The Tylenol Murders: Discussing New Evidence in the Unsolved Case

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Trisha Rich: Hello, everyone, and welcome to CBA’s @theBar, a podcast where we have unrehearsed conversations with our guests about legal news, events, topics and other stories that we think you’re going to find interesting. I’m your host today, Tricia Rich of Holland & Knight, and hosting the podcast with me is Maggie Mendenhall Casey, a lawyer with the City of Chicago. Maggie, welcome.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Hi, Trish. Excited to join you today.

Trisha Rich: I know I’m excited about this story. I’ve been listening to their podcast, so it’s going to be fun. Joining me and Maggie today are two reporters from one of our local newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair. Christy and Stacy are the lead reporters on the Chicago Tribune’s recent series and podcast on the Tylenol Murders, which just passed the 40-year mark. Indeed, the infamous and still unsolved homicides started on September 29, 1982, when 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois died after taking a capsule of Extra Strength Tylenol. That same day, three members of the Janus family of Arlington Heights also ingested tainted capsules, 27-year-old Adam died that day, followed shortly by his 25-year-old brother Stanley, and Stanley’s 19-year-old wife Teresa who had all taken capsules from the same bottle.

The next few days brought three more deaths 31-year-old Mary McFarland from Elmhurst, Illinois, 27-year-old Mary Reiner from Winfield, Illinois, and 35-year-old flight attendant Paula Prince, who lived right here in Old Town in Chicago. It was a member of the Janus family that initially suspected that the Tylenol was tainted, and scientific testing quickly confirmed that the capsules in question had been laced with deadly doses of cyanide. As Tylenol was pulled from shelves across the country, broad warnings went out to Americans everywhere, warning them to discontinue any use of the medication.

The investigation quickly revealed that the tainted capsules had been manufactured in two completely separate locations, one in Pennsylvania and the other one in Texas. This allowed investigators to quickly deduce that the tampering had most likely taken place right here in Chicago when the suspect removed bottles off of the shelves in local stores in the Chicago land area, tampered with the medication, and replaced it back on the shelves to be purchased.

A national recall of 31 million bottles of Tylenol followed in a recall effort that cost in present day money, nearly $300 million. While no one else was ever identified as having been killed from the tainted Tylenol, several more tainted bottles were found in Chicago area stores. In the weeks, months and years that followed the initial investigation, two primary but unrelated suspects were identified James William Lewis and Roger Arnold. Lewis was first identified as a result of a letter that he sent to Johnson & Johnson in which he demanded $1 million to stop the cyanide induced murders.

Lewis was convicted of extortion as a result of sending that letter and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Arnold was identified as a result of reports that he had been making threats to poison others at around the time all of this was happening. Yet to this day, no one has ever been charged with the murders, and the case remains officially unsolved. It is under this backdrop that 40 years later, Chicago Tribune reporters Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair started investigating. And the results of their investigation and interviews are available not only in a special section of the Chicago Tribune’s website, but also in an eight-part podcast that is absolutely fascinating called Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders, the podcast is available to listeners at the same exact place where you listen to this one. I’ve listened to the entire thing, and I can tell you it’s well worth your time. Christy and Stacy. welcome to the pod.

Christy Gutowski: Thanks, Trish. Thanks, Maggie.

Stacy St. Clair: Thanks so much for having us.

Trisha Rich: We’re very excited to have you. So my first question is, how did you guys stumble into this? What made you decide that this was a thing that you wanted to investigate?

Christy Gutowski: Stacy and I got near our start, our reporting careers as reporters for the Daily Herald in the suburbs, where many of the victims lived and died, there was only one Chicago victim, as you mentioned, united flight attendant Paula Prince. So it was early in our careers that Stacy and I had heard about this. I was about 13 when it happened, so not old enough to be a reporter. Stacy was young as well. But when we began working in the Chicago suburbs in the 90s, we actually got to know some of the investigators who had been on Task Force 1. They were now in the twilight of their career, doing jobs as investigators in state’s attorney’s offices. And this case haunted them. They never let it go, even though it had been decades earlier. The fact that they were not able to solve it, especially with a 12-year-old child as one of the victims.

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So Stacy and I covered some of the twists and turns on the anniversaries or when they were going for the Unabomber’s DNA, for example, and the opportunity presented itself this year, we had just come off the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, and we were exhausted and looking for something completely different. And we were approached by an editor who said, what do you guys think about doing an investigation for the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Tylenol Murders? And we jumped.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Can you tell us a little bit about what your research method was? So for something that’s 40 years old, with so many witnesses, multiple suspects, victims, how do you guys really take all that information and then let us know as the public what’s important here and decide what to tell us about and what is not necessarily the most relevant?

Stacy St. Clair: Right. So we took sort of a clean slate approach. Like, we read all the previous reporting. But we didn’t take anything that had previously been reported as fact until we could confirm it ourselves to see if it actually matched up. Sort of stood the test of time, so to speak. As we all know, when breaking news is happening, things are wrong sometimes in breaking news reports, or the real story doesn’t fully develop until later. For example, the Laquan McDonald case, right? The first stories about Laquan McDonald were that he had attacked a police officer, and then down the road, the video gets released, and the story that’s been released is not.

So that’s sort of our mindset is that just because there’s something written about it in the beginning doesn’t mean it pans out so we read everything, and then we went about trying to get documents that matched, and then we had to find people. You know, 40 years is a long time to find folks who were involved in this. And we were very lucky that very early on we got a list of the investigators through the Freedom of Information Act, a list of investigators who were first involved with the case. And so we went about trying to find them, and that’s sort of where we started. And then over the course of the next ten months, we ended up interviewing 150 people. We traveled to seven different states. We got tens of thousands of documents. So it was a pretty long road.

