouth by talking to Clark and Jason Wick and the other investigators, she was right. She could have said nothing, which would have made the government’s job harder and would have given Sughrue more ways to maneuver at trial. Or she could have told Clark and Wick everything she knew, which could have led to a plea deal and created problems for Ken Barnes as her codefendant; maybe she would have been able to testify against him. Instead, Diehl-Armstrong chose to go only halfway in what she told the investigators. Once Barnes made his full confession, she was the sole target of the United States Attorney’s Office. If she thought she could outwit the investigators by talking so much to them, she was mistaken. She had all but talked herself into a federal prosecution.
“I have a very uphill battle here,” she once said of the Pizza Bomber case.76
The witnesses at trial were plentiful—thirty for the government and nine for the defense. Ken Barnes testified about Diehl-Armstrong’s role. His account fit what the female inmates—six in all—testified that Diehl-Armstrong told them, often in separate and isolated conversations. The UPS driver testified that he saw Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong at the pay phone. Another witness said he saw Brian Wells drive away from the dirt road next to Rothstein’s house the day before Wells was killed, which also supported Barnes’s account that he, Diehl-Armstrong, Rothstein, and the others held a planning meeting with Wells the day before he robbed the bank. Floyd Stockton, Bill Rothstein’s housemate, was scheduled to testify, but never came to court; he suffered a stroke just as the trial started. He recovered, but was unable to make the trip from Washington State, where he was living. Partly due to the lack of Stockton’s testimony, many questions in the Pizza Bomber case were left unanswered: Who wrote the notes that Wells had with him? Whose idea was the scavenger hunt? Where was the bomb made? How close was Wells to the Fractured Intellectuals before he joined their strange plan?
Sughrue highlighted the gaps in the case in his closing argument. He also said that Diehl-Armstrong’s mental state ruled out her knowing participation in the conspiracy. He referred to Diehl-Armstrong’s lengthy testimony—she was on the stand for five hours and twenty minutes over a day and a half—and her penchant for shouting remarks from the defense table.
“Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong [is] vulnerable,” Sughrue told the jury. “She’s mentally ill, she told you she’s diagnosed with bipolar. She told you that she has paranoid personality disorder. She said that she had narcissistic, and the government agrees she has grandiose tendencies.
“I’m not asking you to like Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong as she sits there, making these remarks and saying things about different witnesses and about the prosecution and the agents,” Sughrue said. “Your job is not to like her, your job is not to invite her over for dinner or have a birthday party for her. Your job is to understand that once you are a collective jury and you go back there to decide the facts, to know that that oath you swore first starts out with the presumption of innocence.”77
Sughrue blamed Rothstein for Diehl-Armstrong’s indictment.
“There is a constant theme throughout this case, ladies and gentlemen, and that is Bill Rothstein and his ability to manipulate people,” he said, “his ability to categorize people, and his ability to insulate people.”78
In his closing argument, Marshall Piccinini characterized Diehl-Armstrong as shrewd and self-reliant. He said that no one took advantage of her. He said she was incapable of allowing anyone, including Bill Rothstein, to dupe her.
“She is not subject to manipulation,” Piccinini told the jury. “Not subject to manipulation. Things need to go Marge Diehl-Armstrong’s way. When you cross-examine her and ask her a question, things need to go her way. When her own attorney asked her a question, things need to go her way.
“When you saw her sitting here, it’s all about her; nobody could ever manipulate her,” Piccinini said. “She was not subject to manipulation. She was maniacal, devious, involved. She is not manipulated by Mr. Rothstein. They are both manipulators.”79
Diehl-Armstrong was quiet when the jury delivered its guilty verdict on November 1, 2010. At the time when outbursts would be most expected, she said nothing. She instead flooded the courtroom with comments on February 28, 2011, when Judge McLaughlin sentenced her to life plus thirty years. She used that time to explain what had unfolded in her life over her sixty-two years; to proclaim her innocence; and to quote the Arkansas proverb about what doesn’t come out in the wash will come out in the rinse. She spoke of how she was once a musical prodigy on her way to what she thought would be a long and distinguished career in education.
Diehl-Armstrong’s remarks about her past reminded everyone in the courtroom that the Pizza Bomber case concerned much more than what she did in the course of a day in Erie, Pennsylvania, on August 28, 2003. The case also drew on psychiatric evidence that went back six decades—evidence that, taken together, presented a multilayered history of Diehl-Armstrong’s mental illness, a detailed portrait of her mind.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong continued to have a different understanding of that history as she waited to hear the sentence. No matter what any psychiatrist or lawyer or judge had concluded about her over all those years, she said she still knew herself best. The person so many others had evaluated and assisted; the person who had been convicted in connection with the murders of two men and acquitted, by arguing self-defense, in the killing of a third; the person who had undergone years of competency reviews while in state and federal prisons—that person, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong said, was not her.
She was different, she said.
She was better.
“I’m not a crazed killer that goes around here wanting to kill and injure people,” Diehl-Armstrong said in some of her final remarks to the judge. “I am not that type of a woman. I never have been.”80