 What would you think if I said taking a painkiller would actually kill you? I don't mean like an overdose but just one capsule equals death. It would make you think twice about taking one right? Well imagine not knowing this, that taking over the counter medicine would be a roulette wheel of death. This would be the case if you so happened to get a headache in September 1982 in Chicago and you decided to take a Tylenol. It is January 2023 and news outlets throughout the United States are reigniting interest in a 40 year old unsolved case. This new spark of interest has been caused by a request for DNA testing of evidence from a crisis that gripped Chicago and the wider United States in 1982. Although hopeful the new round of news reports and articles represent just another chapter in a senseless and chilling crime spree. The event changed the way medication is packaged across the world. It created fear and worked its way into urban legends that even here in the UK cause a moment of pause for thought. Unknownly the terror caused 40 years ago is the reason why I was told as a child to always check everything I buy is sealed. Showing how much this event illuminated just how vulnerable the things we consume are from tampering. Today I will be looking at the Tylenol tampering crisis. A chilling, bizarre and cruel case of seven acts of cold blooded murder. An innocent looking bottle. You must excuse my ignorance as I've never had a Tylenol. It's not sold here in the UK. And the thought of unsealed medication is a real head scratcher to me. But at least a latter can be chalked down to me being a product of my time. A time post for Tylenol murders. I remember last year or possibly the year before feeling disgusted at the trend of ice cream licking in shops. Remember when people would open up ice cream tubs and lick the top pure nightmare fuel for a germophobe like me. Although disgusting as long as the liquor didn't have any oral born diseases it was relatively harmless. But it shows that tampering with consumable products is alive and well. But back in 1982 today's case of tampering wasn't for likes on TikTok. But an act of cold blooded murder with a little bit of extortion thrown in. Tylenol is probably very familiar for those in North America. But its main ingredient, paracetamol is always readily available over the counter across the globe. Tylenol was introduced in 1955 by McNeil Laboratories. Over the years the brand has released various medications with different ingredients effective in pain relief. One such was Tylenol extra strength. This product has 500 milligram capsules with the active ingredient of acetaminophen also known as paracetamol. In 1959 Johnson and Johnson bought McNeil making the company a subsidiary. Roughly one year later the drug was made available over the counter and prescription free. And from there it took over as one of the most popular pain relief medications available without a prescription. By 1982 Tylenol had a 35% market share. Many have it as their first choice for colds, flus, headaches, toothaches and migraines. And the Tylenol extra bottled capsules are a popular choice. Capsules are especially popular. They are made from gelatine and because of this they are slippery and easy to swallow. But capsules are also easy to open and close. An anti-tampering protection on their packaging was minimal. The bottles that held the capsules came in a paper box with an unglued lid. The red cap on top of the bottle was easily flipped open with only a little piece of cotton left to cover the contents. Confidence in the brand is high. The product works. But the public perception during a deadly period of a few days in 1982 would be shaken to its core. A deadly few days. It is early in the morning of the 29th of September 1982 and in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, Mary Kellerman, a 12 year old girl, is suffering from a runny nose and a sore throat. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. People get cold symptoms all the time. Usually if the symptoms are a bit too much, one takes a painkiller. Mary goes to her parents and explains her symptoms to them. They offer her one capsule of Tylenol extra strength. By 7am in the morning, she is dead. In a Chicago area hospital, Adam Janus, a 27 year old postal worker, also died of a suspected heart attack. Upon hearing the news of Janus's death, his sister-in-law and brother rushed to the family home. Grief often brings a headache. Both took capsules of Tylenol from the same bottle that Adam had earlier in the day. Within hours, Adam's brother, Stanley, aged 25, was also dead. His wife, Teresa, would pass away just two days later. Following days, three more unexplained deaths occurred. 35 year old Mary McFarland of Elmhurst, Illinois. 35 year old Paula Prince of Chicago and 27 year old Mary Biner of Winfield, Illinois. Now unexplained deaths of apparently healthy individuals usually sparked concern amongst the authorities, especially in the case of the Janus family where three died within days of one another. They had all done one thing in common however, taking a Tylenol. In early October 1982, investigators made the link between the victims and Tylenol. Was there an issue with the factory? Once the link was discovered, tests were undertaken on the remaining capsules in the victims' bottles and a worrying ingredient was found, cyanide. Stranger still, the capsule had come from different batches from two different factories, one in Pennsylvania and another in Texas. This suggested the unthinkable that the cyanide had made its way into the capsules after leaving the factory. The victims had another similarity, the Tylenol they all had consumed were in capsules and not tablets. It was quickly becoming apparent that the contamination was deliberate and done after delivery to shops. Interestingly, the bottles involved in the deaths of the Janus family members and Mary Kellerman had come from the same batch, named MC 2880. Johnson and Johnson initially recalled this lot nationwide but as more of the victims' pills were tested, it was apparent that lots 910MD and MB 2738 were also involved and this expanded the recall. This would become one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in history. Tests from pharmacies across the United States localised the cyanide to the Chicago area. The recall was wider in the Chicago area itself with all extra strength capsules pulled from the shelves. Initially, it was thought that only the victims' bottles had cyanide, this totaled 5. But tests pulled from bottles found several more also contaminated. Many of the tested bottles were dropped off by the public at police stations. In total, 8 bottles were found to have been tampered with. Bizarrely, around the same time on the 5th of October, a man was poisoned with strychnine, which had been added to a Tylenol bottle. This was in California. Luckily, the man had survived but confidence in Tylenol capsules had collapsed. Trying to reassure the public, Johnson and Johnson distributed warnings to hospitals and wholesalers as well as halting Tylenol capsule production, advertising and broadening the recall nationwide, costing the company roughly $100M. Johnson