Selects: The Collar Bomb Heist

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Speaker 10 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 6 Chuck here, curating a specially hand-picked selected episode. And this one's from May 2018.
And boy, oh, boy, this is a good one. I forgot all about this.
And this is part of our true crime series.

Speaker 6 Not so grisly.

Speaker 6 as far as like, you know, it's not about an axe murder or anything like that. It's about a heist, and I love me some heist.
And this is called the color bomb heist.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 9 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the True Crime Edition.
Again.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we've done a few of these, right?

Speaker 9 True crime is so hot right now.

Speaker 6 Hey, man,

Speaker 6 we were dabbling on the periphery of true crime when most of these people were wetting their diapers.

Speaker 9 That's right, man.

Speaker 9 That is right. I'm glad somebody finally said it.

Speaker 6 We were occasionally doing a poor job of covering true crime 10 years ago.

Speaker 9 That's right. We're going to do it again.
That's right.

Speaker 6 We continue that great, rich history.

Speaker 9 Yeah, because true crime can be extraordinarily interesting, especially when you're talking about an extraordinarily overcomplicated heist that results in a man's bizarre death, death by bizarre means,

Speaker 9 and involves what really ultimately you could make a case as an unsolved mystery still today,

Speaker 9 even though it's technically bureaucratically been solved.

Speaker 9 A lot of people say, no, this thing hasn't been solved yet.

Speaker 6 You got

Speaker 6 homemade bombs.

Speaker 6 You got a scavenger hunt.

Speaker 6 You got a crack dealer.

Speaker 9 Well, you got to have a crack dealer.

Speaker 6 You got prostitutes.

Speaker 6 You got pizza.

Speaker 9 And yeah, and let's start with the pizza.

Speaker 6 You got a Geo Metro.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 Which, by the way, I just wanted to point out ahead of time, there is no more pizza delivery car

Speaker 6 2003 than a Geometro.

Speaker 9 A teal one, no less.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the thing is, it's almost almost like they rolled them right off the line in 2003

Speaker 6 straight to a pizza place.

Speaker 9 With the pizza guy inside already.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and the little sign magneted on top. Right.

Speaker 9 A little crooked. Yep.

Speaker 9 So the whole thing does start actually with a pizza guy, a pizza place and a teal Geo Metro. And like you said, the whole thing starts in 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 9 And there was a, and still is, I looked it up. There's a pizza place called Mamma Mia's Pizzeria.

Speaker 6 Old on the nose, but fine.

Speaker 9 Sure, it gets the job done, right?

Speaker 9 And at about 2 p.m.

Speaker 9 on August 28th, 2003, a pizza delivery guy named Brian Wells, I think he was 46 at the time, he was about to end his morning shift when a call came in for two small sausage and pepperoni pizzas.

Speaker 9 And the

Speaker 9 delivery was, I guess, the opposite way of where Brian Wells was going to go on his way home. But he said, you know what? I'll take this one last order.
And he walked out the door at about two.

Speaker 9 And the next time that Brian Wells was seen in public again, he was entering a PNC bank branch just down the street from his pizza place, a few miles up the road.

Speaker 9 And he looked a lot different than he did when he left the pizza parlor about 28 minutes earlier.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so

Speaker 6 first of all, he was walking with a cane, kind of a funny-looking cane.

Speaker 6 And then under his t-shirt, he had clearly, and if you've seen the footage and the photos, which you can see,

Speaker 6 warning, by the way, for video.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 6 For the future, it's quite graphic.

Speaker 9 It's out there.

Speaker 6 But it is out there.

Speaker 6 But he had clearly some large, boxy-looking thing. It looked like he was wearing a shoebox around his neck with a t-shirt pulled over it.

Speaker 9 Kind of, but in the teller at the bank's defense, could have been an artificial torso, and she probably didn't want to draw attention to it.

Speaker 6 Yes, she was being very kind. Right.

Speaker 9 So, one thing I want to point out, too, there's already a discrepancy. What we're like a minute into the story, and there's already a discrepancy.

Speaker 9 That shirt he was wearing over that boxy thing underneath his shirt said guess on it.

Speaker 9 And I've seen that it was written somehow, like in spray paint or marker or that it was an actual guest jeans t-shirt.

Speaker 11 Oh, really?

Speaker 6 So either an officially licensed or not licensed, but whatever, brand shirt or a homemade janky spray painted version.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and if you look, the pictures don't really show one way or another. Yeah, I couldn't tell.
It looks more like it's homemade.

