[line trilling]
- We hear a faint...
beep, beep, beep.
[booming, high-pitched ringing]
- And it exploded.
- Investigators found pages upon pages
of a bizarre scavenger hunt.
- It was gonna be an overcomplicated scheme
no one can solve.
- Having a human being go to sites
to try to save his own life.
I'd never seen anything like it.
- Not only was there a plan, but there was a plan
upon a plan upon a plan.
- They tricked him. They duped him.
They killed him.
It was just maniacal.
[beeping]
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[line trilling]
[tense music]
- I got a phone call at my desk
that there was a bank robbery in progress
and gave me the location on Peach Street.
Peach Street is one of the main thoroughfares of Erie.
It goes from south to north.
On the way there, the FBI was also called
'cause they handle all bank robberies.
- The initial details I received that there was
an individual who entered the bank,
had something underneath his shirt.
He had said that it was a bomb.
- The suspect left the McDonald's parking lot,
pulled over into the Eyeglass World
parking lot, where he was stopped.
- They asked the individual to get out of the vehicle,
walk slowly back toward them.
- They had him turn around, handcuffed him.
And, immediately, the guy said he was forced
to wear the bomb and to do the robbery.
At that time, they backed away from him
and started to set a perimeter up.
[indistinct radio chatter]
- That's when I pull up.
He identifies himself as Brian Wells.
He was working for Mama Mia's Pizza.
He received a call to deliver two pizzas
to a location on Peach Street.
And at that point, he was accosted
by a group of individuals who told him,
you need to go rob this bank.
And they put the bomb around his neck.
♪ ♪
- Immediately, our dispatch called Erie's city police,
which has a local bomb squad.
[indistinct radio chatter]
- While we're waiting for the bomb squad,
all of a sudden, we hear a faint
beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
- I told the guys to take cover.
And no sooner than that word bomb got out of my mouth,
it exploded.
[booming, high-pitched ringing]
- I watched Mr. Wells, who was sitting cross-legged,
fall directly back.
[somber music]
And I'll never forget this.
I watched his chest go down, and it never came back up.
♪ ♪
And I thought, oh, my God, this is fatal.
You know, this is just absolutely
the worst thing I had seen.
- I felt the bomb blast with little particles hitting me,
but it wasn't enough to hurt anybody else
or anything like that.
[sirens blaring]
- Within minutes of the bomb detonating,
the Erie bomb squad arrived on scene.
They ruled it safe to where the investigators could check.
- So when approach was made,
you could see the trauma that Mr. Wells had to his chest.
There was a big cavity all the way down to his spine.
[soft dramatic music]
The only thing left of the device
itself was still locked around Mr. Wells's neck.
The box that contained the bombs had detonated,
and those were the pieces landing on the ground.
We called our evidence response team
to collect all those pieces,
so the FBI Quantico lab could figure out
how that was all put together to help identify
the builder of the bomb.
- Traffic is stopped both ways on Peach Street.
And, obviously, people are wondering
what in the world is going on.
- Once we heard that the bomb went off
and someone was killed, like, who would do this?
Was it terrorism?
Was it some kind of organized effort?
It was just so odd and so horrible and so tragic.
- With it being just a middle-class kind of area,
more of a sleepy kind of town,
it was something that people were like,
how could this happen here?
- At this point, it was kind of an all hands on deck
type of scenario because law enforcement
just hadn't encountered anything
this bizarre before in Erie.
[dramatic music]
- After Mr. Wells was taken from the scene
to the coroner's office in Erie,
you have to start with what you know.
You know you have a deceased individual who robbed the bank.
You're gonna talk to the victim tellers.
You're gonna talk to anybody that was at the bank.
Witnesses identified Mr. Wells as very cavalier,
carrying a cane.
And it was described as black, long pipe that he had.
- He'd come in the bank, and he stood in line
to go up to the teller.
There was some lollipops there.
He actually took one out, unwrapped it,
put it in his mouth.
