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The Chicago Tylenol Murders: 7 Deaths, Still Unsolved | Illinois Unsolved · Kat Has Questions: True Crime and Unsolved Mysteries

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Cat Has Questions. Curiosity, stories, and the strange
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: corners of everyday life. Hello, hello. I'm Cat. Welcome back
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: to Cat Has Questions. So, before we get into today's case,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: I have to kind of acknowledge something because this episode
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: is a little bit special. Today is episode 11. 50
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: of Cat Has Questions, which is just kind of wild, honestly.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: When I started this podcast, I obviously hoped people would
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: listen and like I hoped it would grow and I
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: hoped it would build like a little community of people
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: who like sitting down every week and getting way too
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: invested in some questions that I can't stop thinking about.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: But 50 episodes is one of those numbers that makes
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: you stop and realize like, okay, I've actually been doing
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: this for a while. And because episode 50 happens to
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: fall right around September 30th, I knew I wanted to
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: do something big. I also really wanted it to be
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: an Illinois Unsolved episode. So if you've been here for
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a while, you know that Illinois cases have become a
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: really important part of this podcast. I live here, I
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: grew up here, and some of the cases that have
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: stuck with me the most since starting the show are
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: the ones that happened basically in our own backyard. So
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: I started looking at what case would make sense for
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: episode 50, and then I realized what date it would
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: come out on, And this episode is being released on
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: September 30th, 2026. So yesterday, September 29th, marked 44 years
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: since a 12-year-old girl in suburban Chicago took medicine for
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: what seemed like an ordinary cold. But by the end
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: of the next few days, seven people would be dead.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: An entire country would be terrified to open its medicine cabinet.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: And one of the largest investigations in Illinois history would
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: be underway. And the way medications are packaged in the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: United States would change forever. But 44 years later, no
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: one has ever been charged with murdering any of them.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: So for episode 50, we're going back to September of
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: 1982 for one of the most infamous and somehow still
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: unsolved crimes in Illinois history. The Chicago Tylenol Murders. and
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: we're starting with a little girl named Mary. On the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: morning of Wednesday, September 29th, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman woke
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: up at her family's home in Elk Grove Village, Illinois,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: not feeling very well. Mary was an only child. She
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: was close with her parents, Dennis and Jeannie, and by
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: all accounts, she was a pretty typical 12-year-old girl. She
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: liked playing Atari with her dad, Dennis was even restoring
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: a Camaro that he planned to actually give Mary when
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: she turned 16. But that morning, Mary had a cold.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Nothing particularly alarming. Just the kind of thing that probably
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: happens in millions of homes every year. When school starts
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: back up and kids begin passing germs around, aka literally
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: this time of year is when the school illnesses start up.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Mary wasn't feeling well enough to go to school, so
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: she stayed home. And at some point that morning, her
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: parents gave her something for her symptoms, extra-strength Tylenol. It
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: was one of the most popular over-the-counter medications in America.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: There was absolutely nothing unusual about giving it to her.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: So Mary swallowed the capsules, and a short time later,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: she went to the bathroom. Her father, Dennis, heard the
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: bathroom door close, and then he heard something fall. So
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: he called out to her, just to make sure she
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: was okay, but she didn't answer. So Dennis opened the door.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Mary was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, still in
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: her pajamas. At 6.30 that morning, the Elk Grove Village
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Fire Department received a call requesting an ambulance for a
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: 12-year-old girl who had passed out. When paramedics arrived, they
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: had no idea what they were dealing with. Mary wasn't
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: simply faint. She was critically ill. Her condition deteriorated quickly.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Her heart stopped on the way to the hospital. And
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: at Alexian Brothers Medical Center... Doctors tried everything they could
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: think of. CPR, cardiac pacing, attempts to restart the heart
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: of an otherwise healthy 12-year-old child who, just a short
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: time earlier, had been standing in her own bathroom with
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: a cold. Like, that's typically not that serious. But nothing
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: seemed to work. At 9.56 a.m., Mary Kellerman was pronounced dead.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: She was 12 years old, just a baby. And nobody
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: could understand why. Because Mary was so young and because
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: her death was so sudden and unexpected, the Cook County
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Medical Examiner's Office was notified. Police collected items from the
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Kellerman home that might help explain what had happened. Food, medicine,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: anything Mary may have eaten or taken that morning. Among
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: those items was the bottle of extra strength Tylenol. But
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: at that point, there wasn't anything particularly suspicious about it.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Millions of Americans take Tylenol. Mary had a cold. her
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: parents had given her medicine. Why would anyone think otherwise?
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: So the bottle was collected, Mary's body was sent for examination,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: and her parents were left trying to understand how their
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: 12-year-old daughter that had woken up with a cold had
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: been found dead before lunchtime. Seven miles away, another family
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: was about to experience something almost impossible to comprehend. That
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: same Wednesday morning, 27-year-old Adam Janis wasn't feeling well either.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Adam lived in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He was married, he
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: had two young children, and he worked for the United
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: States Postal Service. That morning, Adam had stayed home from
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: work because he hadn't been feeling right. Records would later
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: indicate that he had been experiencing some discomfort or tightness
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: in his chest over the past several days. So again,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: nothing about what happened next immediately screamed murder. Adam picked
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: up his children and stopped at a Juul grocery store
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: While he was there, he had bought several items, and
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: one of them happened to be a brand new bottle
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: of extra-strength Tylenol. Adam went home, he ate lunch with
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: his kids, and then, because he wasn't feeling well, he
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: opened the bottle and took two capsules. After that, Adam
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: went to lie down. A little while later, his wife
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: tried to wake him, and she couldn't. At 1.33 p.m.,
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: an emergency call went out. Adam was rushed to Northwest
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Community Hospital. There, Dr. Thomas Kim and the medical team
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: tried to resuscitate him. But just like the doctors who
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: had treated Mary Kellerman that morning, they were looking at
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: an otherwise healthy young person whose body had just suddenly
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and traumatically shut down. Adam's heart would not restart. At 3.15
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: that afternoon, Adam Janus was pronounced dead. He was 27
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: years old, and Dr. Kim initially suspected some type of
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: cardiac event. Again, Adam had been complaining about chest discomfort
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: for the days leading up to this. A heart problem
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: in a 27-year-old man would certainly be unusual, but it's
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: not impossible. There was no reason yet for Dr. Kim
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: to suspect that Adam's death had anything to do with
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: a 12-year-old girl who had died that morning in Elk
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Grove Village. And there was also no reason to connect
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: the two. There definitely wasn't a reason to suspect the
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: bottle of Tylenol sitting back inside Adam's home could have
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: anything to do with it. So, Adam's family received the
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: call that nobody expects or wants to get. Over the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: next several hours, relatives began gathering at the Janus house.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: They were shocked, confused, and grieving. Among the people who
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: came to Adam's home were his younger brother, Stanley Janus,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and Stanley's wife, Teresa. Stanley was 25 years old, Teresa
