Selects: The Collar Bomb Heist

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Chuck here, curating a specially hand-picked selected episode. This one's from May 2018. And boy, oh boy, this is a good one. I forgot all about this one. This is part of our true crime series. Not so grisly as far as, like, you know, it's not about an axe murder or anything like that. It's about a heist, and I love me some heist. And this is called The Color Bomb Heist.

1:05Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:15Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the true crime edition again. Yeah, we've done a few of these, right? True crime is so hot right now. Hey, man, we were dabbling on the periphery of true crime when most of these people were wet in their diapers. That's right, man. That is right. I'm glad somebody finally said it. We were occasionally doing a poor job of covering true crime 10 years ago. That's right. We're going to do it again. That's right. We continue that great, rich history. Yeah, because true crime can be extraordinarily interesting, especially when you're talking about an extraordinarily overcomplicated heist that results in a man's bizarre death, death by bizarre means, and involves what really ultimately you could make a case as an unsolved mystery still today, even though it's technically bureaucratically been solved.

2:21A lot of people say, no, this thing hasn't been solved yet. You got homemade bombs. You got a scavenger hunt. You got a crack dealer. Well, you got to have a crack dealer. You got prostitutes. You got pizza. Yeah, and let's start with the pizza, shall we? You got a Geo Metro. Right. Which, by the way, I just wanted to point out ahead of time, There is no more pizza delivery car 2003 than a Geo Metro. A teal one, no less. Yeah, the thing is, it's almost like they rolled them right off the line in 2003, straight to a pizza place. With the pizza guy inside already. Yeah, and the little sign magneted on top.

3:06Right, a little crooked. Yep. So the whole thing does start, actually, with a pizza guy, a pizza place and a teal Geo Metro. And like you said, the whole thing starts in 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania. And there was a, and still is, I looked it up, there's a pizza place called Mama Mia's Pizzeria. Mama knows, but fine. Sure. It gets the job done, right? And at about 2 p.m. on August 28, 2003, a pizza delivery guy named Brian Wells, I think he was 46 at the time. He was about to end his morning shift when a call came in for two small sausage and pepperoni pizzas. And the delivery was, I guess, the opposite way of where Brian Wells was going to go on his way home.

4:00But he said, you know what, I'll take this one last order. And he walked out the door at about two. And the next time that Brian Wells was seen in public again, he was entering a PNC bank branch just down the street from his pizza place a few miles up the road. And he looked a lot different than he did when he left the pizza parlor about 28 minutes earlier. Yeah. So first of all, he was walking with a cane, kind of a funny looking cane. And then under his T-shirt, he had clearly, and if you've seen the footage and the photos, which you can see. Warning, by the way, for video. Yeah. For the future, it's quite graphic.

4:48It's out there. But it is out there. But he had clearly some large, boxy-looking thing. It looked like he was wearing a shoebox around his neck with a T-shirt pulled over it. Kind of, but in the teller at the bank's defense, could have been an artificial torso, and she probably didn't want to draw attention to it. Yes, she was being very kind. Right. So one thing I want to point out, too, there's already a discrepancy. What we're like a minute into the story and there's already a discrepancy. That shirt he was wearing over that boxy thing underneath his shirt said Guess on it. And I've seen that it was written somehow like in spray paint or marker or that it was an actual Guess jeans T-shirt.

5:31Oh, really? So either an officially licensed or not licensed, but whatever brand shirt or a homemade janky spray painted version. Yeah. And if you look, the pictures don't really show one way or another. Yeah, I couldn't tell. It looks more like it's homemade. And I looked up to see if there was a guest shirt that, you know, if I could find the actual guest shirt it was and couldn't. So I think it may have been homemade. OK. Regardless, he's wearing this shirt that says guest on and he walks up to the teller and he hands the teller a note. And the note says, I have a bomb. Get everybody who has access codes to the safe together and put$250 ,000 into a bag and bring it to me.

6:15I think he said you have 15 minutes to do this. Yeah, which is kind of a long time if you're a bank robber. It is. It's like almost like luxurious amount of time. I would have said like 60 seconds. Yeah. Or this should have happened yesterday. Chop, chop. Right. So he stands back and waits, apparently grabs a dum-dum lollipop out of the little basket while he's waiting. Because why not? And the teller says, sir, we can't get into the safe. That's just not how things work. I'm sorry. But as a consolation prize, I'm going to put$8 ,702 into a bag for you right here and send you on your way, okay?

6:54Yeah, and importantly, we did not mention he lifted his shirt up and showed this teller. Right. this bomb, what's called a collar bomb, strapped around his neck. Right. So he walks out of the bank, a free man. And the next time that he's seen in public is about 15 minutes later. And he's seen in public by some Pennsylvania state troopers who are on the lookout for this guy. And he's still wearing that shirt. He's still got the big bulge. And he's standing around his Geo Metro parked in a parking lot that is actually shared with that PNC bank and a McDonald's. And he's in a parking lot right there.

