Criminal - The Tylenol Murders

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

On September 29, 1982, Adam Janus suddenly collapsed in his home outside of Chicago. He died within hours. Later that same day, in the same house, his brother also collapsed — then his sister-in-law. All three of them had been healthy. Nobody could figure out what was going on. Stacy St. Clair and Christy Gutowski reported an investigative series looking back on the Tylenol murders for the Chicago Tribune. You can listen to their podcast here, and read their series in the Chicago Tribune here. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. So Adam Janis had taken the day off. He had run some errands with his wife and his young son.

And then he had gone to the local preschool to pick up his daughter around lunchtime. And on the way home, he stopped at a grocery store and he picked up steaks and some fresh cut lilies. And he went home, put the groceries away, told his wife he was going to lay down for a little bit. He went into the bathroom and walked out of the bathroom clutching his chest. And his wife called some neighbors for help. She didn't speak much English. They were both Polish immigrants. And when the paramedics arrived, they were stunned because here was this very healthy, very strong man who had just collapsed out of nowhere. On September 29, 1982,

Adam Janis was taken to Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Illinois, outside Chicago. Shortly after he arrived, he was pronounced dead at 3.15 p.m. The doctor who had worked on Adam, Dr. Thomas Kim,

broke the news to Adam's family, who had gathered at the hospital. And Dr. Kim told them they didn't have an explanation, that it was probably either a stroke or a heart attack, but there was going to need to be more investigation by the medical examiner and the pathologist. We're hearing from Stacey St. Clair, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune. The Janice family, including Adam's brother Stanley and Stanley's wife Teresa, went back to Adam's house. When they got there, Stanley said he had a headache

and went into the bathroom. And then Stanley collapsed in the living room and started having the same symptoms that his brother had. The breathing was very rapid and shallow, and the eyes were fixed and dilated as if they were being suffocated by some kind of invisible force. The paramedics, they arrived very quickly. It was the same paramedic crew that had tried to save Adam. And while they were treating Stanley, Teresa collapsed. And

when the paramedics and firefighters turned her over, they saw that her eyes were fixed and dilated, which is a sign of death. And the fire lieutenant who was in charge of the scene turned to his crew and said, guys, this isn't heart attacks. Stanley and Teresa Janis were brought to the same hospital where Adam Janis had been pronounced dead a few hours earlier. And they were both seen by the same doctor who had worked on Adam, Dr. Thomas Kim. And he got out his medical books and began calling poison centers around the country, trying to figure out what this invisible force was. This is Chicago Tribune investigative reporter Christy Gutowski. She says that the

surviving Janice family members were all quarantined at the hospital while they waited. We interviewed Joseph Janice, the oldest brother of Stanley and Adam, who described looking at his sister throughout the night to see if she was still alive, and he looked at her to see if he was still alive, and they wondered who would be next. Everyone who had responded to the scene, the firefighters and paramedics, were also quarantined. One fire lieutenant named Chuck Kramer called his friend who was a nurse and the town of Arlington Heights' only public health official.

Her name was Helen Jensen. He told her what was going on, and she came to the hospital right away. She, you know, spoke to Adam Janis' widow, and she got some background on what happened in the house that day. Helen Jensen went to the Janis home. When she got there, she started looking at anything that could have caused the family members to get sick. A pot of black coffee, old coffee grounds, home-jarred fruits, a pound cake, some store-bought lilies, cherry juice. She looked through prescription medications. In the bathroom, she found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol on the counter. It was a 50-pill bottle.

She poured them out and counted them. There were only 44 left. She also found the receipt, so she knew that it was a brand-new bottle purchased that day. Six pills were missing, and there were three people who had gotten sick. She took the Tylenol bottle to the hospital and showed it to someone from the Cook County Medical Examiner's office. She said she was met with skepticism and eventually just went home.

