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The Brian Wells Story
| On Brian Wells
I am fascinated by the Brian Wells story. Terrible, heartbreaking, macabre, it would never work as fiction. I mean, the critics laughed at 'Phone Booth', and this story is much more convoluted.
Brian Wells was a very simple man, but at this point, I am not sure whether he was simple-minded or not. He lived alone in Erie Pa., in a cottage with three cats. He was a shy, 46 year old pizza deliveryman.
Last week he committed a robbery, walking into a bank with a bomb strapped around his neck. After the heist, he walked away, and was arrested in a nearby parking lot. This was no ordinary bomb - it was a collar bomb, locked around his neck, a sophisticated device that has been associated with Latin American terrorists. When the police saw the device, they backed away, and called the bomb squad. Mister Wells blew up before they arrived.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer describes the scene.
Handcuffed and tethered to a bomb, pizza delivery man Brian Douglas Wells sat on one of the city's busiest streets and wailed for help. "Why isn't nobody trying to come get this thing off me?" he screamed to police. "It's going to go off. I'm not lying. Did you call my boss? I'm not doing this. This isn't me."
In no way did this seem to be a suicide. Before he died, Wells told the police that he had been nabbed by a 'dark-skinned man' who strapped the bomb around his neck and activated a timing device, telling him that it would only be diffused once he returned with the money. Strange? Damn right. It is theorized that he might have been strapped with the bomb by customers calling for pizza from a supposed construction site, which turned out to be the location of a broadcast antenna.
Wells was carrying a note with him – instructions on how to rob a bank, apparently, followed by three locations that he should go to after the robbery. The FBI has said, rather cryptically, that releasing the note is “more trouble than it is worth”, and cancelled a planned news conference.
Getting stranger… the latest news that I can find just came from the AP a short while ago. Check this:
Information about a second weapon found with Mr. Wells -- which some investigators have reportedly likened to a cane that could fire a projectile -- was another possible topic of the canceled news conference.
FGAQ brings you this information because we find the case utterly intriguing, and thinks you will too. For updates, click here.
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9/23 What has happened to the Brian Wells story? It seems to have made only a minor blip in the national media in spite of being the most bizarre story of recent memory. For those of you who have already forgotten - or never knew - Brian Wells was a mild mannered forty-two year old recluse who supported his very simple lifestyle by delivering pizza. Way back in August, he walked into an Erie, Pa. bank and committed a robbery. When the police caught up with him a few minutes later, they found that he was wearing a collar bomb. As police kept their distance, he begged for help, saying that strangers had locked the bomb to him and forced him to rob the bank before they would defuse the explosives. He had a bit of an obstacle course he was supposed to follow, four stops that would have been hard to make even without interference. He blew up before the bomb squad arrived.
The Erie Times-News has been the only media outlet to give this story full play, and today's major development involves a story that is not - I repeat not - related in any way to the Brian Wells story. I know this for a fact because Erie County District Attorney Brad Foulk said it's not related, although usually when folks go out of their way to say things are not related, they are.
This is your basic body in the freezer story. This tale centers around Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the kind of girl your mama warned you against, the kind of girl that's apt to shoot her boyfriends and store them in the home freezer. Dude by the name of James Roden. Not that she's a weirdo or anything; it's not like she was going to eat him. As a matter of fact, when she was arrested, she and her buddy Billy Rothstein were making plans on buying an ice crushing machine, so as to give the body a proper disposal. I mean it had been frozen for several weeks, and what with deer hunting season approaching...
Marj was not to blame, of course, even though she does admit 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! (her housemate) and Marj is glad to clear up this confusion. She told WSEE-TV that she was being treated for schizophrenia and manic-depression (ed note: mutually exclusive), that she would not commit crimes like 'Jack the Ripper'. Oh by the way, it was Rothstein that turned Diehl-Armstrong in, and she had been acquitted for the murder of another boyfriend back in '88.
Oops, we almost forgot the Brian Wells connection. Forgive me. I forgot to mention that that Marjorie and Rothstein's home is right splat at the start of the dirt road which Wells was on his way to when he set out to deliver those last two sausage pizzas.
No wit intended here. The pizzas were never found.
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Here is a brilliant headline from CBSNews.com
Collar Bomber Probably a Victim
Yes, Erie Pa. investigators have come to the conclusion that Brian Wells probably didn't just lock a time bomb around his own neck as a lark. He probably wasn't part of a clever heist ring. Very good police work, guys.
