- As days ticked by Fahner's Task force searched for any new leads.

It got a break on October 6th, a letter mailed to Johnson and Johnson from someone claiming to be the killer, a single page that would turn the investigation on its head for years to come.

- There are reports that an extortionist is behind the murders in Chicago, according to the Chicago Sun Times the FBI is investigating a Chicago man who allegedly mailed the letter to the makers of Tylenol demanding $1 million.

- The extortionist wrote, gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to place cyanide into capsules sitting on store shelves.

It is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill.

- And he says, if you don't pay me money, I'm gonna do this again, because I know how to do it.

I did it.

- The writer warned, if you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing.

- They're all gonna die immediately if you don't gimme a million dollars, I'm gonna go kill a bunch more.

Another letter addressed to the White House threatened President Ronald Reagan with more poisonings if he raised taxes.

Investigators traced the postage meter stamps on both letters to a Chicago area travel agency.

The owner was ruled out as a suspect.

- So the authorities asked, do you have any enemies?

Is there anybody who would want to put law enforcement on your doorstep like this?

And he came up with a name.

Robert Richardson.

- Robert Richardson was married to a former employee of the travel agency.

He was furious that his wife was still owed $500 in unpaid wages.

The couple lived in this Lincoln Park apartment building.

Richardson rarely worked, but fancied himself a writer.

The 36-year-old had contributed an essay to the Chicago Tribune.

- He was quite proud that it ran in the Chicago Tribune.

One of the things that was really helpful was the Tribune ran his picture.

- The Richardsons had left Chicago on September 4th, three weeks before the poisonings telling neighbors they were moving to Texas.

Authorities announced a federal arrest warrant alleging attempted extortion and circulated their photos.

- The authorities are mounting a nationwide manhunt.

In the case - A Kansas City police sergeant was watching the CBS evening news when a familiar face flashed across his screen.

- 36-year-old Robert Richardson is the man Chicago investigators suspected of - Identified the suspect immediately by his real name.

- I jumped out of the couch and I said, that's god damn.

James Lewis - Barton contacted the FBI and was on an airplane to Chicago the next day.

He told the task force all he knew about James Lewis.

A fugitive also wanted in Kansas City with a lengthy wrap sheet.

He - Hails from a place called Carl's Junction, and it is kind of the southern hill country of Missouri.

- James Lewis grew up a very poor little kid who was abandoned by his parents and then later adopted as he grew into a teenager.

He showed a lot of emotional problems.

He tried to kill himself.

He chased his stepfather with an ax, broke several of his stepfather's ribs.

He ended up in a state psychiatric facility.

By the time he was about 20, he seemed to be turning it around and went to college and met the love of his life.

Leann.

They were two misfits that fit together.

It was a love story like no other.

- One of the things that bonded them was they had a little girl.

Her name was Toni, and she was born with Down Syndrome.

She died in the early to mid seventies.

She had a hole in her heart.

- James and Leann ran a tax preparation business from their home in a working class section of Kansas City.

One of their clients was a 72-year-old bachelor named Raymond West.

- He lived by himself.

He tended flowers.

The neighbors all knew him.

He had no enemies, just a retired guy just living his retired life.

- So it came as a surprise to friends when West vanished in the summer of 1978.

Police discovered a grizzly scene in his attic three weeks later.

- The body had been dismembered, then hoisted up into the attic by way of a triple pulley game hoist, a hoist that would be used by deer hunters to strip a deer in the field.

- Lewis became the lead suspect after trying to cash a forged check worth $5,000 on West's bank account.

- James Lewis was the only one with any kind of motive to kill Ray West, a financial motive.

- They also recovered out of his car boxes of canceled checks from Raymond West and the cords and ropes that were used to hoist the body up.

They found similar rope with similar knots in James Lewis's car.

- The case against Lewis appeared to be a slam dunk, but Leann came from some means and could afford Kansas City's best criminal defense attorneys.

They combed reports and unearthed a critical error.

Cops had failed to inform Lewis of his Miranda rights before questioning him.

