Chicago Tylenol Murders
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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. It's September 1982, the start of cold and flu season. You feel yourself coming down with all the common symptoms. Scratchy throat, stuffy nose, a mild headache, and some body aches.

So, you do what most Americans do. You take a couple extra strength Tylenols and you go lay down. But for seven people throughout the Chicago area, after they took those small white Tylenol pills, they collapsed. They were dead within minutes. Their deaths would forever change the way we take medicine here in the United States.

and would forever change the entire pharmaceutical industry. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 46, The Tylenol Murders. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that

that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved. Others have become cold cases. If you're interested in supporting the show and getting early access to weekly episodes and bonus material, consider visiting our Patreon page, patreon.com slash forensic tales.

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Now, let's jump right into this week's episode. Hi, Forensic Tales listeners. The case we're covering on the show this week isn't your typical mass murderer. Now, when we hear the term mass murderer or mass killing, we visualize terrorists or we think of perpetrators of mass shootings.

And before the fall of 1982, we never associated headache medicine with mass murderers. But that's exactly what happened. From September through October 1982 throughout Chicago, everything changed about the way we take pills in the United States.

The terror began on September 29, 1982, in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, one of the many suburbs throughout the greater Chicago area. Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman wasn't feeling well. She couldn't sleep. She was tossing and turning all night long. So she decided to get out of bed and head to her parents' room, just like what we all did when we were 12 years old.

Mary woke her parents up and complained about having a sore throat and runny nose, pretty much your typical cold. So her parents got out of bed, headed towards the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and gave Mary one extra-strength Tylenol capsule to help her fall back asleep for the rest of the night. Tylenol and Vips Vaporub could fix anything.

So after taking the single white pill, she returned back to her bedroom and fell asleep, only to never wake up again. The following morning, September 30th, around 7 o'clock in the morning, the parents of 12-year-old Mary Kellerman woke up to what would become the worst day of their entire lives. A day no parent can imagine.

A day no parent should have to live through. Mary was dead. Later that day, 27-year-old postal worker Adam Jonas also complained about coming down with a cold. After all, it was the midst of flu season in Chicago, so a sore throat and runny nose wasn't all uncommon or cause for much concern.

So not feeling very well, Adam decided to call off from work and stay home for the day. But even though he decided to stay home from work that day, he was also the father of two young children. So once he picked up his kids from preschool that day, he made a stop at a Jewel grocery store.

He felt absolutely terrible and he was so desperate for some sort of relief from this nasty cold. So that's where he picked up a box of extra strength Tylenol. After stopping by the store, Adam, with his two young kids in the backseat, drove home to his house in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He parked his car inside the garage,

headed indoors, and popped open the bottle of Tylenol. He grabbed some water from the fridge and tossed a couple capsules inside his mouth, headed to his bedroom, and then collapsed. Within minutes, Adam fell into a coma, and he was rushed to the emergency room at Northwest Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead almost upon arrival.

The Jonas family was completely devastated by Adam's death. His death was such a shock, so unexpected, and he left behind two young children who now didn't have a father in their lives. So the members of the Jonas family, including Adam's younger brother, 25-year-old Stanley, and his wife, 19-year-old Teresa, died.

got together at Adam's house to get together and mourn his death. It was just so tragic for everybody. So Stanley and Teresa spent most of the afternoon crying, holding on to each other, and just trying to come to terms with what happened. Later that day, both Stanley and Teresa started to complain about headaches.

Now, I know when I cry, the first thing that always happens is that I get this raging headache afterwards. So looking for something to calm their headaches, Stanley and Teresa go looking through Adam's medicine cabinet. And inside the bathroom, they find a bottle of extra strength Tylenol.

Both Stanley and Teresa popped a couple pills, and within minutes, both of them collapsed on the bathroom floor. Stanley died later that day, and his wife Teresa would die two days later inside of the hospital. She was just 19 years old. Following Adam's death and now Stanley and Teresa, the first thing people thought was that it must be carbon monoxide poisoning in the house.

Because within just a few hours, three people inside the same exact house collapsed and later died. All victims had been inside the same four walls together. And we know that carbon monoxide is one of those poisons where if it leaks inside of your home,

You might not smell it. You might not even know what hit you until you're down, which begged the question, was this a tragic accident? Maybe this was a carbon monoxide leak. So right away, the entire Jonas family, everyone who was inside of Adam's home, they were all rushed to the hospital. Nobody in the family knew if they were next or

Nobody knew what was inside that house that was killing everyone. Now, luckily, the rest of the Jonas family was placed under observation at the hospital and everyone else managed to survive. Whatever it was that killed Adam, Stanley, and Teresa remained a complete and utter mystery.