7:34So basically he left the bank robbery and went about 100 to 200 feet away from it. And that's where he was found like a full 15 minutes later. Yeah, so these coppers, these troopers come over and he says, hey, guys, this is a bomb around my neck. a group of black men chained this bomb around my neck at gunpoint, forced me to rob this bank for them. I'm not lying here. This thing is going to go off. So the cops called the bomb squad, and they do. I saw the family of Wells is still angry about the fact that she says they did nothing to save them. I would be too. By the way, we should shout out Wired Magazine.

8:22Oh, yes, we really, really should. A lot of this came from a great, heavily researched story by Rich Shapiro from about eight years ago called The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist. So thank you, Rich, for your work. But the dude's on the ground. I mean, I kind of remember this happening because when I went and looked at the still images, I was like, wait a minute, I've seen this footage. And it's this guy sitting on the ground with this thing around his neck, kind of just waiting, seated on the pavement for about 25 minutes. He says, very interestingly, like, did you call my boss at the pizza place?

9:04And then all of a sudden this bomb starts beeping fast, which is never a good sign. And when I was reading the story, I thought, well, that's just a ruse. But no, this thing detonated and killed him. It blasted a hole in his chest. It did not blow his head off like the Internet says. No. But it was a violent, awful death. Yeah, it was. And it was pretty quick. And then three minutes after the bomb goes off, the bomb squad showed up. So he's dead. This guy, Brian Wells, is dead. And the whole time he was protesting. He's like, you know, I was forced to rob the bank. Are you guys going to get this off of me or what?

9:46But yeah, he said something like, did you call my boss? Because apparently he was a very loyal employee. He'd been working at Mamma Mia's for how long? Like 10 years or something like that? For years and years. And he'd only called in late once, not even sick, late once when his cat died, said Rich Shapiro in that Wired article. So it seemed like he actually was telling the truth, that he had been abducted and forced to rob the bank and then had been a victim. I think the bomb going off really kind of put an exclamation point on his story that he was not a willing participant in this, right? Yeah, so the cops obviously check out that Geo Metro, and it's sweet, sweet styling, and they saw his cane in there.

10:34Turns out the reason why the cane was funny looking is because it was also a gun. And it really looks a lot like a gun. Yeah, when you look at it. The bomb was clearly homemade. It had a couple of different parts to it. It was this banded metal collar that he wore around his neck. It was like locked to his neck. It had four keyholes and then a combination lock. Yeah, it was really locked to his neck. And then an iron box with two pipe bombs loaded up, ready to go. And then interestingly, and this will figure, put a pin in this one because this will figure in the case later, it had two kitchen timers in there in addition to an electronic countdown timer.

11:19Yeah, which was, I guess, the thing that started beeping faster and faster. Yeah, and then some decoy wires. You always got to have those if you're making a bomb. Sure, but I mean, like, that's pretty smart. So there's decoy wires. There were apparently also stickers that said, like, don't do it, or, you know, skull and crossbones or rat poison, whatever. Skinny and sweet. Yeah. And, oh, that's a good 9 to 5 reference, man. I just saw that the other night. So it was a homemade bomb, but it was, by all accounts, a well-made bomb, too. And it worked, which I think is one of the big questions about any homemade bomb is whether it will actually work or not.

11:58And this one worked with deadly effect. That's right. So the most important thing they found in this car, though, were some letters, some handwritten notes addressed to bomb hostage. So one of them said, I mean, these were instructions basically on what this guy should do, which further kind of cemented like, hey, this guy's probably telling the truth. that said, go rob this bank of 250 grand. And then very strangely outlined this little scavenger hunt basically to where eventually you will land upon the keys and combination to get you out of this thing by going all over town and finding these various hidden notes.

12:40And at the last note, you will be able to free yourself. Yeah, the last one will give you the keys and the combination, but you better hurry because you have a limited amount of time. If you stop and think you're going to waste time, you're going to die. We can detonate this remotely and we're going to be following you. It was written pretty crazily. Have you read any of the note? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so like it's got a lot of, like just like a lot of jump cuts or jump scares in it, you know? It's like, go do this and then go do that after that and then don't try anything funny or we're going to blow you up, you know?

13:17Yeah. It has those every once in a while. And there's drawings in there of where he could find like the notes and all that. So he made it as far as the first note, which was McDonald's. It was in that McDonald's that shared a parking lot with the PNC bank. That was where the first note was. So he made it to that McDonald's, grabbed that note, and that note was directing him out of town to another note. And he didn't make it that far when the cops caught up with him. Yeah, so the scavenger hunt was, like you said, he had gotten just to the one place. So the cops then say, well, here's what we're going to do.