Sergeant Barton was not involved in the procedural blunder.

I think the prosecutor's office was outlawyered.

The case was dismissed and Lewis walked for the time being.

- There's never been any other suspect but James Lewis for this murder.

And he went away scot-free and it's pretty shocking.

So James Lewis gets off on this technicality, but he doesn't go back to some law abiding lifestyle.

Oh no.

He just embarks on a fairly widespread credit card fraud scheme.

- Lewis racked up more than $17,000 in charges on credit cards he took out in his tax client's names.

Barton's team trailed Lewis for weeks and executed a search warrant at his home.

The - Fraud evidence was out in plain sight, scattered everywhere.

- When Barton moved in to arrest Lewis for fraud, five days later, he discovered Lewis and his wife had fled town.

And - So it was like, oh crap, we missed him.

He's gone.

- Just 10 months later, Lewis was on the run again, but now the entire country was looking for him.

Fayer went public, identifying James and Leann as prime suspects in the Tylenol murders.

- Lewis was finished dead meat, cold dead meat.

The entire law enforcement machinery in America was in a manhunt for him.

- Lewis evaded the dragnet for two months until the librarian spotted the now clean shaven suspect reading in the New York Public Library.

FBI Agents arrested Lewis.

On December 13th, 1982.

- A small army of cameramen and reporters jammed the federal building garage ramp, hoping to get a glimpse of Leann Lewis.

- Leann turned herself in the next day and was briefly held for using a false social security number.

- I wanted her to cooperate.

Our approach with Leann was to try to say, don't you think it might be good to flip on James Lewis because he has not done you any favors in life and he is going to jail for a long time.

And she told us to go pound sand - Without Leanne's cooperation.

Investigators struggled to unearth a key piece of evidence, one of the - Most frustrating parts of the investigation.

We couldn't put James Lewis in Chicago at the time of the poisonings.

- They looked at plane tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, fake tickets.

They looked at everything.

They could not prove that James Lewis was any place but New York City during the month of September.

- Today, this will be solved in five minutes because of the cameras.

- While prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to charge Lewis with murder, there was plenty to move forward on attempted extortion - Under tight security that would remain so.

Throughout his brief courtroom appearance, James Lewis, the accused Tylenol extortionist, arrived at the Dirksen Federal Building in a US Marshal's car.

- Lewis's attorney admitted Lewis wrote the extortion letter, but says he had intended to frame his wife's employer not to extort Johnson and Johnson.

- He clearly tried to take advantage of this tragedy.

For someone to take advantage of that situation is the worst low life you could possibly imagine.

Who does that?

What kind of person does that?

- It took the jury just two and a half hours to convict while awaiting sentencing.

Lewis reached out to FBI agent Roy Lane with a stunning offer to help with the Tylenol investigation just as the FBI criminal profiler had predicted.

I was very excited.

That was a big deal.

Lane met with Lewis several times, getting a unique glimpse into the extortionist mind.

- I didn't see psychopathic rage.

What I saw was a lack of concern for anyone other than himself.

I asked him, do you think the poisoner shows extra strength Tylenol so that it would avoid a child being a victim?

And he broke out laughing.

And he says, it's a joke.

Don't you get it?

There's something extra in the capsule.

- Lewis offered far more than just odd jokes, sharing dozens of manuscripts and detailed drawings with Lane, an assistant US attorney, Jeremy Margolis, speculating on how the perpetrator may have spiked Tylenol pills.

- He would suggest a number of different ways that the capsules could be filled.

The drill board method is one, what on earth would possess a human being to spend this much time pontificating on these various methods of creating this diabolical murder scheme?

It's the moth being attracted to the flame.

- He said, I can get you close to the person responsible for this.

And he wanted to eliminate anything he said could be used against him in a court of law.

We couldn't do that.

That's tantamount to giving a person immunity.

And that ended those conversations.

- The judge sentenced Lewis to 10 years in federal prison for attempted extortion, but the Tylenol poisonings went unsolved.