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 binge-watching.

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 sex 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, as those watching the news in the late summer of 2003 will remember, with a rather fruitless bank robbery: 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 about $8,000, Wells was apprehended shortly afterward in a nearby parking lot, where he told surrounding cops that the bomb around his neck was live. Incredulous witnesses heard a continuous “tick-tock”, and then it detonated, lodging shrapnel in Wells’ chest and killing him. In Wells’ car, though, authorities recovered notes that laid out a scavenger hunt, suggesting he was just a cog in an elaborate criminal machine.

“I learned 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, ex-boyfriends. 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 sounding board to profess her innocence. Nevertheless, she was still a wildcard. After one phone conversation with Borzillieri, she told him: “I’ll sue your fucking balls off.” In another, she signed off with: “Love ya!”

Borzillieri says: “They weren’t easy conversations, but a lot of truth was revealed … She was such a narcissist that she always believed people would believe her side of the story.”

Bill Rothstein and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. Photograph: Netflix

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 nextdoor to the site of Wells’s 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. Rich Shapiro, whose 2010 Wired exposé examines the heist comprehensively, told Borzillieri and Schroeder he needed a flow chart just to keep things straight. So, to make Evil Genius, the pair stayed faithful to chronology. They were inspired, first, by Paradise Lost, the celebrated documentary about the West Memphis Three, and second by the philosophical principle of Occam’s razor, which posits that the simplest approach is usually the best.

“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.”

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and the FBI’s Jerry Clark. Photograph: Netflix

Among the many subnarratives coursing through the docuseries, which touches on issues of class stratification and mental illness, is the tension between the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and local law enforcement, whose collective attempts to solve the mystery of the heist were marred by a lack of forensic evidence, the deaths of key witnesses, and their own internecine disputes.

“This is the first time that many of these investigators have gone on camera to tell their story,” says Borzillieri. “Because of the sensitive nature of this case, all law enforcement you see interviewed waited until they were retired to speak.”

The access Borzillieri secured, including unprecedented on-camera interviews with law enforcement, Diehl-Armstrong, and a key witness who surfaces in the fourth episode, reflected the kind of genuine, leather-shoe reporting he conducted from the get-go. “Even though he’s a citizen journalist, I enjoyed working with him more than a lot of other colleagues throughout my career,” says Schroeder. “The first time anybody tells their story, if you catch that on camera, that’s a pretty special moment. To Trey’s credit, it’s good old-fashioned journalism.”

Borzillieri and Schroeder are happy that Evil Genius landed at Netflix, where true-crime junkies will be able to binge all four episodes in full. “We’re grateful to get that many eyeballs on this one-of-a-kind crime,” says Schroeder, “and, creatively, to be able to tell the story the way it should be told.”

“I would add that, embarking on this, there weren’t a lot of documentary series at the time,” Borzillieri notes. “There was a lot of blind faith on my part. Making a Murderer revolutionized this kind of film-making and, in essence, I no longer look like a crazy person carrying a project like this.”

