Brian Wells

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Brian Douglas Wells (* 15. November 1956 , † 28. August 2003 in Erie , Pennsylvania ) was an American man who was involved in a complex criminal case in 2003, in the media as Pizza Bomber case known has been. After a highly unusual bank robbery he carried out himself , he was killed by the explosion of an explosive device tied around his neck . Following the investigation, it was assumed that he was an accomplice in planning the robbery. However, a new testimony from a witness in 2018 called his exact role into question.

Course of action

After dropping out of high school in 1973, Wells worked as a pizza delivery man for 30 years . He was considered a good and reliable employee. On the afternoon of August 28, 2003, Wells received an order to deliver two pizzas to an address just outside the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, USA. It was the remote transmission mast for a local television station on a dirt road. Wells met several people there with whom it was agreed that they would attach a dummy bomb around his neck in order to subsequently rob a branch of a local bank. In the event of a police arrest, he was supposed to pretend that three African American men had attacked him and forced the device to be used. When it became clear at the meeting that a real bomb and not a dummy should be used, Wells tried to escape, but gave up his resistance after a warning shot and the bomb was fastened around his neck.

A little later he entered the PNC Bank on Peach Street with an oversized T-shirt under which the bomb was hidden, additionally armed with a self-made rifle disguised as a walking stick and demanded the return of 250,000 US dollars from the vault. Wells did not threaten anyone with the rifle, but explained that there was a bomb in the box tied with a lock around his neck. The bank employee we spoke to replied that due to security measures it was not possible to open the safe at short notice and only handed over the 8,702 US dollars from the cash register. Wells then drove away in his car, but was caught only 15 minutes later by police patrol involved in the manhunt . He calmly told the police that he had been overpowered by three men at the transmitter mast and that a time-detonated bomb was attached to his neck. He was armed with the gun and forced to rob the bank. Wells said he was running out of time and the cops had to help him. While he had to kneel on the floor, explosives experts tormented their way through the traffic. The police made no attempt of their own to defuse the approximately 15-pound bomb in the form of a single large handcuff for reasons of self-protection . Instead, they left Wells, hands cuffed behind his back, a safe distance away in the parking lot awaiting the defuse team. Three minutes before the Special Forces arrived, the explosive device exploded inside and punched a fist-sized hole in Wells' chest. He died a short time later on the scene. Later in his car a piece of paper was found with detailed instructions to the "bomb hostage" who was supposed to carry out the bank robbery first. Then a kind of scavenger hunt was to take place, at the end of which it was promised to be freed from the bomb. It turned out, however, through the investigation that it was impossible to achieve the goal in the allotted time frame and that Wells' death was inevitable.

Investigations

During the autopsy, the head of Brian Wells' body was surgically cut off so that the attached apparatus could be examined undamaged. This fact was later critically discussed by family members and in the press. The device was a metal device in the form of a single, oversized handcuff with an attached box tilted 90 degrees for positioning in front of the chest, which contained the explosives, the time fuses and also other material and wires that the Complicate construction and thus thwart any attempt to defuse it.

On September 20, 2003, less than a month after Wells died, a man named William Rothstein reported to the police and said there was a frozen body in his freezer. He owned a property right next to the transmission tower Wells was ordered to go to before the bank robbery. Rothstein testified that the body would be James Roden, who was the friend of a woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, with whom he himself had a relationship in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Diehl-Armstrong stated to him that after a dispute over money, he shot her friend Roden in the back with a rifle . She asked the caller Rothstein to help her remove the traces. Together they would have cleaned the scene and from there brought the body to the freezer in Rothstein's garage 16 kilometers away. He later carefully melted down the murder weapon and distributed the metal in several places in the city, but failed to grind the corpse, as agreed, and make it disappear. After the corpse had already been lying in the freezer for five weeks (the time of the crime was given in mid-August 2003), Rothstein decided to call the police because he feared Diehl-Armstrong's reaction to the failure to dispose of the body.

He also stated that the situation was so stressful that he was suicidal. A prepared suicide note was found in his desk. This ended with the sentence: “That has nothing to do with the Wells thing.” Diehl-Armstrong was arrested for the murder the following day, pleaded guilty in January 2005 and received a prison sentence of 7-20 years. At this point in time, Rothstein was already dead: he had died of lymphatic cancer in July 2004 at the age of 60 .