That night, Chuck Kramer got a phone call from another firefighter, Phil Capitelli, to ask what was going on. And Chuck Kramer got a phone call from another firefighter, Phil Capitelli, to ask what was going on. And Chuck Kramer tells him, you know, we had a day like you wouldn't believe. These three healthy people, nothing in common health-wise except that they all took this Tylenol. And Capitelli says, Tylenol? My mother-in-law works with a woman in Elk Grove Village whose daughter died this morning after taking Tylenol.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The same day that three members of the Janus family got sick, a 12-year-old named Mary Kellerman had a sore throat. And her mother had bought a bottle of Tylenol the day before, and she went into the bathroom. Her father heard her go into the bathroom before school began, and she took a Tylenol, and he heard a thump, and he ran to investigate

and he found his daughter in the bathroom and she was pronounced dead shortly later. When Fire Lieutenant Chuck Kramer heard about Mary Kellerman's death, he called the paramedic who had gone to her home. He wanted to know about her symptoms. Were her eyes dilated? Was her breath shallow? She had the same symptoms that the Janice family had had. Chuck Kramer called the hospital. He said, there's something wrong with the Tylenol. The doctor who had treated the Janice family only knew of one chemical that could kill someone that

quickly. He found a 24-hour lab and called a taxi. He put two vials of blood collected from Stanley and Teresa Janus into the taxi and told the driver where to take them. The results came back later that night, showing the presence of cyanide. When the analysis of the pills from the Janus' bottle of Tylenol came back from the county's toxicologist, the report said that four of the 44 capsules contained cyanide, almost three times the amount necessary to kill someone. They also tested the capsules from the bottle found at Mary Kellerman's house and again found cyanide.

Police started looking into where each of the bottles of Tylenol had come from. And so now they know that these two families have purchased the bottles at separate locations, both within the same grocery store chain, but separate locations. And news gets out. By 5.30 that morning, the news is already over the radio saying there's a pain reliever that is causing death. They have a press conference at 9 a.m.

They specifically named Tylenol as being the tainted medication. We don't know the extent of the contamination, so I think at this time it would be wise not to take extra strength Tylenol at all. And in neighboring DuPage County, the deputy coroner, Pete Ziegman, hears these reports, and they have two strange deaths of young mothers in DuPage County. And he thinks to himself, I wonder if these two things can be connected. 27-year-old Mary Lynn Reiner lived in DuPage County. She had given birth to a baby boy just a few days earlier. On the same day Mary Kellerman and the Januses had taken the Tylenol, Mary Lynn Reiner was at home with her mother-in-law.

Her husband was at work, and she had the new baby at home, and she had some aches and pains and went to the local grocery store, Frank's Finer Foods, and bought some Tylenol. And her husband had come home and was in the kitchen. She was going to the bathroom, and she ended up just making it into the kitchen and landing on a chair. And they called an ambulance right away, and she was pronounced dead shortly later. That same day, in the same county, a 31-year-old woman named Mary McFarland had also died. And she worked at an Illinois Bell phone center.

And she was a perfect job for a working single mom. And she had a headache. And after having dinner with one of her friends on her break, she took some Tylenol and fell ill at work and was pronounced dead that night at a hospital. So within the first 24 hours, we have six people who have taken, that they're aware of, who have taken tainted Tylenol. And five of those people are dead, and Teresa Janis is still on life support with no chance of survival. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI. Thank you. Supermarkets around Chicago and in at least 30 states from Florida to North Dakota, stock clerks were busy pulling boxes of extra-strength Tylenol capsules from the shelves. In laboratories, chemists were taking samples to find out which capsules were tainted and which were safe. And police were busy, too, looking for clues and spreading the message.

