# The INFAMOUS Pizza Bomber

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 5 Feb 2025, 58 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9499479305.mp3

Today's episode is on the 'pizza bomber', Brian Wells. This is one hell of a case, including a heist, an abduction, a scavenger hunt, multiple murders, a bank robbery, a collar bomb and a pizza delivery guy. Trigger Warning: suicide, cancer, abduction Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] Oh sheet. Honey, chill, it's just laundry.
[0:03] Not that I'm talking about these arm and Hammer power sheets.
[0:06] All the power of arm and Hammer laundry detergent in a
[0:09] convenient tossable sheet. Oh sheet.
[0:13] That's what I'm saying. And arm and Hammer power sheets
[0:16] deliver an effective clean at a great price.
[0:18] Think of all the laundry we'll do.
[0:20] And all the money we'll save, oh sheet.
[0:24] Arm and hammer, more power to you.
[0:28] Around 1:00 PM on August 28th, 2003, a pizza shop received a
[0:33] fake phone call and within two hours of receiving that, one of
[0:38] their employees was in a bank trying to rob it with a collar
[0:42] bomb around his neck. This is one of the most bizarre
[0:46] and twisted cases we have ever covered.
[0:49] Today we're going to be talking about Brian Wells and the pizza
[0:52] bombing. Now, before we get into the
[0:56] case, I do just want to give my usual disclaimer that I'm in
[0:59] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[1:02] video. This video is for educational
[1:04] purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
[1:08] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:10] one video. Just a couple of content
[1:12] warnings before we get into the case.
[1:14] Today we're going to be discussing themes of suicide,
[1:17] cancer, and abduction. So if any of those are things
[1:20] that you don't want to hear about right now, I completely
[1:22] understand. Click out this video.
[1:24] Hopefully I'll get to see you in some other time with a different
[1:26] video, but for now, look after yourself.
[1:29] And with all that being said, let's get into the case.
[1:31] So today's case takes place in Pennsylvania in a city called
[1:35] Erie, which immediately sets the tone for this one.
[1:39] A city called Erie and a case happens of course.
[1:42] On August 28th, 2003, police in Erie received a 911 call of a
[1:47] bank robbery that was actively still going on.
[1:50] As they were receiving these calls, a short, bald,
[1:54] middle-aged man had hobbled into the bank just a few minutes
[1:57] earlier with his walking stick, and he just seemed like a
[2:00] regular, regular customer. You know, apart from the fact
[2:03] that he had this huge thing around his neck that he had
[2:08] covered up with a T-shirt. He made his way to the desk and
[2:11] he slid the bank. Tell her a note that Red Gather
[2:14] employees with access codes to vault and work fast to fill bag
[2:18] with $250,000. You only have 15 minutes.
[2:23] He then pulled down the neck of his shirt to reveal what he'd
[2:26] been hiding this whole time. A big metal collar around his
[2:31] neck with a bomb strapped to it. He then lifted his walking stick
[2:36] to show that it was actually a gun.
[2:38] It was a shotgun that had been disguised not very well, but no
[2:42] one had actually noticed it yet. So this guy had a bomb around
[2:45] his neck, a shotgun on him, and he's asking the bank tellers to
[2:49] give him quarter of $1,000,000. And obviously bank staff are
[2:53] trained to just hand over the money.
[2:56] It's not worth losing your life over.
[2:58] So they start going into the back and they're like unlocking
[3:01] the vaults and stuff. They're trying to get this
[3:02] money, but it's like physically impossible.
[3:06] Banks have so many safeguarding. Safeguarding is that the word to
[3:10] use? They have like safety features
[3:13] in place like 1 after another after another.
[3:15] There's like players to bank security.
[3:19] So there was no way that just a few of the tellers were going to
[3:22] be able to gather $250,000 from the vaults within 15 minutes.
[3:27] It's just there's only certain people that have certain codes
[3:30] like that. There's a lot more protocol
[3:32] around it. So the staff kind of tried to
[3:34] remain calm, realizing that they couldn't fulfill this request.
[3:37] And so they go over to this man with the collar bomb on, and
[3:41] they tried to explain to him that, look, we don't keep that
[3:44] much money easily accessible. Like we can't, we can't fulfill
[3:48] this, this demand that you've given us, by the way, this whole
[3:52] time. So the tellers had been like
[3:54] scrambling about trying to get this money, trying to unlock the
[3:57] vaults. And this whole time, this man,
[4:00] the bank robber, seemed so creepily calm, like he just
[4:05] didn't. He just didn't look like he was
[4:07] in the middle of a bank robbery. He wasn't like tense or
[4:10] aggressive at all. He was literally just standing
[4:13] as if he was a normal customer. He was just like looking around
[4:16] at 1:00. One point he even grabbed a
[4:17] lollipop out of the bowl of sweets that they had on the
[4:20] counter at the bank. And he's just sucking on a
[4:22] lollipop the whole time. Staff are trying to explain to
[4:25] him like, look, we can't get you this amount of money that you've
[4:28] asked for. And so in the end, the man just
[4:30] tells them to give him as much money as they possibly can in
[4:33] cash. So they hand him over a bag of
[4:35] like loads of notes and whatever, and he leaves the
[4:38] bank. And inside this bag, there was
[4:40] only like $8000. Actually, I have the exact
[4:43] number, 8702. So he went in there with a
[4:46] collar around his neck, a shotgun disguised as a cane,
[4:50] asking for 1/4 of $1,000,000. And he came out of there with
[4:54] less than 10 grand. But yeah, the robber ended up
[4:56] leaving the bank without hurting anyone in the process.
[4:59] But by this point, there'd already been quite a few phone
[5:02] calls to the police. A few of the people that were
[5:05] like, a few of the customers that got kind of trapped in the
[5:07] bank when he came in had actually managed to, like, sneak
[5:10] out of the back. And he didn't seem to care.
[5:13] Like, like I said, he was just really creepily calm.
[5:16] He wasn't angry at people and like, threatening them to stay
[5:18] in place. He didn't seem to care that
[5:20] people were escaping. But yeah, he left everyone
[5:23] unharmed. But the police were well aware
[5:25] that this had happened. And they were on their way.
[5:27] And literally within like 10-15 minutes of the robber leaving
[5:31] the bank, he was caught by police.
[5:34] They must have just intercepted him.
[5:35] They headed straight to the bank, and he was still kind of
[5:38] in the area. So they found him and they
[5:40] apprehended him. They either pulled him over into
[5:42] a parking lot or he was already in this parking lot of an
[5:45] eyeglass world. And that is where the next like
[5:49] major part of this case takes place, just out in the open in a
[5:53] parking lot. The man got out of his car,
[5:55] still had this big collar bomb attached to him, and police went
[5:58] over and handcuffed him and arrested him for armed robbery.
[6:01] But they were very, very scared about this device around his
[6:05] neck. Obviously, they knew nothing
[6:07] about it. It could be fake, but it could
[6:10] be horrifically real. And they didn't know how
[6:13] sensitive it was. They didn't know if he had the
[6:15] power to at any time. They just didn't know anything
[6:19] about this bomb and it was too dangerous to do anything like
[6:23] especially for normal police officers.
[6:25] They needed to get proper bomb squads in.
[6:28] So for the time being to make sure that everyone was safe, you
[6:31] know, like on the police force and just generals, civilians.
[6:34] They sat this guy down and there's these like infamous
[6:38] photos from this case of him sitting like cross legged with
[6:41] his arms handcuffed behind him. They sat him like in front of
[6:44] one of the police cars and all of the police went and stood
[6:47] like far back away from him. They parked their cars between
[6:51] them and him because they were so scared of this bomb going off
[6:54] at any minute. They didn't know how powerful it
[6:56] was. None of the officers tried to
[6:59] get the bomb off him. None of them wanted to touch it,
[7:01] of course. So as they waited for the bomb
[7:04] disposal unit, bomb diffusal, as they waited for the bomb squad
[7:07] to arrive, police kind of stood far away from this, this guy
[7:12] with the collar bomb. And they're shouting questions
[7:14] to him because they want to try to understand what's going on
[7:17] here. They're shouting to him like,
[7:18] what's going on? What is that?
