The Tylenol Murders: Idaho Names the 'Unknown Wanderer', Illinois Investigators Say No, and the Seven Victims Nobody Names

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Monday, September 28th, 2026. 44 years ago this week, a 12-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, woke up with a sore throat. Her parents gave her an extra-strength Tylenol capsule. She died that morning. Within about three days, six more people in the Chicago area were dead the same way. The reason there is a foil seal on the aspirin in your bathroom cabinet right now is those seven people. Nobody has ever been charged with killing them. On Wednesday, a sheriff's office in Idaho held a press conference and said they had finally identified a man who died by cyanide poisoning under a church pew in Boise in December of 1982. And they said the circumstances around him warrant a hard look as a possible suspect in the Tylenol murders. Investigators in Illinois who actually worked that case say no. They say his DNA was compared to the bottles and did not match.

1:12 They say the cyanide that killed him was a different chemical than the cyanide in the capsules. And they say the task force looked at him decades ago and ruled him out. So today we are doing the whole thing. What happened in 1982? why nobody was ever prosecuted, and what it means for law enforcement to publicly name a man who has been dead for 44 years and cannot say a word in his own defense. Mary Kellerman was 12 years old. She lived in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. On the morning of September 29th, 1982, she was not feeling well, and her parents gave her a capsule of extra-strength Tylenol.

1:54 She collapsed. She was pronounced dead that day. That same morning in Arlington Heights, a 27-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus died suddenly. Doctors initially assumed a heart attack. His family gathered at his home to grieve. Later that day, his 25-year-old brother Stanley and Stanley's 19-year-old wife Teresa took capsules from the same bottle in that house. Both of them died. Three members of one family in a single day. Mary McFarland was 31 from Elmhurst. Paula Prince was 35, a flight attendant from Chicago. Mary Reiner was 27, from Winfield, and she had given birth days before. All seven died between September 29th and October 1st, 1982. And here is the part that still astonishes me. The reason anybody figured it out at all was two off-duty firefighters on the phone.

2:47 They were comparing notes about the calls that had come in. One had heard about the Kellerman girl. Juan had heard about the Janus family. And somebody in that conversation said the word Tylenol twice and realized it should not have appeared twice. A medical investigator at the scene of the Janus deaths noticed an almond-like smell, which is the classic sign of cyanide. The county's chief toxicologist tested the capsules. Four of the remaining 44 in the Janus bottle contained nearly three times a fatal dose. By chance, paramedics had inventoried the bottle at the Kellerman house. It matched. Authorities held an emergency press conference telling the public to stop taking Tylenol. Police drove through Chicago neighborhoods with loudspeakers.

3:34 A city of 3 million people was told, in effect, to go check their medicine cabinets right now. The mechanism turned out to be simple and horrifying. Somebody took bottles off store shelves at several different locations, opened the capsules, replaced the medicine inside with potassium cyanide, closed them back up, and put the bottles back on the shelves. There was nothing to break. There was no seal to tear. In 1982, a pill bottle was just a bottle with a cap. Johnson & Johnson pulled roughly 31 million bottles off shelves nationwide, which at the time was an almost unimaginable corporate decision and one that business schools still teach. And within about a year, the entire industry had changed. tamper evident packaging, the foil seal, the shrink band around the cap, the Federal Anti-Tampering Act passed by Congress in 1983, which made product tampering a federal crime. Every single one of those things exists because seven people in Illinois opened a bottle in the ordinary way and swallowed what was inside. Mary Kellerman was 12. Adam Janus was 27. Stanley Janus was 25.

4:42 Teresa Janus was 19. Mary McFarland was 31. Paula Prince was 35. Mary Reiner was 27. Someone has to say their names. And this is the one story where almost nobody does. People know the recall. They know the seal. Ask them to name a victim and you will get silence. When we come back, why nobody has ever been charged. So why has nobody been prosecuted? Start with what the crime actually was, because it is almost uniquely hard to solve.

5:27 There is no relationship between killer and victim. The seven people who died were selected by nothing except which bottle they happened to pick up. There is no motive that points at anyone. There is no witness, because the killing happened days before anyone died, in a store aisle, in about 30 seconds. The only physical evidence is the bottles themselves. And in 1982, there was no DNA testing. Fingerprint work was done, but a retail bottle has been handled by everybody. There was one surveillance image. Paula Prince was photographed at a Walgreens buying the bottle that killed her. And police released. The picture, noting a bearded man standing a few feet behind her. Nobody has ever identified him. Now, the suspects.