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: was only 19, and they were newly married. At some point,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: while the family was gathered inside Adam's home, Stanley's back
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: began bothering him. Stanley had dealt with back pain before,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: so this was nothing out of the ordinary for him, really.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: So he asked Teresa to get him something for it.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: There was a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol sitting there, the
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: same bottle Adam had opened earlier that afternoon. Teresa took
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: out two capsules and gave them to Stanley. And then
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: she took two herself. And within minutes, Stanley collapsed. Imagine
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: the scene inside that house. Their family had just learned
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: that one of their sons and brothers died unexpectedly at
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: 27 years old, and everyone was trying to make sense
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: of that. And now suddenly, his younger brother is unconscious too.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Someone in the house calls 911. Firefighters and paramedics rushed
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: to the Janus home. And they begin working on Stanley.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: And while they're trying to save him, Teresa collapses. So
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: now there are two young, healthy people lying unconscious inside
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: the home where another young man who had become sick
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: only hours earlier and died. Responders split up. Some begin
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: working on Stanley. Others turned to Teresa. And both of
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: them are showing what appears to be essentially the same
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: catastrophic medical emergency. Stanley and Teresa are also rushed to
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Northwest Community Hospital, where Adam was taken earlier that day. Dr.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Thomas Kim had been preparing to leave for the day.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: And then a nurse told him that members of the
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Janus family were coming back. At first, Dr. Kim reportedly
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: assumed she meant Adam's parents. Maybe they had fainted from
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: the grief. Maybe an older relative had suffered some kind
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: of stress-related medical emergency after finding out what happened. But
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: that was not what this nurse meant. They were doing
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: CPR on Adam's 25-year-old brother and his teenage wife. Now Dr.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Kim knew something was wrong. One unexplained death in a
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: young person is unusual. Two people collapsing in the same house,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: maybe a little coincidental. But three is kind of crazy.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: The medical team worked on both Stanley and Teresa. Stanley
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: could not be saved. At 8.15 p.m., Stanley Janis was
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: pronounced dead. Teresa was able to be resuscitated, but she
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: was critically ill and placed on life support. In less
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: than one day, two brothers from the same family were dead,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: and a third family member was fighting for her life.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And nobody knew why. Was there a gas leak inside
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: the house? Carbon monoxide? Possibly something in the food or
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: some kind of weird, like, chemical exposure? Could it be, like,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: an infectious disease that we didn't know about? COVID hadn't
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: happened yet, so that would have been not thought of.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Was there something in that house that everyone else needed
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: to get away from immediately? Authorities didn't know. And that
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: meant the Janice family couldn't simply be allowed to go
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: home and continue grieving. Because for all anyone knew, the
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: house itself could be dangerous. Or maybe they were being
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: targeted for some reason. At around the same time all
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: of this was happening in Arlington Heights... Another young woman
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: was becoming critically ill about 25 miles away. Her name
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: was Mary Rainer. So this is a different Mary than
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: the 12-year-old girl we first talked about. This is a
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: second Mary. So Mary was also 27 years old and
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: lived in Winfield, Illinois. And less than a week earlier,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: she had given birth to her fourth child. That afternoon,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Mary wasn't feeling well, probably still a little sore from
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: giving birth a week ago. So she took something that
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: she believed would help. Tylenol. A little before 4 o'clock,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Mary collapsed inside her home. Her husband, Ed, arrived around
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: the time it happened. And Mary was having seizures. An
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: ambulance rushed her to Central DuPage Hospital. Nobody there knew
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: anything about Mary Kellerman, so the first Mary. And nobody
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: knew about Adam Janus. Three of them were taken to
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: one hospital, and then this Mary, and... Mary Kellerman, the girl,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: were all taken to separate hospitals, so they hadn't really
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: heard about the other events yet at this point. So
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: to everyone treating Mary Rayner, she was simply a young
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: mother who had suddenly become desperately ill. And back in
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Arlington Heights, authorities were still trying to answer a very
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: basic question. What happened inside the Janice house? And that
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: question would eventually bring a public health nurse named Helen
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Jensen through the front door. And Helen was about to
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: notice something that everyone else had missed. Helen Jensen was
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: the public health nurse for Arlington Heights. On the evening
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: of September 29th, she was at home eating dinner when
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: she received a call from Arlington Heights Fire Lieutenant Charles Kramer.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: The situation he described was bizarre. Three young adults, all
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: from the same family, all seriously ill within a matter
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: of hours. Two were dead and one was on life support.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Something had happened in that house and they just didn't
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: know what. Helen began talking with Adam's wife about what
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: everyone had eaten, where they had been, and what they
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: might have been exposed to. Then, Helen went to the
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Janus home herself. She wasn't alone. Police were there. Investigators
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: from the medical examiner's office were there. And they began
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: going through basically anything that could explain why three young
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: healthy adults collapsed in the same place. They looked at everything. Coffee. Cake.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Home canned goods. Prescription medications, they checked the basement for,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: you know, leaks of gas or anything like that. There
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: had apparently been some metalworking done in the home, so
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: they considered whether some kind of chemical used in that
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: process could be responsible. They looked for anything that could
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: connect these three people. And sitting among the things inside
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the house was a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. And Helen
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: noticed it. And then she found the receipt. Adam had
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: bought the bottle earlier that same day, September 29th. It
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: was essentially brand new, and so Helen counted the capsules.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Six of them were missing. Adam, Stanley, and Teresa had
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: all taken two. The six missing capsules, three people. And
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: every person who had taken capsules from that bottle had collapsed.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Helen believed she had found the connection, the Tylenol. That
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: sounds obvious now, because of course it's the Tylenol. We
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: know the name of the case. But imagine saying that
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: in 1982. You're standing inside the home of a family
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: who just experienced this completely incomprehensible medical disaster, and you're
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: suggesting that one of the most trusted pain relievers in
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: the country might somehow be killing them one by one.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: People take Tylenol every day. Children take Tylenol. You can
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: just buy it off the shelf. It's not prescription. There
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: wasn't an obvious reason to look at that bottle and think,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that's a murder weapon. And initially, Helen reportedly had trouble
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: getting other people to take her idea seriously, but she
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: would not let it go. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Kramer was thinking
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: about the symptoms he had seen. The Januses had collapsed rapidly.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Their breathing was abnormal. Their pupils were fixed and dilated.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Something about it was bothering him. So Kramer began checking
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: other emergency calls from that day. And he connected with
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: responders from the strange death that had happened earlier that
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: morning in Elk Grove Village. The 12-year-old girl, Mary Kellerman.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: Her symptoms had looked remarkably similar. And Mary had also
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: taken a medication that morning. Extra Strength Tylenol. These were
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: two different households in two different suburbs, four people but
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: one product. The medical examiner, investigator, Nick Fissos, obtained the
