Tylenol Murders: A Chilling Mystery of Poisoned Pills and a Vanishing Killer

Tylenol Murders: A Chilling Mystery of Poisoned Pills and a Vanishing Killer

Kyle Risi: [00:00:00] And when investigators look at the remaining six capsules in that blister pack, every single one of them contained cyanide.

Adam Cox: Well, this just makes it feel like it. It must be someone on the inside, right? To be able to do that.

Kyle Risi: Gotta be and, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of this entire investigation. 'cause remember, Johnson and Johnson confirmed that contamination must have been carried out by someone outside of the factory.

But this was now a contaminated blister pack. Any tampering would've been obvious, but there's just no signs. And this means it must have left the factory with the cyanide in it. And so now suspicion was firmly back on Johnson and Johnson and their manufacturing process.

Adam Cox: Did they do a coverup or did they not investigate it properly? Feels

Kyle Risi: like it, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. [00:01:00]

Welcome to the Compendium, an Assembly of fascinating things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the draw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your Ring master for this week's episode.

Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the audience heckler for this week.

Kyle Risi: Nice. What are some of your jibs that you're gonna be throwing out?

Adam Cox: Well, um, just take note that if I don't like today's story, I'm gonna start doing,

Kyle Risi: God, you do not want to do that in this episode, I promise you.

Oh, okay. Hey, I can stop you. Sorry. Sucks

Adam Cox: someone died.

Kyle Risi: It's pretty horrific, Adam.

Adam Cox: Okay, fine. ~~Well, ~~I will just ~~re ~~leave a really bad review afterwards.

Kyle Risi: God, please don't do that. You'll create some kind of PAC mentality and all of our listeners will start leaving negative reviews. Leave more positive reviews.

[00:02:00] Yeah. Good point.

Before we dive in, a quick heads up for all of our lovely freaks out there, remember that signing up to our Patreon as a free member will get you early access to next week's episode an entire seven days before anyone else. And as we say, every week, it's completely free of charge.

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Yeah,

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If you're an existing member, you just need to send us a DM with your address and we'll ship one out to you no matter where you are in the world.

Now, with all the tariffs that have been going on, we have had a couple members that have written it saying that they've been charged a tariff in order to receive the key chain. If that is you and you can provide evidence of that, we will refund you the tariff amount.

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Kyle Risi: We had no idea. Surprisingly though all of our American listeners that have received their key chains, they've not had any issues. We had a listener in Spain.

Adam Cox: Oh, maybe that's a Europe thing then do you think, sorry, Donald, not you. Also, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Your support really helps us reach even more people who like you. Love a good tale of the [00:04:00] unexpected.

Kyle Risi: Alright, freaks enough of the housekeeping. Because Adam, today on the ced, we are diving into an assembly of mystery medicine and mayhem.

Adam Cox: Okay, so obviously something went wrong, I'm guessing.

Kyle Risi: Today's story is probably one of the most defining moment in modern American history.

I want you to picture this.

You've got a headache, it's nothing serious. Just one of those everyday aches that kind of buzz behind your eyes, right? So you decide to pop to the local supermarket to grab some Tylenol, which in the USA is just a standard over the counter painkiller in the uk it's kinda like the equivalent of like a pack of paracetamol.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: So this is probably something that you've done like dozens of times without even thinking, but this time that seemingly simple trip results in your horrifically violent and sudden death

Adam Cox: just over some paracetamol. Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: Pretty scary stuff, huh? What was wrong with it?

That's exactly what happened in Chicago in 1982 when seven perfectly healthy people died suddenly and violently. They were all different ages, different backgrounds. The only thing [00:05:00] linking them was that they'd each taken two capsules of this Tylenol.

Adam Cox: And Is that a standard dose then? Two capsules?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, it's like a thousand milligrams.

Adam Cox: So they haven't like overdosed or anything like that. And it's just a regular over the counter drug, which you can get anywhere.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. No overdose.

But because these seven deaths all happened within days of each other, in some cases hours, the news caused mass panic across the United States, sparking one of the longest criminal investigations in US history, pulling one of America's biggest companies into chaos, ultimately changing how we actually package medicine, cosmetics, and even your favorite fromage.

Frey yogurt forever. Fage Fray. Mm. So that little foil seal, That is designed to kind of showcase whether or not someone's tampered with the product.

Adam Cox: I just thought that was to keep it fresh.

Kyle Risi: possibly. But it's also Tamperproof, right? Uhhuh. Because once you lift that lid, you know that someone's opened that, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah. Fair point.

Kyle Risi: What is nuts is that even today, Adam, we still do not know who was responsible because this case is still [00:06:00] completely unsolved. I'm of course talking about the infamous 1982 Tylenol murders that drove widespread panic across the USA.

Do you know anything about the story?

Adam Cox: No. So my first thoughts was, did they have an allergic reaction to something within the drug? Mm-hmm.

But the fact that you're saying this is a murder case Yeah. Someone intended or, tampered with the product. Is that what we're saying?

Kyle Risi: Pretty much. It was one of the biggest product tampering cases in modern American history.

Adam Cox: Did not know about this.

Kyle Risi: And it's a pretty horrific story.

Purely from the fact that these ordinary people were killed by an ordinary household pain remedy that millions of people across the United States trusted and had in the medicine cabinets.

Adam Cox: That's so weird. 'cause even the other day, you were like, oh, I've got a headache. Do we have any paracetamol?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. And we didn't.

Adam Cox: Yeah, we didn't. But that's so normal for someone to go and take that Right.

Kyle Risi: Without even flinching. Right. It's just like autopilot.

Adam Cox: Yeah. You'd never think it would be dangerous, in kind of the recommended dosage at all, would you?

Kyle Risi: So Adam, today's episode is a bit of an epic. I did try to cut this out into [00:07:00] two episodes, but I just, didn't wanna leave anything out and I didn't want this to be another double biller.

But in today's episode of the Compendium, I'm gonna tell you about this incredible moment in American history, the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, how the story ended up terrifying a nation and ultimately led to us reshaping how we package products around the world.

Adam Cox: Okay. I'm settled in, I've got my coffee and my pastry. I'm ready for this?

Kyle Risi: I hope you're not gonna be eating that pastry. While we're, uh, recording, just, Adam, what are your thoughts? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'll get back to you.

So, Adam, our story starts on Wednesday, September the 29th, 1982 in Arlington Heights in Illinois.

27-year-old Adam Janus, a US postal worker, wakes up feeling pretty rough.

He's got kind of like flu-like symptoms settling in, and he decides that he's gonna take the day off work.

But you know how it is, like he's still a dad. He still has responsibilities. So Adam decides to push through. He gets up, he gets dressed, he goes about his morning as best he can.

Eventually, he reaches the final chore of the day, picking up his daughter, Cassia from [00:08:00] nursery. On the way home, he stops at a local jewel supermarket to run a quick errand.

He picks up a couple steaks for dinner, some flowers for his wife Theresa, and a bottle of extra strength Tylenol. Basically just to help ease whatever kind of bug that he's suffering with.

Mm-hmm. When Adam gets home, helps his daughter get fed. He turns to his wife Theresa, and says he's gonna take a couple of Tylenol and lie down for a bit. A while later, Theresa sees Adam coming out of the bathroom. He's clutching at his chest. His face is contorted with pain .

So Theresa helps him to the bed and that's when she notices that his breathing is starting to become really shallow and his pupils are starting to dilate.

In that moment. She looks out the window and she sees two of her neighbors chatting outside, and she knows that one of them is a nurse. So she runs outside to grab some help.

By the time they get to Adam, he's full on convulsing. He's foaming at the mouth and his eyes are rolling into the back of his head. Shit.

The nurse tries to desperately resuscitate Adam yelling at Therea to call for an ambulance. When the paramedics get [00:09:00] there, Adam is completely unresponsive. They rush him to the Chicago Northwest Community Hospital and just a couple hours later at 3:15 PM Adam, Janice is pronounced dead

Adam Cox: bloody hell.

So that is a really quick turn of events and to be convulsing and foaming at the mouth.

My first thoughts with that is like poisoning, right? That's not something of any regular sickness that I'm aware of where. If you've got a bit of a cold, that doesn't happen.

Kyle Risi: So the doctor overseeing Adam is a doctor called Thomas Kim. Now he gathers a family into the waiting room to break the news. And of course, Adam has sadly died in the waiting room. Are Adam's wife, his mother, his brothers Joseph and Stanley and Stanley's new wife, also named Theresa.

Dr. Kim tells them that Adam has suffered a massive heart attack and despite obviously their best efforts, he just didn't survive.

Now naturally the family is devastated, They're desperately trying to understand how a young fit man could just collapse and die outta nowhere.

So Dr. Kim explains to them at this point that there's no clear [00:10:00] explanation what caused the heart attack, but they assure them that there'll be running some tests to find out.

So with heavy hearts, of course, the family, they return back to Adam's home to support Theresa and her daughter and start going through the task of making funeral arrangements. Mm-hmm.

At the house Adam's 25-year-old brother Stanley turns to his wife and tells her that he's got a pounding headache.

He says that he wants to go home and lie down and just rest for a bit. But Stanley's mum steps in and she gently persuades him to stay. So the whole family can be together in one place.

Theresa helps him upstairs on the kitchen counter. She notices a fresh bottle of extra strength Tylenol, the same one that Adam had picked up earlier that day.

She hands Stanley two capsules, and then takes two capsules herself. Since obviously she's starting to feel a bit unwell as well.

Minutes later, Adam Stanley begins clutching on his chest. He collapses too. As he hits the floor. He immediately starts convulsing foam again. Is gurgling out of his mouth. His eyes are rolling in the back of his head.

Obviously the family is in full on panic. They call for an ambulance, and when the paramedics hear the address,

they're like, this is the [00:11:00] second emergency call to this house in a single day. Where the first man, they know it already died.

Adam Cox: Shit. I guess they've all fallen unwell before they've taken the Tylenol. So therefore, I guess someone could suspect, oh, there is some weird bug or something else that's going around, right?

Kyle Risi: Ooh, yeah. I'm loving your intuition here. Fire Lieutenant Chuck Kramer, he orders that a fire engine tail the ambulance, just in case this turns out to be something bigger. Right.

When the paramedics arrive, they begin CPR and Stanley. As this is happening, Theresa suddenly grabs fire lieutenant chuck shoulder, she groans, drops to the floor and immediately she begins convulsing. Just like Stanley.

