The extortionist
A letter looked like a break in the case. The sender had a disturbing past.
The law enforcement officials gathered to discuss the Tylenol murders in July 2022 don’t need to discuss Raymond West’s death and dismemberment.
There’s no point, really.
Illinois authorities — including two people on the videoconference call — had traveled to Kansas City about 15 years ago to persuade Missouri prosecutors to reopen the 1978 death investigation.
The effort failed.
Raymond West’s death, however, would be forever tied to the Tylenol investigation.
Without it, authorities may never have identified their prime suspect.
With seven people dead and the country panicking over the possibility of additional poisonings, a letter began making its way from Manhattan to Tylenol’s manufacturer in Pennsylvania.
It arrived at the McNeil Pharmaceuticals mailroom on Oct. 6, 1982, after a brief stop at the headquarters of Johnson & Johnson, its parent company in New Brunswick, N.J.
John Kopich, then a 27-year-old clerk looking to work his way up the corporate ladder, sat down at his desk that morning and dug into a pile of letters. It was his job to sort through the mail addressed generically to McNeil and figure out where to forward it.
Things were already tense in the office because of the murders. The public no longer trusted the country’s top-selling pain reliever, the company had recalled all Tylenol capsules and the manufacturing plant had been shut down indefinitely. The McNeil campus was crawling with police, FBI and Food and Drug Administration agents questioning employees about the poisonings. No one knew what the future held.
As Kopich sifted through the mail, most of it customer complaints or requests for free samples, he picked up an envelope
addressed to “Johnson & Johnson.” He opened it and read the letter inside.
Then he read it again.
And again.
Penned in neat capital letters on a single sheet of lined legal paper, the message promised to “stop the killing” if Johnson & Johnson wired $1 million to a Chicago-based bank account. It would be easy enough to kill again, the writer said, given he had spent less than $50 so far on the poisonings.
“And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill,” he wrote. “Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little. And there will be no time to take counter measures.”
A shaken Kopich brought the letter to his supervisor, who took it to the company’s security office, federal records show. From there, it went to the FBI and then to the Illinois-based police task force, which found enough clues in the unsigned letter to connect it to a man named Robert Richardson.
“The letter was much bigger than we thought,” Kopich said. “From then on, nothing was the same.”
Richardson and his wife had lived briefly in Chicago before abruptly leaving about three weeks before the poisonings. Friends told the FBI that Richardson — who worked a couple of temp jobs while living on the North Side — fancied himself a writer and was immensely proud that the Chicago Tribune had published one of his essays in its opinion section.
Titled “A Slice of Chicago Life,” the piece was essentially a detailed list of things the author saw while waiting for a bus at State and Madison. Investigators found the essay to be of no value to their case, but the photo of Richardson that accompanied it certainly was.
On Oct. 13, the task force distributed the photo to the media and announced a federal arrest warrant had been issued for Richardson. Though he was wanted for attempted extortion, officials said they had not ruled him out as a potential suspect in the killings.
With the country still consumed by the Tylenol murders, the networks aired the latest development on the evening news. Kansas City police Sgt. David Barton, a leader on the department’s SWAT team, was among those tuning in after a long day.
He watched through halfclosed eyes as anchor Dan Rather introduced a story about the extortion letter. Then the picture of Richardson from the Tribune flashed onto the screen. Barton jumped off the couch. “Goddamn it,” he recalls yelling. “That’s Jim Lewis!”
Barton called one of his FBI contacts. Before Rather finished his broadcast that night, Barton was on his way to a secret location where he had previously worked with the FBI on a multi-agency task force dealing with organized crime and white-collar offenses.
He wouldn’t see his family again for a week.
At the secret location, Barton told his commander about James Lewis’ disturbing history, which included a murder charge that was later dropped and an outstanding warrant connected to an elaborate financial scam. The last time Barton saw Lewis, Barton was searching Lewis’ home as part of an investigation into credit card fraud.
The FBI provided pictures of Richardson and his wife, who went by Nancy. The agents pressed Barton, asking if he was really sure these people were Jim and LeAnn Lewis. Robert Richardson had a beard in the photograph, but Lewis was cleanshaven on his Missouri driver’s license.
“Trust me,” Barton recalled telling the federal agents. “It’s them.”
Barton and two other Kansas City officers flew to Chicago the next morning, having purchased a separate seat for two suitcases filled with evidence and documents related to James Lewis.
Before the flight took off, however, the FBI called Chicago police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek to ask a favor. The Kansas City police chief at the time, Norman Caron, seemed to despise the federal agency so deeply that he was refusing to turn over the Lewis records. The bureau wanted Brzeczek to talk him into it.
