Note: A previous report on the Tylenol murders can be found in the player above.
During a Wednesday news conference in Boise, Idaho, ADA County Sheriff’s Dept. cold case detective Tim Cooper announced that they had come up with a name for the “Unknown Wanderer,” a long unidentified death-by-suicide victim in 1982.
That man, now identified as Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski, was found dead of self-inflicted cyanide poisoning in Dec, 1982, about three months after the Chicago area Tylenol/cyanide murders. Seven people died in the Chicago metro area beginning in late September 1982 after ingesting Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that had been tampered with and filled with deadly potassium cyanide.
Although the news conference had promised to provide a new, possible connection to the Chicago-area Tylenol/cyanide murders, Cooper did not reveal any evidence that the doctor who killed himself in Boise in 1982 was the Chicago Tylenol killer.
Betkouski used a different kind of cyanide to kill himself, than what was used to kill seven people in the Chicago area, using sodium cyanide, as opposed to potassium cyanide And, most importantly, Idaho police said they had no evidence that Betkouski was even in the Chicago area during the time the Tylenol killings took place.
“We’re not naming him as a suspect and can’t put him in Chicago,” Cooper said, noting police have turned over the slim information to police in Chicago and Arlington Heights.
In a lukewarm public statement on Wednesday, Arlington Heights police said only that they had received and reviewed the Idaho information, giving no indication they found it credible. CPD officials said simply that they had been contacted by Idaho authorities “regarding its investigation to determine whether there is a connection to the Tylenol murders investigation, which remains an open cold case.”
“Utter nonsense,” is how former Illinois State Police Director Jeremy Margolis described the alleged “connection” to the Chicago Tylenol/cyanide killings. Margolis was a prominent member of the task force that worked for years to solve the killings and, after listening to the Boise news conference on Wednesday, told NBC Chicago the headline should be: authorities clear Idaho man of role in Chicago Tylenol case.
Margolis, and other top figures in the investigation of the seven Tylenol/cyanide killings, have long focused on the only person who was actually brought to justice in the poisoning murder cases: James Lewis. It was Lewis who was convicted of federal extortion charges after sending a million-dollar demand letter to Tylenol manufacturer Johnson and Johnson to “stop the killings.” Lewis, who died at age 76 in 2023, served almost 13 years in federal prison for the attempted shake-down.
Part of the evidence against Lewis was an intricate pencil drawing he had made, showing how the killer could have split open Tylenol capsules and used a pegboard to replace the pain relief powder with cyanide. Lewis denied being the actual killer until his own death, but to this day there is a quiet consensus among many top investigators on the case that he was – and is – the only person who carried out the killings.
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