The Tylenol Mafia (17 page)

James grew up in a small rural home in Carl Junction, Missouri, where his mother worked in a shirt factory and his father share-cropped 20 acres. The Lewises had no telephone, no automobile, and no modern agricultural equipment. While attending the University of Missouri at Kansas City, James met LeAnn Miller in 1967. They were married one year later. In the early 1970s, James and LeAnn opened their own business, the Lewis and Lewis Business Tax Service, in a store not far from their small house on
Troost
Avenue in Kansas City.

On December 4, 1981, Kansas City police officers showed up at the Lewises’ home. They were investigating James Lewis and George Rea, a former sheriff’s deputy, as possible suspects in a credit card fraud scheme. The next day, James and LeAnn left Kansas City and headed north to Chicago. They rented a room for $100 a month in a rundown, roach-infested apartment building in what was mostly a well-kept historic neighborhood on West Belden Avenue on Chicago’s North Side. They used the names Robert and Nancy Richardson to keep authorities in Kansas City off their trail.

In January 1982, LeAnn got a job at Lakeside Travel, but the company went belly-up just three months later. LeAnn and seventeen other employees were stiffed by the firm’s owner, Frederick Miller McCahey, when their final paychecks bounced.

Jim’s temporary job at First National Bank of Chicago ended in August 1982. So the Lewises, both now unemployed, packed up their few belongings on September 3
^rd
, and took a train to New York City. On September 6
^th
, they rented a room at the Hotel Rutledge on Lexington Avenue and 31
^st
Street in Manhattan.

When the Tylenol murders made front-page news, Lewis saw his chance to draw attention to McCahey and possibly trigger an investigation into his business practices. Lewis’s ill-advised plan involved writing an extortion letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding that the company deposit $1 million into McCahey’s business account at Continental Bank of Illinois if they wanted the killings to stop. That account, as Lewis knew, had been closed since May 1982. Court documents state that Lewis’s reason for writing the extortion letter was to expose what he believed were McCahey’s “fraudulent business dealings.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney, Jeremy Margolis, said Lewis assumed that the FBI would eventually figure out that McCahey hadn’t done the Tylenol killings. Margolis said that during the course of the Bureau’s investigation of McCahey, Lewis expected that “they’d work [McCahey] up one side and down the other and figure out what a horrible white-collar criminal he was and he would suffer his just desserts for bouncing checks on employees.”

Margolis and U.S. Attorney Dan Webb led the team of Justice Department attorneys who prosecuted Lewis for writing the extortion letter. Lewis was convicted of attempted extortion in 1983, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Several years later, Margolis said, “There’s nothing special about James Lewis. He’s a con man. He’s an experienced fraud artist. He’s a criminal and he belongs in the penitentiary.” That sentiment was proclaimed publicly by every one of Big Jim’s boys, with the exception of IDLE Director, James Zagel.

In 2002, Zagel, then a federal judge, told the
Chicago Tribune
that Lewis should no longer be identified as a suspect. “I’m in the business of withholding judgment,” said Zagel. “I, for one, cannot accuse him of more than what he was charged with.”

Zagel maintained an amazingly low profile during the Tylenol murders investigation, especially considering his position as the head of the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement. Maybe Zagel was unwilling to publicly endorse the improbable “approved theory” of the Tylenol murders.

It was nearly impossible, statistically, for someone to plant in the retail stores the number of adulterated Tylenol bottles that it would have taken for five of them to be purchased and the cyanide capsules consumed on that same day. There was also a problem with the hypothesis that the capsules had been filled with cyanide and planted one day before the murders.

Authorities claimed that the cyanide was highly corrosive and would have eaten through the gelatin-based Tylenol capsules very quickly; thus, according to Tyrone Fahner, the tamperings must have occurred at the local retail stores, probably on Tuesday, the day before the murders. When Fahner made that claim, on the second day of the investigation, it was already clear that the cyanide involved in the Tylenol murders did not have the super-corrosive properties Fahner described.

The evidence does in fact support the assertion of officials who said cyanide causes the gel-based Tylenol capsule-shells to corrode (the water in cyanide, not the cyanide itself, is what actually causes gelatin-based capsules to corrode). However, the evidence discredits their assertion that the cyanide-laced capsules would show visible signs of corrosion in just one or two days.

Cook County Toxicologist, Michael Schaffer, said the cyanide from the poisoned capsules in the Kellerman and Janus bottles was moist and had caused the capsules to corrode. Those capsules showed signs of corrosion when Schaffer inspected them just one day after the poisonings. They were somewhat swollen and discolored. The one remaining cyanide-laced capsule in Paula Prince’s Tylenol bottle, inspected two days after the murders, was also discolored and swollen.

On October 21, 1982, a J&J employee working at the company’s temporary lab in Lemont discovered another bottle of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. That bottle, the seventh bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, bore the lot number MC2880, the same lot number that was on the Kellerman and Janus bottles. The seventh bottle had been returned to a Dominick’s store in Chicago on October 3
^rd
, but it had not been purchased there. The person who turned it in was never found. Fahner said the cyanide-laced capsules in the seventh bottle were in an “advanced state of deterioration.” They had corroded to a much greater degree than the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules that Schaffer had inspected about three weeks earlier.

The cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules recovered after the poisoning death of William Pascual in Philadelphia on April 3, 1982, provides another example of the corrosive effects of moist cyanide. Philadelphia authorities re-examined Pascual’s capsules on October 9
^th
, and found that they had degraded into nothing but powder – the result of extensive corrosion in the preceding six months caused by the moist cyanide.

