In September 1982, people started dying mysteriously in the Chicago area. The victims seemed to have nothing in common. Until a surprising discovery revealed a much bigger mystery. One that wouldn’t be so easy to solve.
baiduhai 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 3: Suspects
Read the transcript below.
FINAL TRANSCRIPT IN PROGRESS AS OF 9/26
Based on audio file: final bounce
Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders
Episode 3: The Suspects
Christy Gutowski: It was one week after the Tylenol murders. October 6, 1982.
One week since seven people died, and thousands of leads came in through the tip lines. But law enforcement still had no real suspect.
Until a letter arrived that changed everything. The envelope it came in was addressed to Johnson & Johnson. That’s the parent of McNeil Consumer Products, the company that actually makes Tylenol. It was sent through the regular mail and arrived at J&J’s New Jersey office.
Then because it mentioned McNeil the letter was routed in a company mail sack to that office in Pennsylvania. When the mail clerk there opened it, he saw a hand-written letter that was one page long. It was neatly penned, in all-cap letters that tilted slightly to the right.
Roy Lane Jr.: Well, I have in front of me right here.
Gutowski: Roy Lane Jr. was an FBI agent assigned to the task force. The one that studied chemistry instead of law.
Lane Jr.: He says, ‘As you can see, it is easy to place cyanide, both potassium and sodium in the capsules sitting in store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little, and there will be no time to take countermeasures. If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far I’ve spent less than $50 and it takes me less than ten minutes per bottle.’ And then the next paragraph is about where to transfer the money to.
Gutowski: It said, ‘If you want to stop the killing, then wire 1 million dollars to bank account 84-49-597.’ It looked, to authorities at least, like maybe the letter was both an extortion and a confession. I’m Christy Gutowski.
Stacy St. Clair: And I’m Stacy St. Clair. This is Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders.
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Gutowski: Episode 3: The Suspects.
St. Clair: The extortion letter seemed like it could be a clue into the murders, but the problem was, it was unsigned. It could have been written by anyone. The FBI wasn’t certain whether it came from the killer or not, but one detail, at least, initially made them skeptical. The author of the letter suggested that it was easy to get both potassium and sodium cyanide into the pills. But the tainted pills had only potassium cyanide. Plus, it had been a week without a trace of the killer. Why would they send a letter now? Lane had some ideas.
Lane Jr.: We thought, well, maybe it’s just for the money. Maybe just somebody taking advantage of the situation.
St. Clair: But investigators were following every lead.
Jeremy Margolis: Was this person just a crank who was playing games and tweaking law enforcement? We had no idea, but we were, you know, hell bent on figuring out which of those theories was accurate.
St. Clair: That’s Jeremy Margolis. He’s the former assistant US attorney. The one who said he didn’t have time for drama on the Tylenol Task Force.
Margolis: Were we curious about why that letter would be written?
St. Clair: He and Lane worked alongside each other.
Margolis: Was this person actually responsible for it?
St. Clair: There were some clues. Like the bank account number mentioned in the letter. Which, it turned out, belonged to a business in Chicago called Lakeside Travel. It was a travel agency. They booked flights and rented cars for you before this could all be done online. There was also the postage meter ID on the envelope.
Here’s how it works. Companies register postage meters with the U.S. Postal Service. They each get a unique 7-digit number. If you used a company meter, that unique number would show up imprinted on the envelope. In this case, the number here was pretty easy to track.
It also led to Lakeside Travel. It did not take long to find the owner of Lakeside. A man named Frederick Miller McCahey. The heir to the Miller Brewing fortune. Yes, the beer. Did McCahey write the letter? Was he the killer?
McCahey lived in suburban Chicago. And when the task force sat down with him, they learned that Lakeside Travel had gone out of business earlier that year. And that the bank account had been closed. Also, the letter was not from suburban Chicago. It was sent from New York. It also seemed like McCahey didn’t have a motive to do something like this.
Margolis: He professed to know nothing whatsoever about the letter or the Tylenol killings. And we became quickly convinced that that was true.
St. Clair: The task force ruled him out. So, back to the clues. Looking at the postage meter, it wasn’t exactly kept under lock and key.
Margolis: Then the questions turned to, well, who at Lakeside Travel would have had access to the postage meter and who would have known the bank account number? And then let’s talk about anybody at Lakeside Travel who was odd, different, problematic, fired under questionable circumstances. Anybody you can think of who might be the person who would have done this.