6:11 The name everybody knows is James Lewis. Shortly after the deaths, Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding money to, in his words, stop the killing. Reports of the amount vary between $ 1 and $ 10 million. He was convicted of extortion for that letter and served more than 12 years in federal prison. He always denied the killings. His explanation for the letter was that he was trying to embarrass a business connected to the bank account involved. Investigators never stopped looking at him. Jeremy Margolis a former United States attorney and former director of the Illinois State Police who worked closely with the task force, has named Lewis as the prime suspect for decades. The evidence pointing at Lewis included that note and drawings he made. James Lewis died at his home in Massachusetts in July of 2023, never charged. Then there is Roger Arnold, a dock worker who admitted possessing potassium cyanide, the same substance used in the killings. A bar owner reported hearing him talk about killing people with white powder. Police held him repeatedly. He was never charged in the poisonings. What Arnold did do was shoot and kill a man in 1983, apparently believing he was the bar owner who had talked to police.

7:26 He served 15 years for that and died in 2008. After his death, his body was exhumed so DNA could be compared against material from the bottles. It did not match. That is where this case has sat. An open, active investigation, currently led by the Arlington Heights Police Department, with a task force that has included Illinois State Police and departments across Cook and DuPage counties. The FBI ran it for years and eventually handed it back. 44 years, seven dead, zero charges. And I want to say something about that because it is the thing this show keeps running into. There is a version of the story where the system failed, and there is a version where the system worked exactly as designed and still produced nothing. Because proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt requires evidence, and sometimes the evidence genuinely is not there. The second version is much less satisfying, and I think it is usually the true one. When we come back, Idaho names a man and Illinois says no.

8:43 On December 4th, 1982, about two months after those seven people died in Illinois, a man was found dead beneath a pew at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho. He had been sitting in the church before a confession service was to begin. He died of cyanide poisoning. He had no identification. What he had was a typed suicide note asking that his money pay for his funeral and cremation with anything left over going to the church. The note was signed with a name that was not his. He had $ 1, 900, and he had a ring of about 30 keys. He was buried anonymously. For decades, he was known only as the Unknown Wanderer, and he was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1990. In 2019, a cold case detective with the Ada County Sheriff's Office named Tim Cooper reopened the file after a member of that church approached him about it.

9:35 Cooper says he went through 17,000 missing person records and got nowhere. What finally worked was one of those keys. It had markings and an etching that led to an address in Jacksonville, Florida. Property records showed a man had lived there and had gone missing in 1982 and was declared dead in absentia seven years later. Detectives found a living relative in Los Angeles, D.N.A. comparison established that the man in the church and that relative shared a father. The unknown wanderer was Dr. Matthew Francis Betkowski, an organic chemist from a prominent Los Angeles family. That identification is a genuine piece of police work and Tim Cooper deserves credit for it. A man who was buried without a name has one now, 44 years later, and his family knows what happened to him. It is what came next at that press conference that I want to talk about.

10:28 Cooper laid out what he described as circumstances warranting scrutiny. That Betkowski had a documented fascination with chemistry and explosives. That while working at a testing facility in New Mexico, he allegedly remarked that tainting capsules with poison would be a perfect way to murder someone. That he was fired after a disturbance at a pharmacy. That a woman died of cyanide poisoning at that same facility while he worked there, in a case that remains unsolved. That investigators later recovered a bottle of likely homemade cyanide and a map of Chicago from his childhood home. That he made calls to pharmaceutical and chemical supply companies in Pennsylvania weeks before the poisonings.

11:11 And that photographs place him in Chicago, probably around December of 1981. Now here's what the Ada County Sheriff's Office also said, clearly, and what a lot of the coverage has buried. They are not naming him as a suspect. They cannot place him in the Chicago area during the week the victims died. Cooper said it himself. He cannot put this man's shoes in a pharmacy aisle 44 years ago. And the reaction from Illinois has been blunt. The Arlington Heights Police Department, which leads the case, said it received and reviewed the information from Ada County, that it continues to work with partners, and that because this is an active investigation, it has nothing further to say.