- That was such a psychology dichotomy for me.
How could you be that calm, knowing that
you had a live device around your neck?
- I early on thought he had to have some knowledge
of the plan, in my belief,
because of the way he acted.
And then he ended up jumping the line
and gave a note to the teller demanding money.
♪ ♪
- We got the note.
This was nine total pages of notes.
I've never seen anything like it.
- They're very repetitive
about how it was a bomb hostage.
This bomb's gonna go off.
We've been planning this for a long time.
- The bank robbery notes identified
what the bank teller needed, which was $250,000 in cash,
and not to call the police or hit any alarms
or the bomb would detonate and cause destruction.
- Banks do not keep that much cash on hand.
And so the teller gave him about $8,700.
And he walked out of the bank.
[tense music]
- And then during the search of Mr. Wells' vehicle,
we saw the cane.
And we immediately knew this was different
than any regular cane that we had ever seen.
Once the handle was open, you could see that
it actually contained a 12-gauge shotgun round
and was fully able to fire that.
We saw the bag of money. Then we saw notes.
They were instructions to Mr. Wells
to rob the bank as a bank hostage,
and then go on a series of stops,
like a scavenger hunt, to unlock the collar
around his neck.
♪ ♪
The first site was to go to the McDonald's,
which he did, into the flower bed,
turn over a stone and receive another page of notes.
And that note indicated he's to go back
around the Eyeglass World into the parking lot,
where there was a fire hydrant in front of the Eyeglass World.
And he was to tie an orange ribbon on that fire hydrant
to indicate he had received the money from the bank.
- And then someone was supposed to come by in a car
and pick up the money. It never got to that point.
- That's where he was pulled over
by the Pennsylvania State Police.
He never got to the fire hydrant.
And so the bomb detonated, and he was killed.
Because Mr. Wells couldn't do these additional sites,
we did them.
♪ ♪
- The investigators, as fast as they could in real time,
they started moving forward to try to catch more clues
down the road in this hunt.
- After the Eyeglass World, he was then to head on I-90,
heading towards Cleveland, get off towards 79 northbound
and go to another location
that was at the 180 exit, and go into the woods
and receive another note.
♪ ♪
So we went into the woods, and we saw an orange ribbon,
and attached to that orange ribbon was a Folgers jar.
Opened it up. There's another note.
And it would tell Mr. Wells to get back
on Interchange Road at I-79 southbound
to a McKean Township sign,
where he would go back into the woods
and receive another note.
But as it turned out, the McKean Township sign
that we went to had the orange ribbon,
but it was torn, and there was nothing at the end of that.
So we don't know if he was gonna receive
additional instructions or that's where
the bomb was to detonate.
But either way, he never got to that site.
It was just maniacal when you think about
having a human being go to sites
to try to save his own life.
- Now the investigators wanted to find out,
how did Brian Wells get involved in this
and picked as a victim?
♪ ♪
- We get a call about someone who was well known.
And there was a lot of death around her.
- He said that he helped her to get rid of the body.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- So after the bomb detonated and Brian Wells was killed,
investigators found a bizarre scavenger hunt.
♪ ♪
- Because of some of the references in the notes,
there's some indication that they were local people,
but there's no telltale signs in the notes
who might have done this.
- So the investigators wanted a lot more information
about Brian Wells to figure out,
how did he get involved in this?
- You don't know if he's a hostage.
You don't know if he's a participant.
We're gonna try to find out as much as we can about him.
♪ ♪
We immediately had people at the pizza shop
talking and interviewing individuals there,
including the owner of the pizza shop.
- What we learned is that Brian Wells had been
a pizza delivery man for at least 10 years.
He had a number of friends that he worked with.
They described him as quiet, laid back, easygoing.
[gentle music]
- Brian Wells was 46 years old,
single, never married, no children,
lived in a cottage-like house
behind another house.
Brian Wells grew up in Erie, was close to his mom.
He had siblings as well, and he liked the "Survivor"
television show, puzzles.
