James Lewis, the lone suspect within the 1982 Tylenol murders, was discovered useless Sunday at his residence in suburban Boston, a number of law-enforcement sources confirmed to the Tribune.
His demise comes after 40 years of intense scrutiny from legislation enforcement, wherein Lewis performed a cat-and-mouse recreation with investigators. Local authorities questioned him as just lately as September as a part of a renewed effort to carry expenses within the case.
With the investigation’s solely suspect useless, it now appears unlikely that expenses will ever be introduced in poisonings that killed seven individuals and precipitated a worldwide panic.
“I was always hoping justice would be served, and this short-circuits it,” mentioned former FBI particular agent Roy Lane, who labored the case for many years.
Former assistant U.S. lawyer Jeremy Margolis, who efficiently prosecuted Lewis for an tried extortion associated to the case, additionally expressed remorse that Lewis was by no means held accountable for the murders.
“I was saddened to learn of James Lewis’ death,” he mentioned in a press release to the Tribune. “Not because he’s dead, but because he didn’t die in prison.”
Lewis — a convicted con man who inserted himself into the Tylenol investigation by sending an extortion letter to the drug’s producer — lengthy denied being the killer. He was 76.
Seven Chicago-area residents died after swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide in September 1982. The victims had been Mary Kellerman, Mary McFarland, Mary “Lynn” Reiner, Paula Prince, and Stanley, Adam and Terri Janus. Their deaths prompted a nationwide recall of the medication and led to the adoption of tamper-evident packaging.
The ensuing police investigation, together with the extreme concentrate on Lewis, was the topic of a Tribune sequence and companion podcast final yr. The award-winning podcast, “Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders” was produced in partnership with At Will Media.
The Tribune investigation revealed investigators consider Lewis tampered with the Tylenol in an act of revenge towards Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s mum or dad firm. Records present his 5-year-old daughter, Toni, died in 1974 after the sutures used to repair her congenital coronary heart defect tore.
The sutures had been made by Ethicon, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, based on a medical doc reviewed by the Tribune.
Days after the murders, Lewis despatched a letter to Johnson & Johnson, demanding fee to “stop the killing.” After being convicted of tried extortion, he supplied to assist investigators discover the killer. He met with them a number of occasions, drawing detailed sketches displaying methods of filling the capsules and offering flowcharts on how you can perform the poisonings with out getting caught.
Those drawings performed a key half in what legislation enforcement described as a “chargeable, circumstantial case” towards Lewis, based on paperwork reviewed by the Tribune.
Lewis spent about 13 years in federal jail for tried extortion associated to the Johnson & Johnson letter and for committing mail fraud in a Kansas City bank card rip-off in 1981. He was launched from jail in October 1995 after which joined his spouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the place he lived the remainder of his life.
In a short dialog with the Tribune final August, Lewis once more denied being the Tylenol killer and prompt he has been handled unfairly.
“Have you been harassed over something for 40 years that you didn’t have anything to do with?” he requested.
A Tribune reporter spoke to Lewis whereas he was strolling close to his residence. He gave no direct response to a query about legislation enforcement’s most up-to-date makes an attempt to carry expenses towards him.
Lewis, as an alternative, pointed the finger at Johnson & Johnson and questioned why its company scientists had been allowed to check Tylenol bottles that had been recalled after the murders. Lewis has lengthy maintained that the corporate was given too highly effective a job in an investigation that centered by itself product.
Last September, a suburban police detective and two Illinois State Police investigators traveled to Cambridge to interview Lewis. Sources mentioned they persuaded Lewis to satisfy with them by providing to return a private merchandise seized in a raid of his residence in 2009.
Lewis met with investigators on an overcast afternoon at a resort inside strolling distance of his apartment. They spoke for a number of hours in a recorded interview. Investigators left Boston the subsequent day with out making an arrest. The assembly was essentially the most important signal of exercise within the case in a decade. But the investigation seems to have stalled afterward.
Lewis’ reason for demise was not instantly recognized.
Cambridge police Superintendent Fred Cabral confirmed to the Tribune that authorities discovered Lewis’ physique after responding to his apartment simply after 4 p.m. Sunday.
Lewis’ spouse was out of city on the time. After being unable to succeed in her husband, she requested somebody to examine on him and he was discovered unresponsive.
“We have no reason to believe there was anything suspicious,” Cabral mentioned of Lewis’ demise.
Public information present Lewis had a historical past of coronary heart issues and had been sick just lately. Cabral mentioned Cambridge police additionally notified Illinois legislation enforcement.
The Tribune’s investigation main as much as the crime’s fortieth anniversary included greater than 150 interviews in a number of states. Reporters additionally obtained tens of 1000’s of pages of paperwork by way of information requests, together with sealed affidavits and court docket orders that define a few of legislation enforcement’s greatest proof within the unsolved case.