Speaker 9 And I looked up to see if there was a guest shirt that it, you know, if I could find the actual guest shirt, it was and couldn't. So I think it may have been homemade.
Okay.

Speaker 9 Regardless, he's wearing this shirt that guess on, and he walks up to the teller and he hands the teller a note. And the note says, I have a bomb.

Speaker 9 Get everybody who has access codes to the safe together and put $250,000 into a bag and bring it to me. I think he said, you have 15 minutes to do this.

Speaker 6 Yeah, which is kind of a long time if you're a bank robber.

Speaker 9 It is. It's like almost like a luxurious amount of time.
I would have said like 60 seconds.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Or this should have happened yesterday, chop, chop.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 9 So he

Speaker 9 stands back and waits, apparently, grabs a dumb, dumb lollipop out of the little basket while he's waiting. Because why not? And the teller says, sir, we don't have, like, we can't get into the safe.

Speaker 9 That's just not how things work. I'm sorry.
But as a consolation prize, I'm going to put $8,702 into a bag for you right here and send you on your way, okay?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and importantly, we did not mention, he lifted his shirt up and showed this teller right uh this this bomb this what's called a collar bomb strapped around his neck right

Speaker 9 so he walks out of the bank a free man and the next time that he's seen in public is about 15 minutes later and he's seen in public by some pennsylvania state troopers who are on the lookout for this guy and he's still wearing that shirt he's still got the big bulge and he's standing around his geometro parked in a parking lot that is actually shared with that PNC bank and the McDonald's.

Speaker 9 And he's in a parking lot right there. So basically, he left the bank robbery and went about 100 to 200 feet away from it.
And that's where he was found like a full 15 minutes later.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so these, these, these coppas, these troopers come over,

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 He says, hey, guys, this is a bomb around my neck. A group of

Speaker 6 black men chain this bomb around my neck at gunpoint, force me to rob this bank for them.

Speaker 6 I'm not lying here. This thing is going to go off.
So the cops call the bomb squad, and they do.

Speaker 6 I saw, you know,

Speaker 6 the family of Wells is still angry about the fact that she says they did nothing to save them.

Speaker 9 I would be too.

Speaker 6 By the way, we should shout out.

Speaker 6 Wired magazine.

Speaker 9 Oh, yes, we really, really should.

Speaker 6 A lot of this came from a great,

Speaker 6 heavily heavily researched story by Rich Shapiro

Speaker 6 from about eight years ago called The Incredible True Story of the Colorbomb Heist.

Speaker 6 So thank you, Rich, for your work. But the dude's on the ground.

Speaker 6 I mean, if you, I kind of remember this happening because when I went and looked at the still images, I was like, wait a minute, I've seen this for age.

Speaker 6 And it's this guy sitting on the ground

Speaker 6 with this thing around his neck, kind of just waiting, seated on the pavement for about 25 minutes. He says, very

Speaker 6 interestingly, did you call my boss at the pizza place?

Speaker 6 And then all of a sudden, this bomb starts beeping fast, which is never a good sign. And when I was reading the story, I thought, well, that's just a ruse.

Speaker 6 But no, this thing detonated and killed him. It blasted a hole in his chest.

Speaker 6 It did not blow his head off, like the internet says. No.

Speaker 6 But it was a violent, awful death.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it was. And it was pretty quick.
And then three minutes after the bomb goes off, the bomb squad showed up.

Speaker 9 So he's dead.

Speaker 9 This guy, Brian Wells, is dead. And the whole time he was protesting, he's like, you know, this is, I was forced to rob the bank.
Are you guys going to get this off of me or what?

Speaker 9 Yeah, he said something like, did you call my boss? Because apparently he was a very loyal. employee.
He'd been working at Mamma Mia's for how long? Like 10 years or something like that?

Speaker 9 I I don't know.

Speaker 9 For years and years. And he'd only called in late once, not even sick, late once when his cat died, said Rich Shapiro in that wired article.
So

Speaker 9 it seemed like he actually was telling the truth, that he had been abducted and forced to rob the bank and then had been a victim.

Speaker 9 I think the bomb going off really kind of put an exclamation point on his story that he was not a willing participant in this, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, so the cops obviously check out that Geo Metro and it's sweet, sweet styling, and they saw his cane in there. It turns out the reason why the cane was funny looking is because it was also a gun.

Speaker 9 And it really looks a lot like a gun.

Speaker 6 Yeah, when you look at it.

Speaker 6 The bomb was clearly homemade. It had a couple of different parts to it.
It was

Speaker 6 this banded metal collar. that he wore around his neck.
It was like locked to his neck, had four keyholes, and then a combination lock. Yeah, it was really locked to his neck.

