It was the pizzas, apparently, that got him in trouble. Wells had worked for Mama Mia’s Pizzeria for ten years. On that fateful August day, he was about to go off duty when an order came in for two small sausage and pepperoni pizzas. Wells agreed to deliver them in his own car, then take off for the day.
The address Wells had been sent to wasn’t a home at all, but a secluded, wooded area. The next thing anybody knew, he was walking into the bank with a gun shaped like a cane.
From the start, the authorities wondered if Wells had been involved in the plot. His family and his friends insisted that he was an innocent pawn who had been captured and forced to rob the bank for fear of his life. One source told Wells’s brother John that Brian Wells had found himself surrounded by people with guns. They locked the bomb around his neck, and Wells started running. A gunshot stopped him, convincing him that they would do whatever it took to get him to cooperate. Another witness in the area confirms having heard a shot. Wells repeated the same basic tale in the half hour he spent with police before the bomb went off.
For the next year, the FBI investigated the case without reaching any conclusions. A witness named William Rothstein, who lived in the wooded area near the spot where Wells was supposed to deliver the pizzas, died of cancer, but not until after he swore on his deathbed that he was not involved with the bank job. Coincidentally, he just happened to have a dead body stashed in his freezer when the FBI interviewed him, hidden there to help a friend get away with murder. Another witness, who also drove for Mama Mia’s, died of an overdose within hours of talking to FBI agents.
On the first anniversary of the crime, the FBI released a detailed profile of the unsub they called Collarbomber. The profile stated, “According to these FBI and ATF experts, this is a very complex crime, and most likely involves more than one person. However, it is the ‘mastermind,’ that person who oversaw its design and implementation, that has left the blueprint of his personality on every aspect of the crime.
“To the general public,” the profile continued, “this crime may appear to be an elaborate bank robbery. However, it continues to be the opinion of the BAU that this is much more than a mere bank robbery. The behavior seen in this crime was choreographed by ‘Collarbomber’ watching on the sidelines according to a written script in which he attempted to direct others to do what he wanted them to do. This is very unusual and complex criminal behavior. Because of the complex nature of this crime, the BAU believes there were multiple motives for the offender, and money was not the primary one.”
In “To Hell . . .” “. . . And Back,” the BAU tracks a serial killer who chooses junkies, prostitutes, and the homeless off the streets of Detroit as his victims.
The profile then reveals that the note that was intended for the police would have put them in the same area as Wells when the bomb went off, if Wells had not been spotted and stopped. The idea was to kill as many people as possible—ideally, police officers—and Wells had been instructed that while inside the bank he should stay close to as many bank employees as he could, presumably for that reason.
The authorities suggested that Wells was in on the plot all along. He might have believed that the bomb was simply a fake meant to fool the bank employees. At some point he realized it was genuine, which explains his very real panic during the last minutes of his life.
More time passed. In August 2006, the authorities claimed to be closing in on the real killers. One of the people they looked at was Kenneth Barnes, a convicted drug dealer, described by an acquaintance as “a very smart guy who could make or rebuild anything.” Barnes knew Rothstein, the witness with the corpse in his freezer. Barnes also knew, and occasionally worked for, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, who had been convicted in 2003 of killing her boyfriend. It was her boyfriend’s body that Rothstein had been keeping on ice.
In July 2007, the authorities finally brought indictments in the case, and the conclusions they had reached startled some and outraged Wells’s family and friends. The FBI concluded that Wells really was in on the plot, except that he believed the bomb was a fake; that’s why he went along willingly.
The mastermind behind the plot was deemed to be Diehl-Armstrong, fifty-eight. A federal grand jury indicted her and Barnes, fifty-three, in the case. A third person, Floyd Stockton, sixty, was given immunity in exchange for his testimony against the other two. Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein hatched the scheme, investigators said, in order to raise enough money to have Diehl-Armstrong’s father killed. Barnes would do the murder for $125,000, but Diehl-Armstrong had less than $9,000. Her father’s death, she believed, would net her a big inheritance, but she was unaware that the man had spent most of what she expected to gain. Brian Wells was allegedly roped into the plot through a prostitute who knew Barnes.
