Episode 161: Pennsylvania Collar Bomber - Brian Wells - Part 2

There are some crimes that don’t just make headlines, they stop people in their tracks. Crimes so strange, so elaborate, that even seasoned investigators struggle to explain them. And the case I’m covering this week is one of those stories. It begins on an ordinary afternoon in Erie, Pennsylvania but nothing about what happened next was ordinary. A pizza delivery driver walks into a bank with something locked around his neck, something he says is an explosive device. He hands over a set of instructions that read more like a scavenger hunt than a robbery note. And within minutes, the entire city is thrown into chaos. What followed was a chain of events unlike anything investigators had seen before: a device built with unsettling precision, clues scattered across town, and a timeline that never should have been possible to complete. And the deeper authorities dug, the stranger the story became leading them from an isolated radio tower, to a blue minivan that vanished, to a second death just days later. This case raises questions that still divide people today. Was the man at the center of it a victim or something else entirely? Who built the device? And why did so many clues seem designed to mislead? In this episode, we’re going back to the beginning to the moment the first call came in and following the investigation exactly as it unfolded. Because to understand what happened in Erie, you have to see every piece of the puzzle. And trust me the picture it forms is far more complicated than it first appears.