The Tylenol Mafia (51 page)

Authorities who examined the Tylenol extortion letter back in October 1982 had found Lewis’s fingerprints on that note. Police had also found Lewis’s fingerprints on items collected from Lewis’s Kansas City home in 1981. United Press International reported on October 18, 1982 that FBI experts were “comparing Lewis’s prints with partial finger and palm prints on bottles that held the poison capsules.”

As for the DNA samples – the FBI already had the Lewises’ DNA on items collected when authorities search their Cambridge apartment in February of 2009. The pants, socks, and other clothes collected during that search did not even exist in 1982. Those items were collected because they contained Lewis’s DNA and for no other reason. Prosecutors in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, had also collected items with Lewis’s DNA when they arrested him in August 2004. In addition, “retired” FBI agent Roy Lane had plenty of opportunities to collect items containing the Lewises’ DNA during the meetings and dinners he and “Sherry Nichols” had with the Lewises. It’s hard to believe that the FBI had not already compared the DNA from Lewis’s items to DNA on the bottles and capsules of cyanide-laced Tylenol, which had all been sitting in the FBI lab in Washington D.C. since 1982.

DNA typing (profiling), a technique to perform human identity tests by examining the length variation of DNA repeat
sequences,
was developed in 1984 by English geneticist, Alec
Jeffreys
.
The technology to do DNA profiling became commercially available in 1986. Since that time, human identity testing using DNA typing methods has become widespread. The methods of DNA profiling typically used today, short tandem repeat (STR) testing and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis, have been in use since the mid-1990s. Smaller DNA samples can be analyzed more quickly and accurately today, but the basic technology has not changed since the mid-1990s.

Police forces can collect DNA samples without a suspect’s knowledge and then use that DNA as evidence, as long as it is collected from a public location that does not require a search warrant. Courts have ruled that with regard to DNA evidence, there is no expectation of privacy, citing California v. Greenwood (1985). In that case, the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside the
curtilage
or property line of a home. That same legal authority applies to DNA evidence collected without a warrant. There was nothing to prohibit authorities from running a DNA profile of the DNA on Lewis’s items that were legally collected in public location and in earlier investigations. They did not need a court order to do that.

The failure of officials to disclose the results of the analysis of the Lewises’ DNA samples, submitted on January 6, 2010, is confirmation that those samples do not match any of the DNA evidence supposedly collected during the Tylenol murders investigation. That finding was, of course, a foregone conclusion. The only real question was whether the FBI, IDLE, or authorities in DuPage County had the gall to plant Lewis’s DNA on some of the evidence. That was apparently too dangerous even for them.

The totality of the physical evidence gathered during the 1982 Tylenol murders investigation came from eight bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. The DNA smudge that authorities compared to the Lewises’ DNA samples came from one of those bottles.
 
More specifically, it came from a capsule inside one of those bottles.

On January 12, 2010, Bill Hemmer, of Fox News, interviewed Dr. Michael Baden, a pathologist and frequent contributor on Fox. This interview was one of several media events informing the public that the DNA evidence of interest was on a Tylenol capsule. Hemmer introduced Dr. Baden and then quickly got to the subject-matter at hand. “They are saying there’s a smudge on one of the containers.
A smudge of what?”
Hemmer asked Baden. “Is that a fingerprint, or what would that be?”

“Presumably,” Baden replied, “a fingerprint - and with the new DNA technology, one can pick up from a smudged fingerprint, [the] DNA from the skin cells.”

Then, to emphasize the point that the DNA smudge was from a Tylenol capsule - not a bottle - Hemmer and Baden each picked up an unsealed capsule similar to the Tylenol capsules that had been filled with cyanide in 1982 and 1986.

“This is a capsule,” Hammer continued, “You can take this apart.
Right?
And the medication is on the inside.”

“So we’re taking this [capsule] apart, Baden explained, “And see… and then the medication is on the inside… and one can then take other medication containing cyanide and put it in.”

