Netflix True Crime Saga Starts With A Bank Heist And Gets Stranger By The Minute
Following the success of Netflix’s Making a Murderer docuseries in 2015, the streaming service invested hard in its true crime game and gave subscribers some of the best shows of the latter half of the 2010s. The Keepers (2017), Amanda Knox (2016), and The Staircase (2018) all captured viewers’ attention and elevated the popularity of true crime shows to new levels. But Netflix shed light on one bizarre case from 2003 with the 2018 release of the series Evil Genius: the True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist, a docuseries that begins with a weird bomb threat and just gets more bizarre from there.
This Story Can’t Be Told In 30 Minutes Or Less
In 2003, an Erie, Pennsylvania pizza delivery man named Brian Wells robbed a local bank only to be quickly surrounded by police. Rather than surrender to the armed officers, Wells was killed when explosive devices inside the collar he had locked around his neck detonated. As the ATF, Pennsylvania State Police, and the FBI began investigating, they revealed that Wells did not act alone in the robbery/suicide.
As Evil Genius begins to unfold, it’s revealed that a woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was impatiently waiting for her father to die so that she would receive her inheritance. Not willing to wait until nature took its inevitable course on the old man, Diehl-Armstrong opted to hire a man named Kenneth Barnes to kill him. But what in the world does this have to do with a pizza delivery man robbing a bank and blowing himself up with an improvised explosive device?
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s Elaborate Heist
Evil Genius unravels Diehl-Armstrong’s twisted plot of using Wells to rob the local PNC Bank so that she could use the proceeds of the heist to pay for Barnes to murder dear old dad. All told, the mastermind involved four men in her scheme to get her dad’s money.
The docuseries slowly paints a vivid picture of Diehl-Armstrong that seems like something straight out of the mind of a twisted fiction author. She was arrested for shooting a previous husband (acquitted for self-defense) and had other significant others die from mysterious circumstances. She had sexual and/or emotionally manipulative relationships with several of the men that she would eventually use to conspire to rob the bank and take the hit out on her father.
A Hierarchy Of Insanity
Evil Genius does a great job tying in the warped mind of Diehl-Armstrong with the series of crimes committed that were to lead up to her father getting bumped off. The series impresses that the woman, though suffering from several documented mental illnesses, was able to manipulate and control the men in her life with lethal outcomes for some of them. The filmmakers also lean into the theories held by the surviving members of Wells’ family which, if true, make the story even more strange.
A Twisted Scavenger Hunt
Evil Genius shows how investigators found written instructions for Wells on how he was to rob the bank and deliver the money. In these instructions was a scavenger hunt, where extra time would be given upon completion of each step. The first step was to rob the bank, showing the tellers the bomb collar and a note that stated that the bomb would explode if he wasn’t given $250,000.
You Have To See It To Believe It
GFR SCORE
Only netting an estimated 9K, Wells had to leave the bank without the demands being fulfilled. After the explosion that killed him, police later came to the conclusion that Wells was a willing participant in the bank robbery but had no idea that the bomb around his neck was real. Family members of Wells believe that he really was coerced into the robbery and that the robbery/scavenger hunt instructions were the real deal and not a ploy to throw off the investigators in the aftermath.
Over the course of four episodes, filmmakers do a great job at both framing the entirety of this complicated and weird case as well as lending credibility to the possibility that Wells was a victim.
You can catch the madness behind Evil Genius streaming on Netflix.
