Chicago Tribune investigative reporters Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair uncover new and critical clues in law enforcement’s latest — and possibly last — attempt at closing one of the nation’s most infamous unsolved cases.
Listen to episode 5: Breadcrumbs
Read the transcript below.
Stacy St. Clair: Before we get started, a quick warning: this episode mentions the details of a violent crime. Please take care.
St. Clair: Okay, here it is.
Gutowski: Can you read that? Our…
St. Clair: Yeah. J-E-D West. [birds chirping]
Gutowski: It was a rainy day in March when Stacy and I went to a small cemetery on the outskirts of a town about an hour northeast of Kansas City.
Gutowski: This cemetery is like in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet…
Gutowski: It was dusk, and we were about to be blanketed in darkness. Not far from the main entrance was a rectangular headstone. The grave was clean and well kept.
Gutowski: This marker stone simply says son.
St. Clair: Mmhmm.
Gutowski: There’s a rose in the middle of it.
Gutowski: Raymond M. West. 1905 -1978.
St. Clair: And what we found here is that no one’s ever gonna be responsible for this man’s death.
Gutowski: I’m Christy Gutowski.
St. Clair: I’m Stacy St. Clair. This is Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders.
Gutowski: Episode 5. Breadcrumbs.
John West: He was an interesting gentleman, but he kept to himself. He was a quiet person with regard to family and what he did. He had a lot of friends, but he was eccentric, to say the least.
Gutowski: Raymond’s cousin, John West. He’s about the same age now, as Raymond was when he died in 1978. That year, Raymond was living a quiet life. He was a lifelong bachelor and retired from his job as a truck driver. He kept busy, even if he was frugal in his spending.
West: He’d buy groceries, pay his utility bills and stuff like that. I do remember he mentioned, you know that, that he had been out to dinner, but it’s like, well, once a month deal if he did it. But he just hung on to his money. He never would say what he was going to do with it if something happened to him or when he passed on. He had something planned for it but I never knew what it was.
St. Clair: It was a summer day in 1978 when Raymond West made that phone call from his house in Kansas City. Sunday night, July 23rd. He talked to his friend Candy, and after that. No one was able to place him alive.
Raymond’s other friend, Charles Banker, started to worry. He called the police and filed a missing persons report. The Kansas City Police went into Raymond’s attic, and they found a body about three weeks after Raymond went missing.
We want to be really clear here. There are things we know and things we don’t know about the death of Raymond West. We don’t know from the evidence how Raymond West actually died. We do know his body was dismembered, and then hoisted into his attic.
When the Kansas City Police went up to his attic that hot August day in 1978, they found Raymond’s body face down. His head was wrapped in white sheets, tied with a white cord. Another cord was around his chest. A tan garbage bag was around his waist. That was tied with a cord similar to one from a Venetian blind. Raymond’s legs were severed and moved to separate areas of the attic.
Kansas City Police Detective David Barton wrote an extensive report on the case.
David Barton: It was a very instantaneous decision to go to all this trouble to dismember the body, but not drive it away. You know, not move it out, or not bury it or something.
St. Clair: Near one of his legs was a rope and a pulley. There was another rope tied to the rafters in the attic.
Barton: It was just hauled and put in the attic.
St. Clair: The scene suggested Raymond’s body had been tied and hoisted from below.
Barton: It was a very disorganized murder.
St. Clair: The attic was brutally hot. The high outside that day was 94 degrees. In the unrelenting summer heat, Raymond West’s body had decomposed.
Barton: Once you smell a decomposed body, you can never forget it.
St. Clair: This was no longer a case of a missing person. It was now a full blown homicide investigation.
Gutowski: At the scene, investigators collected evidence. There was a lot of it. In the bathroom, blood-stained soap and a human hair. In the basement, a green trash bag held sheets stained with blood, dark-rimmed glasses, and a wig later identified as belonging to Raymond West.
The Kansas City Police handcuffed James Lewis at his home and then questioned him for hours after they found Raymond’s body. Lewis also provided his fingerprints at their request. This interrogation would come back to haunt investigators.
The next day, Detective David Barton, interviewed Lewis for the first time. He reminded Lewis of his right to remain silent. But he says it didn’t stop Lewis from talking.
Barton: He really enjoyed the interaction and the involvement. Sort of like I really enjoy the fact that you are accusing me of something and I get the opportunity to defend myself. It was sort of like a game, I think.
Gutowski: One of the things they asked about was that 5,000 dollar check from Raymond West. The one the bank flagged as a forgery.
