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California chemist who died in a church may be Tylenol murders suspect · Best of: Features

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  California chemist who died in a church may be Tylenol Murder's suspect.
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  Written by Katie Dowd This article is being read by an automated
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  voice generated by Everlett. A man found dead in a church half
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  way across the country may have suddenly unlocked the key, quite literally,
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  to one of America's most famous unsolved crimes. On december fourth, nineteen
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  eighty two, a parishioner at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise found
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  a man collapsed under a pew. She had worked as a nurse,
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  so she quickly recognized the man was either dying or already dead.
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  A priest was summoned to give his last rites, and police came
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  not long after. In the dead man's pockets were a typed suicide
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  note and one thousand nine hundred dollars. The note said the money
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  was enough to cover his cremation, and any additional funds should be
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  donated to the church. It was signed Wubblewim L. Toomy. No such
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  man existed. His fingerprints came up empty for matches, and it seemed
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  like his sandy coloured hair might have been a dye job to
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  conceal his appearance. Even a feature on Unsolved Mysteries in nineteen ninety
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  did nothing to uncover the identity of the man dubbed the Unknown
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  Wanderer. All that was known for sure was that he had used
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  cyanide to kill himself. The case went cold, but in 2019 Ada
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  County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Investigator Tim Cooper took a fresh look
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  at the evidence. Among the items preserved since 1982 was an engraved
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  key found in the man's possession. Cooper traced it to a neighborhood
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  in Jacksonville, FLA. He learned a homeowner there disappeared in 1982, and
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  he was eventually declared dead in absentia. His name was Dr. Matthew
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  Betkuski. Although Cooper could have stopped there, he kept digging, unraveling a
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  strange and alarming life. Betkouski was born in nineteen forty three in
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  Los Angeles. His grandfather had served as the president of the LA
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  City Council from nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventeen, and his father was
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  an engineer for the Department of Water and Power. In nineteen sixty
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  five, Bitkuski got his bachelor's at Loyola University and then earned a
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  teaching assistantship at Dayton University's chemistry department. Upon moving to Ohio he
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  met his future wife. Their marriage announcement said they were moving to
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  Gainesville so Bitkowski could pursue his PhD at the University of Florida.
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  But although he had a successful career working at one point for
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  Lockheed Martin on a NASA related project in New Mexico, Bitkuski had
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  a reputation for making unsettling comments. Former co workers told Cooper that
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  Betkouski spoke of how to commit a perfect crime, had a history
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  of volatility, and referenced cyanide as an ideal way to kill without
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  detection. He also mentioned putting poison in over the counter medication, an
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  especially worrisome comment coming from someone who had worked in multiple drug
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  stores. It was said than doctor Betkouski attempted to obtain some type
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  of pills or capsules from a pharmacy in the Las Cruces area,
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  Cooper said at a press conference last week. He said this would
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  be for an experiment. For reasons not fully understood, doctor Betkuski created
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  a disturbance At the location and the police were summoned. Less than
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  three months before Betkuski killed himself, a national terror was unfolding in
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  Chicago. In late september nineteen eighty two, seven people took over the
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  counter Tylenol for their usual aches and pains. The capsules had been
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  opened and filled with potassium cyanide, killing the people who took them.
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  The crime sent widespread panic throughout the country. At the time, tamper
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  proof seals were not standard, and investigators believed someone had swapped in
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  the poison after the bottles were placed on shelves. Johnson and Johnson
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  issued one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in American history as investigators
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  tried to find the culprit. The longtime suspect was James William Lewis.
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  Lewis sent a letter to Johnson, and Johnson demanding money to end
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  the Tylenol poisonings, and he eventually went to prison for extortion. But
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  Lewis maintained he never actually touched the pills, and a later DNA
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  test did not match the forensic material left behind on the Tylenol
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  bottles. Despite the high profile nature of the case, it's remained unsolved.
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  Now Ada County detectives think Betkouski may be a compelling suspect. He
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  and his wife divorced the year before the Tylenol murders, and he
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  killed himself in the months after the Chicago cases. Idaho investigators contacted
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  counterparts in Chicago to clue them into their findings, and more evidence
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  is set to be revealed to the public in an updated episode
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  of Unsolved Mysteries. We're hoping that getting his story out generates new
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  leads, not just for this case, but for others we may not
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  even know about yet, Cooper said in a press release. I'm especially
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  interested in learning more about his movements between october fifteenth and december
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  fourth, nineteen eighty two.