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Tylenol bottle that had been collected from the Kellerman home.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: He brought it together with the bottle from the Janus home,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: and investigators began comparing them. According to accounts from the investigation,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: the bottles initially appeared to share the same control or
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: lot information. So Fizzo's called Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Edmund Donahue.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: By this point, Donahue had started considering the possibility that
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: sounded almost unbelievable. Poison. Specifically, cyanide. Donahue reportedly told Fizzo's
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: to open the bottle and smell them. He opened one,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: and then another, and he noticed an odor. Something resembling almonds. Now,
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: a quick note here because this gets repeated a lot
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: in the retellings of this case. Not everyone can actually
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: smell cyanide, and smelling something like almonds is obviously not
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: like a scientific test for cyanide, but it's another clue.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: A lot of people can smell almonds when smelling cyanide.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: The real answer would come from laboratory testing, though. And
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: as doctors and investigators waited for those results, more people
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: were unfortunately already dying. Earlier that evening, at around 6.30,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: 31-year-old Mary McFarland had been at work, This is a
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: different Mary, third Mary. Mary lived in Elmhurst and worked
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: at an Illinois Bell telephone facility in Lombard. People in
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: the office apparently complained sometimes about headaches from the fluorescent lighting,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: and Mary kept medication with her for that reason. That
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: night she had developed a bad headache, so she went
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: into a back area, she took medicine from the supply
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: she carried in her purse, and within minutes Mary collapsed.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: She was rushed to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: so another suburb. No one treating her initially had any
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: reason to connect her to the deaths taking place miles away. Then,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: at around 9.30 that night, another woman stopped at Walgreens
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. Her name was Paula Prince.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Paula was 35 years old, she was a flight attendant
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: for United Airlines, and she had just returned to Chicago
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: after working a flight from Las Vegas. Before going home,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Paula stopped at the Walgreens at 1601 North Wells Street.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: So keep in mind, These have been different locations. It's
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: not all the same Walgreens or pharmacy that these people
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: are stopping at. While she was there, she bought a
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: bottle of extra strength Tylenol. The transaction was captured by
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: the store's automatic surveillance camera. And at the time, the
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: photograph meant absolutely nothing. Paula paid for the medicine. She
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: left the store. She went back to her apartment. And
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: for now, we're going to leave her there because we're
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: going to go back to the Northwest Community Hospital again.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: where doctors are finally getting an answer. So we're going
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: back to where the Janus family is. Dr. Thomas Kim
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: had spent much of the night trying to understand what
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: had happened to the Janus family. Three people, same household.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Blood samples had been sent for testing. And in the
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: early morning hours of September 30th, the results came back.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: There was cyanide in their blood. And not just like
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: a trace amount. It wasn't like an accidental exposure to
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: something harmless. They had ingested cyanide. And now investigators had
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: to look at the Tylenol capsules themselves. Tests confirmed what
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: everyone had begun to fear. The capsules contained cyanide. Someone
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: had taken ordinary, extra-strength Tylenol capsules, opened them, removed at
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: least some of the medication, so like, you know the
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: little pills that can be like pulled apart and put
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: back together? Put cyanide in them and then put the
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: capsules back together. And then somehow returned poisoned medication into
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: the normal stream of products being sold to the public.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: This was no longer a strange medical mystery. Someone had
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: deliberately poisoned medicine. Nobody knew how many bottles were out there.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: And at 3.15 Thursday morning, another patient had died at
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: the Good Samaritan Hospital, Mary McFarland. So this was the
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: third Mary. Testing would also show cyanide in her system.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: Then around nine o'clock in the morning, Mary Reiner died
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: at Central DuPage Hospital. She was the second Mary. That
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Mary had given birth to her fourth child less than
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: a week earlier. And now she was devastatingly dead. At
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: this point, authorities were beginning to realize the scale of
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: what they were actually dealing with. Mary Kellerman in Elk
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Grove Village Adam, Stanley, and Teresa Janus in Arlington Heights,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Mary McFarland in Lombard, Mary Reiner in Winfield, people who
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: did not know one another, different homes, different communities, and
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: all of them had extra-strength Tylenol. It meant that the
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Janus family had not been targeted because of who they were.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: The victims appeared to have one thing in common. They
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: had reached for medicine, and that's it. And think about
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: how terrifying that is. There's a very different kind of
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: fear when a killer chooses a victim. Because at least
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: in our minds, we can try to create rules like
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: don't walk alone, lock your doors, avoid this place, avoid
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: this person, or like if you get weird vibes from someone.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: But how do you protect yourself from a killer when
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: the killer doesn't need to know who you are? They
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: don't need to see you. They don't need to follow
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: you home. They don't even need to be anywhere near
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: you when you die. They just need you to have
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: a headache or a cold or some back pain and
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: have you reach into your medicine cabinet. By the morning
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: of September 30th, the public had to be warned. Officials
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: held a press conference. News stations began telling people that
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Tylenol capsules were potentially contaminated with cyanide. Police departments began
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: trying to spread the warning as quickly as possible. But remember,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: this was 1982. There was no emergency notification appearing on
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: your iPhone, no Facebook post that could be shared 100,000 times,
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: no push alert from CNN. No group texts from your
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: mom saying, don't take Tylenol that's in your bathroom. Police
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: cars literally drove through neighborhoods using loudspeakers telling people to
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: not take Tylenol. People called relatives. News anchors interrupted programming.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: I know that they went door to door and like
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: put signs actually on people's front porches like, don't take Tylenol.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Stores began pulling Tylenol from the shelves. And McNeil Consumer Products,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that manufactured Tylenol, initially recalled
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: a specific lot that investigators believe could have been involved.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: At first, there was still hope that maybe the problem
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: was contained. One manufacturing batch, one contaminated shipment, something that
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: could be identified and isolated. But that idea was not
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: going to last very long because investigators were about to
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: find poison bottles connected to different stores, different locations, and
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: eventually different manufacturing information. So they had like different lot numbers.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: which raised a horrifying possibility. Maybe the poison wasn't introduced
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: at the factory at all. Maybe someone was walking into stores,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: buying or stealing bottles of Tylenol, poisoning them, and then
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: just putting them back on the shelf. And if that
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: was true, there was absolutely no way to know where
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: the next bottle might be. So understandably, Chicago was beginning
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: to panic. And it's not hard to understand why. Tylenol
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: wasn't some obscure medication. It was literally everywhere. People kept
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: it in their purses, desk drawers, kitchen cabinets, bathrooms. Kids
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: took it. Adults took it. Hospitals used it. It was
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: one of the most recognizable and trusted products in America.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: And suddenly, simply owning a bottle of it felt dangerous.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Investigators and public health officials were trying to answer multiple
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: questions at the same time. Where had each victim purchased
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: their Tylenol? Were they contaminated from the same store, the
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: same distributor, the same maybe manufacturing facility, the same lot?
