Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.” She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania, Diehl-Armstrong’s hometown.

Diehl-Armstrong’s life unfolded in an enthralling portrait; a fascinating interplay between mental illness and the law. As a female serial killer, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was in a rare category. In the early 1970s, she was a high-achieving graduate student pursuing a career in education but suffered from bipolar disorder. Before her death, she was sentenced to serve life plus thirty years in federal prison.

In Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella examine female serial killers by focusing on the fascinating and tragic life of one woman. This book also explores mental illness and forensic psychology and provides a history of how American jurisprudence has grappled with such complex and controversial issues as the insanity defense and mental competency to stand trial. The authors’ account shows why Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was unlike any other criminal – man or woman – in American history. Accounts of Diehl-Armstrong’s travails – her difficult childhood, her murder trials, her hoarding – are interpolated with chapters about mental disorders and the law.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 284 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-4422-6007-8 • Hardback • September 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

978-1-4422-6008-5 • eBook • September 2017 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Forensic Psychology, Psychology / History, True Crime / General, True Crime / Murder / Serial Killers

Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was “a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.” She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania, Diehl-Armstrong’s hometown.

Diehl-Armstrong’s life unfolded in an enthralling portrait; a fascinating interplay between mental illness and the law. As a female serial killer, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was in a rare category. In the early 1970s, she was a high-achieving graduate student pursuing a career in education but suffered from bipolar disorder. Before her death, she was sentenced to serve life plus thirty years in federal prison.

In Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella examine female serial killers by focusing on the fascinating and tragic life of one woman. This book also explores mental illness and forensic psychology and provides a history of how American jurisprudence has grappled with such complex and controversial issues as the insanity defense and mental competency to stand trial. The authors’ account shows why Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was unlike any other criminal – man or woman – in American history. Accounts of Diehl-Armstrong’s travails – her difficult childhood, her murder trials, her hoarding – are interpolated with chapters about mental disorders and the law.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 284 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-4422-6007-8 • Hardback • September 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

978-1-4422-6008-5 • eBook • September 2017 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Forensic Psychology, Psychology / History, True Crime / General, True Crime / Murder / Serial Killers

Author

Jerry Clark, PhD, retired as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2011 after twenty-seven years in law enforcement, including careers as a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he is also co-owner of Clark & Wick Investigations LLC.

Ed Palattella joined the Erie Times-News, in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1990. He has won a number of awards, including for his investigative work and his coverage of crime.

Both are the authors of Pizza Bomber: The Untold Story of America’s Most Shocking Bank Robbery and A History of Heists:Bank Robbery in America, which was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2015.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Cycle of Death: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s Pattern of Violence
2 In Rare Company: Female Serial Killers in History
3 Killing Like a Man: Angels of Death, Black Widows, and Damsels of Doom
4 A Cluttered Mind: Marjorie Diehl’s Hoarding and Other Obsessions
5 Dictionary of Disorder: Defining Mental Illness
6 Death of a Boyfriend: A Fatal Shooting, a Suicide, and a Question of Stability
7 “A Madman or a Natural Fool”: Determining Mental Competency
8 “Scared to Death”: Marjorie Diehl’s First Homicide Trial
9 Flight of Ideas: The Burdens of Bipolar Disorder
10 “Freezer Queen”: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong Kills Again
11 The Fractured Intellectuals: The Pizza Bomber Plot Unravels
12 Psyche on Trial: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s Final Verdict
Afterword

Reviews

Former FBI agent Clark and journalist Palattella take a deeper look at the woman behind [a] gruesome crime... Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong is best known for her role as an accomplice in the 2003 bank robbery in Erie, Pa., that led to the death of Brian Wells, a pizza deliveryman, but she had killed before. Clark and Palattella provide chilling details into her gunning down of two boyfriends, starting with the 1984 murder of Bob Thomas, also in Erie. After shooting Thomas in his sleep, she confessed her crime to a stranger and offered her $25,000 to help dispose of the corpse. The authors trace Diehl-Armstrong’s evolution from bright student to murderer and look specifically at how mental illness is used as a defense to criminal culpability in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Diehl-Armstrong was diagnosed as bipolar and had been anorexic as a child, but, as the judge who sentenced her to life for her role in the bank robbery noted, others with those illnesses don’t turn violent. Despite the authors’ detailed knowledge of their subject, readers will emerge from this well-written volume wondering what exactly led this once-promising woman to a life of violent crime.
— Publishers Weekly

One in almost every six serial killers is a woman, according to serial killer expert Eric Hickey. The case of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a female accomplice in the bizarre Pizza Deliveryman Collar Bomb Heist, is a shocking eye-opening account of just how predatory and dangerous a female serial killer can be.
— Peter Vronsky, Author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters and Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters

Clark and Palattella's riveting true crime narrative, wrapped in a history of forensic psychiatry, offers a disturbing tour inside the baffling mind of an anger-driven female serial killer. Meticulous and probing, they unravel the psychiatric and legal back story of the bizarre Pizza Bomber killing and the demented woman who devised fatal solutions to her "poor luck with men." A tangled tale of losers, hoarders, swindlers, and manipulators that offers all the right stuff for criminologists and true crime fans alike.
— Katherine Ramsland PhD, professor of forensic psychology and author of How to Catch a Killer

The case of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong is a labyrinth of lies, deceit, and violence. Fraught with diagnoses of mental illness and mental disorders, authors Clark and Palattella delve into convoluted psychopathology of one of America’s most twisted female serial killers. Her amazing story is a dichotomy of good and evil, of victim and victimizer, of innocence and guilt. This is a must read for those fascinated by the Darkside.
— Eric W. Hickey, PhD, Walden University

Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella

Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

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