KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The Kansas City Police Department says the cold case squad is re-opening a murder case that has been the subject of a two-month long NBC Action News investigation.
The NBC Action News Investigation explored overlooked chemical evidence that could provide new clues and determine whether there is a link between the murder of Raymond West and the 1982 Tylenol killings.
James Lewis, the one-time suspect in the 1978 dismemberment murder of Raymond West faced a recent FBI search at his home in connection to the Bureaus's investigation into the 1982 Tylenol killings.
The FBI would not disclose what if any evidence agents found, but acknowledge removing several boxes of property.
To understand the February search at the Massachusetts home of James Lewis, you have to go back to the Chicago murders of seven people from cyanide-tainted Tylenol.
While no one was ever charged with the actual murders or product tampering, James Lewis was imprisoned for 12 years for an extortion letter demanding money to stop the killings.
He claimed he never had anything to do with the killings and that he wrote the letter to frame someone else.
It was back in 1978 in Kansas City where our story begins when police found the dismembered body of a man stuffed into an attic crawl space inside the victim’s home. .
Police arrested the same James Lewis for murder - but the charges wouldn't stick.
“He’s very smart, but he's got some far out ideas,” said James Bell, the former Jackson County prosecutor who led the failed case against Lewis.
“I think that he was a little bit of an eccentric, a little bit of an odd ball,” said Albert Riederer, who was James Lewis' defense attorney in the 1978 Kansas City murder charge.
Riederer won Lewis his freedom by convincing a judge police failed to give Lewis his Miranda rights.
A park now sits at the site of the victim's since-demolished home in what was the 4800 block of Campbell.
James Lewis ran a tax service out of his since boarded up home in the 5700 block of Troost.
The victim, Raymond West, was one of his accounting clients.
Three decades later, a free man, Lewis appeared on a Boston talk show declaring his innocence.
Lewis didn’t respond to our repeated calls and e-mails, but appeared on a
Boston area talk show recently where he denied involvement in the Tylenol killings and the Raymond West case.
“The medical examiner testified in court that there was no cause of death,” Lewis told the interviewer on the segment which has since been posted on
Youtube.
The interviewer interrupted.
“Wait, wait, No cause of death,” he asked.
“For two weeks he was under the lock and key of a second person,” Lewis said about the body going unfound for weeks before it was discovered. “There was no homicide.”