St. Clair: Around this time, the task force had started using a new technique. Criminal profiling. Today, it seems like all kinds of agencies use this. At least according to TV. Turn on just about any police procedural and you’re likely to see a detective pore over every detail of a crime scene to try to understand the person who committed the crime. This technique was pretty new in the early ’80s. And one of the first times the FBI used it, was on a profile of the Tylenol killer.
Lane Jr.: The person who perpetrated this would most likely have been treated for mental health issues. The person who committed this would most likely have attacked a parent, attacked animals and cruelty to animals.
St. Clair: It wasn’t a profile of the person who wrote the extortion letter. But the FBI wasn’t sure if the letter writer and the killer were one in the same. And to be clear, criminal profiling is kind of controversial. There’s no clear evidence that it’s effective. And, even back in 1982, some officers on the Tylenol case scoffed at it. Roy Lane Jr. found it very helpful, though.
Lane Jr.: And the last point that they wanted to strike home was that the person who committed this is enjoying the attention right now and the fact that he or she had outsmarted the law enforcement.
St. Clair: And there was one more thing in the profile. The FBI wrote that this person would be likely to hold a grudge. They might be motivated by revenge.
Gutowski: So with this in mind, the FBI started interviewing former Lakeside employees. And soon, task force members like Jeremy Margolis had names to work with.
Margolis: The Richardsons. Wife being a former temporary employee and the irate husband who was furious that his wife’s last paycheck bounced because the company went out of business.
Gutowski: Nancy Richardson was a bookkeeper at Lakeside. She’d only started there in early 1982. But she had a front row seat to the company’s demise. Including hearing rumors that McCahey had been siphoning off Lakeside funds for personal reasons. When the company did go broke, Nancy got a final paycheck for $512.
Lane Jr.: She went to cash it at a currency exchange. And she did matter of fact. And the check bounced.
Gutowski: Once the currency exchange realized there were no funds in the Lakeside account, they wanted the money back from Nancy. But this was money that she earned. Worked for. She paid back about 100 dollars.
But the currency exchange wanted it in full. So they sued her to get it back. Nancy’s husband Robert was livid. And he seemed a lot angrier than the actual employees themselves, the ones who had been stiffed. He began organizing his wife’s former colleagues.
Lane Jr.: And then he filed some grievances with the Illinois Labor Department.
Gutowski: Robert acted as the group’s leader. He explained to the hearing officer that McCahey had personal accounts. They should just take the owed wages from there, he said. But the hearing officer didn’t buy it.
Lane Jr.: And he lost.
Gutowski: At the end of the hearing, the owner, McCahey, walked in. A former Lakeside employee who was there remembers them all yelling at each other. And the whole exchange ended with McCahey allegedly threatening Nancy. Her husband Robert filed that one away.
Later that day on the bus, Robert said that he was going to find someone who would investigate McCahey for wrongdoing. The attorney general, or whomever he could find. He’d find someone.
In the final days of Lakeside, before it went bankrupt, Nancy also had filed something away. The FBI said she grabbed some blank envelopes and stamped them with the company’s postage meter. That’s how the Johnson & Johnson extortion letter had the Lakeside ID numbers on it. Because the stamped envelopes had been stolen.
And they also now realized it was Robert Richardson who had sent the letter to get back at McCahey. Now they had a motive for the letter. Revenge. And a name to double down on. Robert Richardson.
So investigators went out to find the Richardsons. They checked the last known address that they had for them. 549 Belden Avenue in Chicago. A five-story stone building with large leafy trees out front. But the Richardsons had moved out one month after their confrontation at the hearing.
On September 4th, about a month before the murders, they had told their friends they were moving to Amarillo, Texas. But they did not move to Amarillo, Texas.
St. Clair: Today, it wouldn’t take long to get more information about someone online. Work history. Relationship status. Hobbies. Location. But in 1982, the task force had to rely on a literal paper trail. And they had little to go on, with no idea where the Richardsons were, who they might be with or even what they looked like. Until they came across another clue.
The clue was on page 13 of an edition of the baiduhai published earlier that July. It was a first person column. A bit of a poem actually, called “A Slice of Chicago Life.” It was a list. Of things the author observed while people-watching on State and Madison in Chicago.
He wrote, “One pretty girl tying her shoe and spilling her purse. One blue-and-white police car sitting empty, windows open. Seven begging pigeons, waddling and cooing. 3:24 – the time at the corner. My bus is here.”
Lane Jr.: And so we went to the baiduhai. And sure enough, they had it. He had prepared an article and it had his photo.
