| Gentleman Collar
In August of 2003, there arose one
particular story that really caught my attention. So much so that I still
regularly search out tidbits on this case, even though there have been no
significant new developments since day one. The media never really found the
right hook with Brian Douglas Wells, in spite of the fact that his demise
was spectacular enough to make for an edge of your seat movie.
The thing is, nothing much ever happens to
resolve these crimes unless they’ve got a good hook. Cash helps move things
along, but if you want to capture the TV Eye, it never hurts to have a kid
or two in the story. Or maybe a pretty, pregnant victim - good looks just
won’t cut it by themselves. Of course, the celebrity factor remains a
sure-fire angle, though the smart money says that the fame card may be
getting a bit overplayed these days, and is quickly being relegated to
Lifetime Channel fodder. The bottom line is, without the right twist, no
matter how spectacular the crime, the story just doesn’t have the longevity
you need for a Fox News Special. Maybe you can muster up a splash of
interest, but soon the world spins on, ultimately leaving justice dependent
on luck.
Brian Wells. You probably don’t even
remember the name, do you? It’s been almost a year and a half. Well, I can
change all that with just two words – pizza bomb. Right. Brian was the pizza
delivery guy who got himself into some sort of a hellish jam, God knows how,
and ended up with a bomb throttled around his neck, and a game plan in his
pocket.
He was a simple man, forty-six years old with
three cats named Kitty and not a whole hell of a lot else. One day he left
his job at Mama Mia’s, jumped into his car with a couple small sausage
pizzas, drove up a dirt road to what was supposedly a construction site, and
lived for one more frenetic hour. Someone met Wells at his destination, and
what took place next may never be known with any certainty.
The aftermath, however, is writ in stone.
Wells showed up at the PNC bank south of Erie with a collar bomb, a gun
shaped like a cane, and nine pages of hand written instructions. The notes
spell out the rules of the game.
“Quietly give the following demand notes
to a receptionist or bank manager. Do not cause alarm. Get required money
and deliver to a specified location by following notes that you will collect
as you race against time. Each note leads to the next note and key until
finished. You will collect several keys and a combination to remove bomb”.
Should wells be tempted to subvert this
mission, there are plenty of explicit threats. “MOST IMPORTANT RULE! Do
not radio, phone or contact anyone. Alerting authorities, your company or
anyone else will bring your death. If we spot police vehicles or air craft
you will be killed… We’re following your moves in cars to make sure you
obey”.
Wells was on an impossible race against time, and his quarter million dollar
heist was just the first stop of what would have been many, had he been a
much luckier man. Instead of completing the course, he died on videotape, a
matchbook sized hole blown through his chest, while the police watched in
the distance, waiting for the bomb squad.
Although the case is still open, and the reward has grown to $100,000, the
FBI has never seriously held a suspect. There were a couple of police
sketches, possible suspects running from possible lookout points, but this
case has always involved more speculation than facts. There was his friend
and co-worker Robert Pinetti, who died from a drug overdose just two days
after Wells demise. Nothing came of that. Jimmy Johnson had his tools seized
for a while, but that connection seemed tenuous at best. The agency has even
refused to rule out the possibility that this was not a murder, but a
suicide, or that Wells was a willing participant in a robbery plot gone
horribly wrong. Not bloody likely.
For quite some time after Wells death, the
FBI said, rather cryptically, that releasing the handwritten notes was “more
trouble than it is worth”, but after the flow of suspects began to peter
out, they rethought this strategy. Days ago, on February 13th, the agency
announced that they had expanded their list of suspects, without rejecting
any of the old ones. They are also exploring the possibility that a small
group, led by a criminal ‘mastermind’, may have been involved. And there
continues to be an undercurrent of paranoid talk that this could have been
an experiment by terrorists, looking for a new tool to use in urban warfare.
There is only one known suspect who seems to fit comfortably into the
psychological profile of what the FBI has dubbed ‘The Collarbomber’. William
Rothstein was questioned and released in the early days of the
investigation, after passing a lie detector test. One wonders at the ease
that authorities showed in their decision to so quickly dismiss him. Now,
the latest statements from the FBI indicate that he is indeed still
considered a suspect. If guilty, he’ll have to get his justice in Hell,
since he died of cancer on July 30, 2004.
Rothstein was a janitor and former substitute
teacher, a rather handsome 60 year old loner who had consistently shown bad
taste in his choice of women. One of the other suspects still under
consideration is Rothstein’s former fiancé, 55 year old Marjorie
Diehl-Armstrong, who is currently residing at Mayview State Hospital near
Pittsburgh. If and when she is ever released, she will begin serving seven
to twenty years for third degree murder, after being found ‘guilty but
mentally ill’ this past January in the slaying of her live in boyfriend,
James Roden.
Just what sort of a relationship did
Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong have at the time of Wells murder? Seeing as
they were both a bit unstable and out of the ordinary, it’s a little
unclear, so let’s just call them real good friends. Let us go out on a
branch and say that Rothstein he is the kind of friend who we might all like
to have if we ever need to dispose of someone who is not a real good friend.