To find out when and where the Tylenol tamperings had occurred, authorities needed to figure out how long it had taken the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to show signs of degradation. This is exactly what Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, had set out to do on Thursday morning, September 30, 1982. Dr. Stein and his staff had “duplicated” the victims’ cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules by putting some of the cyanide from those capsules into new Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. Stein then monitored the “test capsules” to determine how long it took them to show signs of corrosion. Officials from Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol task force never talked about this forensic analysis, but Robert Stein did talk. Stein said that after the cyanide had been in the test capsules for 48 hours, they still showed no signs of corrosion.

A member of the Tylenol task force, who asked not to be identified, refused to comment on Stein’s findings. “We’re giving out what we feel we can,” he said. “We can’t comment on things that might in any way jeopardize the investigation.”

On October 9, 1982, Stein said he had completed tests indicating that the cyanide-loaded Tylenol capsules could have been doctored at their distribution points or at the plant where they were produced. Stein made this statement ten days after the test capsules had been filled with cyanide. These capsules obviously did not yet show (or had just begun to show) visible signs of corrosion. Instead of acknowledging the relevance of Stein’s findings, Tyrone Fahner sharply criticized Stein for suggesting the obvious: that the Tylenol capsules had been poisoned in the distribution channel.

When J&J discovered the seventh bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules on October 21
^st
, Fahner said these capsules, because they were in an advanced state of deterioration from the corrosive poison, should help the authorities work back in time to determine when the contamination occurred and where the batch’s bottles were that day. However, as Fahner must have known, Robert Stein had already determined that some or all of the poisoned capsules had been filled with cyanide about 10 or more days before the murders. Stein already had effectively traced the location of the tamperings to the channel of distribution. Stein’s findings did not fit the approved theory, so officials quickly suppressed those findings.

Even James Lewis questioned the glaring failure of officials to produce clear evidence related to the corrosive capability of cyanide on the gelatin-based Tylenol capsule-shells. In 1992, Lewis commented about this curious fact during a prison interview with an ABC-News reporter. “The Illinois Department of Law Enforcement, the FBI - apparently none of those [agencies] ever did a shelf-life test,” said Lewis. “I have long contended that if you find the person who squelched the shelf-life test, you will be very close to the person who committed the Tylenol murders.”

Lewis did not intend to imply that the person who squelched the shelf life tests had positively identified the Tylenol killer. Lewis did, however, believe that this person, or persons, had suppressed information that should have been used to help investigators track down the Tylenol killer.

The cyanide found in the adulterated Tylenol capsules did cause the capsules to corrode, but not in just one to a few days as was suggested by every official who spoke publicly about the case, other than Robert Stein. Some or all of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the Kellerman, Janus, and Prince bottles showed visible signs of corrosion one to two days after the murders, and thus had been filled with cyanide about ten days or more before they were purchased on September 28
^th
and 29
^th
. However, not all of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules showed signs of corrosion.

On October 8, 1982, NBC-News showed video footage that had been taken at the Illinois Department of Health lab in DuPage County. The video showed the four cyanide-laced red and white Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that were still in Lynn Reiner’s bottle of gray and white Regular Strength Tylenol capsules. Extreme close-up shots revealed that none of these cyanide-laced capsules showed any visible signs of corrosion. They were in perfect condition, with no discoloration or swelling, and thus had been filled with cyanide more recently than the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules from the Kellerman, Janus, and Prince bottles.

Tyrone Fahner said the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules from the different bottles looked different. He said the tampering for some capsules could be detected “by the naked eye,” but others showed no visible evidence that they had been opened and their contents switched.

The Tylenol capsules that could be “detected by the naked eye” as having visible signs of corrosion had been filled with cyanide more than ten days before the murders. The Tylenol capsules that showed no signs of tampering had been filled with cyanide more recently.

The chemical make-up of the cyanide in all of the victims’ Tylenol capsules was identical and had been manufactured by DuPont Laboratories; the varying degrees of corrosion on different capsules were thus not a function of different chemical makeup. The FDA traced the cyanide to DuPont with the aid of an analytical tool developed by Ames Laboratory. The
Chicago Tribune
reported that the poisoned Tylenol capsules contained three different “mixes” of cyanide, but they differed only in the fineness to which the crystals were ground.

Robert Stein’s shelf life tests soundly debunked the claim made by officials who cited the super-corrosiveness of cyanide as their only “proof” that the tamperings had occurred in the retail stores one day before the Tylenol murders. In early 1986, the FDA conducted its own analysis of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules at the agency’s most sophisticated lab for analyzing poisons. This analysis was done on Tylenol capsules containing cyanide with “low water content.” The FDA found that these cyanide-laced capsules would show no signs of degradation for many months.

J&J executives and government officials never found any evidence to support their contention that the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were planted in Chicago area retail stores shortly before the Tylenol murders. However, they did seem to understand that
only
Extra Strength Tylenol capsules had been filled with cyanide.

One obvious indication that Johnson & Johnson executives knew a lot more about the Tylenol killer’s modus operandi than they let on was their insistence that the killer had poisoned
only
Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. Instead of warning consumers to avoid all Tylenol capsules; J&J executives took extraordinary measures to assure the public that only Extra Strength Tylenol capsules had been poisoned.

Within hours of learning about the poisonings, J&J faxed a half million mailgram to retailers, wholesalers, and doctors, alerting them to possible tampering of only Extra Strength Tylenol capsules.
 
The mailgram read: “We currently have no evidence that any other Extra Strength Tylenol capsule product or any other Tylenol product was similarly contaminated.”

When Chicago Mayor, Jane Byrne, announced on Saturday, October 2
^nd
, that all Tylenol products were being removed from the City’s 2,000 stores, Johnson & Johnson responded by refusing to collect or inspect any Regular Strength Tylenol capsules. This was a seemingly peculiar stance to take, because there was no apparent reason to assume that the killer had not put cyanide into Regular Strength Tylenol capsules.