At this point, Chuck's alarm bells are blaring. He's thinking that these are not heart attacks.

He thinks that maybe there's some kind of, carbon monoxide leak in the house. Mm-hmm. Or worse, maybe some kind of airborne contagion. Yeah.

Chuck then orders everyone in the house, all the Janus family members and the paramedics to be moved into police cars for an emergency escort to the hospital.

He then radios ahead and tells them that they need [00:12:00] to prepare a quarantine area because something is just not right in this house.

Yeah. back at the hospital, Dr. Thomas Kim, he's just about to head out for the day when a nurse rushes over to him and says like the Jane is family are being brought back in.

And at first he assumes that maybe something's happened to Adam's parents, maybe they've had a panic attack or they fainted from grief or whatever.

But the nurse says to him, no, it is actually Adam's brother and his wife, people. hmm.

Stanley and Teresa, they're rushed to ICU while the rest of the family, along with the paramedics are escorted into an empty family room and placed an observation.

No one knows what the hell is going on. There are nurses rushing around, securing the area. They're putting on all their personal protective equipment. People are literally crying. It's full on panic.

It's so bad, Adam, that the family requests a priest come and read them their last rites. That is how dire this is feeling. In this moment.

Adam Cox: I've been this poor family, like in the space of 24 hours, what must they be thinking like? I can't even imagine the situation.

Kyle Risi: So, meanwhile, Dr. Kim and his team are [00:13:00] running around trying to kind of figure out any possibility that they can think of that might be causing this.

At first, again, they think it might be carbon monoxide poisoning, but the, the symptoms, Adam, they just do not add up.

Adam Cox: And I guess there's other family members there, which are not sick. They would've been exposed to the carbon monoxide if there was poisoning.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Next they think maybe it might be botulism food poisoning. Again, the symptoms just do not add up. Right. There's no vomiting or anything.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Foaming of the mouth. I would never want food poisoning that does that.

Kyle Risi: They then start leaning towards something that Chuck maybe suspected that maybe it was some sort of airborne contagion. Hmm. Something that maybe the whole family and now the paramedics have all been exposed to, if that is the case, of course, they now need to act fast to make sure that no one affected, comes into contact with any vulnerable patients in the hospital.

Adam Cox: Sure.

Kyle Risi: Immediately they seal off the ward hours go by and Lieutenant Chuck has been stuck in quarantine with the rest of the family, just completely helpless.

So he picks up the phone and he calls someone that he knows that he can trust. It's a woman called Helen Jensen. She's basically a public health nurse in the local community.

Within 15 minutes, Adam [00:14:00] boom, Helen comes storming through the hospital doors. Staff immediately try to stop her. They're like, whoa. Like, hang on woman. We have no idea what's in there. We dunno how dangerous it is. But Helen doesn't even blink 'cause she just walks straight in, no gloves, no gown, no mask. Just pure bravery.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Would you do that? Would you walk in,

Adam Cox: I dunno if there's, if you, there's a doubt of what's going on. And you haven't proven that there isn't like an airborne virus or something.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. I dunno if I would. No, I'd be like, fuck you guys, I'm outta here.

So she has Adam's wife walker through everything that Adam did that morning, just trying to piece it all together. She then clocks something that everyone else has missed. All three people had gotten sick after taking the Tylenol, so she's right on this. Like immediately.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Like smart. I mean, that is the common denominator. And I guess if you did sit everyone down and go, what did you do today? Mm-hmm. I think you would land on that pretty quickly.

Kyle Risi: But at the same time, Tylenol or paracetamol is such a common, typical thing that everyone has in the household. It's amazing that they even picked up on that, right? Like, I wouldn't mention they're taking the Tylenol,

Adam Cox: I know. But if someone said, oh, I felt sick [00:15:00] and I went to lay down, I guess someone would go. Or did you take anything for that?

Kyle Risi: Sure.

Adam Cox: Clever thinking. See, I could be a detective.

Kyle Risi: So Helen is like, I need to check this out. She asked for the keys to the Janus family home and she asked for a police officers to drive her there.

Now, people do say in the story that Helen was extremely brave but I honestly believe she was a little bit fucking bonkers because basically she's like, take me to the house where there could be some kind of airborne contagion. 'cause right now the Tylenol is just a theory, right?

It could still be Ebola in the air.

Adam Cox: Yeah, that's a fair point. They haven't proven it at this point, but I don't know. you do see these shows where you see these kind of crazy cops and whatever, like, I don't know. They're a little bit like, don't follow the rules.

Kyle Risi: Here's, here's the difference. Okay. It's a TV show,

Adam Cox: but tV is based on real life.

Kyle Risi: Okay, fair enough. I dunno, I wouldn't have been so quick to visit the house, but she must be very confident on,

Adam Cox: I've got like a hazmat suit or something like that.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, no she doesn't. Hmm So around 8:00 PM Helen arrives at the James Family Home. She starts gathering everything that she thinks that Adam Stanley and Theresa might have come in contact with.

She grabs the pot of coffee [00:16:00] that everyone's been drinking from that morning. She grabs the flowers that Adam had bought earlier that day and she collects up some fruitcake that they'd all been eating.

Then she finds, of course, the 50 capsule bottle of Tylenol sitting right there on the counter. And she also finds the receipt because of course, as we know, it was purchased earlier that morning.

She knows now exactly where it was bought and what time, basically what she's gonna do, she's gonna go off for a refund. She's like, let's kill three people. Yeah. I think I could at least get a partial refund.

Adam Cox: Or like s store credit. I mean, I'm guessing that the, the thinking behind that is, you go to the store that it was delivered to, you can then find the batch and everything like that and can then connect.

Kyle Risi: My God, you're so good at this. Yes.

So she opens up the bottle, she counts that there's 44 capsules left, which obviously stacks up. The Janus family took six between them.

So now she's almost uncertain that all the pills that they took came from this bottle. Mm-hmm. Helen then heads straight back to the hospital, and when she gets it, Adam, she's hit with the awful news that Stanley has now passed away.

Shit. So he's gone Theresa. However, she's still critical, she's in the coma.

Helen marches straight over to the medical examiner's office and she tells them flat out, I'm telling you, [00:17:00] Tylenol is the link.

It's the only connection in all three of these cases. But sadly, Adam, remember this is the 1980s. Helen is just a nurse. So of course her warnings are just met with complete skepticism.

They're like, Helen, is it? And they're like, mm, yeah, I don't think so. So basically in the end, Helen goes home frustrated. She knows what's going on, but just no motherfucker is listening to her.

Adam Cox: All we need to do is just go like, just test this, product. Mm-hmm. All we need to do is just test it.

Kyle Risi: At this moment. They're not, they're like,

Adam Cox: waste of time or whatever.

Kyle Risi: But also gotta think about how unlikely that must seem as Well, this is so unprecedented. This has never happened before.

Adam Cox: Yeah. In hindsight, we know obviously what the issue is.

Kyle Risi: So that same night over at Arlington Heights, Lieutenant Phillip Capelli from the fire department he gets a phone call. It's from his mother-in-law, Marge. She tells him that her neighbor's daughter, Mary Kelman, has suddenly died that morning. And she asks him if he knows what happened. Basically, she's looking for gossip.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: Philip has no idea. So he rings a friend of his, a guy called Richard Keyworth. [00:18:00] He works in the jurisdiction where the girl had died.

Richard tells him that around six 30 that morning, 12-year-old Mary Kelman had woken up complaining of a sore throat, runny nose, and a headache.

Her parents, Dennis and Gina Kelman decide that she might need to stay home from school that day. They give her one extra strength of Tylenol and Mary goes back to bed.

A short while later, Dennis hears a third coming from the bathroom. When he runs in, Mary has collapsed and she's unconscious on the floor.

They, of course, they call paramedics when they arrive. Mary is in full on cardiac arrest and at 9:56 AM that same morning at Alexia Brothers Medical Center, Mary is pronounced dead and she is 12 years old.

Poor girl. Once again, of course, the doctors, they determined that the cause of her death was another fucking heart attack, likely caused by some undiagnosed kind of medical condition that she might have had.

Adam Cox: But then with the convulse thing, I dunno all the symptoms of heart attacks, but just seems odd.

Kyle Risi: It does so odd.

So over the phone, Richard tells Philip that the paramedics had made a note that Mary has taken [00:19:00] Tylenol just before she collapsed. But at this time, remember, like Tylenol is just a normal widely used over the counter pain reliever. Mm-hmm. So no one thinks anything of it. This is just background noise.

Adam Cox: How far away was, this family to the other family?

Kyle Risi: the same town, different borough, within 20 miles of each other.

But as Phillip is hearing all of this over the phone, something starts nagging at him because he remembers earlier that day he had overheard a series of reports coming out of the Arlington Heights area.

As we know, three other young people had suddenly gone into cardiac arrest as well. So he says to Richard, I know this sounds crazy, but do you think that maybe the Tylenol might be the link between these four cases?

So what's incredible here is that we now have two people who have managed to quickly piece this together potentially. When everyone else has so far dismissed it.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And what does Richard say?

Kyle Risi: So basically Richard and Philip, they call Northwest Community Hospital. They tell them about Mary Kelman and they say, look, I know this is a long shot, but what if the Tylenol is to blame? Of course. This then sounds the alarm for them too, because earlier that day, Helen Jensen had made the same assertion, right?

So they arrange for the Tylenol bottle from Mary Kellerman's house to be taken to the hospital. [00:20:00] It's handed over to the medical examiner, a guy called Nicholas Pishos and right away something catches his attention. right?

Both bottles, were both the extra strength variety of Tylenol,

both originally contained 50 capsules and both were purchased from two different Jewel supermarkets in the area, but also both had the exact same batch number MC 2 8 8 0.

Adam Cox: It's a dodgy batch.

Kyle Risi: It's a dodgy batch, right?

So not convinced that this is just a coincidence. Nicholas calls his boss. It's a guy called Dr. Edmund Donahue.

Edmond says, right, I want you to open up the bottle and give it a sniff. So Nicholas is like, uh, okay. Weird. But sure. He pops open the lid, he takes a cautious sniff and immediately he gets a whiff of strong bitter almonds. So like that marsy pan smell.

Adam Cox: And I'm guessing that's unusual for this truck. What do you think

Kyle Risi: that indicates?

Adam Cox: Well, I dunno if bitter maran would say, oh, this is off. Mm-hmm. But I'm guessing ~~it's, ~~it's very different to what he is expecting to smell.

