Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong

Inside the Mind of a Female Serial Killer

By: Jerry Clark, Ed Palattella

Narrated by: Paul Heitsch

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, as "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 30 years in federal prison.

©2017 Rowman & Littlefield (P)2017 Tantor

Sounds like an advertisement for the DSM

A very interesting and unique crime to write a book on. However the book it written a bit like a thesis. Long and tedious chapters about the history and processes about the DSM and defenses based on insanity pleas. Understand why they are a part of the book but too much time on these frankly boring chapters instead of the crime itself. Took all my power not to skip the chapters.

Weighted down with theory

I could not get through this book despite several tries, because the story us interrupted by almost-full chapters of discussion on psychiatric research. The authors tell us about the history of mania, bipolar disorder, depression, hoarding, the city where Diehl was born, and on and on, dropping any threads that might tie together a narrative until I just gave up. She's definitely an interesting subject, and do is psychiatry. but a book has to confidently lead us to some conclusion, or, lacking one, stick to a narrative. This book does neither, leading me to believe that these authors didn't really have anything to say, but the publisher wanted to make some hay off the recent documentary. Too bad.

I was hoping to hear the story about the woman serial killer

The book is weighted down by theory and psychological analysis history. I couldn’t get through the whole book. I wanted to hear about the serial killer and her story and it wasn’t hardly mentioned. Very disappointing.

Most boring murder book I've read to date.

Struggled to finish this one. I was rolling my eyes with every tangent we took, halting the story. I just wanted to get to the main plot. Not spending chapters explaining mental illness. If I wanted to read the history of psychology I would have read that book instead. This is a female serial killer who helped conspire to have a guy wear a bomb around his neck as he robbed a bank, and all this was after her second murder. I wasn't expecting Hollywood action, or a suspense novel, but I was definitely expecting more excitement than I got.

Monotonous

It was a boring listen that kept going on and on on and on. Then on some more.