What happened to Tylenol Murders suspect after Netflix | UK News

A new Netflix documentary delves into a case that despatched shockwaves across the United States, ensuing in at least seven fatalities.

The three-part sequence, Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, revisits the chilling occasions that shattered the nation’s religion in the security of on a regular basis gadgets.

It also triggered nationwide panic and one of the biggest felony investigations in U.S. historical past.

In 1982, in Chicago, a minimal of seven people misplaced their lives after consuming cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. Each episode explores the questions posed at the time and those that still linger at this time.

One of the suspects, who also options in the docuseries, was James Lewis.

So, who was James Lewis?

Details about James Lewis are scarce, but according to the Netflix documentary, he was deserted by his delivery mom as an toddler in Missouri. He was subsequently adopted but confronted emotional challenges growing up, reviews the Mirror US.

He studied at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where he claims to have met his spouse. He confides to the documentary staff that he can talk about something with her.

A 12 months after their marriage, the couple welcomed a daughter, Toni, who was born with Down Syndrome. James and his spouse both labored as bookkeepers and established their own business named Lewis and Lewis tax service.

Their daughter, born with a coronary heart defect, required surgical procedure at the tender age of two to three months to restore a gap in her atrial wall. Tragically, when she was 5 years previous, the patch got here undone and she handed away.

In the Nineteen Eighties, he spent a transient period dwelling in Chicago with his spouse. However, he has at all times maintained that he was in New York City during the time of the Tylenol poisonings.

The first episode disclosed that he penned an article for the Chicago Tribune newspaper under the pseudonym Robert Richardson. The FBI subsequently issued a wished appeal for him under this alias.

James Lewis has persistently denied being the person accountable and even participated in the documentary’s complete interviews.

Why was he suspected in the Tylenol case?

Prior to the Tylenol poisonings, Lewis had been accused of different crimes. He was charged with the homicide of his pal Ray West in 1978, but the case was in the end dismissed.

In 1981, police reported discovering a number of victims of credit card and identification theft. All these people had been linked by one common issue – they’d all had their taxes achieved by James Lewis.

This led to the authorities acquiring warrants to search his home.

During the search, they found notebooks detailing a credit card scheme and counterfeit IDs. Draft extortion letters had been also discovered, including ones addressed to firms demanding money.

Additionally, a ebook about poisoning was unearthed.

However, when police tried to apprehend Lewis on prices of mail fraud, he was nowhere to be discovered. An investigator featured in the documentary said that Lewis’ involvement in a homicide investigation and identification theft led him to grow to be a focus in the Tylenol case.

What happened to James Lewis?

Upon realising he was the goal of a nationwide manhunt, Lewis knowledgeable his spouse that he had penned a letter to Tylenol’s producers, Johnson and Johnson.

In this letter, he allegedly instructed the company to switch $1 million into an account to ‘stop the killing”. He also wrote a letter to a Chicago newspaper, proclaiming his and his spouse’s innocence.

This letter in the end led authorities to find him in New York City.

During his trial, it was steered that Lewis meant to divert the eye of the authorities in the direction of his spouse’s former employer, whose account quantity he used in the letter as the vacation spot for the funds. Lewis was discovered guilty of extortion and acquired a 10-year prison sentence.

Following his release in 1995, he and his spouse relocated to Massachusetts. In 2010, Lewis consented to present his DNA samples to the authorities.

However, no matches had been discovered with the samples retrieved from the contaminated bottles. After collaborating in the Netflix documentary, Lewis died at the age of 76 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts home in July 2023.

Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders is streaming on Netflix.