Catch me if you can
For the authorities and their target, James Lewis, the game was on
There is a PowerPoint presentation outlining all the evidence in the case, but it’s not shown during the July videoconference on the Tylenol murders.
Everyone on the call already has seen it.
The presentation includes a section on the drawings made by the attempted extortionist shortly before his sentencing. The sketches depict the many ways a person could fill Tylenol capsules with cyanide.
The drawings are extraordinarily detailed.
So detailed, in fact, the U.S. Parole Commission became the first — and, so far, only — government agency to declare someone responsible for the Tylenol murders.
The task force investigating the Tylenol killings doubted that James Lewis would be reckless enough to stay in Manhattan after mailing an extortion letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to “stop the killing.”
Lewis, however, kept sending letters from New York in the fall of 1982 with a catch-meif-you-can swagger that stunned investigators. He wrote to President Ronald Reagan, the Chicago Tribune, the Kansas City Star, the FBI and his wife’s parents in Missouri.
Initially, investigators had viewed Lewis as a heartless opportunist determined to profit off the poisonings that killed seven people, including a child. But their perspective changed after learning he had been charged in — but not convicted of — a gruesome slaying in Kansas City four years earlier.
“It is an important lead,” Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner, coordinator of the multiagency task force investigating the Tylenol murders, told reporters at an Oct. 14 news conference. “Yes, this has great significance.”
Chicago police, meanwhile, had homed in on a man named Roger Arnold, a home
chemist with access to cyanide and a penchant for telling tall tales. Authorities had enough evidence to charge the disgruntled grocery store dockhand with misdemeanor weapons violations unrelated to the poisonings, but detectives planned to keep digging.
The task force wasn’t interested, though. On the same day of Fahner’s announcement, another task force spokesman publicly eliminated Arnold from suspicion, without consulting Chicago police.
As state and federal investigators launched what was then the largest manhunt in U.S. history, they were almost entirely focused on Lewis, a 36-year-old Missouri man with an alleged history of vindictive and violent behavior. The chase was the start of a peculiar game of cat-and-mouse between Lewis and law enforcement that has lasted for decades and, in many ways, has come to define the case.
The letters Lewis sent often referenced details about the Tylenol investigation and included photocopied newspaper articles. The mailings proclaimed his innocence, questioned the business dealings of his nemesis and taunted the Tylenol task force — sometimes all in the same paragraph.
The Tribune was his first choice in communication; he sent three letters to the newspaper during the manhunt, all handwritten with a black felt-tip pen.
“I hope the law finds whoever poisoned these capsules and I would demand capital punishment,” Lewis wrote in a letter to the newspaper. “But what are the chances in the hands of the FBI and Fahner’s Fumblers!!”
It was these very letters, authorities told the Tribune, that ultimately helped lead to his capture.
THE HUNT IS ON
By the time Fahner publicly identified James Lewis as the extortion letter’s author, investigators had figured out much of his troubled background from his friends, co-workers and a pile of police records.
They knew he had been charged with killing Raymond West after the retired delivery man’s dismembered body had been found in the attic of his Kansas City home in 1978. They knew that the case had been dropped because of a procedural error and that, three years later, he spearheaded an elaborate credit card scam.
And they knew Lewis had fled to Chicago, where he and his wife, LeAnn, spent the next nine months living under the names Robert and Nancy Richardson before abruptly leaving about three weeks before the Tylenol poisonings.
What authorities didn’t know, however, was where they went.
The couple had told their Chicago friends they were moving to Amarillo, Texas, to be closer to family. But the extortion letter had been sent Oct. 1 from Manhattan. The following day, a note was mailed from New York to the White House that threatened more poisonings if President Reagan raised taxes as part of a deal with Congress to reduce spending.
Both letters were written as if they came from travel agency owner Frederick Miller McCahey, the former boss of LeAnn Lewis. James Lewis despised McCahey, who he believed drove the travel business into bankruptcy and stiffed his employees on their final paycheck.
The task force knew James Lewis was behind the letters, and initially it seemed doubtful he would stay in Manhattan. Perhaps he had traveled to New York with the sole purpose of mailing the letters. Agents scoured the couple’s former Lakeview apartment but found no clues as to where they might have gone.