Barton: Lewis told me that he did write out the check. He just didn’t sign it.
Gutowski: Why? Did he owe money or was it a loan?
Barton: He said it was a loan at some percent interest, and I’m not sure I remember what interest rate. And he even two days later showed up with a loan document that supposedly Raymond West signed, which was also not in his signature.
Gutowski: Lewis also said he had a promissory note for the check, and according to what he told police, he took it to Raymond’s house on Sunday, July 23.
Barton: So something was very, very strange about that whole thing. But his attorney kept telling him, you don’t need to answer this or we’ll save this for a later time. But he just kept right on talking.
Gutowski: Lewis denied murdering Raymond West. He described Raymond as “a good neighbor and a kind gentleman who played with his daughter occasionally.” He said he had “no reason to think badly about Mr. West.”
Lewis signed a consent form to search his cars. And the police did search his cars. In one, they found 34 canceled checks belonging to Raymond West on the front seat. They found a briefcase with Raymond West’s tax returns. And a nylon rope with slip knots tied into it.
They also found a 1-inch section of rope that matched the rope around Raymond’s body. A police memo shows that the human hair investigators collected inside Raymond’s bathtub was later determined to match Lewis.
Barton: It kind of put together real quick that James Lewis is somebody we needed to look at very hard. All those things were caused by Jim Lewis himself. I mean, it wasn’t like he tried to keep a low profile or stay out of it. It was sort of like he had to be involved in pointing the finger at himself.
Gutowski: It’s worth mentioning here that we did reach out to Lewis multiple times requesting a comment. We couldn’t get him to talk with us about this. But he has repeatedly denied killing West. And he had an alibi. A friend of his said she picked up Lewis as he was walking, not far from West’s home. She said it was about 7 pm, on that same day that Raymond was last known to be alive. She said she and Lewis went to a 9 pm movie with his wife and then walked around the mall.
Gutowski: Later, Lewis also said that that rope in his car, the one that matched the rope found around Raymond’s body, was from back when he had helped Raymond rebuild his house after a flood a year before.
With what the Kansas City Police heard during the interviews and the evidence they collected, they arrested Lewis and prosecutors charged him with murder.
Almost a year later, it was time for court. James Bell was the prosecutor assigned to the case.
St. Clair: So when does the Raymond West case cross your desk?
Bell: Well, it happened in ’78, so it would have been sometime in ’79 that I probably would have first seen the case.
Gutowski: By 1979, Bell was about a year out of law school and just getting his feet wet in the prosecutor’s office.
St. Clair: What about this case or what about you said, I’m going to go ahead and charge this?
Bell: For $5,000? For $5,000 you go and you butcher a man?
St. Clair: But the case against Lewis wasn’t simple. The coroner could not establish the exact cause of death for Raymond. Detective Barton explains.
Barton: Because the body was too decomposed. She was able to determine that the hips had been removed postmortem. But that’s the only thing that definitively she could come up with. There was no cause of death.
St. Clair: Because of that, Lewis argued that West could have died of natural causes, several days before his body was dismembered.
And as James Bell was preparing for trial, he came across a major flaw in the case against Lewis. When we spoke with him, he read from a document from the case file.
Bell: Mr. Lewis was then questioned after being advised of his rights under the Miranda decision. Now there’s the problem.
St. Clair: During that first interview, Kansas City detectives didn’t tell Lewis he had the right to remain silent. Or the right to speak to an attorney. So everything gleaned from that point in the investigation was deemed inadmissible. The ropes in his cars. The canceled checks. The fingerprints. Even his later interview with Barton, when Barton read him his rights. All of it was gone. James Bell, the prosecutor, had to drop the case.
St. Clair: And what is your reaction? You’re a prosecutor with a case with no definitive cause of death. And now you have a Miranda problem.
James Bell: Game’s over. Game’s over. Case, case just went down the river.
St. Clair: Is it a sleepless night when you, I don’t know how many cases you had to dismiss like that during your career as a prosecutor.
James Bell: It’s the only one.
St. Clair: In the years since, Lewis has accused both Bell and Barton of unfairly targeting him. He has a website called 1978 witch hunt dot fifty webs dot com. On that website, he wrote this:
“Neither the police, nor Detective David Barton, nor the Prosecutor, James Bell, knew how West died, but they have accused James William Lewis of murdering and butchering Raymond West[…]Fortunately for justice and truth, reason and common sense prevailed, and James William Lewis was never convicted of murdering Mr. West.”
