California scientist emerges as possible suspect in Tylenol murders

A man found dead in a church halfway across the country may have suddenly unlocked the key – literally – to one of America’s most notorious unsolved crimes.

On December 4, 1982, a parishioner at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise found a man collapsed under a pew. She had worked as a nurse, so she quickly recognized that the man was dying or already dead. A priest was summoned to give his last rites and the police arrived shortly afterwards. In the dead man’s pockets were a typewritten suicide note and $1,900. The note said the money was enough to cover his cremation and any additional funds should be donated to the church. It was signed Wm. L. Toomey.

No such man existed. His fingerprints were blank for matches, and it looked like his sandy hair could have been a dye to disguise his appearance. Even a report on “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1990 did nothing to uncover the identity of the man nicknamed the Unknown Wanderer. All that was certain was that he had used cyanide to commit suicide.

The case remained cold, but in 2019, Ada County Sheriff’s Office Investigator Tim Cooper took another look at the evidence. Among the items kept since 1982 was an engraved key found in the man’s possession. Cooper traced it to a neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida. He learned that an owner had gone missing there in 1982 and was eventually pronounced dead in absentia. His name was Dr. Mathew Betkouski.

Although Cooper could have stopped there, he continued digging, uncovering a strange and alarming life. Betkouski was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. His grandfather had served as president of the Los Angeles City Council from 1915 to 1917, and his father was an engineer with the Department of Water and Power. In 1965, Betkouski received his bachelor’s degree from Loyola University, then obtained a position as a teaching assistant in the chemistry department at the University of Dayton. While moving to Ohio, he met his future wife; their marriage announcement stated that they were moving to Gainesville so that Betkouski could pursue his doctorate at the University of Florida.

But although he had a successful career, at one point working for Lockheed Martin on a NASA-related project in New Mexico, Betkouski had a reputation for making troubling comments. Former colleagues told Cooper that Betkouski talked about how to commit a “perfect crime,” had a “history of volatility” and referred to cyanide as the ideal way to kill without detection. He also mentioned putting poison in over-the-counter medications, a particularly disturbing comment coming from someone who had worked in several pharmacies.

“It was said that Dr. Betkouski attempted to obtain a certain type of pill or capsule from a pharmacy in the Las Cruces area,” Cooper said at a news conference last week. “He said it would be for an experiment. For reasons that are not fully understood, Dr. Betkouski created a disturbance at the scene and the police were summoned.”

Less than three months before Betkouski committed suicide, a national terror was unfolding in Chicago. In late September 1982, seven people took over-the-counter Tylenol for their usual aches and pains. The capsules had been opened and filled with potassium cyanide, killing those who took them. These crimes caused panic throughout the country. At the time, tamper-evident seals were not standard and investigators believed someone had exchanged the poison after the bottles were placed on the shelves. Johnson & Johnson carried out one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in American history as investigators tried to find the culprit.

The long-time suspect was James William Lewis. Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding money to stop the Tylenol poisonings, and he eventually went to prison for extortion. But Lewis claimed he never touched the pills and that a subsequent DNA test did not match the forensic evidence left on the Tylenol bottles. Despite the high-profile nature of the case, it remains unsolved.

Now, Ada County detectives believe Betkouski could be a serious suspect. He and his wife divorced the year before the Tylenol murders, and he committed suicide in the months following the Chicago cases. Idaho investigators have contacted their Chicago counterparts to provide insight into their findings, and more evidence is expected to be revealed to the public in an updated episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

“We hope that the airing of his story will generate new leads, not just for this case, but for others that we may not even know about yet,” Cooper said in a news release. “I am particularly interested in learning more about his movements between October 15 and December 4, 1982.”