Kyle Risi: So if you know your chemistry, you know that this is a positive indication for [00:21:00] cyanide

Adam Cox: bitter almonds. Mm-hmm. That sounds quite nice.

Kyle Risi: I know. I'd be like, I would take four. Yeah. Terrifying.

So he tells Nicholas to send the tunnel immediately for lab testing. When the pills are examined more closely, they notice something else.

So these are the old school capsules that come in two halves. One side is white, one side is red,

Adam Cox: so there's a plastic type capsule? Yeah. It's gelatin essentially. Gel. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Kyle Risi: So one side of those is slightly discolored and a little bit more swollen. It's the red portion of it When they crack it open instead of the normal brilliant white powder that you'd expect. It was instead like really gray, moist, and lumpy.

Adam Cox: If it's wet and clumpy. That doesn't sound like a regular drug or anything, does it? No, it doesn't.

Kyle Risi: It doesn't take long for the lab to confirm that the capsules did indeed contain cyanide just as Nicholas's boss had confirmed. And Adam, I'm not talking about trace amounts, like these capsules were packed full of cyanide.

Adam Cox: It feels any small amount of cyanide is surely dangerous.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So for context, it takes just five to seven micrograms of cyanide to kill a single person, right?

Each one of these contaminated [00:22:00] capsules contains 65 milligrams. So basically that is 10,000 times the lethal dose to kill a human being in just one capsule.

Adam Cox: Bloody hell. And they were taking two as well, weren't they?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. That's right.

So Meanwhile, over the Northwest Community Hospital, Dr. Kim is still trying to work out what the hell is happening with Stanley and Teresa. At this point, he's starting to suspect an overdose of Tylenol

Adam Cox: so he doesn't know anything about cyanide at this point?

Kyle Risi: No idea. But what is incredible is that Dr. Kim is close, right? He's sniffing around the area. He is suspecting that it is the Tylenol, but again, the symptoms, they just don't add up everything that he's seeing. Everything that he's reading, everything is pointing to one thing and that is cyanide poisoning.

But he's adamant this is way too unlikely. It's just not possible because really who suspects that it's gonna be cyanide in your Tylenol? Mm-hmm. Eventually he gives into his instincts. He decides, all right, I need to test for what the signs are telling me, even if this sounds absurd.

But they don't have the equipment to actually run those tests in the hospital. So what he does is he draws some blood from Stanley and Teresa, he then sends them to a 24 [00:23:00] hour lab in Highland Park. And because obviously time is absolutely critical, trying to save Theresa's life. Mm-hmm~~ . ~~They can't wait till morning.

So he does the only thing he can think of and he sticks the blood samples in a cab, which, I mean, imagine that cab driver, like you're out there trying to make rent. Someone just hands you two vials of blood in the middle of a potential public health crisis.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I dunno what you think. 'cause do you think like a airborne virus? Is that what the cab driver could be thinking or,

Kyle Risi: I don't know if he even knows the details. Yeah. But even still, it must be weird as a cab driver being handed two vials of blood and saying, take this to this S lab to be tested immediately. Yeah,

that would be, I'd be like, why? Tell me.

Adam Cox: I just want a cholesterol test. Don't worry. Doesn't know.

Kyle Risi: Can't wait till morning. No.

So eventually the tests come back and just like the Tylenol capsules, it's confirmed, it's cyanide, which is amazing again when you zoom out because now you've got multiple professionals all working separately, all chasing different threads, but somehow all landing on the same terrifying answer all very, very quickly.

Adam Cox: And how quickly is this? Because, is this within a day, two days? This is all the same day. Mm-hmm. Good, smart people.

Kyle Risi: And [00:24:00] here's a wild bit because remember Nicholas, the medical examiner who opened up the bottle and took a sniff and could smell those bit monds.

Well, this is extremely lucky because it turns out that only 60% of people can actually detect that smell. So if he had taken a sniff and gone, there's nothing there, then that whole triage of links between the Tylenol, the batch numbers and the stores where they were purchased from just wouldn't have happened.

At least not that night. Wow.

So there's so many kind of really lucky connections that are happening here. Do you know what I mean?

Adam Cox: Yeah. It was really lucky that he was the one to do that, at this point in time, it's all, like the jigsaw pieces are kind of fitting together.

Kyle Risi: And by the way, do you know what cyanide actually does to your body when you ingest it?

Adam Cox: I'm guessing it kills you,

Kyle Risi: Adam. Yes, I'd say that's safe to assume.

Adam Cox: Um, but I, I have no idea what it actually does to the body there.

Kyle Risi: So basically, Sinai works by blocking your body's ability to absorb oxygen. The switch just gets switched off. First you start feeling nauseous, then come headaches, dizziness, and then confusion. But then after that you get shortness of breath.

Because your lungs are basically just starved, right? Your skin ends up turning this cherry [00:25:00] red color because oxygen is building up in your body. It's there, it just can't be used by your cells.

Then your heart and your brain, the two organs that absolutely depend on that oxygen, they start shutting down. You go into cardiac arrest and if that doesn't kill you, the seizures will, and if somehow you still are hanging on, it's a hundred percent fatal. So basically you will eventually die. It is so grim.

Adam Cox: So it doesn't matter that Theresa is in intensive care, she's not gonna make it.

Kyle Risi: What we're gonna find out is that Theresa is essentially brain dead.

Adam Cox: That's is horrendous.

Kyle Risi: Who would do this? So here's the thing. If this has all been linked to a basic over-the-counter painkiller, this is not just alarming, it's absolutely catastrophic.

Just to give you a bit of perspective of the scale of the panic that is about to erupt in 1982, Tylenol was Johnson and Johnson's best selling non-prescription medication, one of the most popular over the counter remedies in the entire United States.

Literally dominating 37% of the market share. And Each [00:26:00] year they were put in $400 million of sales just from that one product alone. Which means a huge percentage of American households have Tylenol sitting in their bathroom cabinets.

Adam Cox: And I'm guessing this is the reason why this particular product was targeted because it was so common and widely used.

Kyle Risi: I guess assuming that it's someone targeting this product and tampering with them, then yeah, I guess you're gonna pick the most popular one, to get the most victims.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm

Kyle Risi: But also this is huge for Johnson and Johnson because as a business, Tylenol accounts for one fifth of their entire product revenue. So if this story gets out, what do you think they're gonna do?

Adam Cox: I see two things happening. Mm-hmm. One, they're gonna deny it.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: And two, if it did get out, then I don't think anyone's gonna trust Tylenol ever again.

Kyle Risi: No, 100%. But exactly as you said, they're probably not gonna want this to get out. So I imagine a huge company like Johnson and Johnson luring up just to silence anyone that they possibly can.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And sadly, I think that would, that's probably what's gonna happen. And equally they could say oh, it was just a small batch, and then just hush.

Yeah. Everyone else. Mm-hmm. Then it doesn't get [00:27:00] widespread.

Kyle Risi: So the first time the story actually breaks, it's through a news bulletin board at the City News Bureau. It's like an internal wine service for Chicago journalists.

They get a tip that a popular over the counter painkiller may, of course, three violence and sudden deaths.

They don't say it's Tylenol by name, probably for litigation concerns, so a local journalist is desperately trying to get the confirmation of all the facts before they can officially launch the story. Eventually the medical examiner's office says they are actually attributing three of the deaths to Tylenol itself.

And in that moment he gets really nervous because he suddenly remembers that he has a mate who relies on Tylenol for his knee injury.

So he immediately picks up the phone, he calls him, no hesitation, and says, whatever you do tomorrow morning, do not take your Tylenol because something big is kicking off.

Adam Cox: Wow. Wonders. If he's like, I've just taken stuff.

Kyle Risi: I've just taken it. Spin it out, spin it out.

By 5:30 AM local news stations pick up the story immediately. One of them is a station that Helen Jenssen's husband listens to every morning before work. He [00:28:00] wakes up Helen and says, like, you were right. Of course, 1980, gender dynamics at play. It just took a couple of men confirming it before anyone else actually believed her.

But hey, at least it wasn't weeks or months before she was eventually proven, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah. She had an inclination and she was a nurse, right? yeah. Did she know it was cyanide or did she just know it was poisoning and it was Tylenol?

Kyle Risi: I think she just knew it was Tylenol. She didn't know that it was actually cyanide. But it's a good logical thinking, right? Oh yeah.

Adam Cox: You're taking her medication that's made you ill, yeah. It's gonna be that, right?

Kyle Risi: This bit's really incredible because almost immediately the entire community mobilizes local public health departments. They start going door to door with flyers, warning people to get rid of their Tylenol police cars drive through the neighborhoods with bullhorns blaring, ordering people to just throw out their bottles of Tylenol. Churches, send out Boy Scouts canvassing neighborhoods to spread the word stores across the district then start pulling all the Tylenol off their shelves.

Which in hindsight, Adam is absolutely lifesaving because when investigators go through the return stock, they find three more tainted bottles. Luckily, those pills hadn't been taken.

Adam Cox: So [00:29:00] only three then, which I'm not saying that's what they found

Kyle Risi: so many other people were chucking the Tylenol away.

Adam Cox: Sure. So we don't actually know how many were actually infected.

Kyle Risi: That's right. At this point, Johnson and Johnson still have no idea that any of this is happening. It's not until a local journalist calls 'em up asking for comments on the three deaths that have been linked to their Tylenol product, and this is pretty much where they then freak out.

They assemble a crisis team to figure out what the hell is going on and how they are going to respond, right? Mm-hmm. That's probably the most important thing for them So, like for me, my evil corporate Spidey senses are just going off, you know that they're gonna be trying to do something to cover themselves. Yeah.

Adam Cox: Like crisis management.

Kyle Risi: But just when you think that this multi-billion dollar company is about to lawyer up and start threatening people into silence, denying everything.

How do they do the opposite? They come out publicly and announce their commitment to protecting the public no matter what.

They send company officials to meet with detectives to get all the facts straight. Once confirmed that it is the Tylenol, they immediately recall 94,000 bottles with the matching batch number MC 2 8 8 [00:30:00] 0.

Adam Cox: So they do put out a recall. That's good. And I dunno, is that enough just that batch? I do, I do wonder whether you'd be like, actually, should we just recall everything?

Kyle Risi: Well, I guess for the company, they don't want to withdraw anything that they don't need to if they have to recall at all that potentially permanently damages the brand.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Okay.