Reporters seen an FBI video from an elaborate 2007-08 undercover sting operation wherein Lewis acknowledged it took him three days to put in writing the extortion letter. At Lewis’ 1983 trial for tried extortion, prosecutors couldn’t decide the precise date on the letter’s postmark. They instructed jurors solely that it had been despatched in early October.
Since then, nevertheless, developments in expertise had allowed the FBI to find out the letter was mailed Oct. 1, 1982, the Tribune reported.
On the undercover recording, Lewis didn’t dispute that date. After confirming he spent three days writing the letter, Lewis requested FBI Special Agent Lane — who had come out of retirement to assist with the sting — when the homicides happened.
Lane picked up a manila folder, sketched out a calendar and confirmed it to Lewis, who had a messenger bag strapped throughout his physique. The agent calmly counted again three days from Oct. 1, touchdown on Sept. 29 — the day all seven victims swallowed poisoned capsules.
News of the poisonings didn’t change into public till Sept. 30, which means Lewis would have been writing the letter earlier than officers had even decided the drugs had been poisoned.
Lewis was quiet for a second on the recording after which hugged the messenger bag to his chest.
“I see your quandary,” he says on the recording. “I’ve been telling myself for 25 years I worked on it for three days. But it’s impossible.”
The FBI requested Cook and DuPage County prosecutors in 2012 to maneuver ahead with a grand jury, stating that it was legislation enforcement’s greatest — and maybe final — likelihood at bringing justice to the case. No expenses had been ever authorized.
“There’s not, as the prosecutors say, a smoking gun,” Rob Grant, former particular agent accountable for the Chicago workplace, instructed the Tribune final yr. “But smoking guns can come in a lot of different places and they can come from a compilation of evidence. … It’s all the pieces assembled on the table that makes a gun. And it’s all those pieces I think we have.”
Lewis’ life is chronicled in additional than 5,000 pages of court docket transcripts, parole paperwork and psychological assessments maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration and obtained by the Tribune. The information paint a portrait of a convicted con man whose life, at occasions, was pushed by vindictiveness, trauma and a steadfast perception that he was at all times the neatest particular person within the room.
Born on Aug. 8, 1946, in Memphis, Tennessee, Lewis was the youngest of seven youngsters. His start title was Theodore, after his father, Theodore Elmer Wilson. His mother and father had been “poor, irresponsible” and ill-equipped to care for his or her youngsters, based on federal court docket paperwork.
After his father abandoned the household when Lewis was a yr previous, his mom, Opal, moved the youngsters to Joplin, Missouri, to be nearer to her personal mom. But she nonetheless struggled to supply a secure residence and later deserted the youngsters in the summertime of 1948.
Young Theodore was adopted at age 2 and his title was modified to James William Lewis.
The Lewises raised him as an solely little one on a 20-acre farm close to Joplin, residing what investigators referred to as “an unremarkable childhood.”
The first documented signal of psychological hassle got here in summer season 1966 when Lewis was 19. According to the information, the teenager went lacking for about two days that June and was present in a shallow pond “apparently trying to drown himself.”
He was introduced again to his household’s residence, the place he demanded entry to his stepfather’s gun cupboard. When his stepfather refused to offer him the important thing, court docket information say, Lewis violently attacked the older man and broke a number of of his ribs. As his mother and father fled their farm in the course of the outburst, Lewis threatened them with an ax, the information state.
Lewis was arrested on assault expenses and spent three weeks within the county jail, the place authorities mentioned he took 36 aspirin in a suicide try. The expenses had been dropped after Lewis was dedicated to a state psychiatric hospital on June 24, 1966, based on federal information.
In the many years that adopted, Lewis would repeatedly deny attacking his stepfather. “My parents were good and loving people,” he instructed a decide in 1984. He insisted that “his commitment for treatment was merely a ruse he perpetrated in concert with his parents in order to evade the draft,” information present.
He briefly attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the place he befriended individuals within the pharmacology division and met his spouse, LeAnn. The couple married in 1968 and he or she gave start to their solely little one, Toni, the next yr.
Toni, who was born with Down syndrome, would sit within the window of her mother and father’ tax enterprise and wave to passersby. One of these individuals was Raymond West, who befriended the little woman’s mother and father and employed them to do his taxes.
Five years after Toni’s demise, West’s dismembered physique was discovered within the attic of his residence in August 1978. Lewis was charged along with his homicide after Lewis cast a examine in West’s title for $5,000 and police decided Lewis was the final particular person to see West alive. Prosecutors, nevertheless, dropped the case on the eve of trial after a decide discovered Lewis had not been learn his rights earlier than being questioned about his former tax consumer’s demise.
Kansas City police started investigating Lewis once more in 1981 for a bank card rip-off, prompting Lewis to depart city and transfer to Chicago. He and LeAnn lived there for about 9 months below assumed names earlier than assuming new identities and shifting to New York three weeks earlier than the Tylenol poisonings.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com”