James Lewis, sole suspect in 1982 Tylenol murders, has died

James Lewis, the lone suspect in the 1982 Tylenol murders, was found dead Sunday at his home in suburban Boston, making it unlikely anyone will ever be charged in connection with the poisonings that killed seven people and caused a worldwide panic.

His death at age 76 comes after 40 years of intense scrutiny from law enforcement, in which Lewis played a cat-and-mouse game with investigators. Local authorities questioned him as recently as September as part of a renewed effort to bring charges in the case.

Though investigators looked at several potential suspects in the weeks following the murders, Lewis had been the authorities’ sole focus for decades. He did nothing to dull their interest, as he offered to help the FBI find the real killer, granted lengthy interviews to law enforcement and built a website taunting investigators.

Authorities maintained they had a “chargeable, circumstantial case” against Lewis, but prosecutors were hesitant to seek an indictment without direct physical evidence linking Lewis to the poisonings. With the police work so intently focused on Lewis for the past 40 years, it seems improbable they would be able to build an unassailable case against anyone else, absent a confession or a major advancement in DNA technology.

“James Lewis’ death ends a lifetime of cruelty to others and a compulsive need for revenge,” said retired FBI Special Agent Roy Lane, who worked the case for decades. “His death puts the pursuit of justice to an end.”

Illinois Attorney General Tyrone Fahner holds up a photo of Tylenol suspect James Lewis at a news conference on Oct. 13, 1982. (Val Mazzenga / Chicago Tribune)

[ The Tylenol murders: Read the Tribune investigation ]

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Margolis, who successfully prosecuted Lewis for an extortion attempt related to the case, also expressed regret that Lewis was never held accountable for the murders.

“I was saddened to learn of James Lewis’ death,” he said in a statement 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 manufacturer — long denied being the killer.

Seven Chicago-area residents died after swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide in September 1982. The victims were Mary Kellerman, Mary McFarland, Mary “Lynn” Reiner, Paula Prince and Stanley, Adam and Terri Janus. Their deaths prompted a national recall of the medicine and led to the adoption of tamper-evident packaging.

Seven people died in 1982 from cyanide poisoning after ingesting tainted Tylenol, murders that were never solved. From clockwise top left are Adam Janus, Mary McFarland, Mary “Lynn” Reiner, Terri and Stanley Janus, Paula Prince and Mary Kellerman. (Chicago Tribune archive)

The ensuing police investigation, including the intense focus on Lewis, was the subject of a Tribune series and companion podcast last year. The award-winning podcast, “Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders,” was produced in partnership with At Will Media.

The Tribune investigation revealed investigators believe Lewis tampered with the Tylenol in an act of revenge against Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s parent company. Records show his 5-year-old daughter, Toni, died in 1974 after the sutures used to fix her congenital heart defect tore.

The sutures were made by Ethicon, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, according to a medical document reviewed by the Tribune.

Days after the murders, Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson, demanding payment to “stop the killing.” After being convicted of attempted extortion, he offered to help investigators find the killer. He met with them several times, drawing detailed sketches showing ways of filling the capsules and providing flowcharts on how to carry out the poisonings without getting caught.

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This James Lewis drawing depicts a way to use a test tube and paper to fill Tylenol capsules with poison. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Lewis spent about 13 years in federal prison for attempted extortion related to the Johnson & Johnson letter and for committing mail fraud in a Kansas City credit card scam in 1981. He was released from prison in October 1995 and then joined his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lived the rest of his life.

In a brief conversation with the Tribune last August, Lewis again denied being the Tylenol killer and suggested he has been treated unfairly.

“Have you been harassed over something for 40 years that you didn’t have anything to do with?” he asked.

James Lewis, 76, talks with a Tribune reporter as he walked along Cambridge Street on Aug. 22, 2022, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

Lewis, who spoke to the Tribune while walking near his home, gave no direct response to a question about law enforcement’s most recent attempts to bring charges against him.

