The $1 million extortion letter that named a killer — and the man who wrote it

Seven people in the Chicago area died in late September and early October 1982.

They had taken Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with potassium cyanide.

Then a letter arrived at Johnson & Johnson.

It demanded $1 million to "stop the killing."

The letter was a documented object, a piece of paper that promised an end to the deaths.

It was traced to James W. Lewis, a man with a history of fraud and tax evasion.

Lewis was arrested in December 1982 in New York.

He was charged with extortion, not murder.

The charge was about the letter, not the poison.

He was convicted on that charge and served 12 years in federal prison.

Whether Lewis actually committed the murders is not established by the record.

The letter was real. The demand was real. The link to the killings was never made.

Lewis admitted to writing the letter, but he called it a hoax meant to embarrass his former employer.

He was never linked to the actual poisonings.

The extortion was his crime. The deaths remained someone else's.

That is the weight of the letter: it named a price to stop the dying, and its author was never charged with the dying itself.

The record holds the letter. The record does not hold the killer.

THE VICTIMS AND THE POISON

The first victim was a 12-year-old girl.

She took the medication for a cold on September 29, 1982.

She died that day.

That same day, a 27-year-old postal worker died after taking Tylenol.

His brother and sister-in-law died within days.

They took capsules from the same bottle.

It happened at a memorial gathering.

Three more victims followed.

All seven died in the Chicago area between late September and early October.

The deaths were traced to five separate bottles.

Each bottle was purchased from a different store.

Ordinary people bought Tylenol at ordinary stores.

The Cook County Medical Examiner's office determined the cause of death.

Dr. Robert Stein led that office.

The cause was cyanide poisoning.

Potassium cyanide had been placed inside the capsules.

The bottles came from different manufacturing lots.

That meant the cyanide was inserted after the bottles left the factory.

Likely on store shelves.

The randomness is the horror.

A 12-year-old girl with a cold.

A postal worker on a normal day.

A family grieving at a memorial.

The record does not name the exact stores or the purchase dates.

The names of the first two victims are not in the record for this article.

What is documented: five bottles, seven deaths, one poison.

What is not established: how the poison got onto those shelves.

The deaths were someone else's crime.

The letter named a price to stop them.

The letter's author was never charged with them.