SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Tylenol Murders, Part I

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Now up Up is one of my favorite of our true crime episodes on the poisoning deaths of at least seven people in the Chicago area back in 1982.

What makes this case so unsettling is that there doesn't seem to be any connection whatsoever between the victims and the killer.

The murderer just seems to have been a mad poisoner.

Like most good true crime mysteries, this one is also unsolved.

Enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh.

There's Chuck.

There's Josh.

Not me, Torres.

Chuck.

Guest producer Josh is back in the house.

Yeah, and there's Lil Chuck in your pocket.

Remember Lil Elvis?

I was just about to say that.

You got that right, Tanya E.

Oh, man.

What a great sketch.

It really was.

That was Nicholas Cage, wasn't it?

Yeah, man.

Did you ever see Mandy?

Yes, it was terrible.

I don't care what anybody else said.

Did you hate it?

Terrible,

terrible movie.

Yeah, Noel and I talked about it on Movie Crush.

He's seen it like four times,

thinks it's the best thing ever.

Come on, Noel.

And he was like, People either love it or hate it.

And I was like, actually, I was kind of in the middle.

Were you really?

Yeah, I mean, I told him young Chuck, like 22-year-old college Chuck, sure, would have probably liked it a lot more.

Yeah.

But today, Chuck was kind of like, eh, I get it.

Like, sure.

Sure.

Parts of it were fine.

Sure.

To me,

spending an hour doing character development,

but not successfully making you care about the characters

just really irked me.

Wow, you had structural issues.

Yeah.

That was really the big thing.

I also thought Linus Roach was very, very odd for casting, but.

Who's that?

Which one was that?

The main bad guy, the colour leader.

That was weird.

Very weird.

I don't even know him, but I think.

He's from Law and Order.

And like some other stuff.

You got to get into Law and Order, Chase.

See how much you're missing out on?

That's becoming a bit.

So

did we start recording yet?

I think so.

Oh, I already welcomed everybody to the podcast.

That's right.

So, Chuck, we are, this is some true crime stuff we're getting into here.

That's right.

But I feel like we need to set the tone, right?

Because this didn't happen just yesterday.

This happened way back in 1982 in Chicago, Illinois.

And I remember this, even though I was like six at the time.

It was one of my favorite years.

Because of this?

No.

No.

No.

The opposite of that, right?

Mainly because of movies.

What was so great about 1982?

Look it up, man.

Well, I was kind of hoping.

E.T.

Blade Runner.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, some of the best movies.

Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until I was

40?

That's not true.

Yes, it is.

Oh, really?

Yes.

The original.

The original Blade Runner.

Huh.

Did you like it?

Yeah, it was good.

I liked the second one, too.

You're You're like, but they spent way too much time on character development.

Yeah, and I just did a little poking around about 1982, and

it was a good year for an 11-year-old, but it was an uneasy time in America.

Why?

Well, a bunch of awful things happened that year.

And I don't know if it was any more or less than other years, but

Air Flight 90 crashed in the...

into the Potomac River.

Remember that?

No.

In Washington, D.C., the plane crashed in the river?

Didn't it hit a bridge?

Maybe, but

there was like a daring icy river rescue.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

78 people died, though.

That same day, a metro train in D.C.

derailed, killed three people.

Jeez.

February was when Wayne Williams was convicted.

Gotcha.

And that was just the end of a lot of unease, you know, for years.

Yeah.

Klaus Van Bulaw was found guilty of attempted murder of his wife in March.

I didn't make it to the end of Reversal of Fortune, so I honestly didn't know what happened to Klaus.

Guilty.

Okay.

In June was the murder of Vincent Chin, who was a Chinese American who was beaten to death by two men in Michigan thinking he was a Japanese, and they were like stealing their auto work.

Oh, my God.

I know, right?

And then July 9th, Pan Am Flight 759 goes down in Louisiana, kills all 146 people on board, plus eight more on the ground.

And then in September, early September

was when, I know, man, remember planes used to just crash a lot.

Yeah, that never happens now.

Not as much, but yeah, weird that we're recording this in the midst of more plane crashes.

And then early September was when that paper boy in Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again.

Johnny Gauche.

I don't know that one.

That was a big deal, too, because it was, you know, the paperboy, and there was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians, and that turned out not to be true, but he was never found again.

So basically, everything that's going on today is just a rehash of 1982, it sounds like.

I just remember being about that age, and they're just the nightly news sort of just being a horror show and not politically speaking.

