I mentioned this before, but there was a healthy amount of circumstantial evidence, just little of it linking him directly.
The motive in this case was apparently extortion; not a sociopathic compulsion to kill
While extortion was a part of the motivation, this is also an area where the circumstantial nature of the evidence against Lewis comes into play.
Lewis’ daughter had a heart condition and she died after an operation when the sutures used failed. The sutures were made by a subsidiary of Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson.
While some witnesses said he never blamed the company, his website was full of diatribes against Johnson & Johnson and also the subsidiary.
My God, what a ghoul.
Agreed. If so, it was also very stupid because he could have conned himself into several murder charges.
Criminals are usually not noted for their intelligence.
News in the Tylenol case
Former coworkers told Cooper that Betkouski spoke of how to commit a “perfect crime,” had a “history of volatility" and referenced cyanide as an ideal way to kill without detection. He also mentioned putting poison in over-the-counter medication, an especially worrisome comment coming from someone who had worked in multiple drugstores.
“It was said that Dr. Betkouski attempted to obtain some type of pills or capsules from a pharmacy in the Las Cruces area,” Cooper said at a press conference last week. “He said this would be for an experiment. For reasons not fully understood, Dr. Betkouski created a disturbance at the location and the police were summoned.”
I was at an impressionable age when this story broke. For years afterwards, I was afraid to take pills, even after they introduced tamper-proof packaging.
James Lewis was certainly an extortionist in the Tylenol case, and the other major suspect Roger Arnold was certainly a murderer, in a separate case. But I have never been convinced either of them was the Tylenol murderer. I’m not convinced they were innocent either, I’ve been on the fence.
From other news stories I’ve read, I gather there is DNA evidence from inside one of the Tylenol bottles and fingerprint evidence the outside of one of the boxes that have been tested against Lewis and Arnold and found not to match either. The person or persons who left that evidence is not necessarily the killer. For example, the DNA could conceivably be from an innocent J&J employee, and the fingerprints could be from a pharmacy shelf-stocker or a shopper who put the box back on the shelf after deciding not to buy it. But if either matches Betkouski that would be pretty darn conclusive, since I can’t fathom any innocent explanation. I’ll reserve judgment unless and until I hear the results of comparing Betkouski’s fingerprints and DNA against the evidence.