In 1982, a series of events in and around Chicago transformed consumer safety.
On the morning of September 29, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman told
her parents she wasn’t feeling well, so they gave her an extra-strength Tylenol capsule.
Immediately after, Mary collapsed.
She was dead by 10 am.
That same day, postal worker Adam Janus came down with a cold.
He purchased some extra-strength Tylenol at a supermarket.
He took two capsules and immediately went into convulsions.
He later died in hospital.
Doctors suspected the 27-year-old had a heart attack.
After grieving at the hospital,
Adam’s family came together at his home to comfort his wife and two small children.
His brother Stanley was so grief-stricken he came down with a headache. He grabbed
some Tylenol from the same bottle Adam had purchased earlier that day.
He offered some to his newly wedded wife, Theresa. They took two capsules each.
Soon after, they collapsed.
Stanley died that day. Theresa held on for two more days before passing away.
The unusual deaths caught the attention of firefighters from the affected suburbs of Chicago.
Firefighter Richard Keyworth said: “‘This is a wild stab, but maybe it’s Tylenol.”
Another firefighter who had the same suspicions reached out to a nurse from the local community.
Nurse Helen Jensen spoke to Adam Janus’ widow and
realized all three family members had taken Tylenol.
She thought: “It has to be the Tylenol”.
But she said the medical examiner and police didn’t believe her and even laughed it off.
In another suburb of Chicago, Mary Reiner was feeling woozy. She had
given birth to her fourth child two days earlier. The hospital gave her
some Tylenol to help with her postpartum recovery, and she also purchased some from
a store. Immediately after taking two capsules, she felt dizzy and collapsed.
Mary died the following day…at the same hospital where she had just given birth.
Another Mary, Mary McFarland, was taking a dinner break in the shopping center where she worked.
The 31-year-old single mom had a migraine. She took two Tylenol capsules and, minutes later,
collapsed. She never regained consciousness.
That evening, flight attendant Paula Prince landed at Chicago’s
O’Hare International Airport after a long day.
She stopped at a Walgreens on her way home.
An ATM surveillance camera captured the
35-year-old purchasing the pills that would kill her.
When she failed to show up for work,
her sister and a colleague went to her apartment and found her lifeless body.
All seven people died after taking Tylenol.
When an investigator with the medical examiner’s office first examined the Tylenol bottle from
Mary Kellerman’s house and the other one from the Janus’, they smelled like bitter almonds.
The examiner knew instantly what he was dealing with.
The odor was cyanide.
He was lucky to catch a whiff of cyanide because only about 60% of
the population can detect the bitter almond scent.
Out of the 44 remaining capsules in the Janus’ bottle, four were found to contain cyanide.
Each capsule had between 550 to 610 milligrams of potassium
cyanide - nearly three times the amount needed to kill someone.
Their blood samples tested positive for cyanide poisoning.
A dogged reporter named John Flynn Rooney received a tip and broke
the story of the poisonings before an official press conference was called.
Stores began pulling pain relievers from the shelves.
Chicago police drove through the streets using
loudspeakers to order people to flush Tylenol down the toilet.
These quick actions likely saved more lives as no further deaths occurred.
The corporation that owned Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, did NOT think this was the work
of an employee. It believed the capsules were laced with cyanide after leaving the factories.
Because the poisoned capsules came from multiple manufacturing plants.
Investigators believed someone must have taken the bottles off store shelves, pulled the two casings
apart, laced them with poison, and then reattached the halves before returning them to the store.
The capsule on the left is regular Tylenol, the capsule
on the right contains cyanide. The powder is off-white and grayish in color, and lumpier.
Store management pulled all the Tylenol off the shelves on Thursday
The poisonings were the biggest story in the country.
Poison control center. We’ve been receiving calls about once every 15 seconds.
Tylenol was the most popular pain reliever in America.
Extra strength tylenol. Aspirin-free. And
you can’t buy a more potent pain reliever without a prescription
Tylenol controlled 37% of the over-the-counter
pain reliever market and accounted for $400 million in sales the year before.
After the deaths, Tylenol’s market share plummeted to 7%.
Johnson & Johnson recalled all 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules.
More tainted capsules were found. Fortunately, they had not been sold or consumed.
The poisonings changed how over-the-counter drugs were packaged.
At the time, there was no protective sealing on any over-the-counter drug bottles.
Johnson & Johnson worked with the FDA to include
safety seals which became the norm for packaged food as well.
