Evil Genius

I told you about the video. It's for your attorneys.

- Huh? Oh, right. - It's your attorneys.

Isn't that wonderful?

- Can you--? -I had no idea. This is fantastic.

- You're good. -Oh, this is wonderful. Yes.

- Okay. Can you hear us good? -Yes.

- You can hear good? - Thrilled to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Marjorie.

Well, are we ready to roll?

I'm a normal woman. I shop at the mall. I rescue dogs and cats.

I'm a good cook, and I'm-- I'm pretty normal.

I'm not-- I'm not Miss Congeniality, but I'm not the worst one either.

I'm bipolar. I have my highs and I have my lows.

Hey, but you know what? Lincoln was bipolar. Churchill was bipolar.

Um... Some great writers and musicians are bipolar.

I have a genius IQ. I don't have...

This is the only on-camera interview

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong has ever done.

It's a video conference I arranged as part of our new deal.

Marjorie would tell me about the bank heist

if I got her an attorney to discuss legal issues.

What sign are you? When's your birthday?

I'm an Aries.

The moon's in Aries today, that'd figure.

The moon's in Aries. You were born in the Chinese year of the dog.

Help me, because they can't get too much more of an underdog than me.

Let's talk about the James-- The James Roden case first, okay?

I shot and killed James Roden.

I'm not gonna lie about anything that I did do,

and I admit I did it, and I'm sorry that it happened.

Why did you shoot Roden? The motive?

He was in my home, threatened to kill me,

he'd been doing this for ten years.

And he had me out of my mind. I couldn't take it anymore.

I couldn't take it anymore, and everybody has a breaking point!

I wasn't evil. I didn't get a penny. I didn't want him dead.

-I loved him. -When did you first--?

Roden's death didn't have anything to do with the Wells case.

Why was--? Why was the body put in a freezer?

-What was the logic, if any, behind that? -I don't know.

Bill Rothstein says to me, "This is why--" Listen, I'll tell you.

Bill Rothstein says to me:

"I can't get him out till I finish my business project."

Come to find out now, I think his business project was the Wells case.

My relationship with Marjorie began before this interview.

We started communicating in early 2005,

a year and a half after the bank heist.

This is one of the first letters I got from Marge.

I was finally able to ask her what she meant

by that outburst after her preliminary hearing.

Rothstein will be sued, he's a filthy liar.

What about Rothstein?

Rothstein should be charged with the murder of Brian Wells

and a lot of other charges.

All she would tell me

is she assumed Bill was the mastermind of the heist

because he needed money to settle his family's estate.

Marge wanted me to know

she had nothing to do with the heist, and had never been on the FBI's radar.

But that was about to change.

Because around the time she started writing me,

Marjorie has also written a "to whom it may concern" letter to police.

I was assigned to the Polygraph Unit out of Erie when it occurred.

There was a letter authored. It was from Marjorie Diehl.

Marjorie was trying to bargain with the police.

She offered to give information about a cold case, unrelated to the heist,

that involved an old fishing buddy of hers, a guy named Ken Barnes.

But her information was just a rumor.

So, Marjorie came up with a new plan because...

She wanted to move from Muncy to Cambridge Springs.

She wanted to get over here closer to her money and her attorney.

The attorney didn't want to drive down to Muncy to talk with her.

She started saying, "I have information about other crimes,"

and that's why we went over.

That letter was probably our saving grace to get her to start talking.

She brought up about the Pizza Bomber.

She said, "I know Bill Rothstein's involved in it."

She didn't say, "I believe he's involved," she said, "I know he's involved."

I believe she said there was another person involved with him,

and that he was keeping really close to the case,

and he was, like, infatuated with the case.

He knew more than the police did, in case he got talked to on it.

I couldn't get her to give me, you know, why she knew.

"Marjorie, how do you know this?" She wouldn't give that up.

She controlled the interview, it was easy for her.

All she had to do was walk away or say, "I'm not talking anymore."

Back in 2003, after the frozen-body case was over,

state police removed the contents from Marjorie's house

and put it all into storage.

Here's another horse.

Now that Marge was the focus of the bank robbery case,

Trooper Gluth offered the items to the FBI.

For days, investigators sifted through the junk, and finally,

in one of the last boxes, they found a clue.

An angry letter Marge had written to a bank.

Apparently, the manager let Marge's dad empty out a family safety-deposit box

that contained valuables belonging to Marge.

