It’s been more than four decades since seven people died after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in 1982 in the Chicago area, and still nobody knows who contaminated the pills or how they got contaminated.
The poisonings sparked a recall and terrified the nation. How could medicine that was supposed to help people actually be hurting people?
James W. Lewis, the main suspect in this case for more than 40 years, explains why he couldn’t possibly be the so-called Tylenol murderer in Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, out May 26 on Netflix. The three-part series is a comprehensive overview of the case, featuring interviews with journalists who covered it, former law enforcement officials, and people who knew the victims.
Here’s what to know about the Tylenol murders, how Lewis has remained the main suspect for so long, and why the case is still cold after four decades.
What to know about the Tylenol murders
Authorities realized something was amiss when three members of the same family—Stanley Janus (25), Adam Janus (27) and Theresa Janus (20)—died at the same time.
“The only reason why they understood this happened was because three young people from the same family died all together at the same time,” says Yotam Guendelman, co-director of Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders. “In many ways, this is sort of the perfect crime because cyanide is basically untraceable after a few hours.”
Other victims included: Mary Kellerman (12); Mary Reiner (27), a mother who had just delivered her fourth child; Paula Prince (35), a United flight attendant; and Mary McFarland (31), a telephone company worker.
Filmmakers tracked down the people who could recall the horror of watching the victims’ final moments.
Reiner’s daughter Michelle Rosen recalls being eight-years-old when she saw her mother fall to the floor, wracked with convulsions. Jean Regula Leavengood, who rushed over to the home of her fellow flight attendant Prince because she was having trouble getting in touch with her, recalls authorities telling her that Prince’s lips had so much cyanide on them that it would be enough to kill anyone trying to resuscitate her.
The incidents sparked a nationwide recall. Volunteers went door to door to warn people about the tainted Tylenol, and police cars drove up and down the streets blaring the warnings from a megaphone. Law enforcement was trying to figure out whether someone tampered with individual bottles and then put them back on drug store shelves.
As TIME magazine described the significance of the Tylenol poisonings in the Oct. 18, 1982, issue, “Suddenly one of the small bonds of unconscious trust that hold society together had snapped.” The victims “had been murdered by remote control, by a poisoner who had no way of guessing in even the most general sense who his victims might be—men or women, young or old—and could not have cared.”
The consequences of the Tylenol murders can literally be felt today in pill bottles with plastic seals that, if broken, indicate that the contents may be contaminated. As TIME previously reported, the fear that trick-or-treaters could bring home tainted candy dates back, in part, to the Tylenol murders, which occurred a month before Halloween.
The documentary provides the most comprehensive overview to date of another theory—whether someone at a plant of Tylenol’s parent company Johnson & Johnson had come in contact with cyanide and contaminated the pills in the production line. The series points to the presence of cyanide in the facilities where the tainted bottles came from and a woman who died after ingesting a cyanide-laced Tylenol in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1986, when Tylenol bottles had safety seals on them.
“We don’t want to blame anyone, not Jim Lewis, and, of course, not Johnson & Johnson,” Ari Pines, co-director of Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, “But we do believe that in a high profile case such as this, it’s very important to examine up close all the potentially involved players, including big companies.”
Johnson & Johnson had a leading role in the investigations at the time and has repeatedly denied that the contaminated pills were manufactured in their plants. The company did not grant an interview for Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders.
A Tylenol murder suspect speaks
James W. Lewis, who did accounting work, was the leading suspect in the Tylenol murders because he sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million or else more people would be killed. It took producer Molly Forster about a year to gain Lewis’s trust and land an interview with him.
Lewis was initially thought to be capable of the poisonings because he had been arrested before. One of his clients, Ray West, was found dismembered in the attic of his home, and authorities found a forged check that Lewis tried to cash from the client’s account. But the charges were dropped because authorities didn’t read Lewis his Miranda rights on time. Detective David Barton says in the series that law enforcement officials found drafts of extortion letters in Lewis’s house and a book about poisonings.
“I wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Lewis says, chuckling, at the end of the first episode. The series ends with him saying, “You can keep asking me questions forever and ever. If we ever do come up with a…technology which allows you to read my mind, then you won’t find anything in there that will be incriminating.”
As for the extortion letter, he says it came from a place of extreme grief. Johnson & Johnson manufactured a patch that malfunctioned in his daughter’s heart, and he blamed the company for her death.
Lewis was convicted of extortion—spending 12 years in prison—but he was never charged with murder because authorities could not prove that he was in the Chicago area at the time of the deaths. In fact, he had left for New York a few weeks prior.
“They never had any forensic evidence to actually pin him to the murders,” Guendelman explains.
As former Chicago Police superintendent Richard Brzeczek put it: “James Lewis was an asshole, but he wasn’t the Tylenol killer.”
Lewis’s interview for the series turned out to be his last interview before his death on July 9, 2023.
As to why Lewis participated, Gundelman says, “He enjoys attention” and got a kick out of being seen as a mastermind of a crime who escaped justice.
Pines added: “He liked to be regarded as the Tylenol man, without having to sit in prison for it.”
Why the Tylenol murders case hasn’t been solved
“There’s probably more victims than the seven we know about,” says Guendelman.
For one thing, there is not much evidence to work with. Because so many people were told to get rid of their Tylenol bottles, “it means that there’s so much evidence lost basically in the first week after this case,” Guendelman explains.
And given that the leading suspect in the case for four decades is dead, the filmmakers hope that authorities will broaden their search. As Pines puts it, “Focusing on just one suspect has brought us basically nowhere. Continuing to do the same thing will not produce new results.”
The filmmakers hope a documentary series on the case on the world’s largest streaming platform might reach someone who knows something that could help investigators or encourage the FBI to unseal any relevant documents.
Now the question is whether viewers will be afraid to take medicine in their cabinets after watching Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders. Pines warns: “Even if a bottle seems to be completely sealed, it might still be laced with some sort of poison or other toxic agent, so, yeah. I think this series is gonna scare the sh-t out of people.”
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