[7:20] This guy was actually really cooperative with police.
[7:22] He was shouting back to them, answering any questions that
[7:25] they had. And quickly, police learn a lot
[7:27] about this guy. He was called Brian Wells.
[7:30] He said that he was a pizza delivery driver in the area and
[7:34] he had been called out earlier that day to deliver a pizza.
[7:38] But when he'd gotten there, the people that he was supposed to
[7:41] be delivering to, who just abducted him, they jumped him,
[7:45] abducted him and put this collar bomb around his neck and
[7:49] instructed him to go and rob that bank on they would blow up
[7:53] the bomb around his neck and kill him.
[7:55] Brian told the police that he didn't know how long he had
[7:58] left. He didn't know how much time
[8:00] this bomb had on it before it was going to detonate.
[8:03] And he was scared for his life. He was begging them to do
[8:06] something about it, to try and get it off him.
[8:08] And police were so torn up about this situation because they
[8:12] wanted to believe Brian. And of course, a lot of them did
[8:16] to a degree. But also, you can never be too
[8:19] sure. Like what if this is a suicide
[8:21] bombing or what if this is all part of his plan to get police
[8:24] to come over and try and take it off him and then he detonates
[8:27] it. They, there's no way for them to
[8:30] know what he could do with this bomb.
[8:34] So in the meantime, they're still asking him questions.
[8:36] They asked him who had done this to him.
[8:38] And the only way that he could describe his abductors were that
[8:42] they were three black men. That was it.
[8:44] He no other descriptors other than it was 3 black men.
[8:47] Police kept asking him questions, but Brian seemed to
[8:50] be getting like more and more frantic as time is going on.
[8:54] Obviously, he's got a bomb around his neck that could go
[8:57] off on any minute. He doesn't know when it's
[8:59] planned to go off. So he's like begging them,
[9:02] shouting to them, please, someone get this off me.
[9:04] Someone try like, look at it. He kept yelling things like,
[9:08] well, these are exact quotes. He was yelling things like, why
[9:10] isn't anyone coming to get this thing off me?
[9:12] I don't have a lot of time. It's going to go off.
[9:15] And he also actually kept assuring them, I'm not lying.
[9:18] I'm not lying. At 3:18 PM the collar that was
[9:22] around Brian and Wells neck started ticking.
[9:26] If this was a real bomb, it was about to go off.
[9:29] Witnesses said that the look on Brian's face when he heard this
[9:33] beeping coming from his collar, it was just a look of sheer
[9:36] panic. He started like moving around
[9:39] desperately trying to get himself out of this collar.
[9:42] Of course, there was no way that he could, and within only about
[9:45] 1020 seconds of this collar starting to beep, it detonated
[9:51] and killed Brian Wells. There was a small explosion, and
[9:54] then Brian fell backwards. He was still sat down, so the
[9:58] rest of his body fell backwards and there was a huge hole blown
[10:03] in his chest, like a 5 inch hole.
[10:05] And tragically, just two minutes after that bomb detonated, the
[10:10] bomb squad arrived. The people that could have
[10:12] safely gotten that off of Brian's neck had only just
[10:17] missed it. His body was later transported
[10:19] to the morgue with this collar device still around his neck.
[10:22] Because even though they knew that it wasn't dangerous, now it
[10:26] had detonated. The bomb squads had looked at
[10:28] it. They knew it wasn't dangerous,
[10:30] but they just didn't know how to get it off him.
[10:32] It was just so well put on there that like they, they couldn't
[10:36] pry it off him at all. So actually in his autopsy, they
[10:40] had to decapitate Brian Wells, cut his head off in order to get
[10:46] this collar off of him so that they could study the collar.
[10:48] That's crazy. It was very clearly homemade.
[10:52] Although it was very well made, police could tell like a lot of
[10:55] thought and research had gone into it.
[10:57] This was someone that was very adept with tools and they used
[11:02] professional machinery as well. Honestly, police were just quite
[11:05] taken aback by this whole case. This is one of the most mindfuck
[11:09] cases you're ever going to come across.
[11:11] A bank robbery, a collar bomb, an abduction, and now what
[11:15] looked to be a murder as well. All of this in the space of like
[11:19] 2 hours and now they have the biggest cases of their career on
[11:23] their hands. So the most natural place to
[11:25] start this investigation, I guess, is with the now deceased
[11:29] Brian Wells. He was 46 years old at the time
[11:32] of his passing. He had a pretty average life
[11:35] from what police were told. He dropped out of school when he
[11:38] was very young. He never completed his
[11:40] education. He actually dropped out to be a
[11:42] mechanic, but of course ended up being a pizza delivery guy.
[11:45] He lived alone in a rental apartment with three cats.
[11:48] He didn't have like a partner or kids or anything.
[11:51] And Brian was quite a quirky guy.
[11:54] He didn't like technology. He didn't like the Internet, He
[11:57] didn't like electronics. He was a very, very manual,
[12:00] analog kind of guy, so he didn't really have like a TV or a
[12:04] computer or like a good phone or anything like that.
[12:07] He was kind of kooky in a lot of senses.
[12:09] Like his neighbors didn't see him all that often.
[12:12] He kept to himself. But to be fair, on the rare
[12:14] occasions that they would see him, they said that he was very
[12:17] friendly. He was very polite, very
[12:18] courteous, very kind. One neighbor said that he was
[12:21] the kind of person who would get on all fours to play with your
[12:24] dog, which I thought was cute, so I thought I'd include that.
[12:27] So he was just, you know, just a quiet served person, but seemed
[12:31] nice outside of that. Wells was very close with his
[12:33] mother. He would cook them both a meal
[12:36] every single week. She would come round to his
[12:38] house one night a week and they would eat together.
[12:40] Because ever since his father died and his mother became a
[12:43] widow, they, they were both feeling very, very lonely.
[12:47] And so this gave them both a bit of company because truth be
[12:51] told, Brian Wells didn't have a girlfriend, didn't ever.
[12:55] He'd never had a romantic partner before in his life.
[12:59] And it it wasn't for lack of trying.
[13:01] He really, really wanted a girlfriend.
[13:03] He wanted a wife. He wanted a family more than
[13:05] anything. But for some reason, he just
[13:08] couldn't. He just couldn't.
[13:10] The closest that Brian ever came to having a girlfriend was
[13:14] paying sex workers for their time, and not all of that time
[13:19] being taken up by sex. Brian particularly liked
[13:22] soliciting this one woman named Jessica Hoopsick.
[13:25] She was his favorite. He was, he was definitely like
[13:29] in love with her and she let him pay her to spend time with him.
[13:35] So she would just like go out on dates with him and then they
[13:38] would have sex as well. That was like still part of the
[13:41] parcel, but he was also just more so paying for her company.
[13:46] A lot of the time he would pay her either in cash or in crack
[13:49] cooking because she was very heavily addicted to cooking and
[13:53] they had this mutual friend that was a crack dealer.
[13:56] So that would be sometimes how he would give her the payments.
[14:00] But despite his inability to find a partner and a long term
[14:04] relationship, Brian did seem to be a nice guy.
[14:07] Everyone seemed to have good things to say about him.
[14:10] He didn't have any enemies. Like he wasn't a weird guy, No
[14:14] criminal history, you know, just just a normal quiet guy.
