The cold case
Elaborate sting operation raised hopes for a breakthrough
Nearly a quarter-century after the Tylenol murders, retired FBI agent Roy Lane Jr. received an unexpected phone call from Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the bureau’s Chicago office.
It seemed investigative reporter Bob Arya had been looking into the 1982 case since joining CLTV, then a regional 24-hour news station, more than a decade earlier. And now he believed he had solved it.
Grant really didn’t know much about the poisonings, but he thought it was worth hearing what Arya had to say. He asked Lane and a few others to meet with the reporter.
Lane agreed immediately, his desire to close the case still burning strong. He had helped put away judges, mobsters, aldermen and even a former Illinois governor during his legendary 26-year career, but the Tylenol killer had always been beyond his reach.
On a spring morning in 2006, Arya walked into a conference room at the FBI field office in Lisle and presented his case to several current and former agents.
“I went through it like I was presenting a case to the grand jury,” Arya said. “It was one of the most important moments in my life.”
Arya didn’t think the killer was James Lewis, the man convicted of attempted extortion after the poisonings. He also had ruled out Roger Arnold, the wannabe chemist who caught the interest of a few Chicago detectives.
Instead, he offered an entirely new suspect. The Tribune is not naming the man because law enforcement has never charged him or seriously considered him as a person of interest.
After Arya left, the agents talked. They didn’t think the award-winning journalist had the right guy — the group thought the evidence in the dormant investigation still pointed at someone else — but Grant’s interest had been piqued.
“This would make a perfect cold case,” Grant said he told his agents. Everyone agreed — especially Lane. Before retiring in 1996, Lane had kept tabs on Lewis, the man the Tylenol task
Listen to the podcast: “Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders” is hosted by Tribune reporters Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair through a partnership with At Will Media in association with audio-chuck. Find all eight episodes on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
THE STING
force considered to be its prime suspect. Lane and former federal prosecutor Jeremy Margolis had even flown to Boston in 1985 to interview Lewis’ wife, LeAnn, while Lewis was serving time in prison for attempted extortion.
Lane and Margolis met LeAnn Lewis at her apartment building one evening as she returned home from work. Lane told the Tribune she expressed a willingness to talk but wanted her husband’s permission first.
After raising the agent’s hopes, she called Lane back a few days later and said she wouldn’t be able to speak with him after all.
James Lewis “didn’t want me to interview her,” Lane said. “And then an attorney called me and said: ‘Don’t go near LeAnn.’ And that’s kind of how that ended.” Until Arya spoke up in 2006. The FBI wasn’t the only agency newly intrigued by the Tylenol case. About six months after Arya met with the FBI, an Arlington Heights police detective was paged to his department’s lobby. A woman was waiting there with an explosive story: She believed her ex-husband was the Tylenol murderer and responsible for the deaths of three people — Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus — in that town.
Detective Scott Winkelman began reading up on the case and quickly ruled out the ex-husband, sources said. Beyond a general disdain for her ex, the woman’s suspicions were based on the fact that the man knew where the killer’s first victim, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman, of Elk Grove Village, had lived with her parents.
It turned out that lots of people in town knew where the Kellermans once lived. The community wasn’t that big, and the Tribune had even printed the family’s exact address in the paper in cooperation with the FBI and her parents.
The more Winkelman dug, though, the more interested in the case he became, sources told the Tribune. But there was a problem: The records, the evidence, the institutional memory — they were scattered across the various agencies involved in the original task force.
Winkelman reached out to the FBI for help. His newfound interest dovetailed perfectly with Grant’s desire to take a fresh look at the case.
“It all came together,” Lane said.
The second Tylenol task force was born.
The new law enforcement team — which would informally call itself Task Force 2 — had assembled by the early weeks of 2007, with detectives from several local municipalities joining FBI agents and an Illinois State Police investigator.
The Chicago Police Department, which had clashed with the bureau during the original investigation, agreed to cooperate with the reboot. Records show the department assigned two detectives from its cold case unit to take another look at the death of Paula Prince, the only Chicago resident to die from tainted Tylenol.
The FBI has declined to comment on Task Force 2 and denied requests for records related to its work. Winkelman — the former Arlington Heights detective who would become the driving force behind the investigation — told the Tribune he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
The Tribune traced the team’s efforts through sealed court documents, an undercover recording, available police records and interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the investigation. Reporters also have reviewed a confidential presentation given to prosecutors in 2012, a slideshow that ends with the task force asking that witnesses be called before a grand jury.
