Original subtitles

- Hundreds of bank robberies you do in a career.

This one felt different from the minute I got there.

This thing was so confusing right from the start.

He's saying, I'm a pizza delivery driver.

- A group of Black men shot at me and put a bomb on me

and told me to rob the bank.

- Uh, the guy just walked out with, uh, I don't know

how much cash in the bag.

He had a bomb or something wrapped around his neck.

- You don't know if he's a hostage.

You don't know if he's a cooperator.

- Typically, with bank robberies,

you'll see a bomb hoax, never a real device.

- You hear this faint beep, beep, beep.

He turned just a little bit on the ground, and then--

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Hey, guys. - Kristy, how are you?

- Jerry, how you doing? Nice to see you.

- Nice to see you.

- Jerry Clark spent 27 years in law enforcement,

working for NCIS and the DEA before joining the FBI.

He mostly worked Violent Crime,

investigating hundreds of bank robberies.

- Andrew. - Hey, good to see you.

- Andrew Wilson is a 26-year veteran of the FBI.

He worked Counterterrorism before becoming the supervisor

of the resident agency in Erie, Pennsylvania.

- Oh, thank you.

It's a hot summer, 2003, August.

What's happening in your life, Jerry?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked Gangs, Crimes Against Children,

as well as Human and Drug Trafficking.

- It's an average day working at the FBI.

Get a call, bank robbery up at Peach Street

in Erie, Pennsylvania, PNC Bank.

- This one sounded a little different

right out of the chute.

We were getting reports that the robber

stood in line for a second to rob the bank.

You don't normally see that.

So he went around a couple people

and handed a note to the teller.

While she's reading the note,

he reaches in the teller counter basket

and pulls out a lollipop and starts sucking on it.

And the note said, "This is a bank robbery.

I need $250,000 in cash."

And the teller said to him, listen, that's a lot of money

and our bank manager is at lunch.

You're gonna have to come back.

Well, I'm robbing the bank. I can't come back.

So instead they filled a bag with $8,207.

So he was well short of the money he went in for.

And he walked out swinging the bag with the cane,

just as casual as could be.

We had great detail from an individual

in the bank who was talking to 911.

He's saying, hey, I'm watching this guy.

He's got something under his shirt, a bomb or something.

- Oh, wow.

- And he said he got in his vehicle,

and he only drove a short distance.

He stopped at a McDonald's, and he's in the flowerbed.

He's in there turning over rocks.

And then he obtains something from underneath one

of the rocks, and he gets back in his vehicle,

pulls through a lane to an Eyeglass World parking lot.

He had only got a few hundred yards.

Pennsylvania State Police identified the car.

They do a felony car stop.

So the trooper, after handcuffing him,

decides he's gonna slice open the shirt,

pull it back, and take a look at the device.

He takes a look and thought, boy, that looks awful real.

- Typically you work bank robberies,

you'll see a bomb hoax where it'll be

road flares taped together or a cardboard box

with wires sticking out.

It's never a real device.

- So when I roll up, I see an individual handcuffed,

talking to the Pennsylvania State Police.

It immediately felt different.

Hundreds of bank robberies you do in a career.

This one felt different from the minute I got there.

- So the guy's sitting on the ground.

Supposedly he has a bomb attached to him?

- Exactly, and under his shirt I could see the protrusion,

so he definitely had something under there.

Whether it was real or not, we didn't know.

We blocked off both ends of Peach Street,

which is a very, very busy road.

We set up a perimeter and we called the Bomb Squad,

and the Bomb Squad was en route.

- And you have the local news station setting up live

as he's sitting there in handcuffs.

- He has two Pennsylvania State Police troopers

leaning over their vehicles, guns drawn,

in a conversation with him.

And now I can start to hear the conversation.

They're asking him how he got here, what's going on.

He's saying, my name is Brian Wells.

He said, I work at Mama Mia's Pizzeria in Erie.

- Is he crying or saying help me?

- Not really. He was asking for a cigarette.

He was saying the bomb was heavy.

He was asking about us calling his boss.

- He said that he was told to deliver two pizzas

to a tower site, 8645 Peach Street,

and that when he got there,

he's saying a group of Black men shot at me

and put this thing on me and told me to rob the bank.

It bothered me that an individual

would drive that far down

into this wooded tower site area that nobody goes to,

and him feeling comfortable enough to do that.

One of the questions to him was, hey,

can you describe these people?

And he really couldn't.

Your mind is going, oh, my gosh,

he can't describe people that just put this on him?

You don't know if he's a hostage.

You don't know if he's a cooperator.

Something was off.

- So we've called the bomb techs.

They're rolling up and suiting up.

What's happening while they're doing that?

- We're trying to figure out

when they're gonna make an approach.

That was the only thing in my mind.

Hey, let's make this approach.