[14:18] In 1993, he started working at Mamma Mia's Pizzeria in Erie in
[14:23] Pennsylvania. And he was one of the delivery
[14:25] guys because he could drive and he was also just like a every
[14:29] other task kind of guy. At the time of this case, he'd
[14:32] been working at the pizza restaurant for about 10 years,
[14:35] over 10 years. And he really liked it there.
[14:37] He wasn't going to leave. He he enjoyed it.
[14:40] It was an easy job. It was good money.
[14:42] His boss was good to him, he was happy, he was happy there.
[14:45] On the morning of his death, Brian started off his day the
[14:48] same as any other. He would go out and get
[14:50] breakfast somewhere usually, usually McDonald's Actually he
[14:54] liked to go inside and eat in there and read the Morning News
[14:57] as he ate his breakfast and then from there he headed to work.
[15:01] At around 1:30 PM that day the phone rang at the pizza place as
[15:05] it always did and his Co worker Tony picked it up.
[15:08] Actually I think Tony was the boss of the whole thing.
[15:11] But anyway, Tony picked it up and he's trying to take this
[15:14] order, but he just cannot make out what the customer on the
[15:17] other end of the phone is trying to say to him.
[15:19] And he starts getting like a little bit frustrated that he
[15:21] can't hear this. He can't make it out.
[15:23] So he ends up passing the phone over to Brian and Brian can make
[15:26] sense of it. So he grabs a piece of paper and
[15:28] a pen and he starts jotting down this address.
[15:30] The customers said that they were a construction crew working
[15:34] like on site on the on the site. Obviously, they said they wanted
[15:39] two large sausage and pepperoni pizzas and to just come straight
[15:42] to the construction site on 8631 Peach Street.
[15:45] So Brian grabbed the order, grabbed the pizzas, jumped in
[15:48] his car and drove off to go deliver them.
[15:51] And that was the last time any of his Co workers heard from
[15:54] him. He never returned back to the
[15:56] shop later on. He never texted any of them.
[15:59] And they were all a bit worried, but they just kind of assumed
[16:02] that something had come up, you know, maybe a family emergency
[16:05] or something. And he just had to like go
[16:06] straight away, couldn't even like ring them to let them know.
[16:09] Basically, they never suspected that he had just been abducted.
[16:13] We only realized what had actually happened to Brian Wells
[16:16] later that night when they all got home from work and they
[16:19] either switched on the news or they spoke to someone because it
[16:23] was the biggest news in that whole state that day.
[16:26] And bear in mind how much of A mind fuck all of this is going
[16:30] to be for his colleagues, because this is a very quiet,
[16:33] very reserved, very polite, normal man that they've just
[16:37] found out has tried to rob a bank and then been exploded by a
[16:40] bomb. His boss was one of the first
[16:42] people to be questioned by police and he described Brian as
[16:45] quite a submissive man. He he was quite easily led and
[16:50] easily persuaded, Basically the type that could fall victim to a
[16:54] situation like this, like a hostage forced labour situation.
[16:58] He wasn't the type to really stand up for himself.
[17:00] It was a bit of a pushover. He wasn't a defiant person at
[17:03] all. He always followed instructions
[17:05] that he was given. Like there was just no way that
[17:07] he was ever going to try and talk back to anyone trying to
[17:10] shove a collar bomb on him, you know?
[17:13] So basically what is his boss was trying to tell police was
[17:15] that he obviously was a victim in this situation.
[17:20] Like because police at this point, they have no idea whether
[17:23] this was Brian just going crazy and and pulling some really
[17:27] weird stunt or if he was actually a victim of these
[17:30] people that had put a bomb on him and forced him to rob a
[17:32] bank. And his boss, Brian's boss was
[17:35] saying that doesn't sound like Brian at all.
[17:38] I don't think he is even capable of putting together a bank
[17:41] robbery plan himself. So he must have been a victim.
[17:45] But at the moment, another big theory for police was that this
[17:48] was a suicide bombing for some reason that they didn't know
[17:52] quite yet. But like that, that's kind of
[17:55] what this looks like, isn't it? That's that's kind of the most
[17:58] that's what that's why your brain probably would go with a
[18:00] bomb collar. So police went and searched
[18:02] Brian Wells's home to see if they could find any evidence
[18:05] that maybe he had, you know, planned this and it was a
[18:08] suicide bombing. Any notes or anything like that.
[18:10] But there was nothing. Absolutely not a single thing.
[18:13] There were no plans, no tools, no, no, no chemicals or like
[18:18] tools that he'd use to make this bomb.
[18:20] Absolutely nothing. But it was when the search
[18:22] extended to Brian's car, because of course they had that as well.
[18:26] That was when a clear image of the last few hours of Brian
[18:31] Wells's life started to emerge. It seemed that Brian had been
[18:35] sent on a scavenger hunt of sorts via a number of
[18:40] handwritten letters from him, his abductors.
[18:43] These letters were all addressed simply to bomb hostage, and they
[18:47] gave kind of strict instructions on how he could get this collar
[18:51] bomb off of him and how to survive this ordeal.
[18:54] They said that the only way to unlock this collar was through a
[18:58] series of keys and digits that he could collect if he followed
[19:02] every instruction that they gave him.
[19:04] Basically, Brian was instructed to rob multiple banks.
[19:08] This was just the first one. And it wasn't just banks either.
[19:11] There were a bunch of of random stops along the way where he
[19:14] could collect his next clue and then his next one and his next
[19:17] one before he even got to the second bank.
[19:20] And these letters were so scary. They were so threatening, saying
[19:25] that he would be killed for practically everything.
[19:28] So they said that if they spotted police helicopters or
[19:31] cars following him, they would kill him.
[19:33] They said that if they saw him trying to tamper with the collar
[19:36] or trying to pull it off or get out of it early, they would kill
[19:39] him if he went to the police or if he went in the wrong
[19:41] direction or if he wasn't following instructions,
[19:44] anything. They said that they would
[19:46] detonate this bomb early. And at some point in these
[19:48] letters it even says don't even try to like tamper with it or
[19:52] like try and get it off early. Don't try and put one of the
[19:54] keys in before we tell you or it's booby trapped and it will
[19:58] just set off. These people had thought of
[20:01] everything. They had scared Brian into
[20:03] complete submission. And so he just read these
[20:06] letters and followed them. And throughout these letters,
[20:09] there were a lot of really threatening statements to.
[20:12] Remind Brian of just how much was at stake.
[20:14] Things like stay calm and do as instructed to survive.
[20:18] And then at the end of one of the letters in capital letters,
[20:21] it was written, act now, think later or you will die.
[20:25] But at this point, now that police had found these letters,
[20:28] they'd actually already studied the bomb collar and they knew
[20:31] that a lot of the claims being made in these letters were
[20:35] false. The key holes on the collar
[20:37] didn't actually connect to anything.
[20:39] Putting a key in them wasn't going to do anything.
[20:41] So they'd lied to him in that aspect.
[20:43] There were no booby traps anywhere on the collar either.
[20:46] In fact, there was the opposite of booby traps where there was
[20:50] deceptive like warning stickers put on certain things that like
[20:55] there was actually no nothing to be warned of there.
[20:58] Oh, and also the kicker, this bomb actually couldn't be
[21:01] detonated any other way than through those timers running
[21:04] out. There was no way for them to
[21:06] detonate it from afar like they kept threatening in these
[21:09] letters, like if you don't do as we say, we'll detonate it early,
[21:12] we'll just set it off, we'll kill you.
[21:14] They couldn't do that. This bomb was going to go off
[21:17] when those timers finished. Which actually brings me on to
[21:19] the next thing that police found out about this collar was that
[21:23] there was no way to stop it. Once it was on Brian Wells,
[21:26] there was no way to get it off him.
