It was October 1982 in Chicago. Seven people had died after unknowingly taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. No one knew how many others might die or who could be next. The Chicago area had been in chaos for days – pharmacists yanking Tylenol from shelves and officers ordering people to throw out what they had in their homes. People across the country feared they had unwittingly invited a killer into their homes.
James W. Lewis, the man long suspected of committing the infamous “Tylenol murders,” died Sunday, according to Cambridge, Mass., Police Superintendent Fred Cabral. He was 76. Officers, firefighters and other first responders found Lewis dead inside his Cambridge home around 4 p.m. while checking out a call for an unresponsive person. Investigators determined that his death was “not suspicious,” Cabral told The Washington Post.
The poisonings whipped the country into a panic and forced Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, to recall tens of millions of Tylenol capsule bottles. It led to major changes for the sale of over-the-counter drugs, including tamper-resistant packaging and the rise of tablets, which, unlike capsules, can’t be taken apart.
Before dawn on Sept. 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman complained of a cold, according to the Chicago Tribune’s multipart 40th-anniversary series, “The Tylenol Murders.” After persuading her father to let her stay home from school, the seventh-grader ducked into the bathroom to take an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule.
Moments later, her father heard her coughing and the sound of something hitting the floor, according to the Tribune. When he opened the bathroom door, he found his daughter on the ground, her eyes fixed and dilated, her breathing shallow, the Tribune reported. She died within hours.
Mary and six others in the Chicago area died over three days as officials tried to figure out what mysterious force was killing them and, once they homed in on Tylenol bottles, raced to clear them off shelves and out of homes.
Amid the nationwide panic, Johnson & Johnson received a letter demanding $1 million to “stop the killing,” according to the Tribune.
“As you can see, it is easy to place cyanide (both potassium & sodium) into capsules sitting on store shelves,” the letter read, adding, “If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. . …”
Lewis, who was later found to have written the letter, was a suspect in the killings for more than 40 years. Although he was never charged in the deaths, he was convicted of trying to extort Johnson & Johnson, for which he served more than 12 years in prison.
He had lived in Illinois before the poisonings, then moved to New York with his wife by the fall of 1982.
When FBI agents arrested him at a library in New York City in December 1982, Lewis gave a detailed account how the killings were carried out. But in a 1992 interview with the Associated Press, Lewis said that he wasn’t confessing to law enforcement but merely telling them how the killer might have poisoned the Tylenol.
“I was doing like I would have done for a corporate client, making a list of possible scenarios,” Lewis said. Police said that before his arrest, he had worked a slew of jobs, including one in pharmaceutical machinery, and used at least 20 aliases. He was described by law enforcement as “a chameleon.” In his interview with the AP, he described the perpetrator as “a heinous, cold-blooded killer, a cruel monster.”
Lewis told investigators he was trying to embarrass his wife’s former employer after she had been fired. He wrote the extortion letter on the company’s stationery and signed the name of his wife’s former boss. Calling the extortion attempt clumsy, police officials at the time said it would have been nearly impossible for Lewis to collect the $1 million from his wife’s former employer’s business account.
In 2009, Illinois law enforcement authorities announced they had revived their investigation, and the FBI seized a computer and other belongings from Lewis’s home, the AP reported.
Last year, the Illinois State Police and local law enforcement tried to persuade state prosecutors to charge Lewis in the killings, according to the Tribune. Despite not having any physical evidence tying Lewis to the crimes, they said they had a “chargeable, circumstantial case,” the newspaper reported.
No charges were ever filed.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Jonathan Edwards
Children’s vaccine as well as Acetaminophen or Tylenol during pregnancy linked to autism in children. Still waiting for the media to talk about the Remdesivir murderers, mechanical ventilation murderers and of course, the covid murderers.
According to the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute:
Leukemia is the most common type of cancer in children.
According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC):
Formaldehyde is known to cause Leukemia, and other cancers.
According to the vaccine manufacturers, the FDA and the CDC:
Formaldehyde is an ingredient in vaccines – causing Leukemia in children.
The amount of formaldehyde is key. Many ingredients can be poisonous in large quantities but are harmless in small amounts. If there was enough in Tylenol to be a problem, rest assured we’d see much more cancer, etc.
Stop peddling conspiracy theories and use some clear-headed logic.