Stuff You Should Know - The Collar Bomb Heist

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

The collar bomb heist is the crime caper that keeps on giving. Every time the story seemed like it was figured out, another layer appeared. Tune in today to hear Josh and Chuck detail this very odd and twisty story.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, 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 wetting 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 gonna 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 over complicated 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. A 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 gotta have a crack dealer. You got prostitutes, you got pizza. And yeah, and let's start with the pizza show. 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, which is straight to a pizza place. With the pizza guy inside already. Yeah, and the little sign magneted on top. Right, 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 Mamma Mia's Pizzeria. A little on the nose, but fine. Sure, it gets the job done, right? And at about 2 p.m. on August 28th, 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 gonna go on his way home, but 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. It'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 wanna draw attention to it. Yes, she was being very kind. Right.

So one thing I wanna 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 guest jeans t-shirt. 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, if I could find the actual guest shirt, it wasn't, couldn't. So I think it may have been homemade. Regardless, he's wearing this shirt that says guess 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. I think he said you have 15 minutes to do this. Yeah, which kind of a long time if you're a bank robber. It is. It's like almost like luxurious around the time. What he 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 don't have, like 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? Yeah, and importantly, we did not mention, he lifted his shirt up and showed this teller. Right.

This bomb, this 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 Geometro, parked in a parking lot that is actually shared with that PNC bank and the McDonald's. And he's in a parking lot right there. So 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 come over and he says, hey guys, this is a bomb around my neck. A group of black men chain this bomb around my neck at gunpoint, force me to rob this bank for them. I'm not lying here. This thing is gonna go off.

So the cops call 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, but- I would be too. By the way, we should shout out Wired Magazine. Oh 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 Colour Bomb Heist. So thank you, Rich, for your work. But the dude's on the ground, he sit, I mean, if you, 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 this is 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? And 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 they, so he's dead, this guy, Brian Wells is dead.

And the whole time he was protesting, he's like, you know, this is, I was forced to rob the bank. Are you guys gonna get this off of me or what? Yeah, he said something like, did you call my boss? Because apparently he was a very loyal employee. He'd been working at Mama 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. Turns 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.

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, 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. Yeah, which was, I guess, the thing that started beeping faster and faster. Yeah, and then some decoy wires. Y'all always gotta have those if you're making a bomb.

Sure, but I mean, that's pretty smart. So there's decoy wires that were apparently also stickers that said, like, don't do it, or, you know, skull and crossbones, or rat poison, whatever. It's getting sweet. Yeah, and oh, that's a good nine to five 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, the big questions about any homemade bomb is whether it will actually work or not. And 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. It 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 in combination to get you out of this thing by going all over town and finding these various hidden notes, and 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 and 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, like, it's like, go do this and then go do that after that, and then, don't try anything funny, we're going to blow you up, you know? 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 that 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,

but 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. We're going to complete this 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 is just started by the coppers. We'll be right back. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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So the scavenger hunt's still on, Chuck. Correct. 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. But 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. Why the scavenger hunt? It's going to keep coming up again and again, right? 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 why him, what happened with him, and they went back to his placement employment, and they kind of checked out the kind of person he was, right? Yeah, 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. You could only get there by dirt road, and it was right next to a TV transmission tower in kind of a remote wooded area. And cops combed the area, found shoe prints that matched Wells. They found those classic iconic Geometrotire 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, a reporter and photographer for the Erie Times News went and did a little investigating of his own. And saw this house next door where the pizza was delivered, and said, well, you know, I'm just going to go knock on the door.

This guy answers the door, and his name was Bill Rothstein. And he actually said, you can look around if you want. He's 59 years old. He's a handyman, wasn't married, had 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 to 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? Yeah. And then, like I said, the case has gone cold by this time. If 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. And 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 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. He 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's 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 was because since he wasn't going through with grinding up the body, he was worried what this woman, Marjorie Diel Armstrong, was gonna do to him. He's like, I dated this lady. Right. She's not a nice person. And so when he says Marjorie Diel Armstrong

to the eerie cops, just alarm bells start going off. Because by this time already, Marjorie Diel 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 played 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. But there was no coroner's inquest or anything like that. And so it just was something suspicious, 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 Diel Armstrong is gonna do to me, the cops seem to have taken this 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 seven to 20. And then Rothstein, for his part, eventually died of cancer in 2004. Right, and so you said that he had considered killing himself and even wrote a suicide note, right? Yeah.