He’s the kind of friend who would gladly melt your shotgun for you if it
looked like damaging evidence. The kind of friend who would drop everything
at a moment’s notice and come right over to help you clean up a nasty mess:
you know, replace the linoleum, take your putrid bloody mattress down to the
dump, paint over those messy bloodstains on the wall, and even rig up a nice
pulley system to help you get that incriminating body into the freezer,
where it won’t be an eyesore. Now that’s what I call a real buddy.
Now, it could have been that rather than
being thoughtful, Rothstein was just an incredibly stupid man. After the
chips were cashed and he had accepted a $2,000 token of gratitude, he gave
testimony that Diehl-Armstrong had called him and told him she had found
Roden with a hole in him, and she was a little bit worried that she might be
blamed, given that he happened to be befouling her house at the time. When
Rothstein arrived at Diehl-Armstrong's filthy home, with its impressive
collection of garbage, shit and dead animals stacked up to the ceiling,
Rothstein found Diehl-Armstrong lying in bed in the fetal position. (When
investigators later searched the house, they had to wear protective gear and
form a human chain for navigation. Two city dumpsters full of filth were
hauled away) That’s bound to get your sympathy flowing, if you’re a
sensitive guy. And so Rothstein kindly wrapped Roden’s body up in a
bedspread and drove it back to his place for storage.
As tacky as it was for Marjorie to shoot
Roden in the belly with a shotgun, she couldn’t very well ask for leniency
as a first time offender. I mean, it’s not like this was the first boyfriend
she had ever killed. Back in 1984, she was charged in the shooting death of
Robert Thomas. She claimed self defense that time, and got off with
probation for carrying a firearm without a license. With Roden, she also
claimed she was not to blame, even though she did allow that "Yes, it was a
crime or whatever. But it wasn't me who killed him and touched his body and
put him in the freezer." (Adds a new meaning to whatever, doesn't it?) It
was Rothstein, she said! And after all he had done for her…
All good things must come to an end, and so it was with Marjorie’s freedom.
One day, September 20th I believe it was, she decided that it was time to
dispose of Roden’s body – free up a little freezer space – so she and
Rothstein went out on a shopping spree for supplies. Saws – check, plastic
containers – check, hydrogen peroxide – check, and then Diehl-Armstrong
suddenly went too far. She told Rothstein that she wanted to grind up
Roden’s body with an ice crusher. This seemed to negatively affect
Rothstein’s genteel sensibilities. He proceeded to excuse himself, ring up
the police, and then go off on his merry way to commit suicide. As with most
of his endeavors, Rothstein decided against seeing this effort through.
Truthfully, there is nothing that we can find that really links
Diehl-Armstrong, other than the company she keeps, and the fact that she’s
an insane convicted murderer. Rothstein is another story. Erie County
District Attorney Brad Foulk said in the early days of the investigation
that the cases were in no way linked, although usually when folks go out of
their way to say things are not related, they are indeed.
But even if our dots are imaginary, let’s
throw them out there anyway.
- Rothstein had a habit of being in the
vicinity of trouble. He was no first-timer either. Twenty years prior, he
was very helpful in another murder, giving the killer the murder weapon,
giving him a ride after the slaying, and helping to get rid of the gun.
And as is his modus operandi, testifying against him.
- The afternoon that Wells made his final
delivery, the last house in the sparsely populated area that he would have
passed on his way up the dirt access road to the clearing was – you
guessed it - the home of William Rothstein.
- The delivery call that came into Mama
Mia’s and sent Wells on his way was made from a pay phone that Rothstein
would frequently use when he would go to the store and buy 'soda pop'. He
has admitted to using the same phone on the day of the murder.
- Rothstein was a licensed electrician. He
had worked with the robotics team at the local high school. And he
happened to have a machine shop right behind his house, with the means and
know-how to make items like, oh, collar bombs, and cane guns, that sort of
thing.
- Rothstein never did succeed in killing
himself, but he did manage to dash off a suicide note after turning
Diehl-Armstrong in. "It wasn't me that done it," was apparently what he
said, in a nutshell. Does that strike you as kind of an odd disclaimer to
make in what's intended to be your last few words? One anonymous police
source stated that, "He didn't want people, the police, to get hung up on
the fact that the crime scene was so close to his house. It's a bizarre
explanation, but it does make some sense." No it doesn’t.
These facts don’t add up to proof, but they are highly suggestive of a man
who comes close to matching the profile. Could Rothstein have been ‘The
Collarbomber’? There is not a lot of anecdotal information available on
Rothstein. He was a loner, living in a secluded area, just like the FBI
theorized. A tinkerer, skilled at metalworking. Ditto. He was a man who was
not the least bit uncomfortable around murder. Nobody really believes this
case was about robbery, not with a plan that was guaranteed to fail. The
perpetrator had much darker needs, and a man like William Rothstein seems to
fill the bill.
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