The Tylenol Mafia (41 page)

There should have been no more than about four to six weeks of supply of Tylenol capsules in the distribution channel in September of 1982.
There were certainly not 11 million bottles of Tylenol capsules, constituting more than 15 weeks of sales, in the distribution channel. Rather, there was enough Tylenol powder or capsules in bulk containers in the distribution channel to
fill
11 million bottles with Tylenol capsules. Some of that Tylenol had already been bottled, but most had not.
Containers of bulk Tylenol manufactured at the McNeil plants in Round Rock and Fort Washington were shipped through J&J’s Montgomeryville distribution center in August of 1982 to the Chicago area repackager where the tamperings occurred.

A constant barrage of news stories of “copycat” tamperings in retail stores across the country diverted the public’s attention away
from the Tylenol distribution network. The reports on these so-called copycat tamperings made it seem that the tampering-in-the-retail-stores hypothesis was an established fact. The FDA counted 270 incidents of suspected product tamperings reported around the country in the four weeks following the Chicago area deaths. The FDA judged that 36 of the incidents were “hardcore, true tamperings.” These tampering incidents were not really copycats though, because the Tylenol killer had planted the cyanide-laced capsules in the distribution channel – not in the retail stores.
 
What these
tamperers
were actually copying was the tampering-in-the-retail-stores scheme publicized by J&J, the FDA, and the Tylenol task force.

Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on criminal behavior, analyzed the data on the tampering incidents. He found that each of several sharp increases in the monthly rate of complaints occurred in the wake of high-intensity news coverage about tampering. Following press coverage of the fatal Tylenol tampering in Westchester County in February 1986, the rate rocketed to 326 a month. In the following month, tampering complaints reached an all-time high of 456. The rate of tampering complaints declined for a few months, but peaked again after the media publicized tampering fatalities in the summer of 1987. In 1987 and 1988, when there were no nationally publicized tampering stories, the complaint rate fell to approximately 25 per month.

Dr. Dietz concluded that these increases in reported tamperings were the result of an increase in actual tamperings. However, this increase in reported tamperings actually may have been the result of greater vigilance among consumers to inspect products, and an increased diligence in reporting tampering incidents. Nevertheless, there were indisputably, many people tampering with consumer products. And with so many people unable to resist the temptation to contaminate capsules and other products in retail stores, there were certainly also people working in repackaging facilities and distribution centers who also could not resist their urge to put poison in capsules.

In 2002, James Zagel reflected back on the Tylenol investigation in 1982, saying, “You’d come across certain suspects, and it would turn out they didn't do it
-
but they were actually very sorry they hadn’t thought of it. There are people out there who will commit terrible crimes, keep themselves hidden, and just enjoy the uproar they cause.”

Anyone who had access to the area where the capsules were stored or bottled only had to drop a handful of cyanide-laced capsules into the storage bins or production lines. As long as the killer dumped only a few handfuls of poisoned capsules at a time into the bottling production lines, it was likely that only one poisoned capsule would get into any given bottle. When the one cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule in that bottle was swallowed, the evidence of murder disappeared in the victim’s body. Eventually, the Tylenol killer may have become more aggressive, dumping hundreds or thousands of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules into numerous bottling production lines at one repackaging facility over a short period of time until a few of his murders finally made headline news.

*****

In 1982, Tyrone Fahner, Dan Webb, and Jeremy Margolis decided who would and who would not be targeted as suspects in the Tylenol murders investigation. Partnering with this small, tight-knit group of past and future IDLE directors were a number of FBI agents, including Edward Hegarty, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office, and Special Agent Roy J. Lane. After the 1982 Tylenol murders case had gone cold, these investigators settled on James Lewis as their “prime suspect.” They even treated Lewis as a suspect in the 1986 Tylenol murder of Diane Elsroth.

When news of the Tylenol murder in Westchester County reached Chicago on February 10, 1986, some authorities there wondered where Lewis was living at the time. After all, Lewis had at one time lived in New York City. Ironically, Lewis’s residency in New York City from September 6, 1982 to December 27, 1982 proved he could not have been involved in the Tylenol poisonings in Illinois. As it turned out, Lewis also had a pretty good alibi regarding his whereabouts at the time of the 1986 Tylenol murder. He was in prison serving ten years for writing the Tylenol extortion letter. More specifically, Lewis was in the Federal Prison Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. He had suffered a heart attack on February 8, 1986, the same day Diane Elsroth died.