The company also introduced a new version of
its pill - the caplet - which was harder to tamper with than the older capsules.
A few years later, Tylenol stopped selling its capsule version for good.
Johnson & Johnson spent $100 million on the recall and relaunch of Tylenol.
And it was worth it.
Within a year, Tylenol sales bounced back,
and once again became America’s favorite over-the-counter pain reliever.
But for the families of the victims, there was no relief from their pain.
Police had not caught the person responsible for the deaths of their loved ones.
But they did have someone in mind.
About a week after the poisonings, Tylenol’s manufacturer, McNeil,
a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, received a letter in the mail.
Inside was a note written in all caps.
Gentlemen: as you can see it is easy to place cyanide (both potassium and sodium)
into capsules sitting on store shelves. and since the cyanide is inside the gelatin,
it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. another beauty is that cyanide operates
quickly. it takes so very little, and there will be no time to take countermeasures.
If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. so far,
i’ve spent less than 50 dollars and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.
If you want to stop the killing then wire $1,000,000 to bank account
number #84-49-597 at continental illinois bank, Chicago, Illinois.
Was this really the killer?
The FBI discovered that the bank account belonged to Frederick Miller McCahey,
the heir to the Miller Brewing fortune.
However, police didn’t believe he wrote the letter.
The bank account mentioned in the note had been closed after McCahey shut down his travel agency.
The letter was traced to his agency’s Pitney-Bowes stamp machine.
Was the letter writer someone who had access to the agency and held a grudge?
Police learned that one of McCahey’s former employees,
Nancy Richardson, was upset that her final paycheck of $511 had bounced.
Nancy’s husband, Robert Richardson, had angrily confronted McCahey over the check.
The Richardsons had moved out of Chicago just weeks before the poisonings.
When police issued a warrant for the couple’s arrest,
they discovered they had been using fake names.
Robert and Nancy Richardson were aliases.
Their real names were: James and LeAnn Lewis.
Authorities tracked them down in New York City and arrested James
Lewis at the New York Public Library. Lewis’ fingerprints matched those on
the extortion letter sent to Johnson & Johnson.
He said he never intended to collect the cash and was
simply trying to embarrass his wife’s former boss.
Lewis may have been the letter writer, but was he the Tylenol killer?
During his sentencing hearing in the extortion case, he sat down with CBS 2.
Did you commit the Tylenol murders? I did not.
Do you know who did? I do not know who did, no.
But investigators were not convinced.
Clip A new development in the Tylenol murder case.
Some believe Lewis resembled the man caught on surveillance
video watching flight attendant Paula Prince purchase the Tylenol capsules.
Investigators were fortunate to get this shot because the ATM security
camera only captured still photos when someone was using the machine.
As investigators dug into James Lewis’ background,
they learned he had a troubled past and faced a murder charge.
When he was a little boy, his father abandoned him,
then his mother. A couple adopted him at the age of two and raised him on a farm in Missouri.
As a teen, he attacked his adoptive mother with an axe and spent time in a mental institution.
He attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City,
where he met LeAnn. They married and had a daughter.
Toni Ann was born with Down’s syndrome and had other health problems.
By all accounts, Lewis doted on her.
An FBI report stated: “He never showed anger about Toni’s condition or blamed anyone.”
The couple opened a tax accounting business in Kansas City called Lewis & Lewis.
One of their clients was an elderly man named Raymond West.
West lived a simple, retired life after working as a truck driver.
He kept the rose bushes in front of his home perfectly pruned and took walks every day.
But one day, he…disappeared.
When a friend went to his home to check on him, he found a note taped
to the front door which read: “Ray is out of town until Thursday. For further, call Jim”.
It was written on Lewis & Lewis stationery.
When West’s friend returned to the house a few weeks later,
he smelled a foul odor emanating from a bedroom and called police.
When police arrived, they looked in the attic, and to their horror,
found Raymond West’s decomposing body. His legs had been severed.
Police quickly zoned in on a suspect: James Lewis.
West had made out a cheque to Lewis for $5,000 dated the last day anyone
had heard from him. A handwriting expert concluded the check was likely forged.
When police searched Lewis’ cars, they found dozens of canceled checks
belonging to West. They also found a rope matching the rope found around West’s body.
Lewis denied killing West and said the rope was from
the time he helped West rebuild his home after the flood a year before.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence linking Lewis to the crime,
and prosecutors charged him with murder.
However, the case was dismissed due to a technicality.