A warning against the use of Tylenol extra-strength capsules is being broadcast over commercial radio. This product may be contaminated with cyanide and should be destroyed. There were literally going through the streets, police officers with bullhorns telling people not to take Tylenol. Public health departments were going door to door, leaving flyers knocking, saying, if you have Tylenol, Public health departments were going door to door, leaving flyers, knocking, saying, if you have Tylenol, throw it out. The FDA cautioned people not to take Tylenol in its capsule form. And Tylenol itself holds two different lot numbers from the shelves representing about 170,000 bottles, which was sort of unheard of,

but the recall would get even bigger days later. Can you explain what Tylenol bottles were like in those days? You could go into the grocery store and literally open the milk or open the peanut butter, or in this case, open the Tylenol without the tamper-resistant packaging that we're used to now. Now with Tylenol, you have the glued flaps to the box, and you have the plastic wrap to get into the cap. And then inside, there's a protective barrier around the lid, the mouth of the cap. But back then, they didn't have that.

You could literally just pop it open and there's a cotton ball protecting you from the capsules. So it would have been very easy at that time to literally open the capsules, pull them apart, spill out the medicine, and then lace it with something like cyanide. The hospitals and police phone lines were jammed with people who were concerned that they might have ingested something. I mean, it was actually a worldwide panic. People were being stopped as they landed. If you took a flight from the United States to England, they were stopping you in customs to make sure you weren't bringing Tylenol into their country. On October 1st, two days after the first victims of the Tylenol poisoning had been discovered, another victim was found. Paula Prince was 35 years old. She was a flight attendant for United Airlines. And she arrived on a flight from Connecticut on Wednesday night, September 29th. She left a note for her best friend who was a fellow flight

attendant saying, your flight's getting in late, so I'm just going to head home. Give me a call later because I have some really exciting news to tell you. And on her way home, she stopped at a Walgreens near her condo and she purchased a bottle of extra strength Tylenol. And there's actually a picture taken from a security camera on an ATM machine that captures the exact moment she is purchasing the Tylenol at the store. And she's dressed in her United Airlines uniform and has a scarf tied around her neck. And she went home to her condo. She lived alone. And nobody heard from her for several days. So her friend, the same flight attendant she'd left a note for, heard from her co-workers that Paula had missed a scheduled flight, which was odd. So she and Impala's sister, Carol, went up to her

apartment on a Friday night, and they opened the door, and they saw her lying there. And they knew instantly that something horrible had happened to her. And one of the most haunting things about a cyanide death is just how quickly it ravages the body. And no death was more apparent to Stacey and I than we actually saw some photographs. Paula literally fell backwards. She's half in her bathroom, half in the hallway. There's no crawling to the phone to call 911 or for help. And you could tell it's just a life interrupted and stopped. She literally fell backwards,

and the cotton balls from removing her evening's makeup was there as well. And it just shows you just how quickly and deadly cyanide is. These deaths, with the exception of the Janice family, all took place in different towns. So you have five communities where these murders have occurred. Each community has their own police department, and you don't have a and it's, you know, hard for people to imagine this, but back then you didn't have cameras at every stoplight and surveillance cameras at every store and so many of the tools that law enforcement have now, like DNA, to help them solve crimes. Local police departments and the FBI created a task force to work on the case. They attended funerals to see who was there, taking pictures of people,

trying to see if anyone came to more than one funeral. They looked into employees at the stores where the bottles had been sold. They looked into Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, McNeil Pharmaceuticals, and their employees, but they didn't come up with much. Johnson & Johnson offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders. There was a tip line that was set up. What kinds of tips were coming in? All kinds.

I mean, you name it. Psychics were calling. You know, people were calling because they think their uncle's a little crazy and they should, you know, investigate the uncle. And once Johnson & Johnson offered a $100,000 reward, then everybody was calling, right? The phones just exploded, they said. And it was hard weeding through, you know, what's a good tip? What's a little off center? What's just a giant waste of time. But then, on October 6th, a call came in that got their attention. A bar owner called and said that one of his semi-regulars, a man named Roger Arnold, had

been in the bar and was bragging about having cyanide in his home, and not just any cyanide, potassium cyanide, the kind that was used in the murders. And he was kind of an odd guy. He was an amateur home chemist, if you will. And he coincidentally worked as a dockhand for Juul Food Stores. And Juul is one of the stores where two of the bottles have been purchased, one by the Kellerman family and another one by the Janus family. So the bar owner had called. Chicago Police Department said, you should check this guy out.