With James Lewis out of the picture as a suspect in the 1986 Tylenol poisoning, two members of the disbanded 1982 Tylenol task force decided to snoop around the Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood where Lewis’s wife, LeAnn, was living. Jim Thompson’s political appointee, Jeremy Margolis, the Illinois inspector general at the time, went to Cambridge on Monday, February 10, 1986, to harass LeAnn. FBI Special Agent, Roy Lane, joined Margolis on this excursion. Lane had been part of the team of FBI agents and federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago that had handled the extortion case against Lewis.

When contacted on February 11, 1986, Robert Long, an FBI spokesperson in Chicago, said he could not confirm or deny that agents were seeking information on Mrs. Lewis. “It wouldn’t be in law enforcement interests to say if we interviewed her and what she said,” remarked
Long
.

Donald Morano, Lewis’s attorney in Chicago, said Lane had visited Mrs. Lewis’s apartment building on Monday, February 10, 1986. Morano said Lane had asked the doorman where Mrs. Lewis had been just before Elsroth’s death from cyanide-laced Tylenol around 1 a.m. Saturday morning February 8
^th
. FBI agents also questioned LeAnn’s neighbors. Lane then phoned Donald Morano on Tuesday and asked for permission to “debrief” Mrs. Lewis on her movements before the death of Diane Elsroth. Morano said he rejected the request as absurd. He said LeAnn Lewis had been working and “would have had no reason to go to New York.”

James Burke said that he had first learned about the cyanide-laced Tylenol poisoning of Diane Elsroth on the afternoon of Monday, February 10
^th
, but, by then, Lane and Margolis were already in the lobby of LeAnn’s Cambridge apartment, waiting for LeAnn to return home from work. Burke, Lane, and Margolis must have known about the murder of Diane Elsroth on Sunday or early Monday morning, giving them a 12 to 24-hour head start to pursue their own agendas before the story was reported in the news media Monday evening.

Morano said Lane and Margolis initially asked the doorman at LeAnn’s apartment if they could enter her apartment while she was at work. They had no warrant to conduct a legal search, so the doorman refused. Morano said that Lane and Margolis then spoke to LeAnn in the building’s lobby for 90 minutes or more when she returned home from work. They warned LeAnn that unless she agreed to answer their questions, her husband would remain in prison for a long time. Apparently, LeAnn did not give Lane and Margolis the answers they wanted, because Margolis would later make good on that promise.

Neither the FBI spokesperson nor Margolis would comment on Morano’s charges. Margolis said the investigation of the Tylenol deaths in Illinois had been done “properly and professionally and will continue to proceed in that fashion until a resolution is obtained.” Margolis, who played no role whatsoever in the 1986 Tylenol murder investigation, apparently viewed the murder of Diane Elsroth as a good opportunity to harass LeAnn Lewis in the continuing effort of IDLE and the FBI to frame her husband for the 1982 Tylenol murders.

In fact, the jaunt by Lane and Margolis to LeAnn Lewis’s home in February 1986 was not their first. Morano said that Lane and Margolis had also visited LeAnn’s apartment building in October 1985 to question her on the movements of her and her husband in the week before the 1982 Tylenol deaths in Illinois. This October 1985 visit came just four months before the Tylenol murder in New York. Was this yet another unlikely coincidence, or did Lane and Margolis know about other Tylenol poisonings that continued to dot the landscape?

The FBI was able to track down LeAnn Lewis very quickly in 1986, arriving on her doorstep before the murder of Diane Elsroth was publicly disclosed. But in the fall of 1982, after officials linked James Lewis to the Tylenol extortion letter, the FBI had an awful time tracking down the Lewises. That manhunt, which began on October 13, 1982, ended two months later in New York City.

