FBI searches home linked to 1982 Tylenol killings

BOSTON (Reuters) - The FBI on Wednesday searched the residence of a man convicted in 1983 of plotting to extort $1 million to stop the spread of cyanide-laced Tylenol that killed seven people and sparked nationwide panic.

Federal investigators said they searched a Cambridge, Massachusetts, building that is home to James Lewis, who served 10 years of a 20-year sentence for trying to extort money from Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson.

Lewis has denied he laced Tylenol with the cyanide. But the ex-tax consultant, now 62, remains the only person ever linked to the crimes by police in the unsolved case.

Some investigators have said they still consider him a suspect, while others have depicted him as nothing more than an opportunist.

Lewis admitted to sending an extortion letter to the company demanding $1 million to "stop the killing."

"We have conducted searches in Cambridge today in relation to an ongoing criminal investigation," said Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman for the Boston field office of the FBI.

The deaths began without warning on September 29, 1982.

Seven people, all from the Chicago area, died after taking the cyanide-laced Tylenol: a 35-year-old flight attendant; two brothers in their 20s and the wife of one brother who was 19; a 12-year-old girl; a 27-year-old mother of four who had just come home from the hospital with a 5-day-old infant; and a 31-year-old mother of two.

Sales of Tylenol, which had been the top-selling non-aspirin painkiller in the United States, plunged. Johnson & Johnson examined and destroyed 31 million containers of the drug at a cost of $100 million.

The crisis led to a new generation of tamper-resistant or tamper-evident containers for over-the-counter drugs. Sales of Tylenol eventually rebounded. The manufacturer settled out of court with families of the victims in 1991 for an amount believed to have been in the tens of millions of dollars.

(Reporting by Jason Szep; Editing by Xavier Briand)