At a time in her life when many people are preparing for retirement, a fifty-eight-year-old mentally unstable woman by the name of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was indicted in one of the most horrific bank robberies in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her participation in that plot would have been enough, by itself, to secure her a spot as one of America’s most infamous female criminals—a list that includes Bonnie Parker, Patty Hearst, Aileen Wuornos, and Susan Smith. But a series of violent and weird incidents preceded Diehl-Armstrong’s most notorious crime. The pattern deepened her level of criminality and led a federal magistrate judge, in evaluating Diehl-Armstrong’s entire homicidal career, to bestow upon her a dark description: “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.”1
Diehl-Armstrong gained international attention starting in July 2007. A federal grand jury in her hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, indicted her in the bizarre plot that became known as the Pizza Bomber case or the Collar Bomb case. Never before had the FBI worked such a crime. Brian Wells, a pizza deliveryman, was killed in August 2003 when a homemade bomb that was locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank just south of Erie. With her indictment and then her conviction, in 2010, Diehl-Armstrong became the widely photographed and televised face of the strange act of brazen outlawry. Well before then, in the largely sleepy confines of Erie, the only place she has ever lived while not incarcerated, Diehl-Armstrong instilled disbelief and fear.
Throughout her life, six men linked to her or her crimes died; five perished due to unnatural causes. The pattern started in 1984, when Diehl-Armstrong, then Marjorie Diehl, emptied a revolver into her sleeping boyfriend. Between that homicide and the bombing of Wells, four other men died. One was another boyfriend, whom Diehl-Armstrong blasted in the back with a shotgun and whose dead body she helped stuff into a freezer. Another boyfriend committed suicide. Another man died of a suspicious drug overdose. And another, Diehl-Armstrong’s only husband, Richard Armstrong, whom she married in January 1991, suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage after he collapsed during a stroke and hit his head on a coffee table in the couple’s living room in 1992. Each death brought more twisted celebrity to Diehl-Armstrong in Erie. Each death led many in Erie to marvel at how a certain kind of man was sure to risk danger and even death if he came to know—and, especially, if he came to love—Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.
She is, in the words of another judge she has faced, “sociopathic.”2
She also is, according to the federal magistrate judge and the prevailing definitions, a serial killer. She indisputably killed two men, and she was convicted of conspiring in the murder of another—Brian Wells. But Diehl-Armstrong never targeted strangers, and she never tracked or stalked her victims. Despite the level of planning inherent in the Pizza Bomber case, her slayings were more acts of calculated fury than ritualized homicides. Diehl-Armstrong, who, at sixty-eight years old, died on April 4, 2017, while serving a sentence of life plus thirty years in federal prison, was nonetheless a rarity. She was a serial killer who was also a woman.
What led her to kill?
What caused death to surround her?
Those questions have challenged us for years. Jerry Clark tried to answer them as the FBI special agent who led the investigation of the Pizza Bomber case. His background in forensic psychology helped him as he interviewed Diehl-Armstrong eight times. Ed Palattella, who reported on the Pizza Bomber case for the Erie Times-News, gained his own understanding of Diehl-Armstrong through his almost daily telephone conversations with her since late 2007. She has always been willing to talk—sometimes too willing.
In this chronicle of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s life, we aim to provide a deep understanding of her and other women like her—women who have committed serial murders. Our exploration of Diehl-Armstrong’s life also examines the development of forensic psychology and psychiatry. And it looks at how the American justice system has evolved to address such issues as insanity and competency so as to be able to manage cases like Diehl-Armstrong’s—cases in which mental illness is as prevalent as murder. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s relationship with crime is unique in American criminal history. She is as fascinating as she is deadly.
Jerry Clark
Ed Palattella
November 2016
Erie, Pennsylvania