'Pizza Bomb' Suspect Who Contacted ABC News Has Cancer
April 12, 2010 — -- A woman awaiting trial on charges she masterminded a bank robbery plot that ended with a pizza deliveryman being killed by a bomb locked around his neck says she has cancer -- in her neck.
Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, 61, is scheduled for trial Aug. 30. But she told the Erie, Pa., Times-News from jail that she had a cancerous tumor removed from her neck last month and is awaiting test results to determine the extent of her illness, according to The Associated Press.
Armstrong, the so-called "pizza bomber," is serving a seven-to-20-year sentence for the murder of former boyfriend James Roden, which happened during the same month pizza deliveryman Brian Wells was killed by the bomb. She pleaded guilty but mentally ill to that crime in January 2005.
While Armstrong appears to have been complicit in both homicides, authorities have never formally made a link between the two cases.
Despite her apparent cooperation with investigators, federal prosecutors brought felony charges against Armstrong and another man in connection with the Wells case in 2007.
It was around that same time that Armstrong initiated contact with ABC News.
Her letter began enticingly enough.
"I am totally innocent of the Wells crime, but I have a plethora of information to offer.''
Stamped "Inmate Mail -- Pa. Dept. of Corrections'' in Muncy, Pa., and bearing Armstrong's name, the letter arrived unbidden at ABC News in March of 2007, after the network sent a producer to Erie the previous winter to take a fresh look into the long unsolved case.
In the letter, Diehl-Armstrong gets right to the point.
"I'm sane, not on psych[iatric] meds'' and have "equivalent of five college degrees with honors,'' she wrote.