Kyle Risi: And of course by this point, the entire country is in full blown hysteria. Thousands of people started calling the local examiner's office, terrified that they might be in danger.

Phone lines are just jammed. Everyone is asking the same thing. I took Tylenol, am I going to die?

Adam Cox: Yeah. Because even with the information that is a certain batch, do you really trust that? Just being that

Kyle Risi: Yeah. With, with it Could there be another batch affected and

Adam Cox: could it just be Tylenol or could it be other products?

So I think there's gonna be, yeah, a lot of fear basically. and people trying to like deal with a common cold or aches and pains.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure. Hundreds of people, of course, they start calling for ambulances, reporting symptoms of poisoning.

Paramedics, obviously, they scramble to equip all their rigs with cyanide. Antidote kits. Of course, limited supply. 'cause this is unprecedented.

Adam Cox: Oh, so there is an antidote [00:31:00] for it then?

Kyle Risi: I have no idea. That's just what I've read. Who knows what the antidote is?

Adam Cox: I wonder how successful it is as well, because if it's too far gone, it feels like you have no hope.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, and also the amount of damage that it does in a very short space of time, even if you do survive, like what's your quality of life gonna be? Yeah. Will have burnt out your esophagus. Who knows?

People that don't get through to the emergency services, they start just showing up at hospitals in droves, completely overwhelming them.

At this point, Adam, the fear is real and it's spreading fast. Mm-hmm.

Meanwhile, Johnson and Johnson, they think that maybe this was an access sabotage by maybe a disgruntled employee perhaps.

But that gets ruled out pretty quickly because most tunnel production is done completely by machine automated systems and conveyor belts. the entire process is like tightly sealed off as well.

So physically tampering with a capsule without being detected was like nearly impossible for anyone to do on the inside.

So to make sure, they pull the quality control sample from Batch MC2880 from their wash to manufacturing plant to be tested. Adam is completely clean. There's no cyanide, there's no contaminants. Nothing is outta place.

They also confirm that cyanide [00:32:00] isn't even stored at their tunnel manufacturing facilities at all.

Which means only one thing, the contamination couldn't have happened at the factory itself. It had to have happened once the bottles had actually left the plant.

Adam Cox: I was just gonna say if it came out clean, that's the only way.

And if they are capsules, that you put apart in this powder, someone has well, painstakingly, Yeah. Unbid them all and then obviously contaminated it. Mm-hmm. And then put them back. That's the only way. 'cause if it was a regular, pill or something like that, it'd have to be done within the plant.

Kyle Risi: While all this is unfolding at 4:00 PM on Wednesday, the 30th of September. So this is the next day, 31-year-old Mary McFarland, an office worker at the Illinois Bell Telephone store in Yorktown Shopping Center.

She starts complaining of a migraine, which is not unusual for her since obviously she suffered from them quite regularly. Now at her workplace, they kept painkillers on hand for the staff, just a big jar and you can just help yourself. Mary doesn't use them because she always carried her own supply.

She had just picked up a 50 capsule bottle of extra strength [00:33:00] Tylenol from the Woolworths five and Dime right there in the same shop center that she worked.

At 6:45 PM Mary steps into the break room, takes one of the capsules from her own stash. Less than 10 minutes later, she walks back into the break room.

She's pale, she's feeling uneasy, and she tells her colleague, I don't feel good. Then suddenly she collapses. She starts convulsing. She's foaming at the mouth. Mary is rushed to the Good Samaritans Hospital in nearby Downers Grove, and at 3:18 AM the next morning, Mary's gone. She's dead.

Adam Cox: And so the news didn't make it to her I'm guessing. Because You'd think if there was like this fear across the town, then, it'd be all over the news. It'd be in the newspapers. Mm-hmm. But I guess there's only been a short window of time. Yeah. Maybe it doesn't spread. Like if we had social media now, it would be everywhere. Right.

Kyle Risi: I honestly believe it had been just a few more hours. She would've then known.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: When detectives search her belongings, they find her tin in her purse where she kept a little stash inside there are 10 Tylenol capsules, five of them contained cyanide.

They then go to Mary's house to see if they can trace the bottle where the pills came [00:34:00] from. And sure enough, in a bathroom cabinet, they find the bottle of extra strength Tylenol, which is one capsule left inside. They test it, it's laces cyanide.

Here's the spanner in the work. So when they check the batch number, it's not the same batch number as the others.

This one is 1 9 1 0 md.

On top of this, Adam, this particular bottle was manufactured at a Johnson and Johnson's Texas based plant. So a completely different facility altogether. So now any theory that this was a one-off contaminated shipment was completely out the window, which is now fucking terrifying, right?

Adam Cox: Yes. Although I not to say that it isn't terrifying, could it be considering she carries capsules in a tin with her, that she's filled another bottle?

Kyle Risi: Could be. I I'm just, but then where's the original bottle?

Adam Cox: True. Yeah. But I, I was just thinking ~~is, ~~is yeah. You either go, okay, well we need to pull all batches, or actually just the way that she carried it would make me question that a little bit.

Yeah,

Kyle Risi: sure. And I think it's getting that way now that multiple batches have been confirmed, it's [00:35:00] definitely a possibility that Johnson Johnson are going to do ~~a, ~~a nationwide recall of all Tylenol products. Mm-hmm.

But because there's now multiple batches, it does seem that someone is physically targeting the product itself and not just a faulty batch.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But something is about to happen that is really going to make this very confusing because on the same afternoon that Mary McFarland took the Tylenol collapse at work across town, 27-year-old Mary Rainer, so her third Mary, now

she was at home caring for her three young kids and her six day old baby. When the hospital discharged Mary, they'd given her like a little recovery kit, you know, the kind of like basic supplies to help with postpartum healing and stuff like that.

Among those supplies was a blister pack of eight extra strength Tylenol capsules basically that is sealed in foil. Right. Even back then in the eighties.

Adam Cox: Right. Okay.

Kyle Risi: If you had popped one of those pills out to contaminate it, you're gonna know that someone had opened those blister packs. Right?

Adam Cox: Right.

Kyle Risi: So, six days after being discharged Mary takes two of the capsules from the sealed [00:36:00] blister pack, and within minutes she starts feeling dizzy, nauseous, she collapses. And six hours after Mary McFarland died, Mary Raines came to the exact same fate.

And when investigators look at the remaining six capsules in that blister pack, every single one of them contained cyanide.

Adam Cox: Well, this just makes it feel like it. It must be someone on the inside, right? To be able to do that.

Kyle Risi: Gotta be what the fuck is happening. And, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of this entire investigation. 'cause remember, Johnson and Johnson confirmed that contamination must have been carried out by someone outside of the factory.

But this was now a contaminated blister pack. Any tampering would've been obvious, but there's just no signs. And this means it must have left the factory with the cyanide in it. And so now suspicion was firmly back on Johnson and Johnson and their manufacturing process.

Adam Cox: Did they do a coverup or did they not investigate it properly? Feels

Kyle Risi: like it, doesn't it? Mm-hmm.

To make banners even worse, any hope of tracing any other blister packs back to their batch number is completely gone [00:37:00] because the hospitals, they issue an emergency order to destroy all Tylenol in their possession.

So they're fucked. How can they know what batch was affected from these lister backs? Yeah, they can't.

On the same day that Mary McFarland and Mary Rainer took their Tylenol around 8:45 PM 30 5-year-old Paula Prince, a flight attendant for United States Airlines touches down at O'Hara International Airport in Chicago.

She was hanging around the terminal. She's waiting for a friend and colleague, Jean. They basically live in the same apartment building together.

The plan was to head home together and maybe grab a drink and maybe grab something to eat.

But when Paula checks the arrival board, Jean's flight is laid by one hour.

So Paula scribbles down a quick note saying, I'm heading home. Let's meet up for a drink later. I have some really exciting news to tell you.

On the way home, Paula stops at a local Walgreens to grab a few things amongst them. She picks up a bottle of extra strength Tylenol back home.

She's busy taking off her makeup. Paula pops a single capsule from the new bottle, and this is where it's really brutal because she [00:38:00] already had an open bottle of Tylenol in her travel bag. Mm-hmm. But for whatever reason, she just opens this new one.

And because she was at home alone, we can only assume that she lands the same fate as the others because it's not until two days later on Friday, October the first, that her body is discovered by her sister, Carol and Jean. I.

Adam Cox: Bloody how

Kyle Risi: this is the most brutal part because at Paula's funeral, a man approaches Jean and introduces himself and he tells her that he's heard so much about her and that he's been really excited to meet her.

He says that he and Paula had met during a layover in Las Vegas, and they'd fallen madly in deeply in love, and they were planning on getting married. That exciting news that Paula mentioned in her note to Jean, that was it.

Adam Cox: Right. I thought you were about to say he was the potential killer. Yeah. Yeah. But I figured you

Kyle Risi: might think that No, he was the exciting news that she wanted to tell Jean about.

And there are just so many other details in the story that are just like these emotional gut punches moments that if they'd just gone ever so slightly different mm-hmm. Things that might have changed.

For example, if Stanley [00:39:00] Janus was allowed to go home that night, instead of saying over, he and Theresa might have survived.

Right. If Mary McFarland had taken a pill from the staff communal supply, she might have then seen the news later that night and then thrown out her bottle

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But then also with Paula, she already had a bottle of Tylenol in her bag. If she'd reached for that one, instead again, would she have seen the news and then just thrown out her bottle the next day.

Adam Cox: That's the thing, like there's all these different tangents of how or what could happen.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. It feels like sliding doors, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Where, oh, you missed your train, and then all of a sudden your life goes onto a completely different trajectory.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And I guess there's all these people that probably did have a lucky escape because they either did hear the news or they did take a batch that was actually okay.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And sadly, we don't ever hear about them, do we? It's crazy.

Adam Cox: So this is all in the same town still, right?

Kyle Risi: All in Chicago? Yeah. All around the same area, pretty much within two or three days of each other.

But On the same day that they find Paula's body on the 1st of October across town, doctors have to make the heartbreaking decision to take Theresa Janus off of life support because essentially she's declared rain dead, [00:40:00] Adam, she's just 19 years old.

And that now brings the total up to seven.

Adam Cox: So we know there's several batches that have been impacted,~~ um,~~ whether in bottles or whether in the blister packs. Mm-hmm do these batches, just go to a specific city? Because I'm just trying to work out why should Chicago No, they don't.