He had been going through a divorce and drinking heavily. So the police thought it sounded like a pretty good tip. They went out to the Lincoln Avenue bar scene, asked a lot of the different bar owners and bartenders to give him a call when Roger showed up. And a few days later, on October 11th, Roger came in to a bar called Lily's, and they went and rounded him up. Roger Arnold went back to the police department. He admitted that he had purchased some cyanide off of a mail order company out of Wisconsin earlier that summer for some sort of a home project. And said he got rid of it because his wife, ex-wife now, but wife at the time, made her nervous and he didn't like having it around either. But he denied being the Tylenol killer. But Roger Arnold did allow two Chicago Police Department detectives

to go to his house so they could search it. When they got there, they found a number of guns and manuals about how to make different kinds of poisons, including a book called The Poor Man's James Bond. They also found beakers and vials and other chemistry equipment, but no cyanide. He didn't have much of a criminal history, but he had made all these bizarre comments to co-workers at Juul that he was angry. He wanted to poison people. He wanted to throw acid at someone.

There was a student, a medical student working at Juul that summer, and he said, hey, can you get access to body parts? I'd love to freak out the police and drop body parts around. He was just an odd guy. And there were all these similarities between the stores where the tainted bottles were purchased. He lived near them or he hung out near them. And the biggest coincidence was that he actually worked with one of the victim's fathers, Mary Reiner. He worked with her father for a short time at Juul. They apparently got along well. There was no reason to believe that he had any malice towards this man. The man had lunch with him and given him a ride a couple of times when Mr. Arnold's car was, when he was having car problems.

But there were all these similarities. But Roger Arnold was only charged with misdemeanor weapons violations. He was released on bond. We'll be right back. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me.

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Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com. The same day that the tip line received the call about Roger Arnold, a letter arrived at the Tylenol manufacturer in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. It read, Gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to place cyanide, both potassium and sodium, into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little, and there will be no time to take countermeasures.

If you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. And it basically says, if you want to stop the killing, you will wire a million dollars to a specific bank account. Investigators link the bank account and the letter to a man in Chicago named Frederick Miller McKayhee, the heir to the Miller brewing fortune. And more importantly to this story, he was the owner of a defunct business called Lakeside Travel. side travel. And they quickly rule him out as a suspect that he would have no motive to do this and probably wouldn't be as stupid enough to, you know, put his own bank account, you know, in the extortion letter. And they ask him, you know, who would have a vendetta against you to do this? And one name comes up very quickly, and that is the name

of Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson's wife, Nancy Richardson, had worked at Miller-McCahey's travel agency. And when it closed, everyone's final paychecks bounced, including Nancy's. And Nancy had cashed her last paycheck at a currency exchange and the currency exchange gave her the money but then sued her for the money back when the check bounced. And this greatly upset Nancy and even more so her husband Robert. Robert Richardson and Frederick Miller McKayhe gotten a huge argument in public

and later Robert Richardson allegedly swore he would get McKay he investigated by the police when they discovered the possible connection between Robert Richardson and the extortion letter to Johnson and Johnson the FBI put out a wanted poster of him with his picture, and it was distributed across the country. And news outlets across the country carried the story, including CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. And when Dan Rather introduced the story and flashed the picture of Robert Richardson on the screen, there was a police sergeant in Kansas City

who told us he nearly fell off his couch because he instantly recognized the man as someone he had investigated for pretty serious crimes. But he knew him by a different name, James Lewis. So what happens next is that police sergeant and two other Kansas City detectives hop a flight to Chicago. They meet with the Tylenol task force and they tell the Tylenol task force everything they know about James Lewis. And that includes the investigation of a 1978 homicide in Kansas City and a 1981 credit card scam in Kansas City. And after hearing this background, a nationwide manhunt begins. On Halloween that year, more than 40 cities banned trick-or-treating. I was 13 years old in 1982, and I have a memory of my mother wanting to check my Halloween candy, and that was the first time I could recall that, not really understanding why. Why weren't we able to just dive into it? And that was, you know,