Let's find out it's...

- What do we have? - Not a real device...

- Right. - And let's end this thing.

- Right before 3:18, you hear this faint beep, beep, beep.

And everybody who was close enough to hear that thought,

what the heck is that?

- And I could see the individual handcuffed

was very sort of taken back by it himself.

- He turned just a little bit on the ground, and then--

- Anybody who was there on scene

will always remember it for the rest of their life.

I watched Mr. Wells. He fell back.

I watched his chest go down, and it never came back up.

You could feel the percussion from it.

And then you start hearing items flying

and pieces in the air landing on the concrete

and making noise.

And it just--you just couldn't believe what you just saw.

Immediately, you know, everyone wants

to run up and take a look.

And then somebody had the--the wits to say,

hey, secondary, secondary.

Everybody get back, get back.

Uh, because bomb builders love to hurt first responders.

We didn't know if it was a terrorism event,

if it was international, if it was gonna happen again

in ten minutes or two weeks.

- He's lying there, obviously deceased.

We're worried about a secondary.

What are--I mean, where do we go now?

- We had bomb techs make the approach

and start looking to see exactly what we had.

The device had a collar. It was like a handcuff.

The collar held a small box under his chin

that had four keyholes for keys to unlock the collar.

And then the box that held below

that other box was actually in pieces all over Peach Street.

- There were components that were identified,

such as kitchen timers.

- So what are your first steps in the investigation?

- So a lot going on.

Bank, we have people.

Pizza shop, we have people.

Tower site, we have people.

We had determined that the pizzas

were ordered from a pay phone

at the Shell station on 8228 Peach Street.

- What did you find in Brian's car?

- Well, we found the cane that he had taken

when he went into the bank.

The cane is actually a functioning shotgun

and would work if he would pull the trigger.

- Why did he have that? - So this was a mystery, right?

You are a bank hostage with a bomb around your neck,

but they still give you a gun.

So that was incongruent. How is this possible?

Why would you give the guy a gun?

- What else did you find in Brian's car?

- We have notes that we recovered from Mr. Wells's car,

indicating that he was to go on basically a scavenger hunt

to retrieve keys at each site

to unlock the collar around his neck.

There were also notes that the teller had,

but he had notes specifically designed for him.

- These are the notes that--from the car?

- These are actually some of the notes from the car.

- Tell me a little bit what these notes say.

- So the one that I have here,

this was in Mr. Wells's vehicle.

- Okay.

- And this was written specifically to him.

Bomb hostage is what they call him.

There's so much in here, but it's basically

telling him, "Do not delay.

Act now, think later, or you will die."

And there's even a little drawing that indicated

he needs to go to the McDonald's site.

It says, get out of the car near the small sign

that says "24 hours open."

Go in the flowerbed, and there's

a sign underneath a rock that's taped to the bottom.

So when Mr. Wells left the bank,

immediately he went to that flower bed in the McDonald's.

And there was a note to the police saying,

you're not as smart as me.

- So it says, "If bomb hostage is delayed

"for more than 10 minutes,

"he will not have enough time to continue.

"Our team has spent combined 7 1/2 years in prison

"perfecting this plan.

"Do not think that you can outsmart us

"in less than one hour.

"Save bomb hostage and people targeted for retaliation

by standing down."

- The word "retaliate," in nine pages of notes,

was used 51 times.

So when you start to think about that

on the psychological side, you're starting to think,

man, somebody's obsessive.

- When he was on the ground, did he ever say,

I have instructions, or I was supposed to follow this?

He never mentions this situation?

- He never mentions the scavenger hunt or these notes,

so we don't know that until we open his vehicle

and find the notes in there.

What we needed to do next was follow the scavenger hunt

that Mr. Wells was supposed to do

but couldn't because he's deceased,

and figure out what was at each site.

But that's a very dangerous situation, right?

Because we don't know what they're going

to find when they get there.

And that could be a, you know, a tripwire or sniper

or some sort of situation where they're going

to hurt other law enforcement.

So we had to do those very carefully.

- And where was he supposed to go next?

- He actually was to go through the back of the Eyeglass World,

which he did, and that's where he was a felony car stop.

But he was to go to a fire hydrant

in front of that Eyeglass World and tie

an orange ribbon indicating that he had

received the money from the bank.

He never got that far.

He then was to get back in the vehicle,

head southbound on Peach Street,

get on a major I-90 interstate, get off on I-79,

go northbound, and get off at a place

where he was to receive another note.

When we went to the site, the first site

we went to in the woods, as directed, went in.

There was an orange piece of tape

that was tied to a tree that was tied to a Folgers

coffee jar with a twist-off lid,

and inside that was another note.

What was missing at that site was a key.

After we received the note in the Folgers jar,

it indicated, get back on the highway interchange road

heading southbound and to go into a sign in the woods

that said McKean Township.