You know, like real bad incidences occurring.

Well, yeah, plane crash, like just about at any age, like that'll, that'll bring you down if you see that on the news for sure.

Yeah, um, because you know, when you get on a plane, you think, huh, maybe this plane will go down while I'm on it, and that would be terrible.

Although I wasn't flying at 11, so all of those things you just mentioned sweep them totally off the table.

Okay, because come

the end of September of that year, nothing else mattered but what we're about to talk about now.

That's right, nothing, nothing came close to taking over the national psyche, like the deaths of

seven people

beginning on September 29th, 1982 in Chicago, Illinois.

Yeah, and one of the articles I read about this, I mean, are we trying to keep it a secret?

It's a show title, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think they're going to have to figure it out.

So, yeah, go ahead.

The Thailand murders?

Yeah.

Okay.

You're like, oh, no, no.

But that comes up in part two.

Oh, yeah, this is a two-parter as well.

So buckle in, everybody.

So I was doing some research, though, and I saw one article that said something about, you know, the first domestic terror incident in the United States that nobody's ever heard of.

I was like, what?

Who hasn't heard of this?

A millennial wrote that headline.

Well, I have to say, Josh on the way in here.

Yeah.

I told him Tylenol murders, and he went, huh?

He goes, what's Tylenol?

You old codger.

We should probably say what Tylenol is, huh?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I guess just in case you are a millennial and you've never heard of Tylenol, but Tylenol was and still is an over-the-counter pain reliever.

It's like you have aches and pains.

And apparently, what's crazy,

people would take Tylenol whatever was wrong with them.

Right.

Because now you can go get like, you know, aspirin and

Advil and

Aleve.

There was no Aleve back then.

That was a 90s drug.

There's way more over-the-counter pain relievers now than there were back then.

Back then, Tylenol was basically it.

Yeah, it's acetaminophen, which is different than aspirin.

And I think a lot of people just think those are interchangeable.

Right.

The reason I believe Tylenol became so big is because aspirin upsets a lot of people's stomachs.

Right.

Tylenol does not, or it's not supposed to.

And that's why it came out of nowhere and just took over the aspirin market.

I think by 1982, Tylenol had 37% of the market.

That's pretty good.

Cornered.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Almost half.

Especially since some of the other aspirins have been around since the 19th century.

Right.

So it makes sense then

that when a little girl named Mary Ann Kellerman complained that she had a sore throat and wasn't feeling too good at like 7 a.m.

on Wednesday, September 29th, 1982, her parents said, just take an extra strength of Tylenol and go back to bed.

Man.

For a sore throat, for some of them.

Can you imagine the guilt?

Oh, no.

that these parents feel?

Well, don't blow it.

We haven't said what happens to Marianne Kellerman yet.

I think everybody knows.

Yeah, she got up, said I'm sick.

He said, take this.

The father said he heard her go into the bathroom and close the door, then heard something drop and went to the door saying, are you okay?

You're okay.

No answer.

Opened the door.

And there she is on the floor,

taken to the hospital, but died very quickly.

Yeah, probably was dead when she went to the hospital, was pronounced there.

Um, and she, they suspected, and this is just a little 12-year-old girl, a middle school girl, went to Jane Adams middle school.

Um,

she they think she died of a stroke.

That's what they thought happened to her.

They were just so baffled that they're like, it had to have been a stroke.

That's the only thing that can come on like this.

Yeah, so that's 7 a.m.

Just the day is just beginning, and one atrocity has already happened.

Yeah, this is a

very bad day in the history of Chicago, September 29th, 1982.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it started early.

Adam Janice, who

will detail his story, but put a pin in this one too, because he figures in even more prominently in a minute.

But a little bit later that same morning, this gentleman, Adam Janice, he's 27 years old and lived in Arlington Heights, another Chicago suburb, and he died.

And they think that this is a heart attack.

He complained of chest pains after he had driven his daughter's neighbor home from school,

said, I'm going to take the day off, comes home, eats a little lunch, takes two extra strength Tylenol that he bought from a local drugstore, collapses in front of his wife, and by, you know, a few minutes later, when the paramedics arrive, he was dead.

Right.

And again, like you said, they said heart attack because he'd been complaining of chest pains, which had nothing to do with it.

Right.

But just like Marianne Kellerman took an extra strength Tylenol for a sore throat, he took some extra strength Tylenol for some chest pains.

