The Tylenol Mafia (43 page)

Judge Frank McGarr, who presided over Lewis’s extortion trial, wrote, “The evidence shows that the company [J&J] stood ready to transfer the money, but that the FBI instructed it not to do so. The evidence strongly suggests that Johnson & Johnson’s probable response [to the extortion letter] would be to wire the funds, and it is completely consistent with Lewis’s professed motive of exposing McCahey that he expected the corporation to part with the money. Even a temporary loss of the use of money constitutes a deprivation of property.”

The idea that Johnson & Johnson was actually going to deposit $1 million into a closed bank account because of the Tylenol extortion letter is ridiculous. Nevertheless, Lewis did write that letter, and he received a 10-year prison term for doing so. The court documents filed by J&J clearly overstate the veracity of Lewis’s intent. Lewis never had a chance of collecting any money, and he never intended to collect any money. In Lewis, J&J executives had a scapegoat for the Tylenol murders. By casting a dark shadow on Lewis, Johnson & Johnson’s problems were swept under the rug, and any suspicion that the tamperings had occurred in the channel of distribution went away.

Jeremy Margolis, the assistant U.S. attorney on the team of Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted Lewis for extortion, said Lewis “fancied himself a really brilliant guy.” Margolis said Lewis believed that he knew how law enforcement worked, and he had decided to wait and take advantage of the next catastrophe. “It could have been a plane crash, a train wreck, whatever. It just happened to be the Tylenol killings.” Margolis said Lewis “left Chicago with these envelopes in his possession and the bank account number, knowing that something bad would happen someplace, and he would take advantage of it and put the heat on Frederick McCahey.”

Margolis said, “He [Lewis] knew that the Bureau would eventually figure out that McCahey hadn’t done whatever it was that Lewis was claiming McCahey did in the letter - plane crash, train wreck, Tylenol killings, whatever.” Lewis figured that during the course of the Bureau’s investigation of McCahey, “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,” said Margolis

After authorities determined that McCahey had not written the extortion letter, they asked McCahey if anyone might hold a grudge against him. McCahey named Robert and Nancy Richardson, aka James and LeAnn Lewis. Authorities connected the dots and then on October 13, 1982, they issued an arrest warrant and published a headshot of “Robert Richardson.” Kansas City police recognized the suspect and informed the Chicago cops that the name of the man they were looking for was actually James Lewis.

On October 14, 1982, Kansas City authorities sent three officers to Chicago with Lewis’s police file. Chicago Police Lt., August Locallo, said one of the Kansas City officers carried “some written material” to the FBI laboratory in Washington D.C. for fingerprint analysis against a smudge found on one of the cyanide-laced Tylenol bottles and another print lifted from items confiscated from Lewis during a 1978 murder investigation. Lewis’s fingerprints, of course, were not found on any of the Tylenol bottles.

 
The Kansas City police identified Lewis as the man who had been a suspect in the 1978 murder of Raymond West. In 1979, a judge dismissed the murder charge against Lewis at the request of the prosecutor who said the victim’s cause of death could not be determined, and police had illegally seized some evidence. Lewis was still wanted in Missouri on charges related to the credit card scheme that authorities were investigating when the Lewises left Kansas City for Chicago in December of 1981.

When Raymond West died in 1979, he was a lifelong bachelor and former truck driver who had lived with his mother in a small house on the corner of Campbell and
Troost
in Kansas City since 1946. His mother had died in 1977. On Sunday, July 23, 1978, West made his weekly trip to the local florist shop. A neighbor said West called her later that evening. He reported feeling a little sick, but talked mostly about getting his refrigerator fixed. That was the last anyone heard from him.

A longtime friend, Charles Banker, became concerned on Monday when he could not reach West by phone. Banker and his wife drove over to West’s home to investigate. The doors were locked, and West’s car was in the garage. They looked through West’s bedroom window and saw an unmade bed. Worried, they called police. According to Kansas City police reports, the responding officer found the house secured and asked Banker who else might know where West was. Banker mentioned a few neighbors, including the man who did West’s taxes, Jim Lewis.