Speaker 6 And then an iron box with two pipe bombs loaded up, ready to go. And then, interestingly, and this will figure,

Speaker 6 put a pin in this one because this will figure in the in the case later.

Speaker 6 It had two kitchen timers in there in addition to an electronic countdown timer.

Speaker 9 Yeah, which was, I guess, the thing that started beeping faster and faster.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and then some decoy wires. You always got to have those if

Speaker 6 you're making a bomb.

Speaker 9 Sure, but I mean, like, that's pretty smart. So there's decoy wires.
There were apparently also stickers that said, like, don't do it or, you know, skull and crossbones or rat poison, whatever.

Speaker 6 Skinny and sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And, oh, that's a good nine to five reference, man.

Speaker 6 I just saw that the other night.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 it was a homemade bomb, but it was, by all accounts, a well-made bomb, too.

Speaker 9 And it worked, which I think is one of the

Speaker 9 big questions about any homemade bomb is whether it will actually work or not. And this one worked with deadly effect.

Speaker 6 That's right. So, the most important thing they found in this car, though,

Speaker 6 were some letters, some handwritten notes addressed to bomb hostage.

Speaker 6 So, one of them said, I mean, these were instructions basically on what this guy should do, which further kind of cemented, like, hey, this guy's probably telling the truth.

Speaker 6 It said, go rob this bank of 250 grand, and then

Speaker 6 very strangely outlined this little

Speaker 6 scavenger hunt basically to where eventually you will land upon the keys and combination to get you out of this thing by going all over town and finding these various hidden notes.

Speaker 6 And at the last note,

Speaker 6 you will be able to free yourself.

Speaker 9 Yeah, the last one will give you the keys and the combination, but you better hurry because you have a limited amount of time. If you stop and think, you're going to waste time, you're going to die.

Speaker 9 We can detonate this remotely and we're going to be following you. It was written pretty crazily.
Have you read any of the note?

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so like

Speaker 9 it's got a lot of

Speaker 9 like just like a lot of jumps, jump cuts or jump scares in it, you know, like you'll, it's like, go do this and then go do that after that. And then don't try anything funny.

Speaker 9 We're going to blow you up, you know? Yeah. It has those every once in a while.
And there's drawings in there of where he could find like the notes and all that.

Speaker 9 So he made it as far as the first note, which was McDonald's. It was was in that McDonald's that shared a parking lot with the PNC bank.
That was where the first note was.

Speaker 9 So he made it to that McDonald's, grabbed that note, and that note was directing him out of town

Speaker 9 to another note. And he didn't make it that far when the cops caught up with him.

Speaker 6 Yeah. So the scavenger hunt was,

Speaker 6 like you said, he had gotten just to the one place. So the cops then say,

Speaker 6 well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to complete the scavenger hunt.

Speaker 9 They They were like, whoa, you just blew my mind. That's some great policing.

Speaker 6 Should we take a break?

Speaker 9 Sure.

Speaker 6 All right. Scavenger hunt is just started by the coppas.
We'll be right back.

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Speaker 6 All right, we're back.

Speaker 9 So the scavenger hunt's still on, Chuck.

Speaker 9 And they make it, the cops follow from

Speaker 9 the note that Brian Wells had to the next clue, and they found the next note, and that directed them to another place, even further out of town, to where they found the jar where the note was supposed to be, but the note was gone.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and they don't really know what that means. They didn't know if it was just something to keep them busy, preoccupied.

Speaker 6 They didn't know if the person who was designing the scavenger hunt got interrupted or knew that the cops were around and they were doing it sort of in real time. But at any rate,

Speaker 6 unfortunately, the scavenger hunt just kind of fizzled out because that was kind of a cool part of the story.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it really was. It was like, it's one of the things that makes this, it's just an incredibly bizarre crime.
Yeah. Why the scavenger hunt? It's going to keep coming up again and again, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 when the scavenger hunt ran out, the trail actually went cold. The case started to get cold for a few months.
The cops sniffed around.

Speaker 9 Brian Wilson tried to figure out, you know, why him, what happened with him, and they went back to his place of employment and and they

Speaker 9 kind of checked out the kind of person he was, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and they very smartly said, Well, wait a minute,

Speaker 6 why don't we check out what that last delivery was supposed to be? There may be a clue there.

Speaker 6 And it was an interesting place. It was at the, it was, you could only get there by dirt road, and it was right next to a TV transmission tower in a kind of a remote wooded area.
Right.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 cops combed the area, found shoe prints that matched wells. They found those classic, iconic Geometro tire tracks that everyone recognizes by sight.

