'Pizza Bomb' Suspect Contacts ABC News
In letter to network, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong says, "I'm totally innocent.''
July 11, 2007 — -- The letter began enticingly enough.
"I am totally innocent of the [Brian] Wells crime, but I have a plethora of information to offer.''
Stamped "Inmate Mail -- Pa. Dept. of Corrections'' in Muncy, Pa., and bearing the name of the woman now at the center of the "pizza bomber" investigation, the letter arrived unbidden at ABC News in March, after the network sent a producer to Erie last winter to take a fresh look into the long unsolved case.
In the letter inmate Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong gets right to the point.
"I'm sane, not on psych[iatric] meds'' and have "equivalent of five college degrees with honors,'' she wrote.
Armstrong is serving a seven to 20 year sentence for the murder of former boyfriend James Roden, which happened during the same month Wells was killed by the bomb. She pleaded guilty but mentally ill to that crime in January 2005.
While Armstrong appears to have been complicit in both homicides, authorities have never formally made a link between the two cases.
Despite her apparent cooperation with investigators, federal prosecutors brought felony charges against Armstrong and another man in connection with the Wells case Tuesday, and are expected to announce indictments today.
Armstrong, one of the strangest figures in a very unusual case, graduated class valedictorian from her Erie high school, according to former classmate Brad Foulk, currently Erie County's district attorney and the man who prosecuted her for Roden's murder. She went on to earn several postgraduate degrees, but has been linked to violent crime for decades. More than 20 years ago, she shot and killed a man who her attorney Lawrence D'Ambrosio described as a "vicious, abusive'' boyfriend. Then in 2003, authorities say, she shot and killed Roden.
D'Ambrosio told ABC News that Armstrong was preoccupied with the disposal of Roden's body when the pizza bomb plot was carried out by Wells.
"I know Marge,'' D'Ambrosio said Tuesday. "And she has an obsessive, one-track mind, where she's obsessed with one thing and she just stays right on it and you can't talk to her about anything else. There's no way that I can picture her planning something else when she has a one-track mind obsession with 'what are we going to do with my boyfriend's body and not tell the police.' That [bomb plot] was a traumatic incident, and whether she participated or not, it's not something you do every day.''
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