Lewis should have been read his Miranda rights before questioning when he was arrested and
brought to the police station. This is the “You have the right to remain silent” warning.
But police never read him his rights.
A judge ruled that police acted improperly in arresting Lewis…and
threw out the evidence taken from Lewis’ cars and all the statements he made to police.
Prosecutors lost some of their best circumstantial evidence.
There was one other piece of evidence.
A fingerprint was found on the pulley used to hoist West’s body into the attic,
but police had not been able to match the print to Lewis.
Three years later, the FBI used state-of-the-art
equipment to confirm that the fingerprint belonged to Lewis.
However, Lewis was never re-charged with murder.
A reason someone is not charged despite new evidence is that it might not be
sufficient to meet the burden of proof required for a conviction.
What about the Tylenol murders - could Lewis have been behind those?
Investigators believed he had a motive.
And it had to do with his daughter.
Lewis’ daughter Toni Ann had a heart defect that required multiple surgeries.
When she was five, the sutures used to repair the hole in her heart tore apart, and she died.
A federal investigation later confirmed that the polypropylene sutures that tore were sold
under the brand name Prolene, according to records reviewed by the Chicago Tribune.
Prolene was produced by….Johnson & Johnson, the company that made Tylenol.
Lewis blamed the drug manufacturer for the death of his little girl,
according to a police sergeant quoted in a Memphis newspaper.
He served 13 years for extortion for writing the ransom letter to Johnson & Johnson.
While in prison, he produced elaborate sketches
that showed how cyanide powder could be packed into capsules.
But he insisted he was innocent and was simply trying to help investigators solve the crime.
He explained to the Chicago Tribune, “I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed,
but that does not mean I was the killer.”
Lewis was not the only suspect. Police investigated around 400 people, including
Roger Arnold, who worked in the warehouse of one of the stores that sold the tainted Tylenol.
Arnold also worked with the father of one of the victims, Mary Reiner, who had just given birth.
The owner of a bar that Arnold frequented grew concerned after a couple of regulars
reported that Arnold had been talking about possessing cyanide and working on a project.
The bar owner subsequently tipped off police.
When Arnold found out, he became furious and ended up shooting a
man he mistakenly believed was the bar owner.
The man he shot, a father of three, died.
And Arnold was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But there was still no one behind bars for the poisonings.
A few weeks after the murders, the Chicago Tribune appealed to the killer to come forward.
Journalist Bob Greene focused on the suffering
of the parents of young Mary Kellerman. His article read:
If you are the Tylenol killer, some of this may matter to you.
Or it may make no difference at all.
If you are the Tylenol killer, though,
you may be harboring just the vaguest curiosity about the people on the other end of your plan:
the people who were unfortunate enough to purchase the bottles you had touched.
If you are curious, come to a small house on a quiet,
winding street in Elk Grove Village. Come to 1425 Armstrong Lane. The people who live there,
Dennis and Jeanna Kellerman, feel you have already been inside, anyway.
If you are the Tylenol killer, you should know one more thing:
Mary’s mother can’t have any more children.
Mary was her only baby; you might be interested in knowing that Mary was born one month premature,
and that as she entered the world her mother was scared because she was not crying. But the doctor
smiled and said, “It’s all right; she’s only sleeping.” And she was; she was a quiet child,
and because the Kellermans knew she would be their only child, she was especially precious to them.
If you are the Tylenol killer, you might want to know that Mary’s parents always
considered themselves to be overly protective. The reason Mary’s parents were like that was
that they knew something that a 12-year-old girl couldn’t know.
They knew that the world can at times be a cruel place, and that parents have a
duty to protect their child from dangers the child might not even know are there.
They thought they knew about every danger that could possibly touch Mary.
But they did not know about you.
The letter mentioned that Mary’s parents couldn’t bear to visit
the cemetery where their baby girl is buried.
Investigators hoped the letter would compel the killer to visit
Mary’s grave. They kept surveillance on it for months, but the killer never showed.
To this day, no one has been charged for the Tylenol killings.
After the poisonings, some communities banned trick-or-treating as a precaution.
Copycat crimes later cropped up but were never as widespread or fatal as the original poisonings.
Nearly 30 years later, James Lewis self-published a book called “Poison: The Doctor’s Dilemma.”
It’s a fictional thriller about a mass catastrophe in a mid-western
city where underground water supplies have been poisoned, and people are dying.
Lewis has denied any link between his book and the Tylenol poisonings.
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