Alewife Photos by Neil W. McCabe
[Alewife columnist Roger Nicholson conceived of this project and dragged the paper into it. His knowledge of the events is encyclopedic and without him it would have never happened.--Editor.]
My chat with the Tylenol Man
Twenty-five years after eight people died from cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in and around Chicago, the man forever known as the Tylenol Man, who although never charged with the poisoning, is for many the only serious suspect spoke Sept. 24 at Andy's Diner in North Cambridge about his life then and now.
“My wife and I had worked very hard to reconstruct my reputation and life since my release from federal incarceration in 1995,” said James W. Lewis, a computer and business consultant, and was once the president of the Cambridge chapter of Perl software code writers. He and his wife have lived in Cambridge since shortly after leaving prison. “My natural habitat is around people familiar with the language of technology.”
The burden of being the Tylenol Man is overwhelming. Another man, Roger Arnold was also accused of the poisonings and the pressure led him to shot and kill a man who had taunted him, he said.
“I can tell you it is a big weight to have thrown at you and it is nothing that your mother prepares you for and it is not something that you learn about in school,” he said.
“How do you psychologically deal with being labeled a mass murderer when you had nothing to do with it?” he asked.
Lewis said it was an indiscretion of youth and his outrage over the lotting of the Continental Illinois bank that got him into the history books. His wife was working for a travel agency and he worked in the international department of the First National Bank. The man named in the letter was his wife's boss at the travel agency whom Lewis believed was laundering money through the account number his used in the letter.
“As an old man, I look back on it now, and it was a silly thing to do,” he said. “The reason the letters were written, the one reason, was to try get attention focused on the soon to be insolvent Continental Illinois Bank. The bank account that was named in it I had no access to. It was a closed bank account. I had no way of getting anything out of it-- anymore than you do or anyone else.”
Lewis and his wife left for New York City in early September 1982 and it was there that he heard on the radio in the hotel apartment they were staying at that they were looking for him, he said. “They hadn't named me by name yet, but they were looking for me. When I first heard that on the radio, I froze. It was like, oh goodness.”
The most difficult part was having to tell his wife when she came home from work and they were preparing dinner, he said. “I said: 'Honey, I wrote a letter' and she said, 'Oh well, that's good' and I said, well not exactly.”
When he gathered up the courage to explain to her that he wrote the letter that everyone on television, radio and in the newspapers was talking about, LeAnn laid on the bed unable to function, he said. “She went into a catatonic fuge for a couple of days. Looking at her feet and saying nothing.”
No one was ever charged with the murders and Lewis said he never considered make a plea bargain because he knew and the prosecutors knew he was in New York City during the deaths in Chicago, he said.
The nature of cyanide is such that it will dissolve the capsule in a short period of time, which meant that too much time had passed for Lewis to have laced the Tylenol and then gone to New York, he said.
“The police at the time, both state and federal, were like a herd of buffalo stampeding and I was afraid they might try to indict in spite of the fact I was in New York,” he said.
“With all of the publicity of the Tylenol case, they could have convicted me of stealing the moon and you couldn't have gotten a jury to go outside look up into the sky outside and see if it was still there. it didn't matter,” he said.
That new life for Lewis and his wife, LeAnn, took a bad turn in 2004, when he was arrested July 29 on a rape charge and held awaiting trial for three years, he said. It was just after he and his wife had watched Sen. John F. Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “The balloons were still falling when the police knocked on the door.”
Undressed, Lewis, then 300 pounds and bearded, said he got up see who it was. “I looked through the peephole in the door and I saw both uniformed police and plainclothes people and I saw a battering ram.”
He opened the door, he said. “As I unlatched it they came flying in, tossed me on the floor facedown--without a stitch of clothing on.” An hour later, Lewis was taken to the police station, where he was shown the corner of his indictment for rape.
His accuser was his partner in his consulting business, a woman raised in Shanghai living the same building. Police told him the woman claimed he had used a spice spray on her and struggled with her for hours before raping her. For the next year, he lived in the cell block of the Middlesex County Sheriff's Cambridge jail before his transfer to the jail in Middleton.
When court came into session, Lee Hettinger, the Middlesex County the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, told the judge that the accuser was in a room in the courthouse, but she was about to sign a statement saying she would not testify against Lewis. After an hour's wait, the judge was given the paper and Lewis was released. “It was like nothing had happened and I was free to go.”