Speaker 6 But there really weren't any more clues as far as the cops were concerned at that location.

Speaker 6 So where the cops had found a dead end, a reporter and photographer for the Erie Times News went and did a little investigating of his own and saw this house, you know, next door where the pizza was delivered and said, well, you know, I'm just going to go knock on the door.

Speaker 6 This guy answers the door,

Speaker 6 and his name was Bill Rothstein. And he actually said, You know, you can look around if you want.
He's 59 years old. He's a handyman, wasn't married, had lived there his whole life.

Speaker 6 And apparently, he seemed really smart,

Speaker 6 had a very

Speaker 6 articulate way of speaking, and apparently was fluent in several different languages. And the journalist kind of did a little poking around and didn't really see much and took off.

Speaker 6 But he made contact with Bill Rothstein. He's the first person that kind of was went to knocking.
Right.

Speaker 9 But nothing came of it. And the cops, as far as I know, never went and met with Bill Rothstein, even though his house was right next to the delivery place where Wells was supposedly accosted, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And then,

Speaker 9 like I said, the case has gone cold by this time. If a couple months have gone by, the whole, the whole,

Speaker 9 I mean, you've got this crime, this very public caper that's captured the public's attention. A guy died by being blown up

Speaker 9 while under police supervision. And

Speaker 9 there's no leads. There's no nothing.
And then finally,

Speaker 9 several weeks, a few months, I think, after the call,

Speaker 9 there's a 911 call from Bill Rothstein. And he tells the police that in his freezer,

Speaker 9 he has one of those serial killer chest freezers. There's actually a body, a man's body, and that it was,

Speaker 9 it is not someone he murdered, but he helped cover up the murder of this man who was the boyfriend of Bill Rothstein's ex-girlfriend from way, way back in the day.

Speaker 9 And now the chain of events has been set off.

Speaker 6 Right. And if you're like me and you start hearing wife of the ex-girlfriend's dad's cousin, your brain gets a little jumbled.

Speaker 6 So just very plainly, he used to date this woman. This woman called him up and said, Hey, I've murdered my current boyfriend, or was it her husband?

Speaker 9 It was her boyfriend, yeah.

Speaker 6 And she said, and I need your help here.

Speaker 6 I blasted him with a shotgun, and I know we dated, oh, 20 years ago, but will you come help me out? Because they were still in contact, I guess. They remained friends.

Speaker 9 I guess so.

Speaker 6 So, and this racked Bill Rothstein, apparently, he thought about committing suicide.

Speaker 6 Apparently, there was even a note they found, a suicide note but he maintained like you said with the cops that he didn't have anything to do with anything but most of the cleanup the cleanup getting rid of the murder weapon and then holding on to the body yeah but what which the reason he held on the body he was supposed to get apparently supposed to grind this body up and that's where he finally stopped short and was like jesus i can't do this and he said he told the cops that the reason he called them finally was because since he wasn't going through with grinding up the body he was worried what this woman, Marjorie Deal Armstrong, was going to do to him.

Speaker 6 He's like, I dated this lady.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 6 She's not a nice person.

Speaker 9 And so when he says Marjorie Deal Armstrong to the Erie cops, just alarm bells start going off because by this time already, Marjorie Deal Armstrong was a local legend as far as criminals are concerned.

Speaker 9 She was this very, very bright woman

Speaker 9 who,

Speaker 9 I think at the age of 35 back in the 80s, had been indicted for killing one of her boyfriends, shot him six times.

Speaker 9 She played that she had killed him in self-defense, that he was an abuser of her, and she was actually acquitted.

Speaker 9 A few years after that, she was married to a guy named Armstrong, and he showed up at the hospital with a head trauma and actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Speaker 9 But there was no coroner's inquest or anything like that.

Speaker 9 And so it just was something suspicious, you know, the second significant other of this woman to die under suspicious or violent circumstances.

Speaker 9 So when Bill Rothstein said, I'm worried about what Marjorie Deal Armstrong is going to do to me, the cops seem to have taken it very seriously.

Speaker 24 Well, extremely seriously, because the next day they arrested her

Speaker 6 for murder.

Speaker 6 And about a year and a half later, a little short of that, she pled guilty but mentally ill. She was sentenced to 7 to 20.

Speaker 6 And then Rothstein, for his part, eventually died of cancer in 2004.

Speaker 9 Right. And so you said that he had considered killing himself and even wrote a suicide note, right? Yeah.
There's something very, very odd on Bill Rothstein's suicide note.