And what we learned was probably
his favorite puzzle was something
called "The Great Key Hunt."
One of the newspapers in Erie would put
clues in the newspaper where people
would have to find this key.
And then if you got the key, you'd go to the newspaper
and open a locked box,
and there'd be a prize in the lock box.
- In the past, Brian came pretty close
to winning a car for following clues
from one location to the next.
So that would show me that somebody knew Brian Wells
and purposely targeted him
with the scavenger hunt in the notes.
And we backtracked that Mama Mia's
because that's where the initial call
came in to order the pizzas.
- It was determined that a call came in around 1:30.
- From what we were told, it was a male.
Brian Wells took the call and got the information
for the pizza order...
and left, heading towards
8631 Peach Street,
which is a tower site
that is not seen from the road,
and it's enclosed by trees.
- And we're gonna immediately search that area to determine
what evidence we can find there.
- And at that location, they found
tire marks that ultimately matched with Brian's car.
They also matched shoe impression marks
with shoes on his feet at the time of his death.
- And there was a scuff mark on the ground in the dirt
that really determined to us that there was some struggle
that took place back there.
♪ ♪
- But there was very little else in the vicinity.
[mysterious music]
Then the phone call to Mama Mia's Pizza
was traced back to a Shell station.
- The call was made from a payphone
outside the Shell station, which was up the street
from the tower site.
- And so we obtained video footage
from the Shell station,
pulled all the cash register receipts
to try to figure out who had called for the pizzas.
- But nothing was found on the video,
no evidence as to who might have done this.
- We then obtained a search warrant
for Mr. Wells' house.
It had very little furniture
or much in the closet at all.
But on the desk in the living room
were two notebooks, and in these notebooks
were the names and phone numbers
of pretty much everybody he knew.
And we started to identify every person on that list.
♪ ♪
There were two names on that list,
Angie and Jessica,
that Brian Wells' family didn't recognize.
We immediately want to talk to them.
And with their phone numbers, we do a subscriber check.
We find out who their identities are.
We find both had criminal history for prostitution.
We couldn't locate Angie, but Jessica was interviewed.
And she ended up saying that Brian Wells
was a friend of hers,
and he would drive her around the city of Erie
to purchase crack cocaine.
That information was interesting to us.
[tense music]
But at that point, we were still
running down all the initial things related
to the order for the pizzas,
and one of the employees, who also was
a pizza delivery driver for Mama Mia's Pizza,
Robert Pinetti, was working that day.
When we went to see him, he said he was on his shift.
Would you mind coming back on Monday?
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
But then on Sunday night, we get a call...
that Mr. Pinetti was found deceased.
♪ ♪
Two dead pizza delivery drivers within three days.
You're immediately thinking, this can't be coincidence.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
Two dead pizza delivery drivers within three days,
both working at the same pizza shop.
♪ ♪
There's no coincidences in Homicide, right?
This can't be one.
- It seemed odd that a fellow pizza delivery
individual by the name of Robert Pinetti
died within a few days of his buddy, Brian Wells.
- He had an overdose of Xanax and methadone,
which killed him.
When we talked to family members of Mr. Pinetti,
we determined that this was out of his character.
But they had said that, right after the bombing,
he had been very nervous and that he was talking
to people about trying to get a gun.
And we found that to be very interesting.
♪ ♪
- Could it have been where he was worked up
because of what happened to Brian,
and then took something to calm himself down
and just didn't watch what drugs he was using?
Or was he purposely poisoned--
what we call hot shot, where somebody
would give him something that would
automatically overdose him?
But when they did the autopsy,
they weren't able to say this is an overdose
caused by somebody else.
- So that added another layer of mystery
as to what happened here.
At this point, the investigators
aren't ruling out anything.
- But there was nothing initially
to determine if Mr. Wells and Mr. Pinetti's death
were connected, so we had to move on
to the next evidence for the case.
And then our lab at Quantico did an amazing job
with both the explosive device
and the cane gun.