Lewis said he never knew what turned his partner against him. He knows that her own apartment had been ransacked and that she may have struggled with alcoholism. In the end, he believes the police and prosecutors manipulated her in an effort to bag him as a trophy. “Her English is not good, even though she has a master's from Harvard.”
Lewis said he has not had a conversation with his partner since his arrest and he still has no idea how he became the target of her accusations.
The woman, who also worked at a professional bartender, lived along with the Lewises on the ground floor of the Pavilion apartments in East Cambridge, gave for accounts of the events, each different from the other. But just like in the Gospels they offer one central narrative: Lewis stunned the woman with a “spice spray” and took her into his apartment. For three or four hours, the two struggled as Lewis subdued her and gagged her. After 24 hours in his apartment, she escaped to her own apartment at the other end of the hallway.
At noon June 29, she called her father in Chinatown and he came to see her. After the two spoke, the father, whose command of English was weak, he said. The father then called his girlfriend and after the three of them spoke they called the police.
“I had no cuts, scratches or bruises--and when they arrested me I was naked so the police got a good look at my body,” Lewis said. “Her fingerprints were not in the apartment. They couldn't find any fibers or anything. They found none of my DNA on her. They could not find any spice spray in my apartment or hers.”
Her training in martial arts make any struggle with Lewis impossible, especially one that lasted more than three hours, he said. “She told the police her hands were not tied, so if I had gagged her and her hands were not tied, wouldn't it be natural for her to just take the gag out of her mouth? It was like she was having some kind of repetitive dream.”
The nurse at the emergency room said she found scratches on the woman's uterus, but no photos were taken even though such a camera was available, he said. “The uterus is like a crime scene.”
If the rape kit, drug tests or even photographs had demonstrated there had been a rape, then the woman's testimony would not have been necessary for the prosecutors to go forward, he said. “The same rules apply as if it was a homicide, since the victim can't testify because they are dead.”
The woman's own apartment was ransacked and piles with her vomit, he said. “That hallway is very busy and no one saw her run down hall from my apartment and there was no vomit in the hall or in my apartment.”
The detectives were concerned that she had been drugged because of her faulty recollections, but the drug test came back with less insignificant alcohol in her system and acetone, the chemical in nail polish remover, he said. “She was always fixing her nails and always taking nail polish off and putting it on. She was insensitive to the fumes. I remember one time I was in the car with her and I had to roll down the window just to breathe, but it didn't bother her.”
In his Sept. 9, 2004 testimony to the grand jury, Michael Regal, a Cambridge detective, told Hettinger that the woman had told him, “No, there was no sex.” But, the case moved ahead and Lewis stayed in jail, he said. “I can't say how it happened, but you will notice that I never speak ill of her.”
Lewis, gaunt and clean-shaven, said he is just now getting back in the swing of things after spending three years in jail awaiting charge a rape charge that was dropped July 16 on the first day of the trial.
Beginning with push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks in a lounge at the Cambridge facility, Lewis devoted himself to fitness, so that by the time he left Middleton, he was challenging the younger imates to out lift him on the weight machines, he said. He now runs at least 10 kilometers a day and sometimes takes it up to 18 to 20 miles, often on the Minuteman Bike Path.
He is not yet ready for a marathon, but he is looking forward to that challenge, he said.
He was unshackled more than two months ago, but Lewis is still waiting for the return of the hard drives, which were his primary and backup, seized by the then Middlesex County District Attorney, Martha Coakley, although the gutted computer towers have been returned, he said. “It was my whole business on those computers, including software I had written and 10,000 photographs I had taken specifically to sell.”
Meredith Lerner, a spokeswoman for Coakley's successor, Gerald T. Leone Jr., said the DA will not answer any questions about the Lewis case beyond faxing the nolle prosequi petition informing the judge the Commonwealth could not prove its case without the testimony of the complaining witness, signed by Hettinger on behalf of Leone.
It must have been a bitter pill for Hettinger, who in and August 2004 e-mail cajoled the crime lab to help him put away Lewis by expediting the test results from the rape kit to prove sexual assault and the tox screen to prove Lewis had drugged the woman.
Pleading for the fame that would have showered on him, he wrote: “As you may recall this is the case where the suspect was involved in the tylenol (sic) tampering cases of 1982-1983. He recently drugged, kidnapped and possibly raped our victim.”
Comments