Over the next 48 hours, three more strange deaths occurred throughout the Chicago suburbs. 35-year-old Mary Reiner, a wife and mother to four children, one child that she just gave birth to months earlier, took a couple extra-strength Tylenol pills to relieve some of the pain that she had been experiencing postpartum.

Moments after taking the pills, Mary's eight-year-old daughter witnessed her mother collapse and fall to the ground. When Mary's husband, Ed Reiner, arrived home, he rushed to the telephone to call 911, but it was too late. Mary Reiner was pronounced dead at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Illinois. She left behind a husband and four young children.

One child just a couple months old. On September 30th, 30-year-old Mary McFarland started to experience a headache while at work. Mary was a single mother who worked incredibly hard to raise and support her two young sons.

So while working her shift, she went into the back room, took a few Tylenol pills, and just like the others, within minutes, she was on the floor. Mary McFarland was dead. The next day, October 1st, 35-year-old United Airlines flight attendant Paula Jean Prince was on a flight from Los Angeles to O'Hare International Airport.

And on her way home to downtown Chicago, she stopped by a local Walgreens drugstore. She's captured on the store's surveillance cameras, purchasing a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. It had been a really long flight from Nevada to Illinois, and she just needed something to fall asleep that night. Paula, too, had been experiencing some mild cold-like symptoms.

A few days later, Paula was discovered dead inside her apartment with a bottle of Tylenol sitting right there on her nightstand. The deaths of Paula Jean Prince, Mary McFarland, Mary Reiner, Stanley and Teresa, Adam Jonas, and Mary Kellerman were universally related.

All victims experienced some sort of discomfort, a common cold, a simple headache, something that made them do what any of us would do, reach for a Tylenol. And now, now they're all dead. So the news that seven people had been killed after ingesting Tylenol sent shockwaves throughout the Chicago area.

The thought of popping a Tylenol and then peeling over and never getting to live another day wasn't something that anybody in Chicago could understand or even be prepared for. It sent everyone into a panic. This was something that we had never seen before.

So by October 1982, at the same time the deaths were occurring, Tylenol was without a doubt the best selling non-prescription drug in the entire United States. I know for me as a kid, I don't think there was a single time when we didn't have a bottle of Tylenol in our medicine cabinet. You had a headache, you took a Tylenol.

You were coming down with a cold, you grabbed a Tylenol. Tylenol was the ultimate go-to pain reliever. They were easy to swallow and a bottle of it was super cheap, making it pretty much a household staple. So at the time, Tylenol was manufactured by McNeil Consumer Products, which back in the 1980s was a subsidiary of the Johnson & Johnson Company.

So following the seven deaths, Johnson & Johnson immediately started pulling Tylenol off their shelves in pretty much every drugstore throughout Chicago. And the company even issued a mass warning urging people not to consume Tylenol. So as a result, over 31 million bottles of the Tylenol painkiller were recalled.

Now, not too long after investigators knew that all victims had consumed Tylenol right before they died, they also learned that all the bottles purchased by the victims came from different pharmaceutical factories, meaning every single bottle came from a different facility that shipped the bottles out to the stores, which could only mean one thing.

If the bottles came from different pharmaceutical factories, the bottles had to have been tampered with from inside the stores. The Tylenol bottles found in each and every single one of the victims' houses were all sent to the forensic lab for testing. Scientists needed to know what was wrong with the pills and what exactly was in them that was causing these people to collapse and die almost instantly.

So the pills were tested inside of the forensics lab, and they came back positive for the presence of cyanide. The investigators who seized the bottles in the first place made notes in their files that many of the bottles smelled like almonds. Cyanide smells almost exactly like bitter almonds.

It was now crystal clear that someone was intentionally lacing the Tylenol bottles with cyanide, which makes for the almost perfect poison. Cyanide is known to be rapidly acting. It dissolves in the human body very quickly. Sometimes it gives off that bitter almond odor. Sometimes it's completely odorless. You wouldn't even know that there was cyanide there.

