By Claire Booth
I just
finished watching the true crime documentary Evil Genius on Netflix and man, am
I conflicted about my final opinion of it. It was both really good and
disappointing at the same time.
On the one
hand, it was a very well done look at the infamous "pizza bomber" case, where a
delivery driver robbed an Erie, Penn., bank with a bomb locked around his neck.
He was quickly caught by police, but the bomb exploded as he sat handcuffed in
the middle of the street; he was killed instantly. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
The
four-part series lays out the bizarre crime and ensuing law enforcement investigation
nicely. But if you’re looking for answers – like, say, who masterminded the
plot and was the actual "evil genius" – you’ll be disappointed. I think this is
the fault of the title more than anything else. It’s too definitive for what
ultimately played out. The police investigation was unable to determine who
came up with the idea to strap a bomb to a pizza delivery man and send him into
a bank.
It could
have been Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a woman with a long history of mental
illness who was already linked to several suspicious deaths. Or it could have
been her former boyfriend, a man named Bill Rothstein. Diehl-Armstrong is the
evil genius of the title, but there was nothing specific presented in the
documentary that clearly proved it was her instead of Rothstein. Both were
intelligent, grandiose personalities who existed on the fringes of society.
Rothstein
presented himself better, which made it easier to label the prickly, erratic,
anti-social Diehl-Armstrong as the instigator of the plot.I’ll add an
aside here that Diehl-Armstrong did have well-known homicidal tendencies. She’d
been previously charged with murder and acquitted, and was accused of killing
the boyfriend she had during the time of the pizza bomb plot. So she wasn’t
some brilliant person who never got caught, and she wasn’t a person who was
able to present a different, false face to the world. Those talents appeared to
belong to Rothstein.
So who was really the genius? The documentary does a lot
of things well, but answering that question isn’t one of them.