Kyle Risi: So they get distributed all over the country. And that's, that's the interesting thing here, right? ' cause this also proves that. It couldn't have been from a particular batch because other areas around the United States would've been affected. Mm. Because they get disputed everywhere, but it's just in the Chicago area.

Adam Cox: So does someone know if a batch or part of a batch is going to Chicago versus LA

Kyle Risi: don't think so. No. They just get divided up. They go where? Who's ordering what? Yeah. They don't, you probably even think about batches at that point. That's just a manufacturing thing, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah, because I'm just trying to work out how is someone able to just target all of Chicago? Um, I'm, do we find out, I'm guessing

Kyle Risi: we are gonna find out. Yes. But another wrench in the investigation comes when investigators check the batch. Number four, Paula's Tylenol. Again, it's different. This one is 1 8 [00:41:00] 0 1 ma. Just like Mary Rain is blister pack. This one also originated from Johnson and Johnson's Texas manufacturing plant. So now they're looking at three separate batch numbers, two different manufacturing locations, and absolutely no clear pattern.

Just seven innocent people randomly poisoned by a product that they trusted.

So investigators, they start combing through the evidence tied to Paula Prince's case. They find a receipt from the Walgreens where she bought the Tylenol. Naturally you think they'll check the CCTV footage.

But remember this is 1982, so stores didn't actually have aisle cameras yet, so basically there's no way to see how the Tylenol bottles got on the shelf in the first place.

But there was one camera mounted at the front of the store near the ATM. This was one of those old school kind of setups that kind of takes a single photo every time someone withdraws cash from the ATM. Mm-hmm.

It had captured an overview of the checkout where Paula was seen purchasing her Tylenol. In the background of that image, just a few feet behind her, there's a white man with a beard thinning hair standing [00:42:00] facing directly towards her.

He sort of looks like he's looking directly at Paula. It is a fairly creepy image it's creepy enough for the cops to kind of wonder could this potentially be the killer watching her buy the bottle of Tylenol that is just tampered with.

Adam Cox: Okay. So I understand what we're saying is that someone is perhaps going into stores because there's no like clue with the batch numbers and the two different like locations that they're made, someone's physically going into stores replacing bottles of Tylenol on the shelf with ones that they've tampered with.

Okay. So that makes sense how it's targeted the Chicago area. Yes. But how does it work with the blister packs?

Kyle Risi: Exactly. That is the biggest mystery of this entire case.

So yeah, we now have multiple batches contaminated, including blister packs. Johnson and Johnson. They now obviously announced a total nationwide recall of all Tylenol products. And Adam, I cannot understate how huge this is. There are an estimated 31 million bottles of Tylenol in circulation across the United States, all with different batch numbers.

So this recall is going to cost Johnson [00:43:00] Johnson $100 million, which is $300 million in today's money.

Adam Cox: That's a lot of money.

Kyle Risi: They announce that they're going to completely stop all production of Tylenol, and they pull all their ads from circulation. That's billboards, tv, commercials, magazines. It's all gone.

Then to get the word out fast, they send out 450,000 TeleTech messages to doctor's offices, hospitals, pharmacies, and trade groups, ordering the immediate destruction of any Tylenol still on their shelves.

The CEO then goes on national television. He announces that Johnson and Johnson will not manufacture another capsule of Tylenol until they can develop tamper-proof packaging.

He announces that they're also putting up a hundred thousand dollars reward that leads to any arrest or conviction of whoever's been doing this. Basically, they're, they're convicted in believing that someone, exactly as you said, is going into these stores, taking the Tylenol off the shelf, and then replacing them with cyanide laced pills essentially.

years later, in an article in the Washington Post, they write that Johnson and Johnson effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle disasters like this [00:44:00] when they unfold.

So much so that this case is still studied in PR classes at universities all around the world. It's widely considered a textbook example of how to handle a corporate crisis.

They literally say it couldn't have been handled any better because of how they were putting the consumer first, which is just so rare, isn't it? Like we don't see this enough with these big organizations.

Adam Cox: I mean, you'd hope they would if it's a actual, pharmaceutical company, which I know there are potentially some out there which don't do that. But you would hope someone like Johnson Johnson, which has this huge reputation and is so big.

Mm-hmm. Like if they didn't do that, it's gonna be far more damaging. Sure, sure. And all the deaths across America. Can you imagine how much worse this could have been had they not have done that?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, 100%. It's terrifying.

And this is now considered Adam a mass murder investigation. They're bringing over a hundred investigators from 15 different agencies. This is one of the first high profile cases in which the FBI employ a new technique called criminal profiling. Like something that feels very familiar to us now, thanks to [00:45:00] shows like Mindhunter. Back then, this was just completely cutting edge.

Adam Cox: So they're pulled together a criminal profile. What character traits or type of person are they looking for?

Kyle Risi: Listen, it's not that sophisticated. Basically they think they're looking for a man.

Adam Cox: Okay. So largely 50 50 sort of,~~ uh,~~ selection there.

Kyle Risi: You say 50 50. But remember, most poisonings are typically carried out by women, right?

Adam Cox: Are they?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Typically that's like a women's mo. Like if you cross a woman, she's gonna poison the shit outta you.

Adam Cox: Name 25 women that have poisoned people.

Kyle Risi: I'm sure we have some, some certified freaks who will uh, write in Okay.

And let us know. But the difference here is that women typically target people that they know, right? So like revenge. Like you've crossed me, I'm gonna get you.

Whereas obviously men typically kill random victims, which is what this seems to be.

They also reckon that it's likely someone with obviously mental health issues, possibly a history of animal cruelty.

They even raise the possibility of multiple people being involved since some of the capsules seem to have been put back together better than others,

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: While all this is going on, Johnson and Johnson deliver a huge [00:46:00] bombshell, they come forward and they admit that Oopsie, we lied.

We actually do store potassium cyanide in some of our facilities, but they say that there's only useful chemical testing in the lab specifically for testing the primary binding agent within Tylenol itself.

They insist though that those labs are in completely separate locations of the manufacturing areas, and that they are certain that if cyanide had made it into the production line, then it would've been detected within their quality control samples.

Plus, by this point, contaminated bottles had shown up in two different plants on opposite sides of the country. So they say even with cyanide in these labs, contamination at the manufacturing level seems highly unlikely. Meaning that whoever was responsible would've needed to have access to both separate manufacturing plants at the same time, which was impossible without having to sign in and get clearance into those locations.

Adam Cox: Unless they say that there's two people working in cahoots.

Kyle Risi: Possibly, which is why investigators, they go ahead. They interview every single current and former [00:47:00] employee. They interview their friends, their family, everyone even remotely connected to the Tylenol production chain process in any way.

And nothing turns up. There's no suspects, there's no red flags. No one seems to be capable of putting. Something like this.

Adam Cox: There's no new dodgy janitor that's just turned up.

Kyle Risi: Nothing. It's weird.

So the cops confirm that obviously tampering must have happened after the Tylenol had been shipped to Illinois.

Now I know that we still have that issue with the blister packs, but they insist that this theory only makes sense if you completely ignore the blister pack, if you don't ignore it, then the only way that blister pack could have been contaminated would've been during the manufacturing process.

Either that or the killer worked really, really hard to do a convincing job of contaminating those capsules and then like really kind of. Bluing down the foil

Adam Cox: My other strand of thinking was could they have a makeshift, I dunno, machine at home, but I'm guessing this foil probably has the pattern or the logo on it? [00:48:00] So that's quite hard to produce, I would've thought back in the early eighties. It's not like now that you could probably copy that quite easily.

Kyle Risi: But then also think about the blister pack, right? The bliss pack came from the hospital. How would then a killer then get the blister pack into the hospital supply?

Adam Cox: Because they're not gonna be buying it from a local Walmart.

Kyle Risi: No, they're not. Are they?

Adam Cox: Okay. Yeah. I'm very confused.

Kyle Risi: But the cops, they decide that they need to ignore this because of the fact that all of the other poisonings were confined to the Chicago area. If it was contaminated at the plant, then those affected batches would've made it to multiple regions around the USA. Which seems like an impossible coincidence if that was the case.

So somewhere between arriving in Illinois and reaching the store shelves, the Tylenol was somehow tampered with before it physically got into someone's hands.

So investigators, they start to interview every single employee connected to all the effective stores. This includes cashiers, stockroom, workers, janitors, delivery drivers, mates and staff. But after countless interviews, Adam and all the different background checks, no arrests are made.

[00:49:00] So what is going on?

Adam Cox: Yeah. All I can think of is, it's either like a man going into all these different stores and doing it manually, which feels like probably a lot of work by imagine someone that's quite sadistic and doing this in the first place might take quite, or satisfaction in planting them himself.

Kyle Risi: 100%.

Adam Cox: Or you've got maybe a delivery driver or something like that's doing it in the back of his lorry. That's changing the capsules. But the blister pack. That's the only thing. I dunno,

is it like a red herring almost?

Kyle Risi: So, Adam, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to dive into some of the suspects and theories in this case. And maybe among them will be the actual killer.

Adam Cox: I hope so.

Kyle Risi: So Adam, we're back. What are you thinking?

Adam Cox: I'm thinking, I have no idea.

Kyle Risi: It's a troubling one, isn't it?

Adam Cox: In some ways I felt like I was on the right path with trying to work out what had gone on. But I just don't know. I just feel like it's clearly someone targeting the Chicago area.

Yeah. But whether it's an employee of a shop or just some civilian or someone at Johnson Johnson, I have no idea.

Kyle Risi: So one of the early theories was that maybe this was the work of a competitor or [00:50:00] rival of Johnson and Johnson trying to sabotage their bestselling product.

Which kind of makes sense to a degree. I mean, If you believe in sadistic corporate businesses, which I 100% do.

Adam Cox: Yeah. But even still that feels like a stretch that someone would go this far to take down another brand,

Surely like, you know, slate them in the media, tarnish them, to actually kill people with cyanide. No.

Kyle Risi: So for a time, there was also even speculation that a major packaging manufacturer might have done this as a way to force the industry into adopting tamper-proof packaging. ' cause at the time, manufacturers were reluctant to adopt this due to obviously the increased costs that it came with. If so, this works because as we know, this is exactly what happens in the fallout of this, right?

Adam Cox: But even to say like, this is a business decision to do this in order to advance. Are there examples of where businesses have killed people in order to, for gain? Like that?

