Authorities were sure they had Tylenol killer

Top government officials concluded 20 years ago that James W. Lewis was behind the 1982 Tylenol killings and used that belief to deny him parole on extortion charges in 1989, according to documents revealed Wednesday.

In a report for ABC 7 Chicago, ABC 7 investigative reporter and Daily Herald columnist Chuck Goudie described court records filed in connection with Lewis' 1989 request for parole while serving a 20-year sentence for attempting to extort $1 million from the makers of Tylenol. Although Lewis, now 62, confessed to the extortion attempt and has referred to himself as "the Tylenol man," he has always denied lacing the Tylenol tablets with cyanide that led to the deaths of seven people in the Northwest suburbs.

No one has ever been charged in the case, but interest was renewed last week when FBI agents raided Lewis' Cambridge, Mass., home, based, the FBI said, on new tips in the case and improved forensic technologies.

Goudie's report said the U.S. attorney for the northern district in 1989, Anton Valukas, said "the evidence which was out there would lead a rational person to conclude that Lewis was in fact the murderer."

The report said the United States Parole Commission was about to grant Lewis parole in 1989, but stopped when Valukas and the federal prosecutor who sent Lewis to prison, Jeremy Margolis, wrote to say that Lewis had committed "one of the most heinous and despicable crimes that the Northern District of Illinois has experienced."

Margolis said that after his conviction, Lewis had provided authorities with manuscripts and "reams of documents" speculating on how someone could have loaded the cyanide into the Tylenol capsules. Valukas also provided the parole board with a copy of a letter written by Lewis to President Reagan threatening to kill him with a remote-controlled airplane and kill more people with Tylenol laced with cyanide, Goudie reported.

Lewis appealed the denial of his parole, but the appeals court upheld the parole board saying, "The record provides a rational basis for the commission's conclusion that Lewis was the Tylenol murderer."

Despite the strength of their beliefs, authorities apparently never had enough hard evidence to link Lewis directly to the crimes.

"There's a difference between saying there is a rational basis for concluding that someone participated in a crime and proving beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law by competent evidence that they, in fact, were the murderer," Valukas said.

And Lewis' attorney, Mike Monico, said authorities never showed him any evidence linking his client to the killings.

"Just the opposite," Monico said in the ABC 7 report. "... that from the evidence, it seemed difficult for one person to have done this."

Lewis won his parole in 1995, after serving more than 12 years in prison.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago said authorities here have begun poring through a computer and boxes of files seized from Lewis' home last week.

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=271502">FBI says it's going through Tylenol evidence <span class="date"> [2/11/09]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>