For four years the Erie area has wrestled with the key question in the crime known world wide simply as the Pizza Bomber Case.
Was Brian Wells a willing participant in the bizarre scheme to rob the PNC Bank Branch in 2003 or was he a victim?
The US Attorney for the area told reporters Wednesday, that he was both.
Evidence has led investigators to believe that Brian Wells participated in the early planning of one of the strangest capers in the history of Erie County.
One of six or seven conspirators would strap a bomb around his neck and walk into the bank to get enough money to allow Marjorie Diehl Armstrong to hire a hit man to kill her elderly father.
But Wells may have had second thoughts about being the front man and could have been forced to comply, making him both participant and victim.
The group then fashioned an elaborate back-up plan with a rambling holdup note and directions for a number of stops that had to be completed before the egg timer in the collar bomb reached zero.
It was a fall back plan so that Wells could call himself a victim if captured.
It sounds like the group had his back, but they may have had other plans.
Wells never acted like someone who believed that the bomb around his neck was real, even stopping inside the bank to grab a lollypop before approaching the teller.
There may have been no one more surprised in that parking lot that day than Wells when the bomb actually exploded, ending his life.
Of the six or seven conspirators, only three remain alive this week.
Marjorie Diehl and Kenneth Barnes have been indicted for their crimes.
A third man, Floyd Stockton is not indicted and may cut a deal for his testimony against the other two.
And that may be it, despite hard protests from family members maintaining the innocence of the central figure in one of the strangest cases we’ve ever seen.
In the end, as ATF supervisor Mark Potter said, it was about greed and fear and death.
In the end, the details may have been bizarre, but the motives are as old as time.
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