CAMBRIDGE, Mass - FBI agents say they searched the home of a one-time leading suspect in the 1982 murders of seven people who swallowed tainted Tylenol as part of a review of the unsolved case.
Agents from Boston and Chicago were seen Wednesday removing boxes and a computer from the condominium owned by James W. Lewis.
Lewis served more than 12 years in prison for trying to extort $1 million from the painkiller's manufacturers.
A storage facility in Cambridge, Mass., also was searched.
An FBI spokesman in Chicago, Tom Simon, says the search in the Boston-area was related to authorities' decision to review the poisonings case.
No one was ever charged with killing the seven people who took cyanide-laced drugs in the Chicago area 26 years ago, leading to dramatic changes in the way food and medical products are packaged.
The FBI's Chicago office cited "advances in forensic technology" in a statement Wednesday announcing that it, along with Illinois State Police and local departments, were conducting a "complete review of all evidence developed in connection with the 1982 Tylenol murders."
Simon said the FBI issued the statement "to put what is happening in Boston into context."
The review began in part because of publicity and tips that arrived after the 25th anniversary of the deaths in 2007, according to the FBI. It has not resulted in any criminal charges.
"All of these tips have been or will be thoroughly investigated in an effort to solve this crime and bring some measure of closure to the families of the victims," the statement said.
Cmdr. Kenneth Galinski of the Arlington Heights Police Department in suburban Chicago said Thursday that a department officer was in the Boston area. Three of the victims took the tainted pills in Arlington Heights.
Galinski said he's "cautiously optimistic" investigators have made a breakthrough in the case, but said his department's involvement in the investigation is limited.
Galinski said authorities were holding no one in custody, including Lewis. He declined to comment further.
In a space of three days beginning Sept. 29, 1982, seven people who took cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago and four suburbs died.
That triggered a countrywide scare, prompting an untold number of people to throw medicine away and stores across the United States to pull Tylenol from their shelves.
Lewis served more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to "stop the killing."
He was arrested in December 1982. At the time, Lewis gave investigators a detailed account of how the killer might have operated and described how someone could buy medicine, use a special method to add cyanide to the capsules and return them to store shelves.
Lewis later admitted sending the extortion letter but said he never intended to collect it.
He said he wanted to embarrass his wife's former employer by having the money sent to the employer's bank account.
In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Lewis explained that the account he gave authorities was simply his way of explaining the killer's actions.
"I was doing like I would have done for a corporate client, making a list of possible scenarios," said Lewis.
He called the killer "a heinous, cold-blooded killer, a cruel monster."
Lewis also served two years of a 10-year sentence for tax fraud.
In 1978, he was charged in Kansas City with the dismemberment murder of Raymond West, 72, who had hired Lewis as an accountant. The charges were dismissed because West's cause of death was not determined and some evidence had been illegally obtained.
In 2004, Lewis was charged with rape, kidnapping and other offences for an alleged attack on a woman in Cambridge.
He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was scheduled to begin after the victim refused to testify, according to the office of Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone.
Lewis moved to the Boston area after getting out of prison in 1995 and is listed as a partner in a Web design and programming company called Cyberlewis.
On its website, which lists the location searched Wednesday as the company's address, there is a tab labelled "Tylenol" with a written message and audio link in which a voice refers to himself as "Tylenol Man" and complains about "the curse of being labelled the Tylenol Man."