St. Clair: Because of the Miranda rights violation – no one was ever tried in the Raymond West case.
Barton: And so he was released. What became important later is what happened to all the evidence.
St. Clair: After the case against Lewis was dropped, most of the evidence was destroyed. But not all of it.
When David Barton and his colleagues were at that meeting with the Tylenol Task Force in Chicago in October 1982, he shared what he knew about Lewis.
At the same time, records show that another Kansas City detective hopped a commercial flight to Washington, D.C. That detective took with him Lewis’s handwriting samples and a fingerprint lifted from the pulley in Raymond West’s attic. The FBI analyzed the evidence in their lab in Quantico. They searched for a comparison of Lewis’s fingerprint.
FBI records show they found a match. The lab reports indicated that the print on the pulley was identical to Lewis’s right thumb.
When he was later questioned about it, Lewis said that it was a very strange phenomena that when Raymond West died there were no fingerprints, but after the Tylenol murders, a fingerprint mysteriously appeared. He said the fingerprint was invented for publicity value and no other reason.
Either way, the FBI’s findings didn’t matter. Police records show the pulley had been lost. And the Miranda violation still loomed heavily. Kansas City authorities did not reopen the case.
Gutowski: But the story of what happened was enough to perk up the Tylenol task force.
When Barton first arrived in town, the task force considered Lewis a definite-suspect in the extortion letter. And a maybe-suspect in the murders. Here’s what Ty Fahner, the head of the task force, said publicly about Lewis as a murder suspect on October 15th.
Archival recording: It’s not the most promising lead. It’s obviously an important lead because…
Gutowski: But after learning about the fraud and the Raymond West situation, Fahner changed his tune.
Archival Recording: They’re our prime suspects at this point in time by anyone’s definition of what a suspect is.
Gutowski: It’s the first time Fahner has said this publicly. The FBI thought James Lewis could be the Tylenol killer.
Gutowski: The FBI now had a clearer picture of the person they were searching for. But the information Barton told them was all about Lewis’s past. He didn’t have any leads of where Lewis might be now. Lewis gave them some clues. Because he didn’t stay quiet. After sending the extortion letter from New York, he sprinkled a few breadcrumbs around in the form of letters.
Gutowski: The first crumb was a letter he sent to President Ronald Reagan at the White House in October. In this letter, which we obtained from the National Archives, he made a threat against the President. It involved using model airplanes to jam Secret Service radios.
Lewis also wrote he’d plant more cyanide in stores across the country unless the President avoided a tax increase. Lewis signed the letter with the name Fred M. Presumably, Fred McCahey, the owner of Lakeside Travel. The man he’d tried to frame with the extortion letter. The Reagan letter was odd, but it would become more important later on.
The second crumb was a letter Lewis sent a few weeks later.
Archival Recording: The Lewises sent an inch thick packet to the Chicago Tribune, postmarked New York, October 27th.
Gutowski: It arrived in our very own newsroom, in a large brown envelope.
Archival Recording: ‘As you have probably guessed,’ said the cover letter, ‘my wife and I have not committed the Chicago area Tylenol murders. We do not go around killing people.’ The letter was signed Robert Richardson, the name James Lewis had used in Chicago.
Gutowski: In the packet were bank records, a drawing, and court documents from the dispute with the travel agency. Lewis seemed fixated on McCahey. With the extortion letter, the Reagan letter, and now the packet that he sent to the Tribune. He was like a dog with a bone, his jaw locked, refusing to let go.
A Chicago Tribune article at the time called it a vendetta. Lewis said he was just doing his civic duty, by pointing the finger at McCahey for illegal money-making schemes. By late November, Lewis was still on the run and still writing letters.
One last breadcrumb. Another letter. This letter wasn’t about McCahey, but Lewis sent it in part to taunt investigators, it seemed. Records show that on Thanksgiving Day, he sent a letter to the Department of Justice. It included a copy of a newspaper article talking about how slow the Tylenol investigation was moving. On the back of the photo-copied article was a copy of his driver’s license. Kind of like, your investigation is slow, so here, let me help you ID me, here’s my driver’s license.
Gutowski: In one letter he even referred to the Tylenol task force as ‘Fahner’s fumblers.’ He could have just turned himself in. Ended the manhunt. But maybe this was a little more of a thrill.
Roy Lane Jr.: The person who committed this is enjoying the attention right now. But eventually this enjoyment would diminish. And he or she would be looking for more excitement.
Gutowski: While Lewis was sending in the letters, the FBI was busy interviewing people who knew him in Chicago and Kansas City.