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: Could they identify exactly where the contamination happened? And maybe
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: most importantly, were there more poison bottles sitting in people's
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: homes right now? So authorities began collecting Tylenol. Stores pulled
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: it from the shelves. Consumers turned their bottles over to police.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And tips began flooding in. And every new bottle had
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: to be treated like it could potentially contain enough poison
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: to kill someone. And the investigation was growing by the hour.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Local police departments, the Cook County Medical Examiner, state authorities,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: federal agents, Johnson & Johnson, and McNeil. Everyone was trying
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: to figure out how a killer or killers could have
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: gotten cyanide inside sealed capsules and then somehow gotten those
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: capsules into bottles being sold across the Chicago area. And
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: as all of this was going on, one member of
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: the Janice family was still alive. Teresa Janice had survived
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: the initial collapse, and doctors had managed to restore her heartbeat.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: But cyanide had caused devastating damage. She remained on life support,
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: and on Friday, October 1st, at 1.15 p.m., Teresa was
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: taken off of life support, and she died shortly after.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Adam Janice, his brother Stanley, and Stanley's young wife Teresa
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: Three members and one family. Dead because someone had placed
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: poison inside a bottle of medicine. Teresa became the sixth
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: known victim. And at that point, authorities believed they knew
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: the scope of the deaths, but they were wrong. Paula
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Prince was supposed to meet her sister. We talked about
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: her very briefly earlier. She hadn't shown up to meet her.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: And she also hadn't gone to work. Her family and
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: friends were becoming increasingly worried. So on the evening of
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: October 1st, this would have been about two days from
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: when the initial death happened, Paula's sister went to check
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: on her at her apartment in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: At around 5.45 p.m., Paula was found dead inside. She
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: was 35 years old. Inside Paula's bathroom was the bottle
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: of extra-strength Tylenol she had purchased at Walgreens two nights earlier. Inside,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: investigators looked at the bottle. One capsule was missing and
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: they found the receipt, September 29th. And suddenly, investigators could
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: reconstruct one of the most haunting parts of this entire case.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: Paula Prince had walked into Walgreens at 9.30 Wednesday night.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: She bought Tylenol, she took it home. And investigators believe
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: she probably died sometime that night. Which means that by
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: the time officials stood in front of cameras the next
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: morning warning Chicago not to take Tylenol, Paula was likely
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: already dead inside her apartment. She had simply just not
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: been found yet. And unlike several of the other victims,
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: investigators had something else in Paula's case. A photograph. Remember
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: the Walgreens surveillance system? It had captured Paula inside the
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: store when she purchased the bottle. Investigators would later examine
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: those images closely because visible near Paula was an unidentified man.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: At the time, authorities wondered whether that man could somehow
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: be connected to what had happened. The photograph would eventually
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: become one of the most recognizable images associated with the investigation.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: But investigators could not establish that the man in the
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: image was the killer. And despite years of speculation, his
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: identity would never provide the simple answer people might hope.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Paula Prince became the seventh known victim. Seven people. Mary Kellerman,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: who is 12, Adam Janus, 27, Stanley Janus, 25. Teresa Janus, 19.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: Mary McFarland, 31. Mary Rayner, 27. Paula Prince, 35. Seven
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: people who had no obvious connection to one another. A
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: 12-year-old girl, two brothers, a newlywed, a mother of four
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: who had just given birth, a telephone company employee, a
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: flight attendant. There was no shared enemy, no common workplace,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: not a single family connection. As investigators traced the contaminated bottles,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: another assumption began to fall apart. This didn't appear to
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: be one bad batch of medicine. The contaminated Tylenol had
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: been associated with different bottles in different retail locations. That
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: made an accidental problem at the factory increasingly difficult to explain.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Investigators began focusing on a theory that was almost worse.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Someone must have obtained bottles after they had already left
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: the manufacturer, opened them, tampered with the capsules, and then
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: returned them to the shelves. Which meant the victims hadn't
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: been selected. The bottles had. And whoever just so happened
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: to buy one of them became a victim. And that
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: left police with one of the strangest murder investigations imaginable.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: There was no traditional crime scene, no eyewitness who had
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: watched a killer attack someone, no clear motive. Maybe they'd
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: left the store days earlier. Maybe they'd left Illinois. Nobody knew.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: Police had seven murdered people, poisoned medications circulating somewhere in Chicago.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: An increasingly terrified public and virtually no idea who they
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: were looking for. Then, a letter arrived. And for the
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: first time since the poisonings began, investigators had something that
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: appeared to come directly from a person claiming some connection
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: to the murders. He wanted money. One million dollars. And
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: the name investigators would eventually attach to that letter would
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: become inseparable from the case for the next 40 years.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: James Lewis. So the investigation was becoming pointed toward a
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: dominant theory, that the Tylenol had been contaminated after it
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: left the manufacturer, which meant somebody may have been moving
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: around the Chicago area, placing poison bottles onto store shelves.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: But even that left investigators with an enormous question. Why
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: these stores? Why these neighborhoods? Was there some geographic pattern?
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Was the person choosing locations that they were familiar with?