Speaker 9 And again, he didn't kill himself. He died of cancer, but he was able to actually show the cops where his suicide note was, and they read it.

Speaker 9 And the first line of it, from what I understand, was, this has nothing to do with the caller bomb heist or the Brian Wells murder.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's a

Speaker 6 weird thing to put if you had nothing to do with that, you know.

Speaker 9 Right. That's just a very odd thing to do.

Speaker 6 It's like when the cops come in and you go, there's nothing under the bed. Don't, there's no reason to look there.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 9 They say, we just want to make sure your fire alarm is working. Yeah, exactly.
Part of a community service.

Speaker 6 Cool, but the bed's fine.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 9 So that is a very weird thing to say, and that definitely piqued the interest of the cops. But like you said, the cops convicted, or the state convicted Marjorie Deal Armstrong of the murder of

Speaker 9 James Roden or Jim Roden, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 9 She's already in prison. And when she's in prison,

Speaker 9 somehow, this is what I'm unclear on. Somehow, it comes up or she starts talking or something like that that

Speaker 9 Jim Roden's death very much had to do with the Wells case, with Brian Wells' murder, this collar bomb heist,

Speaker 9 and that she knows a lot about it. And if they'll transfer her to a minimum security prison close to Erie,

Speaker 9 she'll start talking.

Speaker 6 Yeah, she asked for the old Hannibal lecter treatment.

Speaker 9 So, is that how it came up? Like, she approached them? Because I'm unclear on that.

Speaker 6 I mean, I think so. This is in the Wired article, it said that

Speaker 6 there was a phone call from a state cop who had just met with her about something unrelated, like a different homicide.

Speaker 6 And she just, and it kind of makes sense, though, now, actually, when we, as we will learn,

Speaker 6 she talked a lot.

Speaker 9 Yeah, a lot.

Speaker 6 So it doesn't surprise me that another cop was just meeting with her about something unrelated. She's like, by the way, that whole collarbon thing, I got all the skinny on that.
Right.

Speaker 9 So there's a couple of things going on here by then.

Speaker 9 By the time she calls the cops, the cops have already spoken apparently with several informants that have shared cells with her or spent time with her in jail already, who are saying like, this lady is the mastermind of that collarbomb heist that's making you guys look bad.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and eventually, you know, when they met with her about this,

Speaker 6 she admitted that she was involved, but...

Speaker 6 Well, she didn't admit she was involved in the plot, but she said, I knew about it.

Speaker 6 I gave him those two kitchen timers.

Speaker 6 And I was really close by when it happened.

Speaker 6 And by the way, the guy who blew up with the collar bomb, Mr. Wells, he was actually in on it too.
And Losteen headed the whole thing up.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 9 For her deal, Armstrong, she said, but I had nothing to do with it, even though I had all these other little things to do with it. I never met Brian Wells.
I didn't know Brian Wells.

Speaker 9 I had nothing to do with his death, aside from supplying the kitchen timers

Speaker 6 And knowing all about it.

Speaker 9 Right, exactly.

Speaker 9 So now it's just getting weird, right? Because there's the Jim Roden murder, who she says that she killed because he was abusing her, who Rothstein said she killed over a dispute with money,

Speaker 9 but is now she's saying is tied to the Wells case,

Speaker 9 and which she knows.

Speaker 9 a lot about, but really nothing about and had nothing to do with. So the cops are like, well, let's just get this lady to talk all we can.

Speaker 9 And one of the things they got out of her was her, she agreed to a tour around Erie, showing them all these places where she had been. And these were all places that were related to the crime.

Speaker 9 Like, I believe she said she'd been at the pizza delivery site.

Speaker 9 I think she said she'd been within a mile of the

Speaker 9 bank when it was robbed. Like all of this stuff, she's just like, they just keep giving her this rope and she's just wrapping it around her neck again and again and again.

Speaker 9 And then finally, Chuck, at the end of this car ride, after she's been interviewing with the cops multiple times, giving them tons of info, what does she say?

Speaker 6 She asked for immunity at this point

Speaker 6 after she had basically completely incriminated herself.

Speaker 6 And previous to all this, a lot more happened. There were four different informants who had come forward and said that this lady's been talking about this for a while.

Speaker 6 She very much had everything to do with it. And then a couple of months after she had started talking to the feds, another big break came.

Speaker 6 This witness came forward and said, hey, there's this crack dealer named Kenny Barnes.

Speaker 9 That is a crack dealer's name.

Speaker 6 Kenneth Barnes. And he was involved.

Speaker 6 They used to go fishing together, Armstrong, Deal Armstrong and Barnes.