“So your theory,” Hemmer said to Baden, “is that this killer… and I'll demonstrate it for the viewers here – we missed that a little bit here - is you take this apart, right, the medication is on the inside… then you would fill the capsule with an amount of cyanide.”

“That’s right,” Baden replied. “And this type of capsule contains enough cyanide to kill you.”

While Hemmer and Baden were talking, the camera zoomed in on their hands as they held the capsules between their fingers, thus bringing home the point that anyone who handled a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule would have left his DNA on that capsule. The Tylenol killer, of course, must have worn gloves when he filled the capsules with cyanide. It doesn’t take much cyanide to kill a person who handles it with bare hands.

“Okay, now you’re 27 years down the road,” remarked Hemmer. “Why now would we have that technology to figure out what happened in 1982, and whether or not this guy [James Lewis] is guilty, or if the true guilty person is still running free?”

“Because right now,” Baden replied, “the police must have gotten some evidence that there was something on either the bottle container that they have in evidence, or the pills. One can leave fingerprints on the capsules themselves that can be picked up now with DNA… the new sensitive DNA. DNA [profiling] was not available in 1982, it’s now available, and it can pick up very small trace evidences of DNA, and if his [Lewis’s] DNA is on any of the capsules or the bottles that the police have in evidence, that’s a home run,” declared Baden. Baden did not mention that the evidence from 1982 was probably not handled or stored in a manner to avoid contamination, since DNA profiling technology was not even discovered until two years later.

“If this case is solved, it’s a big deal,” said Hemmer.

“It’s a very big deal,” echoed Baden.

The Huffington Post
reported on January 9, 2010 that “one of the most harrowing serial murders in Chicago history has moved a step closer to trial, thanks to a tiny smudge of evidence. It’s thought that new advances in forensic science will be able to match this DNA to an old smudged fingerprint.” The consensus among the authorities who commented on the DNA smudge was that it was from a capsule in a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol recovered in the Chicago area in 1982. From where the capsule with this DNA smudge came, is, in retrospect, all too obvious.

On October 26, 1982, one day after discovering the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, officials said the FBI had found no fingerprints on any of the first seven bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol. They apparently meant to say that the FBI had found no
useable
fingerprints, because two weeks earlier they had said that the FBI was comparing Lewis’s fingerprints to partial fingerprints and palm prints on one or more of those seven bottles.

Tyrone Fahner said on November 9, 1982 that a partial fingerprint “smudge” had been found on a capsule inside the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. Because that fingerprint was smudged, the FBI was unable to lift a clear print. That smudged fingerprint did, of course, contain DNA. That “DNA smudge,” since it came from a capsule inside the eighth bottle, left State’s Attorney Joe Birkett with a big problem. The eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, as Birkett should have known, had been planted into evidence two weeks after the Tylenol murders.

On October 14, 1982, so the story goes, Linda Morgan gave the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol to authorities at the Wheaton police station in DuPage County. Ten years later, she reminisced about her “near death” experience. “What’s going to happen happens - and I guess [my death] just wasn’t in God’s plan at that time,” she said. “I bought it, but I hadn’t taken it. My husband didn’t like Tylenol, and my daughter was very little, so I was the only one who would have taken it.”

Morgan did not need the Tylenol when she bought it, but she conveniently bought it on the same day she would need it. She said she put the Tylenol bottle in her medicine cabinet before attending a family outing at a local park. After a run in the park, Morgan said she told her sister that she wanted to go home to take a Tylenol capsule because her legs ached. Her sister then gave her a
Bufferin
instead. The next day, after hearing about the poisonings, Morgan said she pulled the Tylenol bottle out of the medicine cabinet and set it on her dresser. That bottle, according to Morgan, sat on her bedroom dresser for 14 days because family matters, which she never described, prevented her from turning it in earlier.

