A man claiming to be the common-law husband of a woman convicted in a bizarre Pennsylvania bank robbery plot that killed a pizza delivery driver with a bomb locked to his neck wants officials to confirm her death and release her remains.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, 68, died on April 4 of natural causes at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Mark Marvin, 68, from Walden, New York, told the Erie Times-News that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons hasn’t helped him locate Diehl-Armstrong’s remains.
Diehl-Armstrong was serving life plus 30 years in the 2003 Erie bank robbery plot that ended with the death of 46-year-old Brian Wells.
Diehl-Armstrong and at least two others forced Wells to wear a metal collar bomb and gave him instructions to rob a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Dressed as a pizza delivery man, Wells escaped with $8,702 but was stopped by police shortly after.
As he sat handcuffed in a parking lot while police and the FBI waited for a bomb squad, the bomb blew his head off.
A 2004 file photo shows Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong as she heads into a hearing at the Erie County Courthouse in Erie, Pennsylvania. She died of natural causes on April 4
In 2003, Brian Wells, 66, robbed a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania wearing a pizza delivery man’s uniform and a metal collar bomb around his neck. Police captured him after he left the bank and the bomb exploded, blowing his head off
Brian Wells is pictured in his driver’s license photo (left). Prosecutors claimed that he was in on the robbery but his family is adamant that he was a hostage. Diehl-Armstrong is pictured right following a mental competency hearing in 2008 proclaiming her innocence in the 2003 bank robbery and collar bomb death of Brian Wells
Marvin says the Bureau hasn’t confirmed to his satisfaction that she’s dead.
‘It is certainly reasonable to believe she died,’ Marvin said. ‘But I don’t have any confirmation of that.’
Marvin said he met Diehl-Armstrong by mail while he was corresponding with her fellow inmates and helping them with legal issues, though he’s not an attorney.
He said he met her in person in prison.
‘I miss her very much,’ he said of Diehl-Armstrong. ‘She was just really easy to talk to. She appreciated me. We had a really good partnership.’
She insisted she is not guilty
Marvin filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details about her death and where she is buried. He said he fears that they threw her in an unmarked grave in a landfill.
If she is dead, he wants to move her remains to a Quaker cemetery near Poughkeepsie, New York.
‘I am just pursuing her interests,’ Marvin said. ‘She insisted she is not guilty.’
Marvin also wants the judge to ‘abate’ the charges against Diehl-Armstrong, which would declare her innocent after her death.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman was investigating Marvin’s request Tuesday, but didn’t immediately comment.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh, which oversees the satellite office in Erie where Diehl-Armstrong was convicted, also declined to comment.
Wells’ death remained a mystery until Diehl-Armstrong and her fishing buddy Kenneth Barnes were indicted in 2007 on charges they concocted the plot along with her ex-boyfriend William Rothstein, who by then had died of cancer.
Barnes later pleaded guilty and testified against Diehl-Armstrong. Federal prosecutors said Rothstein, a retired high school shop teacher, made the bomb collar using two egg timers provided by Diehl-Armstrong.
William Rothstein, left, and Kenneth Barnes, right, were implicated in the bank robbery
They said he ordered the pizzas that lured Wells to a dead-end road where Wells was fitted with the device and given handwritten instructions on how to rob the bank and disarm the bomb.
Prosecutors contend Wells was in on the plot but was fooled into believing the collar bomb would be a decoy. His family disputes that and maintains he was a hostage.
Diehl-Armstrong suffered from bipolar disorder. She pleaded guilty but mentally ill to fatally shooting her boyfriend, James Roden, in 2003.
She also argued self-defense and was acquitted in the fatal shooting of her boyfriend, Robert Thomas, in 1984.
Diehl-Armstrong is pictured in the Erie County courthouse in 1988 when she was facing trial for the murder of her boyfriend. She was ultimately acquitted