James Lewis is escorted through Boston’s Logan Airport, Friday, October 13, 1995, after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.
Charles Krupa/AP
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Charles Krupa/AP
James Lewis is escorted through Boston’s Logan Airport, Friday, October 13, 1995, after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.
Charles Krupa/AP
Police say the suspect in the 1982 Tylenol poisoning that killed seven people in the Chicago area, sparking nationwide panic and leading to an overhaul of the safety of over-the-counter drug packaging. died, police said Monday.
Police, firefighters and EMTs responded to reports of an unresponsive person around 4 p.m. Sunday who found James W. Lewis dead at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said Cambridge Police Chief Frederick Cabral. said in a statement. Police said he was 76 years old.
“Following an investigation, Lewis’ death was determined to be unsuspicious,” the statement read.
No one has been charged in the deaths of seven people who took over-the-counter pain relievers laced with cyanide. Lewis spent more than 12 years in prison for sending blackmail letters to producer Johnson & Johnson, demanding $1 million to “put an end to the killing.” He and his wife moved to Massachusetts in 1995 after being released. The numbers listed for his wife are not used.
When Lewis was arrested in New York City in 1982 after a nationwide manhunt, he provided investigators with a detailed account of how the killer might have operated. Lewis later admitted to sending the letter and demanding the money, but he said he never intended to take it. He said he wanted to humiliate his wife’s former employer by depositing money into the owner’s bank account.
Lewis, who has a history of trouble with the law, has always denied any role in Tylenol’s deaths, but remains a suspect and in 2010 gave a DNA sample to the FBI. He even created a website that he said was framed. Although the couple lived briefly in Chicago in the early 1980s, Lewis said they were in New York City at the time of the poisoning.
In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Lewis explained that the account he provided to authorities was simply his way of explaining the killer’s actions.
“I am doing as I did with a corporate client, making a list of possible scenarios,” says Lewis. He called the killer “a cruel, cold-blooded killer, a cruel monster.”
The FBI seized a computer and other items from Lewis’ home in February 2009 after Illinois authorities renewed their investigation.
The FBI’s Chicago office at the time cited “advances in forensic technology” and said the agency, along with the Illinois State Police and local police departments, was conducting a “full review of all all evidence developed in connection with the murder.
In a three-day period from September 29, 1982, seven people — including a 12-year-old girl — who ingested cyanide-based Tylenol in the Chicago area died, resulting in a nationwide product recall. Poisoning incidents have led to the use of tamper-proof packaging for over-the-counter medicines.
Helen Jensen, a nurse who helped treat the first victims at a hospital in suburban Chicago, said in a phone interview Monday with the AP that she hoped Lewis’ death would be a recovery. The final ending to a tragedy that has haunted her for four decades. She also hopes it will bring some closure to the victim’s family.
“His death was an ending. Not exactly the ending people wanted,” said Jensen, who is retired. “But it’s over. I’m 86 years old now. And I’m glad I saw the end before I died.”
Jensen said she was the first to discover that a bottle had been tampered with. The investigators laughed at her.
“I’m a woman and I’m a nurse,” she said. “I understood the attitude at the time. But I was proven right the next day.”
Jensen said Lewis, for whom she accepts responsibility, “changed the world because of what he did.”
“We’ve lost our innocence,” she said. “We have become less trusting of others. We can blame it all on him. … He is a terrorist and we have suffered his horrors. for 40 years.”
Lewis had broken the law.
In 1978, he was charged in Kansas City, Missouri, with the murder of 72-year-old Raymond West, who had hired Lewis as an accountant. The charges were dismissed as West’s cause of death was not determined and some evidence was obtained illegally.
He was convicted of six counts of mail fraud in a 1981 Kansas City credit card scheme, accused of using the name and background of a former tax client to obtain 13 credit cards.
Lewis was charged in 2004 with rape, kidnapping and other charges for allegedly assaulting a woman in Cambridge. He was jailed for three years pending trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was scheduled to begin after the victim refused to testify, the District Attorney’s Office Middlesex County said at the time.
Police in 1983 described Lewis as a “chameleon” who lived in multiple states, used at least 20 alias, and held a variety of jobs, including computer expert, tax accountant, and Indian carpet importer. Degree and staff sales of jewelry, pharmaceutical machinery and real estate.
The lack of responsibility in the case has long frustrated the victims’ families.
Monica Janus, who was 8 years old when three members of her family died after taking poisoned drugs, told CBS Chicago in 2022 that she thought the investigation was “really sloppy.”
Cabral said Lewis’ wife was out of town and contacted a neighbor when she was unable to reach her husband, and the neighbor contacted police.