Speaker 6 She sang like a canary to him, basically, and said, here's what she did. She,

Speaker 6 her brother-in-law put him in touch with Barnes

Speaker 6 while he was already in jail on unrelated charges, basically. And so Barnes was already in prison and said, hey, I think I can shorten my time.

Speaker 6 So I'm going to try and get a reduced sentence at least by spilling the beans on Deal Armstrong.

Speaker 9 Right. And Barnes's brother-in-law was who turned him into the cops.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 9 So Barnes is like, uh-oh, I'm already, I'm in jail for selling crack. That's way different from being, you know, very much involved in this collar bomb heist.

Speaker 9 So he said, okay, I'll tell you guys everything you want to know. I'll be your star witness.
Just reduce my sentence

Speaker 9 for my involvement in this. And he started talking.
When he started talking, it was at Marjorie Deal Armstrong's

Speaker 9 trial, which was a pretty spectacular trial from all accounts.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and before the trial even, he told his story was, is that she wanted me to kill her father. He was spending what would end up being her inheritance, she felt.
And so she wanted him dead.

Speaker 6 And so she

Speaker 6 was

Speaker 6 doing this collar bomb heist to raise money to pay me to kill her dad.

Speaker 9 Which, I mean, like,

Speaker 9 that's just the biggest face palm I've ever heard of.

Speaker 6 Yeah, for real.

Speaker 9 So, okay, we'll start Marjorie Deal Armstrong's trial after we take a break. How about that, man?

Speaker 6 That sounds good. Okay.

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Speaker 9 Okay, Chuck. So before Marjorie Deal Armstrong goes to trial, and remember, she's already in prison for the murder of Jim Roden, right? Shooting him in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Yes.

Speaker 9 Bill Rothstein is dead. I want to call him Ace Rothstein.
Ace Rothstein is so bad. But Bill Rothstein is dead.

Speaker 9 He died of lymphoma a couple years before. And by the time Marjorie Deal Armstrong is brought to trial for her involvement as the mastermind of the collar bomb plot,

Speaker 9 they have to verify that she's actually mentally competent to stand trial. And that's kind of touchy because remember when she...

Speaker 9 She was charged with killing her boyfriend back in, I think, 1984 or 1986?

Speaker 9 She was deemed incompetent seven times by psychiatrists before the judge finally said,

Speaker 9 I'm throwing all that out and deciding that she is competent. We're going to go ahead with the trial.

Speaker 9 They also found like 400 pounds of butter and 700 pounds of cheese

Speaker 9 in her house when they were investigating that particular murder.

Speaker 9 And in between 1984 and the time she was tried in the collarbomb heist, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So

Speaker 9 it was actually kind of questionable whether she was mentally competent to stay on trial.

Speaker 9 And right as they were about to start the proceedings, I think the judge ruled that she was competent to stay on trial.

Speaker 9 She was diagnosed with cancer herself.

Speaker 6 That's right.

Speaker 9 So they waited for the cancer diagnosis, her prognosis.

Speaker 9 And the cancer doctor came back and said, three to seven years. And the prosecutor said, giddy up.

Speaker 6 That's right.

Speaker 6 So previous to this she she had gotten the indictment but in that indictment it's very important that she was not i mean granted she was the only one technically indicted but they in the indictment it said that rothstein was definitely a conspirator

Speaker 6 and wells the man who was who was the victim supposedly he was definitely involved in this thing from the beginning yeah you're absolutely right as a very important thing that that showed up in this indictment yeah they said he agreed to rob this bank he thought it was a fake bomb.

Speaker 6 And he was told this scavenger hunt was a ruse to fool the cops. And if and when he did get caught, he could say, you know, I was just following orders, basically what he did.

Speaker 9 Right. And so Brian Wells' family did not like this at all.
Apparently, during the

Speaker 9 press conference where the DA of Erie County is announcing this, you know, this case case is closed. This is the indictment that they have.

Speaker 9 The Wells, some of Brian Wells' sisters were shouting liar at her. They did not take the idea that their brother was an accomplice in this at all

Speaker 6 very well. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 6 there was a lot of back and forth about whether Wells was in on the thing from the beginning

Speaker 6 or whether or not he was in from the beginning and then at one point wanted out and was forced to do this or whether he was forced from the beginning. Everyone's telling a different story.

Speaker 6 And, you know, basically the trial is where we will learn, you know, if all that is true, what really happened.

Speaker 9 So Marjorie Deal Armstrong's lawyer said, you know, to heck with caution,

Speaker 9 let's put you on the stand. Okay.
You've already incriminated yourself multiple times. Why not do it in open court, too?