There was 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, it'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, there's no reason to look there. Right, it's always fun to make sure your fire alarm is working, part of a community service.

Cool, but the bed's fine. 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 Rodin or Jim Rodin, right? 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 Rodin'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.

Yeah, she asked for the old Hannibal Lecter treatment. So is that how it came up? Like she approached them? Cause I'm unclear on that. I mean, I think 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.

Right. 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, when they met with her about this, she admitted that she was involved, but well, she didn't admit she was involved in the plot, but she said, I knew about it. I gave him those two kitchen timers. And I was really close by when it happened. 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. Right, but for her deal arm strong, 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 is now she's saying is tied to the Wells case, and which she knows a lot about,

but really nothing about and had nothing to do with. So 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 her, 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 them tons of info, what 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.

And she sang like a canary to him basically and said, here's what she did. 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 gonna 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, I'm in jail for selling crack. That's way different from being very much involved in this collar bomb heist. So he said, okay, I'll tell you guys everything you wanna know, I'll be your star witness.

Just reduce my sentence for my involvement in this. And he started talking. When he started talking, it was at Marjorie deal armstrong's trial, which was a pretty spectacular trial from all accounts. Yeah, and before the trial even, he told, his story was, is that she wanted me to kill her father.

He was spending what would end up being her inheritance she felt. And so she wanted him dead. And so she was doing this collar bomb heist to raise money to pay me to kill her dad. Which I mean, like, that's just the biggest face palm I've ever heard of. Yeah, for real.

So, okay, we'll start Marjorie deal armstrong's trial after we take a break. How about that, man? That sounds good. Okay. Meanwhile we'll deal armstrong's trial later this hour. And so I doubt we could be bold fidgety's in the way that the yarn can handle it.

Yeah, maybe I could, or how I didn't know that he was falling for the hack. Maybe I might as well try a little differently. Anyways, I just want to ask you. Now, where does Marjorie come? So, she looks in our five rear view central area and one is in the distance, then she's left his charm,

and let's take a look back, maybe we might at most recall the one I've seen before. and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. And so, my husband, Michael? Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot sexy Teen Crush boyband are each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now! If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast.

And make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frost, Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay Chuck, so before Marjorie Deal Armstrong goes to trial, and remember she's already

in prison for the murder of Jim Rodin, right, shooting him in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun. Bill Rothstein is dead. I want to call him Ace Rothstein so bad. But Bill Rothstein is dead. He died of lymphoma a couple of years before. And by the time Marjorie Deal Armstrong is brought to trial for her involvement as the mastermind of the collar bomb plot, they have to verify that she's actually mentally competent to stay in trial.

And that's kind of touchy, because remember when she was charged with killing her boyfriend back in, I think, 1984 and 1986, she was deemed incompetent seven times by psychiatrists before the judge finally said, I'm throwing all that out and deciding that she is competent, we're going to go ahead with the trial. They also found like 400 pounds of butter and 700 pounds of cheese in her house when they were investigating that particular murder. And in between 1984 and the time she was tried in the collar bomb heist, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

So it was actually kind of questionable whether she was mentally competent to stay in trial. And right as they were about to start the proceedings, I think the judge ruled that she was competent to stay in trial, she was diagnosed with cancer herself. That's right. So they waited for the cancer diagnosis, her prognosis. And the cancer doctor came back and said three to seven years and the prosecutors said giddy up. That's right.

In the previous to this, she had gotten the indictment, but in that indictment, it's very important that she was not, I mean, granted, she was the only one technically indicted. But in the indictment it said that Rothstein was definitely a conspirator and Wells, the man who was the victim supposedly, he was definitely involved in this thing from the beginning. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's a very important thing that that showed up in this indictment. Yeah.

