82: The Tylenol Murders

The Tylenol Murders

What do you do when you have a headache? What about a fever? A pain in your lower back? You might lay down, take a rest, but what would you do before that? You’d probably take an over-the-counter pain killer. Depending on where you are in the world you’d grab a couple pills of paracetamol, panadol, calpol, dafalgan, doliprane, excedrin, or endopain. Or you’d reach for the bottle of tylenol sitting in your cabinet, like it does in so many houses around the world.

That’s exactly what the victims of the Tylenol murders did. For a variety of reasons, they all reached for the Tylenol, to devastating and lethal effect. Today we’re talking about the Chicago Tylenol murders, which remain unsolved decades later.

VICTIMS OF THE TYLENOL MURDERS

MARY KELLERMAN

On September 29, 1982 at 6:30AM 12-year-old Mary Kellerman woke up feeling ill in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village. She had a sore throat and her parents decided she should stay home from school. She went into the bathroom, took two tylenol capsules, and seconds later her father, Dennis, heard something drop behind the bathroom door. He called Mary, asking if she was okay, but got no reply. He opened the door and found Mary on the floor, unconscious, still in her pajamas.

Dennis called 911 and paramedics rushed to the scene. They tried desperately to revive Mary, but nothing worked. And by the time they reached Alexian Brothers Medical Center, Mary Kellerman was pronounced dead. It was just before 10AM.

When the medical examiner’s office was notified they didn’t immediately find her death suspicious, but her body was sent for an autopsy because of the sudden manner of her death and her young age. Nick Pishos, an investigator with Cook County’s medical examiner’s office, did a phone interview with Dennis Kellerman to make sure his story matched what police found at their house. Nothing seemed out of order.

ADAM JANUS

At noon, 27-year-old Adam Janus went to pick up his kids from preschool.He had taken the day off from his postal worker job because he felt like he was getting a cold. On his way back home he stopped at the store to buy some Tylenol. He got the kids home and they all had lunch. After that he said: “I’m going to take two Tylenol and lie down.” A few minutes after that he stumbled into the kitchen and collapsed on the floor.

At the hospital Dr. Thomas Kim, medical director of Northwest Community Hospital’s intensive care unit recalled in an oral history for Chicago Mag that doctors tried in vain to resuscitate Janus. He determined the cause of death was probably cardiac. Janus’s family including wife Teresa, his parents, and siblings had all gathered at the hospital and Dr. Kim tried to explain why Janus had died, even though doctors weren’t sure what had happened. Janus’s family left the hospital and returned to Janus’s home in Arlington Heights.

MARY “LYNN” REINER

At 3:45PM Mary “Lynn” Reiner was at her home in Winfield. She had given birth to her fourth child only a week earlier. She wasn’t feeling well so she took some tylenol and quickly collapsed. Her husband, Ed, arrived home shortly after Lynn collapsed. She was rushed to Central DuPage Hospital.

STANLEY JANUS & THERESA JANUS

The Janus family had gone back to Adam Janus’s house and were planning his funeral. Adam’s younger brother, Stanley, struggled with chronic back pain so he asked his wife, Theresa (Adam’s wife was also named Teresa without an H) to get him some Tylenol. She gave him two pills and then took two pills herself. First Stanley collapsed, then Theresa collapsed.

Dr. Kim was about to leave the hospital when he was informed the Janus family was coming back to the hospital for treatment. He assumed the patients were Adam’s parents who were older and might not be coping well with their son’s death. He was surprised to learn it was actually Adam’s brother and sister-in-law that were being brought in. Dr. Kim had spoken to Stanley and he seemed like a strong, healthy, young man. Stanley Janus was pronounced dead at 8:15PM.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Charles Kramer from the Arlington Heights Fire Department had been on scene as Stanley and Theresa Janus were being tended to by paramedics. Kramer realised something had to be going on, so he called public health Nurse Helen Jensen to help out. Kramer told her: “There’s something going on here. We had a death this morning, and now we brought in two more from the same house.” Jensen, who had been eating dinner when the phone rang, dropped everything and headed for the hospital.

Jensen found Adam’s wife Teresa in the hospital and started asking questions. What exactly had happened that morning when her husband had collapsed? What had happened for the rest of the day? She was hoping to uncover the link between these deaths.

