(CHICAGO) — A mysterious man who died of cyanide poisoning inside an Idaho church more than four decades ago has finally been identified and investigators say his past raises questions about a possible connection to the still-unsolved 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders.
The man known for decades as the “Unknown Wanderer” was Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski, an organic chemist with a history of discussing cyanide and poison, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office in Boise announced Wednesday.
Investigators said they couldn’t place Betkouski in Chicago during the final week of September 1982, when seven people died after taking Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide, and they are not naming him as a suspect. Authorities found a map of Chicago and a bottle of sodium cyanide among belongings kept at his family’s Los Angeles home. Investigators stressed that the poison was not the potassium cyanide used in the Tylenol murders.
