NOTORIOUS MURDERS > MOST FAMOUS

The Erie Collar Bomber

By Seamus McGraw

Act Now, Think Later

He was utterly calm, a witness remembered, almost eerily so.

 

For all the confusion, the flashing lights and all the noise of crackling radios, the cops and FBI agents, huddled behind their cruisers, guns in hand, there was almost a kind of silence that swirled like fog in the vast parking lot a stone's throw from the PNC Bank branch in Summit Township, just south of Erie.  It had only been a matter of minutes since the pizza man had walked into the bank and slipped a note through the window that told a teller he had a bomb and demanded that she give him money. She did, though it's not clear whether she gave him the entire quarter of a million dollars he had demanded.

But the pizza man, Brian Wells, never even made it out of the McDonald's parking lot where he had navigated his green Chevrolet Metro, following a series of minute instructions that he claimed were given to him by a group of mysterious men who had abducted him at gunpoint less than an hour earlier.

Within minutes of the holdup, police had surrounded his car, ordered him out of it, and then handcuffed him, only to retreat to a safe distance and leave him there, handcuffed on the pavement, after he revealed his deadly secret.

   

The quiet seemed to seep from Wells as he stood there surrounded by police. He pulled down the collar of his Guess? T-shirt, and for the first time, the unnerved cops could see it -- a cunningly constructed metal collar and three rings, like half a handcuff.   Wells also carried what authorities recognized as a bomb.

"It's going to go off," Wells quietly told the assembled cops.  "It's going to go off in a couple of minutes."

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1. Act Now, Think Later
2. You Will Die!
3. "This Isnt Me"
4. Involved in his own death?
5. Beyond Reason
6. Caught
7. The Most Important Rule
8. The Face of the Puppeteer
9. Dead Men and Dead Ends
10. Blueprints
11. Bibliography