Investigator Nick Pishos was also trying to figure out what was happening. He went to the hospital to speak with Dr. Kim and Nurse Jensen. When the doctor admitted he had no clue what was going on, Pishos suggested he and Jensen head to the Janus house to see if anything stood out to them.

MARY McFARLAND

At 6:30PM 31-year-old Mary McFarland was at her job at Illinois Bell (a telephone company) in Lombard and told her co-workers she had a headache. She went into the back room and took some Tylenol for her headache. Within a few minutes she had collapsed.

Jensen and Pishos arrived at the Janus house at 8PM and began searching. But nothing stood out. Pishos went into the basement and found metalworking equipment. He knew that metalworkers sometimes used cyanide for polishing so he searched for anything that might be poisonous. But he found nothing.

Nurse Jensen was upstairs when she found a shelf full of over-the-counter medications. It was there that she found a bottle of Tylenol with six capsules missing. She put it together: six missing capsules and three people dead from the same home. She knew the Tylenol had to have something to do with the deaths, so she and Pishos brought the bottle back to the hospital.

PAULA PRINCE

At 9:30PM, 35-year-old flight attendant Paula Prince, stopped in at a Walgreens on North Wells Street to buy some Tylenol after working a flight from Las Vegas into O’Hare.

Jensen and Pishos made it back to the hospital by 10PM. Jensen was adamant that the Tylenol was the cause of the deaths, but people weren’t quick to believe her. After all, people all over the world took Tylenol every day and survived. But Jensen was persistent. Dr. Kim was open to her theory but still couldn’t figure out what had actually killed his patients. It wasn’t just Tylenol. The only thing he could think of was cyanide poisoning. But that seemed ridiculous. But still, he decided to test blood samples of the patients who had died. The hospitalcouldn’’t run tests for cyanide, so he had to send them out to another lab.

The bottle of pills from Mary Kellerman’s house had been inventoried by the paramedics and Pishos had them bring it to the hospital. When it arrived, Pishos realised that both bottles of pills had the same control number: MC2880. He called up the medical examiner to tell him of this discovery and Deputy Medical Examiner Donoghue told him to open the bottles and smell them.

When Pishos opened the bottles everything seemed normal. But as he poured out the capsules he noticed a strong smell of almonds.They both said it at the same time: “Cyanide.” Donoghue told Chicago Mag: “I was very lucky because [Pishos] was able to smell cyanide. Only about half the population can smell it.”

We’ve covered cyanide poisoning here on the show before but for a little refresher, cyanide is a chemical asphyxiant that blocks red blood cells from using oxygen. This causes suffocation, brain damage, and cardiac arrest. And it all happens very quickly.

By 1AM on September 30th, Dr. Kim had the lab tests back and the suspicions of Jensen, Pishos and Donoughue were confirmed. The victims each had massive amounts of cyanide in their blood. In some cases 100 to 1,000 times more than the necessary amount to kill them.

At 3:15AM Mary McFarland was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove. Mary “Lynn” Reiner was pronounced dead at Central DuPage Hospital at 9:30AM. Because these victims were being brought into various Chicago area hospitals, police, doctors, and investigators didn’t initially realise the deaths were connected. It was only once word spreading that other similar deaths were occuring in other towns that they were able to see the connection.

By 10AM an attorney from Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, appeared at the medical examiner’s office. The toxicologists explained what they had found: Tylenol bottles riddled with arsenic. Roy Dames, the CEO of the Cook County medical examiner’s office at the time recalled: “My first reaction was: ‘Let’s make sure there’s no other connection between these deaths before we go and tell people not to take Tylenol.’ So they proved it to me, and i said: ‘Great–let’s go.’” He called the CEO of McNeil Consumer Products, the company that manufactured Tylenol, and informed him they would be holding a press conference.

When Nurse Helen Jensen woke up after a fitful, nearly sleepless night, her husband told her the morning news was blaming the deaths on Tylenol. The press conference laid out the incidents, how the victims had died, and warned people to hold off taking Tylenol for the time being. They still didn’t know how the cyanide was getting into the capsules, but they wanted people to be aware of the potential danger.