Trisha Rich: Is there anybody that you wanted to interview but didn’t have the chance to? I mean, what’s the one or two interviews here that you really wanted to get, but you couldn’t for either because they refused to speak to you or they had passed, or what would have helped your investigative process.

Christy Gutowski: For me personally, it was Mary Kellerman’s parents that was the only victim who was a minor in this case. She was 12 years old. She was in the 7th grade, as you mentioned, Trish. She lived in Elk Grove Village. She was an only child. She had three dogs, goldfish, a pony, and her parents doted on her. They actually had a car ready for her 16th birthday sitting in the garage that she never got to drive because she was only 12 when she died. So her parents have never really spoken much to the media in the last several decades. They did some interviews early on, and my heart and Stacy’s as well just always broke for them. And they no longer live in Illinois, and they were the ones that we really wanted to get. We wrote a letter because you think about like, how do you want to be approached for something like this?

Stacy and I are both trauma-based reporters. We’ve done a lot of victim interviews through the years, and we’re very, very sensitive, and we always try to think about how would we want to be approached if it’s our situation, because everyone’s different, right? Some survivors of violent crimes want to tell their story. They want to be a voice for their loved one. It’s their way of taking back some of the power and then others prefer their privacy and you just don’t know what you’re going to encounter.

So we thought about what was the best way to approach the families and the Kellermans in particular, and we thought, at least for me, I prefer a letter. I didn’t want someone knocking on my door that I didn’t expect or a cold call. How do you just call someone in the middle of the day? You never know how you’re going to leave them when you’re like talking about their only child. So we did the letter in each of the cases and fortunately the Kellermans were very polite, very kind, and did cooperate somewhat through email. But they did not want, because of just the things they’ve dealt with over the years, people actually accusing them of harming their child. Just too many crazies out there, they said. So they weren’t willing to give us that deep interview, but if they ever changed their mind, we’re going to be in our car driving to that state very quickly. So that was disappointing for me.

Trisha Rich: Yeah, I think I remember in your podcast most of the information you had from their perspective was a result of a lawsuit they had filed.

(00:10:04)

Am I remembering that correctly?

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah, that’s right. There was a civil lawsuit filed almost immediately after the deaths by all the families actually. And it was a wrongful death suit that blamed the Tylenol’s maker McNeil, which was a subsidiary of and is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. And that case was primarily handled by Corboy & Demetrio out of Chicago and they settled on the eve of trial in 1991. So nine years after the murders and one of the last pre-trial motions that the judge granted was a last minute request by Johnson & Johnson to depose the families and the civil families’ attorneys pushed back and the ultimate decision was they could interview one family member for each victim and they could depose them for an hour.

So we were able to get our hands on on some of the depositions and the Kellerman one was just heartbreaking. That’s where we learned the details about the car that was sitting in the garage that her dad was going to fix up so she would have something to drive when she was 16 or the fact that she had just started babysitting and she was using the money from her babysitting endeavors to buy little gifts for her parents and treats for her dog. And it just really helped us put in perspective who we were writing about.

Christy Gutowski: And when we had situations like that, I might add, to the depositions, never been released before. So that was extremely helpful and that Stacy and I want to ensure that history correctly remembered what happened on that date and the investigation afterwards. So it included details about the parents mourning. Just little things like timing, sounds, images that were different than the medical examiner’s report or the police report. So that was very helpful to us to make sure that history remembers correctly what happened that day.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: I really appreciate the centering of the victims that occurred in this podcast. So often when you’re in the realm of the area of true crimes, so much focus is placed on the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator. And I really appreciated the clear and detailed picture that you painted of the victims and for your reporting methods, that’s so interesting to think of going back to snail mail to reach out to people. But there’s a real touch that you get from that that’s not necessarily conveyed in a text, email, or phone call.

Christy Gutowski: Handwritten, and in cases where we couldn’t get the immediate family member, such as Mary Kellerman, we went to the best friend or the school teacher or the bridesmaid or the co-worker so we wanted to make sure that there was someone who loved each victim represented in our newspaper series. And then the podcast Unsealed.

Trisha Rich: The photographs on the website, too, of everybody in the present day those were just really touching. Who did the photographs for you?

Stacy St. Clair: The photographs were done primarily by Stacey Westcott and Jason Wambsgans, Jason is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer for the Tribune. They did handle all the modern stuff and all the archival work, which was just painstaking was done by Marianne Mather of the Tribune. If we can give a shout out to her because she was down in those dusty archives holding negatives up to the light to see what was in them.

Trisha Rich: Yeah, I loved the podcast, and I’m a podcast fanatic, but the website that you all have put together that goes through some of the things that aren’t in the podcast and the photographs and the timelines and all of that is just really phenomenal work.

Stacy St. Clair: Thank you.

Christy Gutowski: I think about being around during that time, living that terror. Like I mentioned, I was just 13, so I remember my Halloween being disrupted. But that recall and people unfortunately flushing their Tylenol down the toilet and in the garbage so there probably, you know, there was eight tainted bottles that were recovered, five connected to the victims, and three from the recall. But think about the terror and the insanity of people just throwing potential evidence away because everyone just wanted it out of their house.

Trisha Rich: Right. And not only throwing it away, but the 80s sort of solution of putting it into our waterways, right?

