The Tylenol Mafia (48 page)

In Lane’s scenario, journalists and scholars would see the person who confessed to the Tylenol murders as an almost altruistic hero who they would accept as a respected member of the academic community. Society would vindicate this person upon learning that the Tylenol murders had somehow put an end to some unidentified greater evil committed by big business.

Lane completed his “act of reconciliation” scenario by describing the happy “results” of a confession by Chuck Rivers. This confession, if it had appeared in Lewis’s novel, would almost certainly have been promoted and argued by Lane and prosecutors at the State’s Attorney Office in DuPage County as a confession by Lewis to one of the most horrendous crimes of the past century.

The happy-ending Lane envisioned for Lewis’s novel went as follows:

Results
: Chuck is forgiven and embraced for his admissions/courage not only by academia, but also by the citizens of our country/world who so desperately need his talents to save our environment. Might there be a popular uprising to name him environmental czar? He then reconciles with his conscience, wife and child, father and mother, and associates. The only down side to this ending is he loses Jogger. But hey, life goes on!

Lewis, to a certain extent, gave Lane and Nichols the benefit of the doubt early in their collaboration, hoping that maybe they were on the up and up. Yet he and LeAnn always assumed that Lane and Nichols were probably not the honest, trustworthy people they were trying to portray themselves as being. Lewis kept his guard up always, knowing that Lane and Nichols might twist anything he said to fit whatever their needs might be. “Without the either side ever saying so,” said Lewis, “both sides knew that I was the prey, and both sides always knew I was being stalked like a defenseless deer, and both sides always knew Roy and Sherry had complete immunity.”

Roy and Sherry took Jim and LeAnn to dinner on several occasions. They all acted as if they were friends having a nice casual dinner. Roy would drink three or four bourbon-and-waters, and Sherry, who seldom drank, would chide him for drinking too much. Roy encouraged LeAnn and Jim to order drinks – perhaps to loosen their lips – but being teetotalers, they always declined. Lewis could have just walked away from this unholy alliance, but the collaboration was of value to him in a number of ways. Lewis’s infamy and prison record greatly hindered his employability. Nichols was helping Lewis out financially – help that he really needed at that time.

Far more important than Nichols’ financial assistance to Lewis, was the chance, albeit very slim, that she might clear his name in the book she claimed to be writing. From a pragmatic point of view, Lewis knew that if Lane and Nichols were trying to frame him for the Tylenol murders - a suspicion that grew stronger in Lewis’s mind over time - they were going to keep coming after him whether he joined their loathsome cabal or not. The old adage – ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’ – seemed applicable to Lewis’s situation.

“No matter how scared I was, and no matter how surreal the circumstances, I could not back down and disengage,” recalled Lewis. “I had to keep fighting, no matter what, and I always knew I should never show any aberrant behavior which could have been grounds for immediate arrest.”

 
Lewis recognized early on that Lane wanted him to develop a profile of Chuck Rivers that included aspects of the Tylenol killer’s profile that John Douglas had developed in 1982. “I had already read Douglas’s fictional profile,” said Lewis, “so I knew what personality traits the FBI wanted. I was not about to design any character in my book that would sound very much like me, nor any real person, except in trivial, whacky ways.”

Lewis invited Lane to participate in writing the novel “but he never contributed any actual text in place, only weird advice,” said Lewis. “His suggestions were always at cross purposes to what I wanted to write, so I simply ignored his input, but I always listened carefully.”

During their eighteen-month affiliation, Lane provided Lewis with an occasional snippet of information regarding his frustration over his failure to bring the Tylenol killer to justice. “He [Lane] told me on several occasions that his biggest career failure was failing to solve the Tylenol murders,” said Lewis. “He seemed like a guy who seldom failed, so his claimed Tylenol failure embarrassment seemed a reasonable burden.”