St. Clair: One black and white photo of a man with a beard. He had a receding hairline. A serious expression. And a jacket and tie. And right there on the byline, it said: Robert Richardson. The task force got their hands on a photo of Nancy Richardson too.
Lane Jr.: So that was the photo we put on the wanted list.
St. Clair: They sent the wanted poster everywhere. Chicago, New York. Across the country. It went to other law enforcement agencies and to the national media. Then the FBI waited to see what would shake out. This was the biggest story in the country, with or without the wanted poster. And the coverage of the search for the killer became a kind of ambient backdrop to regular life.
This was no less true for a police sergeant in Kansas City, Missouri. That October, Sergeant David Barton was home with the news on.
David Barton: And my kids were there and I’m laying on the couch just tired. And Dan Rather, I distinctly remember it was Dan Rather. CBS News.
Archival Recording: A task force of more than 100 local, state, and federal investigators is looking into seven deaths linked to poisoned Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. They are checking what one official called a myriad of leads.
St. Clair: The newscast cut to headshots of a man and a woman, both wearing glasses. The wanted posters.
Archival Recording: Investigators also said they are seeking these people, Robert and Nancy Richardson, the likely authors of the million dollar extortion letter that Tylenol’s makers received last week.
Barton: I rolled off the couch and jumped up and my daughter, just matter of fact, still remembers me doing this, yelling, ‘God damnit! That’s Jim Lewis!’
Gutowski: James William Lewis. Barton knew a lot about him. Actually, the previous winter, Barton obtained an arrest warrant for Lewis. But before he could grab him, Lewis had fled his home in Missouri.
Now, here he was on national TV, almost a year later apparently using an alias: Robert Richardson. Barton grabbed the phone to call the FBI.
Barton saw Robert Richardson on the news on October 13th, 1982. And on that same broadcast, reporters broke news of a totally separate suspect.
Archival Recording: Chicago Police arrested this man, 48-year-old…
Gutowski: The week prior, the same day the task force actually learned about the extortion letter, the Chicago Police also got their own tip.
Charlie Ford was part of the crew chasing leads. Ford and his partner Jimmy Gildea were the officers who responded to the death of the flight attendant Paula Prince. They were the ones who skipped the task force meetings.
The Chicago Police had gotten a tip. And Ford and Gildea were the ones to follow it.
Charlie Ford: They had a bartender at a bar on Lincoln Avenue.
Gutowski: It was the Oxford Pub, on the city’s North Side.
Ford: He calls us up and we talked to him personally, and he says, ‘Listen.’
Gutowski: Two regulars told the owner that their friend Roger had been acting strange lately. Erratic and despondent, were the words they used. And, they said, they thought he had picked up some cyanide about six months ago for some kind of home project. The caller gave the police the man’s full name. Roger Arnold.
Ford: Oh, that sounds like a pretty good tip and clue to me. So I says, ‘Okay, next time you see this guy, give us a call.’
Gutowski: The Chicago Police sent officers to Lincoln Avenue, where they showed Arnold’s photo to bartenders. Arnold usually wore a Greek fishing hat, the kind with the short round brim.
Five days later, now we’re about two weeks since the murders, another call came in. This time from another pub, Lilly’s, in Lincoln Square. The caller said that Arnold was in the bar. Right now.
Jimmy Gildea: So we shoot over there. We walk in. Bar’s pretty crowded.
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Gutowski: Jimmy Gildea.
Gildea: He identifies the guy to us, uh, you know, covertly.
Ford: Kind of a tall skinny guy, wore glasses, kind of goofy looking.
Gutowski: He had salt and pepper hair, and a beard.
Ford: And we can see right away looking at the guy, he wasn’t wired too tight. He was a little, a little wacky. Just the way he acted, you could see he was, he was, his bubble wasn’t on beam. If you know what I mean. We took him to area six, and the detective’s office is upstairs.
St. Clair: And is he cuffed or?
Ford: Yeah, we had him hooked to the wall. They had a ring, and you had him cuffed on one hand and they take the other cuff and put it through the ring to secure him. He was pretty docile. He wasn’t agitated or excited or anything.
Gutowski: Ford and Gildea told Arnold someone had dropped a dime on him. That Arnold might be the Tylenol killer, cause he boasted at the bar that he had cyanide at home.
Ford: We kind of schmoozed the guy, you know. Only a criminal mastermind could do this and this guy had to be a genius, and he’s, ‘Oh.’ We’re like puffing him up a little bit.
