by Patrick Thornton
On August 28, 2003, a man walked into a Pennsylvania bank and handed a note to the teller demanding $250,000. The note also warned that a bomb would go off if he didn’t get the money.
Leaving the bank with just $8,000, the man was surrounded by police, and revealed himself to be Brian Wells, a pizza delivery driver who had been forced to rob the bank. He claimed the device around his neck was a bomb, and it eventually went off in front of police and media, killing Wells. Police soon uncovered detailed instructions in Wells’s car of actions he’d need to complete to turn off the bomb, including the bank heist. But they determined that there was no way that Wells could’ve possibly finished all the tasks before the device exploded.
Authorities would later attribute the plot to three people: Majorie Diehl-Armstrong, Kenneth Barnes, and William Rothstein. After Wells’s death, Rothstein turned on Diehl-Armstrong, even leading police to a body he’d kept in his freezer for her – that of her ex-boyfriend James Roden. Investigators believe Diehl-Armstrong killed Roden after he threatened to inform police about the impending bank heist. Diehl-Armstrong was alleged to be the mastermind of the robbery, reportedly needing the money so she could have a hit taken out on her father, who she wrongly believed to be wealthy.
For her part, Diehl-Armstrong claimed that Rothstein was the real brains of the operation. Debate remains on whether Brian Wells had any involvement in the plot or not. Diehl-Armstrong was eventually sentenced to life in prison in 2011. She passed in prison and was buried in an unmarked grave in 2017. The complicated case gained attention the same year with the release of a Netflix docuseries centering on Diehl-Armstrong, Evil Genius.
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