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 she apparently was quite a

Speaker 9 She put on quite a performance on the stand over like two days, I think five and a half hours of testimony.

Speaker 9 She yelled, she cried, she berated the prosecutor and her own lawyer.

Speaker 9 When she did mention Brian Wells, she said, I've never met the guy. I learned of his death when everybody else did on the TV news.

Speaker 9 And she stuck with her story, though, that she had nothing to do with this. She knew a little bit about it.
She knew

Speaker 9 the conspirators. The real mastermind was Bill Rothstein, and it wasn't her.
That's what she maintained, though, throughout the trial and even afterward.

Speaker 6 That's right. But before she took the stand, a few days earlier is when they trotted out Ken Barnes and he took the stand.

Speaker 6 And he said he had, you know, by the time she took the stand, he had given a different account of the story than she would later do.

Speaker 6 So he got up there and said she was behind all this. She was the mastermind.
Rothstein was involved. She just recruited him, basically.
She recruited Wells because Wells needed money. And here's where

Speaker 6 the prostitutes come into play. Apparently, Wells had a relationship with a prostitute who was also a crack addict.
So he would buy crack to give her,

Speaker 6 presumably,

Speaker 6 as trade for sex. He ended up falling into debt with these crack dealers and needed money.

Speaker 9 So that's basically the plot of Boulan Rouge.

Speaker 6 And he contends, Barnes did,

Speaker 6 that

Speaker 6 up until the day of the crime, Wells

Speaker 6 thought this whole thing was fake, realized that it was a double cross, it was a real bomb, and he tried to run away and was tackled, and they put a gun to his head and locked him into this device.

Speaker 9 So imagine this, Chuck. Imagine being Brian Wells, and you're agreeing to put on what you are.

Speaker 9 presuming is a fake collar bomb to go carry out a real bank robbery because you need money because you're indebted to crack dealers because you borrowed from crack from them to give to your girlfriend who's a prostitute who you have to give crack to to be with.

Speaker 9 And then you find out on the day of that this is a real bomb and they're putting it on you whether you like it or not.

Speaker 9 What a horrible,

Speaker 9 what a horrible turn of events for this poor guy. Yeah.
I mean, that's just so sad, no matter how you slice it. And then if you take his family's,

Speaker 9 if you take his family's opinion that he was 100% innocent, that he really was delivering pizzas and was accosted and had nothing to do with any of this, which I take with a pretty big grain of salt.

Speaker 9 I mean, that's just as bad. But it's bad either way.
Whether he was an accomplice at one point or not,

Speaker 9 it's super sad. There's a very sad thread that's running through this story in the form of Brian Wells, you know?

Speaker 6 Well, yeah. And on the final day of her trial, at the very, very end of her taking the stand, is when she finally said that she didn't know him, never met him.

Speaker 6 And the first time she had ever laid eyes on him was on the news that day. Right.

Speaker 9 Basically, he and Marjorie Deal Armstrong are fishing, right? They're fishing buddies.

Speaker 9 He's somebody that she would turn to. And she's finding out that her father is blowing through her inheritance, and she wants to put a stop to it.

Speaker 9 And so she approaches Barnes to get him to kill her father. But to get that 250K

Speaker 9 that he says he will kill her father for, she's got to rob a bank.

Speaker 9 So she turns to her friend, Bill Rothstein, to come up with this collar bomb to put it on this other person, Brian Wells, who's going to carry this out.

Speaker 9 And oh, by the way, we're also going to come up with a scavenger hunt to either throw the cops off or to actually make Brian Wells feel more comfortable, give him some sort of cover in case he is caught.

Speaker 9 And that's what we're going to go with Go Team. And Marjorie Deal Armstrong said, that's preposterous.
That wasn't me. Kenneth Barnes said that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 9 And then Bill Rothstein wasn't alive to contradict any of it.

Speaker 6 That's right.

Speaker 9 So she's sentenced, right? She's convicted as the mastermind of this plot.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the jury took about 11 hours, and she was convicted of

Speaker 6 armed bank robbery, conspiracy, and using a destructive device in a crime of violence.

Speaker 9 That's a big one, I'll bet. I'll bet that carries a hefty sentence with it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and she would die in prison, just like her prognosis said. She didn't, I think she lasted a few years.

Speaker 9 No, they gave her three to seven years, and she lasted seven.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so she finally passed away. And, you know, that's kind of the end of the story, even though there's a retired FBI investigator named Jim Fisher who said, I think they got this all wrong.

