JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Ada County Sheriff’s Office cold case detective responsible for linking a Jacksonville man to the 1982 Tylenol poisonings says tampering was also taking place here in Florida.
ACSO Detective Tim Cooper linked Dr. Matthew Francis Betkouski, a chemist, to the infamous cold case after one of 30 keys found on the man previously known as the “Unknown Wanderer,” opened a door off Mills Court in Jacksonville.
The “Unknown Wanderer,” now identified as Betkouski, was found dead inside of a Boise Catholic church in December of 1982, just a couple of months after seven people died from ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules.
The Chicago Tylenol poisonings have remained a cold case for more than four decades.
Although Betkouski has not been officially named a suspect, Cooper discovered newspaper clippings from the late 1970s that show Jacksonville was experiencing tampering of its own.
“Somebody had gone around tampering with eye drop products and nasal spray products,” Cooper said. “Essentially, what they were doing was putting in acid-based chemicals as well as chlorine, which, my understanding from speaking with chemists, can really add to the agitation, the effect of the acid.”
The news clippings, dated May 15, 1979 — three years before the Tylenol poisonings — show that six people were hurt after using Murine eyedrops, a company based out of Chicago.
According to the articles, the eye drops contained hydrochloric acid.
The clippings say that bottles were purchased from four different stores along US 1 from Jacksonville all the way up to Waycross, Georgia, during March and April of 1979.
“It wasn’t a manufacturing error,” said U.S. Food and Drug Administration spokesman Ed Nada to the Fort Pierce Tribune in 1979. “Someone came in and got hold of the Murine and substituted acid for it. It was done sporadically — we don’t know how.”
Cooper said the tampering took place while Betkouski was living in Jacksonville, shortly before he was institutionalized.
He says he discovered the incident while investigating Betkouski.
“We started learning that Dr. Betkouski had made comments related to capsule tampering, and that he may have had a history with other types of pranks or nefarious chemistry-related incidents,” Cooper said. “I was just curious if there had been any others around the country around that time, and the only ones that I found actually were in Jacksonville, Florida.”
He says they also discovered photographic material that indicated Betkouski had lived in Waycross around the same time.
Cooper also says they discovered tampering out of Betkouski’s hometown of Los Angeles, California, through newspaper clippings dated August of 1982 — just two months before the Chicago Tylenol poisonings and four months before Betkouski’s suicide.
“When he was alive, he would return to his home in Hollywood,” Cooper said. “In fact, he spent holidays and time off that he had going back there to see his father and his brother until his father passed.”
But despite what Cooper described as an interesting timeline, Betkouski has not been named a suspect in any of these cases, including the Chicago cold case.
“In the absence of being able to compare modern technology with 1982 evidence collection, it’s a difficult case, and there’s a lot of report material to comb through,” Cooper said. “Some handwritten, a lot of it’s archived at different agencies, and so forth. So, my hat’s off to the investigators for trying to look into this, and I know they have been for years.”
Cooper said his hope in sharing these discoveries is that they’ll learn more information about the Chicago Tylenol poisonings, and whether Betkouski is guilty or not, that people will learn of his story and realize there’s a better way forward.
“The one thing I can prove is that Dr. Betkouski suffered from mental illness bad enough, tragic enough, that he took his own life,” Cooper said. “If there’s people out there who are having those kinds of thoughts they don’t want, or they’re struggling with mental illness, we have so many resources, not just here in Ada County with the sheriff’s office, but all over the country.”
You can learn more about the different mental health resources around Jacksonville here. You can also call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.
Anyone with information related to this case is asked to contact the Ada County Sheriff’s Office at ACSOtips@adacounty.id.gov.
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