This is just what people did back then.

Yeah, and that's what complicated it a little bit at first,

was that, you know, if you take the Tylenol, it means you felt bad already.

So obviously, you know, they're going to be saying like, wait a minute, chest pains or sore throat.

Like, how does that figure in?

Yeah.

And it didn't.

Plus also, what made this even more baffling is that Marianne Kellerman was 12 and healthy.

Adam Janus was 27 and healthy.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden they just dropped dead.

People don't just drop dead.

No matter what you see on TV or in the movies or whatever, whatever dropping dead inexplicably is a really bizarre thing when you're a healthy person that just doesn't happen uh next we have uh mary riner same day same day this is still all on the same day um she's 27 years old she's feeling a little dizzy she had just come home from the hospital uh after having given birth to her fourth kid a couple of days before yeah

super super sad all of these are obviously but being a just a brand new mom for the fourth time is just so tragic.

And then by 3:45, she was so ill, she was rushed back to the hospital and again, died very, very quickly.

Yeah, and like Adam Janus collapsed in front of his wife.

She collapsed in front of her young eight-year-old daughter, one of her children, saw her.

And yeah, when she was taken to the hospital, they pronounced her dead as well.

This is mid-afternoon.

Mary McFarland was up next.

She was over in

the suburb of Lombard, and she worked at an Illinois Bell Phone Center.

Where do you remember like you go get your phone, like the rotary phone?

You would actually lease your phone.

I wasn't involved in that process, but we had them in our home.

Okay.

Well, your parents were.

I never knew that.

I figured they just bought that stuff.

No, there was like a store where you would go.

It's like the phone company's retail store, and you would go and be like, that pink one.

That's like smartphones today.

kind of same model kind of um yeah I guess so but this was with a big clunky rotary phone and you had to pay extra for the extra long cord well Mary McFarland worked in one of these stores and at about four o'clock at the Illinois Bell Phone Center she was she had a massive headache that just came on out of nowhere and she went in back and got some extra strength Tylenol out of her purse took a couple of them and within minutes collapsed in the store yeah she was young as well she was 31 years old

Mother of two.

And then, remember, I was talking about Adam Janice a few minutes ago.

His family goes to the hospital.

Obviously, everyone converges there.

He passes away.

And so the family makes their way home to begin mourning and just sort of trying to reconcile what had just happened.

His brother Stanley, who was only 25, and then his wife, Teresa, who was only 19, are both just overcome and worn out and have headaches.

So they're at Adam's house.

They go to his medicine cabinet, get out the Tylenol that he took completely unknowingly, obviously.

And

Stanley hits the ground, foam comes from his mouth, his eyes roll back in his head, everyone's freaking out.

And a few minutes later, his wife collapses.

And they call the ambulance.

By the time the ambulances get there, I think Stanley died that day.

And Teresa somehow managed to live a couple of days.

Yeah, she hung on and I don't know if like her dose was lesser or what, but she survived for a couple of days after that.

Yeah, I mean, my guess is that

there just wasn't as much cyanide in the capsule she took.

Right.

Did I just give something else away?

Yeah, you did.

But the, so Stanley took his Tylenol first, and then Teresa took hers.

And one of the paramedics noted, like, Teresa was the one that called the ambulance out to come out for Stanley.

And when they get there,

they're both like on the ground.

And they're like, what's going on?

And one of the paramedics said everything that was happening to the guy happened to the woman like a couple minutes later.

Right.

Like she was just following him through this process of like basically systemic organ failure.

And this is the same day that his brother had passed away.

Yep.

This is about five, six hours, six hours after Adam Janice had died.

Then finally, I know this is all tough.

to go through everyone.

We almost selected this as our next live show.

I'm really glad we did.

because i mean can you imagine trying to liven this up with some jokes i i thought the whole time i was like no we can do that but yeah the more i got into it i was like yeah this is probably not good live material right we should have a rule of thumb that any story that begins with the death of a 12-year-old girl probably is not live show material i think you're right uh so finally we have paula uh prince paula jean prince this is a couple of days later this is not the same day uh this is on friday evening uh she was a 35 year old flight attendant and she was found dead in her apartment after police responded for a welfare check that her sister called in saying, Hey, you know, I know she's a flight attendant and all, but no one knows where she is.

Can you go check on her?

A welfare checkup.

And they finally found her, and she was gone.

Yes.

Very, very sad.