Stacy St. Clair: We did talk to Ty Fahner about the decision to tell people to get rid of their Tylenol, and he was the attorney general at the time. He’s at Mayor Brown now, and he basically said, look, I had a choice. I had the idea of people having something potentially deadly in their medicine cabinets, and I had this need to preserve evidence and he chose lives over evidence.

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He’s a former federal prosecutor, so, you know, that had to kill him to be like, throw out your Tylenol, throw out your evidence. But he said if it saved a life, then he felt it was worth it.

Trisha Rich: And I suspect it probably did, right?

Stacy St. Clair: Sure. They found as you mentioned, they found three more bottles, tainted bottles, after the recall. So those bottles could have ended up in people’s medicine cabinets, and they could have ingested them for sure.

Trisha Rich: I remember I was born in 1980, so I was very small when this happened, and so I don’t remember it, but I certainly remember growing up in the, my grandmother and my mom, every time we opened a bottle or a bag of anything, checking to see if the seal was intact. I remember one time returning a bag of cereal to a grocery store because the bag had not sealed properly. And so we opened it up and it was open, and my mom was like, don’t eat any of it. And it seemed like this really just had a pretty significant cultural impact on the way that we thought about food and product safety.

Stacy St. Clair: Sure. At the time, there were no laws requiring things to be safety sealed. It was until 1989 that because of Tylenol, it just took that long to move through Congress, but that because of Tylenol, laws existed that required pharmaceuticals and food products to be sealed. So there’s so many different impacts of this case, and that is probably the biggest and the one that affects us daily.

Christy Gutowski: And as a side note, I no longer grab the first one on the shelf. I’ll grab the one that’s three or four behind for anything because of the way that this case unfolded.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: That is a good, great tip, Christy. Thank you for sharing it to all of our listeners. Don’t take that first bottle off the shelf. I’d love to talk with you guys a little bit, just about the investigation and specific Tylenol Task Force 1. I think that’s what we’ll call it. I’d love to hear just how the Tylenol Task Force played out, especially relative to the recent Marquette 10 indictments.

Stacy St. Clair: Sure. The task force included the FBI, the state police, and then detectives from each community where the victims died. As a side note, the FBI had no jurisdiction in the case. The federal prosecutors had to because it wasn’t a crime in 1982 to tamper with a consumer product. And so the FBI, under Ronald Reagan’s orders, had to find a law to get into the case. And that law was the truth in labeling laws. And they got in under the most — they admitted the most preposterous notion that Johnson & Johnson intentionally put cyanide in the pills and then didn’t label that cyanide was a main ingredient, which is a misdemeanor. And that’s how they got into the case. Nobody took them seriously that they were investing to getting this, but it allowed them entry. So they’re in the case, and CPD joined the case on October 1 after Paula Prince’s body was discovered in her Old Town condo.

And at the time, there’s always tension between big city police departments and the FBI. At the time in Chicago, tensions were at an all-time high because earlier that summer, ten Chicago police officers have been indicted or have been convicted. They were convicted in federal court for accepting bribes to protect heroin rings and cover up other crimes on the city’s west side. And those ten officers became known as the Marquette 10. And the Marquette 10 were indicted after a years’ long sting run by the FBI. So the relationship was at an all-time low. The Marquette 10 remains a stain on the Chicago Police Department and has forever harmed its reputation. And so they had to find a way to work together with this giant mistrust between them. And as it turns out, they ended up not working together. CPD broke off from the task force and started its own task force essentially at Belmont and Western, and they ended up following one lead in Roger Arnold.

(00:20:00)

And the task force had their own suspect in James Lewis and kind of took the investigations down two separate roads.

Christy Gutowski: And our podcast discusses the turf wars. Everybody wanted their name on the marquee, but there was some ingenious things done. Maggie, I think you had asked about some of the investigative part of it. They formed in teams where it was a state police investigator, an FBI agent, and the third member was a suburban officer, as Stacy mentioned, who they were involved because it was their towns where the victims had lived and died. And they worked together on chasing leads. They worked out of an old state police bunker and displayed and they chased leads. They looked at disgruntled J & J employees and maybe disgruntled customers or former employees and current employees at the stores where the tainted bottles were purchased.

And we’re also used to living in the CSI world where DNA and surveillance video, I mean, you can’t go to your house and go to the grocery store without being recorded the entire time. But you got to remember this was 1982 and this was part of the story that I just found fascinating to some of the out of the box thinking that they did. I mean, they really worked very passionately and diligently despite their turf wars to try to find the killer. And they did some really out of the box thinking, like setting up time lapse cameras, videos at the gravesites, hoping that the killer might come back to one of the graves, especially the little girl’s grave.

The FBI talked to their colleagues in the counterintelligence unit with the Soviets to see if the Soviets happened to have satellites trained on any of those stores to see if they could catch the killer coming in and out. And unfortunately, they did not at the time. But this was before DNA and fingerprints were used at the time were something that was common in law enforcement, but they didn’t have their tools that they have now. So we really enjoyed learning a lot more about the way a police work was done back then as well.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Talking about some of the law enforcement techniques that were novel at the time and may not be novel now, the FBI did some criminal profiling for the suspected murder in this particular case. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah, criminal profiling was still pretty new back then. It had only been used a couple of times by the FBI, and they used it in this case. And the famed profiler, John Douglas was one of the people who worked on the profile. One of the things they thought was that the killer would probably be a man. Women are more likely to use poison to murder someone, but men are more likely to commit a mass murder and kill people they don’t know where for women, it’s much more personal and they’re usually attacking one person. They also thought the person probably had a history of abusing animals, had violence in their past. And probably the most random part of the profile was they thought the killer would gravitate towards someone who had gray hair and wore a blue suit with a red tie. So that was in the profile. And later on, the FBI would think a lot about that when James Lewis got into the picture.