Authorities were frustrated with the case and, at times, with one another. It began to show in the press.
Within a week of learning their true identities, Fahner called James and LeAnn Lewis “prime suspects” in the murders but cautioned that investigators lacked direct evidence connecting them to the poisonings.
“They are not simply wanted for extortion,” Fahner told reporters at an Oct. 18 media briefing. “They are wanted in connection with the Tylenol killings.”
The statement led to an exchange of words with Richard Brzeczek, the young and personable Chicago police superintendent whose department had a strained relationship with Fahner’s task force. Brzeczek publicly downplayed the possibility of Lewis being the killer, angering state and federal investigators.
“We have no real leads, no prime suspects, no tentative suspects,” Brzeczek said at a news conference. “We have no mediocre suspects. We have no suspects period.”
Brzeczek told the Tribune he didn’t make the statement to embarrass Fahner, who he considered an outstanding lawyer. He said he just wanted to be honest with people.
“I just don’t want anyone to have false hope,” he said earlier this year.
With their differences now firmly fixed in public view, U.S. Attorney Dan Webb whistled
Fahner, Brzeczek, state police director James Zagel, assistant U.S. attorney Jeremy Margolis and a few other top-ranking law enforcement officials into his office. The men all knew and respected one another, having worked and socialized together for years.
This, however, promised to be a difficult meeting.
Two weeks earlier, Brzeczek had told reporters that police had a better chance of finding “a gray snowflake in Greenland” than finding the Tylenol killer. And now he was publicly contradicting Fahner’s statements on Lewis.
Webb reminded the men that they all had the same goal.
“I gave my team speech,” Webb told the Tribune. “The public’s confidence in how law enforcement responded to this murder scheme was critical. Nationwide, we were under a microscope. We had to be together and we had to work as a team.”
The tension eased, at least for a moment, when someone tipped off authorities that LeAnn Lewis had recently worked a temp job in Manhattan under the alias Nancy Richardson.
After three weeks of perfect attendance, she suddenly stopped showing up at her bookkeeping gig. A man who identified himself as her husband later called the office and reported that she was too ill to come to work. She never returned, not even to pick up her final paycheck.
Her disappearance came after authorities announced that James Lewis was wanted in connection with the extortion letter. A separate warrant was issued for LeAnn on a misdemeanor charge of using a fake Social Security number to work in Chicago.
Records show the couple hastily left their cheap New York hotel on Oct. 14, despite having paid through the 18th.
Then they vanished.
from a cash station camera near the entrance of the drugstore where victim Paula Prince had bought a tainted Tylenol bottle. On WBBM-Ch. 2, Walter Jacobson broke the story that one of the images showed a bearded man seeming to look at the pretty blond flight attendant while she shopped.
When asked about the man’s likeness to Lewis, Fahner told reporters at the time that it was unclear whether he was Lewis.
Sources recently told the Tribune the man in the photo was quickly eliminated from suspicion after he came forward and denied he was the killer, saying his wife had sent him to the store to buy toothpaste. But to this day, some people continue to perpetuate the myth that Lewis appears in the infamous image.
In late October 1982, a tipster reported seeing the Lewises in Miami, renewing doubts as to whether they were still in New York. Acting on information from LeAnn Lewis’ parents, authorities alerted medical centers in Florida that she might seek treatment for a possible kidney infection.
Everyone knew it was a long shot, but the options were limited.
“Literally we were getting 500 people a day saying ‘I just saw him in Alaska in a fishing bar’ or, you know, everywhere,” said retired FBI Special Agent Grey Steed, who was the task force’s liaison in Chicago for the manhunt. “Back in those days, you didn’t have ‘America’s Most Wanted.’ You didn’t have 24-hour television. You didn’t even have to show your ID to get on an airplane.”
Luckily for law enforcement, James Lewis didn’t stay quiet for long.
“We do not go around killing people,” he wrote in his first letter to the Tribune, postmarked Oct. 27 in New York. “We never have and we never shall.”
His note continued: “Contrary to reports we are not armed, unless one means in the anatomical paraplegic sense. We shall never carry weapons no matter how bizarre the police and FBI reports. Domestically, weapons are for two quite similar types of mentalities: (1) criminals & (2) police. We are neither.”
On Oct. 30, Fahner urged the Lewises to turn themselves in.