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Were the seven victims truly random? Or was there just
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: some connection they hadn't found yet? Authorities assembled a massive
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: task force. Local police departments, Chicago police, the Illinois Attorney
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: General's office, state investigators, the FBI, federal regulators, and hundreds
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: of investigators would eventually work leads connected to the case.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Thousands of tips came in. People reported suspicious neighbors, former employees,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: people with chemistry backgrounds, people who just had made strange comments.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: People suddenly seemed fascinated by the poisonings. And as happens
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: in almost every enormous investigation, they also got tips that
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: went absolutely nowhere. But law enforcement had to take them seriously,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: especially if they didn't have anything. Because somewhere in all
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: of that noise could be the person who actually had
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: done this. They tested returned bottles. They traced distribution. They
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: watched people connected to the victims. Investigators reportedly even observed
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: funerals and wondered whether whoever had done this might show
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: up to watch the consequences of what they had caused.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: And still nothing. No fingerprints on a poisoned capsule that
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: simply told them who had handled it. No witness saying, Oh,
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: I watched this person put the bottle back on the shelf.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: No confession, no obvious motive. By October, the person responsible
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: for killing seven people appeared to have simply disappeared into
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: the population. And then, on October 6th, 1982, so this
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: would have been about a week after, an employee at
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Johnson & Johnson received something very different from the thousands
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: of tips police had been sorting through. A letter. It
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: appeared to have been written by someone who knew exactly
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: how terrifying this situation had become. The writer described how
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: easy it was to put cyanide into capsules sitting on
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: store shelves. He emphasized how quickly the poison worked, and
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: he claimed the entire process cost him almost nothing. And
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: then he made a demand. If Johnson & Johnson wanted
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: the killings to stop, the company was to wire $ 1
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: million into a bank account at the Continental Illinois Bank
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: in Chicago. Suddenly, investigators had something they hadn't before. Someone
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: who appeared to be saying, I know how this was done.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: I can do it again. And if you want me
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: to stop, pay me. Johnson & Johnson took the threat
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: seriously enough that the company was prepared to transfer the money.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: But the FBI told them not to. Because, unlike the
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: poisoned bottles scattered around Chicago, this letter had a trail.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: A bank account number, postage, handwriting. a physical document somebody
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: had created and mailed. For the first time, investigators potentially
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: had something that could lead them directly to a person,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: and it did, just not in the way anyone expected.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: The bank account listed in the extortion letter was number
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: 8449597 at the Continental Illinois Bank, so investigators traced it.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: It didn't belong to some mysterious account controlled by the killer.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: It belonged to a Chicago businessman named named Frederick McKayhe.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: McKayhe had owned a company called Lakeside Travel. It was
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: a travel agency, basically, that he opened and operated. By
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: the time of the Tylenol murders, the business had already collapsed,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: and investigators quickly learned that Kayhe had problems of his own.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: Lakeside Travel had been struggling financially, and when the company
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: shut down earlier in 1982, employee payroll checks had bounced.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Former employees had tried to recover money that they were owed,
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: but they couldn't, basically, because the company was bankrupt. And
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: one of the employees was a woman named Leanne. Leanne's
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: paycheck had been for a little over $ 500. When it bounced,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: the currency exchange where she had cashed it came after
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: her for repayment, and her husband was furious. He believed
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: McKayhe was responsible for the mess. So he attended a
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: wage hearing with Leanne. and he argued with McKay. And
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: according to the later federal court record, someone connected to
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Lakeside had given him McKay's Continental Illinois bank account number. Why,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure, or how. But the investigators examined the envelope,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: the postage had been printed by a postage meter, and
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: that meter could be traced back to Lakeside Travel. And
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: at first you might think, okay, then Frederick McKay wrote
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: the letter. Except investigators did not believe that. McKay was questioned,
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: and law enforcement began asking a very obvious question. Who
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: would want to make it look like he was connected
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: to the Tylenol murders? Was there anybody angry enough with
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: him to put his bank account number into an extortion
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: demand connected to seven murders? And McKahee gave investigators a name,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: Robert Richardson. Richardson was the husband of that former Lakeside employee, Leanne,
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: who believed that McKahee owed his wife money. And the
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: more investigators looked at Richardson, the stranger things became. Robert
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: and Nancy Richardson had lived in Chicago. Robert had worked
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: a collection of temporary jobs, and for a time, he
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: had even worked at the First National Bank of Chicago,
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: where his job gave him access to computer systems containing
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: information about corporate banking accounts. And he fancied himself a writer.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: He had even had writing published in the Chicago Tribune.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: But investigators had a problem. Robert and Nancy Richardson weren't
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: in Chicago anymore. And according to the federal court record,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: on or around September 3, 1982, more than three weeks
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: before Mary Kellerman died, the couple took a train from
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Chicago to New York. And they traveled under another set
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: of names, William and Karen Wagner. Once in New York,
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: they moved into a low-cost hotel. Nancy Richardson found temporary
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: work in Manhattan. So now investigators had a man with
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: a motive to make Frederick McKay look suspicious, whose wife's
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: former workplace was connected to the postage on the letter.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: And I know this is confusing because I've literally given
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: you three names now. First Leanne, then Karen, then Nancy.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: But he had access to bank account numbers and who
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: had apparently left Chicago a couple weeks before the poisonings.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: And that last part mattered a lot. Because if Robert
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: Richardson had been living in New York before September 29th,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: how could he have been walking around Chicago putting poison
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: and Tylenol on shelves? Investigators did not have that answer,
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: but they still wanted to find him, and an arrest
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: warrant was issued. Authorities distributed Richardson's photograph, and his face
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: appeared on television around the country. And hundreds of miles
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: away in Kansas City, Missouri, a police sergeant named David
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: Barton happened to see that photograph on the CBS Evening News.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: that the government was looking for a man named Robert Richardson.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: But Barton recognized him. And according to Barton's later recollection,
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: his reaction was immediate. Because that wasn't Robert Richardson. That
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: was James Lewis. And the Kansas City police knew exactly
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: who James Lewis was. So James William Lewis had spent
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: years using different identities, Robert Richardson being only one of them.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: By the early 1980s, police would describe Lewis as something
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: of a chameleon. He had lived in different places, worked
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: different jobs, used numerous aliases, had worked as a tax preparer,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: a computer specialist, a temporary office employee, and he had
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: already had significant contact with law enforcement long before anyone
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: in Chicago had heard of the phrase Tylenol murders. One
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: part of Lewis's past immediately got investigators' attention. In 1978,
