On September 29, 1982, seven people in the Chicago area ingested poison Tylenol pills, consequently collapsing and dying shortly after. The victims included 12 year old Mary Kellerman, 27 year old Mary Reiner, 31 year old Mary McFarland, 35 year old Paula Prince, 27 year old Adam Janus, 25 year old Stanley Janus, and 19 year old Theresa Janus. The last three were unfortunately all from the same family. Adam Janus collapsed after ingesting extra strength Tylenol. He was rushed to the hospital where he died. When the family returned home to mourn, both Adam’s brother Stanley, and Stanley’s wife Theresa took a Tylenol resulting in both of their deaths, making it three deaths, in the same family, on the same day.
The fact that all three of the Janus has died in the same house would eventually lead to investigators connecting the dots. On the night of the 29th, Cook County investigator Nick Pishos compared the Janus’ Tylenol bottle to the bottle from another victim named Mary Kellerman. Once Pishos had both bottles, he noticed that they shared one similarity, a control number: MC2880. Deputy medical examiner Donoghue says he told Pishos to smell the bottles and Pishos remembers that they both smelled like almonds, and cyanide is said to smell like bitter almonds. Exposure to a large dose of cyanide by any method can lead to seizures, cardiac arrest, and respiratory failure. Blood test results would show that the victims had taken a dose that was 100 or even 1,000 times the lethal amount.
Determined that the Tylenol pills were intentially poisoned
Deputy medical examiner Donoghue says he spoke with an attorney for Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s manufacturer parent company. By the evening of October 1, after all seven victims had died, authorities were fairly certain the Tylenol had intentionally been poisoned with potassium cyanide. By someone late that night, it was announced that all Tylenol will be pulled from the shelves. Immediately, McNeil Consumer Products, the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that manufactured Tylenol, recalled over 31 million bottles of Tylenol and issued warnings. They also offered to replace recalled bottles with new bottles and put up a $100,000 reward for anybody with information about the person who had done this. These precautions were estimated to have cost the company roughly 100 million dollars.
By Tuesday, October 5, the US Attorney General, as well as the FBI were on the case, in addition to local authorities. Tyrone Fahner, Illinois State Attorney General says he believes in the initial stages there were about 1200 actual leads. It’s estimated that US newspapers ran over 100,000 separate articles about the incident. A nationwide panic ensued. People who believed they might have been poisoned overwhelmed hospitals and poison control call centers. CPD actually went throughout the city giving warnings about Tylenol through loudspeakers.
Copycat tampering incidents skyrocketed
There were a slew of copycat product tampering incidents according to the FDA, about 270 of them just in the month after the Tylenol murders. Some copycats of them also poison pills with things like rat poison and hydrochloric acid. One fact that baffled police initially was that all of the victims bought their Tylenol from different stores, and those stores got their Tylenol from different production plants.
50 capsules were found to be poisoned
Labs were set up in capsules began to come through for testing. Over 10 million recalled pills were tested. In total, 50 capsules were found to contain cyanide across eight bottles, five of these bottles belong to the victims. Two of these bottles were sent back in the recall and chillingly, one bottle was found sitting on a shelf, still unsold.
No fingerprints or other physical evidence was found. There was also no evidence clearly showing the killer’s trail in the stores, as surveillance cameras were not as common then. Investigators explored the possibility of this being a white-collar crime syndicate, intent on tanking Johnson & Johnson stock. In fact, Tylenol’s share of the non prescription pain reliever market plummeted from 35% to 8% after the murders. Investigators also looked into every disgruntled employee who worked, or had worked where the tainted Tylenol was made, stored, or sold.
Police even investigated shoplifters that were caught
Any shoplifters who had been caught at the stores where the poison Tylenol was found were reevaluated. Those who had just been released from prison or psychiatric hospitals around Chicago were interrogated. The police publicized the victims’ funerals, hoping the killer would show up at one of them. Eventually, the police reached the theory that whoever did this visited the various stores, purchased the Tylenol, planted the potassium cyanide in the capsules, placed those pills back in the bottle, and then returned the bottles around September 28.
This would be one day before the first deaths occurred, their reasoning was that the cyanide would eventually eat through the capsules, so whoever committed the crime would have to do it close to when the capsules were purchased and consumed, and would therefore have to have done it in Chicago.
Poison Pill Suspects
Suspect #1 – 48 year old dock worker Roger Arnold
He said some suspicious things about the Tylenol murders at a bar one night.
The police questioned him and searched his home, they turned up several interesting connections. Roger Arnold worked at a jewel warehouse with the father of one of the victims named Mary Reiner. Adam Janus, another victim, had purchased his Tylenol from a Jewel convenience store. According to the New York Times, the store where Mary Reiner bought her fatal pills was actually across the street from where Roger Arnold’s wife’s psychiatric ward was located. “How-to” crime manuals were found in Arnold’s home. Police also found evidence of chemistry in Arnold’s home, such as beakers and other equipment as well as a bag of powder. Though, the powder was tested and it turned out to be potassium carbonate not cyanide.
Roger Arnold also refused to take a lie-detector test and the police never found enough to prosecute him. In June of 1983 the following year, Arnold shot an innocent man named John Stanisha outside of a bar late one night. Arnold did so under the impression that Stanisha had turned Arnold into the police for his suspicious comments at the bar, which he hadn’t. Stanisha died and Arnold was sentenced to 30 years but got out early on parole.
Suspect #2 – Theodore J Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.
A once brilliant mathematician, Kaczynski is currently serving life in prison for killing three people and wounding 23 others with bombs sent through the mail.