11:53 That is a statement written by people who are not excited. Jeremy Margolis, the former Illinois State Police Director, was less diplomatic. He said there is no evidence. He called the connection nonsense. He said the task force was well aware of Betkowski and had completely discounted him. And he gave a specific technical reason that matters more than anything else in this story. The cyanide that killed Betkowski in that church was homemade sodium cyanide. The cyanide inside those Tylenol capsules was refined laboratory-grade potassium cyanide. Different compound, different source, different chemistry. Beyond that, multiple law enforcement sources have said that Illinois authorities compared Betkowski's DNA against profiles developed from the poison bottles in recent years.

12:43 There was no match. And the original task force looked at the Idaho case back in 1982 when it happened and found no connection. There is also a strange note in all of this. Asked whether his office was collaborating with Arlington Heights, Sheriff Matt Clifford said they had communicated early on, but that he had not heard from them in quite some time and could not tell you why. So let me tell you where I land, and I have thought about this a lot. I am glad Matthew Betkowski has his name back. That is unambiguously good. But I am uneasy about the rest of it, and here is why. A man who died in 1982 cannot be charged. He cannot be tried.

13:26 He cannot cross-examine a witness or explain a phone call or account for a map. Everything in that press conference would have been tested in a courtroom if he were alive, and almost none of it would have survived untested. A fascination with chemistry is not evidence. A remark a colleague remembers from decades ago is not evidence. A map of Chicago is not evidence. And on the two hard physical questions, the answers appear to point the other way. Wrong cyanide, no DNA match. What I understand is the impulse. Cooper spent years on this and found something real, and a detective who believes he has stumbled onto the biggest unsolved case in the country is going to say so. He also said openly that he lacks a smoking gun, which is more honest than most. But there are seven families who have waited 44 years, and on Wednesday, they woke up to headlines saying the Tylenol killer had been identified.

14:22 Then they read further and found out it is a maybe from a different state, disputed by the people who ran the investigation. That is a cruel thing to do to people by accident. Mary Kellerman was 12 years old. Adam Janus was 27. Stanley Janus was 25. Teresa Janus was 19. Mary McFarland was 31. Paula Prince was 35. Mary Reiner was 27. It is still an open case. Somebody did this. And 44 years later, the honest answer is that we do not know who. Someone has to say their names. That's the show for Monday, September 28th.

15:02 If you listen on Apple, there is a button at the top that says, listen uninterrupted. $ 5 a month, no ads, and it covers thousands of shows across Calaroga media. 30 days free if you want to try it. Everybody who already has, thank you. And on Spotify, drop a comment on this one. When investigators believe a dead man committed a crime but cannot prove it, should they say so publicly? He cannot defend himself, and his family has to live with it. But the victim's families have waited four decades for any answer at all. I go back and. Forth, Tomorrow is Plymouth County. Lindsay Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan with a motion to dismiss her case entirely on double jeopardy grounds already on file. And we should finally learn whether she faces a second trial.

15:50 I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. The Tylenol murders remain an unsolved open investigation. Nobody has ever been charged in the deaths. The Ada County Sheriff's Office has expressly stated it is not naming Matthew Betkowski as a suspect and cannot place him in the Chicago area during the week of the killings. The circumstances described by that office are their characterizations of information they gathered, not findings by any court, and Betkowski is deceased and cannot respond to any of it. The objections described in this episode come from Illinois investigators and prosecutors who worked the original case. including the account that Betkiewski's DNA did not match profiles from the poisoned bottles and that the cyanide involved was chemically different. Those statements come from law enforcement sources and interviews, and we have not independently reviewed the underlying forensic reports. James Lewis was convicted of extortion in connection with a letter sent to Johnson & Johnson and served time for that offense. He was never charged in the deaths and denied involvement until his death in 2023. Reports differ on the amount demanded in that letter. Roger Arnold was never charged in the poisonings, and DNA testing after his death did not match the bottles.

17:10 Accounts differ slightly on some details of the original investigation, including the spelling of one victim's surname in some coverage. Where sources conflict, we have used the figures most. Consistently reported by Illinois outlets and the agencies involved. This episode discusses the deaths of a child and of six adults, and a death by suicide. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.