Kyle Risi: This could be the first, it's just been covered up with good pr. Mm-hmm.

Some speculate that the killer only intended to target one specific victim, then created a smokescreen with [00:51:00] the other murders. And The idea was that if the killer only poisoned one bottle, the police might immediately link it to the killer and then catch on pretty fast. Right?

Now, it made me wonder, and look, I know this is dark and there's zero evidence of this, but maybe Mary Rainier's husband was the intended killer, Maybe he poisoned the blister pack, then went out and contaminated other bottles to make it seem like it was one of many.

The police think that this is a possibility because they interview all the family members, friends, coworkers, anyone, even with the smallest possible connection.

But in the end. Everybody is cleared. But that is a theory that potentially makes sense to me. I get it. It's horrible but it's serious enough for the police to go down, that line of query.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Whether I believe it's him that did that. I don't know. But, I can see how this could be a way to cover up another merger. You need to rule it out. Yeah.

So are we saying that within the blister pack they found traces of cyanide in the other capsules, which had not been split open?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. all of the six remaining capsules [00:52:00] were stuffed with cyanide.

Adam Cox: Okay, fine.

Yeah, no, I can see it being a bit of a way as a decoy. Mm-hmm. But I don't think it's, once someone connects to the family.

Kyle Risi: Of course, a theory we've already alluded to is that the killer was local to the Chicago area, which is based purely on the distribution of the bottles. They reckon that the bottles had either been purchased or possibly shoplifted, then lace with cyanide, then put back on the shelves where someone would then grab them.

But police never find any fingerprints, which leads to the theory that the killer might have worn gloves. And they use this to see if they can get anyone to jog their memory because it was September at the time, so it was really warm. So they figured that if someone had seen someone wearing gloves in the supermarket in the middle of the day or in the evening or whatever, this might jog someone's memory.

But again, nothing turns up.

Adam Cox: And it sounds like there's quite a few stores that would've stocked this in terms of going to like contaminate these bottles at certain stores, that's probably a lot of work and also a chance that you could reveal yourself if you're actually doing it. Yeah. Once you didn't have great CCTV, it's just more of a risk,

Kyle Risi: a lot more chance that you'll be spotted. Yeah. [00:53:00] If you're going across multiple stores.

Adam Cox: So it feels like it could have been done before it got to the stores.

Kyle Risi: Based on the fact that the deaths all happened so close together, and that Tylenol is such a big seller. Investigators believe that the killer contaminated the bottles in a single day. Likely the day before the poisoning started. Just because how quickly Tylenol sells, right? Mm-hmm. Everyone has it.

This is backed up by the fact that two police officers operating in a borough in Illinois, they had stopped a local restaurant for lunch on Tuesday, September the 28th. So the day before the first death.

They noticed two cardboard boxes near where they had parked. The boxes were clearly marked, extra strength Tylenol capsules, they could see that there were 24 bottles of Tylenol inside and scattered all around on the ground was just a mess of white powder and hundreds of empty red and white capsule casings just kind of littered the ground.

Some of the capsules looked like they'd been taken apart and then put back together.

Adam Cox: So that seems suspicious.

Kyle Risi: It does seem very suspicious. But get this, one of the officers, he picks up one of the bottles to investigate, but then shrugs it off, and then they both head inside to eat.

But as they sat down he starts [00:54:00] getting a headache. along with that, a rash starts developing down the length of his arm. Now, when they're leaving, the second officer goes and takes another look at the boxes, and soon after that he starts to feel sick as well.

Of course, at the time they don't think anything of it. But when the news breaks, they rush, of course, to report what they had found. But weirdly, when those remnants were tested, there's no cyanide detected at all.

So what was that?

Adam Cox: That made them have that weird rash and feel ill? Yeah.

Kyle Risi: The only explanation I can think of is potentially like mass hysteria, because remember, we've seen how this can spread like in the Satanic panic episode, right? Mm-hmm.

But if this was the killer, then this might have been that moment that they were prepping those capsules. right? Mm-hmm

So by October the second, the funerals had begun across Chicago for all of the victims. Starting, of course, with the Janus family.

Detectives stake out each of the different funerals, just in case the killer couldn't resist to show up, to inspect his handiwork. After the services were done, they then set up surveillance cameras around the different grave sites just to keep an eye on them because there was this real feeling that someone as [00:55:00] statistic as this might wanna kind of visit the grave sites to kind of see their victims essentially.

Mm-hmm.

While all this is happening on Wednesday, the 6th of October, an envelope arrives at the McNeil Consumer Products headquarters.

McNeil's is basically a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson, and the envelope had just one word scroll across it. Tylenol the letter inside Red

Gentleman.

As you can see, it is very easy to place cyanide both potassium and sodium into the capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill.

How sadistic is that? Yeah.

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 and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle. If you want to stop the killings, then wire $1 million to bank accounts 8 [00:56:00] 4 4 9 5 9 7 at Continental, Illinois Bank Chicago.

Do not attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter.

A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything that you can possibly do.

At this point, the investigators are now facing two possibilities. Either this was a letter from the killer or this was the work of a con artist. Perhaps someone trying to capsulize on this tragedy.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I didn't think about that, but, that makes sense.

Kyle Risi: I mean, the detail that he knows about what Sinai does, especially in the eighties when there's no internet, right. Shocking.

He's raised a very plausible explanation, an avenue of investigation that the police were already looking at, that it was a lone person.

Adam Cox: How many might mass murderers issues like a ransom note or that kind of note basically to get money. I just don't, I feel like they, they enjoy the killing so much. They just want the notoriety of what they've done. For asking for money, though

Kyle Risi: So this is an extortion attempt by the, by the sounds of it.

So the cops very easily, and I mean very, very [00:57:00] easily trace the postage to a travel agency in Chicago.

Also, the bank account number in the letter is for an account that was closed five months earlier. So it wasn't even a well-planned extortion attempt. If anything, this looks like a setup.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I was trying to work out why would they give a bad bank account, but they're trying to basically, yeah, set up someone to take the fall for this

Kyle Risi: The account belonged to a guy called Frederick Miller McKee. He was the heir to the Miller Brewing fortune. So why would he need to extort someone out of a million bucks? He was already rich. The answer is he wouldn't because the aim of the letter was to incriminate Frederick in the title of no murders.

But why turns out that Frederick used to own the same traveler agency that the letter was postmarked for, but the business had since gone under, but before it did, employees were complaining that Frederick wasn't paying them.

One of those ex-employees that didn't get paid was a woman called Nancy Richardson, her husband, a guy called Robert Richardson. He did not take kindly to the fact that Frederick was screwing over his wife.

So investigators discover [00:58:00] that Robert and Nancy are not even their real names. Their real names are James and Leanne Lewis. They dig a little bit deeper, and as they do, James Lewis starts to fit the FBI profile of the tunnel killer almost perfectly.

First of all, he grew up in a deeply unstable household. He was known to fly into these violent rages. At one time, he chases his mother with an ax. Another time, he beats his dad up so badly that he breaks a bunch of his ribs.

Adam Cox: Well, that sounds like someone you don't want as a son.

Kyle Risi: He meets Nancy at university and when they graduate, they get jobs as bookkeepers at a tax service. But James gets the sack after he goes into a violent rage at his boss, of course, because he fears that he's gonna get arrested. He and Leanne, they leave the state, and go to Kansas where they set up their own tax business.

This is where they both meet their first client, a 72-year-old man named Raymond West. But in July of 1978, Raymond mysteriously disappears. And what is strange is that his [00:59:00] car was still in his garage. So you don't disappear without your car, do you?

Adam Cox: No. He's gone for a walk and got lost

Kyle Risi: So when Raymond's friends start getting worried, the police carry out a search . And there they find Raymond's decomposed and dismembered body stuffed into a bid bag.

Adam Cox: Oh.

Kyle Risi: A few weeks prior to Raymond going missing, he had withdrawn $5,000 and pay that money directly to James. When questioned James just says it was a loan for a business expansion. But Raymond's family are like, Raymond would never give anyone a penny, not even us. He was known to be extremely tight with his money.

Police search James's house. They find 20 feet of knotted white rope and a bin bag filled with personal documents and checks all belonging to Raymond.

And so James is officially charged the Raymond's murder.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, he liked to like wield an ax. Yeah. Really? And this is what he's done.

Kyle Risi: So When this goes to court, James's defense attorney argues the original indictment was worded incorrectly. Apparently they left out the word felonious, so I have no idea what that means.

Adam Cox: And because they, they left it out, it meant that he could get away with it,

Kyle Risi: [01:00:00] essentially. So the judge throws the case out just like that.

So after Raymond West's case collapses, the police are still hell bent on trying to nail James for something, which is when they learned that James and Leanne had actually been involved in a lot of credit card fraud schemes.

So they decide to try and get them on that, but surprise, surprise, they fled again. This is when they actually end up in Chicago operating under Robert and Nancy Richardson.

As we know, Nancy started working at the travel agency where Frederick Stiffer for the $500. Right, right.

So a few years later, when the Tylenol deaths start hitting the headlines. James sees this as the perfect opportunity to try and frame Frederick and implicate him in the Tylenol murders as an act of revenge.

Adam Cox: Ah, I see. So this like criminal is just trying to like get his own back. Yeah. well that's, that's really quite sad because he is taken away actual time from police investigating what's actually going on. To investigating this guy who's just a bad boss.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. [01:01:00] Crazy.

So the cops start looking for him. Through various aliases that he is used in the past. They pretty much link him to New York City. But they don't know where he is. They do know, however, that, based on how much he seemed to know about the Tylenol killings in his letters, they figure that he's following the news very, very closely.

So they come up with this really crazy idea. They placed 24 hour surveillance cameras against all of the news stands across New York City to try and catch him. Right. Their hope is that he'll go pick up a paper, and then. They'll swarm in and catch him.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: But they get nothing.

So then they wonder whether or not James might be reading the papers at the local library, So the cops reach out to every library in New York City and they ask the staff to be on a lookout. And eventually on Monday, December the 13th, a library employee spots James Re a stack of newspapers. And that's how they arrest him.

It's not just wild.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I would never have thought that would lead to a library to think that's the way he's getting his information. Yeah. But I'm guessing if he knows so much information, then it's in the papers. It's perhaps not in the news on TV or whatever. Yeah, that's quite smart.

Kyle Risi: Crazy.