Morgan claimed to have bought the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol at Frank’s Finer Foods on the morning of the Tylenol murders. However, as described earlier, the lot number on that bottle revealed that it had never been inside any of the Frank’s Finer Foods stores. The Tylenol in the Frank’s Finer Foods stores had been distributed through J&J’s regional distribution center in Glendale, California. But the Tylenol in the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol had been distributed through J&J’s regional distribution center in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania.

Instead of turning the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol over to the FBI or IDLE for inspection, the Wheaton police said they had attached a note to the bottle, stating that it may be contaminated, and then mailed it to the Maple Plain Company in Minnesota. The Maple Plain Company, a coupon company handling the reverse distribution of the returned Tylenol, supposedly then mailed the bottle to the McNeil Consumer Products Company in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.

Within days of Johnson & Johnson’s “discovery” of the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, it became clear that the poisoned capsules inside that bottle were not the work of the Tylenol killer. Tyrone Fahner said, “The [eighth] bottle is clearly different than the other seven… Some [of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules] were put together ‘
unartfully
,’” and the poisoned medicine inside those capsules had an “
orangish
” color, whereas the contents in the cyanide-laced capsules from the other seven bottles were off-white in color. Furthermore, the adulterated capsules in the eighth bottle showed no signs of corrosion when inspected 26 days after the Tylenol murders, yet the cyanide-laced capsules in the seventh bottle, inspected 22 days after the murders, were in an “advanced state of deterioration” from the corrosive effects of the moist cyanide. Someone, not the Tylenol killer, had put cyanide into seven Tylenol capsules in the eighth bottle sometime after the Tylenol murders. The eighth bottle was then planted into evidence on October 14, 1982; one day after Roger Arnold was released from jail.

It is an amazing coincidence that Linda Morgan, the only person identified as having turned in a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules after the Tylenol murders, was married to an 18
^th
Circuit Court judge who traveled in the same circles as the DuPage County lawyers hired by Johnson & Johnson “to help uncover the details” of the Tylenol murders.

Linda and Judge Lewis Morgan lived in Wheaton, a city of about 54,000 people, and the county seat of DuPage County. It is currently one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, with the highest per capita income in the Midwest; nineteen of the county’s towns have average household incomes of over $100,000. At the center of the legal community in Wheaton is the 18
^th
Circuit Court, which has general jurisdiction over a wide variety of civil and criminal cases in DuPage County, ranging from small claim actions to domestic relations to criminal felonies.

Since 1990, the DuPage County courthouse has been located at County Farm Road and Manchester Road in Wheaton. In 1982, the courthouse was located at East Liberty Drive and
Reber
Street, two miles east of its current location. The law office of Rook, Pitts, and Poust, at 201 Naperville Road, was right across the street from the 18
^th
Circuit Court, when, on the morning of September 30, 1982, McNeil Chairman, David Collins, called that office shortly after stepping off the helipad at the McNeil Consumer Products Company in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Collins first talked to his attorney pal, Paul Noland, and told him to immediately go to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office and find out all he could about the Tylenol poisonings. Then he talked to his attorney pal, Francis “Mike” Heroux, and asked him to also provide legal assistance to help J&J get through the Tylenol crisis.

Paul Noland was sworn in as a judge for the 18
^th
Circuit Court in DuPage County in 1992. He retired in 1998. A judge in the 18
^th
Circuit Court granted the warrant to search Lewis’s home on February 4, 2009. On November 23, 2009, Judge Paul Noland was recalled to the 18
^th
Circuit Court to serve on the bench for one year. Exactly one month later, a summons was issued requiring the Lewises to appear in Middlesex Superior Court in Massachusetts to determine the enforceability of the Certificate of Materiality that had been granted by an 18
^th
Circuit Court Judge. That order required the Lewises to submit DNA samples for comparison to a “DNA smudge” on a capsule in the planted eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol that the wife of Judge Lewis Morgan, of the 18
^th
Circuit Court, had supposedly given to the Wheaton police two weeks after the Tylenol murders. The woman initially identified as having turned in that bottle, Marylou Walter, was the wife of Judge Duane Walter of the 18
^th
Circuit Court.