“If you’re innocent, as you claim,” he said at a media briefing, “we’ll help you prove your innocence.”
Days later, Fahner lost his election bid to keep his job as attorney general. He remained the public face of the task force for two more months until leaving office early the next year.
James Lewis took credit for Fahner’s defeat in a letter to his wife’s parents a short time later.
“We think we may be able to continue similar victories,” Lewis wrote. “This is not the type of game most people can stomach. But this appears to be the only game in town.”
Lewis sent at least two letters that November to LeAnn’s parents, who were cooperating with law enforcement. The messages, which have not previously been made public, include Lewis’ typical purple prose and his belief in a vast government conspiracy against him dating back to the West murder charges.
“As you know, we did not start
this mess,” he wrote. “It was started four years ago by certain government employees who violated a very sacred public trust. As for us, we are just two dumb country kids with our love for each other to keep us warm.”
Two weeks later, Lewis took a sharper tone with his in-laws, who had been quoted in media coverage of the manhunt.
“Because you love her we think you will want to read this very carefully,” he wrote. “From your point of view, LeAnn should come back to Kansas City. If you convince her to return, you shall surely guarantee that she shall loose (sic). And you will also loose. Those prospects are not pleasant. Is this your intention? We don’t think so.”
On the day Lewis mailed the letter, his father-in-law wired the couple $140 with the FBI’s knowledge. Surveillance cameras showed the Lewises picking up the money at a Western Union in Manhattan on Nov. 21, just days before their 14th wedding anniversary.
The sighting sparked a new weeklong manhunt in New York.
By this time, the task force had read enough of Lewis’ letters to the Tribune to realize that he had access to the newspaper and had been reading it during the manhunt. Investigators began leaking specific items to the Tribune in the hopes of luring him out of hiding, and the FBI began 24-hour surveillance of every New York newsstand that sold the Tribune. Both efforts proved futile.
Then Steed had an idea. Lewis had often included photocopied articles about the Tylenol case in his mailings.
Where would he go to make those copies? Steed asked himself.
“Frankly, I kicked myself that I didn’t think of it quicker,” he told the Tribune. “I called an agent in New York who was assigned to handle the leads and I said, ‘Hey, we should stake out the public library.’”
Federal agents soon swarmed the New York libraries that carried the Tribune, leaving behind copies of the FBI’s “wanted” poster with photos of the Lewises. They didn’t have to wait long before a potential sighting.
About 1 p.m. Dec. 13, a librarian working in a modest annex in midtown Manhattan spotted a clean-shaven man who resembled the bearded fugitive. He studied the photos in the poster again, then asked the senior librarian what he thought. After walking past the patron to try to get a better look, the senior librarian called the FBI.
Minutes later, agents headed to the library with a New York police escort that took them right to the doorstep. Officers covered the exits as agents rushed to the library’s fourth floor.
The librarian pointed out the man, whose back was turned to the agents as he used a reference book to write out the mailing addresses of major newspapers. The agents cautiously approached, with their guns holstered. The man did not have identification and refused to provide his name, but there was no doubt in their minds.
“He had a 20-carat stare,” said a retired FBI agent who was part of the arrest. “He was strange.”
James Lewis’ life on the run was over.
TAKEN INTO CUSTODY
At the local FBI offices, Lewis was fingerprinted and photographed. He declined to sign a waiver of his Miranda rights, but he agreed to talk to the arresting agents’ boss.
Lewis described the couple’s movements since arriving in New York in early September 1982, a three-month period also detailed in more than a thousand pages of FBI records and court documents obtained by the Tribune.
After arriving by train on Sept. 5, they moved into a cheap hotel in midtown Manhattan. Co-workers at LeAnn’s new bookkeeping job told agents she said she moved to New York because her husband, a computer consultant, had a good business opportunity there.
James Lewis did not find a steady job in New York. He seemed to spend most of his time reading newspapers and financial magazines. He waited outside his wife’s work twice a day so they could have lunch and, later, walk home together.
When the manhunt started, the couple hid in plain sight for two months. They rented a furnished room at another flophouse under the names Edward and Carol Scott, and LeAnn eventually got a different bookkeeping job. Lewis told the FBI the couple even attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
Equal parts brazen and bizarre,