Trisha Rich: That’s so funny, but it reminds me of the profile of John List where the FBI said, when you find him, he’ll be wearing dark glasses. And sure enough, he was.

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah. To be perfectly honest, there were people both in the 1982 task force and then later task force that investigated this case that sort of laughed when they talk to us about the profile, right? They think it’s so broad that it didn’t really help. But there are others, including that FBI Special Agent Roy Lane, Jr. who was sort of the lead investigator on the case and the one who has spanned both the first Tylenol task force and the second one that was rebooted in 2006. And he really thought it was helpful and he believed in it.

Trisha Rich: Okay, well, with that, let’s go ahead and take our first break and we’ll you will be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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Trisha Rich: And we are back with Christy and Stacy from the Chicago Tribune. We are talking about the Chicago Tylenol Murders. Again, thank you for joining us and we’re going to jump right back in. So we’ve talked about a little bit about the murders and the investigations. How was it that the task force ended up landing on what ultimately ended up to be sort of the two primary suspects in this case, neither of which, by the way, have ever been charged.

Christy Gutowski: So days after the Tylenol murders, an extortion letter arrived demanding $1 million from Johnson & Johnson to stop the killing. And authorities were able, through an investigation, to eventually, within days, determine who wrote the letter. And it was a man named James Lewis, so he became obviously a suspect. In the early days of the investigation into James Lewis, authorities, the task force, Ty Fahner really just thought it was a hoax, an opportunist. But once they learned more about James Lewis’ background James and his wife LeAnn Lewis, had lived in Chicago for a short time, under a year, and moved to New York a few weeks before the Tylenol killings. But before they lived in Chicago, they lived in Kansas City and they were wanted in Kansas City. James Lewis was wanted in Kansas City on a fraud case and he also had been charged with a brutal well, as a dismemberment of a man who he knew, and he had been charged with the murder, but the charges got dismissed because of Miranda violation.

So once the Tylenol task force learned from Kansas City Police that Lewis had been a murder suspect, but for a violation of his rights from an error made by police, the charges were dropped. On the eve of the murder trial, they became much more interested in James Lewis and he became the task force main suspect. The problem was they had to find him. He had disappeared. He had left Chicago three weeks before the murder so he became the subject of a nationwide manhunt for a couple of months in late 1982 until they eventually found him in New York and he was charged with attempted extortion.

Trisha Rich: And what about Arnold?

Stacy St. Clair: So, on the same day that Johnson & Johnson received a letter written by James Lewis, Chicago Police got a phone call from a bar owner on Lincoln Avenue who said that his customers had told him about a man at the bar who had been acting erratic and claimed to have had cyanide. So the cops went down to Lincoln Avenue. They thought it was a good tip. They said, hey, if you see this guy, his name is Roger Arnold. If you see him around, give us a call. And about a week later, they did get a call saying that he was at a bar and that they would come pick him up. And they did. And they brought him into the station. They questioned him. He signed a consent for a search of his house.

They went to the house, they found all kinds of unregistered weapons, beakers, catalogues for ordering chemicals, and a book called Poor Man’s James Bond, which had a recipe on how to make potassium cyanide. So they thought he looked pretty good, and they drove him back to the station, where they were going to question him further. But the two detectives that we interviewed who were leading that case said while they were inventorying the stuff from the search warrant, they left Roger Arnold in the holding room, and all the police brass showed up, and they started to try to interview him themselves, right. To be the ones who cracked the case. So, like, within the turf war, there’s another turf war, and that’s CPD’s turf war.

And by the time they got back to Roger, he’s like, oh, yeah, a bunch of people have been in here talking to me, and I think I need a lawyer. And he got a lawyer. And Tom Royce, who was sort of a legendary defense attorney in Chicago back in that time, and Mr. Royce did not allow Roger Arnold to speak to police. So that was sort of where they left it.

Trisha Rich: Brilliant defense lawyer move.

Stacy St. Clair: Yes, please stop talking.

Trisha Rich: Yeah. And so the task force and the police generally sort of — it seems like from my listening to the podcast and the reading of the materials that you have on your website, they end up following both of these guys for quite a while.

Christy Gutowski: So Roger Arnold got out on bond for — they charged him with, like the unregistered weapons violations, just a misdemeanor.

(00:30:05)

And he had a bar scuffle that had happened earlier that summer that they got a misdemeanor assault on for that too. And he got out and tried to go about his life again in Chicago. And he did have all these, like Stacy mentioned, all these odd coincidences. He was a dock hand for Jewel, which is where two of the tainted bottles came from, not where he specifically worked, but that grocery chain. Well, a lot of people worked for Jewel, right?

But it was odd, and he had gone through a divorce earlier that summer and was despondent and acting bizarre and said all sorts of odd things to his co-workers. For example, there was a medical student who worked for Jewel where he worked, and he said, can you get cadaver parts? Can you get body parts? He hated law enforcement. He wanted to lead them all around the city and try to trick the police and talked about poisoning people and throwing acid on them. So he certainly had a lot of peculiar coincidences, as you might say. But he tried to go about his life, but he’s name had been leaked to the media during those three days that he was on police custody.