Diehl-Armstrong was already in prison for her previous boyfriend’s murder (the one whose corpse had been found in Rothstein’s freezer), but there was controversy over whether, due to severe bipolar disorder, she was competent to stand trial in the bank robbery case. Various judges ruled that she was not, but in September 2009 another judge determined that she was. Barnes, who had already been tried, was sentenced to forty-five years for his role in the crime.
John Wells doesn’t believe the official story. He’s created a Web site on which he pleads for anyone with further knowledge to come forward. He asks some reasonable questions. If money was the goal, he wants to know, then why put his brother through a complicated scavenger hunt after the robbery? Why try to set up an encounter between Brian and the police in the hope of killing some cops? If Diehl-Armstrong was after quick cash, there would have been easier ways to go about getting it. And if she was too bipolar to stand trial, would she have been able to conceive of such a devious plan?
These questions might never be answered, and we might never know for certain if the pizza deliveryman realized, when he left Mama Mia’s that day, what the rest of his afternoon would hold.
IN THE EPISODE “Derailed” (109), BAU profiler Elle Greenaway is held hostage on a train, along with the other passengers, by a paranoid schizophrenic who believes that the government has implanted a microchip in his body to monitor him. In this episode, Spencer Reid mentions the real-life case of Ralph Tortorici.
Tortorici had suffered delusions for years before the incident took place. He had been born with a defective urethra, and it had taken a series of operations to correct the problem. Somewhere along the way he became convinced that during his final operation, the government put a tracking device in his body. In 1992, at the age of twenty-four, he told doctors at the university health center at State University of New York-Albany that a microchip had been implanted in his penis. He was referred for psychiatric help, but his delusions didn’t go away. He turned to drugs to quiet his fear, but they didn’t do the job, either.
Finally, on December 14, 1994, Tortorici interrupted a professor and thirty-five students in an ancient history class on campus. He carried a high-powered rifle and a hunting knife. He announced that he had a computer chip in his brain, and that he wanted the professor to leave the classroom and summon the press and the state’s congressional representatives. He wanted President Clinton’s intervention as well, because it was the government, he was convinced, that was responsible for the chip. Once the professor was gone, Tortorici used a fire hose to secure the doors.
The professor called the police, who negotiated with Tortorici over a PA system. Tortorici fired his rifle once to show that he was serious. When it appeared that the negotiations were breaking down, a sophomore named Jason McEnaney rushed Tortorici and tried to get the gun. It discharged, seriously wounding McEnaney. Other students charged, and in the ensuing struggle, Tortorici was injured with his own knife.
Upon his arrest, Tortorici was charged with multiple counts of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and attempted murder. Found competent to stand trial, he asked to be excused from being present in the courtroom, which is almost unheard of in a criminal trial. Without him there
, all the focus was on the facts of the case rather than on a defendant who might have come across as somewhat sympathetic.
In February 1996, the jury found him guilty on eleven counts of kidnapping and aggravated assault, and he was sentenced to fifteen to forty-seven years in prison. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt in 1996, Tortorici succeeded on August 10, 1999, in hanging himself with a bedsheet.
THE UNSUB in the episode “The Eyes Have It” (506), a taxidermist, is described as an assaultive enucleator because he removes the eyeballs from his murder victims. The surgical removal of an eyeball is a process called enucleation of the eye, and it is usually done only when an eyeball is seriously damaged or diseased. It’s a very uncommon practice among murderers; far more common is simply to stab or otherwise attack the eyes.
One assaultive enucleator’s first victim was a streetwalker who worked near the Star Motel in Dallas, Texas. When Mary Lou Pratt’s body was found dumped on a suburban street on the morning of December 13, 1980, she had a bullet from a .44 in the back of her head. It wasn’t until she was on the medical examiner’s slab that anyone discovered that her eyeballs had been surgically removed.
