by kleinbl00

You wanna talk about fuckin' weird?

Country was goddamn paralyzed in the fall of 1982. People were afraid of eating anything. Everyone threw out their pills. Then Weekly Reader ran like three different articles about what all the awesome new "safety seals" on mutherfucking everything were for without saying "because some creep-ass mutherfucker slipped cyanide into the tylenol and we were powerless to do anything about it."

AND YET

In 1978, he was charged in Kansas City, Missouri, 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.

He was convicted of six counts of mail fraud in a 1981 credit card scheme in Kansas City, accused of using the name and background of a former tax client to obtain 13 credit cards.

Lewis was charged in 2004 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, the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office said at the time.

Police in 1983 described Lewis as a “chameleon” who lived in several states, used at least 20 aliases and held many jobs, including computer specialist, tax accountant, importer of Indian tapestries and salesman of jewelry, pharmaceutical machinery and real estate.

Nobody ever said shit about Jim Lewis getting arrested, probably because they knew there was no way they'd get a murder conviction. If you weren't old enough to consume news in 1982, the tylenol killer became nothing more than a bar trivia question (never made Trivial Pursuit because that was too creepy). It completely dropped out of everyone's memories because it was scary and oh by the way now there's seven seals between you and your advil don't you feel safe?

If you wanted to know when wypepo started freaking balls about Halloween candy? It was really given wings by Jim Lewis, and then two years later when Ronald O'Brien was executed for poisoning his own kid, it was fuckin' over. In between, D.A.R.E. was founded and stranger danger became the theme song of American life.

America is rolling on more than 40 years of PTSD from something we have complete amnesia about.