Mystery Unsolved Inc True Crime

The Tylenol Murders

This week on Mystery Unsolved Inc we covered the Chicago Tylenol murders. A case unlike anything we've seen before. At the time the case was the center of a national media circus. Some may even say frenzy.

Reynard relays the information, "On September 29th 1982, seven people in the Chicago area ingested poison Tylenol pills, consequently collapsing and dying shortly after. The victims included twelve year old Mary Kellerman, twenty-seven year old Mary Reiner, thirty-one year-old Mary McFarland, thirty-five year old Paula Prince, twenty-seven year old Adam Janus, twenty-five year old Stanley Janus, and nineteen year old Teresa Janus. The last three were unfortunately all from the same family. Adam Janus collapsed after ingesting Extra Strength Tylenol. He was rushed to the hospital where he died. When the family returned home to mourn, both Adams brother Stanley and Stanley's wife Teresa took a Tylenol resulting in both of their deaths, making it three deaths in the same family on the same day."

"The fact that all three of the Janus had died in the same house would eventually lead to investigators connecting the dots. On the night of the 29th, Cook County investigator Nick Pishos compared the Janus' Tylenol bottle to the bottle from another victim named Mary Kellerman. Once Pishos had both bottles, he noticed that they shared one similarity, a Control Number MC - 2 8 8 0. Deputy Medical Examiner Donoghue says he told Pishos to smell the bottles and Pishos remembers that they both smelled like almonds, and cyanide is said to smell like bitter almonds. Exposure to a large dose of cyanide by any method can lead to seizures, cardiac arrest, and respiratory failure. Blood test results would show that the victims had taken a dose that was one hundred or even one thousand times the lethal amount."

"Deputy Medical Examiner Donoghue says he spoke with an attorney for Johnson & Johnson, Tylenols manufacturer parent company. By the evening of October 1st, after all seven victims had died, authorities were fairly certain the Tylenol had intentionally been poisoned with potassium cyanide by someone. Late that night, it was announced that all Tylenol will be pulled from the shelves. Immediately, McNeil Consumer Products, the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that manufactured Tylenol, recalled over thirty-one million bottles of Tylenol, and issued warnings. They also offered to replace recalled the bottles with new bottles and put up a one hundred thousand dollar reward for anybody with information about the person who had done this. These precautions were estimated to have cost the company roughly one hundred million dollars."

"By Tuesday October 5th, the US Attorney General as well as the FBI were on the case, in addition to local authorities. Tyrone Fahner, Illinois State Attorney General, says he believes in the initial stages there were about twelve hundred actual leads. It's estimated that US newspapers ran over one hundred thousand separate articles about the incident. A nationwide panic ensued. People who believed they might have been poisoned overwhelmed hospitals and poison control call centers. CPD actually went throughout the city giving warnings about Tylenol through loudspeakers."

"There were a slew of copycat product tampering incidents according to the FDA, about two hundred seventy of them just in the month after the Tylenol murders. Some copycats of them also poison pills with things like rat poison and hydrochloric acid. One fact that baffled police initially was that all of the victims bought their Tylenol from different stores and those stores got their Tylenol from different production plants."

"Labs were set up in capsules began to come through for testing. Over ten million recalled pills were tested. In total, fifty capsules were found to contain cyanide across eight bottles. Five of these bottles belong to the victims, two of these bottles were sent back in the recall, and chillingly one bottle, was found sitting on a shelf still unsold. No fingerprints or other physical evidence was found. There was also no evidence clearly showing the killer's trail in the stores as surveillance cameras were not as common then. Investigators explored the possibility of this being a white-collar crime syndicate, intent on tanking Johnson & Johnson stock. In fact, Tylenol share of the non-prescription pain reliever market plummeted from thirty-five percent to eight percent after the murders. Investigators also looked into every disgruntled employee who worked, or had worked, where the tainted Tylenol was made stored or sold."