Gutowski: But Arnold told them he didn’t do it, he swears he wasn’t involved. Ford and Gildea decided to hang onto him anyway, to work him toward a confession. They continued to talk to him that night and started to build a picture of this man’s life. They learned that Arnold had gotten a divorce a few months prior. He’d lost the home to his ex-wife in the breakup. He’d been pretty depressed ever since.
Gildea: He just struck me as being real, real resentful of his lot in life. And he was kind of a broken little man, really. I thought. You know? But, you know, he’s not going to get a gun and walk in and shoot people, but poisoning? Yeah, maybe.
Gutowski: As for the Tylenol murders, the link between Arnold and the killings did seem a bit stronger than a feeling.
Here’s what the detectives found. Arnold worked at Jewel Foods, the local grocery chain where some of the tainted Tylenol was sold. He worked in the warehouse, though, not the stores, loading and unloading trucks. And according to his manager there, Arnold had recently said he was angry. He talked about wanting to throw acid or poison people. Plus, he worked with Mary Reiner’s father at the warehouse. Mary had just given birth to her fourth child days before she died of cyanide poisoning. Arnold and her father occasionally ate lunch together. Here’s another connection. Arnold had visited his then-wife at a psychiatric hospital that was across the street from the store where Mary Reiner bought her tainted Tylenol. He also was familiar with some of the areas where the tainted capsules were sold. And to top it off, Roger Arnold admitted that he had bought cyanide recently, from a mail-order place in Wisconsin. But Arnold insisted he had gotten rid of it a few months ago before the murders.
The evidence, the circumstantial evidence at least, had started to pile up. Cyanide? Check. A connection with one of the victims? Check. Made incriminating statements about poison? Check that one off, too.
Ford and Gildea hoped that this was their chance to solve this case. They headed out to search Arnold’s home on the South Side of Chicago. And took Arnold with them.
Ford: It was an old frame house, and he gave us the key, so we got in there and searched the place. And we were in there for about an hour, hour and a half. We found all kinds of order forms for chemical companies, order chemicals. In his basement he’s got beakers and vials.
Gutowski: And he had all kinds of books. One of them was called “Poor Man’s James Bond.” One section of it explained how to make potassium cyanide. The kind used in the poisonings. They also found an airplane ticket to Thailand leaving on October 15th. That was just a few days away. A one-way ticket. Plus four handguns and one rifle.
Ford: Ah, it didn’t surprise me we found what we did in there. Because it looked like, yeah, he’s the guy.
Gutowski: Why? What would’ve been his motive?
Ford: He’s nuts. He was nuts. He just wanted, you know, you have mass murders all the time just kill people cause they think they can get away with it. You know? Prove to themselves that they’re a criminal mastermind.
Gutowski: After the search, Ford and Gildea were buttering him up to confess. So they continued that buddy-buddy routine.
Ford: You do that a lot with the, you get these suspects, you, you schmooze them.
Gutowski: Before getting back to the station, they took Roger Arnold to the old school Italian joint, Ricobene’s. It’s a Chicago institution. They got the special, the steak sandwich. Breaded, with red sauce.
Ford: You wine them and you dine them. It’s like you’re going out on a date. (laughs) Except going to first base with them puts them in a penitentiary. (laughs)
Gutowski: Ford and Gildea went back to the station, with Arnold, and all their evidence. They cataloged what they got with full bellies and planned to keep interviewing him the next day. But the next day, everything changed.
St. Clair: Detective Jimmy Gildea had left Roger Arnold in a room, and gone to handle other tasks. By the time he got back, word had spread that a suspect was in custody for the Tylenol murders. The station was packed. A lot of the police bosses were there.
Gildea: That’s when we went back and talked to him and we said, ‘Anybody come in here and bother you?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, there’s been a bunch of people came in here and talked to me.’ Well, that’s a no-no. You don’t go, I don’t talk to your suspect or interviewee without asking you.
St. Clair: This was a tense time. It had been two weeks without a real suspect and the pressure to find the killer and solve the murders was building by the day. And, sure, let’s not forget about the FBI’s top suspect. The author of the extortion letter. James Lewis. But right now? Lewis was nowhere to be found. But here in Chicago was Roger Arnold. Right there in lockup. Arnold, with his cyanide project, his anger issues, and his connection to at least one of the victims. So the bees swarmed to the honey.
Ford: They’re all trying to make a name for themselves. ‘I’m deputy superintendent so-and-so, and I solved this case.’ We were literally kept out of the room. Cause all the bosses were in there. We never got to talk to him after that. That was it.
St. Clair: Has that ever happened to you in…?