It was at this point that Jensen realised nobody had called up the police department to tell them exactly what was going on. She called the police and told them they needed to take Tylenol off the shelves of Chicago stores. The police initially balked at the idea, but the deputy chief of police was on the call and ultimately agreed it was the best option.

By 3PM Johnson & Johnson announced the recall of all Tylenol from control lot MC2880. Roy Dames spent the rest of the day fielding calls from concerned citizens who had taken Tylenol and were worried that they might be next. The deaths and the information that something as common and innocuous as Tylenol had caused them caused a panic.

And while the world began to panic, investigators still had no idea who had poisoned the pills. By 8PM on September 3oth, the Illinois attorney general, Tyrone Fahner, was called in to help organise the investigation alongside Illinois State Police director, James Zagel.

INVESTIGATION

On the morning of October 1st, Fahner brought together members of state police, local law enforcement, police chiefs, Zagel, and even federal agents to help with the investigation. They had no clue how big the issue was. Was it just in Chicago, just in Illinois, what about the rest of the country or the world?

By that evening, Theresa Janus was taken off life support at Northwest Community Hospital and was pronounced dead. Police also discovered the body of Paula Prince in her apartment in Old Town after her family and friends had failed to reach her. In Prince’s apartment, police found an open Tylenol bottle on the bathroom vanity. Prince had taken the Tylenol, had taken a few steps towards the bathroom door and then collapsed. And as a confirmation, police found security camera photos of Prince buying the Tylenol at Walgreens the night before.

Prince’s death got Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne and Chicago Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek involved. And late that night Mayor Byrne held a press conference officially stating that all Tylenol would be removed from Chicago shelves. By October 4th, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance requiring tamper-resistant packaging for all drugs sold in stores.

On October 5th, Johnson & Johnson recalled all Tylenol products nationwide. That was about 31 million bottles of pills with a value of more than $100 million dollars. We’ll talk more about Johnson & Johnson’s response to this crisis in a minute, but for now we’ll look at the investigation.

Johnson & Johnson acted quickly by recalling all bottles of Tylenol from the MC2880 control batch. But two of the deadly bottles coming from the same manufacturing batch turned out to be largely coincidental. Further investigation found that the tainted bottles came from different drug manufacturing companies and locations. This led investigators to conclude that the pills weren’t being altered at the factory, but it was more likely that someone was purchasing or taking the bottles from Chicago stores, filling the capsules with cyanide, and then putting them back on the shelves. And it’s important to remember that at this point in time the only thing standing between consumers and their over-the-counter medications was a cotton ball. No child proof lid, no foil safety seal, no plastic bottle wrapper. And the drugs inside we’re openable capsules with drugs inside. So it makes sense that someone could alter pills and put bottles back on the shelf to then be sold as new to unsuspecting buyers. Along with the five bottles that were found with the victims, a handful of other contaminated bottles were later recovered in the Chicago area.

This led investigators to suspect they were looking for a single culprit intent on causing random harm and widespread panic. Attorney General Fhaner goes a far as to call it an act of terrorism. He said: “There was no intended victim, just random victims. Not unlike what happens in the world today when people throw pipe bombs. Up until that time, when you had mass murderers like Richard Speck, these were people who had selected victims and decided what they were going to do or not going to do. But this really was random. And that’s what terrorism is to me—to frighten or kill indiscriminately.”

This led police to check in on any potentially disgruntled former Johnson & Johnson employees. Detectives spoke to several people who J&J had fired, and while a few seemed capable of the crime, none were ever considered seriously as suspects.

On October 6th, Johnson & Johnson received a letter demanding $1 million in exchange for stopping the poisonings. Investigators quickly discovered the letter was sent by a man named James William Lewis. Lewis was a man with a rough childhood and a troubled past who had already had run-ins with the law. He and his wife had started a bookkeeping company and were arrested in 1979 for the murder of their first accounting client, 72-year-old Raymond West. Police believed Lewis and his wife killed and dismembered West and then hid the man’s body in his own attic. However, the case against Lewis consisted of mostly circumstantial evidence and was ultimately dismissed.