13:55We're going to complete the scavenger hunt. They were like, whoa, you just blew my mind. That's some great policing. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. Scavenger hunt has just started by the Coffas. We'll be right back.

14:20Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

14:55I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:34All right, we're back. So the scavenger hunt's still on, Chuck. Correct. And they make it, the cops follow from the note that Brian Wells had to the next clue. And they found the next note. And that directed them to another place, even further out of town, to where they found the jar where the note was supposed to be, but the note was gone. Yeah, and they don't really know what that means. They didn't know if it was just something to keep them busy, preoccupied. They didn't know if the person who was designing the scavenger hunt got interrupted. or knew that the cops were around and they were doing it sort of in real time.

16:12But at any rate, unfortunately, the scavenger hunt just kind of fizzled out because that was kind of a cool part of the story. Yeah, it really was. It was like, it's one of the things that makes this just an incredibly bizarre crime. Yeah. Why the scavenger hunt? It's going to keep coming up again and again, right? Yeah. So when the scavenger hunt ran out, the trail actually went cold. The case started to get cold for a few months. The cops sniffed around Brian Wells, tried to figure out, you know, why him, what happened with him. And they went back to his place of employment and they kind of checked out the kind of person he was, right?

16:50Yeah, and they very smartly said, well, wait a minute. Why don't we check out what that last delivery was supposed to be? There may be a clue there. And it was an interesting place. It was at the – you could only get there by dirt road. and it was right next to a TV transmission tower in a kind of a remote wooded area. Right. And cops combed the area, found shoe prints that matched wells. They found those classic, iconic Geo Metro tire tracks that everyone recognizes by sight. But there really weren't any more clues as far as the cops were concerned at that location. So where the cops had found a dead end, And a reporter and photographer for the Eerie Times News went and did a little investigating of his own and saw this house, you know, next door where the pizza was delivered and said, well, you know, I'm just going to go knock on the door.

17:45This guy answers the door and his name was Bill Rothstein. And he actually said, you know, you can look around if you want. He's 59 years old. He's a handyman, wasn't married. He'd lived there his whole life. and apparently he seemed really smart, had a very articulate way of speaking and apparently was fluent in several different languages. And the journalist kind of did a little poking around and didn't really see much and took off. But he made contact with Bill Rothstein. He's the first person that kind of went a-knocking. Right. But nothing came of it. And the cops, as far as I know, never went and met with Bill Rothstein, even though his house was right next to the delivery place where Wells was supposedly accosted, right?

18:31Yeah. And then, like I said, the case has gone cold by this time. A couple months have gone by. The whole—I mean, you've got this crime, this very public caper that's captured the public's attention. A guy died by being blown up while under police supervision. And there's no leads. There's no nothing. And then finally, several weeks, a few months, I think, after the call, there's a 911 call from Bill Rothstein. And he tells the police that in his freezer, he has one of those serial killer chest freezers, there's actually a body, a man's body. and that it was, it is not someone he murdered, but he helped cover up the murder of this man who was the boyfriend of Bill Rothstein's ex-girlfriend from way, way back in the day.

19:28And now the chain of events has been set off. Right. And if you're like me and you start hearing wife of the ex-girlfriend's dad's cousin, your brain gets a little jumbled. So just very plainly, he used to date this woman. This woman called him up and said, hey, I've murdered my current boyfriend. Or was it her husband? It was her boyfriend, yeah. And she said, and I need your help here. I blasted him with a shotgun. And I know we dated, oh, 20 years ago. But will you come help me out? Because they were still in contact, I guess. They remained friends. I guess so. And this racked Bill Rothstein, apparently.

20:11He thought about committing suicide, apparently. There was even a note they found, a suicide note. But he maintained, like you said with the cops, that he didn't have anything to do with anything but most of the cleanup. The cleanup, getting rid of the murder weapon, and then holding on to the body. Yeah, but which the reason he held on the body, he was supposed to get, apparently he was supposed to grind this body up. And that's where he finally stopped short and was like, Jesus, I can't do this. And he said he told the cops that the reason he called them finally is because since he wasn't going through with grinding up the body, he was worried what this woman, Marjorie Deal Armstrong, was going to do to him.

20:49He's like, I dated this lady. Right. She's not a nice person. And so when he says Marjorie Deal Armstrong to the eerie cops, just alarm bells start going off. Because by this time already, Marjorie Deal Armstrong was a local legend as far as criminals are concerned. She was this very, very bright woman who, I think at the age of 35, back in the 80s, had been indicted for killing one of her boyfriends, shot him six times. She pled that she had killed him in self-defense, that he was an abuser of her, and she was actually acquitted. A few years after that, she was married to a guy named Armstrong, and he showed up at the hospital with a head trauma and actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

21:37But there was no coroner's inquest or anything like that. And so it just was something suspicious, you know, the second significant other of this woman to die under suspicious or violent circumstances. So when Bill Rothstein said, I'm worried about what Marjorie Deal Armstrong is going to do to me, the cops seem to have taken it very seriously. Well, extremely seriously because the next day they arrested her. That's pretty serious. For murder. And about a year and a half later, a little short of that, she pled guilty but mentally ill. She was sentenced to 7 to 20. And then Rothstein, for his part, eventually died of cancer in 2004.