[21:28] There was no way that he was going to be able to get it off
[21:30] himself. They couldn't even get it off
[21:32] him when he died. They had to decapitate him to
[21:35] remove it. So once that collar was on him
[21:38] that day, he was gonna die. There was no way for him to have
[21:41] gotten out of it and survived. So the instructions in these
[21:44] letters, obviously the first instruction was to go to the
[21:47] bank and rob it. He was told to use his collar as
[21:51] like a something to scare the bank tellers.
[21:53] He was told to show them it and to show them the gun, all of it.
[21:56] They'd like given him little pointers throughout these notes
[21:58] of like what to do. And then when he was done at the
[22:01] bank, he was told to take the money and go to this McDonald's
[22:05] and go to the drive through sign.
[22:06] You know, they've got that big sign outside with the M on it.
[22:09] Apparently at the bottom of that there was a flower bed.
[22:12] He was to look through this flower bed and he would find a
[22:14] rock with his next clue taped to it.
[22:17] And it seemed that Brian had made it to the McDonald's and
[22:20] he'd found that next clue. And he had gone to the next
[22:23] location, which was a wooded area quite some time away.
[22:27] But actually it was when he was on his way to that wooded area
[22:30] was when he was intercepted by police and apprehended.
[22:33] So he never made it to the third location, but after this whole
[22:37] case, police went like police followed the scavenger hunt
[22:40] themselves. They went clue by clue by clue
[22:43] to see, well, obviously to see if they can find any evidence or
[22:47] anything like that. And so they followed it from the
[22:50] McDonald's to this woods and they found another clue.
[22:53] I don't think there was anything important there, just literally
[22:56] another clue to go to another location, which was some random
[22:59] dirt road and there was a road sign on there.
[23:02] That road sign was where the next clue was, and when they got
[23:05] to it, there was just an empty jar there.
[23:08] So it looked like there had been a clue, the next clue there at
[23:11] some point. But the orchestrators of this
[23:13] whole thing that were running the scavenger hunt probably
[23:16] found out that Brian Wells had died and then it was over.
[23:18] So they went and recovered all the the rest of it.
[23:22] So this kind of proves that Brian was being watched
[23:25] constantly, just like the notes said.
[23:28] Did I say that? I think I might have forgot to
[23:30] tell you that in these letters they said that he was being
[23:33] watched at all times. There was someone at every
[23:35] single location to watch him, so he couldn't like, step out of
[23:39] line or whatever. That proves that Brian was being
[23:41] watched. They saw that he died and that
[23:43] the scavenger hunt was over early, so they went and
[23:46] recovered the rest of it. And as police were following
[23:48] this scavenger hunt from McDonald's to the woods and then
[23:51] from the woods to the road sign, it was taking them hours because
[23:55] Brian was being sent like back on himself every time.
[23:57] And they realized that the amount of time that Brian's
[24:00] collar had on it, it would have just gone off before he'd even
[24:03] reached like the second or third clue.
[24:06] Like there was no chance that he was ever going to survive this.
[24:11] That bomb was going off, and there was no way that Brian
[24:14] would have collected all the keys and all the digits that
[24:17] these letters promised in time to save himself.
[24:20] He was always going to be killed.
[24:22] And maybe that was the way for his abductors to just get rid of
[24:25] him. I mean, he might have seen them
[24:27] when they abducted him and strapped that collar to him.
[24:30] He would be able to tell police a lot of things.
[24:32] They just kind of needed him gone.
[24:34] To be fair, he was a liability to keep alive, but they couldn't
[24:38] get rid of him until they got their money first.
[24:40] So police investigated where the phone call had come from to the
[24:45] pizza delivery place that day. Of course, that way they could
[24:48] track down the abductors. But they found that it actually
[24:50] came from a pay phone. So that kind of puts them at a
[24:53] dead end. But that pay phone was on the
[24:56] same Rd. on Peach St. as where Brian was ambushed and had the
[25:00] collar put on him. So it seemed like Brian's story
[25:03] that he managed to tell police just before he died, it seemed
[25:06] like that was checking out because, well, the letters seem
[25:09] to prove that he had been instructed to rob the bank.
[25:13] He didn't do it of his own free will.
[25:14] He was told that he was going to be killed otherwise.
[25:16] So who did this to him? Who could have put this collar
[25:20] on him? Well, right now in the
[25:21] investigation, police had no leads.
[25:24] Zero leads because no one had seen anything.
[25:27] There were no witnesses to him having the collar put on him.
[25:31] So I mean, like, there was no leads.
[25:35] Very quickly, this case ended up going cold.
[25:38] Police were trying their best, of course, this was kind of the
[25:40] main focus, especially in the beginning, but they really
[25:43] weren't making any progress. That was until 3 weeks later
[25:48] when they got a phone call from a man named Bill Rothstein.
[25:51] He told them to go down to a particular address on Peach St.
[25:55] which is the same St. that Brian was abducted on, although he was
[25:59] abducted on just like some random patch of land down the
[26:02] bottom. Whereas this address that that
[26:04] Bill Rothstein was telling them to go to, it was an actual house
[26:07] on that street. Bill told them to go down to
[26:10] that address, to go into the garage and look in the big chest
[26:14] freezer at the back because they will find a frozen human body.
[26:19] He said that it was his house that he was sending police to.
[26:22] It was his house that this body was being stored in.
[26:25] But it wasn't him that had killed the the person.
[26:28] He said it was actually his friend that had committed the
[26:31] murder. Oh yeah, this was from a murder.
[26:33] This body was from a murder. I'm sure you could have guessed
[26:35] that. But he said that his friend had
[26:38] committed murder and now he was just doing a favour for them by
[26:43] like harbouring this body in his house.
[26:45] So of course, police on the phone start asking, well, who
[26:48] did kill this guy? And he said that it was his
[26:51] friend, 54 year old Marjorie Deal Armstrong.
[26:56] And the body of this person in his garage was her boyfriend.
[27:01] She'd murdered her boyfriend on the night of August 13th as this
[27:06] man was sleeping in bed. Marjorie had grabbed a shotgun
[27:10] and and shot him several times in the head, just killing him in
[27:13] his sleep. That was two weeks before the
[27:16] pizza bombing incident. So 5 weeks, 5 or 6 weeks ago at
[27:22] this point. By the time that Bill calls
[27:23] police and tells them Marjorie had killed her boyfriend six
[27:27] weeks ago. So immediately police go to both
[27:30] addresses of Bill Rothstein and Marjorie and they arrest both of
[27:34] them on suspicion of this murder.
[27:36] They didn't know who was involved and to what degree, so
[27:39] they arrested both of them and took them both back to the
[27:41] police station. And Bill was willing to tell
[27:44] them anything and everything they wanted to know on the
[27:47] chance that they might let him off a little bit because he said
[27:51] that he really had nothing to do with this murder.
[27:53] He was just harbouring the body and he knew that was wrong and
[27:56] he wanted to put it right. Now, by the way, I know that
[27:59] this kind of body in the freezer situation seems completely
[28:02] irrelevant to the pizza bomber story, but just you wait, it
[28:06] will all connect in the end. It's it's one of those stories
[28:09] that it's like a really long build up, but a really big
[28:12] payoff. Wait for it.
[28:13] So, yeah, they took both Bill Rothstein and Marjorie Deal
[28:16] Armstrong to different police stations.
[28:18] And Marjorie was fuming, by the way.
[28:20] She was absolutely seething that she was being arrested for this.
[28:24] She kept blaming it all on Bill, saying that Bill, Bill did the
[28:27] murder. Bill was hiding the body.
[28:29] Bill killed her boyfriend. Why would Bill kill your
[28:33] boyfriend? But she had nothing to do with
[28:34] it. Well, that's what she was
[28:36] saying. She was saying she had
[28:37] absolutely nothing to do with it.