[01:02:00] Eventually James admits to writing the letters to try and frame Frederick. But he insists, of course it was never about getting the money

Fine. But does he get charged with ~~like ~~wasting police time then?

No, he actually gets charged with extorting the money. Right. Regardless of where, what his intention was, he did attempt to extort the money.

Adam Cox: Oh, okay.

Kyle Risi: And he gets 20 years in federal prison.

Adam Cox: Do they use his other crimes because of they couldn't pin him to the murder or anything because 20 years sounds quite a lot for extortion. Is it because of all of his past?

Kyle Risi: It's America, right? You mess with their money, they mess with your life.

Okay.

But the thing is though, the cops, they are still 100% convinced that he is the Tylenol murderer and they base this on the fact that he looks uncannily similar to the man that was caught on camera, standing behind Paula Prince at the Walgreen store.

And honestly, Adam, he really does like you look that picture up on Google and it is eerie. But of course this is not enough to charge him for the murders.

After Mary Kellerman's funeral, a 12-year-old victim, the Chicago Tribune run an article titled Living in the Tylenol Killer's [01:03:00] Shadow.

This was written by a columnist called Bob Green, and it wasn't your typical kind of think piece it was a direct message to the killer, and it was designed to try and bait the killer into showing up at Mary's grave, which of course, the cops had placed 24 hour surveillance cameras all around.

The ask begins.

If you are the Tylenol killer, some of this may matter to you, or it may make no difference at all, but if you are the Tylenol killer, you must be harboring just the biggest curiosity about the people on the other end of your plan.

The people who are unfortunate enough to purchase the bottles that you were touched Already, you can see what Green's trying to do here. He's just kind of trying to tap into his ego that twisted pride, a God complex,

Adam Cox: and try and lure him out, I guess.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

He then goes on to say.

If you are curious, come to a small house on a quiet winding street on Elk Grove Village, Illinois. The people who live there, Dennis and Gina Kelman feel that you have already been inside.

He says.

If you are the Tylenol killer, you should know one more thing. Mary's mother cannot have any more children. Mary was her [01:04:00] only baby. She was born one month premature. And when she entered the world, her mother was scared because she wasn't crying, but the doctor smiled and said, it's all right. She's only sleeping. And she was.

She was a quiet child. And because the Kellerman's knew she would be their only child, she was especially precious to them.

I mean, how do you even respond to that? Mm-hmm. Like even reading that, that's quite stinging, isn't it?

Adam Cox: Yeah. It really pauses on the heartstrings, doesn't it?

Kyle Risi: Green goes on to say.

If you're wondering whether or not Mary's parents talk about you, you do not have to wonder anymore. They do. You've never been in the house, and yet they cannot walk into a room without feeling like you are there. You do not know them, but you've changed their lives forever.

They feel like they can't get away from you. And you should know Mary's parents are too shattered to even visit her grave.

Mary is buried at St. Michael's, the archangel in nearby Palatine, Illinois. And they wish they could go, but they can't. The hurt is too deep and you are keeping them even from that.

Wow. Powerful stuff, eh?

Adam Cox: [01:05:00] And are they revealing the location of Mary, of where Mary is buried in order to try and see if he would go to the grave?

Kyle Risi: 100%. That's the idea. Yeah.

They wanna try and see if they can catch him in the act, maybe provoke the sense of guilt or even vanity, if you will.

But here's the thing though, right? If the killer wanted to know where Mary was buried, I think they probably knew they could probably have worked that out. Do you know what I mean? Especially if they were like meticulously following the details of the case.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I guess that's assuming that they care that much about the victims or whether,

Kyle Risi: I think if you've gone to that extent to kill someone, then you probably do. If anything, I feel that this piece just reads like a trap. Mm-hmm. I would go, they want me to visit.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I'm not falling for that. Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: And that's the thing, no one ever visits that grave.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I guess it was worth a shot though, right? Because they're hoping that this guy does have so much of an ego that he would just do, that. He would slip up

Kyle Risi: worth a shot, but maybe if they hadn't said anything, maybe the killer would've gone and visited.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: And so, of course in a completely predictable way when [01:06:00] something like the Tylenol murders makes national headlines, you know what's coming, right?

Copycats?

Adam Cox: Oh no, actually copying, like poisoning, medicine

Kyle Risi: So In the months that followed over, 270 similar incidents were reported across the United States. People turned up to emergency rooms after taking pills laced with everything from rat poison to hydrochloric acid. In some cases people even swallowed glass.

Adam Cox: Bloody hell.

Kyle Risi: That's a lot. 270. People reported pins in Halloween candy. And the fear was so real that communities just canceled Halloween entirely. And this is one of the origin kind of theories around where that fear that people were spiking Halloween candy came from this case in in 1982.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: But Eventually Tylenol does return back to the Shells, but it's not. Before Johnson and Johnson completely overhaul their packaging, they introduced basically a triple seal tamperproof container, which as we know it today, a glue kind of box outer carton.

They also put the plastic seal over the neck of the bottle as well, like what we see with mouthwash. And the foil seal over the mouth of the bottle as well.

And they [01:07:00] also invent the caplets, which are those gel coated capsule shaped tablets that we recognize today, like precisely for that reason to prevent anyone tampering.

Adam Cox: Like a, like a co level or oil tablet. Exactly. Yes.

Kyle Risi: It's like a proper gelatin capsule.

And because of the copycat striking other products too, this ends up becoming a global standard to issue tamperproof evident protections on all sorts of products. This is why you have yogurt pots with a foil, lids, mouth. Washers now come with a plastic seal around the neck of the bottle. Cosmetics products, they come with seals as well. All of this traces back to what happened in Chicago in 1982.

It's really crazy how. The world that we live in can be shaped by one incident that happened in the 1980s.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And obviously several people died, which is really sad. But it's quite interesting how even just those deaths, not that they're insignificant but they transformed a lot. Yeah. They've now perhaps prevented other people or copycats or other things that could have gone wrong in the last sort of 30 to 40 years. That's now [01:08:00] saved. Perhaps more people than we realize.

As well as keeping your yogurts fresh.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. God forbid it'll go bad.

So another suspect that draws police attention is a 48-year-old dock hand named Roger Arnold.

He worked at a warehouse just west of Chicago that actually supplied Jewel Supermarkets the same chain that of course we know sold Tylenol to Adam Janus and to Mary Kellerman's mom, Gina.

In October, 1982, Roger was drinking in a bar when he started talking about killing people with cyanide. The owner of the bar, a guy called Marty Sinclair heard this and immediately called the police.

Adam Cox: He's like, well, that sounds like familiar.

Kyle Risi: Shouldn't there be like some kind of bar to customer confidentiality kind of rule?

Adam Cox: I don't think that works there. Doesn't work here. It's more like counseling. But if you admit to killing someone

Kyle Risi: gonna call the police. Yeah.

Anyway, the police raid Roger's apartment. They find a bunch of funnels, beakers, test tubes, and a mysterious bag of chemical powder. Naturally, they arrest him. He's questioned for three days, and the entire time he just says, obviously he denies everything. Mm-hmm. But he says, I'd like to be on the [01:09:00] homicide of the guy that turned me in for what he did to me. That's his response. Interesting

Adam Cox: response.

Kyle Risi: Turns out that the chemical powder was potassium carbonate. Now that is completely harmless and is actually used in glass and soap making.

Weirdly, Roger refuses to explain why he even had it in the first place, insisting that whatever he was doing with it was just not illegal. Which to me says, you're doing something illegal.

Adam Cox: You just admit what you're doing of making some soap. Just say that. Yeah, just say soap, but without any evidence tying him to the murders. They just have to let him go.

He becomes a complete and utter pariah in his local community. People start calling him the Tylenol kid.

So all this resentment starts building up. And so the following summer, Roger dries back to the bar and a point blank rage. He shoots a man called John Tonisha, a father of three as he was leaving the bar.

Is that the guy that Dr. Ben,

Kyle Risi: he got the wrong guy. Uhhuh Roger was meant to kill Marty Sinclair, the bar owner, who reports him to the police. Instead, he killed an innocent man and later he ends up being convicted of secondary degree murder. And he [01:10:00] sentenced to 30 years imprison only serving 15

Adam Cox: second degree murder.

Kyle Risi: Oh God. No. Maybe it's 'cause he was not the intended victim. I

Adam Cox: know, but he still meant to kill someone.

Kyle Risi: But the thing is though, in total, the cops end up identifying over 10,000 potential suspects, which are just wild

Adam Cox: 10,000 and just to think the way that they had to log things back then. Mm-hmm. And just, it's all probably written. They would've a computer, but Yep. Not in the same way that you can easily search file, I imagine.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. And because of course they couldn't manually cross reference that many names. Every time a new report came in, this case was actually one of the first criminal cases in the United States to use a computer program to process their suspect data.

Mm-hmm. So designed to flag individuals who appeared across multiple police reports from different agencies, just to kind of find patterns that maybe investigators might have missed.

But even this, Adam, they never find any new credible suspects outside of James and Roger Arnold.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, in some way this has led them to arresting James. But I don't know. Is there enough evidence of of him though?

Kyle Risi: [01:11:00] Well, not really. No, not really. By November, 1982, of course, all the leads are dried up. The case goes completely cold. And as a result, the Tylenol task force is cut from 115 investigators down to just 50. And by March of 1983, there were just 10 full-time officers working on this case.

But it does lead to one major change because that same year, Congress passes a bill now known as the T, no bill making it a federal crime to tam with any consumer products. And the max sentence comes with a hundred thousand dollars fine and literally life imprisonment.

Adam Cox: Is that for any tampering of products

Kyle Risi: that's the maximum sentence that they will push for. And the law is later used in 19 86, 2 people in Washington state died after taking Exogen capsules later cyanide. So another copycat killer. People just sick. Mm-hmm. Do you know what I mean? It's, there's not even any originality there.

Like just come up with your own scheme rather than copying someone else. There's no pride in that. I mean, there's no pride in killing someone with sign anyway. But the fact that you're copycatting someone is just sick.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, just, just don't [01:12:00] kill people.

Kyle Risi: Nine years after the original title Law murders the families of the Seven Victims, they actually decided to sue Johnson and Johnson arguing that the product tampering was already a known issue before 1982, and that they should have introduced these different safety measures long before this tragedy even happened.

And eventually they settled out of court and some of that settlement money helps pay for the college education for the eight children who'd lost kind of their parents during these murders.