Speaker 6 I think that Rothstein was the guy the whole time. And he makes a decently compelling case, but it's, you know, everyone's dead now.

Speaker 9 Yeah, Jim Fisher's gone a little bit down the rabbit hole, if you ask me.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to tell with literally everyone having died.

Speaker 6 But for his money, he thinks it was Rothstein.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and so there's probably not many people who are familiar with the case who would say that it wasn't Rothstein who built the bomb.

Speaker 9 But what Jim Fisher's saying is like Bill Rothstein was behind everything.

Speaker 9 And Marjorie Deal Armstrong murdering Jim Roden was just like a gift that dropped in Bill Rothstein's lap that he could use to make all these puppets dance, including the cops.

Speaker 9 And that the whole point of it was to create this elaborate scheme, this elaborate crime that would puzzle people for

Speaker 9 years and years to come, which it's doing that. And that that was the point.
And that Brian Wells was going to die one way or another, right?

Speaker 9 Because I think the FBI said they concluded the whole scavenger hunt was a hoax and that Brian Wells was never going to survive this, didn't they? Yeah.

Speaker 9 So this is Jim Fisher's position. But like you said, now that everybody's dead, really the only question is, you know, just how complicit was Brian Wells is the last big question.

Speaker 6 That's right.

Speaker 9 And then there's one other guy who seems to have got off scot-free named Floyd Stockton. Did you look into him?

Speaker 6 A little bit.

Speaker 9 So he's a guy who was there.

Speaker 9 He was there. He supposedly handed Rothstein the bomb to put around Brian Wells' neck.
He was staying with Rothstein as a buddy on his couch, fleeing a rape charge in Washington.

Speaker 9 And somehow, for some reason, he got immunity and was not indicted, even though he was very much involved in this and he got off scot-free.

Speaker 9 And Brian Wells' family is going nuts over the fact that this guy's out there walking free, that he was a part of this

Speaker 9 caper, and

Speaker 9 he didn't see a second inside of a jail.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more people involved, Eamon.

Speaker 9 So what do you think? Do you think Brian Wells was complicit? And if so, how much?

Speaker 6 Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like

Speaker 6 I kind of believe the story that they were all in it together and he was probably double-crossed.

Speaker 6 This is just from reading about this thing many, many years later.

Speaker 9 Do you think Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the mastermind?

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 9 I don't know either. Maybe we'll never know.

Speaker 9 But we might, but probably not.

Speaker 9 You got anything else?

Speaker 6 I got nothing else.

Speaker 9 All right.

Speaker 9 Well, if you want to know more about the collar bomb case, you can type that word in the search bar, your favorite search engine, and it will likely bring up a very great article on Wired from Rich Shapiro.

Speaker 9 Read that. Start there.
It's great. And since I said Rich Shapiro, it's time for for listener mail.

Speaker 6 I'm going to go with one on emoji and John Adams. Hey guys, enjoyed the recent podcast about the history of emojis and emoticons.

Speaker 6 It reminded me of a discovery I made in the diaries of John Adams that makes a historical figure who's sometimes described as aloof seem completely charming.

Speaker 6 When the future president was about 22 years old, he made an entry in his diary in 1756 saying, a cloudy morning about 10, and he drew a little sunshine, break out, a warm day.

Speaker 6 He uses a little lying drawing on the sun that I always call an 18th century emoji.

Speaker 6 He likes the little creation so much he reused it a month later in the same diary, a misty morning, little sunshine, break out about noon.

Speaker 6 On the Massachusetts Historical Society website, the text of his letters and diaries is faithfully transcribed but in the cases a in these cases a parenthetical note tells readers that there are small drawings of the sun and advises them to refer to the scans of the handwritten page where you can actually see this.

Speaker 6 Apparently, he grew out of his habit, though, because his later diaries do not use the adorable little sun. Keep up the great work.
My wife and I host a local history podcast for Boston. Nice.

Speaker 6 It's tightly scripted. Oh man, he didn't even tell me what it was.
I would have totally shouted it out. What?

Speaker 6 I know.

Speaker 6 Big missed opportunity there, Jake.

Speaker 6 One of these days we'll be confident enough to have an unscripted conversation like you guys do. And that is from Jake Sconyers.

Speaker 9 Okay, so everybody's look up Jake Sconyers' Boston History Podcast, and he'll probably bring it up, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, probably so.

Speaker 9 Thanks a lot, Jake.

Speaker 9 Thanks for keeping up the good fight up there. That's pretty cool.
Good story, too. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jake did, tell us about your podcast.
That's great.

Speaker 9 You can send us all an email, the stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushodknow.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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