Here are some things that match up with the Tylenol killings: Kaczynski is an Illinois native and his first bomb was found in Chicago, where he lived at the time. As you already know, all seven killings occurred within Illinois. However one Tylenol death that is not official is the cyanide poisoning via extra strength Tylenol of Jay Adam Mitchell in Sheridan, Wyoming that occurred a little over two months before the Illinois Tylenol killings. This is noteworthy, because Sheridan, Wyoming is a town on the way to Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana, where he lived at the time of the killings.
Kaczynski’s victims also had connections to wood. For instance, one of the surviving victims was named Percy Woods who resided in Lake Forest, Illinois. Another victim was Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association. Furthermore, Kaczynski’s bombs were partially made of wood, and he often used return addresses and pseudonyms involving types of wood in the past. One example was Frederick Benjamin Isaac Wood with an address of 549 Wood Street in Wood Lake, California. This is relevant because two of the three founders of Johnson & Johnson have the middle name “Wood”.
Unabomber seemed like a possible suspect in the Tylenol murders
Admittedly, those seem like thin connections but in February 2009, the FBI office in Chicago announced that it would use advancements in forensic technology in a review of all evidence relevant to the Tylenol killings. The FBI requested a DNA sample from Kaczynski. Here’s Kaczynski in his own words: “the officer said the FBI was prepared to get a court order to compel me to provide the DNA sample but wanted to know whether I would provide the sample voluntarily.”
“the officer said the FBI was prepared to get a court order to compel me to provide the DNA sample but wanted to know whether I would provide the sample voluntarily.”
Kaczynski wrote that he was willing to provide the sample on one condition, that the courts not allowed the United States Marshal Service to conduct an auction of Kaczynski’s belongings. Here is his reason why: “even on the assumption that the FBI is entirely honest (an assumption I’m unwilling to make), partial DNA profiles can throw suspicion on persons who are entirely innocent.
For example, such profiles can show that 5% or 3% or 1% of Americans have the same partial profile as the person who committed a certain crime.” He then goes on to say that if a match were to occur, “some of the evidence seized from my cabin in 1996 may turn out to be important.” In summation, Kaczynski believes that the items up for auction may be crucial in proving he never owned potassium cyanide. Regardless, the auction went forward his planned and Kaczynski declined to give his DNA voluntarily.
Suspect #3 – tax accountant James Lewis.
On Wednesday, October 6, one week after the first deaths, Johnson and Johnson received a photocopy of a handwritten, unsigned letter. On this letter, the FBI found fingerprints of James Lewis.
The letter reads: “Johnson & Johnson, parent of McNeil Laboratories. Gentlemen: as you can see it is easy to play cyanide both potassium and sodium into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little, and there will be no time to take countermeasures. If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far, I’ve spent less than 50 dollars and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle. If you want to stop the killing then wire $1,000,000 to bank account number #84-49-597 at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, Illinois. Don’t attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter. A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything you can possibly do.”
As mentioned before, James Lewis’s fingerprints were found on this letter. A warrant for his arrest was issued, and the ensuing manhunt would end on December 13, after Lewis was spotted at a New York public library annex.
Strangely, the bank account number listed in Lewis’s letter did not belong to Lewis, but instead belonged to a man named Frederick Miller McCahey, a man who Lewis believed had stiffed his wife LeAnn out of $511 in change. Basically, Lewis only included McCahey’s his bank account number in hopes that it would expose this $511 theft, and ultimately had nothing to do with the murders, and was as petty as it was idiotic.
That being said, Lewis’s past did lead investigators to suspect that he could be the Tylenol killer. He allegedly chased his mother with an axe when he was 19. In 1966, he was committed to the Missouri state mental hospital after taking 36 Anacin pills. There, he was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. Later, he tried to explain that both of these events were attempts to avoid the Vietnam draft. Later in his life, Lewis was charged and acquitted for the murder of a man named Raymond West, who had been found dismembered in his own home in the summer of 1978.
Poison Tylenol murders suspect Lewis lived under assumed names in Chicago
After that, Lewis and his wife launched a short-lived business venture attempting to import pill making machines made in India. In 1981, Lewis was suspected for falsifying credit card applications using fake addresses and mail boxes. In a search of Lewis’s home on December 4, 1981, the police did find plenty of evidence to arrest Lewis for these particular crimes. As a result, Lewis and his wife fled to Chicago, where they lived under assumed names for almost a year, bringing us to the timeline of the Tylenol murders.
However, the Lewis’s bought Amtrak tickets from Chicago to New York City on September 4, 1982, which was 25 days before the Tylenol death began, and if you recall the Tylenol killer would have to plant the cyanide within close proximity of the consumption date, and 25 days was too long. But, some investigators on the original case believed it would have been possible for the perpetrator to fly into O’Hare Airport, rent a car, plant the poison, and leave Chicago.
Lewis may have been seen at a drugstore
Surveillance video from one of the drugstores did show a bearded man, who some thought looked a lot like Lewis, but there was no positive ID, and nobody could place Lewis in Chicago shortly before the deaths. Ultimately, authorities never even had enough to prosecute Lewis, let alone convicted of the murders. However, Lewis’s letter-writing Fiasco did lead to him being convicted of extortion. Lewis was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but served a little less than 13. While in prison, Lewis bizarrely offered his help and explained and drew in detail how someone might go about injecting the capsules with lethal amounts of cyanide. Lewis was released in 1995 and he and his wife now live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 2010, James Lewis published a book titled “Poison! The Doctor’s Dilemma”. Lewis would insist that the book had nothing to do with the Tylenol murders, and also stated that he regretted sending the police the ransom note. The fictional plot of the book is about death by water poisoned with lead in southern Missouri when. He went on public access television in January 2010 to promote his book. He ended up giving a 48 minute interview, in which many of the questions were directed at his role in the 1982 Tylenol murders. Lewis referred everyone to his lawyer, and refused to comment further.
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