[28:38] It was all Bill. Now, Marjorie was a very, very
[28:42] mentally ill woman. She had been diagnosed with a
[28:44] lot of different things over the decades, including bipolar
[28:47] mania. She had an unspecified
[28:51] personality disorder. She had narcissism, had
[28:54] narcissism. Can you have narcissism?
[28:56] She was like, diagnosed with narcissistic personality
[28:59] disorder. Maybe that was the unspecified
[29:02] personality disorder. Look at me like actually
[29:05] analysing my own words as I'm saying them.
[29:08] I should probably think before I speak.
[29:10] Regardless of like the specifics of that.
[29:12] Marjorie had just been suffering with her mental health and
[29:16] various mental illnesses since she was a child.
[29:18] This had been a lifelong battle for her.
[29:20] She had been in therapy since she was very, very tiny, but all
[29:23] of it just never really seemed to do anything for her.
[29:27] None of it ever really made anything easier.
[29:29] She was struggling the same way that she had all those years ago
[29:33] and nothing ever got better for her.
[29:34] She was entirely consumed by her poor mental health and it really
[29:38] influenced her actions and the way that she was with people.
[29:42] She was a very volatile and aggressive person to be around.
[29:45] But regardless, Marjorie was quite a popular woman it seems
[29:49] unless you got like too close to her.
[29:51] That was when you saw her dark side.
[29:53] But for just like casual acquaintances and friends, she
[29:57] was so popular. Everyone loved her and honestly
[30:01] she got a lot of attention from men, mainly because she was
[30:05] beautiful. She was very conventionally
[30:06] attractive and she knew that about herself and she would kind
[30:10] of use it to her advantage. And she was actually really good
[30:15] at manipulation, especially with men that fancied her because
[30:19] they were, they're kind of the easiest people to like,
[30:22] manipulate. But one big thing I want to
[30:25] mention about Marjorie Deal Armstrong is that most of her
[30:29] significant romantic relationships throughout her
[30:32] life, at least five of them had ended with her boyfriend or
[30:36] husband mysteriously dying. So of course, we have this one
[30:40] that was shot in the head and then his body put in a freezer.
[30:43] There was another one who fell and hit his head on a coffee
[30:47] table and died of, you know, some sort of like and trauma.
[30:52] His death was ruled an accident. But like, by the end of this
[30:56] case, you might not think it was an accident with one of her
[30:59] boyfriends. They'd actually split up and he
[31:01] survived. They kind of went their separate
[31:03] ways. But in the weeks after their
[31:05] split, he hung himself. And another one, she was
[31:08] actually arrested for murdering him, right?
[31:12] He he died from multiple gunshot wounds.
[31:16] So she was arrested for murdering him.
[31:18] She seemed to be, you know, the most likely suspect, but she was
[31:21] actually acquitted of that murder because she said she shot
[31:25] him in self-defense. So it was, it's proof that
[31:29] Marjorie has killed one of her husband's before.
[31:32] But self-defense, I'm calling her bluff.
[31:35] That man was shot 6 * 6 times in self-defense.
[31:40] I mean, when you put it with the fact that four of her other
[31:43] husbands have died, like, was it in self-defense?
[31:47] So she has killed someone for sure.
[31:49] It's just not classed as murder. So anyway, now police have these
[31:53] two suspects in their custody, Marjorie and Bill.
[31:56] So let's start with Bill Rothstein, shall we?
[31:58] Police asked him why on earth he was harbouring a dead body in
[32:02] his freezer in his garage for a friend when he had nothing to do
[32:05] with the murder. And he said that he had a soft
[32:09] spot for Marjorie Deal Armstrong.
[32:11] The two of them had dated long, long ago, decades ago.
[32:16] They tried it twice, actually. They'd been engaged twice, but
[32:20] both times Marjorie had called it off.
[32:22] Phil was truly in love with Marjorie, and Marjorie knew
[32:25] that. And just with every other man in
[32:29] her life. She used it to her advantage.
[32:31] She manipulated him. She used it to get things that
[32:34] she wanted, and in this instance, she wanted him to hide
[32:37] A body for her. And the murder weapon.
[32:40] And he agreed to her. She would just kind of pick him
[32:42] up and drop him whenever it was convenient for her and whenever
[32:45] she had something that she needed him to do.
[32:47] And he was more than willing to do the craziest of stuff.
[32:50] Look, hide A body in his freezer.
[32:52] And he even melted down the gun that she used to shoot him.
[32:56] Yeah. Bill went through with all of
[32:57] this quite quickly. Like, immediately.
[32:59] He didn't really question it. He just did what Marjorie wanted
[33:02] of him. So he put the body in his
[33:04] freezer, melted the gun, whatever.
[33:06] And as the weeks were going by, the guilt was really getting to
[33:10] him as it was kind of settling what he'd done.
[33:14] He was hiding a murder victim's body and helping someone get
[33:18] away with it like it was eating him alive.
[33:20] And so at this point, he decided to call the police.
[33:23] Actually, I think the thing that triggered him finally calling
[33:26] the police in the end was when Marjorie mentioned maybe
[33:29] grinding up her ex boyfriend's frozen body in a meat grinder or
[33:34] an ice grinder. Bill Rothstein said that he had
[33:37] been so guilty about all of this in the weeks leading up to it
[33:40] that he'd even considered committing suicide.
[33:44] He didn't want to wrap Marjorie in that bad that he thought the
[33:49] only way to get out of this situation whilst, you know,
[33:52] still preserving her is to kill himself.
[33:56] And he even proved this to police.
[33:58] He said, look, if you go into my house and you go into this
[34:00] particular drawer, I've written out a suicide note.
[34:03] I had written this out and it confirmed pretty much everything
[34:06] that he was saying about Marjorie murdering her boyfriend
[34:09] and stuff like that. And he couldn't live with the
[34:10] guilt. But there was one more thing
[34:13] written on this suicide note that was even more suspicious.
[34:17] It was the opening sentence, right, that his suicide note
[34:20] starts with. This has nothing to do with the
[34:23] Wells case. What?
[34:26] Up until now, there had been absolutely no links between
[34:29] Marjorie and Bill and the frozen body and Brian Wells and the
[34:34] pizza bombing. But it was very obvious that
[34:36] that's what this suicide note was referring to because, well,
[34:39] I mean, Brian was literally abducted on the same street just
[34:42] three weeks before. There were no other Wells cases
[34:45] that people were talking about. Everyone was talking about the
[34:47] Brian Wells case and the pizza bombing.
[34:49] So they tried to ask Bill Rothstein, like, what are your
[34:52] links to the Wells case? Why did you write this?
[34:54] What does this mean? But he wouldn't say anything.
[34:58] He kept so tight lipped about this, like he was just no
[35:01] comment in his way through the whole questioning.
[35:03] And it was quite frustrating for police because there were no
[35:06] obvious links or connections between Brian Wells and Bill
[35:10] Rothstein, between the pizza bombing and between body in the
[35:14] freezer. They couldn't understand why
[35:16] these two were linked, but they clearly were.
[35:18] And there was more to dig into here.
[35:20] So police went to go and search Bill Rothstein's home and inside
[35:24] they found a crap ton of machinery and professional tools
[35:29] like welding shit like this guy had everything and more that you
[35:35] would possibly need to make a homemade collar bomb.
[35:37] So now they think they're on to something.
[35:39] They believe that Bill Rothstein could be capable of making that
[35:43] bomb and that could have been the connection to the Wells kiss
[35:46] somehow. So they start digging into that
[35:48] more. They wanted to know more about
[35:50] Bill Rothstein and like what kind of person he was, what kind
[35:52] of life he lived. They found out that at the time
[35:55] of the pizza bombing, he was living in that house with
[35:58] Marjorie and also with some other guy called Floyd.
[36:02] His name was Floyd Stockton was this third other roommate.