So he certainly had a lot of peculiar coincidence as you might say but he tried to go about his life but his name had been leaked to the media during those three days they was in police custody. And so, he said that his life, his reputation had been ruined after that and he began drinking. He was already drinking heavily but he over the course of that next year became much more despondent and drinking every night and became very, very angry and bitter and wanted revenge against the person he thought had called authorities and dropped a dime on him. And that was a bar owner on Lincoln Avenue, a man named Marty Sinclair.

And one night in June of 1983, he thought he saw Marty Sinclair and went up to him with a gun and shot him in the chest and it was mistaken identity of someone who looked like this bar owner. It was a man named John Stanisha, a computer programmer in his 40s who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. He was just out with friends one night listening to music at a bar, father of three little girls and he died right there on the street. So, Roger Arnold eventually did become a murderer and he was convicted and went to prison for 15 years of his 30-year sentence and then got out and was never charged with anything to do with the Tylenol killings.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: When we talk about the Tylenol killings, it’s almost as if the seven individuals that consumed the Tylenol and then also John Stanisha just being an unfortunate side effect of the investigation and what happened with the case. So I again appreciate the time that was spent in telling us that story as well. But when you talk about Roger Arnold and him invoking Miranda and not talking to police any further, we have James Lewis who is the exact opposite, extremely loquacious. He spoke with you all, he spoke to FBI agents, U.S. attorneys so I’d love to hear about all of the interviews that James Lewis consented to.

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah, I mean, as you might imagine, he was a defense attorney’s sort of worst nightmare. Any time law enforcement wanted to talk to him, he was willing. And sort of the first sign that he gave of this was after his conviction for the attempted extortion. He reaches out to Roy Lane, the FBI agent that sort of spearheaded his case, and said, “I’d like to help you solve the Tylenol murders.

So they retained that. They’re like, “Okay, come on over.” So he was at the MCC, they bring them over the FBI offices and Roy Lane and Jeremy Margolis who was a federal prosecutor at the time, they sort of tag team him and get him talking and he says to them, “I’m not the killer but if I was the killer, this is how I would do it.” And he provides them with drawings, very, very detailed drawings of how you could get cyanide into a capsule without poisoning yourself and causing all kinds of havoc that would bring police to your door. And he creates a decision tree for them that if you’re going to put these pills on the shelves, you have to follow these steps and if you don’t follow the steps, you go back to study it. It’s so detailed.

And what Lane and Margolis did is they also locked him into a timeline during those conversations. By that time, he admitted, his attorney Mike Monaco admitted during the trial that James Lewis wrote the letter. It was in his opening statement. So they locked James Lewis into everything he did before mailing that letter and that included, he said he first heard about the murders on October 1 in the New York Times and that he went to the library.

(00:35:03)

He researched Johnson & Johnson’s address. He researched how the cyanide would work with the gelatin capsules, how much cyanide costs. And he did all these things and then eventually mails the letter. So they locked him into that and that became very important later on. But then he kept talking. He talked to investigators, they rebooted the investigation in around 2006. In 2013, he sat down for a long conversation with investigators. Roy Lane in 2007-2008 did a very elaborate sting against him and he talked to Roy Lane for that. And then we know that just last month in September, investigators went back to Boston where Lewis now lives and he talked to them for hours without an attorney and then record a conversation. He does not hesitate to talk to law enforcement. And for a long time, any media that knock on his door.

Christy Gutowski: Stacy and I describe it as a cat and mouse game that he’s played with law enforcement a decade after decade, after decade after decade. And just to go back to the question about profiling, Roy Lane who served main protagonist in our podcast, in our newspaper series because he’s really the only one who was involved in 1982 and in 2006 for the reboot for Task Force 2. And I suspect he’s still a little bit involved in some way but he happened to always wear a blue suit and a red tie. So, sort of interesting that he was the one that Lewis called when he was awaiting sentencing. I’m sure much to the chagrin of Mike Monaco who by that point I believe was out of the case and Lewis represented himself at his sentencing.

Trisha Rich: I got to say I know Mike and I think he’s an excellent attorney and he’s probably who I would hire if I was Mr. Lewis and I feel pretty confident that Mike would say, “Do not talk to investigators.” So, one thing that strikes me as interesting is I’ve listened to your whole podcast, I’ve listened to other podcasts about this case, I’ve been familiar with it since I was a small child even though I didn’t grow up here and it’s remarkable to me that, I’ll say I still don’t know that I really have a feel for if I think one or both of these guys were involved at all. I think it’s really hard to tell but it’s remarkable to me that Mr. Lewis would do this if he wasn’t the person behind the Tylenol murders because it seems like a really dangerous and unsmart idea to insert yourself in something like this over and over and over again.

Christy Gutowski: Stacy and I repeatedly asked people that we interviewed he’s either the unluckiest man or the luckiest man in the world because he’s charged with the murder in 1978 and on the eve of trial because of Miranda violation, the charges are dropped. I mean, his thumb print was found on a pulley that was used to hoist the body into the attic. So, there’s a lot of evidence on that one. And then in 2004, he’s charged, after he serves his time in federal prison for the attempted extortion, he is charged with the rape of a neighbor and business colleague who was too traumatized to testify on the eve of trial. So, those charges are dropped. So, we asked everyone and then you get the Tylenol situation, either they’re really lucky or really unlucky.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Yeah. Yeah.