As Task Force 2 began its work, James Lewis was in a Massachusetts jail awaiting trial on charges that he kidnapped and raped his neighbor amid a 2004 business dispute. Grant said those allegations strengthened his commitment to reexamining the Tylenol murders.
“In my calculation, he was an ongoing threat,” Grant told the Tribune. “He’s out there and his still being a threat to people concerned me. … That’s not to say he’s a killer.”
The charges against Lewis were dropped in 2007 after the woman declined to testify against him. Lewis, who always maintained his innocence, was released after more than three years behind bars.
Lane was the only member of the original Tylenol task force to play an active role in the new investigation. He initially had been asked only to introduce another FBI agent to LeAnn Lewis and let his colleague take it from there.
But that role quickly expanded. Around the time Lewis was released from jail, investigators had launched an elaborate sting operation to get him talking, according to records reviewed by the Tribune. And Lane knew Lewis well, having met with him several times in 1983 while Lewis awaited sentencing for trying to extort money from the company that made Tylenol.
For the sting, records show, Lane introduced Lewis and his wife to a woman Lane called Sherry Nichols, saying she was an investigative journalist working on a book about the Tylenol murders.
In reality, the woman was an undercover FBI agent. Her name was not Sherry Nichols.
Crafting a story reminiscent of Arya’s meeting with FBI agents in 2006, Lane told Lewis that Nichols had done copious research on the case and firmly believed someone else was responsible for the killings. With Lewis’ help, Lane said, she could clear his name.
Broke and never afraid to engage with law enforcement, Lewis jumped at the opportunity.
“Sounded like a great idea,” Lewis later wrote on his website. “I had endured nearly 30 years of being publicly vilified in the press worldwide as the prime Tylenol mass murder suspect.”
Lewis, who declined to be interviewed for this series, wrote extensively about the sting on his website. Lane would not discuss details of the undercover operation but he told the Tribune Lewis’ account was about “50%” accurate.
In a brief interaction with a Tribune reporter in August, Lewis disputed that description.
“It’s absolutely, very carefully, 100% correct,” Lewis said.
A QUANDARY
Lane and “Sherry Nichols” met with the Lewises more than five dozen times between April 2007 and November 2008, records show. The agents spoke with James and LeAnn both separately and together. Behavioral analysts worked with the team throughout the 19-month sting, offering advice on how to stroke Lewis’ ego and make him comfortable enough to share his thoughts on the poisonings, sources said.
During the operation, Lane helped Lewis with a novel he had begun in jail a few years earlier. Titled “Poison! The Doctor’s Dilemma,” it’s the story of a brilliant doctor from rural Missouri who works with a law enforcement task force to find a rogue government employee named Agua Naranja — Spanish for “orange water” — and figure out who has poisoned underground water supplies.
The book, which Lewis self-published in 2010, opens with a mass poisoning in Chicago and the doctor testifying at the same federal courthouse where Lewis’ attempted extortion trial was held.
It is dedicated to his wife, with gratitude for her generosity and understanding, and their daughter, “Toni, who never lived to see this book.”
According to Lewis’ website, Nichols gave him money to buy a new laptop. He said the agents also treated him and his wife to nice dinners, encouraging them to drink even though they are self-described teetotalers.
“Jim was very impressed,” said Roger Nicholson, a community access television host who befriended Lewis around 2007. “You know, he was being wined and dined and treated like a dignitary. That’s what the attraction was … but Roy was pulling a number on him.”
Lewis describes Nichols paying for the couple to take a weeklong vacation to Missouri, as well, according to his website. Sources told the Tribune that undercover officers from Task Force 2 trailed the couple the entire time, following them as they did research for Lewis’ novel in Kansas City and in his small hometown outside Joplin.
As part of the operation, Nichols and Lane also went to New York with James and LeAnn Lewis at separate times, visiting the hotels where they had lived, the offices where she had worked and the library where Lewis had been arrested for the Tylenol extortion letter in December 1982.
In 2007, the foursome traveled to Chicago and visited, among other places, the condo building where Prince lived and the Old Town Walgreens where she purchased her poisoned bottle. After he left the pharmacy, Lewis told the undercover agents he had a sense of “deja vu,” police records