Our experts were saying the builder of the cane
and the builder of the bomb
were probably the same individual
because of the craftsmanship
and the manner that they used to construct it.
- The bomb itself was angle iron
and pieces of pipe that was filled
with just regular gunpowder
to make the bomb explode.
- But the timing mechanism in this device was
really, really well-designed.
- The timers were wired in series.
So the first timer would run its 30 minutes,
and then it took the second timer
to run to where they would make contact
that would detonate the bomb.
- The ultimate goal of this premeditated plan
was to see someone killed.
- This plan is so unbelievably diabolical.
So investigators, including myself,
with the Behavioral Analysis Unit
worked on the profile of the bomb builder for a few weeks.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
The profile indicated that the bomb builder was probably
a shop teacher or a handyman, was very meticulous,
probably a loner.
- The person who did this was most likely a packrat,
someone who collected things, someone very intelligent,
electrical engineering background--
so more than a hobbyist.
- This was a profile of who we would be looking for.
[tense music]
- And then three weeks into the investigation,
state police receive a 911 call from a gentleman
by the name of Bill Rothstein.
- This case just kept getting crazier and crazier.
- Somebody calling in saying, hey, I have a body
in my house is very odd.
- Rothstein was very distraught,
said he was contemplating suicide.
He wanted to get investigators involved to get the body out
and arrest this lady, who he identified
as Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong,
who was responsible for the murder.
- He said the person in the freezer
is an individual named James Roden,
who was the boyfriend of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.
- He said that they got into a fight
and that she shot him, and he helped her
to get rid of the body.
- He did not tell us what they were arguing about.
He just said they had an argument.
But Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, if you were from Erie,
you knew who she was.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was an interesting,
interesting woman. Born and raised in Erie.
She had stayed here her whole life.
- Marjorie had a history dating all the way back
to the '80s, when she shot and killed a boyfriend
while he was laying on the couch.
- She tried to dispose of the body afterwards,
making frantic phone calls,
trying to pay people to dispose of the body.
- But ultimately, she was acquitted
for a battered spouse defense and was freed.
- So then in 1992, her husband at the time
went to the emergency room, and she said he had fallen
and hit his head on a coffee table.
- And that led to an aneurysm, which he later dies from.
- And there's some speculation
that she might have been involved in his death.
- But there was never any charges rendered.
- And then she did have a landlord
who hung himself, unfortunately.
- She definitely wasn't involved in that,
but he did say that, according to
the coroner's report-- that he was being harangued,
and we think that was by her.
♪ ♪
- There was a lot of death around her.
At that point, the police convinced
Mr. Rothstein to actually come
to the Pennsylvania State Police barracks,
which he did.
While Bill Rothstein is detained,
investigators are going to his residence.
[dramatic music]
- Once we got to Bill Rothstein's house,
we saw a lady sitting on the bed in the bedroom--
learned her to be Marjorie Diehl.
Marjorie was angry and lost it.
She was just hollering, and she wanted us out of there.
And I had a couple troopers stand by in that bedroom
while I go out and search that garage.
[camera clicking]
There's junk on both sides.
You have to actually make a path
to get through all the junk.
But I found the freezer.
Open it up,
and there was a body in the fetal position
wrapped up with clear plastic.
♪ ♪
Once I found the body,
Marjorie was in a state of shock.
And I said, Marjorie,
I'm now placing you under arrest
for killing James Roden.
- As the police are searching Bill Rothstein's house,
they find what is a very peculiar suicide note
in which Bill says that this has nothing to do
with the Brian Wells case.
- Why would you even put that in the suicide note?
- It was very bizarre.
[tense music]
- That information was passed on
to the federal law enforcement agents
investigating the Brian Wells case.
- Bill Rothstein's house,
that's exactly next-door to where
the pizzas were delivered by Mr. Wells.
That cannot be a coincidence.
And so my job was to determine if Mr. Wells,
Mr. Pinetti's death, and Mr. Roden's death
are all in one case.