What they learned is contained in 500 pages of FBI records, which we obtained from a source. They state, for example, that he was an eccentric man who loved to argue about anything and everything. He loved junk food and had a soft spot for Dr. Pepper and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. FBI agents also wrote that Lewis was concerned about looking “macho.” He didn’t shave his beard because he wanted to avoid looking younger.
That was the same beard in his photo as Robert Richardson. The very same photo the FBI put in the wanted posters.
Archival Recording: The search for Tylenol suspect James Lewis zeroes in on New York City, where authorities say Lewis and his wife were spotted less than a week ago.
Gutowski: Another breadcrumb. Records show that LeAnn had been calling her dad, from wherever she and Lewis were staying. The FBI was listening in to her dad’s phone calls according to those records. Lewis had continued writing additional letters to the Tribune, commenting on its coverage of the Tylenol investigation. Postmarked, consistently, from New York.
Grey Steed: Grey. G-R-E-Y. Last name is Steed S-T-E-E-D.
Gutowski: Steed was a colleague of Roy Lane, Jr.
Steed: I was always told that was a great FBI name.
Gutowski: They figured out Lewis was getting his hands on a Chicago newspaper while living in New York.
Steed: It dawned on me. It’s like, well, where would you go to get a copy? You’re not sending the clip out copy, you’re photographing it.
Gutowski: There were really only two choices, either at a newsstand or at the library.
Steed: So I called the agent in New York and told him I said, “Hey, we should stake out the public library.” So they went out and gave pictures of Lewis to the guy that was in the periodicals section of the New York Public Library.
Gutowski: On December 13, 1982, a librarian at the New York Public Library reported for work at a branch in midtown Manhattan.
Archival Recording: Good evening. After a nationwide manhunt for more than 10 weeks, the FBI today finally arrested James Lewis in New York on charges…
Gutowski: It was a Monday. A couple inches of snow were on the ground. Around midday, the librarian noticed someone on the fourth floor was taking notes.
Archival Recording: Even at the library where Lewis was captured, this employee remembers seeing him several times before calling the police.
Gutowski: The librarian slipped into an office, looked at the wanted poster with Lewis on it that the FBI had left, and consulted with a colleague.
Archival Recording: So he passed my reference desk yesterday about 1:30. And, uh, I just glanced up at him and in an instant, something looked familiar.
Gutowski: They called the FBI.
Archival Recording: When Lewis was arrested in this cubicle, he was studying a registrar of major American newspapers and taking down their addresses.
Gutowski: The FBI handcuffed him and put him in the back of a car waiting outside.
St. Clair: The massive manhunt was over. James Lewis, wanted for attempted extortion, was now in custody. A judge set his bond at five million dollars. Which might have seemed like a steep bond for an extortion letter. But you gotta understand, this wasn’t any attempted extortion. This was an extremely high-profile case with a link to seven mysterious murders. And a potential suspect with a curious past. But the question was how likely was it that Lewis was the Tylenol killer?
Let’s start with cyanide. In Roger Arnold’s case, CPD thought he might be the killer because, among other reasons, he had admitted to buying cyanide from a mail-order place in Wisconsin. When Lewis talked to the FBI, he did not admit to having cyanide.
When the authorities had searched Lewis’s home on Troost during the mail fraud case in 1981, they had seen a little black book with gold lettering on it, called “Handbook of Poisoning.” There are at least two pages on cyanide. I have a copy of it right here. It’s the same edition as the one Lewis had. I actually bought it on eBay from a vendor in Missouri. Lewis’s copy is still in an FBI evidence locker.
The information on cyanide is on page 196. That page tells you how much potassium cyanide is needed for a fatal dose. That’s the kind of cyanide used in the murders.
According to FBI records we reviewed, when authorities later tested that page for fingerprints, they found a match. On page 196, near the section that detailed the lethal dose of potassium cyanide, they found James Lewis’s fingerprint.
Gutowski: But what about Chicago? If Lewis was the Tylenol killer, the FBI had to prove that he was in Chicago at the time. The last they knew, the Lewises had left Chicago in early September, almost a month before the murders.
They had told friends in town that they were moving to Texas, but instead they traveled by Amtrak to New York. Federal records show they traveled under aliases: Karen and William Wagner. In those weeks between leaving Chicago and the murders, we know that the Lewises stayed in a hotel in New York City. Their neighbors there didn’t know much about them. Lewis spent time at public libraries.
