How ‘Evil Genius’ came to life
Trey Borzillieri and Barbara Schroeder, the duo behind the series, say the show will draw in true-crime junkies
With its ever-expanding repertoire of original films, TV series, standup specials, and talkshows, Netflix makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Amid all the content, though, the streaming site has steadily made its own canon of true-crime documentaries, owing to an array of innately fascinating subjects that lend themselves to bingewatching.
First there was Making a Murderer, which cast doubt on a Wisconsin man’s conviction, followed by The Keepers, about the unsolved murder of a nun, and Wild, Wild Country, the story of the Oregon-based Rajneeshpuram cult. Now, Mark and Jay Duplass, the producers of Wild, Wild Country, boast a second, equally strange true-crime hit: Evil Genius, the bizarre tale of the “pizza bomber” heist in the appropriately named town of Erie, Pennsylvania.
It begins with a rather fruitless bank robbery in 2003: a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells walked into a PNC bank in Erie with a metal bomb collared to his neck and a cane-like shotgun in tow.
Making off with around $8,000 (Dh29,379) dollars, Wells was apprehended shortly afterward in a nearby parking lot, where he told cops that the bomb around his neck was live. Incredulous witnesses heard a continuous “ticktock”, and then it detonated, killing him. In Wells’ car, though, authorities recovered notes, suggesting he was just a cog in an elaborate criminal machine.
“I learnt about it the night that it happened,” says Trey Borzillieri, the creator of Evil Genius, who’s spent more than a decade investigating the heist and its aftermath. “I was in Buffalo, which is very close to Erie, and I saw it become an international story. You’ve basically got Brian Wells delivering that pizza and then showing up at a PNC bank and robbing it. They start the investigation, then a month later there’s a body in a freezer right next to the road he made the last delivery to.
“At the time, you knew this was a major story,” he adds. “So that was the moment I decided to embark on this documentary.”
Borzillieri, who last year produced a docu-series on the Zodiac killer, would make the acquaintance of a remarkably idiosyncratic cast of characters along the way, none more compelling than Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the owl-eyed local pseudo-celebrity known for a streak of suborned, and often murdered, exboyfriends.
An erstwhile beauty queen and musical prodigy diagnosed with bipolar disorder and mania, Diehl-Armstrong is the undisputed star of Evil Genius, if not exactly its subject, a shrewd manipulator who’s more Nannie Doss than Aileen Wuornos.
“She’s very smart; people would call her brilliant,” says Barbara Schroeder, who joined Borzillieri on the project in 2013. Schroeder, who wrote and directed the documentary Talhotblond, about an internet love triangle that goes south, was intrigued by the access her collaborator got to Diehl-Armstrong, whose first on-camera interview is featured in Evil Genius.
“She was able to get men to do her bidding and put them under her spell,” Schroeder says. “I’m an experienced journalist, so when Trey was telling me he had years of phone calls with someone who might be the mastermind, that was just astonishing. I started listening to the audio that he got and it was just riveting.”
Borzillieri and Diehl-Armstrong established a relationship before she was a public suspect, which meant she often used him as a soundboard to profess her innocence.
Weeks after the Wells heist, local law enforcement received a call from Bill Rothstein, a kind of Falstaff in overalls. Portly and gregarious, Rothstein was another ex-boyfriend of Diehl-Armstrong’s who lived next door to the site of Wells’ final delivery and alerted authorities to the body of James Roden, which was frozen stiff in a freezer in his garage. Roden, too, was an ex of Diehl-Armstrong’s.
“The case was cold, and it looked like Rothstein would be a definite suspect,” Borzillieri recalls. “The fact that the body was the live-in boyfriend of Marjorie’s at the time, you thought this had to be connected. But when the FBI said that it wasn’t, that’s what really compelled me to get off the couch and start knocking on doors.”
Mostly, those doors begat more doors. So, to make Evil Genius, the pair stayed faithful to chronology. “It was like a labyrinth, because there is more to the story than just Brian’s death,” Schroeder says. “It could have been written a lot of different ways, but we kept it really simple: here’s the heist, here’s the frozen body, here are the suspects, and here are the confessions. We thought it would be the most engaging way for people to follow Trey’s journey and these social misfits who basically outplayed the FBI.”