Unbelievable.

We got there, went into the woods.

Orange piece of tape, just like at the first site.

But it was torn, and there was nothing there.

So we don't know if that was the last site

or there would have been another note,

but somebody definitely got there before us.

And any of the sites that we went to from then on,

no keys were ever found.

- Andrew, when you saw this, were you thinking,

well, that poor bastard,

of course he's not gonna get through this?

- You could barely read all the notes,

you know, in an hour and figure out what to do,

let alone actually go to the places.

There's no way this guy was going to get the keys

to free the device from himself.

- So at this point, we had enough probable cause

to get a search warrant to go into Mr. Wells's house.

He lived in a real small apartment

behind someone's residence.

He lived alone.

He wasn't married and didn't have any children.

In the middle of the night, we had to go to the judge's house

to have her sign the warrant.

At 1:36 in the morning, we finally make entry.

Inside, we were surprised to see that

there was not much in there, not a lot of belongings.

The really key piece that we found in there

was not related to the device or the robbery,

but it turns out to be vitally important.

And that's a notebook on his desk

in the middle of his living room,

and it listed every person that he knew

and their phone number.

He did not know a lot of people,

because it could barely fill the page.

But the two people that he knew that were listed

in his own handwriting,

whose names his family didn't recognize,

were Jessica and Angie, and their phone numbers.

And both those phone numbers we did a subscriber check for,

and determined that they had criminal histories

for prostitution.

- When we approach these ladies and ask them about Brian Wells,

are they shocked that this happened?

- They weren't.

Something amiss here,

that neither of them seemed overly shocked about it.

Angie has a boyfriend named Jimmy, African American guy.

And after we did some digging,

we determined he was in the military

and he worked with explosives.

He actually worked at a position at a company in Erie,

would close the door sometimes at his job,

and he'd say, don't bother me. I'm working on something.

We're immediately thinking, oh, my God, he's building a bomb.

It's a manufacturing plant.

It's got all the tools he needs.

He could make the device.

- You're probably thinking, finally,

we got a break in the case.

Brian says he's kidnapped by Black guys.

You're talking to these ladies whose name are in his book.

- Yes.

Perfectly fit the scenario, the conceptualization

of what happened.

But it became clear that Jimmy didn't know Brian Wells

and had no connection to the case.

Then, after interviewing people at the pizza shop,

we determined that the pizza shop

had an employee, Greg, that was fired

for stealing from the cash register.

And so he becomes interesting to us,

because as he's walking out the door of being fired,

he said, you're gonna pay for this, to the owner.

So now we think he's retaliating against the owner

for being fired.

When we do interview him, we determine

that he was across the street at the time the bank

was being robbed, at a PetSmart,

saying he was filling out a job application.

It was like, can this be any more of a coincidence,

and how many coincidences can we have in this thing?

So we were interviewing Brian Wells's co-workers

at the pizza shop, and Robert Pinetti

was one of them.

Pinetti said, I've got some work.

I'm busy on shift.

Can you come back on Monday, and I'll talk to you then?

Well, of course, as it goes, Monday never happened,

because Pinetti dies on Sunday.

- What?

- Now you have two dead pizza delivery guys

from the same restaurant.

- Once the tox came back, we knew it was an overdose.

We knew that it was Xanax and methadone combination,

which was lethal synergistically.

- Was he known to be a heroin addict, or--

- No.

So whoever gave that to him

intentionally wanted him dead.

- Wow.

What makes you think he even knew anything?

- The fact that he was so nervous.

Robert Pinetti was actually going to his sister

looking for a gun that she had.

He was acting very suspicious and strange.

But unfortunately, it was one of the most

difficult parts for me, personally.

Whatever he knew was now gone.

So now we're totally in the dark here,

trying to figure out how this is all related.

Is Brian a hostage?

Is he a cooperator?

Are there other people involved?

Is this a bigger conspiracy?

Is it an outside force?

You know, all these different aspects that are out there.

Three weeks after the whole bombing incident,

Pennsylvania State Police receive a call, and it's a guy.

He describes himself as Bill Rothstein,

and he said that there's a dead body

in the freezer of his garage.

- Next time on "FBI True"...

- Bill Rothstein said Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

killed her boyfriend,

and that's why he's in the freezer.

- Three dead bodies in three weeks, all in close proximity.

What the hell is going on?

- The tower site where Brian Wells

delivers the pizzas is steps away

from Bill Rothstein's driveway.

- I helped her with it.

I put it basically in my garage.

She wanted it completely destroyed.

- If you were from Erie, you knew the name

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

She had a lot of death around her.

- Rothstein should be charged with the murder of Brian Wells

and a lot of other charges.

- You didn't shoot that guy, Marjorie?

- It'll come out in court what happened, and you'll see.