Original subtitles

- We get the call, bank robbery.

- Brian Wells said he was a pizza delivery driver.

He said a group of Black men shot at me

and put this bomb around me and told me to rob the bank.

- You hear this faint beep, beep, beep.

We were interviewing Brian Wells' co-workers

at the pizza shop.

Robert Pinetti said,

"Can you come back on Monday? And I'll talk to you then."

Monday never happened because Pinetti dies on Sunday.

Now you have two dead pizza delivery guys

from the same restaurant.

Three weeks after the whole bombing incident,

Bill Rothstein said that there's a dead body

in the freezer of his garage.

- 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."

- I remember getting the call on a Sunday morning.

And it's like, oh, my God,

now we have a dead body in the freezer, potentially?

But what's interesting and why it piqued our interest

is 8631 Peach is the tower site

where Brian Wells delivers the pizzas

before the bank robbery.

Two steps over is 8645 Peach,

the house where this dead body is.

Bill Rothstein said that a female that he identified

as Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong...

- He said the dead body was her boyfriend.

His name is James Roden.

She killed him and that's why he's in the freezer.

- Bill and Marjorie were actually engaged in the '70s.

They never got married. They still remained friends.

Bill was someone that she would have do favors for her.

- So Pennsylvania State Police gets a search warrant

for Rothstein's residence.

We were able to accompany them in there.

- So you go in the front door.

- Things everywhere, total disarray, dirty, garbage,

just an amazing mess.

- The freezer readily visible or no?

- Not really.

It was sort of tucked in, but immediately apparent

that there's a long freezer.

Everyone's standing around taking a look, and going,

what are we going to find in here?

When it's opened up, there's something in there.

It's wrapped in tarp and plastic and duct tape,

frozen solid, I mean, hard as a rock.

Because of the rigidity of the, now we know,

body that was in there, couldn't move it.

So we had to unplug the freezer, put it in the van,

take it to the coroner's office.

And it sat for-- - It took days to thaw out.

- Days.

- Three dead bodies in three weeks,

all in close proximity.

What the hell is going on?

- So immediately during the day and into the evening,

Rothstein is being interviewed

by the Pennsylvania State Police...

Sitting in their overalls.

He always wore these bib overalls.

His story was that Marjorie had shot James Roden

twice on the bed with a 12-gauge shotgun.

- That she murdered him.

- So those were her words? "I murdered him?"

Or "I killed him?" - No, that's not--

I don't know what her exact words were,

but that is what she said.

You know what I'm saying?

She indicated that she did murder

or that she had killed him.

- He went over to help her dispose of the body.

- The body in her house that she wanted to remove,

I helped her with it.

I put it, basically, in my garage.

That Saturday, she wanted it completely destroyed.

- He said he had nothing to do with the killing

except for the fact that he moved the body for her.

- Went into, like, histrionics, which is basically like,

oh, she leaned back in the chair and said,

nobody can help me.

You're the only one who can help me,

or something like that.

- I went to the barracks

and I wanted to interview Rothstein

because I'm trying to figure out if this is linked

to the Brian Wells case.

I open the door. I go in, introduce myself.

I say, hey, Bill, how are you doing?

Jerry Clark from the FBI. I'd like to talk to you.

And he said, listen, I need to tell you something.

And I go, what?

And he goes, I'm the smartest guy in this room.

And I looked at him, and I--

I said, well, my wife tells me that every night,

so let's get started.

So I said, hey, do you mind us asking you questions

about the Brian Wells case?

Well, he's saying this is not related to Brian Wells.

Hey, have you ever been down the tower site,

you know, right next to your house?

No, I never go back there. Hell, no.

I don't--I don't do anything back there.

He was a narcissist.

And so I thought, you know what?

I'm gonna play to that.

And I said, Bill, listen,

I'm just--I'm at a loss. Mind helping me out?

I said, why wouldn't Brian Wells, has that collar,

put around his neck and go right to a police department?

Why does he go rob the bank?

He looked right at me. He goes, hypothetically?

Yeah, yeah, Bill, hypothetically.

He said, what if they told them there were wires in the collar

and if he veered off course, they'd give him a shock?