By itself, cyanide isn't necessarily dangerous or deadly. And actually, cyanide is naturally found in some foods like lima beans and almonds. And cyanide is also in the cigarettes that we smoke. So you're welcome if you needed another reason to quit smoking. But depending on the amount of consumption and its unique chemical compounds, it can be extremely deadly.

The immediate signs of cyanide poisoning are just as awful as you can imagine. If you accidentally ingest a deadly or dangerous amount of this stuff, you can experience convulsions, it can rapidly slow down your heart, you'll experience respiratory failure, and then you'll ultimately die. And if you're lucky enough to survive cyanide poisoning, you'll

you'll probably develop lifelong heart, brain, and nerve damage. So to say that this stuff is dangerous would be the understatement of this entire episode. So by the middle of October, police had speculated that someone took the bottles of Tylenol from the grocery stores a few weeks before the murders.

They believed someone took the bottles, laced them with deadly amounts of cyanide, and then they took the bottles and returned them back to the store shelves. And keep in mind here, this didn't occur at just one singular location. Remember, all of these bottles of Tylenol were purchased at different stores throughout Chicago.

Only one laced bottle came from the actual city of Chicago, and the rest of the bottles were spread out through different suburbs. So it's also been said that each pill had a deadly amount of cyanide. The scary reality was that if you just ingested one of these pills daily,

you'd be dead. There was so much cyanide in just one single pill that if you took it, you had no shot. You had no chance at survival. Now, the information that the Tylenol had been intentionally laced with cyanide, well, this caused a whole new level of hysteria throughout Chicago.

People already knew that the deaths were related to the pills. The bottles had already been taken off store shelves. But I think what really made the entire thing just bone chilling was the fact that this everyday painkiller was laced with cyanide. That someone was trying to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people, and they were using medicine to do it.

So huge crowds of people throughout Chicago began banging on the doors of local hospitals, believing they'd been poisoned. Emergency rooms overflowed with patients every single day. The telephone lines for poison control hotlines were so backed up that the callers who called in had to wait hours before they could speak to someone.

Johnson & Johnson had even set up a dedicated 1-800 number to address their customers' concerns who thought they may have purchased one of these bottles. And it got so bad that Johnson & Johnson also had to set up a dedicated phone number just to deal with the media inquiries about the deaths.

But I think it's important to mention here that during this time, Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, had a really good response to this crisis. In my opinion, too often we're far too quick to criticize companies for how they react or how they respond to tragedies involving their products or services. But

Here is a textbook perfect case where a large, major U.S. company actually had a quick and efficient response to a crisis. And to take that a step farther, Johnson & Johnson even offered up a $100,000 reward for any information that could possibly lead to an arrest.

I think they deserve a lot of credit when we talk about the aftermath here. But that's not to say that there wasn't an extreme loss to the company. The company had recalled over 30 million of its bottles, which I'm sure you can imagine the type of financial loss that it carries with 30 million products. And to give you an idea,

Johnson & Johnson reportedly lost over $100 million just from the recall and products alone. Now, even though millions of bottles had been pulled from store shelves, people not only in the Chicago area, but throughout the entire country, people were scared. They were scared that they were going to buy an everyday household product and be killed by it.

It became a case of mass hysteria. Am I going to go buy romaine lettuce and have a seizure? Am I going to go buy some milk and die? Remember, before Chicago 1982, we had never seen a mass murder like this. We hadn't seen an offender use something like an over-the-counter pain medicine to essentially murder people. And as the days go by, people wanted to know who this mass murderer was.

At first, some people thought maybe it was an employee, either from Johnson & Johnson, or maybe it was an employee from one of these drugstores. I think their theory emerged pretty early on because people believed that whoever was responsible had at least in some way some sort of access to many bottles of Tylenol.

Maybe it was a delivery person, a person who delivered the bottles to multiple drugstores. Maybe it was someone who helped stock the shelves at different locations. It was the theory that someone had access to the bottles, that they could take the bottles home for a few days, and that they could put them back on the store shelves really without anyone else knowing that the bottles were even touched.

At the same exact time this theory started to take off and get some steam behind it, a suspect emerged. A man who wrote a letter himself directly to Johnson & Johnson. In the letter, the man demanded that Johnson & Johnson pay him $1 million for him to stop the poisonings.

He said that if he didn't get the money, more and more innocent people would be murdered. He would kill children. He would kill grandparents. He would keep killing. So Johnson and Johnson representatives quickly forwarded the ransom letter over to the police and the FBI.