Lewis, instead, pointed the finger at Johnson & Johnson and questioned why its corporate scientists were allowed to test Tylenol bottles that were recalled after the murders. Lewis long maintained that the company was given too powerful a role in an investigation that centered on its own product.

[ [Don't miss] The Tylenol murders: 40 years ago, an infamous Chicago-area crime took these 7 lives ]

Last September, a suburban police detective and two Illinois State Police investigators traveled to Cambridge to interview Lewis. Sources said they persuaded Lewis to meet with them by offering to return a personal item seized in a raid of his home in 2009.

Investigators spoke to Lewis for several hours in a recorded interview and left Boston the next day without making an arrest. The meeting was the most significant sign of activity in the case in a decade. But the investigation appears to have stalled afterward.

Cambridge police Superintendent Fred Cabral confirmed to the Tribune that authorities found Lewis’ body after responding to his condo just after 4 p.m. Sunday.

Lewis’ wife, who was out of town at the time, had asked someone to check on him after she was unable to reach him.

His cause of death was not immediately known. Public records show Lewis had a history of heart problems and had been in poor health recently.

“We have no reason to believe there was anything suspicious,” Cabral said of Lewis’ death.

Massachusetts authorities initially said there would not be an autopsy, but the state medical examiner’s office accepted jurisdiction over the case Monday at the request of Illinois law enforcement. An autopsy is now expected to be performed this week.

Chicago-area law enforcement agencies involved in the Tylenol case declined to comment on Lewis’ death, citing an ongoing investigation. Several sources, however, told the Tribune this latest development will likely curtail work on the case given the energy and resources expended on Lewis.

Investigators’ intense interest in Lewis drew occasional accusations of tunnel vision. Though the criticism often came from armchair detectives, at least one victim’s daughter believed authorities had focused on the wrong person.

“Lewis was convicted of his opportunistic act and spent 12 years in prison for it,” Michelle Rosen, daughter of Mary Reiner, told the Tribune in 2022. “I am appalled that they still circle back to him as the possible murderer. This inhibits the investigation and influences the public into believing a false narrative.”

The Tribune’s investigation leading up to the crime’s 40th anniversary included more than 150 interviews in multiple states. Reporters also obtained tens of thousands of pages of documents through records requests, including sealed affidavits and court orders that outline some of law enforcement’s best evidence in the unsolved case.

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Helena and Jan Tarasewicz, center left, the parents of Theresa "Terri" Janus, grieve at the funeral Mass for Terri, her husband Stanley and her brother-in-law Adam Janus at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church. (Carl Hugare / Chicago Tribune)

One revelation was an FBI video from an elaborate 2007-08 undercover sting operation in which Lewis stated it took him three days to write the extortion letter.

Advancements in technology had allowed the FBI to determine the letter was mailed Oct. 1, 1982, the Tribune reported. On the undercover recording, which the reporters viewed, Lewis did not dispute that date.

[ [Don't miss] Movement in the Tylenol murders: Law enforcement seeks to persuade prosecutors to act on ‘chargeable’ case ]

FBI Special Agent Lane, who had come out of retirement to help with the sting, then sketched out a calendar for Lewis and counted back three days from Oct. 1, landing on Sept. 29. That was the day all seven victims swallowed poisoned capsules.

News of the poisonings didn’t become public until Sept. 30, meaning Lewis would have been writing the letter before officials had even determined the pills had been poisoned.

Lewis was quiet for a moment on the recording. “I see your quandary,” he says. “I’ve been telling myself for 25 years I worked on it for three days. But it’s impossible.”

The medical examiner's office shows Tylenol bottles containing analyzed contents of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. The specimen, right, was found to contain the poison cyanide. (Charles Osgood / Chicago Tribune)

Lewis also made potentially incriminating statements about the timeline to his friend Roger Nicholson, a self-described provocateur who hosted a community access television show. In one conversation confirmed by the Tribune, Lewis told Nicholson that he was in New York when the deaths started and he made a point to stand in front of security cameras so he’d have an alibi. Nicholson believed the only way Lewis would have known he needed an alibi before the murders became public was if he was involved.

