Collar Case Still Bizarre Puzzle

People who knew Brian Douglas Wells can't believe he could have masterminded any bank heist, particularly a plot as bizarre as the one the 46-year-old deliveryman has been linked to for a week.

But a former FBI profiler tells CBS News she thinks it was a "fairly elaborate suicide."

Wells died last week after robbing a bank near Erie when a bomb hanging from a locked, metal collar around his neck exploded.

Pleading with police to help him get the bomb off, Wells told authorities he had been forced to rob the bank, indicating that someone else had clasped the bomb to him.

Authorities have been trying to figure out whether that story was true, or whether Wells had played a more willing part in the robbery.

Living in a rented cottage with hand-me-down furniture and three cats, Wells was content to deliver pizzas 27 hours a week and spend much of his free time listening to his stereo. Money, say his friends, never meant much to him.

Wells' friends and neighbors are firm in their belief that he was a victim.

"He had a different set of values," said his landlord, Linda Payne, who rented the white cottage behind her home to the unmarried Wells for five years.

While Wells' family members have refused to speak publicly, others described him as a quiet man of average intelligence, friendly and willing to help with chores from picking up the mail to shoveling snow in winter.

Former FBI agent Candice DeLong doesn't buy Wells' story that he was kidnapped while delivering pizza and collared with the bomb.

"I had to ask myself would bad guys who are sophisticated enough to devise or develop this collar bomb put it on someone that they had no idea would carry out their plan successfully?" she told CBS News Early Show co-anchor René Syler.

She is also suspicious because of how Wells robbed the PNC Bank branch: He simply walked up to a teller and demanded money. Plotters, she said, should have known banks have silent alarms, and they hadn't given him enough time.

"I think it was less than 30 minutes to get back to them with whatever cash he might have been able to steal," DeLong said. "They had no idea what he was going to do. If somebody grabs me and puts a collar bomb around my neck I'm going to the nearest police station and say 'get this thing off me.'"

"We have moved away further from the theory that he was doing this by himself towards that there were other individuals involved," FBI Agent Kenneth McCabe said Wednesday.

Investigators haven't talked about what a search of Wells' home produced, but Payne said she doesn't believe they found much to support a theory that he was willingly involved in the heist or the making of the bomb.

"He didn't have a computer. He couldn't get it off the Internet. He would have no desire to make a bomb. He would have no desire to hang something around his neck," Payne said.

Investigators seized drill bits, household tools, phone bills and letters from Wells' home when they searched it last Friday, according to court documents. FBI officials have said they are trying to reconstruct the bomb and analyze notes found with Wells to determine whether he was forced to rob the bank by someone who had locked the collar around his neck.

Korac Timon, chief deputy coroner in Erie County, says the blast killed Wells, leaving a postcard-sized hole in his chest.

FBI Agent Kenneth McCabe said through a spokesman Wednesday he has never heard of such a collar-bomb device being used in America but that he was aware of at least one similar case in Colombia.

In May 2000, in what was believed to be an extortion attempt, a collar packed with explosives and placed around the neck of a 53-year-old woman exploded, killing her and a bomb technician trying to disarm it. This summer, Colombian rebels were accused of using a so-called "necklace bomb" to try to extort money from a Venezuelan rancher. Police were able to disarm that bomb, authorities said.

One of Wells' co-workers, Robert Pinetti, 43, was found dead Sunday at his home in nearby Lawrence Park Township, Pa., likely from a drug overdose.

On the Early Show Wednesday, McCabe said so far, there is "no link" between the two deaths, but former FBI profiler DeLong thinks there is.

"What are the odds of two men from the same pizza place? I think that's probably a connection there," she said.

DeLong, author of "Special Agents: My Life on the Frontline," suggests Wells may have been mentally ill.