Marge was furious with her dad and the bank,

which was PNC Bank, the same bank Brian Wells robbed.

I think Marjorie had an ax to grind against PNC Bank.

How would that make Marjorie feel? She'd been done wrong.

Her inheritance from her mom never came to her, and they were rude to her.

I had interviewed a ton of people in my career, but Marjorie was...

unique.

We sign in, check in all our guns and badges,

and we're taken down a long hallway.

And to this day...

it still reminds me of Silence of the Lambs ,

where Clarice Starling's walking down this dark, dingy hallway

to interview Hannibal Lecter.

And we walk in, and we have a very small room.

And all of a sudden, you know,

lieutenant brings her in and she sits down,

and I'm looking right at her and I thought, "Oh, my goodness."

This is her. This is Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.

And, uh, it started out with, you know, "What do you want?"

Every time we went to interview Marjorie,

the first minute was her yelling at us.

She would scream, yell obscenities at us. Um, "Why are you guys here?"

Jerry would always compliment her and say:

"You look good," and she'd calm down.

She would calm down and say, "Thank you, Jerry.

-How can I help you guys today?" -One of the first things she says is:

"I'll talk to you about the Wells case,

but only if you move me closer to Erie."

And I said, "Well, Marjorie, I'll see what I can do, but I'm in the federal system,

you're in the state system.

I'll make calls and see if we can have that happen."

Just like Mr. Rothstein, very manipulative, uh, very intelligent.

She was very careful with her words.

The first interview, she felt us out as much as we were feeling her out.

She would give you answers that were very... limited,

very shallow, hoping that we would accept them and go away.

We never did. We kept coming back.

A few weeks after Marjorie asked the FBI to move her

to a prison closer to Erie, they actually arranged for a transfer,

anticipating she'd provide new information about the heist.

But she didn't. She just kept implicating Bill Rothstein.

Now, here's a letter, um, from her, from Muncy prison.

I admit I wondered a few times, why was I building rapport with this person,

a criminal who'd murdered two boyfriends

and whose husband died in a suspicious home accident?

Plus, there was her questionable mental state.

You know, she includes sometimes--

Like, look, this is just-- This is some-- An inclusion.

It's like some red paper with a horse,

and, like, a sticker from an orange, Florida orange.

It says something like, "Please keep. Thanks."

But she promised to tell me secrets about the heist,

and now we started talking.

You're an angel of mercy. I don't know, it's just like,

I really do appreciate from the bottom of my heart everything you've done.

And those books really do distract me from this hellhole here.

So, for years, I would carry this bag around my waist.

People were like, "What is that?

You're walking around, uh, now with a fanny pack?"

And, you know, would carry a variety of recorders,

and would...

record all the calls with Marge,

listening to Marge through the years.

Most of the time she was...

professing her innocence.

But Marge finally did come through on her end of our deal. Told me something new.

It was a story about a blue van at Bill Rothstein's house.

Marge thought it was suspicious that Bill, immediately after the heist,

had towed the blue van away,

and then didn't tow it back until after he'd been cleared as a suspect.

Tell me a little bit about this Astro van, please.

All right, I thought you knew about that.

Anyway, yeah, he was driving it.

He was driving it then. I saw him.

And, uh--

Now do you think that the Astro van

was the car that Bill was driving around on August 28th?

Yes. Yes, I do.

One of them. I think he was switching cars.

When I tell you he was driving that car that day, I know that for a fucking fact.

I saw him with my own eyes. I'm not making up shit to you.

This is the truth.

It dawned on me.

There was a blue van in Rothstein's driveway when I tried to interview him.

So, when I talked with the state trooper, Lamont King,

who had seen a van leave the last scavenger hunt site of the bank heist,

I asked if Lamont would look at my video.

When I see the picture of the blue van, uh, it just really, uh--

Like I said, I didn't hear anything about it until, uh, Trey sent it to me.

And I'm thinking, "That's the van."

There's no doubt in my mind that's the van I saw that day.

Is it safe to think you were driving around with Rothstein on that day?

I'm not gonna say that. People wanna believe that if I know all that,

then I was in on the plot. And I wasn't! I absolutely wasn't!

I had no idea what the hell they were doing.

I thought it had something to do with it.

And when I talked to Trey, he shocked the daylights out of me,

because he brought the van up

and because the van was never ever mentioned again.

We missed things.

We did. We missed things that came back later on

that said, "We could've had that a month afterward. We're nine months afterward,

or a year after, and we're getting it now." Because we missed it.