Daily Herald opinion: Tylenol suspect's death is a reminder of authorities' determinaton to solve cold cases
This editorial is a consensus opinion of the Daily Herald Editorial Board.
If, as some investigators hope, Leann Lewis is willing and able to provide new information now that her husband James has died, that could mean much more than a capstone on a mystery that has haunted the suburbs - and beyond - for 40 years.
It would bring some measure of comfort and relief to families from Elk Grove Village, Arlington Heights, Lisle, Winfield and Elmhurst who lost loved ones when cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were secreted into bottles on local store shelves, killing seven people.
For years, James Lewis, who served more than 12 years in prison for trying to extort $1 million from Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson after the killings, has been the primary suspect in the poisonings, but authorities have never found sufficient hard evidence to bring charges against him for the murders. With his death Sunday at the age of 76 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, authorities believe his widow may at last be persuaded to provide some information that would conclusively identify the killer and let them put this case to rest.
If that happens, it will satisfy the curiosity of people around the country who remember the tense days and weeks in 1982 when the killings occurred, have studied the case's impact on product packaging or just followed descriptions of the mystery at every disappointing five- or 10-year anniversary. But it will also provide some peace for family members who lost so much, as well as reassurance to many more like them awaiting answers to long unsolved death or missing-person investigations, reassurance that their loved ones are not forgotten and that their community has stuck with them to help find answers that tear at them every day.
This is the value of the so-called "cold case" investigation. More than just filling out the details of an incomplete story, these investigations affirm our humanity and our respect for human life.
"It's not a closed case. It's a cold case," retired Elk Grove Village police chief Chuck Walsh told our Christopher Placek Monday - repeating a sentiment he used on the 40th anniversary of the killings last September and perhaps many times before and since. It's a sentiment that has brought closure to countless families - to the extent there can ever be closure in such situations - and hope to countless more who cling to every new thread that may help provide answers about a slain or missing daughter, son, brother, sister, father, mother or friend.
On the day her daughter Kristy's killer was sentenced in 2018, 33 years after the Glen Ellyn teenager was murdered, Sandra Wessleman offered words that reflect the importance of getting such answers.
"What an amazing day," she said. "I can go home today and try to be a real person, whatever that is. It's a joyful day and a very sad day."
Such a day has been elusive for more than four decades for the families of the seven men, women and children killed in the Tylenol case. Perhaps it now may be at hand, or at least nearer. But to whatever degree that can be conceived, for them or the many unfortunate families who share their peculiar sense of loss, we owe gratitude to the various detectives, attorneys and other authorities who refuse to consider such cases mere mysteries and make them missions to offer some relief to real human suffering.