She was found in her bathroom with a bottle of extra strength Tylenol still open on the counter.

And she, they looked into

her receipts receipts and found that she had purchased it on Wednesday, September 29th.

That's right.

So at the end of this very short span of time in the Chicago area, we have seven people dead.

And I feel like that's a good time to take a message break.

Yeah?

Yeah.

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Okay, Chuck.

So you said cyanide.

How did you know that?

Because I was 11 years old and I watched the nightly news like all 11-year-olds did.

You just called it, right?

Just me and Broca,

Dan Rather,

Coppel.

Yep.

Who else?

That was it.

Peter Jennings.

He came a little later, but sure.

Was he?

Yeah.

Yeah, he came after somebody.

Well, I mean, Cronkite wasn't still around, was he, or was he?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I was kind of into the news as a kid a little bit.

Well, yeah, I mean,

that was where you got your news back then.

Yeah, you would watch the evening news.

It's very strange to think about now.

Right.

With the, with the up-to-the-minute news cycle.

So, oh, yeah, I know.

How much more innocent things were back then?

I know.

So remove yourself from the benefit of hindsight or the benefit of Dan Rather's insight

and put yourself in the shoes of the people in Chicago, right?

These are seven different deaths.

I think from five different townships in the greater Chicago area, including Chicago.

Paula Prince, the last person to die, lived in Chicago.

These people aren't talking.

These people have no idea what's going on.

It's just that there were five, seven separate baffling deaths.

You keep saying five.

You want two

fewer people to be dead.

Yeah, I do.

That's good.

My wishes aren't working, though.

It just so happens that the ambulance, the paramedics that showed up to attend to Mary, Mary Ann Kellerman, the first girl to die,

they were just logging everything because it was such a baffling thing.

And they logged her Tylenol.

Yeah, logged as in collected.

Right.

Yeah.

Took it as evidence to maybe look into.

Who knows?

Sure.

But they took the extra strength Tylenol that she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stuck.

Yeah, I'm I'm sure the dad was like, you know, she went in, took some Tylenol and dropped dead.

Right.

So it probably made sense, even though it's just Tylenol, to say like, well, hey, let's at least take this in.

Yes.

And that Tylenol.

Right.

You know?

Because that bottle of Tylenol made its way into the hands of a medical examiner whose name was...

Michael Schaefer.

And Michael Schaefer tested the Tylenol and was rather surprised to find that some of the capsules had not Tylenol in it, but 65 milligrams of potassium cyanide.

Yeah.

And it takes about 50 milligrams to kill a healthy adult.

Yeah, I mean, some of them, I don't think they were all exactly the same, but some of them had been completely emptied of any acetaminophen and completely filled with cyanide.

With cyanide, right?

Yeah, I mean, it was someone intent on for sure killing people.

Yes, because cyanide is no joke.

No.

It's a really, really small molecule

it normally attaches to metals outside of the body, which is why you have potassium,

I guess, which is why you have potassium cyanide.

Right.

When it goes into the body, when you ingest it, however, you ingest it, whether it's from a Tylenol capsule or breathing cyanide gas, like they used to use to execute people with.

Yeah, like they stopped using it for executions because it was such a brutal death.

Yeah, it's a very cruel, painful way to die.

In the body, it detaches from its mineral or metal, and it attaches to a protein in the body called

cytochrome C oxidase, which doesn't sound like it'd be a big problem, but it turns out that that's about the worst protein that cyanide could attach itself to because we really need cytochrome C oxidase to breathe.

Yeah.

Basically, it, I mean, this sounds like such a cruel thing because it's just rapid cell death.

And it's not like your throat closes up and you can't breathe.

Like, you're inhaling oxygen and you are technically taking breaths, but the oxygen is not getting in the cells.

No, it's not because that C or that cytochrome C oxidase is

what helps transport the oxygen and allows the oxygen to be used for energy.

Yeah.

So if the potassium is clinging to it, the oxygen can't.

It just stays in the bloodstream and it doesn't get used by the cells.

And since your central nervous system is the most oxygen-hungry system in your entire body,

it starts to shut down first.

And when your brain and your spinal cords start shutting down, all sorts of things happen.

Your lungs start shutting down.

Your heart, God bless it, keeps beating.

for minutes after the rest of your body shut down.

So you're not technically dead.

They're not sure exactly how long the pain and excruciation of dying from cyanide lasts, but they think you're probably conscious and aware and freaked out for about about a minute at least, and your heart may continue beating for three or four minutes after that.

So it's not a pleasant death at all.

No, I mean, you're, you're gasping for air, you're breathing in air, nothing's happening.

Like I said,

Stanley Janice, he was foaming at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head in front of his family.

It's just like, it's awful, like writhing on the floor,

gasping for air you're breathing, but it's not doing anything.

It's just, I can't imagine anything more horrifying.

Right, because your central nervous system has kind of fallen out of its out of control or rhythm.

Convulsions are usually a hallmark of cyanide poisoning.

And then you turn bright red at the end of it.

Yeah,

a cherry red, they said, because when your body has gotten rid of oxygen to your cells and the oxygen becomes depleted,

your skin kind of turns like a rusty brownish red.

But because it can't unload that oxygen when you're dead, it stays a bright red and your skin turns bright red.

And then the other real telltale sign is your breath will smell a bit like almonds.

Yeah, I mean, not a bit.

I mean, these bottles supposedly were really pungent with bitter almond.

And unless you know what that means, then

you're probably not clued in, you know?

Like, I wouldn't have known.

If I opened a bottle of Tylenol and it smelled like bitter almond, I'd probably be like, huh.

Right.

It's a nice smell, actually.

Yeah, I like this Tylenol.

Yeah.

I guess they have a new almond flavor.

Awful.

So Michael Schaefer, that medical examiner, has just realized that this little girl has been poisoned, but he knows nothing about these other deaths.

There's nothing like that.

It's not entirely clear how

everything became connected or who connected it.

But what I find just particularly astonishing is that within just a few hours, by that evening, by the evening of September 29th, people were saying there's something up with the Tylenol in these mysterious deaths that have been going on all around Chicago.

Yeah, I mean, we'll get into the drag net they cast, but within a few days, they had kind of solved everything, but who did it and how it may have happened.

Who done it.

Who done it.

So, yeah, very quickly they figured out the Tylenol.

And there are a couple of different stories on, like you said, on who was the first person to point this out.

One story is that a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago was doing the reporter thing and doing some deep diving and investigating and called up a deputy coroner and said, hey, I think this is what's happening.

They told the police.

Another story is that two people who didn't know each other kind of came together independently to let people know.

One was a fire captain named Philip Capitelli.

I knew it.

I knew you were going to do that.

There was like a 90% chance.

You know why?

Because we got a lot of support from people that wrote in saying, I'm Italian and I love it.

Keep doing it.

Right.

And only one guy who hated it.

But ironically, it was fire captain Philip Capitelli who had written in and said no.

So he

here was his deal.

His mother-in-law was friends with Mary Kellerman, the victim's mother.

Yeah, the first of the little girl.

And she said, hey, would you mind looking into this?

Because I'm friends with this little girl's mom.

And it's weird that she dropped dead at age 12.

And he's a fire fire captain, and they're all connected to, you know, the police and to the medical community.

Everybody knows you want something done, ask a fire captain.

I would.

Sure.

Because they'll bust into the room with an axe to get everybody's attention.

So he's investigating, and then there's this, there's a nurse named Helen Jensen.

And she, I don't know, do you know why she was so into this case?

Was she just a dude?

No, no, no.

She was the

public health nurse for Cook County, I believe.

Okay, so she had an official designation to investigate.

Yes, but unfortunately, no one would listen to her because this is 1982 and she was a nurse.

Right.

Even though she was like a public health director, she was still a nurse and people wouldn't listen to her.

And she recalled in an oral history I read about this that she was stomping her feet out of frustration, saying, like, there's something wrong with the Tylenol.

Like, the Tylenol is behind all this, and people wouldn't listen to her.

Amazing.

Supposedly, she and Philip

got together and

joined forces.

Right.

And I guess we're able to convince everybody that, no, there's something wrong with the Tylenol.

And by this time, people started talking.

Sure.

And, you know, the idea that Michael Schaefer had identified Tylenol, I don't know if it was the same day or the day after, something like that, but all this is within a span of 36,

48 hours tops.

Yeah, it was really fast.

That all of this is going on, that the dots are being being connected.

Right.

So

then what follows is Cook County's deputy chief medical examiner, Dr.

Edmund Donahue, holds a presser.

I've either watched this one or one of the other ones.

Like, I remember specifically seeing this press conference on the news.

Probably saw Jane Burns.

That would have been the nationwide one, I guess.

Yeah.

And I was like, how would that have been nationwide?

And then I looked it up.

WGN was a superstation starting in 1980.

Oh, you know it, man.

So everybody saw it because WGN could broadcast nationwide by 1982.

I watched Cubs games as a kid just because it was on.

Yep.

That was it.

Like that and Braves games were all you could see.

Yeah, man.

So Dr.

Donahue

has a presser, a local presser.

Of course, there is panic initially.

Yeah, he scares the

S out of everybody because he comes out of nowhere and says, stop taking the Tylenol.

Oh, yeah, sure.

And so anyone, I mean, imagine how many people in Chicago had taken Tylenol within two hours of that press conference.

Right.

And are thinking, like, should I go to the hospital?

Right.

And as a matter of fact,

the poison control lines for basically in every city where somebody saw this started to light up right after that.

And people were like, I just took Tylenol.

Am I okay?

Or gave my kid.

Can you imagine?

And what came to be the pat response was, if you are still standing and talking to us, you're probably okay.

okay.

Which is sort of a double-edged sword.

Right.

It's like, don't worry, you die super fast.

Right, kind of.

So just relax.

So just hold the line for five minutes, and then I'm going to come back and check on you.

And if you're still talking, you're fine.

Oh, man.

All right.

So then the Chicago Mayor's Office gets involved.

Like you said, Mayor Jane Byrne.

She gets, says, you know, print a bunch of flyers, print them in a bunch of languages.

Maybe on Goldenrod and Cornflower Blue.

Sure.

Why not?

Really catch people's attention.

that she had police drive through um

with loudspeakers on their car literally saying yeah like don't take tylenol reenacting that scene from the blues brothers where they're driving i was thinking slacker and that's funny two different movies but do you remember they're driving through in the police car with the loudspeaker talking about their their show yeah same as slacker i don't remember i don't i guess i didn't make it to the end of slacker either

it was in the middle-ish it was no dazed and confused huh oh just different movies.

Okay.

So they're posting flyers.

Cops are driving around, blaring it through neighborhoods.

And then she has

a press conference.

She has all Tylenol removed from the Chicago area.

She calls for it.

Well, sure.

She didn't go around with

her basket.

Right.

No, I'm not 100% clear if she was actually able to demand that the Tylenol be removed.

I think she was more warning.

Yeah, I mean, I doubt if there was any law she could invoke.

I wonder, though.

Seems like you would want to do that.

Afterwards, I would imagine.

Yeah.

That's, you know, we'll talk about that later.

Okay.

So the TV and the radio, you know, obviously everyone picks this up, not just in Chicago or the United States.

It goes worldwide.

Yeah.

And so, you know, there's people in Europe and Asia pulling Tylenol off the shelves.

Yeah.

So this is a big deal.

And there was a lot of

attention lavished on this.

There was a poll that was taken the next month in October

that found that 90%, and this was in cities all over the country, that found that 90% of respondents were aware of this Tylenol poisoning story.

Some press agency, like a news clipping service, said that

the number of stories dedicated to it were second only to the number of stories dedicated to the assassination of JFK.

That's how big this story became overnight.

And again, one of the reasons why is because everybody took Tylenol for everything all the time.

That's just what you did.

It was just something everyone took.

And that same product was now killing people.

So the most chilling part of all this to me, and this is all chilling,

may be the copycat stuff.

Because almost immediately, copycat incidences started popping up all over the country.

There were 270 reports of product tampering.

In the month after, 36 were, quote, hardcore, true tamperings.

And that's what's most chilling to me is like, there were that many people, at least 36.

Let's go in the low end, 36 people across the country that wanted to kill people and just saw an idea and were like, oh, that's what I'll do now.

I should have thought of that myself.

I mean, that's scary, man.

Yeah.

What's scary, but but also infuriating is that they're such terrible self-starters that they had to be a copycat murderer in that.

Right.

You know what I'm saying?

Sure.

Like, it's bad enough that they're trying to kill somebody.

Yeah.

Randomly kill somebody, anonymously kill somebody.

They didn't even think of it themselves.

I know.

That is a pathetic murderer right there.

That's pretty pathetic.

Put my foot down.

Excedrin, extra strength Excedrin capsules were found poison with mercuric chloride.

And that almost killed a man in Colorado.

His name was William Sinkovich.

And he got, he had liver and kidney failure, but he did survive.

This one gets me.

More than one person thought, oh, well, you know, people spray and like drop things in their eyes and nose.

I'll put acid in there.

So tampered cyanx and tampered visine both turned up after they had burned people with acid.

Chemical burn up your nose.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, that's a bad one.

So food was also on the list of things being tampered with.

Orange juice, chocolate milk,

very high-profile incident with ballpark hot dogs.

Yeah.

They pulled a million pounds of wieners off the shelves.

And ran them through a metal detector.

Yeah, because this was a scare, all, you know, the old urban legend of razor blades and Halloween candy.

I don't, did they actually find pins and needles and things for sure?

Yes.

Okay, because I thought that had literally never happened.

It hadn't.

It was an urban legend that became true.

Okay.

But nothing in the wieners.

No, some boys, I think in Detroit, claimed to have found razor blades in their ballpark wieners.

And like you said, a million pounds were recalled.

And then the boys were like, we were just kidding.

Wow.

Yeah.

And ballpark, we'll talk about how ballpark was treated after that, but they were put on shoulders and carried around for how great they handled everything.

And, you know, there were a lot of hoaxes.

There were a lot of

tips called in about other tampering.

And it had a really, like,

if the purpose of this was to induce panic and fear and terror, then it absolutely worked.

Absolutely.

Should we take another break?

I think so, man.

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Okay, Chuck.

I also want to point this out.

Time magazine, you know how I'm like super into

like going back and reading contemporary news articles about an event?

Yeah.

This one, I mean, it's all over the place.

But Time wrote about the copycat incidents back in 1982, and they said that the copycats were trying to, quote, emulate their demonic hero, the still unknown poisoner.

Their demonic hero.

That's what the journalists from Time decided to go with.

That's funny.

I mean, that seems like a very 2019 thing to write.

That's what I'm saying.

I feel like we're reverting back to 1982 right now.

Are we?

I guess so.

After that intro of yours, I'm now convinced.

All right.

So everybody's freaked out.

There are whole towns that canceled Halloween because remember, this happened like a month before Halloween, and everyone was very scared about...

candy tampering because of the urban legend.

Sure.

In some places, it turned out to be true, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There were all these hoaxes.

There were all these actual true product tampering, copycats.

People were freaked out and the cops needed to do something.

And initially, these seven different deaths in five different towns in the Chicago area were being treated as five different investigations.

That didn't last for very long.

Within two days, by Friday, by the time Mayor Byrne holds her press conference on WGN,

what came to be called the Tylenol Task Force was formed.

All five of those investigations got folded into not just local investigations, the FBI, the Illinois State Police.

FDA, of course.

Yeah, the FDA was involved.

And then the whole thing was led by the Illinois District Attorney's Office, who was the nominal head of the investigation.

Yeah, so they figured out pretty quickly that,

you know, like I said earlier, they cast their dragnet.

They come up with about a 50-mile radius of where all this stuff was bought and sold

and go investigate drugstore after drugstore and they did find more uh more bad Tylenol that still sitting on the shelves,

thankfully.

Yeah, yeah,

I don't want to skim past that.

They found more Tylenol waiting to be bought.

That's right.

Like just sitting there like, hey, come buy me within two days of these first deaths.

That's right.

These first murders.

We keep calling them deaths.

These were murders.

That's right.

And they name their case.

There are always code names for all these cases.

This one ranks pretty low, in my opinion.

Timers.

T-Y-M-U-R-S.

Short, obviously, for Tylenol murders.

At the very least, the S should have been a Z.

Timers.

Yeah.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just give it a little flavor.

Agreed.

So the cops are...

There was some confusion about how this went down because they're trying to figure out, you know, did it happen at the factory?

Did it happen after after the factory?

Right.

What's the supply chain like?

Well, that's huge.

That's like the crux of the investigation.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Where did the tainting occur?

Yeah.

So they found out that all of the containers were from lot number MC 2880,

which was pushed out in August.

Again, this was the end of September.

Yep.

And

all states east of the Mississippi, plus the Dakotas, Nebraska, and a bit of Wyoming.

Just a touch of Wyoming for flavor.

That's right.

Like the Z.

For that mesquite flavor.

Right.

However, they were from different production plants and they were sold in different drugstores.

Which is weird.

It's tough to wrap your head around that because it's the same lot.

Right.

But they came from different plants.

Right.

And it turns out Tylenol has also a really weird, convoluted distribution network.

I think that's every company.

Okay.

I have a friend that works in supply chain management and I was like, huh?

So supposedly

they'll take boxes and open them up and repackage them in smaller boxes.

And it happens at like different companies at different points around the country.

Yeah, it's pretty complicated.

It is.

From a product from factory to your mouth.

Right.

Like what happens to kind of everything.

Yeah.

I would think simplicity would be safer.

Much.

You know?

Probably not cheaper, though.

You're probably right.

So what they finally figured out was, here's what we think happened is

this stuff was not tainted at the factory.

This stuff was not tainted in the supply chain, but this stuff was tainted

from the store and then returned back to the store.

Right.

Because

these pills were sold in different stores, which is a big one, because it not only could it have been like...

part of the factory, it could have been one of the local stores' distribution centers where there was somebody messing with it.

But since they were sold in jewel food stores, in Walgreens, in other places too, around the Chicago area, that didn't make any sense.

It couldn't have just been like the jewel distribution center.

It also, because they were coming from different production plants, it really couldn't have been the production plant or the factory where it came from.

It had to be, like you said, happening at the stores.

Yeah, and there were a lot of initial theories.

You know, was it someone who, like a former disgruntled employee of Johnson ⁇ Johnson?

Was it someone,

was it just a serial killer who just picked Tylenol and wanted to randomly kill people?

Right.

And this is, that's weird.

That's a weird idea at the time.

Like, now it just seems normal.

Like, yeah, probably.

That's sad.

But this was two years before the San Yesidro McDonald's massacre, which is one of the very, one of the next random

killings of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was...

kind of the first of that, but it was still so new and remote and alien that that didn't seem like a realistic idea at the time.

Yeah, some of the other ideas, they thought maybe this was someone that was targeting a specific person or people

and then randomly poisoned other people to cover their tracks.

One of the weird

one of the weird theories that came out later after, and spoiler alert, we now have tamper-proof.

medicines.

I'm sure everyone's noticed.

There was one theory that it was someone who had a financial stake in tamper-proof technology.

Yeah, I saw something like that, too.

I don't think there was ever a ton of credence put into that one, but point is, there were a lot, I mean, they were flying blind basically because it was just such an unexpected, odd, random thing.

They were basically coming up with kind of any idea they could think of.

But the one that the cops settled on, and the one that Johnson and Johnson also settled on, too, because they went back and tested samples from Lot MC 2880 and found that

there was no tainting of the lot, that their samples were pure.

So the cops and Johnson and Johnson both decided, they settled on what's called the mad poisoner theory.

That somebody went around this 50-mile radius in the Chicago area

in about seven hours, is what the cops calculated it would have taken, either bought a bunch of Tylenol and then took it back to their house and poisoned it, repackaged it, and then drove around and redistributed it, or went from store to store, went in, bought some Tylenol, took it out to the car, poisoned it, and then repackaged it and brought it back in.

But that it was local and it was specific to Chicago.

That was the mad poisoner theory.

And again, why?

Still, no one has any idea why.

It could have been random.

They could have been targeting somebody.

It could have been a disgruntled Johnson ⁇ Johnson employee.

But the main theory for the Tylenol killings of 1982 in Chicago Chicago is the mad poisoner theory.

Yeah, and do you know how they tested the rest of that lot?

How?

They got Detective John Pinky McFarland, who had the best drug pinky in all of Illinois.

And he went around and dipped that pinky in, touched it to his tongue and said, it's good.

He's like, I can't feel my face right now.

The guy's a legend.

Yeah,

his pinky ring is so significant, he can barely lift his finger.

He only lifts it to test drugs.

I told you we'd find some jokes.

Sure.

So by mid-October, this is sort of the final bit of part one here.

There was another bottle that people that they found, another tainted bottle.

This is so crazy.

That was purchased on September 29th, so it fit the bill.

And it was a woman who

was feeling bad and went to go get that Tylenol.

And her sister was like, no, I've got some bufferin right here.

Just go ahead and take that.

And the lady presumably said, well, I really prefer Cetaminophen, but I guess I'll take an aspirin.

She, yeah.

Her sister-in-law saved her by offering her buffering instead.

You believe that?

She was steps away from dropping dead at a family gathering.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

And that is a good place to stop, huh?

Yeah.

So that's part one of the Tylenol Murders or TIE murders with an S.

And we're going to come back with part two after this.

If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime, you can go on to stuffyshouldknow.com and check out our social links, or you can send us a good old-fashioned email, 1982 version, to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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