The officer called Lewis, who said West had gone to the Ozarks for three or four days with his girlfriend. According to Banker, however, West had never had a romantic involvement during their 30-year friendship, and he never went anywhere significant without telling him. Banker filed a missing person’s report.

Banker returned to West’s home on Wednesday and saw a note stuck on the still-locked front door written on Lewis & Lewis letterhead. It read, “Ray is out of town until Thursday, for further information call Jim.” Again, Banker called police. The police arrived shortly thereafter and forced their way into the house. Everything appeared to be in order. Then they found a note on the living room coffee table. It said, “Please don’t disturb until after 1:00. - Sleeping late, Raymond.” West was nowhere to be found. Banker changed the locks on the doors and then gave one key to police and kept the other one.

About three weeks later, on August 14
^th
, Banker went back to West’s home. There was an awful smell coming from inside the house. He unlocked the front door and went inside to search through the house again. When he entered the spare bedroom, he noticed some dried blood on the floor.
 
He called police back to the house again. This time they conducted a more extensive search. When they went down to the basement, they found a bloody lawn chair and garbage bag containing West’s toupee and eyeglasses as well as some bloodstained sheets.

Upon returning to West’s upstairs bedroom, officers noticed a foot-long stain on the ceiling. They found a ladder and then climbed up into the attic through a window from outside the house. A partially decomposed body was lying face down, still dressed in a striped polo shirt and tan corduroy pants. Both legs had been severed at the hip joint and then wrapped with sheets. The right leg lay near the head on the right side; the other rested farther down on the left. The head was also wrapped with sheets and a cord, and the torso was partially covered with a garbage bag tied with cotton rope. As the body had decomposed over the previous three weeks, all the wrappings had become saturated with blood and other bodily fluids that had soaked through the insulation, and dripped onto the floor of the bedroom
 
below.

Police drove down the street to talk to Lewis again. After a short conversation, they arrested Lewis and brought him in for questioning. Lewis had tried to cash a check for $5,000 from Raymond West dated July 23, 1978, the day
West
went missing. The bank had refused to cash it when they could not get hold of West to confirm its validity. Lewis said the check was a loan West had given him during a morning visit on Sunday, July 23. He also said that he had put the note on West’s front door, so folks like Banker wouldn’t worry about West. After submitting fingerprints and a handwriting sample, Lewis was released.

The following day, police returned to the Lewis home to inquire further about the check. Lewis said the $5,000 was a “business expansion” loan from West. He then produced a typed promissory note. Lewis agreed to sign a consent-to-search form, allowing police to search his home and office as well as his vehicles. Detectives searched Lewis’s car and discovered a black attaché case with papers bearing Raymond West’s name and a bundle of his checks. In late August 1978, the Jackson County Grand Jury charged Lewis with capital murder, despite the fact that the Medical Examiners had been unable to determine how
West
had actually died.

Just days before the October 1979 trial date, Prosecutor James Bell asked for a dismissal of the case. The entire case was a mess. Police had no probable cause to arrest Lewis the first time, and they had neglected to read him his Miranda warning. Prosecutors had a bag of bloody body parts and no known cause of death. Detectives had found nothing at West’s house that could tie Lewis to the crime. Bell told reporters that the case was “one of the most mysterious, confusing, befuddling, complex... and probably one of the most difficult cases I ever handled.”

When Lewis came under public scrutiny because of the Tylenol extortion letter, Jackson County Circuit Judge, Gene Martin, appointed a special prosecutor, James K. Fischer, on October 19, 1982, to reopen the Raymond West case. The reopened case went nowhere, and Fischer never charged anyone with a crime related to West’s death. There are few confirmed facts in this case, but one fact is indisputable: The Raymond West case has nothing to do with the Tylenol murders. Furthermore, as the Tylenol case illustrates all too well, it is a good idea to understand all the facts before blindly accepting as accurate the statements and theories put forth by officials in charge of a criminal investigation.

