The Slammer

Maggie had wanted to tell the woman in the blue space suit to leave her alone. She was too early and Maggie was tired of being poked and prodded. She stayed curled up in bed. She didn’t even look over her shoulder at the woman. She’d simply wait until Colonel Platt returned. But this time the woman brought in a laptop computer and without a word she left.

Maggie booted up the computer and was surprised to find she had access to a wireless network that connected with ease. In a matter of minutes she started trying to track down any information on the manila envelope she had taken from the Kellerman house.

The postage was a metered stamp from a post office in D.C. but the return address was actually Oklahoma. Why go to the trouble of pretending it came from Oklahoma when it was obviously sent from D.C.? If this envelope had delivered the deadly concoction that made Ms. Kellerman ill, Maggie believed there had to be some clue in the return address.

Other criminals had used return addresses to make a statement or confuse law enforcement. If Maggie remembered correctly, at least one of the Unabomber’s intended victims was not the recipient of the rigged package, but rather the person listed on the return address. Theodore Kaczynski had even gone to the trouble of supplying insufficient postage so the package would be “returned to sender.” It was a cunning way for a criminal to remove himself from the victim, make the victim and the crime look random. It became tougher when law enforcement couldn’t make a connection between the victim and the suspected killer. The smartest criminal minds, the dangerous ones, used this knowledge to their advantage.

Maggie suspected this guy was in that category. It was certainly clear to her that he wanted attention or he wouldn’t have dropped a note right into the FBI’s lap. He wanted to thumb his nose at them, show how smart and clever he was. He didn’t just want the FBI investigating his shenanigans, he wanted to drop them smack-dab in the middle of it all. He wanted them to experience this right alongside the victims he had hand chosen. And for whatever twisted reason, Maggie believed he had specially chosen Ms. Kellerman and Mary Louise. There was no doubt in her mind that they were not random victims.

Maggie brought up Google maps and keyed in the return address listed on the package: 4205 Highway 66 West, El Reno, OK 73036. She expected to find a residence belonging to James Lewis who was listed as the sender. What came up on the screen stopped her.

She checked everything she had keyed in. Maybe she had gotten the numbers wrong. There was no mistake. The return address was for the U.S. Federal Correctional Institution for the South Central Region.

“Okay,” she told herself. Federal prisoners had access to plenty of things these days but there was no way one would be able to send out a package that wasn’t thoroughly inspected.

She Googled “James Lewis” + “federal prison.” Several news articles came up. All of them included the Tylenol murderers in Chicago during the fall of 1982. Maggie sat up on the edge of her chair.

Now, this was interesting.

Maggie was only a girl at the time. Her father was still alive and they lived in Green Bay, close enough to Chicago that she remembered her parents had been concerned. It didn’t matter. She knew the case. Every FBI agent knew the case. It was one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in history.

She scanned one of the articles to refresh her memory of the details. Seven people died after taking cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. The murderer had shoplifted bottles from area stores, emptied and refilled capsules with cyanide, replaced them in their bottle and box then returned them to each store. Hard to image how easy it had been before tamperproof packaging.

Maggie found James Lewis’s name and continued reading. Lewis was a New York man who was charged and convicted, not of the murders. There was no evidence that he had access to or had tampered with any of the bottles. Instead, Lewis was convicted of attempting to extort one million dollars from Tylenol makers Johnson & Johnson. He served thirteen years of a twenty-year sentence. And he served those thirteen years in the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma. However, Lewis was released in 1995 and was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Maggie sat back. Obviously Lewis hadn’t sent this. He wouldn’t set himself up. But the person who did send it wanted to draw attention to the unsolved case. Or was it simply a piece of trivia he found amusing?

Maggie browsed the other articles about the Tylenol case. How could it be relevant? It was interesting, but it all happened twenty-five years ago.

She checked the date and slid to the edge of her chair again.

It was exactly twenty-five years ago.

The first victim died on September 29, 1982. And that’s when Maggie saw it and she knew she was right. He hadn’t chosen at random. Just the opposite.

The first victim of the Tylenol murders was a twelve-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, Illinois, and her name was Mary Kellerman.