Mary Kellerman woke up on September 29, 1982 with a sore throat. She was twelve years old. She resided in the city of Elk Grove, in Illinois. and her parents gave her a Tylenol capsule, a popular brand of paracetamol in the United States. Within a couple of hours Mary she died suddenly in the bathroom. There was not even a minute of hope for her family.
Arlington Heights is an average town of nearly 80,000 residents. Adam Janus was living on September 29 oblivious to the drama unfolding in Elk Grove. He had also woken up with some physical discomfort. Before starting to deliver the mail to his neighbors, this 27-year-old postman went to a general store, bought a bottle of Tylenol and took two pills. A little later he passed away at the hospital. “They told my family that he had died of a heart attack and our response was: why would he die like this?” recalls one of his nieces.
The next day, during funeral services, Stanley, Adam’s brother, and his wife, Theresa, both newlyweds, developed severe headaches. They went into the house, found the bottle of painkillers and took a couple of capsules. He died almost instantly. His partner, two days later. It didn’t take a week for authorities to record three more sudden and unexplained deaths in a relatively close radius: 31-year-old Mary McFarland, 27-year-old Mary Reiner, and 35-year-old Paula Prince. The Police only found a common link between all the victims: they had consumed Tylenol before dying.
The researchers packaged the vials and sent them to the laboratory. But all it took was for an impulsive prosecutor present at one of the deadly scenes to drop a handful of capsules into his hand and sniff them to discover the bitter almond aroma of cyanide. Further examination revealed that someone had injected the poison into a number of vials and placed them back on the shelves of several randomly selected pharmacies. One million containers were urgently checked in the area where the poisonings occurred. Capsules adulterated with cyanide were found in three. One of them was located in a pharmacy. The other two were handed over to the Police by private individuals who had bought them days before.
Forty-one years after that appalling succession of tragedies that terrified America, the ‘Tylenol murders’ remain unsolved. The sole suspect, James William Lewis, died on Sunday, July 9, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 76 years old and his death has been attributed to natural causes. If he really was the author of those deaths, he has taken the secret to the grave. If he wasn’t, researchers, who haven’t thrown in the towel in four decades, continue to have a puzzle before them.
One million dollars
Lewis was always an ambiguous figure in this case. The FBI arrested him after he sent an anonymous letter to the pharmaceutical manufacturer of Tylenol demanding a million dollars to stop poisoning the painkillers. He explained that he had barely spent $50 contaminating several boats and if he wanted to “stop the killing” the company had to pay. However, detectives have always been surprised that the individual provided a bank account to deposit the money and that the letterhead had the letterhead of a commercial firm; two facts that precisely do not help to maintain anonymity.
The veracity of that message could never be proven. Lewis’s wife had recently been laid off from her job. For this reason, her partner apparently used a page with the company’s letterhead to write the blackmail note. There were investigators who concluded that the suspect had set up the entire scheme solely with the intention of involving his wife’s former bosses, an aspect that he himself corroborated in his police statement. Even so, he ended up in jail for attempted extortion.
Actually, the Police never took him off their radar during these last 41 years. Lewis, whose real name was Theodore Elmore, was the youngest of seven children in a broken Memphis family. His father left home. Then his mother abandoned them when they were still kids. It was the 1960s. A shopkeeper realized that something unusual was happening when he caught one of the daughters stealing milk. Alone, with no other relatives, they ended up in an orphanage. Theodore was adopted by a family who changed his name to James Lewis. Under this identity he coined a history of psychological problems, conflicting tendencies, and notable studies. Nor would it be his first alias.
The Police questioned all the employees of the pharmaceutical company, who were ruled out as suspects, investigated a dubious world of ‘household’ chemicals and exhaustively analyzed the extortion letter. They found enough evidence to identify the author, a Chicago resident known as Robert Richardson, an aspiring writer, who had worked various jobs, one of them distributing medicines. The suspect had also sent letters to various newspapers and even wrote to President Ronald Reagan urging him to lower taxes.
Richardson and his wife had left Chicago days before the first cyanide deaths and their whereabouts were unknown, although the envelopes bore a New York postmark. Chicago, the most populous city in Illinois, from which they abruptly left, is 35 minutes from Elk Grove and just 45 from Arlington Heights.
The news broadcasted his photo. A few days later, David Barton, a Kansas Police Sergeant, was watching television. He jumped up in the chair. Richardson appeared on the screen. But he was actually looking at James Lewis, whom he had investigated four years earlier for the disappearance and death of a 72-year-old neighbor whose dismembered remains were found thanks to the intense heat of the summer of 1978. He quickly called the FBI to tell them the true identity. of the man they were looking for and his rocky record.
Lewis got away with the murder due to a technical irregularity in his arrest and the absence of sufficient solid evidence to prove that he had shot his neighbor and dismembered the body. Some thirty uncashed checks were found in his car, all of them in his name and signed by his neighbor.
He was also investigated for his alleged involvement in a financial scam. Apparently, he applied for bank cards in the name of third parties and then used them until the branch decided to block them. The key was to ask the bank to send the card at home, always in rural areas where postmen deposited mail in mailboxes placed at the foot of the roads. Lewis would set up a fake mailbox in front of the address he had given the bank office himself, and then, when the delivery man had left the card inside, he would pick up the mailbox, put it in a van, and drive it away.
The initiation challenges
In the search of his house, the Police found numerous documents, files and a kind of “crime manual”, as the ‘Chicago Tribune’ described it at the time in an excellent series of investigative reports. The booklet proposed advice such as altering the calligraphy when writing a message, always using gloves or a damp sponge to close the envelopes in order to avoid leaving traces of saliva. He also posed initiation ‘challenges’, such as stealing a dozen bibles in the neighborhood or renting a car under a false identity. At the time, researchers missed a book on poisons.
Despite everything, the agents did not find solid evidence against Lewis, only circumstantial evidence. Due to his character, he also fit the profile of a clumsy conspirator-swindler, but far from the image of a serial killer capable of killing in a stealthy and sophisticated way. When he was arrested in 1982, he offered the Police a fairly good description of how to carry out the poisoning, but he always pointed out that they were “possible scenarios” with which he wanted to enlighten the police from a theoretical point of view. He defended his innocence to the media with the same vehemence that he described the poisoner as a “monster.”
Police have reopened the case on several occasions. In 2009, a personal computer from the suspect was seized. And last year the Illinois Police tried to formalize a new charge. The agents are currently working with DNA techniques, which did not exist in 1982 with the necessary precision, in order to search the Tylenol vials for possible biological evidence of the culprit.
The wave of deaths became a terrifying phenomenon in 1978. The Americans panicked. The drugmaker recalled 30 million bottles of Tylenol out of an abundance of caution. The mistrust of other drugs in common use was also evident. At that time, various common drugs were simply packaged in a jar protected by cotton. Following the pattern of the unknown poisoner, any citizen could buy a bottle of pills, contaminate it, and later leave it on the shelves of a pharmacy.
Today, anyone who buys a medicine will find sealed packages, plastic seals on the caps, security threads or blister packs. If anyone wonders about the reason for this type of packaging, they must go back to those murders, because they are measures that the pharmaceutical industry implemented then to guarantee that no drug could be manipulated. Or that any improper handling is evident. The tragic crimes in Illinois also sped up processes to create casings stronger than gelatin and turn powdered formulations that were necessarily encapsulating it into pills. Because, today, the poisoner theoretically continues to roam freely.
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