1982 Tylenol Murder Case Reopened: Home of James Lewis Searched

In 1982 Chicago was plagued by a serial killer who claimed 7 victims in a matter of days and put a nation on high alert.  The killer's weapon of choice was cyanide tainted Tylenol capsules.  The world famous Tylenol tampering case, also known as the Tylenol murders, has remained unsolved to this day, although FBI investigators have kept prime suspect James Lewis in their sights.

James William Lewis was convicted of extortion in the case after he was linked to a letter sent to Tylenol demanding $1 million to "stop the killings."  The FBI was unable to build a case against Lewis for actually tampering with the Tylenol bottles but for the past 27 years he has remained the favorite suspect in the case.

Lewis was released from prison in 1995 after serving 11 years in prison and returned to his wife where he launched several companies including one called CyberLewis that contains the curious page titled Tylenol. On that page Lewis complains about living with the stigma of being the "Tylenol man."

The CyberLewis website is curiously unavailable today, displaying a 509 bandwidth exceeded error message when accessed, but a cached version of the Tylenol page can still be found on the Google search engine.  The cached versions of the site pages show many pages that address the Tylenol murder case. 

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On the Tylenol page at CyberLewis, a page with the meta title of "My Voices," James Lewis invites people to contact him with the preface:

The initial investigation spanned decades and included 20,000 pages of reports containing 6,500 tips that identify 400 different suspects.  After exploring all these leads the Tylenol tampering task force discovered nothing and continued to look at Lewis as the most likely suspect.

Citing new evidence based on advances in forensic technology and new tips the FBI announced February 3 that it would be reopening the serial murder investigation.  The first stop on the new trail of the Tylenol murderer was the home of James Lewis.

Investigators arrived at Lewis' home with a search warrant, which suggests that the FBI was able to establish probable cause, although they have not specifically named Lewis as the focus of the reopened investigation.

The 1982 Tylenol murders, as they came to be known in the press, resulted in the death of seven people; the youngest victim, Mary Kellerman was just 12 years old, th oldest, Paula Prince, was only 35.  The random nature of victim selection has made it difficult to profile the killer using standard forensic profiling.

The Tylenol tampering case resulted to changes to the packaging of consumer goods that can still be seen today.  The now common phrase "safety sealed for your protection" that appears on the outer packaging of most ingestible consumer products is a direct remnant of the Tylenol murders.