The Tylenol Mafia (52 page)

The judicial careers of Lewis Morgan and Duane Walter were somewhat tumultuous. On June 25, 1985, the Illinois Courts Commission officially reprimanded Judges Morgan and Walter for retaining fees for solemnizing marriages outside of the regular session of the Court’s marriage division. Also embroiled in the wedding fees scandal was Judge Bruce
Fawell
, the chief judge of the 18
^th
Circuit Court. After 20 years on the bench,
Fawell
resigned in 1984 to avoid censure from the Illinois Courts Commission. The Commission said the conduct of Duane Walter and Lewis Morgan as judges was “prejudicial to the administration of justice and tended to bring the judicial office into disrepute.”

Judges Morgan and Walter soon came under fire again. In 1986, Judge Walter made racist statements that led the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board to file judicial misconduct complaints and reassign him to traffic court while it investigated the complaints. According to one courtroom transcript from an appearance before Judge Walter by an African American man from Cook County, Walter stated, “The guy lives in Chicago, he should stay in Chicago. I don’t invite Harold Washington (Chicago’s African-American Mayor at the time) out here. Harold has never invited me into Chicago, and I wouldn’t go if he did.”

Walter then warned the African American man appearing before him: “Johnny, you come back to DuPage County, you have deep troubles. It’s like the South. They never let you guys run around in the South.” Interestingly, Walter made these comments on September 29, 1986 - the four-year anniversary of the Tylenol murders. Walter also was accused of making rude remarks to a pregnant, unmarried teenager and her mother when they appeared before him at a juvenile hearing. To avoid censure, Judge Duane Walter left the bench in 1987.

Judge Lewis Morgan, after being accused of improper conduct, resigned from the bench in 1986. An article by Art Barnum in the October 25, 1989 edition of
The
Chicago Tribune
described these allegations:

A former DuPage County judge who left the bench under a cloud of alleged improper judicial actions has been charged with several more legal improprieties by the state agency that regulates the legal profession. Lewis V. Morgan Jr., now a private Wheaton attorney who was a DuPage County judge from 1975 to 1986, has been accused of several legal profession violations stemming from his representation of a Florida woman whose divorce case he had heard as a judge in 1982.

Investigators for the State Commission had undertaken a preliminary investigation earlier in 1989 of the charges against Morgan. A three-lawyer panel had agreed that a formal hearing was called for, but the panel did not make its findings public.

The attorneys of Wheaton have always been a closely intertwined bunch, so it is not surprising that the attorneys involved in the Tylenol murders case and connected to the 18
^th
Circuit Court were not limited to the attorneys for Johnson & Johnson. Ed Reiner, following the recommendation of an attorney acquaintance, hired Attorney Robert Dyer to file a liability lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson for the cyanide-laced Tylenol poisoning of his wife, Lynn.

Robert Dyer was a partner in the law firm of
Rathje
, Woodward, Dyer, and Burt, which was founded by Bert
Rathje
and John Woodward.
Rathje
was named the Chief Judge of the 18
^th
circuit court in 1964.
Rathje’s
son, S. Louis
Rathje
, was a partner in his father’s firm from 1970 to 1992, and became a judge in the 18
^th
Circuit Court in 1992. Alfred Woodward, the brother of the firm’s co-founder, was a partner in the firm from 1950 to 1970. He became a judge in the 18
^th
Circuit court in 1970 and was Chief Judge from 1973 to 1975.

Alfred Woodward’s son is Bob Woodward, the journalist who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as President of the United States on August 9, 1974. Bob Woodward graduated from Wheaton Community High School in 1961 and left his hometown that year. He told the Daily Herald in 2002 that life in Wheaton had sparked his interest in finding the truth behind the façade of society. “You realize a small town like that has lots of secrets,” he said “There is a big difference in how people appear and how they actually are.” On the surface, it seems life is plugging along normally, but the reality is that under the surface, tensions and problems are trying to pull it all apart,” Woodward said. “You see that very dramatically in a place like Wheaton.”