37

________

An envelope, with the word “TYLENOL” written above Johnson & Johnson’s address, arrived at the company’s headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on October 6, 1982. Inside that envelope was an extortion letter with a preposterous demand: “If you want the killing to stop,
then
wire $1 million to #84-49-597 at Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago.”

One week after receiving the extortion letter, officials identified its author as Robert Richardson, aka James Lewis. The FBI launched a nationwide manhunt for Lewis, and his wife, LeAnn. Authorities released a “special nationwide bulletin” stating that the Lewises “should be considered armed and dangerous.” Then, Lewis sightings began coming in from all over the country.

Police in Amarillo, Texas, said Lewis’s picture closely resembled a composite sketch of a suspect in a $100,000 jewel heist. That person turned out not to be Lewis. At Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel, a woman carrying suspicious ID cards was arrested for passing a bad check, but police soon realized she was not LeAnn Lewis. A Texas woman mistakenly identified her own son as James Lewis based on a picture of Lewis in the newspaper. One person called police and insisted he had spotted the pair at a World Series game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the St Louis Cardinals. When police pressed him, he admitted he had not actually been at the game - he merely thought he had seen the couple when a TV camera scanned the crowd

In Carl Junction, Missouri, Jim Lewis’s hometown, at least six residents said they had recently seen the Lewises. Police rushed to an abandoned house after a woman reported that Lewis was hiding there, only to find a 19-year-old neighbor feeding his pet gophers. A hair stylist reported that a nervous man fitting Lewis’s description had come into her salon to have his hair bleached, but then bolted when she casually mentioned the Tylenol murders. She was “99-and-three-fourths sure” that the customer was James Lewis. Later, the man identified himself to police and explained that he had suddenly realized he wasn’t carrying enough money to pay for the dye job. A local convenience store clerk said the Lewises had stopped in once for candy bars, and again for cigarettes. That lead didn’t pan out either.

An investigator at the Tylenol task-force headquarters said, “Callers have spotted them [the Lewises] in Hartford and Honolulu the same day, and in Miami and Missouri the same day. As of now, the hard info is zilch.”

*****

James Lewis grew up on a small farm in Carl Junction, Missouri, without electricity, telephones, automobiles or modern agricultural equipment. His mother, Charlotte, worked in a shirt factory. His father, Floyd, a World War II veteran, sharecropped 20 acres. Floyd died of a heart attack in 1959 when Jim was twelve years old. Charlotte married Glen Nelson a few years later. Glen was a pacifist who had served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II. James realized early in life that he too was a pacifist.

Lewis attended Brick Elementary School, a one room schoolhouse located just a mile from his small rural home. In sixth grade Lewis was bussed to the “big” school in Carl Junction, which had two classrooms and two teachers. In high school, Lewis played the B-flat slide trombone and held first chair throughout all four years there. He got good grades, and he liked math.

James and LeAnn met while they were students at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. They were married on Thanksgiving Day, 1968. One year later, they had a baby girl, Toni Ann. She was born with Down’s syndrome and had a congenital heart defect, but whatever hardships this may have caused only seemed to bring the family closer together. Toni Ann didn’t learn as fast as most other kids, but she did have a special intellectual skill that allowed her to retain everything she did learn.

In the early 1970s, James and LeAnn leased a storefront in Kansas City and opened their own business, the Lewis & Lewis Business Tax Service. In 1974, Toni Ann underwent her fifth open-heart-surgery. Shortly thereafter, James and LeAnn suffered a heart-breaking loss when five-year-old Toni Ann died of complications from that surgery.

In 1975, Lewis collaborated with
Viren
Mehta to form a Company called
Aljeev
International, which they incorporated in Missouri. Mehta, who was born in India, had earned a Master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the 1970’s. The
Aljeev
business plan was to install tablet-making tools into rotary tablet machines already owned by pharmaceutical manufacturers in overseas markets. The factories targeted as their potential customers were located in Third World countries, but owned by giant multinational American drug firms based in the United States, such as Pfizer, Dow Chemical, Upjohn and others. Lewis and Mehta never actually sold any tablet-making tools, and
Aljeev
never had any assets. Lewis said the business venture was a total failure and underfunded.
 
“We were inexperienced kids, with illusions of grandeur, but without a written business plan,” recalled Lewis.