Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
- The Tylenol murders killed seven people in Chicago over the course of three days in 1982.
- James W. Lewis wrote a letter demanding $1 million to “stop the killing” but later said he wasn’t the perpetrator.
- Decades later, authorities found new evidence in the case against Lewis, but his death brought an end to the investigation.
On July 9, 2023, James William Lewis was found dead in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home as a result of cardiac arrest. The 76-year-old had practiced an array of occupations during his lifetime, having been a web designer, an accounting firm owner with his wife, Leanne, and even a self-published novelist.
Yet, upon his death, retired FBI Special Agent Roy Lane told the Chicago Tribune, “James Lewis’ death ends a lifetime of cruelty to others and a compulsive need for revenge.” Meanwhile, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Margolis told ABC Chicago, “I was saddened to learn of James Lewis’ death. Not because he’s dead, but because he didn’t die in prison.”
What had this frail old man done to earn the ire of law enforcement, not to mention the national news coverage of his death? As his New York Times obituary read, Lewis had “offered prosecutors help in solving the Tylenol murders,” a series of poisonings that claimed at least 7 lives in the Chicago area in 1982. A series of poisonings that, right until the moment Lewis drew his last breath, the FBI had been trying to conclusively prove Lewis, himself, had been behind.
The Tylenol Murders
It began with the death of a 12-year-old girl.
Mary Kellerman took Extra Strength Tylenol, a common and popular painkiller, that her mother, Jeanna, had purchased on September 28, 1982, according to the Chicago Tribune. By 9:56 a.m. on September 29, the 12-year-old girl was pronounced dead.
Six more lives would be lost from September 29 to October 1: Adam Janus, 27; Mary “Lynn” Reiner, 27; Stanley Janus, 25; Theresa “Terri” Janus, 20; Mary McFarland, 31; and Paula Prince, 35. All died, investigators would discover, as a result of having consumed Tylenol that had been laced with potassium cyanide.
Johnson & Johnson “ordered a nationwide recall of 31 million bottles of Tylenol, with a retail value of more than $100 million,” per the New York Times. They also offered “$100,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the ‘person or persons responsible for the murders.’” What they received instead was a handwritten extortion letter demanding $1 million. In exchange, the letter writer would “stop the killing.”
The letter was stamped by a postage meter affiliated with Lakeside Travel. The bank account the $1 million was meant to be sent to was also connected to the Chicago-based travel agency.
Then the anonymous sender mailed out a second letter. Again, it was postmarked from Lakeside Travel, and it again evoked the Tylenol murders. But this one wasn’t sent to Johnson & Johnson, and it wasn’t asking for money. It was making threats to President Ronald Reagan.
A reported “15-agency task force” went to work trying to determine who wrote the letters. The stamps from Lakeside Travel weren’t a smoking gun; both the bank account and the business they were attached to had been defunct for some time. But they weren’t a total red herring. either. Digging into the history of the travel agency led them to a disgruntled former employee, Leanne Lewis. And in looking into Leanne, they took notice of James.
James Lewis: Letter Writer and Suspected Killer
James W. Lewis was convicted of attempted extortion in connection with the Tylenol murders but maintained he wasn’t the killer.
James Lewis had had trouble with the law before. As a December 1982 New York Times piece noted, “Mr. Lewis was under indictment for six months in a Missouri land fraud case and was the subject of mail fraud and Internal Revenue Service investigations in Kansas City.”
Additionally, there was the matter of a murder in Kansas City in 1978. Lewis had been charged with killing 72-year-old Raymond West, a former accounting client of his, after West’s “dismembered and decomposed body was found hanging from a pulley in his attic” on the same day Lewis attempted to pass off a forged check to get money from West’s account. Lewis managed to avoid facing a full trial for West’s murder due to a technicality—not being informed of his full rights upon his arrest.
In the wake of the Tylenol murders, prosecutors had no way to prove Lewis’ involvement in the poisonings directly, but he was convicted of attempted extortion due to the Johnson & Johnson letter. Lewis was sentenced to 10 years in prison but, ultimately, served more than 12 years behind bars.