And so immediately, I responded to
the Pennsylvania State Police barracks.
However, I could not interview Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
because she had requested a lawyer.
But they allowed me to interview Mr. Rothstein,
and that's what I did.
[mysterious music]
So Bill Rothstein identifies his relationship
with Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
as going all the way back to the 1970s,
where they had met at his father's Rola Cola business.
They dated, and they were actually engaged at one point.
And they sort of drifted a little bit apart,
but still were very good friends.
♪ ♪
When I asked Rothstein about the Wells case,
he was sticking with the story,
I don't know anything about the Wells case.
I've never been back on the tower site road.
Also, Mr. Rothstein was one of the most arrogant
people I had ever interviewed.
He was a true narcissist.
I picked up on it, and I worked with that.
I said, Bill, I just can't figure this out.
Hypothetically, how would you even
go about making a pipe bomb? And he said, hypothetically?
Yea, hypothetically.
He said, I would cut the tops off a shotgun shells
and pour the black powder in to the pipes.
I almost slid out of the chair
because I knew from our lab
that that's exactly how that bomb was constructed.
Also we find out he was a shop teacher.
He worked in HVAC.
He lived alone and was a loner.
He had a shop in his garage, and he was a packrat.
He would fit a number of the characteristics in the profile
of the bomb builder perfectly.
I knew he was involved.
But he's not gonna make any confession right there.
So I terminated the interview at that time.
Said, Bill, hopefully we can talk again soon.
He was further detained at that time
for the dead body in the garage.
And he was in discussions with the Pennsylvania State Police
on James Roden's murder,
helping cooperate against Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.
Bill told us he feared that she was gonna
kill him if he didn't do something,
and that's why he turned her in.
[dramatic music]
- We had already searched Bill Rothstein's house,
where we found the body.
So two days later, we obtained a search warrant
for Marjorie Diehl's house, where she killed Roden.
- Ready to go, or are you still writing?
- Mr. Rothstein went to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong's
house with the investigators.
- During the admission of Bill Rothstein,
it was discovered that Marjorie Diehl purchased
a 12-gauge shotgun, shot James Roden,
and solicited Bill Rothstein
to help her clean up the crime scene.
- So what the investigation determined was that
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was responsible
for James Roden's death,
but Marjorie and Bill were not yet connected
to the Brian Wells case other than the note at Bill's.
- Bill Rothstein pled guilty for abuse of a corpse
and disposing of evidence.
But Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was immediately
declared incompetent to stand trial
for the James Roden case.
- Investigators were prohibited by law
from talking to her about the Wells case.
And that puts everything on hold.
- This was a real obstacle in this case.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
And then I hear Bill Rothstein's
in the hospital, very ill.
- Bill Rothstein was suffering from cancer.
The last time they interviewed him,
he essentially was dying.
[vitals monitor beeps]
- I said, Bill, don't take this with you.
Cleanse your soul.
Tell me these cases are related.
And he lifts his big arm out of the bed and makes a no.
♪ ♪
Four days later, he dies.
This was really a huge blow to our investigation
because we knew he had knowledge
about the Brian Wells case.
He just wasn't sharing it.
And now that he's gone, we weren't gonna get it.
With Bill Rothstein dead,
we really needed to talk to Marjorie.
But we had to wait until 2005.
♪ ♪
- In January of 2005,
she pleaded guilty but mentally ill
in Roden's death.
She was sentenced to 7 to 20 years in state prison.
Once she got there
and her mental health had stabilized,
then the investigators were able to talk
to her about the Wells cases.
- And the first piece of information that she gave
was that they should take a look at a man
named Ken Barnes.
He had something to do with the robbery.
- This plan, it just kept unraveling
into this one giant,
really diabolical scheme to kill.
[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- In Erie, the state police and the Erie city police
knew Ken Barnes, whose name first arises
from Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in 2005
as having been a known crack dealer.
We started thinking, wow, that's interesting
because we did have crack in this case
come up in the past.
