FILE: Samples of extra strength Tylenol and sample of cyanide laced medicine are side by side in the Cook County Medical Examiners office in Oct. 1982.
FILE: Samples of extra strength Tylenol and sample of cyanide laced medicine are side by side in the Cook County Medical Examiners office in Oct. 1982.
A man found dead in a church halfway across the country may have suddenly unlocked the key — quite literally — to one of America’s most famous unsolved crimes.
On Dec. 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 the man was either dying or already dead. A priest was summoned to give his last rites, and police came not long after. In the dead man’s pockets were a typed 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 came up empty for matches, and it seemed like his sandy-colored hair might have been a dye job to conceal his appearance. Even a feature on “Unsolved Mysteries" in 1990 did nothing to uncover the identity of the man dubbed the Unknown Wanderer. All that was known for sure was that he had used cyanide to kill himself.
The case went cold, but in 2019 Ada County Sheriff’s Office cold case investigator Tim Cooper took a fresh look at the evidence. Among the items preserved since 1982 was an engraved key found in the man’s possession. Cooper traced it to a neighborhood in Jacksonville, Fla. He learned a homeowner there disappeared in 1982, and he was eventually declared dead in absentia. His name was Dr. Mathew Betkouski.
Undated photos of Dr. Mathew Betkouski provided by the Ada County Sheriff's Office in Sept. 2026.
Undated photos of Dr. Mathew Betkouski provided by the Ada County Sheriff's Office in Sept. 2026.
Although Cooper could have stopped there, he kept digging, unraveling a strange and alarming life. Betkouski was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. His grandfather had served as the president of the LA City Council from 1915-1917, and his father was an engineer for the Department of Water and Power. In 1965, Betkouski got his bachelor’s at Loyola University and then earned a teaching assistantship at Dayton University’s chemistry department. Upon moving to Ohio, he met his future wife; their marriage announcement said they were moving to Gainesville so Betkouski could pursue his PhD at the University of Florida.
But although he had a successful career, working at one point for Lockheed Martin on a NASA-related project in New Mexico, Betkouski had a reputation for making unsettling comments. Former coworkers told Cooper that Betkouski spoke of how to commit a “perfect crime,” had a “history of volatility" and referenced cyanide as an ideal way to kill without detection. He also mentioned putting poison in over-the-counter medication, an especially worrisome comment coming from someone who had worked in multiple drugstores.
“It was said that Dr. Betkouski attempted to obtain some type of pills or capsules from a pharmacy in the Las Cruces area,” Cooper said at a press conference last week. “He said this would be for an experiment. For reasons not fully understood, Dr. Betkouski created a disturbance at the location and the police were summoned.”
Less than three months before Betkouski killed himself, 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 the people who took them. The crimes sent widespread panic throughout the country. At the time, tamper-proof seals were not standard, and investigators believed someone had swapped in the poison after the bottles were placed on shelves. Johnson & Johnson issued one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in American history as investigators tried to find the culprit.
FILE: Drugstore clerk removes Tylenol capsules from the shelves of a pharmacy September 30, 1982 in New York City.
FILE: Drugstore clerk removes Tylenol capsules from the shelves of a pharmacy September 30, 1982 in New York City.
The longtime suspect was James William Lewis. Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding money to end the Tylenol poisonings, and he eventually went to prison for extortion. But Lewis maintained he never actually touched the pills, and a later DNA test did not match the forensic material left behind on the Tylenol bottles. Despite the high-profile nature of the case, it’s remained unsolved.
Now, Ada County detectives think Betkouski may be a compelling suspect. He and his wife divorced the year before the Tylenol murders, and he killed himself in the months after the Chicago cases. Idaho investigators contacted counterparts in Chicago to clue them into their findings, and more evidence is set to be revealed to the public in an updated episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.”
“We’re hoping that getting his story out generates new leads, not just for this case, but for others we may not even know about yet,” Cooper said in a press release. “I’m especially interested in learning more about his movements between October 15 and December 4, 1982.”