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: Lewis had been charged in Kansas City with the murder
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: of a 72-year-old man named Raymond West. West had been
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: one of Lewis's tax clients, and he had disappeared in
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: July of that year. Several weeks later, his body was
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: found inside the attic of his home. His remains had
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: been dismembered. Police came to believe Lewis was responsible. And
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: there were also circumstances that they considered suspicious, including a $ 5, 000
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: check connected to West that Lewis said represented a loan.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: So Lewis was arrested and charged with the murder. But
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: this is important. James Lewis was never convicted of killing
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Raymond West. The case against him ran into major legal
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: and evidentiary problems. West's body was so badly decomposed that
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: the medical examiner could not determine the exact cause of death.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: And a court also found problems with Lewis's arrest and
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: with evidence police had obtained during their investigation. The murder
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: charge had to ultimately be dismissed before the trial. Lewis
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: always denied killing Raymond West. So I guess we're not
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: going to sit here 48 years later saying he did,
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: but what matters for the Tylenol investigation is that when
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: Kansas City police... saw Lewis's face connected to a nationwide
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: search involving seven cyanide deaths, they didn't see some completely
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: unknown businessman from Chicago. They saw someone that had once
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: been investigated for an extremely disturbing homicide. And that wasn't
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Lewis's only legal trouble. He had also been prosecuted in
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: connection with a fraudulent credit card scheme involving identities belonging
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: to tax clients. So... By the time he and Leanne
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: moved to Chicago in late 1981, they were living as
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: Robert and Nancy Richardson. And then, less than a year later,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: they left Chicago again. And again, they used different names. So,
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: federal authorities were looking for Robert Richardson, but they knew
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: they were actually looking for James Lewis. And Lewis knew
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: they were looking for him. After his photograph and arrest
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: warrant became public, he and Leanne left the hotel where
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: they had been staying in New York, and they checked
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: into another hotel. This time, according to the court record,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: they used the names Edward and Carol Scott. And he
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: remained a fugitive for a few weeks. But then Lewis
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: did something strange. He began communicating. He sent material to
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: the Chicago Tribune. He was contacting government agencies. And he
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: was identifying himself as James William Lewis. He even included
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: identifying material with some of those communications. And throughout all
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: of it, he maintained that authorities had the situation wrong.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: According to Lewis, yes, he had written the Tylenol extortion letter,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: so he admits to that, but no, he had not
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: poisoned the Tylenol. And according to him, he hadn't really
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: been trying to get a million dollars either. His explanation
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: was that the letter was essentially a setup. Lewis said
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: he was furious with Frederick McKayhee over what had happened
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: at the Lakeside Travel Agency and him not paying his wife.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: And he wanted law enforcement to invest McKayhee. So according
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: to Lewis, he wrote a threatening letter connected to the
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: biggest criminal investigation in the country at the time, put
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: McKay's bank account information on it, and expected the FBI
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: would follow the trail straight to him. Which, if that
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: sounds like an absolutely insane plan to you, same. But
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: that was his explanation. He claimed he wasn't the Tylenol killer.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: He claimed he was exploiting the Tylenol murders to get
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: revenge on somebody else, which is also still like a
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: horrible thing to do. So that really isn't a great explanation, James.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: But the search for him continued. And for approximately two months,
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: they hunted Lewis across New York. Then on December 13th, 1982,
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: they finally found him. He was arrested inside a public
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: library in New York City. And this detail comes straight
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: out of the later federal appellate decision. When authorities arrested him,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: Lewis was sitting there reading two reference books. One was
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: called Newspapers of the Southwest. The other was called Largest
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: Corporations in America. Which I will just let you do
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: with that what you want. But Lewis was finally in custody.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: The most prominent name ever associated with the Tylenol murders
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: had been caught. But there was an enormous problem. The
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: government could prove that James Lewis wrote an extortion letter.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: That did not mean they could prove he murdered seven people.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: And those are two very different things. As I mentioned,
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: James Lewis eventually did admit that he wrote the letter
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: sent to Johnson & Johnson. So the question in his
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: federal case wasn't did he write the letter. It was
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: what was he trying to accomplish by writing it. Lewis's
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: defense was strange. He argued that he never realistically expected
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: to receive the money. Remember, the bank account listed in
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: demand wasn't his. And it actually wasn't even active anymore.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: So Lewis said his actual goal was to direct law
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: enforcement toward McKayhee so that he could get the money,
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: I guess, for his wife. Basically, he's saying, I wasn't
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: trying to get a million dollars. I was trying to
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: make the FBI investigate someone I hated. The jury did
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: not buy that defense, and he was convicted. On June 14th, 1984,
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol extortion attempt. And this is a distinction I really,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: really want to keep clear because it does get blurred
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: constantly when people talk about the case. James Lewis was
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: convicted in connection with the Tylenol case, but he was
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: not convicted of the actual Tylenol murders. He wasn't even
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: tried for the murders. One of the biggest practical questions
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: surrounding Lewis was where was he when the Tylenol poisonings
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: were occurring? The federal court record placed James and Leanne
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: on a train leaving Chicago for New York around September 3rd.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: So the investigators could establish the couple had relocated to
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: New York, but what they couldn't establish was James Lewis
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: standing inside one of the Chicago-area stores connected to the
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: contaminated Tylenol. And the more law enforcement talked to Lewis,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: the more interested Lewis seemed in exactly how the crime
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: had been committed. After his extortion conviction, Lewis actually offered
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: to help investigators understand how the real killer might have
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: pulled it off. And this is where things get very weird.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: He began drawing diagrams and proposed methods. He described ways
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: that someone could efficiently open capsules and fill them with
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: poison and put them back together. One of his ideas
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: became known as the, quote, drill board method, where Lewis
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: described a board with holes drilled into it where the
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: bottom capsule could be placed upright and the poison could
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: be distributed inside of it. According to Lewis, he wasn't
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: describing something he'd done, of course, just simply thinking through
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: the crime. trying to help investigators. But James Lewis was
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: not the only person police investigated. And while attention was
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: beginning to turn toward the man in New York who
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: had written the extortion letter, back in Chicago, detectives were
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: pursuing another suspect. A man whose connection to cyanide had
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: begun before James Lewis's letter ever arrived. And his name
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: was Roger Arnold. Arnold was 48 years old and worked
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: as a dock worker at a Juul grocery warehouse in
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: Melrose Park. Not long after the poisonings, police heard from
