We’ve repeatedly binge-watched Making A Murderer, we’ve exhausted The Jinx, The Keepers and Wild Wild Country are over, and we’ve read every article possible on the Golden State Killer.
So Netflix’s Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist made a lot of true crime lovers happy when it dropped on the service.
The four-episode series is all about a fascinating crime known as the Pizza Bomber Case, which sounds like something straight off the Saw cutting room floor.
In 2003, a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells visited a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, demanding that the teller give him $250,000. In a wad of notes he handed over, Wells claimed to have a bomb attached to him – visible via a strange square bulge under his t-shirt – and that it would go off if the teller did not do as he told.
The teller couldn’t access the vaults, so Wells only left the bank with $8,702. The police soon caught him, and sat him down with his hands cuffed behind his back.
However, this is where things got weird. Wells told police that the collar bomb around his neck was real, and that it was going to go off. After 25 minutes, three minutes before the bomb squad arrived, the collar bomb detonated, killing Wells while he was in police custody.
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The notes in Wells’ possession featured a list of instructions from his captors, with each step in a twisted scavenger hunt leading to the keys to free him. It was later realised that he never would have had enough time to reach the keys.
This incident is tragic and bizarre enough – but the background of the crime saw it named ‘one of the most complicated and bizarre crimes in the annals of the FBI’.
Warning – true life spoilers ahead for any of you have not binge-watched Evil Genius yet.
Before his death, Wells claimed three black men had put the bomb around his neck when he delivered pizzas to them earlier in the day. The delivery man had been called to bring two sausage and pepperoni pizzas to a TV transmission tower.
The tower was beside a house owned by Bill Rothstein – who, one month after the fatal bank robbery, called 911 to report a frozen dead body in his freezer.
Rothstein claimed that his ex-fiancee Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong killed her boyfriend James Roden and asked him for help in removing his body and cleaning up the scene. Rothstein kept the body in his chest freezer for five weeks before calling the police, saying he was afraid of what Diehl-Armstrong would do to him.
Bizarrely, Rothstein had written a suicide note, which opened with ‘This has nothing to do with the Wells case.’
(Narrator – it had everything to do with the Wells case.)
Diehl-Armstrong was arrested for Roden’s murder and in 2005, she was sentenced to seven to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty but mentally ill. This was not the first boyfriend death Diehl-Armstrong was related to. In 1984, she was charged with murdering boyfriend Robert Thomas, but was acquitted after she claimed she shot him in self-defense. Four years later, her husband Richard Armstrong died of a cerebral haemorrhage after visiting the hospital with a head injury.
And in an effort to make a deal to be transferred to a minimum security prison, Diehl-Armstrong confessed to involvement in the Pizza Bomber case.
She admitted to having supplied the kitchen timers for the bomb and claimed that Rothstein – who died of cancer in 2004 – was the mastermind behind the crime. Diehl-Armstrong also claimed Wells was in on the robbery.
A few months later, a co-conspirator named Kenneth Barnes was arrested, who claimed Diehl-Armstrong was actually the mastermind behind the plot. Barnes claimed she needed the bank money to pay him to kill her father, who she believed was wasting her ineheritance. (In the end, Diehl-Armstrong was left with nothing.)
It was also claimed by another informant that Diehl-Armstrong killed James Roden because he was going to tell somebody about the robbery.
Police were also told that Wells believed he would be wearing a fake bomb, but was double-crossed, and was destined to die after being caught up in the hoax scavenger hunt.
In 2008, Barnes was sentenced to 45 years in prison on bank robbery, conspiracy and weapons charges. In 2011, Diehl-Armstrong was sentenced to life in prison – she died in 2017.
Evil Genius is streaming now on Netflix.
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