The Collar Bomb Heist

On August 28th 2003, Brian Wells, a pizza delivery man in Eerie, Pennsylvania, died after robbing a bank with a bomb around his neck. When the police started investigating the events that led up to Wells’ death, things began to get very strange very quickly.

At 1:47 pm on August 28th, a pizza delivery was placed at the pizzeria that Brian Wells worked at. The owner of the pizzeria can’t quite catch the address and hands the phone to Wells. Despite being the end of his shift, Wells agrees to deliver the pizza to 8631 Peach Street. At around 2 pm the pizza was delivered, however, not to the address listed, but to a TV transmission tower in the woods off Peach Street, accessible by a dirt road. Later on, police would find the tyre tracks and footprints that matched Wells’ car and shoes. There were no other clues as to why he was there or who he had met. During the time he was at the TV transmission tower, the collar bomb was attached to Wells.

At 2:20 pm, Wells walked into PNC Bank wearing the bomb, two miles from the delivery address. He was wearing a white t-shirt with the word ‘Guess’ written across the chest and holding a cane. Wells headed to the teller and passed them a note which read ‘Gather employees with access codes to the vault and work fast to fill the bag with $250,000. You have only 15 minutes.’ The teller managed to fill the bag with $8,702. Leaving the bank, Wells left a note and his drivers license, before walking out sucking on a Dum Dum lollipop from the counter.

Fifteen minutes later, Wells was cuffed by State Troopers and sat on the ground in the car park. He informed the Troopers of the bomb around his neck and told them that he had been accosted by a group of black men who put the bomb around his neck whilst holding him at gunpoint. Wells shouted “It’s gonna go off” and “I’m not lying” to police who were now positioned behind their cars. Wells sat on the ground for twenty-five minutes before the bomb started to beep at a faster pace. Ultimately, the device detonated putting Wells on his back and leaving him with a five-inch gash in his chest. Wells died at 3:18 pm, the bomb squad arrived three minutes later. 

When investigating Wells’ car, police found pages of handwritten instructions. The instructions told Wells to exit the bank and go to the McDonald’s drive-thru sign in the flower bed, where he would find a rock with a note taped to the bottom. The notes said ‘this powerful, booby-trapped bomb can be removed only by following our instructions, act now, think later or you will die!’ The instructions also warned Wells that he would be watched by sentries ‘if anyone follows or interferes, we may leave and allow the timer to detonate or call the cell phone detonator.” If followed, the instructions would lead Wells to the combination to remove the bomb. The police tried following the rest of the instructions and came to a dead end. With the time limit on the bomb, Wells would have never been able to complete the instructions in time. 

Less than a month after Wells’ death, September 20th, Bill Rothstein calls the police: “at 8645 Peach Street, there is a frozen body… it’s in the freezer.” The address was Rothstein’s house and he claimed that the body in the freezer, James Roden, was him doing a favour for friend and two-times ex-fiancee, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. Diehl-Armstrong was Roden’s girlfriend and shot him with a shotgun on 13th August, six weeks before the body was reported. In police custody, Rothstein revealed that Diehl-Armstrong wanted the body disposed of using a grinder. Rothstein had felt incredibly guilty and had considered suicide. Police found Rothstein’s suicide note that started “This has nothing to do with the Wells case”. 

From an outside perspective, there was no apparent connection between Wells and Rothstein and Diehl-Armstrong. The only link seemed to be coincidence; Rothstein’s home was one of the only houses in the vicinity of Wells’ pizza delivery, a five-minute walk away. However, more and more coincidences piled up. The phone that placed the pizza order came from a Shell station, half a mile away from Rothstein’s house. The manager said that Rothstein would come into the shop to buy a newspaper and cookies and sit in his car, have brunch and read the paper. He also used to make calls from the payphone. Police searched Rothstein’s house and found power tools and old machinery. Rothstein had the equipment and the know-how to build the collar bomb.

The bomb was of DIY design and consisted of two parts:

• A triple banded metal collar with four keyholes and a three combination lock.
• An iron box that held two six-inch pipe bombs loaded with double-base smokeless powder.

The collar looked like a giant handcuff around Wells’ neck. The device also contained two Sunbeam kitchen timers and one electronic countdown timer. Wires were connected to nothing (decoy for a would-be disabler) and had stickers with deceptive warnings. Until this incident, collar bombs had only been known to be used by Columbian drug lords in territory wars.

Initially, the FBI was not interested in investigating the Roden case until they realised Rothstein’s suicide note was false. Marjorie admitted that Roden’s death had everything to do with the ‘Collar Bomber’.

To Be Continued: 11th August