The task force did understand that they could be missing key information here.
Records show that they considered whether Lewis traveled back to Chicago the week of the murders under an alias. And they looked into whether he somehow used his access to Lakeside Travel, his wife’s former employer, to secure airline or train tickets or book car rentals. Lewis himself suggested this possibility in his letter to Reagan. Roy Lane Jr.
Lane Jr.: In one paragraph, he goes, I used to own a travel agency and before it closed, I caused the issuance of many airline tickets in many names. With these tickets, I can fly to any city quickly and plant more cyanide in stores all over the country. [shuffling papers] And that’s in James Lewis’s words.
Gutowski: Records show that agents thought it was possible Lewis could have used an unknown alias to travel to Chicago, lace the Tylenol with cyanide and then head back to New York.
Steed: So that was a possibility that we did look into, that maybe he flew back on a stolen ticket or you know, a handwritten ticket that was not actually paid for.
Gutowski: FBI agent Grey Steed.
Steed: Never found anything to link him coming back to Chicago.
Gutowski: The FBI couldn’t find any evidence to prove it. This was an enormous obstacle in the case against Jim Lewis.
St. Clair: If the team could have placed Jim Lewis in Chicago that week, he would have indicted him right then and there.
Lane Jr.: Yes.
St. Clair: Did you think there was going to be an indictment?
Lane Jr.: That was our missing piece. We did everything. I mean, we went through every train record between New York City and here. We went through every airplane ticket. Trying to find anything that we could that would link Lewis and his travel from New York to here and then back again. And we just didn’t have that link.
Gutowski: But don’t forget that there are two main suspects here. It’s not just Lewis. While the task force was on Lewis, the Chicago Police were chasing their own suspect. Roger Arnold, the divorced barfly and home chemist. Arnold was angry. Someone had accused him of being the Tylenol killer. He decided to take things into his own hands.
St. Clair: In October 1982, just a couple of weeks after the Tylenol murders, while the FBI chased Lewis, the Chicago Police Department was working the case against Roger Arnold. He had been released from jail. Free to go. Pending gun and assault charges.
After he was released, he complained that the media was bothering him. Teenagers threw garbage at his home. And he felt like the news was painting a picture of him as a psychopath, he said. Dangerous. He said he feared for his own safety. That some vigilante who wanted justice in the Tylenol murders would attack him. Maybe kill him. As he stewed on this situation, he started to focus on one person.
The person who first called CPD with the tip about him. He discovered the man’s name while reading police records in his gun case. The name: Marty Sinclair. Marty owned one of the pubs on Lincoln Avenue, the street where Arnold liked to drink.
By early 1983, more than six months after the Tylenol murders, Arnold was depressed and drinking heavily every night. The more he drank, the more depressed he became. And the more depressed he became, the more enraged he became. One evening in mid June 1983, Arnold went out to drink at a bar called Lilly’s on Lincoln Avenue. He was drinking a lot. And carrying a gun.
Around midnight, someone told him Marty, Marty Sinclair, the guy who had called the cops on him after the Tylenol murders was there, at the bar. Arnold left the bar. He said he went to get Mexican food up the street. We have no proof that he did that. But we know he went back to the bar around closing time.
He decided to make Marty Sinclair pay for tipping off the police. He was worked up. When Arnold recalled this moment years later, he said he saw Marty Sinclair leave that bar with a couple of friends.
Laurie Edling: So my dad was a bigger guy. Him and his friend were walking on the sidewalk. His other friend was walking ahead of them. And then Roger Arnold started walking toward my dad. He said something.
St. Clair: The way Arnold remembered it, he said, “Marty, did you turn me in?” And then Arnold pulled out his gun and fired a shot at the man that he saw.
Edling: My dad fell on the sidewalk. His friend was like, “What the hell?” Then my dad was like, “I don’t want to die. Oh my God. I’ve been shot. I don’t want to die.” And then he stopped and he’s like, “I’m dying. I’m dying.” And then he died.
St. Clair: Arnold walked to his car. Then he drove to the Chicago River all the way on the Southwest Side of the city. He threw his gun into the water. And then he drove over the border to Indiana. When he got to a hotel there, he called his lawyer. The next day Arnold turned himself in.
Jimmy Gildea: When I saw the picture of the guy that he killed, I knew exactly. He thinks he killed the guy that flipped him, you know the bartender.
St. Clair: Jimmy Gildea, the Chicago Police detective who picked up Roger the first time, eight months before.