And that was with Jessica,
whose name was in Brian Wells's notebook.
- This woman didn't have a car.
And so she was a friend of Brian Wells.
And Brian would drive her to buy drugs.
- And we started thinking, wow, maybe here's our connection.
[tense music]
We started interviewing Ken Barnes.
And he initially would say he doesn't know anything.
He knows Marjorie. He knows Bill Rothstein.
And he knows Brian Wells because Brian Wells
would drive Jessica over
to his house to buy crack cocaine,
but wasn't linking them together.
- During that time, we received a tip from
a UPS driver that he had seen William Rothstein
and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong at a payphone
outside near the PNC Bank,
the exact payphone where the call
was made to order the pizza.
So we started going back to the footage
that we had inside the Shell station
and determined that we had Ken Barnes
inside the Shell station.
So we interviewed him again.
- But Ken Barnes, initially he wasn't
very cooperative or forthcoming.
- It was a series of just interview after interview
after interview for years.
It was intense at times, but we all cared.
And I just was not gonna let it go unsolved.
- Every time we went to have a conversation with him,
he'd talk with us.
It may only be for a short time,
but he would talk to us.
- Until finally he reached the point where,
OK, I'm just gonna tell you everything I know.
- Ken Barnes finally decided
to tell the truth and to, in fact,
act as a cooperating witness.
- He said he knew Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
because they would go fishing at the South Pier in Erie.
He knew Bill Rothstein because he was friends
with Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.
- The way Ken Barnes puts it, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
is upset because her father was worth about
more than $1 million at the time.
And he is handing out his money
to friends and neighbors,
even the mail carrier, because he doesn't want
her to get money when he dies.
She believes that that money belongs to her.
That's her inheritance.
And then if he dies now, she'll get the money.
So Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong solicits Barnes
to kill her father, and Barnes said he'd do it for $250,000.
So Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Bill Rothstein
came up with this plot to rob this PNC Bank branch,
and that money would be used to pay Ken Barnes as a hit man.
- According to Ken Barnes, Bill Rothstein
decides, well, I'm gonna come up
with the perfect crime.
- It's gonna be an overcomplicated scheme
no one can solve.
- Let's use a patsy to rob the bank.
They'll be a hostage.
We'll get rid of him as a witness.
They all decided Brian Wells would be perfect for this.
He's that guy that comes over with Jessica.
He is very naive, and we could talk him into this.
- What they told Brian was that, if he was caught,
he'd say, hey, I don't know who did this.
I was a bomb hostage.
- Ken Barnes told law enforcement that Brian Wells
agreed to participate in the bank robbery in exchange
for $5,000, but we don't think
that Brian really knew the full extent
of what he was agreeing to do.
- He was told the device would be fake.
And then Barnes said there was a pre-planning meeting
on August 27th, the day before the robbery,
and Mr. Wells was there.
But he never saw the real device.
A day later, when the bank robbery happens,
Brian Wells shows up, delivers the pizzas.
They go to put the bomb on him. He sees it.
He goes, that looks too real.
I don't want to do this anymore.
Ken Barnes grabs him, punches him,
knocks him to the ground, and that's when
they put it around his neck.
♪ ♪
- They give him the notes, and they give him the cane gun,
and then he's on his way.
And they told him that, if he disclosed what happened,
they were gonna kill him.
- But he was never going to survive because he would
have never had time to accomplish
all those routes he was to do.
That bomb was just going to detonate
wherever he was in that scavenger hunt.
They tricked him. They duped him.
They killed him.
And it was horrific what happened to him.
- We also had other corroborating witnesses
from the various prisons that Marjorie
had been incarcerated at.
- She would sit in there, and she would tell everybody
what she did, brag about being involved
in the Brian Wells case
and that she shot her boyfriend,
James Roden, because he would not cooperate.
♪ ♪
Through the inmate witnesses,
we determined that James Roden was
part of the scheme to rob the bank.
