Indictments will soon be handed up in the case of a pizza deliveryman who in August 2003 wound up in the middle of a bizarre bank robbery scheme that ended with a bomb around his neck exploding, according to lawyers involved with the case.
Brian Wells, 46, robbed a suburban Erie, Pa., bank in 2003 with the bomb attached to his neck and then was killed when it exploded as he sat handcuffed in a parking lot while police waited for a bomb squad.
No one was charged as authorities struggled to determine who was behind the plot and whether Wells was an innocent victim or willing participant.
Tim Lucas, a lawyer who represents a witness who testified before a grand jury in the pizza-bomber case, told FOX News on Tuesday that the indictments likely will charge Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, 58, who is in jail for another killing, with Wells' death. One or two other individuals might also be charged, Lucas said, but the government believes Diehl-Armstrong was the ringleader.
Diehl-Armstrong's lawyer, federal public defender Thomas Patton, also said in court papers filed Monday in Erie that he anticipates his client being charged, reports The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
"Ms. Diehl-Armstrong has not yet been charged; however, it is anticipated that an indictment will be forthcoming shortly," Patton wrote in a request for a gag order to keep prosecutors from holding a news conference to announce the charges, the newspaper reported.
Click here to read The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review story
Diehl-Armstrong, formerly of Erie, is serving 20 years in state prison for killing her roommate, James Roden. Diehl-Armstrong pleaded guilty but mentally ill.
Roden's killing led police to question Diehl-Armstrong in the Wells case because Roden's body was found in the freezer of a man named William Rothstein, who has since died. Rothstein's house was near the TV tower. Wells told police before he died that he had been accosted by gunmen who locked the bomb on his neck and forced him to rob the bank when he went to deliver a pizza to a TV tower on a dead-end road.
Diehl-Armstrong was also charged in 1984 with the death of her boyfriend, Robert Thomas, but was acquitted of the homicide charge. She was, however, convicted of carrying a firearm without a license, and received probation.
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