Stacy St. Clair: He always talks about how people call me the Tylenol man. That’s what he says. And he said when he was in prison, all people did was call him a Tylenol man. But we talked to people who served time with him in prisons and jails in different locations around the country at different times and they all said, “Well, he introduces himself as the Tylenol man but nobody called him that really.”

Trisha Rich: That does not shock me at all. That’s exactly the impression I have, right? That he is the one that’s talking about it, that he is the one associating with it and that he’s going out of his way to do that. He’s got a website.

Christy Gutowski: He does. He has a website. He’s always denied being the Tylenol killer but it goes back to this cat and mouse game. Is he enjoying it? There’s something that he told Jeremy Margolis and Roy Lane that always stuck with me and Stacy and I talked about it a lot but Roy Lane had asked him in 1983 in those meetings, “Why do you think the killer chose Extra Strength Tylenol? Do you think maybe they were trying to spare a child? Because obviously, these were going to be random killings. You couldn’t choose your victim. Do you think maybe they wanted to spare a child? Because maybe a mom or dad would give their child a regular strength instead of extra strength?”

And according to Lane, Lewis broke out hysterically laughing, hysterically, and said, “No, don’t you get it?

(00:40:02)

There’s something extra in the capsule.” So is it someone playing a game with law enforcement or is it someone who’s guilty of these poisonings? We don’t know.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: And to go back to the profiling that we discussed earlier, I think a part of it was, it would be somebody who’s attention-seeking and then also a little bit about that individual being vengeful as well. And I believe it might be in Tylenol too where they finally identified a potential motive for Lewis to have poisoned those capsules. Can you guys talk about that?

Stacy St. Clair: Sure. One of the things they did struggle with for decades was what the motive would be for him to randomly kill people using Tylenol if he in fact did kill anyone. And they really couldn’t come up with any grudge that he would have against Johnson & Johnson or its subsidiary McNeil. And during Task Force 2 which was rebooted by the FBI in 2006, investigators went back to Kansas City and they looked through the medical records of Lewis’ daughter Toni who died in 1974 at age five and she had a heart defect. And when they read the autopsy, the autopsy showed that the repair to this heart defect failed when the sutures tore and she died as a result and the sutures were marketed under the name Prolene and Prolene was trademarked by Johnson & Johnson in 1968.

So they believed that this was an act of revenge against Johnson & Johnson for the death of his daughter and we have — Christy and I have no way of knowing whether Lewis even saw this autopsy. We have written letters to him, emailed him, tried to ask him when Christy interviewed him and we got no response. But what we do know is that he has a website in which he has — we talk about keeps inserting himself. He has a website where he rants against Johnson & Johnson and the subsidiary that makes Prolene which is Ethicon. So, it’s a study in contrast. Roger Arnold got out of prison, kept his head down, never talked about the Tylenol murders and James Lewis has done just the opposite.

Trisha Rich: One of the things, one of the remarkable things you ladies were able to do in this investigation is uncover some new evidence, new things that the public is now seeing for the first time. Can you talk about some of that?

Christy Gutowski: Sure. We should be clear that there is no DNA connecting James Lewis to the Tylenol murders but what we learned was that he remains law enforcement especially the task force, their one and only suspect, their main suspect, they continue to say that they believe James Lewis is the Tylenol killer. They believe they have a circumstantial solid case that should be prosecuted. They presented this case in 2012 to Cook County prosecutor at the time and States Attorney Anita Alvarez and DuPage County States Attorney Bob Berlin because DuPage and Cook of course, murder is a State crime so it has to be a state prosecutor.

And this meeting ended with them asking for a grand jury to be used to lock in some testimonial evidence and eventual charges and nothing really ever happened. And that was at the conclusion of the Task Force 2 reboot that Stacy talked about. But everything that Task Force 2 did back then has never been made public and it just sort of there was some headlines about the raid that they did on his Cambridge Massachusetts home, his condo in 2009. There were some stories about them going into court and getting his DNA and his fingerprints which they already had and there was some coverage of them also getting the Unabombers for example as a rule-out DNA as well.

So, what Stacy and I wanted to do is we wanted to learn more about the case, everything they had against Lewis. And it was very difficult because it’s an open case, right? You can’t FOIA a lot of these records and things like that but we were able through time to get confidential sources. And that’s the beauty of getting 10 months to work on one story is you can build trust with folks.

(00:44:56)

And what we learned a lot of the circumstantial case that they have against Lewis is contained in this PowerPoint presentation and it’s been updated through the years but it’s basically what we saw was 50 pages with many slides and links with different evidence that they present to prosecutors and they update it so we get more information. I’m sure they’re updating it now based on their six-hour interview with James Lewis last month.

But one of the most compelling things that we saw was an undercover FBI video clip and this was taken Circa 2007 during Task Force 2 and Stacy had talked about how Roy Lane and another FBI agent which they called Sherry Nichols, that’s not her real name, but they worked undercover with Lewis gaining his trust under the guise that this other FBI agent, Sherry Nichols, was writing a book about the Tylenol case and did not believe it was Lewis and Lewis was helping her.

So, in 2007, Stacy and I actually got to see this this video which I’ve been reporting for 30 years you don’t see undercover FBI video especially not in Chicago until a case is charged. Sometimes even after that. But it was telling it was this timeline that Stacy talked about earlier. Remember they locked Lewis into a timeline in 1983 during these meetings with Roy Lane and Jeremy Margolis and Lewis had said that he practices his letters whenever — he’s a big letter writer. While they’re looking for him in the manhunt, he was writing letters to the Chicago Tribune, the Kansas City Star, all these different authorities.