Years later, living in New York with Leanne, Lewis would maintain his innocence in the poisoning case. He sent letters to the Chicago Tribune arguing that he was a “victim,” and that while he did write the extortion letter, he only did so to draw attention to the “shady business practices” of his wife’s former employer.
Recent Discoveries
“You used to like to talk to the Chicago Tribune,” reporter Christy Gutowski remarked to a fleeing elderly James Lewis in the 2022 investigative podcast Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders. By then, Lewis had largely been avoiding the spotlight, but that was a relatively new stance for the man.
After his conviction, he contacted the same law enforcement officers who had sought to capture him; this time, he declared himself an amateur detective. The imprisoned man offered to help authorities solve the Tylenol murders. Hoping perhaps that Lewis would slip up and confess, they took him up on his offer. Over the course of his interviews, Lewis explained how “anybody” could have done the poisoning and preceded to lay out exactly how they were likely done—by someone other than him, of course. After a certain point, Lewis demanded immunity in exchange for further information, but that was a request law enforcement couldn’t abide. So Lewis clammed up.
At least, when it came to talking to the cops, anyway.
When Lewis was released in October 1995, rather than slip away into obscurity, he instead relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and launched his own personal website, the now-deleted cyberlewis.com. Where once Lewis had to rely on mailing his screeds to newspapers, now he had a forum to reach the public directly, posting consistently about how he and Leanne had been in New York at the time of the killings, how he was the victim of an elaborate framing, and any other errant thoughts he had had.
And Lewis didn’t limit himself to merely blogging either. He made multiple appearances on a public access television show, The Cambridge Rag, where an antagonistic host (who was also Lewis’ roommate at the time) directly drilled him on his Tylenol murders-era alibi.
James Lewis, seen here in October 2007, blogged and spoke publicly about his innocence for years.
Lewis’ openness, even eagerness, to keep talking about the Tylenol saga is what led investigators in the late 2000s to try again to get a confession out of him. They set up a sting operation, where an undercover agent posed as a researcher working on a book about the murders, who wanted to use Lewis as an expert and research partner. In return for his assistance on their book, they would assist Lewis in the writing of his own novel, titled Poison: The Doctor’s Dilemma. The work’s fictional plot lined up suspiciously, some might say even confessionally, with the events of the Tylenol murders from the point-of-view of the killer.
Lewis went along with the ruse for some time, being “wined and dined” by the seemingly admiring author, until an FBI raid on his home exposed the charade. Once again, Lewis clammed up, with the exception of his website. And the public access show. And self-publishing his novel.
In 2009, FBI agents raided James Lewis’ apartment at 170 Gore Street in Cambridge to collect evidence in their ongoing investigation of the Tylenol murders.
Law enforcement still had no physical evidence to connect Lewis to the killings. Even DNA analysis they had done on the original Tylenol bottles, when compared with a DNA sample they’d procured from Lewis, didn’t provide a positive match.
The undercover operation did yield some things. As of 2022, when the Unsealed podcast reported on the 40th anniversary of the killings and the quest for closure, the government was still in the process of building a case against Lewis based on new information they had uncovered. Namely, two particularly damning things:
- A motive: For the longest time, it wasn’t clear why, if for any particular reason, James Lewis would target Johnson & Johnson. His vendetta against Lakeside Travel was apparent, he had even confessed to that himself. But if he was the killer, why choose them? As it turns out, like Lakeside Travel, Lewis did have a familial connection to Johnson & Johnson as well. “Records show his 5-year-old daughter, Toni, died in 1974 after the sutures used to fix her congenital heart defect tore,” the Chicago Tribune summarized in an article updated in 2024. “The sutures were made by Ethicon, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, according to a medical document reviewed by the Tribune.”
- The postmark: At the time the Lakeside letters were first discovered, the date of the postmark was illegible. But by the 2000s, modern technology had allowed investigators to parse the date. With that, they were able to determine that if Lewis’ long-maintained timeline regarding his letter-writing—namely that it took him three days to write the extortion letter—were true, than he would have to had to written the note before the murders had even made the newspapers.
But, of course, James Lewis died before law enforcement could prosecute a new case against him. And with his death, many involved in the case seemed to suggest, went any real chance at closure regarding the identity of the Tylenol killer.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
