Nice post. 

Tylenol murders.

Last poisoning I heard of turned out to be a disgruntled ex-employee but that has been ruled out in the Tylenol murders. I very much doubt we are into 'random psycho' territory here (if we were he would have been caught by now.) James Lewis is an opportunist who got greedy and is now facing the consequences. I don't think he did it, nor does he know who did. If anyone in authority thought Lewis could really catch the killer they would have refused him the $1m but given him the entirety of the $100,000 reward offered by Johnson & Johnson.

This is someone with an axe to grind against society at large. The FBI are right to investigate Ted Kaczynski. Although bombing is more his 'thing' it wouldn't surprise me at all if he had a little 'activist-in-training' waitng in the wings. People like that always attract company. Also there is no mention of evidence of Kaczynski's 'theme' (wood/nature) ever being found (unless of course it was a trace amount included in the compound placed in the capsules themselves but that seems very unlikely.)

Whoever did this is now probably 45-50 years old at least. There have been copycats but the killer has never pulled the same trick twice (suggesting this was helped by insanity but not motivated by it. In the killer's mind this was something they had to do to prove a point, not because they wanted to.)

I suppose we can be thankful that this case lead to the creation of a lot of tamper-proof packaging but that's going to be no consolation to the familes of the people who lost their lives.

Also it's interesting to see the pattern of stores/homes 'hit' by the poisonings. They run south; apparently [according to a friend of mine who is very big on true crime so I accept no responsibility for the accuracy of this bit] a very common pattern followed by criminals. Guilty persons fleeing a scene or trying to create a seemingly 'random pattern' will often (unwittingly) travel south and refuse to cross natural barriers like rivers, lakes, mountain ranges etc. This was someone who lives or lived in the area, knew it well enough to know where every pharmacy was.

I don't agree with the alternative theory that this was conducted in a warehouse and that Johnson & Johnson knew but kept quiet about it. Because that makes things unnecessarily complicated for the company. Because it would then obvously be a disgruntled ex-employee and easy to solve. Why create a costly conspiracy theory when you could be solving the crime, catching the 'bad guy' and reassuring your customers worth millions of dollars?

Thoughts?

Last edited by Mnemosyne (December 28, 2012 12:00 pm)