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: the owner of a bar in Chicago. According to investigators,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: Arnold had been a semi-regular customer there. And before the
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Tylenol murders ever happened, Arnold had allegedly been talking about cyanide.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Not just poison in general, but cyanide specifically. According to
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: later accounts from investigators, Arnold had made comments about how
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: easy it would be to put cyanide inside capsules, give
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: them to someone, and never get caught. And now, seven
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: people had just died after swallowing cyanide that someone had
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: put inside capsules. So, yeah, police wanted to talk to
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Roger about that. When they questioned him, Arnold acknowledged that
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: he had purchased cyanide before. He said it had been
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: for amateur experiments, which I'm like, where are people just
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: buying cyanide? Like, that's scary. And doing amateur experiments. He
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: denied having anything to do with the Tylenol murders. but
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: police searched his home on October 11th, so that would
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: have been a couple weeks after the murders. And what
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: they found didn't exactly make everyone relax. There were several firearms, ammunition,
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: lab equipment, beakers, test tubes, books dealing with explosives and poisons,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: and one book contained information about producing potassium cyanide. Investigators
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: also found a white granular substance, but when it was tested,
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: it wasn't cyanide. And despite Arnold admitting that he had
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: possessed cyanide at one point, investigators did not find cyanide
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: in his home during the search. So the investigators started
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: looking at Arnold's connection. And there were several. He worked
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: at a Juul warehouse, and at least some of the
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: contaminated bottles had been purchased from a Juul store. He
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: frequented bars in the area near the Walgreens where Paula
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: Prince had purchased her Tylenol, And possibly the strangest connection
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: of all, Arnold actually worked with Mary Reiner's father. And
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Mary Reiner, of course, was one of the seven people
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: who had died. And Arnold's wife had also received psychiatric
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: treatment at Central DuPage Hospital, the hospital where Mary had
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: recently given birth. You can understand why detectives kind of
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: kept looking at this. A man who reportedly talked about
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: putting cyanide into capsules, it's a very specific conversation, and
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: he worked for a grocery store chain, That contaminated medication
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: was sold from and had connections to the family of
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: one of the victims. He also had chemistry equipment and
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: books about poison in his house. If you're a detective
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: in October 1982, Roger D. Arnold is absolutely someone you
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: need to eliminate before you can move on. And police
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: were never able to build a Tylenol murder case against him.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: But the investigation itself had consequences, serious ones. Arnold became
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: furious with the person who had reported him to the police.
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: and he believed he knew who was responsible. So Arnold
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: kept going back to bars that he had frequented, looking
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: for the person who he thought had turned him in.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: And then in June of 1983, Arnold saw a man
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: leaving a bar who he believed was the person working
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: at the bar who had turned him in, and he
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: shot him. The victim's name was John Stanisha, and he
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: was 46 years old. He worked as a computer consultant,
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: and he had three daughters. And he had absolutely nothing
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: to do with the Tylenol investigation. Roger Arnold had killed
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: the wrong man. According to the detective, Arnold broke down
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: when he realized what he had done. So sometimes John
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: Stanisha is referred to occasionally as the eighth victim of
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol murders because the investigation itself set that trajectory
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: in motion. Arnold was convicted of murder and sentenced to
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: 30 years in prison. He served roughly half that sentence
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: and later died in 2008. Years later, Arnold was actually
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: ruled out based on DNA from DNA recovered from the
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: Tylenol evidence. His DNA did not match the profile they
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: were examining. So now law enforcement had two very different
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: men who had drawn serious attention. Roger Darnold, a man
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: who had reportedly talked about cyanide before the murders and
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: had several strange connections to the case, and James Lewis,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: a man who wrote a letter claiming he could stop
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: the murders and then spent years explaining to investigators exactly
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: how someone might have committed them, even though he didn't
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: do it. Neither man could be physically tied to a
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: poison bottle. And yet, as the years passed, investigators kept
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: coming back to one of them, James Lewis. So probably
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: the biggest question in this case is, did James Lewis
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: do it? Because depending on what you read, James Lewis
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: is described as everything from the obvious killer who somehow
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: escaped prosecution to a bizarre opportunist who inserted himself into
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: a murder investigation that had nothing to do with it.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: And the truth is, there is evidence that makes Lewis
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: look really suspicious. And there's also enormous holes in the
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: case against him. One thing that is odd about the
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: evidence in his case is that decades later, advances in
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: forensic examination reportedly allowed investigators... to determine that Lewis's letter
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: had been mailed on October 1st, 1982. But during later
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: recorded conversations, Lewis apparently said it had taken him about
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: three days to write the Johnson & Johnson letter. And
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: investigators immediately saw a potential problem. If Lewis really spent
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: three days composing a letter that was mailed on October 1st,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: you work backwards. September 28th would be three days to
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: when he started composing the letter. But that was before
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol deaths were widely known to the public. So
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: that would mean he was writing these extortion letters before
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: anybody even knew about the poisonings. Investigators believe that contradiction
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: was important enough to help justify a search of his
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: home decades later. But again, it's not a confession. The
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: investigators also developed another possible motive for James. And this
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: one's heartbreaking. James and Leanne had a daughter named Toni.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: Tony had serious health problems and underwent a surgery for
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: a congenital heart defect, and she died in 1974 when
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: she was five years old. Decades later, investigators looked into
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: the medical circumstances surrounding Tony's death. According to records, sutures
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: used during Tony's surgery had been manufactured by Ethicon, which
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: was a Johnson & Johnson company. Investigators began considering whether
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: Lewis could have blamed Johnson & Johnson for his daughter's death.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: In other words... Maybe Tylenol poisonings weren't random rage directed
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: at the public. Maybe they were revenge against the company.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: Investigators saw a pattern in Lewis's life of becoming consumed
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: with people or organizations he believed had wronged him. Frederick McKay,
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: Johnson & Johnson, and I think the biggest piece of
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: circumstantial evidence of all, James Lewis continually put himself into
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: this story. Nobody forced him to write the letter. Nobody
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: told him to draw diagrams of how to cut the
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: capsules open, he kept stepping back into it. But which
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: brings us to the obvious question, if he's the killer,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: why wasn't he charged? The biggest problem is that they
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: cannot pinpoint him being in Chicago. There's no proof that
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: he was in Chicago at that time. As far as
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: anybody knew, they were in New York. Could he theoretically
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: have traveled back without leaving an obvious record? Sure, it
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: was 1982, not 2026, so there aren't cell towers tracking
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: your phone. There aren't license plate readers. You're not leaving
