The Trib ran an excellent multipart series last year on the fortieth anniversary of the murders. A great read, with plenty on Lewis’s sordid past. There is an associated podcast as well.
I remember only a little of this from when it happened, and this does a great job of filling in the missing pieces, thank you for posting it.
Thanks for some updated info. Still some uncertainty there but I guess he was the closest they were going to get without a confession.
Whoever it was had a lasting effect on product manufacturing. I think there was once a thread from a younger Doper who was unaware of the poisonings and didn’t realize it triggered safety sealed packaging.
Until now, I’ve conflated her with the Tylenol killer. I had no idea the Tylenol killer was never brought to justice.
James Lewis was the FBI’s prime suspect but Roger Arnold was Chcago PD’s prime suspect. He is dead, also.
Resurrected due to recent news.
You can get a special tool to open that kind of packaging. Of course, the thing comes packaged in the very stuff it’s supposed to open.
The rest of the article is quite interesting.
I must have missed this thread the first time around. Do any of the articles mention which Boston suburb he lived in? It would be a little creepy to find out he was anywhere close to me.
And while we’re on the subject, what’s the theory on how someone got poison into the Tylenol bottles? Did they buy some bottles of Tylenol, take them home and lace them with cyanide, then take them to a drugstore and slip them back onto the shelves? And how long before the deaths was it done? I hardly ever take any medications. If someone tampered with anything in my medicine cabinet, it could be months or years before anything happened to me.
Do you keep your medicine supply stocked or do you buy some OTC medicine when you need it, then relegate the remainder of the bottle to the ol’ medicine cabinet?
What I found interesting was the side=by-side photos of three young people accompanied by the caption “Director Yotam Guendelman told Fox News Digital he believes there could be more victims.”
The two young men in the photo array look quite similar apart from longer hair on one of them, seem to be dressed identically and are posing in front of the same wallpaper. Did two of the victims attend the same senior prom?*
*two of the victims were brothers, so that would explain the resemblnce. Maybe the photo dates from a wedding both attended.
Wasn’t the Tylenol in capsules? I assume he pulled them apart, poured out some of the powder and replaced it with the cyanide.
A bit of both. I live alone, so if I’m sick enough to need medicine I need to be well enough to go out and get it myself. A couple weeks ago I noticed I was out of Neosporin, so I bought some. Heaven knows how long it’ll be before I open it and use any.
Maybe, but where did he do that? If he’d done that sort of thing while standing in the aisle of a drugstore, someone might have noticed. That’s why I figure someone, whether it was James Lewis or not, probably bought some Tylenol, did the tampering at home, then slipped it back onto the shelves at a store.
If that’s how it was done, what evidence could there be of the crime?
John Waters has a bottle of Tylenol from the same lot as the cyanide-laced capsules.
I think that that, exactly, has always been the assumed technique that the killer used.
The murders are exactly why not only are gelatin capsules filled with a powder (as Tylenol was in those days) are no longer used in OTC drugs, but why tamper-proof packaging is now ubiquitous with medications. In 1982, it was not only feasible, but fairly simple, to contaminate an OTC medicine like Tylenol, slip the package back onto the shelf, and have someone purchase and use it without ever suspecting anything – the killer took advantage of what is now obvious to us, with hindsight, of a massive gap in product safety.
And that would be only a certain kind of killer, one who just wants to kill and doesn’t care who actually gets killed. A killer who doesn’t need or want the visceral sensation of watching someone die at their hands, but does want very much to get away with it. Someone who is looking for a feeling of power and invincibility? I wonder if serial-killer profilers have done any work on that type of killer.
Since the victims were hit within only a 3-day period, it seemed logical to assume the bottles were planted very shortly before they were purchased.
Agreed, but I wonder if there was any research at the time on how long between when people buy Tylenol and take it.
It’s a rather morbid subject, but the planning and logistics of a crime like this are interesting. I remember a big recall once the source of the poison was discovered, but I never heard if any other poisoned bottles were found.
As I recall, they bought it at a convenience store in a small bottle which means that they likely needed it soon. This as opposed to a giant bottle at a drugstore. Then again, they wouldn’t use it all at once. Did they poison all of the pills in the bottle or just one.
I was a teenager but I recall it being huge news and everyone threw out all of thier Tylenol capsules regardless of provenance.
G. Gordon Liddy claimed he and other Nixon henchmen discussed putting poison in a bottle of aspirin in the home of journalist Jack Anderson, in retaliation for something he wrote. Liddy said they ruled it out because they couldn’t be sure it would be consumed by Anderson himself (vice a family member) or how long it would be until that happened.
I seem to recall an in-depth piece in the New Yorker (?) about it where a husband had gone out to get his wife a bottle. Or maybe the wife had just gone out to get one. Sorry, I don’t recall the specifics, but it was right away.
Eta: it doesn’t appear to have been the New Yorker. In that case, it was a podcast, or I’m imagining it.
I found it. From the This is Criminal podcast, based on reporting from the Chicago Tribune.
Phoebe Judge: Helen Jensen went to the Janus home. When she got there, she started looking at anything that could have caused the family members to get sick — a pot of black coffee, old coffee grounds, home jarred fruits, a pound cake, some store-bought lilies, cherry juice. She looked through prescription medications. In the bathroom she found a bottle of extra strength Tylenol on the counter. It was a 50-pill bottle. She poured them out and counted them. There were only 44 left. She also found the receipt, so she knew that it was a brand-new bottle purchased that day. Six pills were missing and there were three people who had gotten sick.