Lane also gave out a few clues about what Lewis suspected was Lane’s involvement in an ongoing investigation of the Tylenol murders. “At one point, Roy and Sherry claimed that the investigation necessitated that Roy travel to Thailand. They never told me exactly why, and I never asked,” said Lewis. “At the time, I assumed they were looking into something connected with Roger Arnold.” Arnold had purchased two one-way tickets to Thailand a few days before the Tylenol murders.

 
Lane also asked Lewis about India. “Somehow, Roy also got the idea I had been to India, which I hadn’t,” said Lewis. “I also knew there was absolutely no evidence of me ever being in India. No airline tickets. No contacts. No correspondence. No passport records. I simply had never been on the subcontinent.”

Lane’s interest in a possible India connection evidently stemmed from Lewis’s involvement in
Aljeev
International; a business venture founded and incorporated by Lewis and
Viren
Mehta in Missouri in 1975. Through
Aljeev
International, Lewis and Mehta had hoped to sell tablet-making tools to pharmaceutical factories in Third World countries.
Aljeev
never actually sold any tablet-making tools, and the company was a complete failure that was quickly abandoned.

Lewis goaded Lane a bit by including in his novel several scenes that took place in India.
 
“I did character sketches of Doctor Rivers’ activities, in India, including jogging (which I've enjoyed for decades); just to play with Roy’s imagination, just in case he was not being honest with me.” Lewis studied satellite photos and other documents so he could describe very accurately in his novel, the specific geological features for the scenes that took place in India.

Lane never went to India, but the idea of Lane, overweight and a heavy smoker, hiking through remote areas of India under the hot summer sun was more than a little amusing to Lewis. “Believe me,” said Lewis, “Roy is not the type to take a vacation in that hellish terrain. He was too fat and lazy and would have died of heat stroke. Much of that area can never be accessed by car. The barren hills and desert are virtually uninhabited. There are no motels, stores, or gas stations for several hundred miles. Roy would have had either to hike, ride a horse, or flown in a helicopter to reach the places I visually described in detail.”

The trip to Thailand; the numerous meetings with Lewis; the 80 hours of interviews - every aspect of the con game Lane and Nichols carried out against Lewis went nowhere. They did not produce anything that prosecutors could use to bring charges against Lewis. A year and a half after the Lane/Nichols/Lewis collaboration had began, it ended when agents from the FBI barged in on what Lewis thought was going to be a relaxing morning at the local Starbucks on February 4, 2009. Officials reactivated the Tylenol murders investigation in a very public way because two undercover FBI operatives had failed to dig up anything that would allow prosecutors in DuPage County to bring murder charges against Lewis.

The “new leads” that the FBI said had been generated as a result of publicity from the 25
^th
anniversary of the Tylenol murders, were apparently the fabricated story that Nichols and Lane had tried to create for the fictional character, Chuck Rivers. When Rivers refused to confess to a Tylenol murders-like crime, officials reactivated the investigation and wrote a new chapter in their own fictional tale of t
he Tylenol murders
.

After the Tylenol case was reactivated, Lane sent a few more emails to Lewis and then cut off all contact. On February 5, 2009, one day after authorities searched the Lewises’ apartment; Lane sent his regards to Jim and LeAnn:

I’ve been on the road, home now and traveling again tomorrow. Wow, what news! Hope you and LeAnn are holding up well. It must be a media circus out there.

My thoughts are for your well-being.

Take care, Roy

On February 9, 2009, Lane replied to an email Lewis had sent one month earlier:

Sorry for the delay, but I have been on the road for the past few days. The below link to DD [Doctor’s Dilemma] is all I have available at this time.

Hope the media circus has calmed and you can go about your business.
Amazing all the hoopla over something that happened 26 years ago.
They must not be familiar with Confucius when he said, “Things that are done, it is needless to speak about....things that are past, it is needless to blame.”

Best to you and LeAnn.

