Idaho Cold Case Ties Dead Doctor to 1982 Tylenol Murders Probe

A man found dead in an Idaho church more than 40 years ago has been identified as a possible suspect in the 1982 cyanide poisonings known as the Tylenol murders, authorities said Wednesday.

The Ada County Sheriff's Office reopened its cold case in 2019, and Detective Tim Cooper said the inquiry led investigators to posthumously identify Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski. He had taken his own life with cyanide and was buried without a name.

As detectives pieced together his background, they came to regard him as a potential suspect in the deaths of seven people in the Chicago area who consumed Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. The killings, which remain unsolved, prompted a nationwide recall of the painkiller and drove the adoption of child safety caps and tamper-resistant packaging for medicines.

An engraved key discovered with the body pointed investigators to a street in Jacksonville, Florida, where a property owner had vanished in 1982. Photographs and DNA testing were used to confirm the man's identity.

Investigators later learned that Betkouski had worked in drugstores. Former colleagues and acquaintances described him as volatile, fascinated by the notion of a "perfect crime," and once said cyanide could kill without detection, according to authorities.

Detectives recovered cyanide from Betkouski's desk. Cooper said it appeared to have been made at home and was a different compound from the one used in the 1982 killings.

Betkouski lived in five states over his lifetime but never in Illinois or near Chicago, investigators said. Photographs showed he had visited the Chicago area a year before the killings, though it was unclear whether he returned the following year.

The Chicago Police Department said its detectives have been in contact with Idaho authorities to establish whether the findings are connected to the Tylenol murders investigation, which remains an open cold case. The department did not say whether it considers Betkouski a suspect.

For years, investigators believed a man named James Lewis was responsible, though he was never charged. Lewis died in 2023 after serving more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson, then the drug's manufacturer, demanding $1 million to "stop the killing." When arrested in 1982, Lewis gave investigators a detailed account of how the killer might have operated, but he always denied involvement.