Somewhere, just under the surface of the quiet suburban town of Wheaton, lays the secret truth about the conspiracy to plant the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules.

Lawrence Marshall, a Professor of Law at Northwestern University, said in 1999, “We generally condone a great deal of misconduct when we think it serves the ultimate ends of justice. Many players in the system - judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors - know some of the stuff that happens, but nonetheless tend to turn a blind eye. There’s a feeling that that is how it works, that it’s legitimate to bend the truth sometimes when you are doing it with -
quote
, the greater good,
end quote
- in mind.”

There was plenty of truth-bending involved in getting the Tylenol murders case reactivated, but there was no greater good in play, just more questions and a huge risk that the prior misconduct by the J&J executives and government officials involved in the investigation would come to light. Why not let it all stay conveniently buried?

The problem with doing nothing was that in all likelihood, the truth about the Tylenol murders was not going to lie dead quietly. Under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the FBI should have declassified documents from the Tylenol murders investigation on the 25
^th
anniversary of the case – but not if the case was being actively investigated.

In July 2007, with the imminent declassification of the Tylenol murders’ documents drawing near, “retired” FBI Agent, Roy Lane, and “Sherry Nichols,” posing as a freelance journalist writing a book about the Tylenol murders, initiated an operation that looked an awful lot like an attempt to frame James Lewis for the Tylenol murders. Lane and Nichols, apparently working as operatives of the FBI, met with James and LeAnn Lewis many times. They took the Lewises out to dinner, paid James thousands of dollars, and taped 80 hours of interviews with him. Lane attempted to persuade Lewis to write his novel,
POISON! The Doctor’s Dilemma
, in a way that the FBI and prosecutors in DuPage County hoped to pawn off as a confession from Lewis to the Tylenol murders. Neither Nichols nor Lane responded to emails inquiring about their “collaboration” with Lewis.

In the fall of 2008, authorities in Illinois secretly formed a new Tylenol task force of investigators from the FBI, the Chicago and suburban police, and the Illinois State Police (ISP); previously known as the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement (IDLE). Authorities convened grand juries in Cook and DuPage Counties to review evidence from the 1982 Tylenol murders. Sherry Nichols’s phantom Tylenol murders book was supposedly in editing at the time, marking the end of the covert investigation. It was now time for the FBI and DuPage County authorities to initiate the overt phase of their Tylenol murders operation – a decision possibly made easier by the recent death of Roger Arnold on June 16, 2008, at the age of 74. His death cleared the way for investigators to reactivate the Tylenol murders investigation with no worry that reporters might ask Arnold questions that officials did not want answered.

In January 2009, at the request of State’s Attorney, Joe Birkett, an 18
^th
Circuit Court judge granted a warrant to search the apartment of James and LeAnn Lewis. This public reactivation of the Tylenol murders investigation generated a quick flurry of media coverage when FBI and ISP agents searched the Lewises’ apartment on February 4, 2009, and again when the FBI collected the Lewises’ DNA samples in Middlesex County on January 6, 2010. But that was it. There was no new evidence. The reactivated investigation was a good story for the press and a convenient cover story for government officials and J&J executives who wanted to keep the public in the dark about the real killer’s true modus operandi. The news stories claiming that the FBI and Illinois authorities were still investigating James Lewis after so many years definitely accomplished that goal.

The FBI now says that it is actively involved in the Tylenol murders investigation, but in 1999 the FBI denied any involvement at all. Wally Kowalski, of the Department of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, filed a FOIA request in 1999 seeking documents related to the Tylenol murders investigation. He received a response from FBI Section Chief, John M. Kelso Jr., who said that a search of the central records system at FBI headquarters “located no records indicating that your subject [the 1982 Tylenol murders] was the subject of an investigation by the FBI.”