They said he agreed to rob this bank. He thought it was a fake bomb. And he was told the scavenger hunt was a ruse to fool the cops. And if and when he did get caught, he could say, I was just following orders, basically what he did. Right. And so Brian Wells' family did not like this at all. Apparently during the press conference where the DA of Erie County is announcing this,

this case is closed, this is the indictment that they have. The Wells, some of Brian Wells' sisters were shouting liar at her. They did not take the idea that their brother was an accomplice in this at all. Very well. Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of back and forth about whether Wells was in on the thing from the beginning or whether or not he was in from the beginning and then at one point wanted out and was forced to do this or whether he was forced from the beginning.

Everyone's telling a different story and basically the trial is where we will learn, if all of that is true, what really happened. So Marjorie D. Armstrong's lawyer said, to heck with caution, let's put you on the stand. You've already incriminated yourself multiple times. Why not do it in open court too? And she apparently was quite a, she put on quite a performance on the stand over like two days, I think five and a half hours of testimony. She yelled, she cried, she berated the prosecutor and her own lawyer.

When she did mention Brian Wells, she said, I've never met the guy. I learned of his death when everybody else did on the TV news. And she stuck with her story though that she had nothing to do with this. She knew a little bit about it. She knew the conspirators. The real mastermind was Bill Rothstein and it wasn't her. That's what she maintained though throughout the trial and even afterward. That's right.

But before she took the stand a few days earlier is when they trotted out Ken Barnes and he took the stand. And he said, he had, you know, by the time she took the stand, he had given a different account of the story than she would later do. So he got up there and said, she was behind all this. She was the mastermind. Rothstein was involved. She just recruited him basically.

She recruited Wells because Wells needed money. And here's where the prostitutes come into play. Basically Wells had a relationship with a prostitute who was also a crack addict. So he would buy crack to give her presumably as trade for sex. He ended up falling into debt with these crack dealers and needed money. It's basically the plot of Mulan Roosh. And he contends, Barnes did, that up until the day of the crime, Wells thought this whole thing was fake, realized that it was a double cross, it was a real bomb and he tried to

run away and was tackled and they put a gun to his head and locked him into this device. So imagine this Chuck, imagine being Brian Wells and you're agreeing to put on what you are presuming is a fake collar bomb to go carry out a real bank robbery because you need money because you're indebted to crack dealers because you borrowed from crack from them to give to your girlfriend who's a prostitute who you have to give crack to to be with. And then you find out on the day of that this is a real bomb and they're putting it on you whether you like it or not. What a horrible, what a horrible turn of events for this poor guy.

I mean, that's just so sad no matter how you slice it. And then if you take his family's opinion that he was 100% innocent, that he really was delivering pizzas and was accosted and had nothing to do with any of this, which I take with a pretty big grain of salt. I mean, that's just as bad, but it's bad either way, whether he was an accomplice at one point or not, it's very, it's super sad. There's a very sad thread that's running through the story in the form of Brian Wells, you know?

Well, yeah. And on the final day of her trial at the very, very end of her taking the stand is when she finally said that she didn't knew him, never met him. And the first time she had ever laid eyes on him was on the news that day. Right. Basically, he and Marjorie Deal Armstrong are fishing, right? They're fishing buddies. He's somebody that she would turn to.

And she's finding out that her father is blowing through her inheritance and she wants to put a stop to it. And so she approaches Barnes to get him to kill her father. But to get that 250K that he says he will kill her father for, she's got to rob a bank. So she turns to her friend, Bill Rothstein, to come up with this collar bomb to put it on this other person, Brian Wells, who's going to carry this out. And oh, by the way, we're also going to come up with a scavenger hunt to either throw the cops off or to actually make Brian Wells feel more comfortable, give him some sort of cover

in case he is caught. And that's what we're going to go with, go team. Marjorie Deal Armstrong said that's preposterous, that wasn't me. Kenneth Barnes said that's exactly what happened. And then Bill Rothstein wasn't alive to contradict any of it. That's right. So she's sentenced, right? She's convicted as the mastermind of this plot.

Yeah. The jury took about 11 hours and she was convicted of armed bank robbery, conspiracy in using a destructive device in a crime of violence. That's a big one, I'll bet. I'll bet that carries a hefty sentence with it. Yeah. And she would die in prison just like her prognosis said. She didn't, I think she lasted a few years.

