Pizza Bomber: The Untold Story of America’s Most Shocking Bank Robbery
By Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella

The crime:

On August 28, 2003 a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells robbed a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania with a bomb locked to a collar around his neck. He was almost immediately apprehended by the police and the bomb detonated while he was in custody, killing him instantly. After years of investigation a rough outline of the robbery plot was pieced together, principally involving a mentally ill woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a superficially genial but disturbed handyman named Bill Rothstein, and a couple of junky lowlifes named Barnes and Stockton. Diehl-Armstrong was the only one who would go to trial for the crime, as Rothstein died of cancer before he could be charged with anything, Barnes pled guilty for a reduced sentence, and Stockton was granted immunity for testifying against Diehl-Armstrong. Barnes and Diehl-Armstrong both died in prison.

The book:

I’d forgotten all about the Pizza Bomber case. At the time it was headline news, receiving national (and some international) coverage and having seven episodes devoted to it on America’s Most Wanted. But the churn of new and shocking crimes is endless and it took reading this book, which was published in 2012, to bring the story back to me. I then went and watched the four-part Netflix documentary Evil Genius that came out in 2018, which brought the story up to date. But more on that in just a bit.

Both authors were involved in the case – Jerry Clark being the lead FBI agent in charge of the investigation and Ed Palattella covering the story for the Erie Times-News – and there’s a bit of a joke near the end of the book where the lawyer for one of the conspirators tells Clark that his client is looking for a book or movie deal. “Get in line,” Clark tells him. “Everyone who’s touched this wants that.”

Indeed, and it was a “line” that Clark himself was near the front of.

The reason there was such a line is that the story is true crime gold. All of the essential elements are here: a cast of eccentric characters, a strange and sensational crime, and a mystery remaining at the end as to what exactly was going on. As the judge at Diehl-Armstrong’s trial put it, “This case represents the unfortunate combination of the incredibly bizarre and the sadly tragic.”

The biggest question has to do with how much Brian Wells knew about the plot in advance. Was he a total innocent, grabbed nearly at random, or was he a semi-willing co-conspirator in the bank robbery? Did he know the bomb around his neck was real? Law enforcement at the time felt that he was involved in the plot to some degree, and they had grounds for thinking so. One witness put him together with Rothstein the day before the robbery, and his behaviour leading up to his death was very strange. On the other hand, in the Evil Genius documentary a prostitute Wells associated with confesses that she basically set him up as the stooge (this is, by the way, perhaps the bit of information that Clark thought she was holding back at the end of the book). Is she a credible witness? No. Is she more credible than the other participants in the scheme? Yes.

It seems unlikely we’ll ever know what was going on now. But the question of Wells’ involvement underlines a bigger mystery relating to the case: Just how smart were these guys?

Clark and Palattella go out of their way to make the argument that Diehl-Armstrong, Rothstein, and even Wells were smarter than average. Perhaps. Wells, however, was a middle-aged man delivering pizzas and using prostitutes. Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein both came from privileged backgrounds and were recognized as intelligent, but they had both bottomed out: living in hovels, with no jobs and not only associating with criminals but being engaged in various criminal activities themselves. That they considered themselves to be intellectuals and the smartest people in whatever room they happened to be in is pretty strong evidence of the contrary. Being smart is not something that really smart people brag about.

They might have been “fractured intellectuals,” to use the term Rothstein adopted for one of his clubs. Diehl-Armstrong in particular was mentally ill. But it’s probably as accurate, and more to the point, to just describe them as bitter losers, experiencing the full measure of downward mobility with the next stop being homelessness and a potter’s field. As Clark and Palattella observe, “their avarice fit with their obsession to hang on to the past, to the prosperity their families once enjoyed.” The robbery they planned made no sense whatsoever except as a way of lashing out at forces they felt had conspired against them.

So, intelligent? I guess it depends on how you define intelligence. Clark and Palattella mention IQs on occasion, but I don’t think that means much. Criminal masterminds? Hardly. In my notes on Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice I brought up the subject of criminal intelligence, but I don’t think even by those loose standards anyone here qualifies. “For people who were supposed to be brilliant,” the authors write, “Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein did a lot of stupid things.” Perhaps the best assessment came from Diehl-Armstrong herself, describing Rothstein: “as very stupid but very, very intelligent and dangerous.” A good example is the collar bomb itself, considered by one of the agents as “the most sophisticated improvised explosive device (IED) he had ever seen.” Despite all its cleverness though, it was also a Rube Goldberg doohickey that only half worked as it was supposed to. Or was it supposed to work at all?

I do have to credit the gang with one very notable accomplishment though. The hardest part in any conspiracy is getting everyone involved to keep a secret. This never works out. So how did this gang of broken and burned-out cases manage to maintain so much solidarity in silence? Even Brian Wells, wearing the collar, played his part until the end, making up some story about being shanghaied by a bunch of Black guys.

I guess fear was the main motivator. In the documentary, Diehl-Armstrong says all the co-conspirators were afraid of the death penalty and so watched each other’s backs. They may also have been afraid of each other, and Diehl-Armstrong in particular. She’d already killed a couple of partners. In Evil Geniuses it’s suggested that Rothstein was still carrying a torch for Diehl-Armstrong, but since he’d already dropped the dime on her for Roden’s murder I have trouble squaring that.

Still, it’s impressive that there was so much solidarity. Even after copping pleas, Barnes and Stockton clearly didn’t want to rat their partners-in-crime out.

So there you have it: violence, weirdos, and mystery. True crime in its purest form.

Noted in passing:

There are often moments when you’re reading the description of some action in a book that you have to stop and wonder just what’s happening because it’s so hard to visualize. For example, in the authors’ brief recounting of the stormy relationship between Diehl-Armstrong and then-boyfriend Jim Roden (she ended up killing him and stuffing his body in Rothstein’s freezer) this little nugget is served up: “Violence plagued their relationship for a decade. He cut her thigh by pushing her into a broken glass panel of a stove door in July 1994.”

Now just how did this work? Stove doors are usually pretty low to the ground and Diehl-Armstrong was a very tall woman. How would he push her thigh into a stove door? Or was the glass panel completely detached from the stove door and located somewhere else?

Takeaways:

Dead men tell no tales. But dying men can be liars even on their death bed. Clark and Palattella talk about the admissibility of “dying declarations” as evidence (they are considered an exception to the rule against hearsay) because the circumstances under which they are made support their credibility. But Bill Rothstein repeatedly lied that he’d had no involvement in Wells’ killing, even just hours before his death. Does it make sense to believe that someone’s character is going to change in their final days, or even minutes? Thinking like that seems to belong in a time when there was widespread belief in deathbed conversions and sneaking into heaven by a whisker. I don’t think it applies very much today.

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