because of Tylenol. A few days after Halloween, the FDA began requiring companies to add safety seals to their products so that anyone opening a new bottle of over-the-counter medicine could see whether it had been tampered with. Johnson & Johnson put Tylenol capsules back on the market, this time with three different tamper-proof seals. Meanwhile, investigators were looking for James Lewis and his wife Leanne in New York, where the extortion letter had been postmarked. So they begin this dragnet, and we interviewed the FBI agents who were in charge of it, and they literally go block by block by block in Manhattan in a grid system. They know that they're staying in, like, transient hotels, and they're focusing on this particular area in Manhattan,

and weeks go by, and the Lewises are always one step ahead of the FBI. The Chicago Tribune had begun receiving letters responding to their coverage of the Tylenol murders. The letters appeared to be from James Lewis, but they were signed with his alias, Robert Richardson. In one, he wrote that he hadn't committed the murders. He said that the paper had incorrectly reported that he and his wife were armed. He wrote that, quote, And it's clear to the FBI agents that he's reading the press coverage of how the task force is doing and what's going on with the Tylenol murders because these letters reference specific things. And he's also photocopying newspaper articles of the Chicago Tribune.

So the task force starts thinking, well, where can he get access to the Chicago Tribune in New York? He's copying them. He's knowledgeable about what's going on. And they realize that he's either getting them from a public library or something along those lines. So they start blanketing these wanted posters at public libraries, and they have newsstands under surveillance and they get lucky after weeks and weeks i think the manhunt was two months long at least uh december mid-december a librarian calls and says there's a man here he's hunched over he's looking at a a book a reference book of addresses of major newspapers in the country, and he's clean shaven in the wanted poster. He had a beard, but they were pretty sure they'd

seen this man several times, and they were pretty sure it was him. So the FBI comes. They race up to the fourth floor of this library, and they approach the man, and sure enough, it's James Lewis. He stands up. He does not resist arrest. He doesn't have any weapons on him. He doesn't say who he is, but at this point, the manhunt is over. He was arrested in December of 1982, so this is a couple months after the Tylenol murders, and his wife turned herself in the next day. Investigators didn't have enough to charge him with the actual murders, and he was found guilty of attempted extortion almost a year later, in October 1983.

But while he's awaiting his sentencing, he calls the FBI and he offers to help solve the Tylenol murders. He met with the FBI investigators about six times. He always maintained that he had nothing to do with the murders, but he told investigators that he had some ideas for how someone could have done it. And he makes very, very detailed drawings, about a half dozen of them, showing the various methods and ways that you could fill capsules with cyanide and transport them to the store where you could, you know,

salt the bottles with them. And he also makes a very detailed decision tree that says, you know, if you, like, are your pills dry? If yes, follow this path. If no, go back to the beginning. You know, are you on a park bench when you are pouring the pills into the Tylenol bottle? If yes, do this. If no, you know, follow this different route. So it was just extraordinarily detailed. These drawings that he said were done on speculation at the request of the assistant U.S. attorney. He later told the Chicago Tribune that he was just trying to help. And, you know, he could describe how Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean that he killed Caesar. That

moment of him offering the drawings, these very detailed drawings, which have been determined to be feasible, they would never shake him as the prime suspect after that moment. Investigators had previously collected information on James Lewis

when they were looking into a murder that had occurred four years before. While he was living in Kansas City, James Lewis and his wife Leanne had a tax business. And one of their tax clients was an elderly man by the name of Raymond West. A friend of Raymond West's, a man named Charles Banker, hadn't heard from him in a few days, so he stopped by his house. When he knocked on the door, no one answered, but he could see that his friend's car was in the garage. It was unusual for Raymond to be out of touch like this.