Brzeczek obliged, persuading Caron to give the documents and other evidence to Chicago detectives. Caron agreed on one condition: Brzeczek could not let the feds see them.
The superintendent promised he wouldn’t share the files — and then promptly turned them over to the FBI, records show.
“Yeah, I did,” Brzeczek said, chuckling at the memory 40 years later. “Caron hated the FBI like somebody hates the devil.”
When Barton and his fellow Kansas City detectives landed at O’Hare International Airport, a Chicago police lieutenant drove them directly to the task force bunker in nearby Des Plaines. They were ushered into the briefing room, where the investigators formed a circle around Barton.
And he told them everything he knew about James William Lewis.
Lewis, now 76, declined to be interviewed at length for this series, but in a brief conversation with a Tribune reporter in late August he denied being responsible for the Tylenol killings.
He did not respond to requests for comment on his background or his interactions with law enforcement in Missouri.
Lewis’ life before the extortion letter, however, is chronicled in more than 5,000 pages of court transcripts, parole documents and psychological assessments maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration and obtained by the Tribune. Together, the records paint a portrait of a convicted
con man whose life, at times, has been driven by vindictiveness, trauma and a steadfast belief that he’s always the smartest person in the room.
Born on Aug. 8, 1946, in Memphis, Tennessee, Lewis was the youngest of seven children. His birth name was Theodore, after his father, Theodore Elmer Wilson. His parents were “poor, irresponsible” and ill-equipped to care for their children, according to federal court documents.
Two of his brothers died young, one possibly from pneumonia. The other died after eating “two-year-old tomatoes during his first year of life” and receiving no medical intervention. After his father deserted the family when Lewis was a year old, his mother, Opal, moved the children to Joplin, Missouri, to be closer to her own mother. But she still struggled to provide a stable home and later abandoned the children in the summer of 1948.
The children survived on their own for about two weeks before a local grocer contacted authorities after noticing Lewis’ 9-year-old sister stealing milk, records show. The children were placed in an orphanage, and a local couple, Floyd and Charlotte Lewis, adopted Theodore.
They renamed the 2-year-old boy James William Lewis.
The Lewises raised him as an only child on a 20-acre farm near Joplin. Lewis would later describe his adoptive parents as loving and supportive, according to records. His father died of a heart attack when Lewis was 12, and his mother, who worked at a shirt factory, remarried two years later.
The records describe Lewis’ adolescent years as “unremarkable.” He received average grades in high school and played in a band but otherwise was “somewhat of a loner.”
The first documented sign of psychological trouble came in summer 1966 when he was 19. According to the records, the teen went missing for about two days that June and was found in a shallow pond “apparently trying to drown himself.”
He was brought back to his family’s home, where he demanded access to his stepfather’s gun cabinet. When his stepfather refused to give him the key, court records say, Lewis violently attacked the older man and broke several of his ribs. As his parents fled their farm during the outburst, Lewis threatened them with an ax, the records state.
Lewis was arrested on assault charges and spent three weeks in the county jail, where authorities said he took 36 aspirin in a suicide attempt. The charges were dropped after Lewis was committed to a state psychiatric hospital on June 24, 1966, according to federal records.
The documents also state that Lewis spoke about planning “the
murder of a girlfriend’s husband and the murder of his parents” during his hospitalization.
In the decades that followed, Lewis would repeatedly deny attacking his stepfather. “My parents were good and loving people,” he told a judge in 1984. He insisted that “his commitment for treatment was merely a ruse he perpetrated in concert with his parents in order to evade the draft,” records show.
He also denied ever expressing homicidal thoughts or trying to harm himself, and maintained he had doctored his hospital records to suggest severe mental illness in order to obtain a college scholarship.
A federal probation officer told the same judge that many of Lewis’ explanations defied logic.
“The defendant’s belief in such an elaborate scheme and his inability to acknowledge mental health problems may have been the beginning of a life dominated by manipulation, fraud and con-artistry,” the officer wrote in one court document.
Federal records indicate Lewis returned to the state hospital in 1967 after a disastrous first semester at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, when he failed several courses. Lewis later denied being hospitalized more than once.
While attending college, he met a fellow student named LeAnn Miller, a young woman with an upper-middle class upbringing and a talent for crunching numbers, federal records show. They married in Kansas City in November 1968, and LeAnn gave birth to their only child, a girl named Toni Ann, seven months later.
Born with Down syndrome, Toni Ann had learned about 30 words by the time she was 5 years old. Her father had taught her most of them, a reflection of what one acquaintance described as a “clinical” interest in his daughter’s development.
Jim and LeAnn Lewis, meanwhile, opened a small bookkeeping and tax preparation business, called Lewis & Lewis, along a busy road in midtown Kansas City. Jim Lewis helped out there, but multiple sources told the Tribune his wife did most of the work.