I swear, I almost slid out of my chair.

- That's not public information.

- No. - Right.

- There were wires in the collar.

And nobody knew that

except the bomb builder and any of the investigators.

I go, you know what? Here's another thing.

I just can't figure this out.

I wouldn't even know how to make a bomb.

How would you make a bomb?

And he said, well, hypothetically?

Yeah, hypothetically.

Well, I'd cut the tops off of shotgun shells

and use the black powder to pour into the pipes.

Again, nobody knew

that it was Remington 12-gauge shotgun shells

that they'd cut open to use the black powder.

So two singular pieces of information

he knew and nobody else did.

I walked out of that room, like, beating my chest,

going, this guy's involved.

And I don't know the links yet, but he's involved.

- Rothstein blames Roden's death

on Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

Had you heard that name before?

- Boy, I sure had.

And if you were from Erie,

you knew the name Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

She had a lot of death around her.

She was on trial in 1988 for killing a boyfriend of hers.

She shot six times while he was on the couch sleeping.

She actually was acquitted in the case

for one of the first battered spouse defenses

used in Erie County.

Even though acquitted on that case,

she was charged with having a firearm that was unlicensed.

I actually was a parole officer in Erie County in the '80s.

I had her on supervision.

- I thank God and I thank the jury

and everybody that has always believed

to help me get through this. - OK.

- After being acquitted of that case,

years later, got married to Richard Armstrong.

He died of some blunt force trauma to his head.

And she explained that he had fallen

and hit the coffee table.

There was always this belief that

she had some connection to that.

So Rothstein takes us on a guided tour

of both Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong's house

where James Roden was shot on the bed

twice with a 12-gauge shotgun and at his house,

where he had moved the body from her house to his house.

- Ready to go, or? - Let's go.

- Some of the tools are mine

and some of the tools are Jim's.

- Jim? - The guy who died.

- OK.

- I dumped hydrogen peroxide here

once probably maybe Friday or Thursday

or something like that.

- Why?

- To get rid of any evidence of blood because she thought

that gets rid of evidence of blood.

So I dragged this bedsheet over to here on top of the tarp.

Then I took the tarp and folded it up around it

and tried to use some, uh, duct tape and packaging

tape to wrap it up.

- He ends up talking all about how she shot him,

how he took all the material from her house to his house,

including the mattress James Roden was shot on.

- There's the mattress that came off the bed.

- Bill, where did the body come in?

- Through the front door.

There wasn't this much clutter because

I hadn't put this much stuff here.

- Was it just he moving the body, or did he have help?

- So he did it all himself.

- So I tied the rope across.

I think I tied the two things into the pulley

and tried to just use it up as a single-lever pulley.

And it was real tough and I used my body to do it also.

- So the story he tells you is they

take the entire crime scene out of her house

and put it in his house.

- That's exactly what they were doing.

And the first thing they thought of

was, well, let's put him in the freezer.

Once he's frozen solid, we'll use a chainsaw,

cut him into pieces, and then put them in an ice chipper,

and then we'll throw and scatter

all the pieces around town.

So that was their initial plan.

And that's when Bill Rothstein became highly nervous

and didn't seem like he wanted to go through with it.

And that's why he called 911 and turned her in.

- When do we go talk to Marjorie?

- Marjorie, when she initially is arrested

for the death of James Roden,

she immediately asked for a lawyer,

so we can't really interview her.

- They're going to get a negligence suit filed by me

from my--my jail cell if necessary.

- But as she was being moved in the county courthouse,

you know, reporters would be there.

And she mentioned Bill Rothstein's

name and the Brian Wells case.

- What do you say about Rothstein?

- Rothstein should be charged with the murder of Brian Wells

and a lot of other charges.

- He says you committed the murder.

- Rothstein is a filthy liar.

- You didn't shoot that guy, Marjorie?

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

- So another thing about Marjorie is

she had a history of mental illness

in the behavioral health system.

She declared incompetent to stand trial on the state case

because Roden's death was still a homicide in the state

because it's not linked to the Brian Wells case yet.

So she's sent away for restoration.