and Johnson also issued a nationwide offer to replace customers' capsules with their pill variant and on top of that, the company offered a $100,000 reward for the information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murders. The police were starting to form a theory. But after arriving on the shelves of local grocers and drugstores in the Chicago area, random bottles of Tylenol were removed from the shelves, then the capsules were adulterated with 65mg of potassium cyanide and then returned to the shelves to be purchased by any unknown victim. The reference, the amount of cyanide was 10,000 times over the average amount to kill a person, but although the police had an idea of the method of the poisoning, they had no real leads, until Johnson and Johnson received a letter. On the 1st of October 1982, a letter was posted to Johnson and Johnson, demanding $1M be sent to an account at the Continental Illinois Bank. The letter was traced to James W. Lewis via a positive match of fingerprints and a postage mark from Lakeside Travel, his wife's previous employer. The police now had a suspect, but it was taken till the 13th of December 1982 to apprehend Lewis in New York, and thus Lewis would be forever intertwined with the Tylenol case. This wasn't Lewis's first running with the law, just a few years earlier he had been charged with murder in 1978 in Kansas City, but the case was thrown out of court due to a technicality, strangely in that case he had also written a letter. Lewis claimed innocence, stating the reason for the letter was to shame his wife's former employer. Lewis was the only suspect who had described how a culprit could have added cyanide to the bottles. In a method he called the drill board method. Lewis even said someone could drill holes into a plywood contraption, put the bottom capsule into a hole, put cyanide on top of the board, scrape it across with a bread knife, clean up the excess, put the tops of the capsules in, load them into the Tylenol bottles and put them on to store shelves. But there was no concrete evidence showing his part in the poisoning and instead of being charged with murder he was charged with extortion and held on a 5 million dollar bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre until the 16th of October 1983. Although no watertight evidence, Lewis had a striking resemblance to this person of interest from a CCTV still. The image showed victim Paula Prince buying a bottle of tainted Tylenol. His defence at trial claimed he was innocent of extortion because the money was to be paid into a bank account of a defunct company his wife had formerly worked for in order to try and frame his wife's old boss. Needless to say, this bizarre defence and another charge of credit card fraud netted him a 20 year prison sentence, of which he would serve 13 years. But Lewis would always stay as suspect number one for the next 40 odd years. Although someone was now behind bars, no one had been charged with the murders and the case would continue to go on unsolved. Two other suspects were also well suspected during the Tylenol case. These were Roger Arnold, age 48. He was arrested in mid-October 1982 after a Lincoln Park bar owner told officers. Two customers said Arnold had purchased a large quantity of cyanide. After searching his home a number of books on explosives and poisons, laboratory vials, beakers, test tubes and a number of weapons were found. But interestingly no cyanide. His link was that Arnold's wife was in Central DuPage Hospital at the time of the poisonings. Across the road was a grocery shop, Frank's Foods, where one of the victims had bought their bottle of tainted Tylenol. Arnold had also worked with one of the victims' fathers at a warehouse. Bizarrely Arnold would go to prison for murder, but not the ones you might think. After his questioning, Arnold hunted down the bar owner who dobbed him in and shot him dead. The only problem was he killed the wrong man. And thus the case went pretty cold. Lewis was in jail, Arnold was also in jail, but Lewis was released in 1995 and would remain a top suspect, although constantly attesting his innocence. During a 2007-2008 undercover sting operation run by the FBI, Lewis stated it took him three days to write the extortion letter. This combined with the postal date being forensically proven under the letter's ink of the 1st of October meant that the letter was written before the public knew of the Tylenol case. Lewis, although at the time of his apprehension in New York, was living there. He and his wife had been living in the Chicago area until early September, roughly around 20-24 days before the crisis began. Strangely, in 2009, Lewis was interviewed by the press, where he again denied all accusations against him. There's also a weird case that happened in 1978 with Raymond West, who ended up dead in his attic. And you were the prime suspect as the guy who did that, who killed him, who murdered him. But the guy was dismembered and stuffed in a plastic bag in his attic. How does somebody dismember themselves and stuff themselves in a plastic bag? You got it. Come on. Around the same time in 2009, FBI agents searched Lewis' apartment, who was now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But again, no arrests were made. In 2010, Lewis and his wife had their DNA taken. One of the other suspects, Roger Arnold's DNA, was also taken. But due to Arnold being dead for two years, his body was exhumed and a sample was taken from a femur bone. Sadly, none of the DNA samples created any movement in the case. They even took DNA in 2011 from the unibomber, Ted Tysinski, but again, alas, no luck. As of the end of January 2023, more DNA tests have been undertaken, but no news so far. Aftermath Even though the killer hasn't been identified, the crisis changed the pharmaceutical industry permanently. Johnson and Johnson within two months had Tylenol back on the shelves, but with an improved triple seal. Their market share had plummeted from 35% to just 8%, but amazingly, this was turned around in just under a year. The event cost the company over $100 million in the recall alone and an undisclosed 1991 settlement with the victims' families. The crisis spawned, unsurprisingly, copycat murders, most notably in 1986, where three people died of cyanide poisoning. New federal laws post-crisis now made product tampering a federal crime, which even attempting to tamper with a product can carry a 10-year sentence. So for my ratings, today is only going to be a legacy rating, and I'm going to give this one a 9. All videos on the channel are Creative Commons Attribution Share Light licensed. Played before videos are produced by me, John, in the currently wet and windy suburban corner of southern London, UK. I have Patreon members and YouTube members as well, so thank you for your financial support, as well as the rest of you for tuning in every week to watch your dose of disaster. I've got Patreon, Instagram and Twitter, so check them out if you fancy, and if you're enjoying this outro song, please feel free to check it out on my second channel made by John. And all that's left to say is thank you for watching and MrMusic, play us out please.