Gildea: And so I said, “Take a look at this, Roger.” And I gave him the driver’s license of the victim. I said look at that name and address. I mean, he looks at it, realizing that it’s not the person he thought was his informer on his case. And you just killed him. And he just broke down and started crying and was inconsolable, really, because he realized he killed the wrong guy.
St. Clair: Arnold had shot and killed a man. But that man was not Marty Sinclair, the bar owner who called in a tip to the Chicago Police. The man Arnold shot and killed was named John Stanisha.
Edling: John, Jack, he was known by Jack, was my dad.
St. Clair: Laurie Edling is John Stanisha’s daughter. She was 16-years-old at the time of the shooting.
Edling: He was really bright. Real cerebral, and read a lot of books, and intellectual right. But then he had a side to him, like way into music.
St. Clair: Laurie’s dad loved the song “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” by Steely Dan.
Edling: I can remember driving down the Dan Ryan with him with that song like blasting. My dad like, “Unroll all the windows, turn up the radio loud!”
Edling: And that song always reminds me of him. I remember for a long time struggling with like my dad died on a dirty, glittery sidewalk in the city. And being really angry about that. But the surreal part is so we’re at the funeral mass. And one of the last people that came up for communion was Marty Sinclair. And it was like, wow, it was absolutely surreal because he did look a lot like my dad.
St. Clair: But Marty Sinclair was alive. Her dad was not.
Edling: So it was like a crime within a crime.
St. Clair: For this crime at least, there was some closure. Arnold eventually admitted to killing John Stanisha. He was convicted of murder in January 1984. And sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was sent to Joliet Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Illinois.
Arnold filed an appeal to overturn the conviction. And while he was waiting for an answer, Chicago Police detectives Jimmy Gildea and Charlie Ford heard that he might be willing to talk. They saw this as potential leverage. An olive branch. A steak sandwich, if you will. If they got him transferred somewhere less medieval…
Gildea: Maybe he’ll flip.
St. Clair: So they asked prosecutors to help get him moved.
Gildea: And the State’s Attorney supervisor said it’s a non-starter, they won’t do it.
St. Clair: The state’s attorney basically said no. Their view was, look, the FBI has the main suspect in the Tylenol murders already. Their suspect is James Lewis. Ford and Gildea believed that if Chicago Police declared they had the killer and it was Roger Arnold, it would just muck up the FBI case against Lewis. And the FBI just wasn’t interested in letting CPD pursue Arnold.
Charlie Ford: They didn’t want to go along. They didn’t want to take their tunnel vision off those people and go down with us and interview ’em.
St. Clair: So they didn’t interview Arnold any further. That was the end of their work on the Arnold case. Charlie Ford, Gildea’s partner, thought the FBI was zeroing in too much on the wrong guy.
Ford: They had nothing other than that letter, the extortion letter. They had no, no, no other evidence at all, zero.
St. Clair: According to Ford and Gildea, it all came back to the turf war.
Ford: The, the FBI, the FBI, the FBI. They got tunnel vision. And once they had a suspect, they don’t want to let them go. They don’t want to admit that that’s the wrong guy, that somebody else has got the right guy. They don’t, they want, they don’t want to do that because they’re the super sleuths and all. We’re just the Podunk, you know, crooked, big city coppers. And, you know, we couldn’t possibly be right.
St. Clair: The FBI disagreed.
Lane Jr.: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s tunnel vision.
St. Clair: Roy Lane Jr.
Lane Jr.: But I have heard that before. You just go where the evidence takes you. It wasn’t like other avenues were shut off. Other avenues were fully investigated. And the evidence took me to James Lewis.
St. Clair: And that evidence, from Roy Lane’s perspective, would only get stronger. Nearly one year after he was arrested, James Lewis picked up the phone. And called Lane. And offered to help him solve the Tylenol murders.
Gutowski: For exclusive details about Raymond West and Roger Arnold, as well as a transcript of this episode, visit our website at Chicago Tribune dot com forward slash Tylenol murders.
St. Clair: Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders is Executive Produced by Will Malnati from AT
WILL MEDIA. And Mitch Pugh from the Chicago Tribune in association with audiochuck. Produced by Claire Tighe, Jessica Glazer, and Anmargaret Warner. Edited by Morgan Springer. Fact-checked by Wudan Yan. Production support from Clementine Ford, Molly Getman, Zach Grappone, Matt Hickey, Andrew Holzberger, Seth Richardson, and Mark Van Hare. Mixed by Daniel Tureck. Original music by Hannis Brown. Reported by us, Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair.
