At long last, a conviction in one of the most Gothic crime cases of our time. Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was sentenced to prison time for masterminding the collarbomb case. "'She was motivated by greed and completely characterized by evil,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Marshall Piccinini said."
If you don't recall it, the collar-bomb case was this Batman-style caper where a pizza delivery guy held up a bank, sporting a cane-gun, and claiming to be acting on orders from criminals who'd locked a large bomb to his neck. Brian Wells soon blew up in a parking lot, and police investigations have worked through many mazes and false leads since, finally indicting Diehl-Armstrong and a friend four years ago.
...but is this the end? Perhaps not, Gothic mavens. Consider the rise of similar crimes, with minions tasked by shadowy criminals to carry out acts of evil. Mobile phones make it easier to mind remote henchpeople. We may see a thousand collarbombs b(l)oom.
Or is Diehl-Armstrong just a puppet herself? In the courtroom she shouted that the real criminals were still at large.
She said she was convicted unfairly and "was not part of this conspiracy.""I am not a crazed killer," Diehl-Armstrong said in court. "The true killers are still out there."
Those sneaky villains might include a dead man. In Wired's theory, "Bill Rothstein, the man who lived next to the TV tower and who agreed to keep a dead man in his garage freezer" might have been the real criminal mastermind. Rothstein was comfortable with both power tools and manipulation, but died after tipping off the police. Hmmm.
“The son of a bitch ended up winning,” Fisher says. “He died with all of the secrets. He died taking all the answers with him. He gets the last laugh in that sense. He escaped punishment. He escaped detection. He left us with these idiots and a bunch of questions.”
Perhaps the villain is safely defeated. Or maybe not, and other puppetmasters are out there, masterminding new schemes, even from beyond the grave...
(thanks to legal-eyed Ladi)
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