Decades after an unidentified man died by suicide inside a Boise church, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office has revealed his true identity as Mathew Betkouski, a chemist with a prominent Los Angeles background. According to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, detectives also uncovered evidence indicating Betkouski may have had a potential connection to the infamous 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders.
Uncovering the Unknown Wanderer After More Than 40 Years
The case began on Dec. 4, 1982, when parishioners discovered an unidentified man dead under a pew in Boise’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church, having taken a fatal dose of cyanide, according to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office. Dubbed the “Unknown Wanderer,” the man carried two key rings with nearly 30 keys, $1,900 in cash, and a note requesting cremation signed with the false name Wm. L. Toomey. After a 1990 feature on “Unsolved Mysteries” yielded no answers, Ada County Detective Tim Cooper reopened the investigation in 2019 following a suggestion from a Sacred Heart church member. To solve the identity puzzle, the sheriff’s office consulted local key experts who traced one of the keys to a specific street in Jacksonville, Florida. Land deeds revealed a man named Betkouski, who went missing in 1982, previously owned the home, leading detectives to track down his surviving brother and confirm his identity through DNA testing.
Investigating Potential Ties to the Chicago Tylenol Poisonings
As investigators pieced together Betkouski’s background, they uncovered a disturbing employment history and physical evidence pointing toward the Chicago-area cyanide poisonings that killed seven people in 1982. According to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, Betkouski worked from 1979 to 1982 on a NASA-related project at the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, before being terminated following a disturbance at a local pharmacy where he attempted to obtain pills for an experiment. A fellow scientist at the facility recalled that Betkouski previously commented on how poison could be introduced into over-the-counter capsules. Furthermore, investigators traveling to Los Angeles to review possessions kept by Betkouski’s family found a late-1970s map of Chicago, photographs showing Betkouski visiting the Chicago area in December 1981, and a bottle of homemade sodium cyanide. Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford emphasized during a press conference that while these items raise serious questions, his office is not officially naming Betkouski as a Tylenol suspect, leaving that determination to law enforcement agencies in Chicago.