Records maintained by the National Archives suggest her father, a retired communications company vice president, wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement.
“The father indicated (Lewis) initially impresses people as an outgoing and friendly individual, but soon alienates most people by trying to be a ‘know-it-all,’” the records state. “He resented the fact that his daughter ‘carried the load’ at Lewis & Lewis Tax Service while the defendant sat around ‘thinking.’ ”
While LeAnn Lewis worked, Toni Ann often played in the front window and waved to passersby. One of those people was Raymond West, a retired delivery man who lived in the neighborhood and took daily walks. He became cordial with her parents and, eventually, hired them to do his taxes.
By all accounts a happy child, Toni Ann had a heart defect that required surgery when she was just 3 months old. The tiny girl had another surgery at age 5 and died a short time later when the sutures used to repair the hole in her heart tore apart, records show.
Nearly eight years after her death, FBI agents working the Tylenol case interviewed Toni Ann’s doctors and caretakers, as well as the couple’s acquaintances, about her parents’ reaction to her death. Most said the couple accepted the death and never faulted anyone, according to sealed records obtained by the Tribune.
“Jim was loving with Toni,” a FBI report from 1982 states. “He never showed anger about Toni’s condition or blamed anyone.”
A later federal investigation located a hospital autopsy for Toni Ann that showed the polypropylene sutures that tore were sold under the brand name Prolene, according to records reviewed by the Tribune. Johnson & Johnson trademarked Prolene in 1968, and the product is still used in cardiac bypass surgeries today.
About three years after Toni Ann’s death, the Lewises befriended Percy Menzies, a newly arrived immigrant who had been a pharmaceutical executive in his native India. They helped Menzies, his wife and their special-needs son find a place to live in Kansas City and assisted the family in obtaining visas for permanent residency.
Jim Lewis tried to launch a business with Menzies and a mutual friend, going so far as to file incorporation papers with the state. The company, Aljeev International, planned to sell pill presses in developing countries, though Lewis also wanted to import sporting equipment and semiprecious stones.
THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM
Menzies told the Tribune he quickly realized Lewis’ ambitions dwarfed his abilities and his bank account.
“He definitely has some issues,” Menzies said. “That feeling of grandiosity and all that. … He was trying to punch way above his weight.”
The personal and professional relationship between the Lewises and Menzies soon soured. Menzies, who went on to a successful career with DuPont Pharmaceuticals and now runs a rehabilitation center he founded in the St. Louis area, said he couldn’t recall what caused the final rift. He said he just remembers feeling relieved to have Jim Lewis out of his life.
Shortly after their brief friendship ended, Lewis began spending a lot of time at Raymond West’s home — much to West’s displeasure, according to police records.
The 72-year-old West, who had never married, looked after people in his neighborhood and kept the rose bushes in front of his home perfectly pruned. He would read the newspaper on his front porch each day, then put it aside and take a bundle to a nearby florist each week to reuse.
He turned a bedroom in his home into a music room where he would sit in an old green lawn chair and listen to albums for hours. He collected kitschy Avon decanters — glass bottles that came in various shapes, such as a race car, a bald eagle or a Victorian lady.
And he liked to drive around in an old convertible with the wind whipping through his hair. While cruising around one day, a stranger called him a hippie and yelled at him to get a haircut. West yanked off the wig he wore, showed the man his bald head, then drove away laughing.
“He was an interesting gentleman, but he kept to himself,” his cousin John West said. “He was a quiet person with regard to family and what he did. He had a lot of friends … but he was eccentric, to say the least.”
Around 6:30 p.m. on July 23, 1978, West called his friend Candy Lowe to chat. During their hourlong conversation, he talked about having an upset stomach and promised he would come out later in the week to fix her refrigerator, Lowe later told police. He also told her that James Lewis, his tax man, had been hanging around the house quite a bit lately against his wishes.
The following evening, West’s friend Charles Banker drove to West’s house and knocked on the door, which was secured with a padlock amid ongoing repairs from a massive flood. No one answered, so Banker went around back and stood on a flower pot and peered into West’s bedroom window. The bed was unmade and the sheet pulled back, but otherwise nothing was out of place.
He called the police and suggested authorities ask James Lewis about West’s whereabouts. An officer called Lewis, who told him West had gone to the Ozarks “for three or four days with his girlfriend,” according to a 1978 police memorandum obtained by the Tribune.
Banker and West had been
friends for decades, going back to the early 1940s when Banker rented a room in the house from West’s mother, Daisy. The men celebrated holidays together and spoke regularly on the phone. Banker’s daughter, Charlotte, called West “Uncle Ray” and loved to spend time with him.
Banker was adamant West did not have a girlfriend and would not leave town without telling him. Plus, West’s car was still in the garage.