[36:05] And I don't know too much about him, but what I do know is
[36:07] absolutely horrific. So at this point, at the time of
[36:11] the pizza bombing, Floyd Stockton was actually on the run
[36:14] from police after sexually assaulting a young woman with
[36:17] learning disabilities. He did that and then he ran
[36:21] away. And he'd been living at Bill
[36:23] Rothstein House for a while. And Bill knew what his friend
[36:26] had done. Bill knew that was why Stockton
[36:29] was staying at his house and and he didn't care.
[36:32] He was just harboring this guy. And police found out that Floyd
[36:35] Stockton just so happened to move out of Bill Rothstein house
[36:39] on the day of the pizza bombing. So let's just pause here for a
[36:42] second on the pizza bombing stuff because we've got 2 cases
[36:45] going on at once. The Bonnie in the freezer.
[36:47] Let's just tie up some loose ends with that first before we
[36:51] explain the pizza bombing. So Marjorie was charged with the
[36:54] murder of her ex-boyfriend and she was put on trial for it and
[36:58] she was eventually sent to prison.
[37:00] But I'll tell you about that part at the end of the case.
[37:02] I know it's getting literally so confusing, but at this point in
[37:05] time, Marjorie is in police custody.
[37:08] She hasn't been sent to prison for for the murder just yet, but
[37:10] she's about to be. But at this point, when she's in
[37:12] police custody, she got the news that her good friend Bill
[37:15] Rothstein had passed away. On the outside.
[37:19] He apparently had Hodgkin's lymphoma, something that he'd
[37:22] either been keeping secret from his family for a long time or
[37:26] perhaps didn't even know about himself.
[37:28] Because literally within a week of putting himself in hospital,
[37:33] he'd passed away. So now Marjorie is in prison
[37:36] while in police custody, and she's hearing this, hearing that
[37:39] Bill is no longer around to tell his side of the story.
[37:43] And all of a sudden, she starts to talk because she realizes
[37:47] that she's kind of the only one left.
[37:48] So she can completely control this narrative.
[37:52] So she starts out by confessing to the police that yes, she did
[37:55] shoot her boyfriend. And yes, Bill was right.
[37:58] It was all her all along. And she did want to keep the
[38:02] body in his freezer. And he did let her, you know,
[38:04] that whole story that he told was correct.
[38:07] She said that her and her boyfriend had had an argument
[38:09] that night over some other woman.
[38:11] And she said that her mental illness was really, really
[38:14] triggered by this. And after he fell asleep, she
[38:18] went and grabbed a gun and just shot him to death in his sleep.
[38:22] Marjorie was sentenced to a minimum of seven years in
[38:25] maximum security prison. And she absolutely hated it
[38:30] there. She was so desperate to get out
[38:32] of there that she was willing to do almost anything.
[38:36] But because she was a very smart and manipulative woman, she knew
[38:39] that there was an easy way to get out of there.
[38:41] So she wrote a polite letter to whom it may concern that she
[38:45] would be willing to share some information about the Pete's
[38:49] bombing with them if they were willing to put her in a lower
[38:52] security prison because she just hated the maximum security
[38:55] prisons. She said if they grant her
[38:57] request and they transfer her out of the prison that she is
[39:00] currently in, she will tell them the truth about the pizza
[39:04] bombing. She said that Bill Rothstein
[39:06] absolutely had a hand in the pizza bombings, and so did she,
[39:11] and so did some guy called Kenneth Barnes.
[39:14] Who's he? We don't know him yet.
[39:15] We'll get back to him. He was a crack dealer and a
[39:17] friend of Marjorie's, but we'll get back to him in a bit.
[39:20] Police went on to search Marjorie's home.
[39:22] Just kind of, well, for everything, she was being
[39:25] accused of so many different things at this point in time.
[39:27] They wanted to go and search her house.
[39:29] And in there they found a handwritten letter written by
[39:33] Marjorie to the exact bank that Brian Wells would later rob with
[39:39] the collar on. And Marjorie was very angry.
[39:41] In this handwritten letter, something had happened.
[39:43] Basically, I think she shared an account with her dad and he was
[39:47] spending a large amount of money from it.
[39:49] And she didn't like that he was allowed to do that.
[39:51] So she'd written like a very strongly worded, aggressive, not
[39:56] an e-mail handwritten letter to this bank and she just hadn't
[39:59] sent it yet. But this letter kind of proved
[40:02] that she had like, I don't know, like personal beef with the
[40:06] bank. So I don't know, things are
[40:08] starting to add up. Police are starting to believe
[40:11] Marjorie when she says that the. Pizza bombing was all them.
[40:14] So right now in this case, it had been a couple of years since
[40:18] the pizza bombing and they still had no answers on it.
[40:21] But now they've they're hearing all of this from Marjorie.
[40:23] They're like, oh crap, we could actually solve this.
[40:26] So they decided to go back to all of the old evidence that
[40:29] they had, pull it all out and just look at it all again, re
[40:32] examine it all, refresh their minds of it all.
[40:35] And one of the things that they looked at was the body Cam
[40:38] footage of police officers from when they went to go and arrest
[40:41] Bill Rothstein. They walked all through his
[40:43] house with them and so these body Cam thingies could show his
[40:48] house at the time of this and it was a mess.
[40:51] Let me tell you, Bill and Marjorie were insane hoarders.
[40:56] Insane, insane insane. Like actually unhealthy
[40:58] unhygienic kind of hoarders. Dirty, moldy food everywhere.
[41:02] Dog feces. Like it wasn't just like clutter
[41:05] and a load of stuff. It was disgusting living
[41:09] conditions. But that's not my point.
[41:10] I just wanted to tell you my point is that on this body Cam
[41:14] footage, they noticed as one of the officers walked past a desk,
[41:18] they noticed some like diagrams on a piece of paper.
[41:22] So they zoomed in, they cleared it all up, and they saw a few
[41:25] arrows written on this diagram. And they recognized these arrows
[41:29] as being the same arrows that were drawn on the bomb.
[41:33] You know, it had like decoy arrows and stuff here and there.
[41:36] They compared Bill Rothstein's arrows from this diagram to the
[41:40] arrows done on the bomb and and they were exactly the same.
[41:44] I mean, I know an arrow is just an arrow, but people have their
[41:47] own specific little ways of drawing things like that, don't
[41:50] they? And these two arrows were
[41:51] exactly the same. So police decided to take this
[41:54] one step further and they grabbed, they found this like
[41:57] old notebook in one of his rooms.
[41:59] And it was completely empty, although it did seem as though
[42:02] it had once had stuff in it. But those pages had been ripped
[42:06] out. It wasn't like a full book.
[42:08] Loads of it had been ripped out. So they wanted to find out what
[42:11] had been written in this book. So they use this technique and I
[42:14] think this is really, really cool.
[42:15] They use this technique where they grabbed a pencil and just
[42:17] like lightly shaded over the whole thing.
[42:20] And that was able to reveal the indents in that page from the
[42:24] page above it. So say someone wrote on there
[42:27] and then turn the page, there'd be little dents in there, No,
[42:29] and shading with the pencil brings them out.
[42:32] And this, the, the last thing that was written in this
[42:35] notebook was nothing to do with the pizza bombing.
[42:37] It was nothing of interest, but it did show Bill Rothstein's
[42:40] handwriting, which was then compared to the handwriting of
[42:43] the letters that were found in Brian Wells's car.
[42:46] And a lot of them with the same handwriting, not all of them,
[42:50] but a few of them had clearly been written by Bill Rothstein.
[42:53] So now police knew that Bill Rothstein had had a huge part in
[42:57] the pizza bombing. But of course, because he passed
[42:59] away since then, they couldn't bring him to justice.
[43:02] They couldn't question him about it further.