But officially, Johnson and Johnson always denied any responsibility saying that they had nothing to do with the poisonings. Which I don't know, I You still can't explain the blister packs, can you? No. You can't explain that.

Adam Cox: I wonder if it was to happen now, whether it'd be easier to trace these, batches that go out or where they get, stored or any, anything like that. It feels like it's probably a lot harder to get away with that now.

Yeah, And it's just, it's one of those things that you just perhaps would anyone of us suspected someone to ever do this up until that point?

I think people like you say, this is a safe medicine that people just take every day. Mm-hmm. No one would've ever [01:13:00] thought that this would, would happen, I guess.

Kyle Risi: I don't think so either. It's just shocking. It's so scary.

But the thing is though, like, they also set that court because they want this to disappear very, very quickly. Right? When the murders first happened, Johnson and Johnson's market share was $5.4 billion. Afterwards, their Tylenol market share crashed from 35%, just 8%. So settling out a court for them was just good business.

But honestly, I think that just a lot of that is just PR done. Right? Because don't forget, they initially lied about storing cyanide in their manufacturing facilities, how can you easily come back from that?

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: I'm still not convinced they've answered one of the biggest questions of all.

And that is, how did that cyanide end up in those BISA packs? They were already in those foil seal trays, tamper-proof by design.

So that question I think will always stick with me as we leave this case behind, because if that is true, then the story might not just be about a lone killer that no one ever caught.

It could be a huge corporate coverup

Adam Cox: and negligence that they had. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Gross negligence.

Adam Cox: And the thing is, it's, it's not the first time [01:14:00] Johnson Johnson have come into controversy, I can't remember how many years ago it was, the tot powder,

so it, it's, again, it's one of those things that's probably never intentional. That probably was never intentional or did they know? It's just one of these things like what have they done to cover their back? Yeah. You know, there's some greedy higher ups there that would probably do everything. Oh,

Kyle Risi: 100%. Everything is led by the stock market now, right? Mm-hmm. Oh, our stock value has fallen. God forbid you take any money out of a rich billionaire's pocket, right?

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: So back to James. So James is obviously still serving time for attempted extortion.

He reaches out to the authorities, specifically US attorney Jeremy Margolis, volunteering to help solve the very crime that the cops still think that he committed. So I do wonder whether or not this is gonna be potentially a way of trying to trap him. 'cause they still definitely believe that he did it.

Basically he hands over hundreds of pages of handwritten manuscripts, diagrams, and elaborate theories, or hypothetical. Of course,

he also includes detailed sketchs , showing how the killer might have put the cyanide in the capsules. Basically the diagrams show how the [01:15:00] killer using a wooden chopping board would drill holes into it wide enough to stand the Tylenol capsules .

He then suggested that you place the empty half of the capsule inside the board. and then scoop the cyanide into the open capsules. Then of course you scrape off the excess, you reseal the capsules and then you return them to the bottles.

He then even noted how the whole process could be done in the front seat of his car in a parking lot.

Adam Cox: Right. Wow. He's gone into a lot of detail. Someone that's not involved. He's just basically tried to stitch someone up Yeah. To get money, but, um, but now all of a sudden he knows how it's done.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Of course, he makes very sure that this can't be seen as a confession because he made sure to label each of the illustrations with drawn on speculation at the request of assistant US Attorney General Jeremy d Margolis.

Adam Cox: I know he knew a lot about cyanide or like what was going on in the news. So are we saying he is laying on more than he knows?

So it's either clever and calculated. If he was responsible, [01:16:00] if he wasn't, then this is just a shameless way of getting attention for himself, right?

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Shameless.

But eventually in 1995, James is released on parole after 13 years in prison. But then in 2004, again, just showing you what a scumbag he is, he's charged with rape and kidnapping, accused of attacking a woman in his apartment building.

But again, another escape from the law because the charges are dropped when the woman refuses to testify.

So he's just a free man.

Mm.

Kyle Risi: Still the Tylenol task force, they never let go of the belief that James was the guy. They just don't have enough evidence.

But there is one more suspect on the list, and that is a guy called Ted Kazinski. Do you know that name?

Adam Cox: No. What? How did he get involved? Who the hell is Ted Kozinski? We haven't met him before. Right? He's the Unibomber Unibomber. Do you not know that story?

Remind me.

Kyle Risi: So basically he's this reclusive genius turned terrorist who spent 20 years maing bombs to various academics and airline executives raging against the [01:17:00] industrial society that we were living in, basically.

Adam Cox: Right. Okay. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: So the reason why he was under suspicion is 'cause one of his first bombings happened actually in Chicago. And at the time he was reportedly staying with his parents in Lombard. So not too far from actually where the crimes actually happened. Okay.

But the thing is though, this didn't fit his mo at all. Ted was typically surgical about who he targeted. His victims always represented something. Mm-hmm. So they were like, like a CEO of an airline or a dean of a university or something like that.

Someone that. If they were killed, it would make huge headlines. It would, it would be significant. He's not, he's not saying that the death of a 12-year-old Mary Kelman isn't significant, but like someone big.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I completely understand. He's not targeting random victims. They're very, targeted.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. Whereas the Tylenol poisonings, they didn't carry any kind of manifesto or any meaningful message. It was just senseless killings.

Adam Cox: Not revenge or anything. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And Adam, even to this day, the tunnel murders, they still remain unsolved. There's no justice, there's no closure. Just [01:18:00] seven ordinary families torn apart by something that they'll never understand.

Adam Cox: How did they get closure?

is what I want to know. yes, they've got compensation. Yeah. I'm sure they've been able to make the best of their lives. Mm-hmm. To whatever level they can, but to not know what actually happened and not to get answers from Johnson Johnson or the police to ever solve these crimes.

Kyle Risi: It's probably the hardest bit, isn't it?

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Well, actually that brings me nicely onto the final words from some of the family members, because Mary Rainer's husband says that their 2-year-old would often point at photographs of his mother and ask when she was coming home. And he was like, for. For ages. He just had to keep explaining that she was now in heaven.

Theresa, Jan's mother, she says that once their house was filled with music parties, laughter, and now it's just empty. That one gets me the most because it's that silence. Right. It's where there was once laughter. There's now not, yeah.

that's hard, especially when you're then still stuck in that room and just kind of listened to that silence.

That must be difficult.

Adam Cox: And, and again, [01:19:00] yeah. There's these just unsold questions just plaguing Yeah. Your mind probably.

Kyle Risi: And Mary McFarlane's brother, he says that he can't even look at a bottle of Tylenol anymore.

Adam Cox: Wow.

Kyle Risi: And Adam. Yeah. It's unsolved. But that is the story of the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders.

Adam Cox: I had no idea about that. I didn't realize what that led in terms of the future of, you know, Tampa proof, but to have like a reputable company and product that you're supposed to trust. Mm-hmm. You just think like, how else could this happen? Yeah. What other things have gone wrong that perhaps we don't even know about?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And I mean, I could understand that sense if we believe that it was Johnson and Johnson at fault here. I, I don't necessarily think that there were, I know that there's a big question over that blister pack, but you can't really hold them too much to account, but. There are now tamper proof.

Packaging on a lot of cosmetics and medicine products and stuff so that's at least comforting to know. Yeah. But God, back then that they didn't have any of that. It's just really difficult to imagine a world where that [01:20:00] wasn't just the norm.

Adam Cox: I wonder if, like, if you work at Johnson Johnson, there's always these rumors that go round, or was it Sam from, I don't know.

yeah, I imagine there would be, there's gotta be some there. Speculation. Yeah. Because it doesn't sound like Johnson Johnson themselves have done this purposefully, but, you know, negligence and maybe controls. Mm-hmm.

And then how they might have covered up. We don't know that obviously. Yeah. Then yeah, we just don't know. But yeah, poor families,

Kyle Risi: I definitely think that it was just someone going store to store shoplifting the items. Filling them with and just random cyanide and then yeah, just random and senseless.

Adam Cox: It seems that way. And I think how they were just able to get away with it and they're just, obviously they perhaps didn't do it again.

Mm-hmm. Because maybe there's a risk of doing that, but they're just hiding in plain sight.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's it. So a couple years ago there was the 40th anniversary of ~~the, ~~the Title I murders. As part of that, they released a whole bunch of different articles, which is just really incredibly detailed. That goes into testimony from Helen Jensen, Chuck, the Fire Lieutenant, Dr. Kim, all the different sequence events [01:21:00] that we pretty much covered today, but in a lot more detail. And it's just harrowing. You get to really dive deep into some of the nitty gritty details of what these people went through and the fight that they went through to try and kind of get ahead of this.

Mm-hmm. Because that's the incredible bit. There could have been so many more casualties. Yeah. If it wasn't for those incredible people piecing all those things together

Adam Cox: that quickly Yeah. And getting it outta stores.

Kyle Risi: But on the flip side, so many of these kind of like, but what if, if only this small thing had been different, this wouldn't have happened, like with the Janus family, Stanley and Theresa.

If they had just gone home that day, it wouldn't have happened. If Mary McFarland had taken a tablet from her own stash, she would've then seen the news the next morning and thrown outta the bottle. And the same with Paula.

Adam Cox: True. But would someone else have died? Because the fact that there were multiple incidents in a very short space of time Yeah. Is what kind of connected these dots together. So if it wasn't them, it might have been someone else.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Who knows?

So if you guys do wanna know [01:22:00] more on the 26th of May, I believe that there is a new. Documentary coming out on the Tylenol murders. Oh, right. Which I'm really excited about.

It's gonna include some interviews from the actual people that actually live through this, which is gonna be gonna be really interesting to watch

Adam Cox: and a new insight into Yeah. Their experience and what happened.

Kyle Risi: That's right. Yeah. So keep an eye out for that. I think that comes out maybe a couple days before this, so by the time you listen to this, you can definitely get stuck into the Netflix documentary on Netflix.

Cool. So yeah, we'll be watching. I hope you will be too. So should we run the outro?

Adam Cox: Yeah, sure.

Kyle Risi: And so that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did.

Adam Cox: If today's episode sparked your curiosity, do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show.

Kyle Risi: And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget the next week's episode is already waiting for you on a Patreon and it's completely free to access.

Adam Cox: And if you want, even more than join our certified freaks [01:23:00] tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next. I would love for you to be part of our growing community.

Kyle Risi: As always, don't forget the new episodes drop every Tuesday. And until then, remember even the most trusted remedies can conceal a deadly secret.

See you next time.

Adam Cox: See ya.