A couple of months later, another hooker, Veronica Rodriguez, told patrol officers John Matthews and Regina Smith, who worked the hooker stroll, that she had been raped and assaulted by a white trick, who had left a gash on her forehead and a slice across her throat. She had escaped him and run away, she said, to a friend’s house.
On February 10, prostitute Susan Peterson was found, dumped just outside Dallas city limits. She’d been shot three times. As in the case of Pratt, her eyeballs were gone. She had worked in the same neighborhood as Pratt, so the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands. Both victims were white, so the killer probably was, too, and so would any future victims be.
But the next body was an African American prostitute named Shirley Williams. Her eyeballs had been removed, but with less care. The broken tip of an X-Acto blade was found in one eye. The killer had been rushed, perhaps.
When Matthews and Smith returned to the neighborhood, yet another black hooker, Brenda White, told them a story about a white john who had scared her so much she had jumped from his car and run away. He’d shouted that he hated whores and wanted to kill them all.
The patrol officers heard too many stories from too many hookers about a scary white man, so they started trying to run the man down. Rodriguez had identified the friend whose house she had run to as Axton Schindler, a truck driver. When they ran his address, however, it came up as belonging to someone named Fred Albright. But Albright was dead. Even so, he owned other property, very close to where the first two bodies had been dumped. Schindler’s real address was nearby, in one of Albright’s other houses.
An officer at the police department had heard the name Albright before, in an anonymous tip from someone who had known Pratt. The late Fred Albright’s adopted son, a man named Charles Albright, the tipster had said, had a thing for eyes. Running Charles Albright’s name, they discovered a man with multiple arrests on his record, for theft, burglary, forgery, and sexual intercourse with a child—a girl who had been fourteen when he was fifty-one. They showed Albright’s photo to White and Rodriguez, and they both identified him as the man who had attacked them.
Born on August 10, 1933, Charles Albright had been given up by his birth mother and adopted when he was three weeks old. His adoptive mother doted on him, but she was strange and unstable. Sometimes she would make him wear dresses and play with dolls, and she would tie him to his bed when he wouldn’t nap.
When he was eleven she enrolled him in a mail-order taxidermy course. He was fascinated by the taxidermy eyes he saw in stores, but those, his penny-pinching mother insisted, were too expensive. He proved to be a good student and a skilled taxidermist, even as a boy, but animals with buttons sewn in place of eyes never looked quite right.
Albright overcame his unusual upbringing to become a cultured, educated man, fluent in several languages; a skilled artist and a science teacher; a husband and a father. He was also a frequenter of prostitutes, a thief, a liar, and, eventually, a murderer.
He never admitted to the crimes, and the investigators were able to gather only enough physical evidence to tie him to one, the murder of Shirley Williams. For her murder, Albright was sentenced to life in prison.
THREE CRIMINALS, mentioned by name on Criminal Minds one time each, have a great deal in common. In the episode “North Mammon” (207), an unsub abducts three high school girls and imprisons them in a concrete cellar, telling them that if they can select one girl to die, the other two will be set free. Spencer Reid refers to the sophisticated complex that John Jamelske built under his suburban home, where he kept careful track of the lives of the victims he imprisoned there for years. (Indeed he did have such a lair, although “sophisticated” might be a stretch.) In “Cradle to Grave” (505), the unsub has a more specific goal for the women he imprisons in his house: he wants to get them pregnant. That episode brings up the crimes of Gary Heidnik and Josef Fritzl.
John Jamelske was a handyman who had become a millionaire real estate investor from the Syracuse, New York, suburb of DeWitt. During the 1980s, when he was in his fifties, Jamelske went through what some called a midlife crisis. He lost weight, grew a ponytail, and started wearing designer jeans. His wife suspected that he was having an affair but didn’t pursue the matter.