[43:04] They just had to try and keep digging and just keep trying.
[43:07] Marjorie, I mean, they asked her absolutely everything about a
[43:10] million times, but she just wasn't giving them anything.
[43:13] She was, like I keep saying, very manipulative.
[43:16] She knew how to get what she wanted out of police.
[43:18] She was keeping her cards close to a chest because if she was
[43:21] going to give them something, she wanted something back for
[43:24] it. She wasn't going to give up
[43:25] information for free. Well, she didn't give up
[43:27] information to police very easily, but you know who she did
[43:30] talk to about a lot of it? Her fellow inmates, which is
[43:34] never a smart idea because they're always looking to snitch
[43:37] on each other. And that's exactly what they
[43:39] did. And that's how we actually know.
[43:41] Most of what we know in this case is because Marjorie had
[43:44] such a big blabbermouth on her. People like this usually do
[43:48] narcissists that do evil criminal things.
[43:51] They just can't keep them things to themselves because they're
[43:54] proud of them. They want to brag about them.
[43:55] They want to tell everyone, look, look what I did.
[43:58] I'm responsible for this. But you know, as soon as you
[44:00] start telling people that, they're going to tell the
[44:02] authorities. And that's exactly what they
[44:04] through these fellow inmates, police were able to figure out
[44:07] that it was Bill Rothstein that had researched and built that
[44:11] collar bomb that was used on Brian Wells.
[44:13] They also learned that the third roommate, you know, Floyd
[44:16] Stockton, that ran away after the pizza bombing, He definitely
[44:20] also had a part in it. They believed that his part was
[44:22] mainly like physical. So he like grabbed hold of Brian
[44:26] Wells and like held him down and helped strap the collar on him,
[44:28] that kind of thing. Marjorie, of course, was the
[44:30] brains behind the whole operation.
[44:32] They believe it was her idea to do all the scavenger hunt kind
[44:35] of stuff. She was the brains of the
[44:37] operation. So police confronted Marjorie
[44:40] about everything they'd been hearing from her fellow inmates.
[44:43] And she said none of that's true.
[44:45] They're all lying about me. You can't prove that any of that
[44:47] is true. And that's annoying because
[44:48] she's right. They couldn't prove any of it,
[44:51] but they knew they were on the right path.
[44:53] After a lot of digging, detectives finally managed to
[44:57] piece together the truth behind the pizza bombing, why it came
[45:01] about, who exactly did what and what why Brian Wells.
[45:05] So it all started when Marjorie Deal Armstrong was running out
[45:09] of money. So the way that Marjorie had
[45:11] been living her life for the past few years, maybe even a
[45:14] decade, she never had a job. She was living on inheritance
[45:19] from her mother. Her mother had passed away and
[45:21] left her quite a lot of money. She was from quite a wealthy
[45:23] family, so she didn't need to get a job.
[45:26] She'd just been living off this money, living a life happy
[45:29] without a job. But now it was running out.
[45:31] And as she was watching this number in her bank account
[45:33] dwindle, she started to panic. She knew that she needed to
[45:37] replenish that money, but she didn't really know how to go
[45:40] about it. Getting a job was out of the
[45:42] question. She was not willing to do that
[45:44] at all. Instead, she had this bright
[45:46] idea to hire a hit man to kill her own father, right?
[45:52] So she could then have his inheritance to replenish her
[45:56] mother's inheritance. What an insane thought process.
[45:59] But you know that that was Marjorie's plan, and she got
[46:02] straight on it. She got in contact with an old
[46:05] friend that she used to go fishing with.
[46:07] This guy was called Kenneth Barnes.
[46:09] Do you remember I mentioned him earlier?
[46:11] Well, I said she got in contact with him again.
[46:13] He was an old friend, but they'd been in contact here and there
[46:16] because Kenneth sold cocaine and Marjorie used cooking sometimes.
[46:21] In fact, Kenneth was a full time crack dealer.
[46:24] He was known as Cooking Kenny, and he didn't have much going
[46:27] for him in life. I mean, yeah, full time crack
[46:30] dealer. He was constantly being looked
[46:32] for by police. The only ways that he could make
[46:34] money were through crime. Like he really didn't have
[46:38] anything going for him. He was willing to do just about
[46:41] anything, especially law bending to make some money.
[46:45] And Marjorie knew that that was why he was the guy that she
[46:47] called. So Marjorie approached Kenneth
[46:50] maybe a week or two before the pizza bombing and she proposed
[46:53] this plan that she pays him to go and kill her dad and then he
[46:57] could have a bit of the inheritance money that she got.
[47:00] And he was willing to do that. You know, he was willing to go
[47:02] and kill an innocent man for some money, but only if he was
[47:06] going to get paid A lot of money.
[47:09] He said he wanted at least $200,000, otherwise he wasn't
[47:12] even going to consider it. And of course, Marjorie didn't
[47:15] have anywhere near $200,000. That was exactly why she wanted
[47:20] someone to kill her father, because she needed money.
[47:22] She didn't have such a huge amount just lying around to pay
[47:25] someone. So now she's thinking of a way
[47:27] that she can quickly come into possession of $200,000 so that
[47:32] she can spend that on the hitman to then make $2,000,000 in
[47:36] inheritance from her father. Yeah, they were really rich, by
[47:39] the way, 2 million in inheritance.
[47:41] But I think the reason that she wasn't seeing any of this was
[47:43] because her and her father weren't friends.
[47:46] I mean, clearly she's trying to kill him.
[47:48] But yeah, they, he didn't give her any money.
[47:50] So, yeah, she's thinking of ways that she can make this $200,000.
[47:54] She needs to make such a huge amount of money in such a short
[47:56] space of time. How can one possibly do that
[48:00] from robbing a bank? But obviously she wasn't going
[48:03] to do it herself. Marjorie was far too smart and
[48:06] manipulative for that. She was going to make people do
[48:09] it for her. She always made people do The
[48:11] Dirty work for her. She wanted to figure out a way
[48:13] that they could force someone else to rob a bank on their
[48:18] behalf. And that was when Marjorie and
[48:21] Bill Rothstein came up with the idea of the collar bomb.
[48:24] Abducting someone, strapping this collar bomb to them and
[48:27] then just handing them some instructions saying rob this
[48:30] bank or you're going to die. I think most people would
[48:34] probably go through with the plans.
[48:36] I mean, especially if it said time after time in this letter,
[48:39] don't try and call the police. Don't try and go the wrong way
[48:42] or we will kill you. OK, so now they had the plan
[48:44] that they were going to use this collar bomb to get someone to
[48:47] rob a bank and then they would have money for the hitman.
[48:50] But who were they going to force to rob the bank?
[48:53] Marjorie knew of a local prostitute named Jessica
[48:57] Hoopsick. You might remember that name.
[48:59] That was the prostitute that Brian Wells was practically in
[49:03] love with and did absolutely everything for.
[49:05] He would pay her just to spend time with him.
[49:09] He didn't even want to have sex with her most of the time.
[49:11] Jessica was a good friend of Kenneth's, and of course Kenneth
[49:14] was a friend of Marjorie's. There's a lot of names in this
[49:17] case, so I'm sorry if it gets confusing.
[49:19] Basically, Jessica was really close with Kenneth because he
[49:23] was her dealer as well. She was addicted to cocaine and
[49:26] he would often give her it for like free of a cheaper because
[49:29] she was a pretty girl and she would actually do a lot of her
[49:31] prostitution round at Kenneth's house.
[49:33] She used it kind of like a base. And so Kenneth had met Brian
[49:38] Wells before. Before the robbery, Kenneth had
[49:41] approached Jessica Hoopsek and asked her for a favour, if she
[49:45] could name him a man who was quite a pushover, someone that
[49:50] seemed quite easy to intimidate and manipulate into committing
[49:55] something as serious as a bank robbery.