Charles called the police. The last person to hear from Raymond, another friend, said Raymond had called her and they talked for a while. He mentioned he had an upset stomach, and also that his taxman, James Lewis, had been over at his house a lot lately, uninvited. The police called James Lewis, who said he actually knew where Raymond had gone,

to the Ozarks for a few days with his girlfriend. But his friend Charles Banker insisted that Raymond didn't have a girlfriend. He returned to Raymond's house, and this time there was a note on the front door. It said Raymond was in the Ozarks and to contact Jim for more information. It was on James Lewis's company stationery. Around this time, James Lewis attempted to cash a $5,000 check from Raymond West. The bank thought this was suspicious, so they returned the check as a forgery.

Several weeks later, Raymond West was found dead in his attic. James Lewis was arrested and charged with murder. And then, the day before his trial began, the case was dismissed. The case was tossed because a judge found that in his first interview with police that James Lewis had not been read his Miranda rights. So everything gleaned in the investigation after that was deemed inadmissible. And that, coupled with the fact that the medical examiner could not determine an exact cause of death because the body had so badly decomposed in the summer heat, prosecutors dropped the charges. Years later, when they were investigating the Tylenol murders, police retested a fingerprint found in Raymond West's attic. It had been on a pulley that had been used to lift his body

into the attic. And it was a match to James Lewis. But that case wasn't reopened. Too much evidence was either missing or had been destroyed. In June of 1984, James Lewis was sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted extortion for sending the letter to Johnson & Johnson. The Tylenol task force still suspected that he was responsible for the murders, but they could never place him in Chicago in the

days leading up to the poisonings. He was released in 1995 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he started a website design firm. Stacey St. Clair says that for the most part, the case went dormant. There was some testing as DNA technology became more mainstream in police work, but no one was assigned to the case full-time. And then, in 2007, as the 25th anniversary of the murders approached, another task force was created,

known as Task Force 2. It included one of the original FBI agents on the case, a man named Roy Lane. So when they decide to form Task Force Two, the first thing they do is they look to see where James Lewis is. And it's been sort of years since anyone kept tabs on him. And they launch this ruse where Roy Lane contacts Jim Lewis and says, I know a journalist who is writing a book about the murders,

and she doesn't think it's you, and she can clear you. Would you be willing to help her? And James Lewis accepts the opportunity, and in his own words, happily accepts the opportunity to clear his name. And all the while, he and his wife Leanne have no idea that they're being recorded and every word they say is being captured. And what things do they say? There was a meeting between the undercover FBI agent posing as the journalist. Her name was Sherry Nichols. That's not her real name.

That was the name that was given during the operation in Lane. And we're there at the Sheridan Hotel in Chicago. And Mr. Lewis is sitting on a couch, and they're talking about the timeline of when he mailed the letter, wrote the letter, and mailed the letter, the extortion letter. And they didn't know, the task force didn't know back in the 1980s or even the 1990s, when Lewis mailed the letter. They just know that they got it around the 5th and 6th of October. They hadn't been able to clearly see the original postmark. But through advances in technology, by 2007, the FBI lab was able to lift layer by layer by layer of ink off of the envelope of the extortion letter.

And they learned for the first time that it was mailed October 1st. The victims had taken the poisoned Tylenol capsules two days earlier, on September 29th. Lewis has said repeatedly that it took him at least three days to mail the letter. Lewis has also told them that he first learned about the murders while reading a New York Times article on October 1st. And on the video clip, the Sheridan, Agent Lane has basically picked up a manila folder and he has created a calendar on it and he's counting backwards. And Lane is very cool. And he said, well, you would have been writing the letter when the people are dying, before the people are dying. And Lewis is