I finally watched the video of the final moments. I'd been avoiding it. Wells is sitting cross legged on the ground. No one, including the camera is near him. He barely moves. And then, he's gone. There is an explosion but we don't see Wells. I suppose the force of the blast slammed him flat to the ground, out of camera range. But it is more like a magicians trick than a snuff film, debris flying through the air, while the performer has gone.
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Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Brian Wells: A Conjuncture
We now have a link between the Erie pizza deliveryman who was blown up by a collar bomb in a sinister but still not understood bank robbery, and the Erie nut job who had her ex-boyfriend, James Roden, stashed in a freezer.
The link is William Rothstein. His relationship with Diehl-Armstrong is a little bit unclear, so lets just call them friends. Let us say that he is the kind of friend who we might all like to have if we ever wanted to dispose of someone who was not a friend. The kind of friend who would melt your shotgun for you. The kind of friend who would come over and help you clean up a big mess: you know, replace the linoleum, take your bloody mattress to the dump, paint over those messy bloodstains on the wall, and rig up a nice pulley system to help you get that incriminating body into the freezer. Now that’s a buddy.
But even the best of friends have their limits, and Diehl-Armstrong’s idea to run Roden’s body through an ice crusher was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back. (This is what I’m thinking, although Marjorie was apparently crazy enough to have been contemplating using this.)
So Rothstein did the right thing. He called the police and went off to kill himself. Even wrote a suicide note. And one thing that he wanted to make absolutely clear in his note was that he did not kill Brian Wells. I’m sure he was nervous about that since the police were scouring the area, and he was living at the end of the line where Wells made his final delivery. Rothstein didn’t end up committing suicide, but he is adamant about this. According to a police source, "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."
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I am going to have to gather my notes together on the Brian Wells case, and the parallel Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong sideshow. The Wells story has all but disappeared from the national media, and the Diehl-Armstrong story never appeared there to begin with. For those of you who haven't seen my previous comments, Brian Wells was the pizza deliveryman who robbed a bank and was blown up by a collar bomb. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was the nut who put down her boyfriend with a shotgun blast to the belly, and then stored him in a freezer with the help of her good friend William Rothstein. Both cases happened in Erie, Pa., and even though the FBI says there is no connection, I am convinced that there is. There are far too many coincidences.
(1) This was where the last pizzas were delivered. Yeah, there is nothing habitable past the Diehl-Armstrong/Rothstein household. (And what a household it was. Lets check in with WSEE: Police officers suited up in protective gear and formed a human chain to begin that search. Every item in the home was examined and either submitted into evidence, or thrown into a garbage. Investigators say inside the house is absolutely disgusting, not to mention the unbearable smell even outside. Captain Skindell says they've seen disgusting houses before, but he says, this one's unique.) What we are talking about here, from some reports I've read, is a woman who would go out for a drive on trash day, steal your garbage, and stack it up in her house. We're talking not one, not two, but multiple dead and decomposing animals.
(2) Rothstein was a licensed electrician. He worked with the robotics team at the local high school. He had the know-how to make items like, oh, collar bombs, and cane guns and that sort of thing. Oh, yeah: he helped another woman cover up another murder twenty years prior. (Saturday it was revealed that he and Marjorie were helping to hide the rapist of a 19 year-old retarded woman.)
(3) Rothstein wrote a suicide note, after turning Diehl Armstrong in. "It wasn't me," was what he said, in a nutshell. Kind of an odd disclaimer to make in what's intended to be your last few words. And why didn't he kill himself, anyway?
(4) The call for Brian Wells last pizza delivery was made from a pay phone that Rothstein often used when he would go to the store to buy 'soda pop'.
The story continues...
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| Brian Wells Has Left the House
Friggin pizza man -
He blowed up good.
No one give a fuck because
He wasn't pregnant
Blonde
Or rich
Or famous.
He wasn't any one you'd want to know
Creepy in reality
And one time he did dare to call the cops
with some words you wouldn't say before the kids.
Here's a better Brian Wells <skating little faggot>
Here's a better Brian Wells <you can hire him on the cheap>
Here's a better Brian Wells <he can do the hustle>
Here's a better Brian Wells <direct from San Diego>
Here's a better Brian Wells <Biology in Texas>
Here's a better Brian Wells <Football in Cincinnati... and might I say his record's swell at 10 and 1, and 7-3, Unlike the other Brian Wells - the pizza bombed, eternally >
What is death
anyway
If you're worthless to begin with?
So glad he didn't want to rob that bank.
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7:17:10 AM 
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