In July of 2004, 11 months after the bombing,

I had heard that Bill Rothstein was in a local hospital.

So we go to the hospital and I look at Bill Rothstein

and I go, oh, my gosh.

And I, you know, watched my father die of cancer.

And Bill was far along in that process,

much further than I even thought.

So now I'm thinking, this may be my last chance, right?

So I start going at it a little bit.

Hey, Bill, you gotta help me here.

Are these connected?

Meaning Brian Wells case and James Roden's death.

I said, don't bring this with you.

Cleanse your soul. - Yeah, yeah.

- Lay it out. Tell me now.

And he lifted his big arm out of the bed, and he made a "no."

He wrote it, like N-O.

- I said, hey, Bill, don't bring this with you.

Are these connected?

And he lifted his big arm out of the bed, and he made a "no."

And four days later, he was dead.

He would never want you to think that you figured it out

and were smarter than him.

He would never give you the satisfaction.

He'd rather bring it with him. And he did.

Witnesses started coming forward that were

really helpful that didn't come forward for two years.

So in 2005, a UPS driver driving by the Shell station

on Peach Street where the phone call was made

ordering the two pizzas that Brian Wells delivered

to the tower site at 1:30,

the UPS driver, he's driving by.

He sees Bill Rothstein and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

at the pay phone.

To his credit, he knew Bill Rothstein,

so it wasn't even... - Oh, OK.

- An eyewitness identification issue.

- Right.

- The best thing about him being a UPS driver,

he has logs of his stops.

So it's not just, oh, somebody's just saying,

hey, I was there.

And when he turned and saw him, he made a comment to himself,

nice bibs, because Bill had on, you know,

bib overalls that he always wore.

- When do you finally get to interview Marjorie?

- She's two years in the restoration process

until she's finally restored.

She comes back to Erie,

pleads guilty for killing James Roden,

and really gets handed an amazingly light sentence,

quite honestly, 7 1/2 to 20 years.

She's then sent to State Correctional Institution

at Muncy in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania.

As soon as she's competent and already pled,

we're on the highway, right?

We're going to see her.

She sits down and I say, hi, I'm Jerry Clark.

We're here to talk to you about the Wells case.

And so she immediately blurts out,

I'm not talking to you about Wells.

She would never admit

that she was involved in the Wells case.

But at one point in one of the interviews,

Marjorie lets it slip out

that Bill Rothstein was looking for two kitchen timers.

And we thought, oh, man, nobody knows that

there were two kitchen timers in that device.

As we were getting up to walk out,

she said, and you better check out a guy named Ken Barnes.

And we go, Ken Barnes, all right.

And we had heard that name before.

He was a local crack dealer.

And we knew we had crack in this case

from one of our prostitutes, Jessica,

because she had told us that Brian Wells would

drive her around for her to buy crack cocaine.

And now we're thinking we're going to go back to Jessica

and say take us to every place that you bought crack cocaine.

And she took us to Ken Barnes's house.

We started to figure out that, all right,

Ken Barnes now knows Jessica, Jessica knows Brian Wells.

She introduces those two.

The state police, they ended up charging Ken Barnes

for selling crack to some undercovers.

And at least now we knew he was in the Erie County Prison

and we could interview him where we knew he'd be.

- How'd that go?

- We probably did 12 to 13, 14 interviews

until Barnes finally said,

all right, here's what happened.

Basically, they all met each other at Ken Barnes's house.

Brian Wells would drive Jessica over

to buy crack cocaine.

She and he would have sex.

Brian Wells would pay her.

She would then take that money and buy crack.

While they were there, they started to meet with Marjorie

at one point and discuss a bank robbery.

Hey, Brian, if we did this, you could make $5,000

by robbing this bank wearing a fake bomb and being a hostage.

And all that would happen is if you get caught,

you get to walk away because it's a hostage situation.

If you don't get caught, we'll take it off you.

It's fake anyway.

And, uh, we'll give you the five grand.

They then tell Pinetti, Brian Wells's coworker,

who also hung out at Ken Barnes's house.

Brian seems a little wishy-washy

about wanting to do this.

If you get him to cooperate, we'll pay you $5,000.

And so Pinetti was going to get something out of it, too.

- And Ken also gives us the reason why

they wanted to rob the bank for $250,000,

that Marge Diehl's father was giving away money

she thought was hers.

She wanted Ken to kill her father

so she would have that money that she believed was hers.

- She asked me if I would kill her dad.

And I said, why? - Just like that?

- Yeah. - Would you kill my dad?

- Yeah.

She said that he was giving away her inheritance.

And she was so damn obsessed with it.

- Ken agreed to do it, but said I need the $250,000 down.

- I said, well, Marjorie, I said, that would cost you.

And she goes, well, how much? I said $1/4 million.

- That's why they put it on the bank robbery notes.

We need $250,000.

- And we corroborate what Ken Barnes tells us

with a guy named Floyd Stockton

who was living with Bill Rothstein

when they were planning the robbery.

- What did you learn everyone's role was

from this gang of misfits?

- Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong wanted the money

to kill her dad to get the inheritance.

Bill Rothstein's role was to come up with the plan,

which is the scavenger hunt,

the bank robbery plan,

and making the device and the cane gun.

Ken Barnes was a very computer-savvy guy.

He was actually a television repair man at one point.

So those timers that were used in the device

was actually designed by Ken Barnes.

So according to Ken Barnes, the day before the robbery,

there was a pre-planning meeting.

The device wasn't shown to Brian Wells,

so he didn't know what it looked like.

The next day when he shows up to deliver the pizzas,

and they open the back of Bill Rothstein's van,

pull out the device,

Brian Wells looked at it and said, you know what?

This looks too real.

I don't want to do this anymore.

Brian started to run away.

Ken grabbed him, punched him, knocked him to the ground.

That's why he had dirt on his knees

in the photo in the bank.

Bill Rothstein shoots a gun in the air,

expended one shell casing.

And that's when he told Floyd Stockton

to put that device around Brian's neck.

They duped him. They convinced him it was fake.

And then they murdered him, basically.

I still to this day in my heart

don't believe he knew it was real.

- Did you ever find out

why Brian Wells was given the cane gun?

- Ken Barnes told me when Brian was robbing the bank

and saying he had a bomb, if they didn't believe him,

he was to raise up the cane and say, I have a shotgun here.

You better believe me. And I need the money.

- So how was Roden connected to this?

- Roden, he had a role going into it.

And Marge was concerned he was going to talk

to the authorities, and so she killed him.

- It's interesting.

There were never any Black guys

who forced Wells to Rob the bank.

They were all white.

They got rid of all of the people

that were the supporting cast to this caper.

- They sure did.

They weren't allowing for any witnesses.

And many times, in all the discussion about this case,

everybody thinks of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

as the mastermind.

- Were you the mastermind behind this Brian Wells case?

- I wasn't even involved. - You weren't involved?

You didn't know what was going to happen?

- I did nothing.

- You didn't do the collar bombing?

- Nothing. I'm innocent.

- Was Bill Rothstein the mastermind?

- Bill Rothstein and the government are framing me, OK?

Framing me, OK? And the rest of these lying--

lying, perjuring witnesses.

- Rothstein's dead. He can't defend himself.

- There's no physical evidence.

- But Bill Rothstein really masterminded this thing.

He put together the device.

He made the cane gun.

He had the scavenger hunt.

And it was his plan, not Marjorie's.

So to me, Bill Rothstein is the mastermind.

- So now that it's two decades later, what are your thoughts?

- I guess, in my career--

you know, I've--I've worked counterterrorism,

I've worked drug cases--

this is the most bizarre and heinous crime...

- Yeah.

- You know, that I was involved with in the FBI.

- I have such interesting thoughts about this case

because it really became a part of my fabric

of what my whole life had turned out to be.

Three people died in a horrific way,

and I'll never forget that.

And what doesn't help me is, 21 years later,

I still have people come up to me in Erie and say,

hey, did I ever tell you this about Marjorie?

Or did I ever tell you this about Bill?

And I'm thinking, why didn't you tell me that--

- Yeah, exactly. - All that time ago?

So it's still--you know, it still is with me,

whatever I do.