like, well, that can't be right. I've been telling myself for 25 years under oath, it took me at least three days, I would have sworn to it under oath. When did the people die? And Lane very coolly is explaining the timeline to him. If he had taken three days to write the letter, Roy Lane said, he would have started writing it the same day people had been taking the poison Tylenol, September 29th, before it was even in the news. And Lewis at one point clutches, he's carrying a messenger bag that is strapped over his chest as he's seated, and he clutches the bag and he's quiet and he appears nervous. And he's like, well, that just couldn't have happened. It must be faulty memory. Agent Roy Lane, and the agent posing as the journalist, also took James Lewis to the Walgreens in Chicago where Paula Prince, the flight attendant, had purchased her bottle of Tylenol. James Lewis headed

straight to where the Tylenol used to be in 1982, but that's not where it was anymore. They used the information in part to get a search warrant for Lewis's condo in Cambridge. And inside the condo and several storage areas, they got a whole bunch of paperwork. And among the papers was a very detailed timeline of what Jim and Leanne Lewis did beginning September 1st of 1982, taking you through the rest of that, much of that fall. And the list is very detailed to the point where it'll have the day they bought a frying pan at Gimbel's and visits to the library. But there is a time gap for James Lewis from September 25th to midnight of September 29th. And that falls in the window

in which investigators believe the poison bottles were put on the shelves. Investigators also looked again at a book that was taken from James Lewis's belongings back in 1982. It's called The Handbook of Poisoning. And they found fingerprints, multiple fingerprints belonging to James Lewis in the book, including a fingerprint on page 196, which details how much potassium cyanide is needed to kill the average human. It's like pieces of a puzzle. They don't have a smoking gun, right? They don't have a confession. They don't have DNA. They don't have a witness that saw him at one of the stores where the tainted bottles were shelved.

But it's pieces of a puzzle, and each piece is a piece of evidence, and it all fits together and leads them to one person, and that's James Lewis. This past September was the 40th anniversary of the murders. Investigators went to Cambridge and met again with James Lewis. He's now 76. He voluntarily met with them without an attorney and talked for several hours, according to our sources. And investigators have put the ball in prosecutors' hands. And they've said, this is as good as it's going to get.

This is a chargeable, circumstantial case. And they've asked prosecutors to take it. And so far, the two prosecutors who have authority over the case have not taken the case, have not charged it. So the way it looks now is that prosecutors will run out the clock until there's no possibility to charge James Lewis. The other main suspect in the case, the one who'd been reported to the tip line by a bar owner for saying he had cyanide, Roger Arnold, died in 2008. Not only did he claim to have cyanide, but he had a connection to one of the victims, and investigators had proof he was in Chicago at the time of the murders. They did exhume Roger Arnold's body as part of Task Force 2

to see if his DNA matched the DNA profiles found on the bottles. It didn't. So my guess is what investigators tell us they fear the most, and that is just prosecutors running out the clock. Stacey St. Clair and Christy Gutowski reported an investigative series,

looking back on the case, published in the Chicago Tribune earlier this year and accompanied by a podcast, Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders. They tried to interview James Lewis, and they approached him, but he declined a formal interview. In 1983, Congress passed what was called the Tylenol Bill, making it a federal crime to tamper with consumer products, labels, or containers in a way that could hurt someone. And then, in 1989, the FDA created federal guidelines requiring manufacturers to make their products tamper-proof. Just the last question for both of you. You know, why 40 years later is there still such an interest?

Because it taps into our biggest fear, right? That we do something so ordinary. You know, buying a bottle of Tylenol for your 12-year-old who has the flu. Or taking a couple Tylenol because you've got a headache at work. And then you're dead. And there's nothing you could have done to stop it. And there's nothing you could have done to fix it. And there's nothing you could have done to fix it once you've swallowed it. And we're reminded of it, of this crime, every time we go into a store.

Every time you open the safety seal on a bottle of salad dressing or a bottle of cough medicine or your peanut butter or your jelly, you're breaking through those seals because of these seven people and the horrific way they died. And that's why, you know, I think it sticks with people. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sachiko, Libby Foster, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're on TikTok at criminal underscore podcast where we're posting some behind-the-scenes content.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation, Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition.

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