- And in the end, he had an argument with Marjorie,
and he threatened to contact law enforcement
and tell them about their plans to commit the bank robbery.
And that's why she killed him, to keep him quiet.
- Before his death, Bill Rothstein had said
that they had an argument.
But it turns out that argument becomes
pretty important as to what they were arguing about.
♪ ♪
The inmate witnesses also told us
there was an individual that was living
in Bill Rothstein's house right before the bank robbery.
His name was Floyd Stockton.
♪ ♪
After doing criminal history,
we realized that Floyd Stockton
was a wanted fugitive from the State of Washington
for a rape charge, and he had been hiding out
in Erie, Pennsylvania.
So we found Mr. Stockton and arrested him
for the rape charge, and before he was extradited
back to Washington State, we interviewed him.
Tell us about the Brian Wells case.
[tense music]
- Floyd Stockton was a very close friend of Bill Rothstein
and gave a long statement and made the admission
he was involved in the case.
- Mr. Stockton was at the pre-planning meeting.
And his role was to put
the bomb around Brian Wells's neck.
Also, he saw Robert Pinetti,
the other pizza delivery driver.
His role was to make sure that
Brian Wells continued to cooperate.
And he was gonna get money to do that.
- Pinetti talked him into it. Basically, they were friends.
Now, we know Pinetti was definitely
involved in the plot.
- After the death of Brian Wells,
I think he panicked.
I think he was looking for something to calm him down.
And I think Ken Barnes gave him a hot shot.
That's never been charged, but that's what we think happened.
So all pieces together, and this plan
is like no other we've ever seen.
♪ ♪
- Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
is furious when she learns that
her father has been spending his money that she believes
to be her inheritance.
- So she solicits Ken Barnes for $250,000
to kill her father.
- And they would get the $250,000 by robbing a PNC Bank.
- Then they found somebody who was allegedly a hostage,
Brian Wells, to further their plan.
- Over a couple of months, Bill Rothstein
constructed the bomb and the cane gun,
and came up with the scavenger hunt.
- One day before the bank robbery,
all of the co-conspirators got together
at the tower site to discuss the robbery.
- The next day, call comes in to the pizza shop.
Brian Wells delivers the pizzas.
The device is attached to his neck.
And then Brian Wells drives directly to the bank
and robs it, still believing that that device is a fake.
- He got into his car, and he began the scavenger hunt.
- And then at some point, they were gonna
intercept him to get the money.
- But during the rest of the scavenger hunt,
the bomb was set to explode.
And that would eliminate Brian from going to the police.
- Not only was there a plan, but there was a plan
upon a plan upon a plan.
- It's difficult to think that somebody
was tricked into death.
I still feel horrible for the Wells family.
- The co-conspirators treated Brian Wells
as a thing, not as a person.
He was treated as a-- as a means to an end.
[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Ken Barnes and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong
were charged with three offenses--
conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery,
committing the armed bank robbery,
and then they were charged with using
a destructive device to commit the armed bank robbery.
- They were not charged with murder.
There's no federal charge for murder,
but the conspiracy charges
apply to bank robbery involving a death.
♪ ♪
- William Rothstein was already deceased,
so he wasn't included in the indictment.
Floyd Stockton, we chose not to charge him,
but to use his cooperation to be able to charge
Ken and Marjorie.
♪ ♪
[gentle music]
♪ ♪
- This is probably the most premeditated case
you'll ever see.
Their whole plan was crazy.
You're gonna hire a guy to kill your father,
and he wants $250,000.
So you're gonna have a guy rob a bank,
and then you kill three men.
And at the end of it,
Marjorie didn't inherit any money.
It's such a bizarre situation.
- It's a very strange case,
and it's the strangest one I've ever worked on,
something nobody will ever forget.
- This plan and this plot is evil,
just no consideration of human life.
- This happened in Erie, Pennsylvania,
a town I love and adore,
and I'm just really, really glad
that we were able to get to the bottom of it
and bring justice.