Upon learning about the Raymond West case, Fahner appeared to become more interested in talking to James Lewis. “The extortion demand we took as a hoax initially, but the murder charge and previous record puts it in a different light,” Fahner now said. “Obviously, this has great significance. We want these people [the Lewises] back. We still have no direct evidence that these people were involved in the cyanide-Tylenol deaths, but we want them back so we can pursue that angle.”

When Fahner made that statement on October 15, 1982, officials from the FBI and IDLE were then already committed to charging Ed Reiner, Roger Arnold, and possibly Howard Fearon Sr. with the fabricated Tylenol murder conspiracy. The FBI and IDLE continued to pursue these three men, coming within one day of making arrests before the Tylenol murder conspiracy theory evaporated into thin air on October 26, 1982. It was only
after
t
he FBI and IDLE failed to bring their Tylenol murder conspiracy theory to fruition that they targeted James Lewis as their “prime suspect.”

After a one-day media blast that promoted the Tylenol murder conspiracy theory story on October 25, 1982, Roger Arnold and the relatives of Lynn Reiner were out, and James Lewis was in as the patsy for the Tylenol murders. The problem with making Lewis the patsy was that Lewis had an ironclad alibi. He had been living in New York City since 23 days before the Tylenol poisonings, and 22 days before the Kane County Sheriff’s deputies found the boxes of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot.

38

________

James Lewis was in his tiny studio apartment at the Hotel Rutledge, reading a newspaper and listening to the radio, when he first heard the news reports about the Tylenol extortion letter. “They hadn’t named me by name yet, but they were looking for me,” Lewis said. “When I first heard that on the radio, I froze. It was like, oh goodness.” The most difficult part was telling his wife. He broke the news to LeAnn that night while they were preparing dinner together. “I said, ‘Honey, I wrote a letter’ and she said, ‘Oh well, that’s good,’ and I said, well not exactly.”

On October 16, 1982, with Lewis’s face plastered all over the media, Jim and LeAnn checked out of the Hotel Rutledge and moved a few blocks down the road to Hotel 17. On Monday, October 18
^th
, investigators released a grainy photo of a man they said might be the “prime suspect,” James Lewis. The picture was that of a middle-aged bearded man captured on a surveillance camera at the Walgreens store where Paula Prince had bought her bottle of poisoned Tylenol. The man was in the background, while in the foreground; Paula Prince was paying for her bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules.

Unidentified sources “close to the investigation” said the photo could be the case’s first real homicide clue. Fanner said the photo would be an “extremely significant” clue if the man in the picture were identified as Lewis. “If it turns out it is,” said Fahner, “it’s dramatic as hell if you put it together with the $1 million extortion letter, the connection to the murder in Kansas City, and the fact that this guy used 17 aliases.” No one ever substantiated the “17 aliases” claim, because it was not true.

“It could be a tremendous stroke of irony that the person [in the picture] . . . turns out to be Paula Prince, and behind her, it turns out to be the man who salted those capsules,” Fahner mused. He said investigators had other photographs that provided a clearer image of the man in the published photo and experts were also using computer techniques to enhance and enlarge the images. “If the photo has [Lewis] in it, that’s big, important stuff,” Fahner said. “If it turns out not to be, we’re right back where we started.”

As it turned out, the man in the photo did not resemble James Lewis all that much after all. When shown an enlarged and enhanced copy of the photo by a television reporter, Lewis’s former landlord in Chicago, Tom Kline, said, “I’m very doubtful it is him.”

On October 20
^th
, authorities confirmed that a computerized analysis of the photo, commissioned by a local television station but not made public, showed that the man in the photo did not look like Lewis. The original, unenhanced grainy version of the photo had been broadcast on October 18
^th
by the local CBS television station in Chicago, WBBM, as though it had just been discovered. Chicago detectives had actually uncovered the picture nearly a week earlier after going through boxes of film from security cameras at six stores that authorities had linked to the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules.