Idaho authorities say they have a new lead on the Tylenol murders. Illinois investigators are skeptical.
An unknown man walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise on Dec. 4, 1982.
He wore a Seiko watch, a leather belt and a bolo tie made of turquoise and silver. He carried a wallet but no identification. An envelope filled with 19 $100 bills sat inside his shirt pocket. His hair was dyed and he had a deep tan, not common in the Idaho winter.
Within hours, he died by suicide inside the church. The cause was cyanide poisoning.
The Ada County sheriff’s office has spent decades searching for the man’s identity. At a Wednesday morning news conference, they announced they’ve uncovered the identity of the “Unknown Wanderer” and that he may be connected to the 1982 Tylenol murders.
Illinois investigators, however, remain highly skeptical, pointing to a lack of physical evidence.
“The reliance on psychological profiles to prove a crime is no more reliable than the reliance of tarot cards or seeing how chicken bones line up in the dirt,” said former federal prosecutor Jeremy Margolis, who was a key player in the original task force in 1982.
Seven Chicago-area residents died after swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide in September 1982. Widely regarded as an act of domestic terrorism — a term not in the country’s vernacular at the time — the murders led to tamper-evident packaging, copycat killings and myths about tainted Halloween candy. No one has been charged with the murders. The lone suspect died in 2023.
Tim Cooper, a detective with the Ada County sheriff’s office, said he reopened the “Unknown Wanderer” case in 2019 after a member of the Sacred Heart church approached him. He combed through 17,000 missing person records but it was an engraved key located with the man’s belongings that finally helped crack the case, he said.
He connected the key to Jacksonville, Florida, using its markings and etchings. There, detectives found a property owner who had gone missing in 1982 and was declared deceased in absentia seven years later.
They compared DNA from the missing man’s brother with the man who died in the Boise church. It found that the two men had the same father, Cooper said.
Cooper said they were then able to determine the “Unknown Wanderer” was Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski.
Betkouski, an organic chemist, was by all accounts a “brilliant man” and had a documented fascination with explosives, Cooper alleged. Betkouski came from a prominent Los Angeles family.
In 1974, Betkouski sustained a traumatic brain injury that worsened his mental health problems, Cooper said. Co-workers at Flavors & Fragrances in the Jacksonville area reported him for discussing the “perfect crime” and that “cyanide could be used as a less messy means of taking one’s life,” Cooper alleged. He was later fired from the job.
“Dr. Betkouski was observed talking to himself on occasions and had fears that he was being tracked,” Cooper said.
Betkouski was terminated from another job in New Mexico in 1982, Cooper said. A fellow scientist recalled a comment from Betkouski that poison could be introduced into over-the-counter capsules. Betkouski also is believed to have taken home unauthorized material from the lab, Cooper alleged.
In recent years, detectives were able to examine Betkouski’s remaining items that his brother kept at his home in Los Angeles. In his desk, they found photos, letters, a map of Chicago and a small bottle of cyanide with a handwritten label.
Although heavily implied, officers at the news conference stopped short of labeling Betkouski as a suspect in the Tylenol murders. For one, Cooper said the cyanide they found in his desk was sodium cyanide, not potassium cyanide, which was the type used in the poisonings.
They also couldn’t prove Betkouski visited the Chicago area in 1982. The most recent pictures they found of him in the area are believed to be from December 1981, Cooper said. He also mentioned that Betkouski supposedly talked to a priest at the Boise church, but that the priest never gave an official statement to investigators.
“We have heard various things that may have been said or done in the church that day, and some are interesting,” Cooper said. “But in the end, we cannot independently verify what was or wasn’t said in the confessional on the day Dr. Betkouski died.”
The sheriff’s department also brought up forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who shared his belief that Betkouski committed the Tylenol murders. He said Betkouski’s brain injury made him more paranoid. Betkouski also allegedly indicated in a letter that “scenes of violence could produce euphoria,” which demonstrates a possible motive for such a violent event, Dietz theorized.
He said he presented the evidence to other forensic psychiatrists and criminal profilers who also labeled Betkouski as a “viable suspect.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing to have been around at the beginning in 1982, and now today in 2026 to see very likely closure,” Dietz said.
‘No credible evidence’
However, the news conference did not persuade current and former investigators with deep ties to the case, as Idaho law enforcement did not offer any physical evidence connecting Betkouski to the killings. They also downplayed the psychological profile outlined by Dietz.
“It was clear from the press conference that Idaho law enforcement, which does not regard the man as a suspect in the Tylenol murders, found no credible evidence he was involved in the Tylenol murders,” said Margolis, the former federal prosecutor.
Multiple law-enforcement sources said that Illinois authorities had compared Betkouski’s DNA with profiles found on the poisoned Tylenol bottles in recent years, but there was no match. The police task force formed in the wake of the 1982 killings also looked at the Idaho case at the time of Betkouski’s suicide but did not find any connection.
When asked at the news conference if the department was collaborating with the Arlington Heights Police Department, which has been the lead agency on the case, Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford said they communicated with them early on but that they haven’t heard from them “in quite some time now and I couldn’t tell you why.”
He said the department also shared its findings with Chicago police.
“It’s not our job to name him as a suspect. This is not an Idaho case. The Tylenol killers case remains with Chicago because that’s their job,” Clifford said. “We’ve sent everything to them and what they do with it is whatever they want to do. If they use it and rule him out then we’re all OK with that too.”
He said instead that additional details of the possible connection would be released in an Unsolved Mysteries documentary called “Unmasking the Tylenol Killer” that releases Oct. 9 on Roku.
“So I’m not going to beat around the bush with everybody, but this isn’t over, and what you’ve heard today could take months or even years to fully work through,” Clifford said.
Christopher Sefton, the acting deputy chief of the Arlington Heights Police Department, said they received and reviewed Ada County’s information and that they “remain committed to collaborating with our law enforcement partners and pursuing any viable leads as they become available.” A Chicago police spokesperson also confirmed they’d been in contact with them.
An FBI spokesperson shared a stronger stance. The spokesperson said there have been “repeated claims over the past 44 years about alleged links to the Tylenol Murders which have (remained) unsubstantiated.”
“Out of respect for the ongoing, legitimate investigation, those impacted by the tragedy, and the law enforcement partners who have provided genuine support since the start, the FBI remains the lead on investigating and releasing credible information to the public once the evidence yields a true case resolution,” the spokesperson said.
Focus on another suspect
Illinois authorities have instead long identified James Lewis as the lone suspect in the Tylenol investigation.
As the Tribune first reported, Lewis’ body was found in his downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts condominium in July 2023. He died at the age of 76 from a pulmonary thromboembolism — a blood clot in the lungs, according to Massachusetts medical examiner officials.
Though Illinois investigators looked at several potential suspects in the weeks following the murders, Lewis had been the authorities’ sole focus for decades. He did nothing to dull their interest, as he offered to help the FBI find the real killer, granted lengthy interviews to law enforcement and built a website taunting investigators.
Authorities long maintained they had a “chargeable, circumstantial case” against Lewis, but prosecutors were hesitant to seek an indictment without direct physical evidence linking Lewis to the poisonings.
Roy Lane, a retired FBI special agent who worked the case for decades, said Wednesday he remains convinced Lewis is the killer.
“I read all the (Ada County sheriff) reports,” Lane told the Tribune. “I’ll say this — the detective did do a great job developing background on (Betkouski) but there was nothing there to tie him to Tylenol.”
Lane also said the profiler information, while interesting, “doesn’t prove anything” as far as evidence in the Tylenol case.
Lewis — a convicted con man who inserted himself into the Tylenol investigation shortly after the poisonings by sending an extortion letter to the drug’s manufacturer — long denied being the killer, including in a brief Tribune interview in August 2022.
“Have you been harassed over something for 40 years that you didn’t have anything to do with?” he told the Tribune.
Lewis spent about 13 years in federal prison for attempted extortion related to that letter and for committing mail fraud in an earlier Kansas City credit card scam. He was released from prison in 1995 and joined his wife in Cambridge, where he lived the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, in the years since Lewis’ death, at least two books have been published with alternative theories behind the deadly poisonings.
In one, a California man alleges his father — an electrician living in southwest suburban Lyons at the time of the crime — made a deathbed confession in which he admitted to lacing the capsules with cyanide. His father died of pancreatic cancer in October 2023, according to Joseph Cibelli’s book, “The Tylenol Murders: A Father’s Confession to His Son.”
And, later this month, to coincide with the crime’s 44th anniversary, Mount Prospect resident Thomas A. Braun’s book, “Seven Innocents & the Tylenol Trail of Death,” will launch. Braun, a retired pharmacist, included a chapter regarding the Idaho cold case.
rjohnson@chicagotribune.com; cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com