Take care, Roy

Retired FBI agent, Grey Steed, who had worked on the Lewis extortion probe in 1982 and 1983, said investigators had contacted him to discuss the Tylenol case prior to its reactivation. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t looking for something in the way of memoirs or some type of journal he [Lewis] was keeping,” said Steed. With this public statement, Steed had primed the public to accept as plausible, the absurd idea that the fictional writings of James Lewis could provide the “evidence” that the state’s attorney in DuPage County needed, but didn’t have, to prosecute Lewis for the Tylenol murders.

And what exactly was the FBI hoping to find in those memoirs?
 
An email that Roy Lane sent to Jim Lewis thirteen months before authorities searched Lewis’s Cambridge apartment provides the answer:

Sherry told me that she spoke to you the other day and you had more material for me. Good. You also made a comment when we were in Boston that it might be necessary to prepare five different endings for our story just like they did for Who Shot JR. We would then choose the most fitting of the five. In the nuclear world, I had a boss who I very much admired and when we discussed problem solving he would always advise me to start with the answer. Knowing the answer, I could then build and act on a plan to achieve the desired result. Maybe we could use the same logic for the five endings. Let’s identify each of the five and use these endings to guide us in developing the entire story line. I have some thoughts on the five different endings. If you agree or have any comments, let me know. This does not have to be a major project at this time but just an exercise in identifying five possible outcomes for Chuck.

Regards, Roy

The IDLE and FBI agents who searched Lewis’s apartment on February 4, 2009 were looking for an alternative ending to
POISON! The Doctor’s Dilemma
that included a confession from Chuck Rivers. The FBI never found that alternative storyline, because Lewis never wrote it.

The FBI’s last-ditch effort to “solve” the Tylenol murders was to try to get Chuck Rivers to confess to the murder of 12 people in Chicago, and then use that confession to convict an innocent man for the Tylenol murders. This was to be the FBI’s way of bringing “some measure of closure to the families of the victims” of the 1982 Tylenol killer: Mary Kellerman, Adam Janus, Lynn Reiner, Stanley Janus, Theresa Janus, Mary McFarland, and Paula Prince. The FBI never really cared about justice for the Tylenol victims or their families.

Roy Lane’s sting operation failed to produce any information that prosecutors could use to bring a case against Lewis for the Tylenol murders. The FBI’s investigation of Lewis had, however, followed a familiar pattern.

41

________

Maurice
Possley
and Ken Armstrong wrote a series of articles in 1999 for
The Chicago Tribune
on prosecutorial abuse. What they found was alarming: “With impunity, prosecutors across the country have violated their oaths and the law, committing the worst kinds of deception in the most serious of cases. They have prosecuted black men; hiding evidence the real killers were white. They have prosecuted a wife; hiding evidence her husband committed suicide. They have prosecuted parents, hiding evidence their daughter was killed by wild dogs. They do it to win. They do it because they won’t get punished.” Moreover, they do it to gain power – political power.

“Winning has become more important than doing justice,” says Harvard University law professor Alan
Dershowitz
. “Nobody runs for the Senate saying I did justice.”

Although the
Tribune
found 381 defendants whose homicide convictions were overturned based upon such misconduct, that number accounts for only a fraction of how often prosecutors commit such deception--which is by design hidden and can take extraordinary efforts to uncover. The reason they are not punished, said Lawrence Marshall, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is because “Prosecutors just don’t prosecute prosecutors. We don’t ask people to investigate their own family, and prosecutors are like family.”

Because of this failure to reign in rogue prosecutors and the FBI agents and local law enforcement officers who aid them, innocent persons have been targeted as “prime suspects” in many high-profile murder cases. The FBI wrongly accused Richard Jewell in 1996 for the Olympic Park bombing, Steven Hatfill in 2002 for the Anthrax attacks, and Brandon Mayfield in 2004 for the Madrid terrorist attack. Another individual wrongly accused by the FBI, Stella Nickell, was convicted of carrying out the Excedrin poisonings in the Seattle, Washington area in June of 1986.