Last week, the FBI reopened the infamous Tylenol murder investigation. FBI agents from Boston and Chicago removed boxes and a computer from the Boston condominium owned by James W. Lewis. For years, he’s been a leading suspect in the still-unsolved case.

For those unfamiliar with the case, the murders began on September 29th, 1982. Over the course of the next three days, seven people who took cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago and four suburbs died. The deaths triggered a national panic, prompting people to throw medicine away and stores nationwide to pull Tylenol from their shelves. The poisonings led to the introduction of tamperproof packaging and labels warning against taking capsules from damaged packages.

James Lewis was arrested in December 1982 after a nationwide manhunt. Later, he described to investigators how someone could buy medicine, use a special method to add cyanide to the capsules and return them to store shelves, but he denied having anything to do with the crime. He eventually served more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, demanding $1 million to stop the killing. He later admitted sending the extortion letter but said he never intended to collect the money. Instead, he claimed that he wanted to embarrass his wife’s former employer by having the money sent to the employer’s bank account.

Lewis has a long history of run-ins with the law. He served two years of a 10-year sentence for tax fraud. In 1978, he was charged in Kansas City with the dismemberment murder of Raymond West, 72, who had hired Lewis as an accountant. The charges were dismissed because West’s cause of death was not determined and some evidence had been illegally obtained. In 2004, he was charged with rape, kidnapping and other offenses for an alleged attack on a woman in Cambridge. He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was scheduled to begin after the victim refused to testify. But the bizarre aspects of the Tylenol murder investigation do not end with James W. Lewis.

A second man named Roger Arnold was investigated and cleared of the killings. However, the intense media spotlight caused him to have a nervous breakdown. Arnold blamed bar owner Marty Sinclair for sending the police his way. Arnold shot and killed a man he believed to be Sinclair, but who was in fact an innocent man who didn’t know Arnold. Arnold served 15 years on a 30-year sentence for second-degree murder.

A woman named Laurie Dann was also a suspect in the Tylenol murders at one time. Dann lived in Chicago’s north suburbs and had a long history of mental illness. She had engaged in other secret poisoning attempts and eventually shot and killed a boy and wounded two girls and three boys in a school in Winnetka, Illinois. Dann then took a family hostage and shot a man before finally killing herself.

One hopes that new forensic evidence and leads finally bring this bizarre and tragic case to a close.