[49:58] Now, Jessica's hearing all this and she says she didn't think
[50:01] that Kenneth was serious. She didn't think this was a
[50:04] serious inquiry and that she was giving over like, you know, an
[50:08] actual suggestion. She thought this was just like a
[50:10] bit of a joke. And so she said, oh, obviously,
[50:13] Brian Wells. She maintains that she didn't
[50:16] think that she was actually giving over a name to, you know,
[50:19] be part of this big conspiracy to rob a bank.
[50:22] But I mean, this case looks pretty cut and dry that these
[50:25] 3-4 people, if you include Jessica, had orchestrated this
[50:30] fake pizza delivery call. They'd abducted Brian Wells,
[50:34] strapped this collar to him and carried all of this out.
[50:36] But then A twist. Oh, Marjorie herself decided to
[50:41] go and throw a spanner in the works when she told police that
[50:44] Brian Wells had actually been in on all of this the whole time.
[50:49] She said that he wasn't an innocent victim like police
[50:52] thought. And like police had been saying
[50:54] for years, they thought that this was just some innocent
[50:56] pizza delivery guy that had been ambushed and forced to do this.
[51:00] But Marjorie was now saying that's not the case at all.
[51:04] He was with us when we were planning it.
[51:06] He came to the planning meetings.
[51:07] He knew that he was the one that was going to rob the bank.
[51:10] He knew his role in this heist. It was all a plan.
[51:15] Marjorie said that they were planning to use a fake bomb
[51:18] collar, or at least one that he would be able to get out of.
[51:23] But of course, we know that that didn't end up happening.
[51:25] So the theory is that Brian was complicit in this.
[51:29] He was consenting in this whole operation to rob this bank, and
[51:34] then he thought he was going to survive.
[51:35] He thought he was going to get this collar off at the end and
[51:37] survive and have a cut of the money.
[51:39] But it turns out that on the day that they carried this whole
[51:41] thing out, Bill Rothstein and Marjorie had swapped out the
[51:45] fake bomb for a real 1, actually killed Brian Wells.
[51:50] I suppose it was 1 less person to give a cut of the money and
[51:53] it made sure that it was unlikely going to get traced
[51:56] back to them, which it actually wasn't going to get traced back
[52:00] to them had they not all just started blabbing.
[52:03] Marjorie said that they had all these different little like
[52:06] plans and cues in place, You know, like this was a full
[52:09] orchestrated thing. Like for example when they made
[52:13] the call to the pizza delivery place and the person was giving
[52:17] over the order of in the address, they were mumbling on
[52:20] purpose so that Brians coworker would pass the phone to Brian,
[52:25] the next available coworker so that he could then take down the
[52:28] address. Because he was supposed to be
[52:30] the only one that knew the address and knew where to go.
[52:33] That was his cue to set off, and they were ready to start this
[52:37] this bank heist. It's unclear at what point
[52:40] during all of this Brian Wells realized that he was going to
[52:44] die and that this bomb was real. A lot of witnesses at the scene
[52:48] say that they think he literally only found out that the bomb was
[52:51] real 10 seconds before he died. When it started beeping.
[52:54] As soon as that bomb started ticking, he looked so visibly
[52:57] panicked. And like I said, he was
[52:59] wriggling around trying to get out of this collar.
[53:01] Of course he couldn't and then it exploded.
[53:04] But the people that saw him there that day said it was real
[53:07] fear in his eyes. And I mean, up until that point
[53:10] he had been incredibly calm to say he had a collar bomb
[53:14] strapped to his neck that could have gone off at any minute.
[53:16] He was so calm in the bank as he was robbing it.
[53:19] He was so calm. Literally just sat there with
[53:21] his legs crossed chatting to police Like maybe he didn't
[53:25] think he was going to die. Maybe he did somehow think that
[53:27] he was going to get out of this alive.
[53:29] Brian's friends and family think that he never had any part in
[53:33] this. They sincerely believe that he
[53:35] was literally just an innocent pizza delivery man that was
[53:38] called out to this horrific scheme.
[53:40] He was a victim and nothing more.
[53:41] But the annoying thing here is that it's literally Marjorie's
[53:44] word against, well, no one else is because no one else is here
[53:49] to tell their part of the story other than Kenneth Barnes.
[53:52] But I don't think he's really said anything.
[53:54] It's just Marjorie dictating this whole story.
[53:57] And we don't know how much of it is true.
[53:59] Especially the stuff about Brian Wells being in on it is so vague
[54:03] and iffy that we just don't know.
[54:06] A lot of people think that he is innocent.
[54:09] A lot of people do. But a lot of people also think
[54:12] that he had a part in it because of all of this and because of
[54:14] all these, like, little pieces of not necessarily evidence, but
[54:18] like little bits of information that Marjorie can give, police
[54:21] do kind of suggest that he was in on it.
[54:24] So by the time police finally figure out the true story here,
[54:27] it's four years later, or even like 5-6 years later, it's like
[54:31] 2000 and seven, 2009, when all the court proceedings are
[54:36] happening, 2007 and 2009. That's not me getting those
[54:39] numbers confused, by the way. Some of it happened in 2007,
[54:42] some happened in 2009. It's like between four and six
[54:45] years after. And finally, Marjorie Deal
[54:48] Armstrong was found guilty of orchestrating this whole pizza
[54:52] bombing. And she was found guilty.
[54:54] Well, I already told you this, but she was also found guilty
[54:56] for the murder of her boyfriend, you know, the one in the
[54:58] freezer. And we actually have an answer
[55:00] as to why she killed him now as well.
[55:02] It wasn't because of an argument over another woman.
[55:05] Turns out it was because he knew too much about the pizza
[55:07] bombing. He'd like overheard a
[55:09] conversation or something like that.
[55:10] And she could tell that he didn't approve.
[55:12] And she knew she had to get rid of him otherwise he would grasp
[55:15] on their plan. So she waited until he fell
[55:17] asleep that night and just shot him in his sleep.
[55:20] It's really scary how much this woman does not value human life
[55:23] at all. Or this person overheard a
[55:26] conversation. Let's just kill them.
[55:28] Let's just eradicate that human being completely forever.
[55:31] That's crazy. So yeah, she was charged with
[55:34] like, the armed robbery and stuff.
[55:35] Actually, none of them were charged with murder for Brian
[55:39] Wells because police do truly believe that he had a part in
[55:43] this whole heist. Like that's the official
[55:45] believed theory was that Brian was in on his own death.
[55:49] Well, not to the extent that he thought he was going to die, but
[55:52] he was in on the robbery. So yeah, none of them were
[55:54] actually charged with murder because police don't believe
[55:57] that this is a murder. Instead they all just face
[55:59] charges of armed robbery. No armed bank robbery.
[56:03] Is that a separate charge if you try and rob a bank?
[56:06] Armed bank robbery, conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and
[56:09] using a destructive device in a violent crime.
[56:12] Kenneth Barnes pled guilty to his charges and he was sentenced
[56:15] to 25 years in prison. Although he actually passed away
[56:18] in 2, 2019, he was still in prison at the time.
[56:21] Marjorie, like I said, she was already in prison as all the
[56:25] pizza bomb charges were being put on her because she already
[56:29] had all the murdering boyfriend charges.
[56:31] She was already in prison for 7 to 20 years for the murder of
[56:36] her boyfriend and then for the pizza bombing.
[56:38] She was given life in prison with a minimum of 30 years, but
[56:43] it turns out she wasn't behind bars for very long at all.
[56:47] Marjorie Deal Armstrong was diagnosed with terminal breast
[56:50] cancer and at the age of 68, she passed away in prison in 2017.
[56:59] Thank you so much for listening to usual disclaimer.
[57:02] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[57:04] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
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[57:28] See you next time.

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