And the letter was also sent to the forensic lab to try and get maybe a fingerprint or any other type of forensic evidence that could possibly shed some light onto who wrote the letter. So at the forensic lab, the team found several fingerprints on the letter and identified them through criminal records as belonging to a man by the name of James William Lewis.

The fingerprints on the ransom letter finally gave police hope that they thought they had nailed down the Tylenol murderer. Police investigated every aspect and looked into every corner about who James William Lewis was. Was this their guy? Was this the person who used over-the-counter medicine to commit mass murder? They knew he was the one responsible for writing the ransom letter to Johnson & Johnson, but

But did he really have anything to do with the Tylenol murders? After police looked at Lewis underneath a microscope, it became pretty apparent that this guy had absolutely nothing to do with the murders. And when I say he had nothing to do with it, I mean this guy had never even stepped foot to Chicago. He lived hundreds of miles away in New York with his wife,

He had no connection to Johnson & Johnson, no connection to Tylenol, nothing. James William Lewis turned out to be a guy who simply wanted his two minutes of fame. And while in the spotlight, wanted to snag $1 million from the Johnson & Johnson empire.

But instead of getting the money, Lewis actually got slapped with federal extortion charges and he was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for writing the ransom letter. Since then, he has adamantly denied having any involvement in the Tylenol murders. So needless to say, his little plan backfired pretty quickly.

So back in Chicago, police and federal agents were back to square one. They were still looking for the person responsible for tampering with the pills and killing all of these innocent people. Even though the stores had already pulled the Tylenol bottles from their shelves, nobody knew if the suspect had also tampered with any other type of medicine or any other product. People were really freaked out.

You felt a tickle in your throat. You called the poison hotline fearing you'd be next. If you had a headache, you toughed it out. You weren't going to take a Tylenol again in fear you'd become the next victim. And this fear continued on into early 1983. Several months into the investigation, police were still nowhere closer to naming a suspect.

So the FBI decided to do something for the investigation that we don't see too often. They had come up with a criminal profile of the suspect that was unique. Authorities were convinced that the type of person who would commit these crimes would also become obsessed with what they've done.

The FBI profiled this offender to be someone who wouldn't be able to stay away from his victims, and they would want to relive his crimes as much as he possibly could. This is a behavior that we see in serial killers all the time. These types of killers become obsessed with their crimes.

They will clip and save every newspaper article about their killings. They will stalk the victims' families. They will show up to the victims' funerals. They will even visit their grave sites. They will do just about anything they can to continue to live out this fantasy that they get. And that's what the FBI profiles thought their suspect would do.

So in early 1983, the FBI approached the Chicago Tribune, which was a daily newspaper right there in Illinois. And they wanted the newspaper to write a story about one of the victims. So the FBI asked columnist Bob Green to write a story about the killer's first and youngest victim, which was 12-year-old Mary Kellerman.

And with the family's permission, Bob Green wrote a story about Mary. And in the story, he included exactly where her body was buried. And the FBI believed that the suspect they were searching for was just the type of offender who would be obsessed with his crimes and that he would want to go visit his first and youngest victim's gravesite.

So by putting Mary Kellerman's address in the newspaper with the Chicago Tribune, they hoped that their guy would just walk right up to where Mary was buried. So police set up 24-7 camera surveillance from every angle around Mary Kellerman's gravesite. They were so sure that their guy would come visit her gravesite and relive this part of his crime.

But as the first day passed, then the second day, and then weeks passed, with no sign of anyone visiting the gravesite, this led to yet another dead end in the case. While investigators searched for their suspect, the Tylenol murders in the fall of 1982 laid the foundation, pretty much laid the groundwork for copycats.

This idea of copycat murders is nothing new to the field of criminology. Many serial killers, even mass shooters, will write about how their actions were inspired by other mass murderers. That's why we need to be so vigilant about what we share in the media right after a mass murder event.

We don't want to give away certain details of a crime or a murder because we don't want to inspire those copycat scenarios, which unfortunately is exactly what happened here. The Tylenol murders in 1982 inspired many copycats over the next few years. Now, none of these copycats were as deadly as the 1982 Chicago murders, but

But through the rest of the 1980s and well into the early part of the 1990s, the Food and Drug Administration reported over 270 separate incidents of products being tampered with. Back in 1986, so this is now four years after the Chicago deaths, three people died after ingesting gelatin capsules that were intentionally tampered with.

