The Pizza Bomber

Brian Wells had delivered pizzas for Mama Mia’s Pizzeria in Erie, Pennsylvania, for about ten years. On August 28, 2003, the shop took an order for a delivery to a TV transmission tower off Peach Street. Not long afterward, Wells walked into a PNC Bank at the Summit Towne Centre with a metal collar bomb locked around his neck and handed the teller a note demanding money.

He left with $8,702 and was stopped by Pennsylvania State Police in a nearby parking lot. Handcuffed and sitting on the pavement, he told officers that others had forced him into the scheme. At 3:18 p.m., before a bomb squad arrived, the device exploded and killed him. Notes found with him laid out a scavenger hunt that supposedly led to the keys.

The FBI worked the case for years. In September 2003, handyman William Rothstein reported a body in his freezer, that of James Roden, the longtime boyfriend of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. Rothstein died in 2004 without being charged. In 2007 prosecutors charged Diehl-Armstrong and Kenneth Barnes, saying the robbery was meant to pay Barnes to kill her father and that Wells had taken part in planning it. Barnes pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years, later reduced. Diehl-Armstrong was convicted in 2010, sentenced to life in 2011, and died in prison in 2017. Floyd Stockton testified under immunity.