22:21Right. And so you said that he had considered killing himself and even wrote a suicide note, right? Yeah. There's something very, very odd on Bill Rothstein's suicide note. And again, he didn't kill himself. He died of cancer. But he was able to actually show the cops where his suicide note was. And they read it. And the first line of it, from what I understand, was this has nothing to do with the collar bomb heist or the Brian Wells murder. Yeah, that's a weird thing to put if you had nothing to do with that, you know. Right. That's just a very odd thing to do. It's like when the cops come in and you go, there's nothing under the bed.

23:01There's no reason to look there. Right. They say, we just want to make sure your fire alarm is working. Yeah, exactly. Part of a community service. Cool, but the bed's fine. Right. So that is a very weird thing to say, and that definitely piqued the interest of the cops. But like you said, the cops convicted or the state convicted Marjorie Deal Armstrong of the murder of James Roden or Jim Roden, right? Yeah. She's already in prison. And when she's in prison, somehow, this is what I'm unclear on. Somehow it comes up or she starts talking or something like that. that Jim Roden's death very much had to do with the Wells case, with Brian Wells' murder, this collar bomb heist, and that she knows a lot about it, and if they'll transfer her to a minimum security prison close to Erie, she'll start talking.

23:58Yeah, she asked for the old Hannibal Lecter treatment. So is that how it came up, like she approached them? Because I'm unclear on that. I mean, I think so. So this is in the Wired article. It said that there was a phone call from a state cop who had just met with her about something unrelated, like a different homicide. And she just and it kind of makes sense, though, now, actually, when we as we will learn, she talked a lot. Yeah, a lot. So it doesn't surprise me that another cop was just meeting with her about something unrelated. She's like, by the way, that whole collar bomb thing, I got all the skinny on that.

24:40Right. So there's a couple of things going on here by then. By the time she calls the cops, the cops have already spoken, apparently, with several informants that have shared cells with her or spent time with her in jail already who are saying, like, this lady is the mastermind of that collar bomb heist that's making you guys look bad. yeah and eventually you know when they met with her about this she she admitted that she was involved but um well she didn't admit she was involved in the plot but she said i knew about it i gave him i gave him those two kitchen timers and i was really close by when it happened uh and by the way the guy who blew up with the collar bomb mr wells he was actually in on it too And Rothstein headed the whole thing up.

25:31Right. But for D.L. Armstrong, she said, but I had nothing to do with it. Even though I had all these other little things to do with it, I never met Brian Wells. I didn't know Brian Wells. I had nothing to do with his death, aside from supplying the kitchen timers. And knowing all about it. Right, exactly. So now it's just getting weird, right? Because there's the Jim Roden murder, who she says that she killed because he was abusing her, who Rothstein said she killed over a dispute with money, but now she's saying is tied to the Wells case, which she knows a lot about, but really nothing about and had nothing to do with.

26:11So the cops are like, well, let's just get this lady to talk all we can. And one of the things they got out of her was she agreed to a tour around Erie, showing them all these places where she had been. and these were all places that were related to the crime. Like, I believe she said she'd been at the pizza delivery site. I think she said she'd been within a mile of the bank when it was robbed. Like, all of this stuff, she's just like, they just keep giving her this rope and she's just wrapping it around her neck again and again and again. And then finally, Chuck, at the end of this car ride, after she's been interviewing with the cops multiple times, giving him tons of info.

26:54What does she say? She asked for immunity at this point after she had basically completely incriminated herself. And previous to all this, a lot more happened. There were four different informants who had come forward and said that this lady's been talking about this for a while. She very much had everything to do with it. And then a couple of months after she had started talking to the feds, another big break came. This witness came forward and said, hey, there's this crack dealer named Kenny Barnes. That is a crack dealer's name. Kenneth Barnes. And he was involved. They used to go fishing together, Armstrong, Deal Armstrong and Barnes.

27:37And she sang like a canary to him, basically, and said, here's what she did. And she, her brother-in-law put him in touch with Barnes while he was already in jail on unrelated charges, basically. And so Barnes was already in prison and said, hey, I think I can shorten my time. So I'm going to try and get a reduced sentence at least by spilling the beans on Deal Armstrong. Right. And Barnes' brother-in-law was who turned him into the cops. Oh, yeah. So Barnes is like, oh, I'm already, I'm in jail for selling crack. That's way different from being, you know, very much involved in this collar bomb heist.