So he said that he had practiced letter for at least three days. And in the video, he’s sitting at a hotel in downtown Chicago and he’s got a messenger bag across his chest and one of the FBI agents is wearing a little undercover surveillance video camera. And in the next room is behavioral FBI analyst who are feeding kind of language, a narrative to tell to Roy Lane and this other FBI agent. And they’re talking to him about his timeline. And he says, Roy Lane has a manila folder and he draws a calendar on it and he goes backwards.

He’s like, “You know Jim, if you didn’t mail the letter until three days, that’s going back to before the people took the tainted capsules.” And Lewis, you could tell he’s like, “Well, when did they die?” And at one point, he’s clutching the messenger bag and looking very nervous and quiet. He’s like, “Well, it must be faulty memory. I’ve been telling myself for at least three days but that can’t be right. That’s not possible.” And another thing that he didn’t realize at the time was, the FBI never knew. Task Force never knew when he mailed that letter during his extortion trial, attempted extortion trial in 1983. They just said early October.

But through advances in technology, the FBI lab was able to lift layer upon layer of ink off of the postage and they found out that he mailed it October 1. So the earliest he got it, if he got in the mail October 1 and he count backwards, there’s a timeline problem for Lewis especially if you remember that he said that he didn’t learn about the killings until he read that New York Times article on the first.

Trisha Rich: That is absolutely fascinating. So we’re running short on time here but there’s a couple more questions I want to ask. First and foremost, do you think there’s going to be an indictment in this case? Do you think it’s ever going to happen?

Stacy St. Clair: I don’t know.

Christy Gutowski: One at a time.

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah, one at a time.

Christy Gutowski: One at a time.

Stacy St. Clair: I don’t know. I mean, local police and the FBI are confident they have a chargeable circumstantial case but by calling to the circumstantial case, they’re acknowledging they don’t have direct physical evidence and they can’t place him in Chicago during the timeline where they say the bottles were put on the shelf. We’ve talked to a lot of defense attorneys about this but one of the ones we talked to is with Sam Adam, Jr. who said do we want to be charging people who you can’t say they were even in the city when it happened? But you know, Sam Adam also told us that he hates circumstantial cases because you can’t really argue against people’s logic and reason. So I don’t know is the answer for me.

Trisha Rich: I thought it was really interesting when Sam Adams said that. I think if you let in some of the earlier evidence related to some of his other unrelated bad conduct, he’s like there’s not a jury that would not convict this guy. And I thought that was really interesting.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: I mean, I’m going to have to pop in here as a former prosecutor.

(00:50:00)

In a bit of a defense of circumstantial evidence on the one hand I mean, a jury can be swayed by emotion and that’s something that we want to be wary of especially in light of the attention that’s been on this case for now for decades. But at the same time, you know, back to the basic circumstantial evidence where you wake up in the morning, you see snow is on the ground, you see that the snow – they’re laughing. I’m sure you guys have heard this one before. You didn’t see it snow but you know that it was snowing. But that makes sense and I’m curious in terms of what steps have been taken to exclude Roger Arnold because that’s going to be the biggest defense, right? If they try to charge Lewis, well no. It was Roger Arnold. He’s a suspect himself who’s no longer around. So if you guys want to talk about that.

Christy Gutowski: One thing we learned in our investigation was that they exhumed Roger Arnold’s body in June of 2010. He served sometime in the Army I believe so he was buried in a national military cemetery near Joliet. And Stacy and I were able to find out through sources and then through FOIA that they exhumed his body in June 2010. The order to get permission to exhume his body is sealed in DuPage County court so we weren’t able to get it that way but we got it through another means and they removed his femur and put him back, buried him that same day and no one has ever officially said whether they, on the record said whether it was a match but obviously, and we know from our sources that it was not or else they wouldn’t still be looking at James Lewis.

But that was from the defense attorneys and attorneys that we interviewed was basically a rule out.

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah. And that’s the same reason why they went after the Unabomber’s DNA that made headlines many years ago but our sources told us it was almost a defensive move so that if they do charge the case someday, a defense attorney can’t say, “Well what about the Unabomber? You had a known domestic terrorist who shopped at the Woolworths where Mary McFarland bought her tainted Tylenol. Like what about him?” And they can say, “Well, here’s his DNA. It doesn’t match.” So they’ve been doing defensive mechanisms to rule people out like that for several years now or decades now at this point.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Before we close out, is there anybody in particular that you guys wanted to thank for helping to formulate the story, the podcast itself?

Stacy St. Clair: Yeah, our podcast producers first of all. We don’t know how to do podcasts. As you guys know, it’s a whole other world of communication and so, our producers Claire Tighe, Jessica Glazer and Anmargaret Warner at At Will Media were just fantastic. And then, Chris can talk about the Tribune people.

Christy Gutowski: Our editors for giving us the time (00:53:05) and Phil Jurik and our executive editor Mitch Pugh. We got to go to Boston twice because we didn’t get Lewis the first time so we wanted to try one more time. We really wanted to hear what he had to say. So, you know, times are tough in the newspaper business but we were given all the resources that we needed to do this job. And of course, our amazing photo department like you said Trish for unearthing all those amazing images that really captured what things were like back in 1982 in the hysteria that was caused because of this just unbelievably tragic crime.