The murder of Roden was possibly the third that Diehl-Armstrong had committed. In 1984 she was charged with murdering her then boyfriend, Robert Thomas. She herself stated that she fired the six shots in self-defense and was acquitted. In 1988 her husband, Richard Armstrong, died of a brain haemorrhage . This time an accident was assumed. Shortly after her conviction, Diehl-Armstrong reported to the authorities again in April 2005 and offered to divulge her knowledge of the Wells case in exchange for being transferred to a prison closer to Erie, where prison conditions are better . In her interrogation she admitted her involvement in the crime. She also stated that Wells had privy to the plan and that Rothstein was the brains behind the matter. Even before their confession, the investigators had received information from four different witnesses about a connection between Diehl-Armstrong and the Wells case, to whom Diehl-Armstrong had commented in detail on the crime. One of them described that Diehl-Armstrong feared the betrayal of the planned bank robbery by her boyfriend at the time, James Roden, and that she had therefore shot him.

At the end of 2005 the last accomplice, Kenneth Barnes, became known. This had betrayed himself to his brother-in-law, whereupon he turned to the police. Barnes, who was already in jail for a drug offense, agreed to testify in full in the Wells case for a reduction in his sentence. First, he confirmed the investigators' suspicions that Diehl-Armstrong, whom he knew from fishing trips together, was the brains behind the matter. The motive behind the crime was that Diehl-Armstrong wanted to use the money from the bank robbery to pay Barnes to kill her father. She assumed that he was in the process of wasting his fortune and hoped that his premature death would give him a higher inheritance. It later became known that most of this inheritance had already been spent and the daughter had been disinherited .

After the investigation was largely complete, further questions could be clarified. The background to the awkward scavenger hunt was probably just an attempt to shake off the police, combined with the idea that if Wells were caught, he could believe that he had been forced to act. In this regard, it was found that the bomb was designed so that any attempt to remove it would have prematurely exploded. Therefore, the investigators assume that Wells should die in any case.

Brian Wells was recruited for the cause by Barnes, who was active as a crack dealer . At the time, Wells regularly went to a prostitute named Jessica Hoopsick, whom he paid with crack. Since he had no money left at the time, Wells allegedly allowed himself to be persuaded into the bank robbery, of which he was promised a share of the booty. Kenneth Barnes was sentenced to 45 years on December 3, 2008, and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 30 years on February 28, 2011, in addition to her prison sentence for the murder of Roden.

New testimony in 2018

The pizza bomber case received a lot of media attention and was covered several times by journalists and authors ( see below ). As part of the four-part documentary Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist by the streaming service Netflix , it was announced in 2018 that the prostitute Jessica Hoopsick confessed to her involvement in the case. According to her own statement, she had arranged the contact between Wells and Kenneth Barnes in 2003 because the latter was looking for an "errand boy" and she described Wells as a "weakling". Expressing regret for their involvement, she said Brian Wells had no in-depth knowledge of planning the bank robbery. This statement is particularly relevant because, under the laws of the state of Pennsylvania, a possible conviction of the surviving participants for murder (which is not subject to a statute of limitations ) of Brian Wells would only be possible if he was not an accomplice . The suspicion that the thesis of complicity by the convicted is upheld in order to escape the death penalty has so far neither been substantiated nor refuted. The ATF agent Jason Wick said that Hoopsick had shown himself to be uncooperative in the original 2003 investigation and that the authorities had long suspected that she had more information about the case, but that her credibility could also be questionable.

Cinematic processing

The Brian Wells bank robbery was picked up in several television series. These were:

  • Criminal Intent (Episode 3x13: Highly Explosive , 2004)
  • Criminal Minds (Episode 1x03: Red or Blue , 2005)
  • Bones (Episode 5x10: What Was Left of the Christmas Man , 2009)
  • The Mentalist (Episode 3x23: Bombs , 2011)
  • Almost Human (Episode 1x07: Simon Says , 2014)
  • Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist (four-part Netflix documentary, 2018)

In addition, the movie comedy 30 Minutes or Less (2011) is based on the events in Erie.

In addition to the four-part Netflix documentary series, there are TV documentaries on the Brian Wells case:

  • CopyCat Killers , Season 2 Episode 3: Saw - Deadly Scavenger Hunt , USA 2016
  • The Price of Duty - Investigators and Their Hardest Case , Season 1 Episode 2: Detective Clark and a Mysterious Lead , USA 2018

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Saw - Tödliche Schnitzeljagd (Saw) , fernsehserien.de , accessed on August 27, 2020.
  2. ↑ Detective Clark and a Mysterious Trail (Jerry Clark) , fernsehserien.de, accessed on August 27, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Wells, Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wells, Brian Douglas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pizza delivery boy whose mysterious violent death caused significant media coverage in the United States
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1956
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 2003
Place of death Erie , Pennsylvania