Lewis’s fingerprints were found on the envelope sent to J&J and he was arrested and charged with extortion. Police and Justice Department investigators believed Lewis was responsible for the poisonings. However, Lewis and his wife had been living in New York at the time of the murders and police couldn’t find any evidence to link them to the crime. It was later revealed that Lews had sent a second extortion letter to then president Ronald Reagan warning the Tylenol poisonings would continue unless the federal government overhauled taxes. In this letter he also threatened to crash remote-controlled airplanes into the White House. Lewis was convicted of extortion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He served 13 years and was released in 1995. He denies any involvement in the Tylenol murders.

A handful of other suspects were investigated and later cleared but the case quickly went cold. Over the years the case has been worked on by all sorts of law enforcement teams including local, state, and federal investigators. FBI profiler, John Douglas was even involved with the case in 1983 and worked with Chicago journalists to publish the address and grave location of first victim, Mary Kellerman. Douglas believed running this information in the news might encourage the killer to visit the gravesite, but nobody appeared at the location.

The Chicago Police Department released one of the surveillance photos of Paula Prince buying Tylenol at Walgreens. The photo shows Prince in the centre of the frame and a bearded man in the upper right corner of the photo. Police believed this bearded man may have been the killer, and may have been James Lewis.

Skip forward to 2009 when Illinois authorities refocused their efforts in the case. FBI agents searched James Lewis’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and took a number of items into custody. But this didn’t lead anywhere. The FBI said in a written statement: “This review was prompted, in part, by the recent 25th anniversary of this crime and the resulting publicity. Further, given the many recent advances in forensic technology, it was only natural that a second look be taken at the case and recovered evidence.”

In an interesting turn of events, the FBI requested DNA samples from none other than “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynsk in 2011i. Kaczynski denied any involvement. But the idea isn’t crazy. The first four Unabomber crimes occured in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs between 1978 and 1980. And Kaczynski’s parents had a home in the Chicago suburb of Lombard in 1982 where he occasionally stayed. This kind of random, mass hysteria crime does fit in with Kaczynski’s screed against society and technology, especially if you think of pharmaceuticals as a technology. Kaczynski wasn’t captured until 1996, so it is definitely possible that he could have committed the tylenol murders. But Kaczynski’s involvement has never been proven. The case still remains unsolved today, nearly 40 years later.

JOHNSON & JOHNSON’S RESPONSE

Today when you think of massive pharmaceutical companies, you’re likely to think of companies like Perdue Pharma, makers of Oxy-Contin, who willfully aided and abetted doctors to prescribe more opioid painkillers leading to the current opioid epidemic. And while large corporations rarely put the customer before the bottom line, as the details of the tylenol murders came to light, Johnson & Johnson reacted swiftly and remarkably well.

In addition to recalling all the Tylenol with the same control numbers as some of the tainted bottles, and then recalling all Tylenol products nationwide, they also told customers that they could also exchange any bottles of Tylenol capsules for bottles of solid pills at no charge, to put their fears at ease. Johnson & Johnson also worked closely with law enforcement to help search for the killer.

By November Johnson & Johnson had introduced a new packaging technique that included a “triple-sealed” bottle that would help customers know the products they were buying hadn’t been tampered with. This type of packaging, in addition to more exacting quality control methods, and a shift away from capsules towards solid pills, was adopted by the pharmaceutical industry at large and changed the way we interact with not just drugs but many consumer products. Alan Hilburg, a public relations expert who worked with J&J during the crisis, told the New York Times in 2018: “We concluded we were never going to be judged by what caused the problem…We were always going to be judged on how we responded to it.”

Hilburg was right. Johnson & Johnson’s quick response and transparency with both customers and lawmakers is now often taught in business schools as an example of how to properly handle a crisis. The company managed to regain the trust they had lost and by 1983 had nearly completely regained their market share.

Following the tylenol murders there were several copycat crimes. Some involved tylenol and other over-the-counter drugs, but some involved other products. Following the murders in Chicago, product tampering became a federal crime, leading to harsher sentences for some of these copycat crimes. For example, Stella Nickell was sentenced to 90 years in prison for tainting Excedrin capsules with cyanide and killing two people.

And that is the story of the still unsolved Tylenol murders.