Ford: No. And it’s like a parade of fools going in there. Guys who were never detectives. They don’t know how to interview anybody. And finally, by the time they got done, he’s demanding an attorney, and an attorney comes in, and now he clams up.
St. Clair: Ford and Gildea were now less free to buddy-buddy it up with Arnold. And public pressure was mounting. People needed these murders to be solved, in order to feel safe again. But to Ford, it felt like the big wigs had gotten in the way.
Ford: If they’d have left us alone we probably could’ve got the guy to flip. He wanted to go down in history as being the mastermind, you know, the guy that could do the crime that he could kill a whole bunch of people and get away with it.
Gutowski: But he was denying it, right?
Ford: Well, we didn’t put it right on him at the start. If you puffed up his ego enough he would’ve, he would’ve gave it up.
St. Clair: Ford was sure of it.
Ford: In my opinion, and my experience, and the demeanor, and all the evidence absolutely points to, in my mind, that he was absolutely the Tylenol murderer. In my mind. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
St. Clair: For forty years, Ford had a feeling about Arnold.
Ford: All the pieces, all the tips, all the clues, all the arrows, they all pointed towards him.
St. Clair: A feeling he held on to. Even after he retired, his investment in the case was just as strong as it had been all those years ago.
Ford: I can refresh my memory, I can probably remember every crime scene I’ve been at. But this one here always stayed with me because it was a big case and we couldn’t solve it.
St. Clair: When Christy and I started looking into the Tylenol murders, Ford was a very invested source. He would take all of our calls. Respond to all of our emails.
Ford: Oh, by the way, did I tell you guys about this book that was sent to me? (laughs)
St. Clair: No.
Ford: Look at this. The Tylenol killer’s theory number seven. It’s got the flow charts in it, and mathematical equations and…
St. Clair: He pointed us to documents.
Ford: Did you ever get my original case report I wrote up on the crime scene?
St. Clair: No. I put a FOIA into CPD today for it. So hopefully, it’ll shake it out.
St. Clair: Maybe he felt the same urgency we did. We felt that time was running out. And that became even more clear, about two weeks after we recorded with Ford. I was waiting for a response to an email I had sent him. But I hadn’t heard back yet, which was weird because he had always been so responsive.
Gutowski: Hey Stace.
St. Clair: Hey. So your source was right. Charlie Ford died overnight.
Gutowski: Oh.
St. Clair: I know.
Gutowski: You know what happened?
St. Clair: I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. Um.
St. Clair: His wife, Gayle, told us he died of a heart attack. He was 76 years old. Gayle told us that spent his last night alive out to dinner with friends eating liver and onions. It wasn’t Ricobene’s, but I’m sure he enjoyed it just the same. We had talked to him four days before.
Gutowski: Man, it really underscores just 40 years, and how time is running out.
St. Clair: Yep.
Gutowski: This case.
St. Clair: This is just going to happen more and more, right? As the years…In the coming years… More people are going to die, more people’s memories are going to be lost forever.
St. Clair: There were so many people we tried to find for this story. A lot of them were already deceased. Or had dementia or were too sick to really talk to us. More than ever, we were feeling that time really was running out to solve the Tylenol murders.
And it turns out, Ford’s death would have future implications for the case. But we’ll get to that.
For now, though, let’s go back to October 1982. Back when Ford and Gildea felt their access to Arnold had been blocked.
Either way, prosecutors didn’t have solid evidence to charge Arnold for murder. The case was all circumstantial. So, for now, the state’s attorney charged him with what they had. Failing to register the guns he kept at his house. And with assault. Apparently he had recently pulled a gun on someone during a bar fight.
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On October 13th, two days after his arrest, Arnold was at his bond hearing. Before he made bond and left, he made a comment. He said he’d like to “be in on the homicide of the guy who called the cops on him.” “Be in on the homicide.” That’s a quote. Not a great thing for a suspect in a mass murder, a man facing assault and weapons charges, to say as he’s released.
Arnold didn’t know who called the cops on him. But now he was free. And he was pissed.
And while he was out, Arnold went and did something that surprised everyone. He proved that he was a killer.
Gutowski: For exclusive details about Roger Arnold, the extortion letter, and a transcript of this episode, visit chicagotribune.com/tylenolmurders.
St. Clair: Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders is executive produced by Will Malnati from AT WILL MEDIA and Mitch Pugh from the baiduhai, 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, Matt Hickey, Zach Grappone, Andrew Holzberger, Mark Van Hare, and Seth Richardson. Mixed by Daniel Tureck. Original music by Hannis Brown. Reported by us, Stacy St. Clair and Christy Gutowski.