Does anyone remember the crazy case of the collar bomb wearing pizza delivery dude turned bank robber? When I first heard this news story I thought it was a prank gone way wrong. It turns out the whole robbery thing was part of a nutty scheme concocted by a woman named Diehl Armstrong. The dead pizza guy was forced to wear the collar bomb, but he was in on the robbery, so I guess he drew the short straw. Poor loser.
Read the whole story below and the answer is yes, yes reality is stranger than fiction.
A man has been sentenced to 45 years in prison over the bizarre death of a pizza delivery man forced to rob a bank with a collar-bomb strapped to his neck.
Brian Wells was killed when the collar-bomb exploded as he was waiting for the bomb squad after he was arrested following the robbery of a bank in Pennsylvania.
The robbery, in which he presented a note to a bank teller and demanded cash, netted only about $13,000.
Kenneth Barnes, 55, was sentenced overnight to 45 years in prison for the crime, in which he said he played only a minimal role, the Associated Press reported.
Barnes and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong were charged with conspiring to strap the bomb to Wells's neck before the robbery of the PNC Bank in Summit, Erie County, on August 28, 2003.
Diehl-Armstrong, 59, the plot's alleged mastermind, is awaiting an examination to determine if she is mentally competent to stand trial. Prosecutors say she wanted the money to hire Barnes to kill her father. She is already in prison for killing her boyfriend to keep him quiet about the bank plot.
Barnes apologized to Wells's family before the sentence was imposed overnight.
"What happened to him was something that wasn't supposed to happen," he said.
Prosecutors said Wells was initially an active member in the plot but when he realized the bomb was real, he had to be forced at gunpoint to put it on. His family maintains he was an innocent victim.
Another boyfriend of Diehl-Armstrong called in a phony pizza order to lure Wells to a secluded dead-end road, according to the indictment.
US Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan called Barnes' sentence "appropriate and just".
She reiterated prosecutors' conclusion that Wells was involved in the plot, saying his family's contentions "are overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence".
Comments