Erie, Pa. – A pizza deliveryman robs a bank, takes off in his Geo Metro and is surrounded by police minutes later in a parking lot. A bomb is attached to a triple-banded metal collar locked around his neck; the hand- written instructions he was given say he can free himself by going on a sort of scavenger hunt.
“It’s going to go off,” Brian Wells told police. “I’m not lying.”
The scene of Wells’ 2003 death couldn’t have been more tragically bizarre. Or so it seemed until Wednesday, when prosecutors said the convoluted plot was, at least in the beginning, partially his.
Wells is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in indictments unsealed Wednesday against Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Kenneth E. Barnes.
Authorities said Diehl- Armstrong, a former teacher and high school valedictorian, hatched the robbery plan with her friend Barnes so she could pay someone to kill her father. She killed her boyfriend before the robbery to keep him from disclosing details of the plot, according to the indictment.
Wells, to some extent, helped plan the robbery and then got caught up in something “much more sinister,” U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said in the first accounting of the baffling and sensational crime.
“It may be that his role transitioned from that of the planning stages to being an unwilling participant in the scheme,” she said.
Wells, 46, told police before the bomb exploded that he was an innocent victim and had been forced by gunmen to rob the bank.
Wells’ brother, John Wells, angrily denied that his brother had anything to do with the scheme.
Buchanan said Wells had a limited role in the plot and that it was unclear if his co-conspirators planned on his being killed.
“If he died, he could not be a witness,” it said in the indictment.
Diehl-Armstrong and Barnes were each charged with bank robbery, conspiracy and a firearms count.