And lastly, just all of the people that we encountered on our reporting journey. Like Stacy said, we interviewed more than 150 people and they were just very generous of their time. It’s obviously a very emotional thing. Several people cried as we interviewed them and it’s not something that anyone who’s ever been touched by this case ever forgot.

Stacy St. Clair: And because it’s a legal podcast, we should thank our attorneys, Karen Flax, our in-house counsel at the Tribune and Melissa Pryor of Miller Shakman. You guys can imagine all the many and different ways we need attorneys on a story like this and we are grateful to them.

Trisha Rich: Well, we especially appreciate that you have named several CBA members like Melissa and like Mike Monaco and like Sam Adams. So we’re glad to, I don’t know if we can take all the credit for this but we’re glad to always have a good shout out for the lawyers. So that is where we’re going to have to leave it. Unfortunately, 40 years and one hour didn’t solve this case but we will be back in just a second for our last segment, “Stranger Than Legal Fiction.”

[Music]

(00:55:04)

And we are back with Stranger Than Legal Fiction. Christy, Stacy, thank you guys so much for joining us today. We have one more segment before we let you go. So our regular listeners know the rules, I’ll repeat them for you. Maggie and I have both done some research. We’ve come up with a couple of laws, one that is real and one that is not real but they both sound kind of silly. And we’re going to quiz both of and each other and see who wins the grand prize of fame and glory and bragging rights.

So Maggie, do you want to go first?

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Sure. So my laws are from the State of Illinois and they’re about hunting in particular. It is hunting season after all, I think. So which law is real and which law in fact is fake? So it is legal every month of the year to hunt skunks in the State of Illinois and it is legal every month of the year to hunt woodchucks in the State of Illinois. Which one is correct and which one is incorrect?

Stacy St. Clair: I’m going to go with woodchucks.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: You think that’s a woodchuck law is false?

Stacy St. Clair: No, I think you can hunt a woodchuck whenever you want.

Christy Gutowski: I don’t know if you guys know this but Stacy is like the trivia queen. No one ever beats her. She takes this seriously. She does it like it’s a hobby of hers. I’ll regret this but I’ll go with the other one, the skunks, just to make it interesting.

Trisha Rich: I think it’s woodchucks too and I grew up in Rural America in Michigan which our guests don’t know but Maggie does and woodchucks caused a fair amount of damage out there. And so, I grew up in a place where shooting woodchucks is actually not uncommon past time so I think it’s woodchucks as well.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: So Christy is right here. It is actually legal every month of the year to hunt the pascal skunks and woodchucks, it’s not legal to hunt them in April or all of April or May.

Trisha Rich: Huh. Breeding season for woodchucks maybe?

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: I have absolutely no idea. I’ve never hunted. I’ve never held a gun and somehow I ended up in this area of the law for a question so there we go.

Stacy St. Clair: I could have answered bobcat questions. I did stories about bobcat hunting. That is very controversial a couple of years ago.

Trisha Rich: Well, Maggie, I hope you’re not telling me that the good people of Salem County Michigan are hunting woodchucks out of season? I’m going to have to go back and check that out.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: Illinois law only.

Trisha Rich: Okay. Next up, so I randomly selected a couple of Arizona laws today. So number one, in Arizona, it is illegal to manufacture, distribute or possess imitation cocaine which can include sugar, flour or any other white powder. Or number two, I’m going to screw up a pronunciation I’ve never heard of this place, in Nogales, Arizona. I’m not sure, people can tweet at me later. It is illegal to wear suspenders.

Maggie Mendenhall Casey: I’ll take a stab at it. I think the first one is true and the second one is false.

Trisha Rich: Okay, who’s next?

Stacy St. Clair: I’m going to say the suspenders is true. Can they both be true or not? one needs to be false? I’m going to say the suspenders is true.

Trisha Rich: I was going to say it’s a tricky Stranger Than Legal Fiction loophole because every once in a while we get a law that was true and has since been repealed.

Stacy St. Clair: I’ll say suspenders is true.

Trisha Rich: Okay.

Christy Gutowski: I’ve got to agree with Stacy on this one.

Trisha Rich: Okay. So we have two suspenders and one illegal possessing an imitation cocaine. Our prosecutor friends have it. Maggie, nice work.

Stacy St. Clair: Why do we go with the prosecutor?

Trisha Rich: I know. Under Arizona State Law 13-34:53, it is illegal to manufacture, distribute or possess imitation cocaine. The suspenders law is a longtime urban legend but actually does not have a basis in law and I cannot for the life of me figure out why that has ever picked up steam. So next time you guys are on this podcast for the next wonderful series of stories you do, we will try to make it a little bit easier so maybe you can walk away the winners instead of Maggie.

Stacy St. Clair: Well, it’s our fault for not siding with the prosecutor on what the imitation cocaine law. We deserve to lose.

Trisha Rich: Yeah, fair enough. But we got to call it here. That’s our show for today.

(01:00:00)

I want to thank our guests from the Chicago Tribune, Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair, not only for joining us, but also for their incredible work on this story and their podcast. It’s absolutely phenomenal. Everybody should go out and listen to it right now. I also want to thank my co-host Maggie and our executive producer Jen Byrne and everyone at the Legal Talk Network. They’re truly the very best in the business and we’re proud to work with them.

Remember you can follow us. Send us comments, questions, episode ideas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. You can find any of us and you can look for CBA @theBar, all one word. Please also rate and leave your feedback on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you download your podcast. It helps us get the word out. Until next time for everyone here at the Chicago Bar Association, thank you for joining us and we’ll see you soon @theBar.

[Music]

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