What she didn’t know was that from 1988 until his capture in 2003, Jamelske kept women and girls captive in his underground dungeon. He raped them on an almost daily basis and required them to keep detailed records of when they had sex, when they brushed their teeth, and when they bathed.
His first victim was a fourteen-year-old Native American girl, whom he kept until she was seventeen. He warned her that her family would be killed if she told what had happened to her. When she returned home, she told no one what she had been through, and she let her family think she had simply run away.
In 1995, Jamelske took a fourteen-year-old Latina and kept her for thirteen months, then let her go with the same kind of threat. She told her family but was afraid to tell the police.
In August 1997, he snatched a fifty-two-year-old Vietnamese woman. She stayed in the dungeon until May 1998. When she was finally freed, she went to the cops, but she was unable to identify her captor or take authorities to the place she’d been held. The investigation stalled.
Jamelske’s wife, Dorothy, died in August 1999, after a battle with colon cancer. Jamelske waited until May 2001 to select his dungeon’s next occupant, a young white woman whom he kept for only two months. She also reported her abduction and described the inside of the dungeon, but she, like the previous victims, was unable to pinpoint its location. He took them out of the house blindfolded, or in the dead of night, and dropped them off in far-flung parts of the city.
In October 2002 he abducted a sixteen-year-old black girl. During the time they spent together, Jamelske grew to trust her. He let her have access to parts of his house, although he secured those sections so she couldn’t get out. He took her out bowling and to karaoke bars. He seemed to think that they had a regular, romantic relationship.
The morning of April 8, 2003, he took the girl along on an errand. She asked to be allowed to telephone a church about the times for services, but instead she called her sister and told her what had been going on. The sister alerted the police, and Jamelske was arrested. At the time, he remembered thinking, “I did something wrong, but I figured it’s like unlawful imprisonment, maybe [ I’ll get] thirty hours of community service or something of that nature.”
Given his capacity for denial of such epic proportions, his sentence of eighteen years to life probably came as a surprise to him. At the time of this writing, he is serving hard time at Dannemora, where it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be set free.
By contrast, Josef Fritzl of Amstetten, Austria, didn’t abduct perfect strangers to keep in his secret dungeon. Instead, in an
even more perverse crime, his captive was his daughter Elisabeth. He kept her in his dungeon for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her, which resulted in the births of seven children, whom he also kept in the dungeon.
Fritzl was a native son of Amstetten, born there on April 9, 1935. In 1956, he married, and he and his wife had seven children, including Elisabeth, who was born in 1966. Fritzl’s childhood was ravaged by war and by family abuse. He claimed that during World War II bombing raids, his mother would take the rest of the family to a shelter but would leave him alone at home.
In 1967, the year after Elisabeth’s birth, Fritzl was convicted of rape. He was, he told officials, “born to rape.” He began raping Elisabeth when she was eleven. On August 29, 1984, when she was eighteen, he took her into the dungeon he had built in the cellar and locked her away. He forced her to write occasional letters saying that she was alive and well but asking her family not to search for her. These letters seemed to convince Elisabeth’s mother, who remained unaware of her daughter’s proximity.
The dungeon was a remarkable construction. A person had to pass through eight doors, one of which had an electronic lock for which only Fritzl knew the password, to reach the outside world. Inside were four windowless rooms, including a full bathroom, a kitchenette, and two sleeping areas with beds.
One of Elisabeth’s babies, a boy with a twin brother, grew ill shortly after birth. Despite his daughter’s pleadings, Fritzl refused to take the infant to get medical care. When the boy died, Fritzl cremated him in the furnace.
Fritzl took three of his daughter’s children upstairs into the house, claiming that Elisabeth had dropped them off to be raised by their grandparents. Fritzl’s wife, who was forbidden to set foot in the basement, apparently never knew that her daughter was so close or that her grandchildren’s father was her husband.
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