Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - They Strapped a Bomb To His Neck - The Pizza Bomber story

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

This is the story Brian Wells, the pizza bomber, as well as Kenneth Barnes, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, and William Rothstein and their plot to rob a bank.

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Meet the New Avengers. That's cool, then. Marvel Studios, Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, rated PG-13. Now streaming on, you guessed it, Disney Plus. So one day, a pizza delivery man is out delivering pizzas. But when he shows up to the delivery address, there appears to be no one there. It's just an empty field with a TV tower in it. So he gets out of his car, and then suddenly, three people appear,

and they've got pew-pues pointed at him, and they grab him, and they lock a collar around his neck. A collar that contains a bomb. And then they hand him a nine-page long handwritten note that tells him they need him to rob a bank for them. And if he doesn't follow these very specific instructions, the bomb will go off and he'll die. So the pizza man, his name's Brian. And poor Brian, he doesn't know what to do. And they suddenly hand him a shotgun that's modified to look like a walking cane.

This is an actual picture of the walking cane shotgun. I guess to help him protect himself while he robs this bank for them? And then they're like, okay, Brian, the clock is ticking. We'll be watching. Minutes later, Brian pulls up to the bank. And with the collar bomb still on him, He walks inside and he goes up to the counter and he slips the bank teller a note that says to put $250,000 in a bag. Now the teller, I guess she can't get $250,000.

So she puts around $8,700 into a bag. And she gives it to Brian and Brian leaves. And he gets in his car and the instructions tell him to go to a nearby McDonald's. So he speeds to the McDonald's to get the next clue, which ends up being a note hidden under a rock there. So Brian gets the note and then he drives away toward the next location to find whatever clue. is after that. But that is when police finally catch up to him for the bank robbery. And they get him out of his car and then they handcuff him. And poor Brian's like, wait, but I'm a hostage. And then he tells them about the three people who put the bomb around his neck and made him do all this. So

police, they see the bomb and they immediately call the bomb squad. And Brian, he tries to tell them, like, you don't understand. I don't have time. I need to finish this scavenger hunt or this bomb will go off. And as the bomb ticks away, it gets louder and louder. And Brian, he gets more and anxious and a bit of time passes and the bomb squad hasn't shown up yet and everyone's just kind of standing around waiting for them and he feels like no one is listening to him and then suddenly the bomb explodes and Brian is unalived now because this is such an unusual case the FBI gets involved and pretty quickly they get contacted by this guy William and William tells them hey look I had nothing to do with any collar bomb

but I know who did and he tells them that the mastermind behind this whole bank robbery is this other woman who lives in that town. This woman, Marjorie. And then William also tells them that Marjorie had unalived her own boyfriend with poison. And then paid William $2,000 to hide the boyfriend's body in his freezer. Well, now we're getting somewhere. So then the FBI finds the boyfriend's body in Williams freezer. And they go and they arrest Marjorie. Now Marjorie, she claims she's innocent in this whole collar bomb thing. But she ends up taking a police deal for unaliving her boyfriend and they throw her in prison. So how did William know that Marjorie was allegedly the mastermind behind the bank heist? Well, unfortunately for the FBI, William can't

answer too many questions because within about a year, he dies from cancer. So they get no more information out of him, which is a bummer for the investigation. But then, about six months after getting sent to prison, Marjorie suddenly decides she wants to cooperate with the FBI, thinking maybe they'll lighten her sentence or transfer her to a minimum security prison. So she sits down with the FBI and she admits to them that she was actually involved in the collar bomb plot and that her former boyfriend, the one she unalived, knew about the collar bomb and he threatened to snitch on her. That's why she says she unalived him and had William put him in the freezer.

But then, to make this even more confusing, the FBI suddenly gets a random tip about another guy involved in the bomb plot. This guy. Barnes. Now Barnes, he's already in prison for an unrelated drug charge. So the FBI goes to the prison and they interview him. And he admits that yes, he actually was involved in the collar bomb plot, but he says that William, the guy who died of cancer, was actually the mastermind behind the whole thing. Not Marjorie. He says William was really the one who sat down and constructed the whole collar bomb and he built the shotgun cane thing himself. He was handy like that. So Barnes, he pleads guilty to his involvement in the plot and he gets 14. 35 years in prison. But then, a couple of years into his sentence, Barnes changes his story,

and he tells the FBI that while William did build the collar bomb device, he wasn't actually the mastermind. Instead, it was Marjorie the whole time. She was the mastermind. He says Marjorie came up with his whole collar bomb plan to rob the bank for $250,000, and that she wanted that $250,000 so that she could use it to hire a hitman, and that she wanted a hitman so that she could have him unalive her biological father, and she wanted him unalived so that she could get her family inheritance. But then, Barnes drops another bomb on them. He tells the FBI that not only was Marjorie in on it, and that not only was William in on it, but that Brian, the man with the collar bomb around his neck who died, he says that he was in on the collar bomb plot too, and that

Brian agreed to rob the bank with this bomb around his neck in exchange for a cut of the $250,000. However, he says that Brian didn't actually know that the bomb around his neck was a real bomb. Brian thought the whole time the bomb would be fake. I guess they were supposed to give him a fake one. So he thought that was fake until... It exploded. So anyway, Marjorie finally goes to trial for this and she's sentenced to life. And here's what she looks like for real.

I hope that story wasn't too confusing. Shout out to Pennsylvania.