A woman from Yonkers, New York, died after she ingested some extra-strength Tylenol pills that were also laced with cyanide. Two people from the state of Washington were killed after their Excedrin pills were poisoned with cyanide. A University of Texas college student was found dead inside of his very own apartment after he was poisoned with cyanide.

Pills were being tainted with from everything from rat poison to hydrochloric acid. And it was killing people and making people sick all across the country. A person who was looking for an easy way to kill innocent people, they looked to what the suspect did in Chicago and they became a copycat. And it wasn't just pills and other products people were tampering with following Chicago.

At Halloween, parents of young trick-or-treaters were finding tiny razor blades inside of their kids' candy. They were placed inside of snicker bar wrappers and candy corn. The year following the Tylenol murders, many parents were too scared to even let their children go trick-or-treating, fearing that these copycats were out there to poison and harm their babies.

It wasn't just bad things that came out of what happened back in 1982. Because of the Tylenol murders, in 1983, the U.S. Congress passed a law that is known as the Tylenol Bill. The bill makes it a federal offense to tamper with any type of consumer product.

And then a few years later, in 1989, the FDA created manufacturer guidelines to ensure that all consumer products, like over-the-counter pain medicine, were tamper-proof. Companies were now required to dramatically improve their packaging for safety purposes, something that we just didn't see in the early 1980s.

And because of the Chicago Tylenol murders, that's why we see those protective seals on our bottles. And if the seal is broken or messed with, we're told not to buy that particular bottle. Now, as soon as those companies started improving safety measures on their products, we saw a dramatic decline in those instances of copycats.

Of course, they still happened here and there, but it made it much more difficult for someone to go in and tamper with a product if it was all safely sealed up. The FDA even started to move away from using capsules for its pills and moved towards the solid caplet, which, again, made it a lot harder for people to mess with. So taking a step backwards, beyond the tragedy itself,

There was really a lot done to help prevent this from ever happening again. But as we work to make sure that this doesn't happen in the future, we still don't know who was responsible or behind the Tylenol murders. Back in 2009, several years after the murders, the FBI reopened their investigation into the case and

And they once again looked at James Lewis, the same guy who wrote the ransom letter. They went back and searched a storage unit he rented, but didn't find anything. And they really didn't disclose much about why they even looked at this guy again as a possible suspect. James Lewis had maintained his innocence over the years forever.

and said that he wrote the ransom letter just trying to extort the company out of a million dollars. Since then, there hasn't been a single arrest. A few more people emerged as possible persons of interest, but nothing really concrete came about it. Some people looked at Lori Dan as possibly being involved,

Lori Dan was a woman also from Illinois who prepared homemade rice cereal crackers and some juice boxes that she poisoned with arsenic. And she mailed it to some former kids that she used to babysit. She would go on to shoot and kill a kid and injure two more before eventually turning the gun on herself.

But many people speculated she might have something to do with the Tylenol murders because she also used poison in her attempted murders. But besides the poisoning part of the story, there really wasn't anything else tying her to the case. And she's never been named as a possible suspect here, at least not by the FBI or any other agency who has worked the case since then.

So it's now been just over 38 years since the Tylenol murders, and we still don't know who was responsible for those seven murders all those years ago. Since the murders, Tylenol sales have rebounded. They're still one of the nation's favorite over-the-counter painkillers in pretty much every American's medicine cabinet.

Some people thought that what happened back in 1982 would be the death of Tylenol or the death of the entire Johnson & Johnson company. But in reality, it's completely the opposite.

The Tylenol murders and how the Johnson & Johnson brand handled it has become a classic case study that we see in most business schools all across the country. So how do we solve this one? Will we ever solve this one? Right now in 2020, our biggest hope at cracking this one open is DNA.

Police and FBI still have in their possession, locked in evidence, many of the tainted Tylenol capsules used in the killings. These capsules come from the same exact bottles purchased by the victims. So at this point, our best shot at solving this one is DNA.

If DNA testing can get advanced enough in order to extract a potential profile from any of these remaining capsules, we've got a chance. There's a real possibility that the offender's DNA is still on one of these tainted pills.

And with the advancements in DNA, it's a real chance we'll be able to test it and pull a complete DNA profile and then be able to match it to a suspect. So as we wait for DNA testing to become advanced enough to be able to test these pills,

We will forever be changed about the way we take medicine here in the United States. Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio Production. The

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