Worried about his friend, Banker called West’s number repeatedly, but no one answered. When he drove back to the home two days later, the bedroom window shade had been pulled down and he could no longer see inside, according to the police memorandum.
And a note was now taped to the front door, stating that West had gone to Ozarks for a few days and to contact “Jim” for further information. It was written on “Lewis & Lewis” stationery, according to the memo.
Banker called the police again. They then forced their way into the house.
Once inside, they found a second note lying on the coffee table.
“Please don’t disturb until after 1 pm, sleeping late,” it stated. The note was signed “Raymond.”
Banker told police the message
did not match West’s handwriting and West only used “Raymond” on official paperwork. For anything else, he always wrote “Ray.”
Authorities searched the house with Banker, but nothing seemed out of place. Banker bought two new padlocks and resecured the front and garage doors after police left.
Lewis drove up to the house while Banker was attaching a hasp to the front door, police records state. He ran onto the porch and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”
“He could tell Lewis was very mad but he did not say anything else to him,” the police report states. “Lewis was standing close to him and breathing heavily.”
Lewis eventually drove away and Banker went to Park National Bank down the street to see if there had been any activity on West’s account. The vice president told him the bank was refusing to cover a $5,000 check allegedly signed by Raymond West because they thought it was a forgery. West, who was tight with his money, never wrote a check for more than $100 without telling the bank first, records show.
The check was dated July 23, 1978 — the last day anyone reported having contact with West. It was made out to “Lewis
& Lewis EA.”
Lewis, who had cashed the check at a different bank, told police the money was a loan from West at 8% interest, records show. He acknowledged to police that he put the note on West’s front door, saying he didn’t want people to worry about his client’s whereabouts, according to the 1978 memo.
Nearly three weeks later, Banker went back into the house and smelled a foul odor coming from the guest bedroom. Banker kicked a sheet on the floor — one that had been there since the first time he and the local authorities inspected the room — and found a large blood-like stain underneath. He called the police again.
Upon arriving, the police moved some furniture around and discovered a bullet hole in the guest bedroom wall and a 4-inchsquare stain that appeared to be blood directly below it. The green lawn chair West liked to sit on while listening to music was missing.
Authorities found the chair, with red stains on it, in a dark corner of the basement. Next to it was a green plastic trash bag containing West’s wig, his darkrimmed eyeglasses and bloodstained sheets.
Police soon discovered blood stains in the guest bedroom closet, which offered the home’s only access to the attic. They climbed up, following the overwhelming stench.
And that’s when they saw a scene so gruesome, investigators still grimace and wrinkle their noses in revulsion as they describe it nearly a half-century later.
A FINGERPRINT, A MISSED CHANCE
It was a dismembered body, rapidly decomposing in the summer heat.
The corpse’s skin had turned from its normal pale color to a putrid orange. A white sheet had been tied around the head, leaving it mummified and almost unrecognizable.
Both legs had been severed at the hip joints and placed in different parts of the attic. The torso, still dressed in a polo shirt, was covered by a trash bag and cinched around the waist with a Venetian blind-type cord. A cotton clothesline was tied around the chest.
The gold-colored Seiko watch on the body’s bloated wrist belonged to Raymond West. It had not been wound since July 23, according to police reports.
The Kansas City Police Department declined to answer questions about the case or provide records related to West’s death, citing a state law that barred their release. The Tribune, however, obtained three department memos — written in 1978, 1982 and 2007 — that detail the evidence in the case and the many ways the investigation fell apart after authorities discovered West’s body.
To begin with, it was never clear exactly how West died. Despite the bullet hole in the wall, the medical examiner couldn’t find a bullet wound on his body. The corpse was far too decomposed for the medical examiner to determine an exact cause of death.
The attic, however, contained several clues as to what happened to him afterward.
A section of rope hung from the rafters right above the attic door. A triple-pulley game hoist — a mechanism used to hang slain animals — was nestled in the insulation next to the entrance.
Investigators determined that after West died, likely from a gunshot, someone dismembered him and then yanked the body parts into the attic with the pulley. They wondered if the killer intended to come back later and dispose of the body when the interest in the man’s whereabouts had waned.
“When you have a dismembered body, it’s an attempt to hide the body in some other place. Haul it somewhere, scatter it, move it around,” said Barton, who rose to the rank of major in the Kansas City Police Department and went on to lead a federal drug task force program under three different U.S. presidents. “This was dismembered to keep it in the same place … which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Quite frankly, it was a very disorganized murder.”
Shortly after police discovered the body, Stephen Warlen, a forensic specialist with the department, began dusting for fingerprints in the attic. His attention turned quickly to the pulley,
AN INTERESTING GENTLEMAN