THE main suspect in the poisoning of several people in a major Illinois city died 40 years after the crime rattled the country.

In September 1982, seven unsuspecting Chicagoans were killed by taking cyanide-laced Tylenol pills.

The poisoned capsules killed three people in one family along with four others, including a 12-year-old girl.

Police long suspected that a Massachusetts man was behind the murders.

James Lewis was found guilty of extortion just a year later in October 1983 for sending a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the company behind Tylenol, demanding $1million to “stop the killings.”

However, Lewis’ lawyer argued that he wrote the letter to get back at his wife’s former employer.

In the letter, Lewis requested that the money be placed in a nonactive account belonging to his wife’s former boss, the New York Times reported at the time.

Lewis repeatedly denied that he was the killer, but police kept questioning him decades after Mary Kellerman, 12, Adam Janus, 27, Stanley Janus, 25, Theresa Janus, 20, Mary McFarland, 31, Paula Prince, 35, and Mary Reiner, 27, died.

Investigators talked to Lewis at least 34 times from when officials re-opened the case in 2007 until 2009, case records obtained by local CBS affiliate WBBM-TV show.

In the meetings, Lewis would go into detail about how he thought the killer got away with poisoning all those people.

Read Related Also: American Library Association Helped Create Legislation to Keep Sexual Material in School Libraries

“Sounds to me like somebody did a pre-mix,” Lewis told retired special FBI agent Roy Lane during a 2008 meeting.

“Open the bottle, toss [the capsules] in, walk to the next shelf, or the next store, or whatever. That would cut down their standing time at the shelf an awful lot.”

Lewis added that the killer could have worn gloves or used a paper clip to lift the paper lid on the Tylenol box and the cotton.

Former assistant United States Attorney Jeremy Margolis, who prosecuted Lewis in his extortion case, previously told the outlet that Lewis first offered his assistance to the FBI after being convicted for the threatening letter.

“He did a lot of drawings, a lot of pen and ink drawings, proposing how the killer might have filled these capsules with the [cyanide] that killed these people,” Margolis said.

Additionally, in 2010, investigators found Lewis’s fingerprints on a book titled Handbook of Posionings, according to police records obtained by the outlet.

Police could never place Lewis in Chicago shortly before the murders and had trouble identifying a timeline of when Lewis wrote the letter to Johnson & Johnson.

In July 2023, over 40 years after the murders, Lewis died at 76 in his Cambridge home from pulmonary thromboembolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs.

With the death of Lewis, investigators lost their biggest lead and the killings that caused mass hysteria across the US in the early 1980’s remained unsolved.

However, the victims did not die in vain. Following their deaths, tamper-resistant pill containers were introduced, which meant people could now see if their bottles had been opened or altered.