“He better have prayed to God there was no afterlife,” Nicholson told the Tribune after learning about Lewis’ death.

The FBI asked Cook and DuPage County prosecutors in 2012 to move forward with a grand jury, stating that it was law enforcement’s best — and perhaps last — chance at bringing justice to the case. No charges were ever approved.

Lewis’ life is chronicled in more than 5,000 pages of court transcripts, parole documents and psychological assessments maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration and obtained by the Tribune. The records paint a portrait of a convicted con man driven at times by vindictiveness, trauma and a steadfast belief that he is always the smartest person in the room.

[ [Don't miss] The Tylenol murders, part 4: ‘That’s Jim Lewis!’ The task force turns its attention to a man with a disturbing past. ]

Born Aug. 8, 1946, in Memphis, Tennessee, Lewis was the youngest of seven children. His birth name was Theodore, after his father, Theodore Elmer Wilson. His parents were “poor, irresponsible” and ill-equipped to care for their children, according to federal court documents.

After his father deserted the family when Lewis was a year old, his mother, Opal, moved the children to Joplin, Missouri, to be closer to her own mother. But she still struggled to provide a stable home and later abandoned the children in the summer of 1948.

Young Theodore was adopted at age 2 and his name was changed to James William Lewis. His adoptive parents raised him as an only child on a 20-acre farm near Joplin, living what investigators called “an unremarkable childhood.”

The first documented sign of psychological trouble came in summer 1966 when Lewis was 19. According to the records, the teen went missing for about two days that June and was found in a shallow pond “apparently trying to drown himself.”

He was brought back to his family’s home, where he demanded access to his stepfather’s gun cabinet. When his stepfather refused to give him the key, court records say, Lewis attacked the older man and broke several of his ribs. As his parents fled their farm during the outburst, Lewis threatened them with an ax, the records state.

Lewis was arrested on assault charges and spent three weeks in the county jail, where authorities said he took 36 aspirin in a suicide attempt. The charges were dropped after Lewis was committed to a state psychiatric hospital on June 24, 1966, according to federal records.

At a news conference where Tyrone Fahner introduced new evidence in the extortion case, the media was given handout photos of Robert Richardson and his wife Nancy, shown here, who were actually James and LeAnn Lewis. The news conference was held at Area 6 police headquarters at Belmont and Western avenues in Chicago on Oct. 14, 1982. (John Bartley / Chicago Tribune)

Lewis briefly attended the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he befriended people in the pharmacology department and met his wife, LeAnn. The couple married in 1968 and she gave birth to their only child, Toni, the following year.

Toni, who was born with Down syndrome, would sit in the window of her parents’ tax business and wave to passersby. One of those people was Raymond West, who befriended the little girl’s parents and hired them to do his taxes.

Five years after Toni’s death, West’s dismembered body was found in the attic of his home in August 1978. Lewis was charged with his murder after he forged a check in West’s name for $5,000 and police determined Lewis was the last person to see West alive. Prosecutors, however, dropped the case on the eve of trial after a judge found Lewis had not been read his rights before being questioned about his former tax client’s death.

Raymond West’s cousin, John, believes Lewis killed his relative and said he found some solace in the news of Lewis’ death.

“Now, my cousin Raymond can rest in peace,” he said Monday.

The sun rises over the grave of Raymond West who is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery on Aug. 29, 2022, in Carrollton, Missouri. West was slain in Kansas City in 1978. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

Kansas City police began investigating Lewis again in 1981 for a credit card scam, prompting Lewis to leave town and move to Chicago. He and LeAnn lived there for about nine months under assumed names before assuming new identities and moving to New York three weeks before the Tylenol poisonings.

While living in Cambridge, Lewis was charged in 2004 with the rape, drugging and kidnapping of a neighbor, but the case was dropped after she declined to testify. In 2010 Lewis self-published a novel called “Poison! The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com

sstclair@chicagotribune.com