No, they gave her three to seven years and she lasted seven. Yeah. So she finally passed away. And that's kind of the end of the story, even though there's a retired FBI investigator named Jim Fisher who said, I think they got this all wrong. I think that Rothstein was the guy the whole time. And he makes a decently compelling case, but it's, you know, everyone's dead now. Yeah.

Jim Fisher's gone a little bit down the rabbit hole if you ask me. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell with literally everyone having died. But for his money, he thinks it was Rothstein. Yeah. And so there's probably not many people who are familiar with the case who would say that it wasn't Rothstein who built the bomb. So what Jim Fisher is saying is like Bill Rothstein was behind everything and Marjorie

Deal Armstrong murdering Jim Rodin was just like a gift that dropped in Bill Rothstein's lap that he could use to make all these puppets dance, including the cops. And that the whole point of it was to create this elaborate scheme, this elaborate crime that would puzzle people for years and years to come, which it's doing that. And that that was the point and that Brian Wells was going to die one way or another. Right. Because I think the FBI said they concluded the whole scavenger hunt was a hoax and that Brian Wells was never going to survive this.

Didn't they? Yeah. So this is Jim Fisher's position. But like you said, now that everybody's dead, really the only question is, you know, just how, how complicit was Brian Wells is the, is the last big question. That's right. And then there's one other guy who seems to have got off Scott Free named Floyd Stockton. Did you look into him?

A little bit. So he's a guy who was there. He was, he was there. He supposedly handed Rothstein the bomb to put around Brian Wells neck. He was staying with Rothstein as a buddy on his couch fleeing a rape charge in Washington. And somehow for some reason, he got immunity and was not indicted, even though he was very much involved in this and he got off Scott Free and Brian Wells family is going nuts over the fact that this guy's out there walking free.

That he was, he was a part of this, this caper and he just, he didn't see a second inside of a jail. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more people involved even. So what do you think? Do you think Brian Wells was, was complicit? And if so, how much? Oh man, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like I kind of believe the story that they were all in it together and

he was probably double crossed, but this is just from reading about this thing many, many years later. Do you think Marjorie Deal Armstrong was the mastermind? I don't know. I don't know either. Maybe we'll never know, but we might, but probably not. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

All right. Well, if you want to know more about the collar bomb case, you can type that word in the search bar, your favorite search engine, and it will likely bring up a very great article on Wired from Rich Shapiro. Read that. Start there. It's great. And since I said Rich Shapiro, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to go with one on Emoji and John Adams. Hey guys, enjoy the recent podcast about the history of emojis and emoticons, reminding me of a discovery I made in the diaries of John Adams that makes a historical figure who's sometimes described as aloof, seemed completely charming. When the future president was about 22 years old, he made an entry in his diary in 1756 saying, a cloudy morning, about 10, and he drew a little sunshine, break out a warm day. He uses a little lying drawing in the sun that I always call an 18th century emoji. He liked a little creation so much he reused it a month later in the same diary, a misty

morning, little sunshine, break out about noon. On the Massachusetts Historical Society website, the text of his letters and diaries is faithfully transcribed, but in these cases, a parenthetical note tells readers that there are small drawings of the sun and advises them to refer to the scans of the handwritten page where you can actually see this. Apparently he grew out of his habit, though, because his later diaries do not use the adorable little sun. Keep up the great work.

My wife and I host a local history podcast for Boston, and it's tightly scripted. Oh man, he didn't even tell me what it was. I would have totally shouted it out. What? No. Big, big missed opportunity there, Jake. Sad face. One of these days, we'll be confident enough to have an unscripted conversation like you

guys do, and that is from Jake Skonyers. Okay, so everybody's look up Jake Skonyers Boston History Podcast, and it will probably bring it up, right? Yeah, probably so. Thanks a lot, Jake. Thanks for keeping up the good fight up there. That's pretty cool. Good story, too.

If you want to get in touch with us, like Jake did, tell us about your podcast. That's great. You can tweet to us. I'm at JoshOmClark and at SYSK Podcast, and Chuck is at Movie Crush, all on Twitter. On Facebook, you can go to facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow, or facebook.com slash CharlesWChuck Bryant. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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