When the Tylenol case was reactivated in 2009, the lawyer-lawmen involved in the original investigation came out of the woodwork to demonize James Lewis. In an interview with NBC-News in Chicago, Tyrone Fahner declared: “[Lewis] was clearly the head and shoulders bad guy in the whole thing. And we felt that he committed the murders, but we couldn’t prove it at that time.” Fahner, of course, has never cited any evidence implicating Lewis in the tamperings.

Dan Webb, the U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois from 1981 to 1985, also commented on the reactivated investigation while the FBI and ISP were still searching Lewis’s apartment. In an interview with ABC-7 in Chicago, Webb said, “As someone who was very much involved 27 years ago, the fact that they [FBI and ISP] have current information is at least encouraging to me. You cannot get a search warrant today to search a given house unless you actually have probable cause. That means the FBI has a reasonable basis to believe that there’s evidence of a crime being housed at a certain location.”

The FBI, as Webb should have known, since he “was very much involved in the case 27 years ago,” did not have probable cause to search Lewis’s home. None of the items that the FBI removed from Lewis’s home even existed in the 1980s. Apparently a judge had granted the search warrant on the basis of an alleged DNA smudge on a capsule in the planted eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, and on the hope that James Lewis’s fictional novel,
POISON! The Doctor’s
Dilemma
,
contained a paragraph or two that prosecutors could claim was a confession to the Tylenol murders.

The FBI released a statement on February 4, 2009, claiming that new tips generated by the 25
^th
anniversary of the Tylenol murders were being pursued in “a renewed effort to solve this crime and bring some measure of closure for the families of the victims.” Nearly a year later the FBI collected DNA samples from James and LeAnn Lewis.

The DNA technology available to the FBI and ISP had been in use for more than a decade. If these agencies did actually have DNA evidence from the Tylenol case, they could have compared the Lewises’ DNA to that “evidence” years ago. Human DNA typing (profiling) was invented in 1984, but was not available commercially until 1986. It was not used by the FBI until 1988. Still, the authorities who collected the evidence in the Tylenol murders investigation in 1982 might have preserved any potential DNA evidence if they had been extraordinarily careful with it. But they weren’t.

Network news
video clips taken in October 1982 show lab workers handling the victims’ bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the labs at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Cook County and the Illinois Department of Health in DuPage County. These lab workers, who were not wearing gloves, were handling the bottles and repeatedly pouring the capsules into their hands and back into the bottles. In the video clips shown on NBC, the lot numbers from the victims’ Tylenol bottles can be seen on the bottles being handled by the lab workers. The commentary in these video clips further clarifies that the bottles and capsules being shown were from the Tylenol victims. All of the victims’ Tylenol bottles and capsules were handled in this same casual, unknowing manner.

The mishandling of evidence from the Tylenol murders case was first reported in 1984 by Pam Zekman, an investigative reporter for Chicago’s CBS affiliate, WBBM-TV. Zekman was especially critical of Cook County Toxicologist, Michael Schaffer; the star of at least one video-clip showing him with his paws all over the Tylenol bottles and capsules that had been recovered from some of the victim’s homes.

Schaffer responded to Zekman’s reports by hiring attorney Robert Maloney, who then filed a libel suit seeking $25 million in damages. Maloney told the
Chicago Sun-Times
in March 1986 that Schaffer was asking for $25 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in actual damages against Zekman. “She made statements that made him [Schaffer] out to be incompetent, to the point at which whoever is responsible for these foul crimes will never be found guilty,” said Maloney. The suit also named former WBBM-TV General Manager Gary Cummings as a co-defendant for airing an editorial repeating Zekman’s charges.

 
“I stand behind my story,” Zekman stated.

Ultimately, Schaffer’s lawsuit disappeared somewhere inside the shadow legal system, but it may have served to dissuade other Chicago area journalists from exposing the details about the mishandling of evidence. All of the bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules collected during the Tylenol murders investigation were contaminated by authorities in 1982. The “DNA smudge” - the only
 
“evidence” ever mentioned by spokespersons for the current Tylenol task force - is irrelevant to the Tylenol murders, because it came from a capsule in the planted eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol.