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

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In part two of our episode on the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, we look at the suspects in the case and really zero in on one one of them.

But to this day, it's not clear if they were behind it.

And although there was a lot of weird evidence around him, it's all circumstantial.

I hope you enjoy finishing up on the Tylenol murders.

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

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant.

There's guest producer Josh over there.

I guess enough with the pleasantries.

Let's get back to it, Chuck.

Tylenol Murders, Part Two.

Part two.

If you did not listen to the first part, in 1982, seven people were murdered by ingesting Tylenol tainted with cyanide.

All on the same day.

All on the same day.

America and much of the world is super freaked out.

Johnson ⁇ Johnson is the manufacturer.

And part one of part two

has to deal with Johnson ⁇ Johnson and how they handled this in a public relations sort of way.

Right.

Because there were and are a huge company.

Like you said in the episode one, they held 37% of the market share, which was many hundreds of millions of dollars of Tylenol that they're selling every year.

And that's in $1982.

Right.

Which is like...

gazillions now.

So it was a very big deal for that company.

And the way they handled it is taught in colleges and PR classes all over the world as exactly how to handle a big public relations crisis like this.

Like it's literally called a textbook example of how it's done.

Yeah, they did a good job

because as you remember from the last episode, they found out pretty sure early on that this had nothing to do with Johnson ⁇ Johnson.

Right.

Like it wasn't in their factory.

It wasn't in their supply chain that it happened, almost certainly, and that it probably happened by some crazed person taking them out of the store, tainting them, maybe in the store, in the parking lot, then putting them back on the shelf.

But Johnson and Johnson can't come out on the news and say, hey, wasn't us.

Right.

Well, at first, though, and this gets overlooked and left out of the college business courses and the PR courses, at first, Johnson ⁇ Johnson was not in favor of a massive recall.

Sure, because that looks, well, it looks good in one way, way, but bad in another.

And they actually didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference on Friday calling for a recall of the Tylenol in Chicago.

And Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm and went, yes, we're recalling all of the Tylenol in Chicago.

Yes, what she said.

Right.

So by Friday, the 31st of September, is there a 31 in September?

Was this October 1st?

I have no idea.

I think it was October 1st.

Anyway, by the Friday, two days after the death, the deaths, Johnson and Johnson recalled all of the Tylenol in Chicago.

And that should have been enough.

To them, that was enough.

But this PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast.

And like we said earlier in part one, became global almost overnight.

It was not enough.

Yeah.

And so Johnson and Johnson, within a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra strength Tylenol in the United States, which is worth about $100 million at the time, took it back to their factories and destroyed it.

So they say.

Right.

Yeah, both Johnson and Johnson.

Right.

I wonder if one of them was like,

I don't know about this.

One of them said, okay, I'll take all the states west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and some Wyoming, and then you take all the other states.

That's a part one joke.

They even got an award,

the Public Relations Society of America, which is a real thing,

believe it or not.

They awarded them their Silver Anvil Award for how they handled the crisis.

The Tylenol poisonings.

That's right.

And

high-grade foods, remember we talked about the bad wieners in the first episode, the ballpark Franks that supposedly had razor blades but did not.

That still created a public relations crisis for them, even though they were just these little jerks in Detroit.

And they won the golden anvil, which is one higher than silver.

Because of how they handled the PR crisis brought about by the copycats of the actual Tylenol crisis.

Which was in fact really brought about by two jerk kids in Detroit.

Right.

Really not even copycats.

Not the Tylenol crisis.

I wonder where those kids are today.

Probably in the Senate.

I bet one of them was the guy who did

our lighting at our Detroit show.

Do you want some smoke?

I'll go and see more smoke.

Yeah, guys, we did a show in Detroit a few years ago, and very famously, we still use that as the standard bearer for a bad crew.

Bad.

We had a guy that looked like a

former roadie for Uriah Heap that was running like...

a light show basically during the middle of our podcast and like smoke came out.

We were like, we had to stop the show almost.

We're like, dude, what are you doing?

Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter had turned like brown and you could no longer see the words.

And you asked him, we had to stop the show, and you had to ask him to use a different color light.

Uh-huh.

And his response, because Yumi was hanging out, and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in the sound booth with the guy.

Yeah.

His response, according to them, was, they want smoke, I'll give him some more smoke.

And we got some more smoke.

Like a smoke machine.

Yeah.

Man.

And people ask us why we haven't been back to detroit that's a big reason it's a big reason not the only reason uh

okay so they've won the golden anvil for the the wiener uh pr moves um mcneil consumer products which is a subsidiary of johnson and johnson they actually make tylenol yeah they make the pills Again, the way all this supply chain works is really convoluted.

And like you said, they didn't want to recall Johnson ⁇ Johnson everything at first.

They want to kind of take it a little slower, I guess.

Well, sure, I mean, because they'd found out the drugs were actually fine.

Right.

Thanks to Pinky McFarland.

This is $100 million worth of stock that they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall.

That's right.

So they were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.

They had no choice.

No.

That was the only way to do it was to lose a lot of money in favor of future gains.

Yeah, but even at the time, a lot of people were like, this is it for Tylenol.

Sure.

The public has lost faith in Tylenol.

So when Tylenol recalled 31 million 50-count bottles of extra strength Tylenol and destroyed it all, there was a chance that not only were they losing $100 million, but that they were losing $100 million

of a brand that had already lost

the public trust and would never regain it.

Which wasn't true, but yeah.

No, but they didn't necessarily know that at the time.

It was still up in the air.

So

it was basically 31 million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public this taint of Tylenol is gone forever.

That's right.

Your chances of dying from taking extra strength Tylenol are now gone.

You can go back to taking Tylenol now.

That was one thing.

And that was a big gesture,

which is what it amounted to.

It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson.

But they did other stuff too.

They started to do things right.

Out of their reluctance, once they finally said,

we have to just go go with this to save face and to win back public trust, they started to do things right, like including like setting up a hotline,

putting out a $100,000 reward for information.

Jump change, considering how much they had lost already.

It's $1982.

Well, still jump change.

It is.

Yeah.

And that remains unclaimed.

It does.

But because of all of this, Johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and actually

managed to position itself as a victim

in all of this.

Like, yes, there were these

seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson, I don't think, ever tried to push them out of the spotlight, but they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner who may or may not have something out for them.

But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit because of this, and they were a victim and were able to generate public sympathy, which is part of the road to regaining the public trust.

Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes.

Yeah.

so

we'll take you back to 1982.

If you weren't around then or old enough to be taking

OTC pills and pain relievers, OTC is over-the-counter, by the way.

That's right.

Okay.

You down with OTC?

Yeah, you know me.

So dumb.

I love that you played along, though.

I appreciate that.

You could have made me feel stupid.

We've been partners for 11 years almost now.

Yeah, that'll be when next month or this month.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

So

unbelievable.

Not in that way.

Okay.

So here's how it used to happen.

If you wanted to take a pill like a Tylenol, you would

get your bottle.

You would pop it open with your thumb.

Well, first, first, it came in a little box.

Sure, but the box wasn't even glued shut.

No.

You would pop it open with your finger.

You would take out the cotton in there and you would take your pill.

It was that easy.

There was no tamper-proofing.

No.

There was no, the cotton was completely superfluous at this time.

Yeah, cotton originally was introduced to keep bare aspirin, like the hard tablets, yeah, from getting crushed in transport.

Yeah.

And since they started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton any longer.

But because consumers expected it, I know.

Still today, you'll find cotton in your pills.

There's no reason for it to be there except because the companies know that you want it to be there.

You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills.

I imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that, too.

Oh, I'll bet they're not complaining.

Big cotton.

They should,

new fancy OTC pills should have micro-modal in there.

Right.

It just comes with a pair of meundis stuffed into your pill pile.

That'd be a big thing.

You're like, these have been worn.

So

this was a time, it was a very innocent time previous to this where you could like, and you pointed this out.

I remember seeing this in grocery stores.

Like, I remember seeing mothers in grocery stores opening food products and smelling them.

Yes,

that's what you could do.

And then closing it back and putting it back on the shelf.

Yeah.

Oh, there's a little mold in this one.

Yeah.

I'll just leave it for the next person.

Forget poisoning.

Like, these, they could be spitting in this stuff.

It was allowed.

That's just the way it was.

Like, there was America was innocent enough that that was fine.

That's how we lived.

And that sets up this Tylenol poisoning.

It really shows how much of a jarring experience it was for America.

Because all of a sudden, like it's finally sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong with the Tylenol.

Somebody has gone out of their way to poison the Tylenol in order to randomly kill people.

And the reason they were able to do this is because it's easy to get into the Tylenol,

tamper with it, put it back, and no no one will be

any more the wiser.

And wait, it's not just Tylenol.

Milk doesn't have anything that keeps it tamper-resistant.

Neither does orange juice.

Neither does cereal.

Neither does cottage cheese.

Nothing does.

And America freaked out.

And this is the reason why this Tylenol poisoning is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in the United States, because it was terrorism pure and simple.

America was terrified.

They were petrified not only to take Tylenol or any over-the-counter medicine now, they were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids.

Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one to die in Chicago, she had a coworker who said, like, everything looked tainted now.

I was afraid to give my kids milk.

I was afraid to give my kids cereal.

If they could get to the

Tylenol, they could poison anything.

And that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that everybody went through.

And as a result, within six weeks, Tylenol said, we got this covered.

Yeah, and I have a feeling

they did this so fast, there had to have been this idea in place already.

Yeah, it was.

I saw, I saw a reference that it was.

And I imagine it was not done because they were like, well, it's a lot of money and why would we bother?

It's like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine.

Right.

And then that happened.

So within six weeks, they had a box that was actually glued shut.

So if your little box had been opened, you would be able to tell.

Yeah, that was part one of three of this tamper-resistant packaging.

That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle after you open it.

Or no, no, no, the plastic is over the cap on the outside of the bottle.

Yeah, like the plastic foil.

And then the

actual foil was over the mouth of the bottle that we all have to poke through now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.

None of that existed until the beginning of 1983.

So all three of these are put in place within six weeks.

Not only that, they said, you know what?

We're going to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now.

We didn't have them back then.

Everything was a little capsule that you could literally pull apart and you could snort the Tylenol if you wanted to.

Sure.

I'm quite sure some people did.

I'm sure someone did.

But the Caplet is, you know, a tablet coated with an easy-to-swallow gelatin.

It's solid.

I imagine you could tamper with it.

And even, I even saw with all these things in place, they said nothing is tamper-proof.

But these measures really went a long way to restore the public, you know, well, like the good feelings about what was going on.

Yeah, within about a year, Tylenol or Johnson and Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Tylenol.

That's hard to believe.

A year.

That was really fast.

But it also goes to show like just how perfectly they did everything from that, from the time they committed to it on.

Yeah, and I feel like I remember like commercials with CEOs and stuff addressing the public.

He became

I can't remember his name.

I want to say Joffrey Beam, but that's like a shoe brand.

Gabby Johnson?

No.

No.

Bill Johnson?

No.

Jimmy Johnson?

Howard Johnson?

Yes.

I can't remember his name, but

Jimmy Johnson is way far away from that.

But he became a public face.

He would, you know, go on to 60 Minutes and he talked to Dan Rather and Ted Coppel and all those cats.

Like he was out there like showing how much the company cared yeah and it had had a huge effect and then in 1983 Congress got involved they passed what they dubbed the Tylenol bill which basically says if you do something like this it's now a federal offense a few years later in 1989

the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any product really to make it tamper-proof yeah because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that that started doing this they followed suit very quickly once Tylenol came out with it because they kind of had to if they wanted to keep up with Tylenol.

But also the

manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer product started putting their products in like tamper-proof packaging.

They had to.

Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside the box.

To trap the chemicals in.

I guess.

But also to show like nobody's injected this with lie or something like that.

Although lie is used in the making of soap, isn't it?

I remember my fight club.

It's pretty funny.

Someone injected soap into this soap.

All right, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner right after this.

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All right, so

this was a very big case at the time.

Obviously, like we've been saying, it was a landmark case.

So, of course, you're going to get

psychological profiles, which, you know, we should do one on profiling, actually.

Have we done that?

I don't think so.

That'd be a good one.

Yeah.

Because it always seems like the trope in movies and TV, but it is kind of like that.

No, it is a thing for sure.

It's not like they just make this stuff up, but in the end, they said, you know, this is probably a man in his 20s or 30s who was sort of a Jekyll and Hyde type.

During the day, he's very ordinary.

He could be in the desk cubicle next to you and you wouldn't even know it.

Every once in a while, you just hear him go,

yeah, exactly.

But deep in the recesses of his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self-doubt and has an illusion that a random killing can boost his sense of self-worth.

Self-worth?

Which is just, it sounds like a straight out of a movie.

It sounds like a psychiatrist saying, I want to be on TV.

Yeah.

Listen to me.

They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture, was that he had probably already taken his own life

after the killings.

That was one specific person who said that.

Yeah.

It was, I think like the medical examiner for Cook County.

Yeah.

He probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't worry about it.

Don't worry, everybody.

Yeah.

Yeah, he just threw that out there.

I don't know if it was to calm people or not, but

or maybe he's just throwing his two cents in.

But

I think you kind of said it earlier.

I don't remember if it was part one or part two.

The whole thing's just blurred and become a haze by now.

But

no one has ever been charged with the Tylenol murders.

Yeah, that's the ending.

But there has been

a lot, there were a lot of suspects.

Remember, Tylenol set up a hotline and this Tylenol task force, 140-person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in.

They were trying to whittle those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing.

And out of all of them,

they deemed 1,200 tips or 1,200 leads worth checking out.

That's a lot of leads for a case,

even considering you had 140 people working them.

And I read somewhere that they started out with like 20,000 suspects or something like that and whittled it down to 400.

Yeah, and sort of the sad part is as quickly as they sort of figured a lot of this out and had that 140-person task force, they almost just as quickly within a few months realized that like

we don't have a very good chance at finding this person.

Yeah, it became clear very quickly.

Yeah, they whittled that down.

By the last week of October, the task force was down to 40 people.

By the end of the year, it was down to 20.

And it was a situation, again, in 1982, where you didn't have security cameras everywhere.

You didn't have credit cards and debit cards

creating paper trails.

It was a lot easier back then to get away with something like this, to

be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe slip some Tylenol into your pocket, go out to the parking lot, and come back in and slip them back on the shelf.

Yeah, if you're really easy.

You won't even go to the trouble of buying it.

Yeah, I guess that's a good point.

You can just steal it and then put it back.

But, you know, people were using cash.

If there were cameras in a place, they were probably trained on employees.

I worked at a Golden Pantry in college, and the only camera we had was directly above us pointing down at the cash register.

It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway?

Alps.

No.

Okay.

The one on the east side.

College Station Road, I think.

Okay.

Yeah.

Very interesting job.

That's the one where I got a job.

I needed a job.

I got a job at McDonald's.

And I showed up, I took the one-hour training video, and they got my uniform number.

I went home, and I was supposed to show up the next day.

And I was just like, I can't do it.

I can't go work at McDonald's.

And I got the Golden Pantry job later that day.

There you go.

Which, hey, man.

Sure.

It's like, sign me up.

From Golden Arches to Golden Pantry.

That's like a rags to riches story.

I was selling beer and cigarettes.

Nice.

It was pretty great.

You're like, one for you, one for me.

Oh, I would never do that.

All right.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, I was at Golden Pantry.

So the cameras trained on the register.

They're not, you know, you could come and go in a store and no one even knows in 1982.

Right.

Super cops have nothing to go on.

Most importantly, no motive.

That was a big one.

Because remember, this is just a Jekyll and Hyde type.

who you'd never suspect.

Who's probably at the bottom of the Chicago River.

Right.

Who also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people, anonymous poisoning, killing, not even shooting.

It just made zero sense whatsoever.

So, like we said earlier, the cops figured out within about a month, within the first month of the investigation, that this was, they were not going to have a break in this case.

But that's not to say that they didn't have some suspects.

Some people definitely did kind of come to come to the fore, but not many of them.

Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub-stories in and of themselves.

For sure.

The first guy's name was

last name Arnold.

First name Roger.

Roger.

That's right.

I call him Richard.

That's all right.

But for good reason.

Oh, sure.

Because you said he was like the Richard Jewell of his day.

Yeah.

The Olympic bomber who was not the bomber.

Right.

But whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as the Olympic bomber.

Right.

Same thing happened to this guy.

Yeah, he was one of the first named suspects, 49-year-old guy.

So put yourself in the position, okay?

The media is going berserk on the story.

Everybody hears about it.

It's a mad anonymous poisoner, and now all of a sudden there's a name and a face associated with it who's a suspect, but he's the first person named.

Oh, yeah.

It's like people going crazy, like trying to get to this guy to interview him.

Yeah, I have my doubts about this guy.

Not that he did that, but there were a lot of hinky things that.

they found out about him.

Sure.

And then how it all ended up.

Yeah.

As you're about to see.

So he was a DIY chemist.

It's a big one.

There's a big thing right there.

Because into chemistry.

Yeah, they said he's a Jekyll and Hyde type who's probably into chemistry.

That's right.

He was a dock hand

at Jewel Foods at a warehouse west of Chicago.

And Jewel Foods, there are a couple of different Jewel Foods where the Tyranol was bought.

It's like a grocery store, a food market.

It's all checking out so far.

So the cops look into him and go to his house.

He has a book

a handbook rather on methods of killing people how to kill people a to z i don't know if that's a title but okay that's a good one he had five unregistered guns it's a big one he admitted to having cyanide once yeah but he said i threw it out like at least six months before these murders he's like when were the murders again oh yeah six months before that that's why no one and then his wife said uh you know they were investigating her and interviewing her.

She was like, you know what, actually, I did take some Tylenol and felt really sick and threw up one time.

But again,

it was probably due to overeating and it was just that once.

That was the fact of the podcast.

So, like, you can't blame cops for saying this guy's a pretty good lead.

Yeah, because you can kind of start to see, like, if you add all the other stuff together and then hear about the wife throwing up from Tylenol, be like,

could you see this guy like toying with his wife, like testing it out on her, just enough to make her sick, but not to kill her, to see what happened, you know, see if she would notice?

Who knows?

Right.

But the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him.

There's not a person associated with the story that I came across who

I actually think this guy did it.

Yeah, for sure.

I didn't find one person who thought Ronald

Roger Arnold actually did it.

But in very short order, he proved that he was more than capable of murder because six months after he was cleared as a suspect, he was brought in for the murder of somebody else, a guy named John Stanisha.

Stenisha.

Stanisha, I would say.

Yeah, I'm going with that too.

Son Slovak or something.

Yeah.

He was 46.

He was a Chicago

computer consultant.

Which is, that's saying something in 1982.

Yeah, probably so.

So here's what happened.

Arnold, there was this bartender named or bar owner named Marty Sinclair, who Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops and ruined his life, essentially.

So he goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair, and it's actually this just completely innocent random guy who gets shot point blank.

And so he, in fact, did kill somebody.

He did.

Because of what had happened to his life.

It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.

He was definitely...

He created an intentional homicide.

He killed somebody on purpose.

Mistaken identity killing, though.

Right.

And because of this, because it was directly related to the Tylenol poisonings, John Stanischa is frequently considered an eighth victim of the Tylenol killings.

Kind of like an honorary victim in this case.

But it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of mistaken identity.

You know, it would have like a slightly different ring to it if it had been the right guy.

The fact that it was the wrong guy and this poor dude just happened to be in the wrong bar and happened to look like the owner.

That's just, it just is perfect for this, for this saga.

Yeah, I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that.

I'll bet he was not very happy.

Probably not, but probably also very relieved and probably also guilt.

Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that.

A range of emotions, I would imagine.

Yeah, all over the place.

So Arnold ended up serving 15 years of a 30-year sentence, was released in 99, and died nine years later.

Yep.

So, Chuck, before we go on to the main attraction as far as the suspects go,

I propose that we take a break.

Agreed.

Okay, we'll be right back.

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All right, Chuck.

So this dude, there was basically two suspects in this whole case.

Over all these years, there were basically two people.

And again, no one was ever actually charged with the murders, but this guy came awfully close, and his name was James Lewis.

Or was it?

It turns out it was.

But James Lewis came under the attention of the Chicago PD and the Tylenol Task Force when a letter showed up at Johnson Johnson headquarters.

And it was from allegedly the Tylenol poisoner, the mad poisoner.

And in the letter, it said basically, like, I've spent $50 so far, and the whole thing has taken me about 10 minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people.

I basically see no reason to stop.

Pay me one million dollars, and then I will stop the killings.

And it wire he gave a bank account number, right?

It said, wire me this money.

Very, very presciently.

No, that's not the right word.

Stupidly?

Maybe, but is it?

No, it's not.

So this letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account is associated with a travel agency in Chicago.

And so the cops go, okay, this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but let's go check it out.

And they find the owner of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under.

And this guy is like, oh my God, you're kidding me.

He's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can tell you who did.

It's a guy named Robert Richardson.

Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson who had worked at the travel agency.

And when the travel agency went belly up, Nancy lost her job and never got her last paycheck.

Well, Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this and was even more so the type of guy who would write a letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for the Tylenol murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck.

He was that kind of dude.

And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson cat, and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis.

Right.

So when we joked earlier about, is that his real name?

And you said it was, it was.

It was.

His name was not Robert Richardson, though.

That was an alias.

So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant.

He had, and this is just a strange, ironic twist, when he was 20 years old, he tried to take his own life by swallowing aspirin.

36 of them.

Yeah.

So that's just neither here nor there, but an interesting little side note.

Yeah, the fact that that, like, most people don't have that as part of their past.

Yeah, it is interesting that it came up.

So he had a pretty long rap sheet.

He was wanted by postal inspectors for credit card fraud in Kansas City.

He was indicted in 1978 for, and this one is just mind-blowing.

He's indicted for murder after police found remains of one of his former clients in bags in his attic, and he got let loose because it was an illegal search.

But he was caught with the body of one of his clients,

dismembered in his attic with no good explanation, as far as I've ever heard.

Yeah, so, well, what explanation would be good?

Well, we were playing poker and one thing led to another.

Right.

Yada, yada, yada.

Started juggling swords.

And yeah.

So his wife's real name was Leanne, the one who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid.

They fled Kansas City in December of 81

and this was as U.S.

postal inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme.

So they're like

just bad people.

Not the postal inspectors.

No, no, no.

The Lewises.

She's great.

So they moved to Chicago.

They changed their names to Robert

Nancy Richardson.

He got that job as a tax preparer, but then he was fired after a violent outburst in his office uh against his co-workers um

and then she lost her job went unpaid they they left chicago and this turns out this is what got them uh exonerated from the tylenol thing is they left chicago and moved to new york uh before this happened right before those same months right but if the theory held up that this person went around most likely in one day and did all this stuff, then it couldn't have been them.

No, and here's why, because the cops had decided that it was done locally.

And one of the other things that supported that local mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide ate through the gelatin capsules eventually.

So it had a very, very short shelf life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush of cyanide powder and melted gelatin.

So like you said, it had to have been done basically the day before.

the 29th, on the 28th.

They could not, no matter how hard they tried, they could not put James Lewis or his wife in Chicago that day.

Right.

They just couldn't.

And for his part, James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter.

I wrote the letter to Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy, but I did not, I did not poison the Tylenol.

He was always been adamant about that.

He's never toyed around with it.

He's never messed around.

He's never been coy.

He's always been adamant that he did not poison that Tylenol.

Although

the Tylenol Task Force tried to trip him up once, I guess to just get this on the record that he'd done this.

But they asked him like in an interview, okay, let's say you had done it.

How would you have done it?

And he actually

showed them how he would have done it.

Right.

Yeah, he just didn't write a book about it.

He just showed them in an interview.

Yeah, and he defends this later on by saying.

It was just a speculative scenario.

I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer.

Right.

I think the answer for me would have been, I don't know, man.

Yeah.

I'm innocent.

I can't figure this out.

But he's like, here's how I do it.

I've been waiting for you to ask me though.

He's eventually found in New York City.

He's at the public library

with a reference book copying names and addresses of newspapers.

I would imagine to send them letters like Zodiac style.

Yeah, because we got to say this.

So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis.

And it became part of the national media

circus.

It was a manhunt.

While they were looking for James Lewis.

This guy was writing letters to newspapers.

He called in a radio talk show.

Oh, yeah.

He was really relishing the fact that there was a national manhunt out for him.

Who, like.

That's what I'm saying.

On the one hand, you've got to kind of feel a little bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded into, you know, the rap for these murders.

After his extortion attempt.

That's where the feeling is bad for him.

You're like, oh, yeah, that's right.

He totally brought this on himself.

Yeah, so they hauled him out of the New York Public Library.

He was sentenced to 10 years for extortion attempt and 10 years for credit, that original credit card fraud, and served 13 years and lives in the greater Boston area today.

Still today, I think there are a few people who are like, I could see this guy.

Maybe, maybe he could be it.

Some detectives maintain that the Tylenol murderer could have have flown into O'Hare, rented a car, done that circuit,

flown or driven back to O'Hare and flown out all on the same day the day before, but they could never put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day.

So he was cleared finally, although he did serve two consecutive 10-year sentences, or he served 13 of the 20 years for that credit card fraud that the postal inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter.

And like you said, he lives in Cambridge, Mass now.

But then in 2009, the case, after basically having gone dormant in the early 80s, was reignited by the FBI because they worked up, they thought, a DNA profile from the capsules.

And they raided James Lewis's house,

demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample.

James and Leanne Lewis fought it in court.

The judge is like, no, you have to do this.

Before leaving the courthouse, they gave him the samples and nothing has come of it.

So I guess that means tacitly that the Lewises were cleared once and for all of the Tylenol murders.

Yeah, and you know, the DNA thing is an interesting piece because

they still have some samples of the cyanide.

I guess that the capsules have worn away by now if it had the cyanide in there.

But there was and still is hope

that DNA could crack this case.

Just like eight or nine years ago, the Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski, is that a two-parter?

No.

No?

Just a one-parter.

Good podcast, though.

I don't think so.

That was a good episode.

Sure.

He grew up in Chicago, and his parents were living in the greater Chicago area in 82, and he is the Unabomber.

So they said, we might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him.

And

he was cleared.

I don't think he was ever a super strong suspect.

No.

And he probably would have admitted it.

So he was like, no, this is not me.

Right.

So

the Unibomber has been cleared

from the Tylenol murders.

But that remains, the case remains unsolved to this day.

I think they also have a fingerprint workup that they found on one of the bottles.

And that and some DNA is, they're just sitting around with that.

There's, there are no suspects.

Every suspect has been cleared.

And there's nobody on the horizon.

It's just an unsolved, random series of killings that happened.

Yeah, they're still working on it, though.

There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkleman who has been on this task force for a long time, and he says he thinks it's solvable.

And his department did just solve a 45-year-old murder case, cold case.

Man, if they solved this one, that would be

the biggest cold case ever solved.

I think,

I mean, who knows, but I could see maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day.

Maybe.

Like, I don't know if they're going to catch someone at the bottom of the Chicago River and haul them off to jail, but I could see the truth coming out one day.

I hope so for the families because

Monica Janice, she's the niece of Adam, Stanley, and Teresa.

She said her family to this day, this is from an article like last year, I think,

said that they have still not gotten over it.

She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said literally every day for the rest of their lives, they just cried about

the fact that they didn't know who did it.

She grew up, it has been arapy therapy her whole life because they were all victims, you know, that this post-traumatic stress disorder kicks in, where she grew up fearing that any of her family members could die at any time.

Joseph Manis,

her dad, says that he still has dreams like, you know, on the reg

about these murders.

He said he had one recently where everyone involved was in a room in the case, and then two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how they got away with murder.

Michelle Rosen, she's the daughter of Mary Reiner.

She has dedicated her life to investigating this on her own, and she doesn't agree with the lone, the mad poisoner theory at all.

No,

this is interesting.

Yeah, she thinks it had something to do with the supply chain.

And that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it up.

Yeah.

One of the things, one of the things that people who believe this point to is that Johnson Johnson Johnson recalled all of that Tylenol, 31 million bottles, and then destroyed them

allegedly without testing any of it.

So we will never know whether it was.

Pinky had the day off.

Right.

Whether it was beyond Chicago or just local to Chicago.

Seems like it took long enough that other people would have died in that week before the national recall was undertaken.

But

there was something very, very interesting that was a postscript to all this that does undermine that mad poisoner theory.

Yeah, it was just a few years later in 1985, a woman in New York named Diane Elsroth took two extra strength Tylenol capsules and died from cyanide poisoning.

But they found, I mean, it's just completely unrelated.

Was it another copycat case?

Well, or the original poisoner, maybe.

So this is a different cyanide.

Right.

The cyanide was definitely not the same side from the same batch.

It was chemically different.

But there was another bottle found around the block from where Mary Ellsroth bought hers and Yonkers that did match that cyanide.

So there were two bottles of extra strength Tylenol two years later in another state that had been tampered with.

The problem is this was after the three-prong tamper-resistant packaging had been introduced.

Which means it was an inside job, right?

I guess, because the tamper, the thing had not been obviously tampered with.

And then Tylenol was never able to explain what happened.

Yeah, and then within five days of her death, eight states outright banned the capsules, Tylenol capsules.

Right.

And Tylenol, for its part, was like, we've been trying to get everybody to take caplets anyway, but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it.

And then a guy wrote a book, right?

Scott Barts.

Yeah, a former Johnson ⁇ Johnson employee

wrote in 2011 a self-published book on the Tylenol poisonings.

And he said,

what we were talking about earlier, he's like, this supply chain is so convoluted.

Right.

Basically, like it definitely could have happened at any point along the way.

And his idea is that Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution network and they covered it up.

Self-published book.

Yeah.

You got to note that for sure.

I'm not knocking it.

No.

But it's noteworthy.

It does.

If there's like any hint of journalistic integrity in us, that feels like we have to note that.

Sure.

So that's the Tylenol poisonings of 1982 in Chicago.

Changed America.

Changed the world, but definitely changed America.

It was the end of some form of innocence that we still had.

Absolutely.

If you want to know more about the Tylenol poisonings, go online.

There's stuff all over the place, and you can go down that rabbit hole.

And it's deep and wide.

Since I said that, it's time for listener man.

This is from Jen from Brunswick, Maine.

Hey guys, been listening for several years and never thought I'd have a

never thought

a perfect time to write in would be related to synthetic farts.

Remember the discussed episode?

Yeah.

We talked about synthetic farts.

It's a real thing.

When I was in high school, my dad came across this stuff online.

called liquid

ASS.

That's horrible.

Not allowed to curse, right?

No.

Is that a curse?

You couldn't spell it out, though.

Sure.

Or I guess maybe you should have said like

A asterisk asterisk.

Yeah, there you go.

Good name for a product, though.

She said he found it on a joke website and ordered some.

And I have to tell you, it is the worst thing you have ever smelled.

I can't even describe it.

It makes you want to not breathe anymore.

The tiniest little drop is deadly.

So of course I took it to college with me to play pranks and boy did it backfire.

I thought it was pretty funny putting a couple of of drops in the radiator by my

across the hall friend's room,

not even thinking about what would happen when the heat turned on.

Well, the heat turned on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag.

Smell took almost a week to finally go away and I have not used it again in the 10 years since.

That's probably

learning your lesson.

But she still has the bottle.

She's like, but I kept it.

Right, just in case.

Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast.

This is the first podcast I ever listened to, and it's still always on the top of my download list.

Thanks.

Thanks for giving this 28-year-old woman a platform on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that is not completely out of place.

Signed anonymous.

That is Jen Green.

Thanks, Jen Green.

Very brave of you to put your name on that one.

Especially, I wonder if you stepped up and said that horrible smell, that was my bad.

Right.

If you have a great story about college pranks, we want to hear about it.

You can get in touch with us via our social links by going to stuffyushouldn't know.com or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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

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