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: a digital credit card trail every time you buy coffee.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: The problem number two is that there was no physical
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: evidence connecting Lewis to the poisoned Tylenol. No fingerprints that,
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: you know, had his DNA on them. The Tylenol murders
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: never technically disappeared. The case remained opened, but decades passed.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: Investigators retired, witnesses aged, evidence sat in storage. James Lewis
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: finished his prison sentence for the extortion and eventually moved
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: with Leanne to Massachusetts. Then the 25th anniversary approached in 2007,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: and the case received renewed attention. Forensic science had changed
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: dramatically since 1982. DNA testing had become something investigators in
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: the original case couldn't possibly have imagined using in the
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: way we do today. Investigators were still heavily focusing on
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: James Lewis. So beginning in 2007, retired FBI agent Roy
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: Lane and other investigators began meeting with him. A lot.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: Investigators wanted more than another formal interview. They wanted Lewis comfortable, talking, explaining.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: So they built an undercover operation. Lewis was approached with
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: what was essentially the perfect bait for someone who had
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: spent decades insisting he was misunderstood. A journalist was supposedly
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: writing a book about the Tylenol murders. And the book
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: could help clear James Lewis's name. He could participate, and
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: he could explain what really happened. He could finally tell
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: his side. Except the journalist wasn't actually a journalist. She
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: was an undercover federal agent, and the book wasn't real.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: The meetings were being used to investigate him. Over time,
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: agents met James and Leanne more than 60 times, according
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: to WTTW's later reconstruction of the operation. They encouraged Lewis
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: to talk about the murders. In one recorded meeting, Lewis
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: demonstrated how someone could open a Tylenol package using something
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: as simple as a paperclip. He talked about ways the
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: killer could avoid fingerprints, or avoid DNA. Buy bottles in
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: advance and practice manipulating them. And one of the strangest
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: moments came when investigators brought him back to Chicago. They
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: took him to the Walgreens where Paula Prince had purchased
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol in 1982. According to one of the investigators involved,
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: Lewis became extremely animated, and he reportedly walked directly toward
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: the area where the Tylenol had been stocked decades earlier.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: Investigators noticed, and of course they did. But again, think
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: about the problem. By that point, James had been studying, discussing,
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: and obsessing over the case for decades. In February 2009,
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: FBI agents searched Lewis' home in Cambridge. They removed boxes
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: of material, and the case was suddenly back in the headlines.
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: After more than 26 years, law enforcement was inside James
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: Lewis' home looking for evidence of the Tylenol murders. And still,
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: they did not find the thing prosecutors needed. So, investigators
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: had samples of DNA from James Lewis. And in 2010,
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: Lewis provided DNA, and they compared it. It didn't match.
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: DNA recovered from the Tylenol evidence does not match James Lewis.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: Later testing also failed to connect Roger Arnold, like I
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: said earlier. Now, this seems like it's the moment where
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: you say, okay, then neither of them did it. Except
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: it's not that simple. Because investigators could not establish that
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: the unidentified DNA belonged to the killer specifically. Think about
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: every person who may have touched one of those bottles.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: At the manufacturing plant, the warehouse, a truck driver, an employee,
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: a cashier, a pharmacist, a police officer... So an unknown
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: DNA profile on a bottle doesn't automatically equal Tylenol killer.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: Detectives can believe someone did it. A retired investigator can say,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: if you ask me, this is our guy. But they
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. According to
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: reporters who examined the later investigation, prosecutors in both Cook
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: and DuPage counties were shown the circumstantial case against Lewis,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: and they declined to charge him. One of the journalists
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: who spent years investigating the case summarized the problem very simply.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: There was no physical evidence connecting James Lewis to the
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: Tylenol murders. And this is where I get stuck on
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: this case, because James Lewis is a fantastic suspect. James
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Lewis continued denying the murders for the rest of his life. Then,
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: on July 9, 2023, Cambridge police were asked to perform
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: a wellness check at his home in Massachusetts. Lewis was
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: found unresponsive. He was 76 years old, and his death
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: was later determined to be from natural causes, a pulmonary embolism.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: And just like that, the man investigators had spent roughly
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: four decades circling was gone. If James Lewis was the
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Tylenol killer, he died without ever being held criminally responsible
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: for the murders. And if James Lewis wasn't the Tylenol killer,
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: then law enforcement spent decades focused on a man who
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: inserted himself into the investigation, while the person who actually
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: poisoned those capsules may have disappeared almost completely. But even
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: though the person responsible may never have been identified, they
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: still changed something almost every single person listening to this
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: episode has experienced. You've probably interacted with the legacy of
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol killer this week, maybe even today. If you've
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: peeled foil off of a bottle ever, or broken a
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: plastic seal, pushed through the child-resistant packaging, gotten annoyed because
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: the medicine you wanted was ridiculously hard to open, there's
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: a reason for that. And after September 1982, Nobody could
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: look at an unopened bottle of medicine the same way again.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: So if you ever see anything that says, sealed for
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: your protection, in the first few days after the Tylenol deaths,
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: Johnson & Johnson had a problem. that went far beyond
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: the contaminated bottles. Nobody knew how many bottles were poisoned.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Nobody knew where they were. By October 5th, 1982, Johnson
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: & Johnson made an enormous decision. The company recalled Tylenol nationwide.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Approximately 31 million bottles were pulled from circulation and and
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: Johnson & Johnson stopped distributing the capsules. The cost of
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: this recall and response would eventually exceed $ 100 million from
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: the company. Even if Johnson & Johnson somehow convinced the
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: public that every contaminated bottle had been removed, why would
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: anyone ever trust the next bottle? So back in 1982,
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: you could walk into a store, take a bottle of
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: capsules off a shelf, and open the top of it.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: You could dump things in and potentially return it without
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: leaving any obvious evidence. There was no foil membrane that
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: you had to puncture, no plastic ring that had to
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: snap or kind of peel off the side. And the
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: only thing standing between a consumer and whatever was inside
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: the bottle was basically trust. And that trust was gone.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: The pharmaceutical industry had to redesign the medicine cabinet fast.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: So on November 5th, 1982, barely five weeks after the murders,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: the FDA published new regulations requiring tamper-resistant packaging for most
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: over-the-counter medications. If someone gets into a product before you do,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: you should be able to tell. That's why when you
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: open a tamper-resistant packaging and it says, like, if this
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: has been opened, do not take it, it's literally because
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: of the Chicago Tylenol murders. Before in 1982, this was
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: not standard. Child-resistant caps, the seals, anything like that. Johnson
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: & Johnson stopped selling over-the-counter medications in traditional two-piece capsules
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: entirely because of those capsules being able to open and
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: close back up. And then on October 13th, 1983, President
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan signed the Federal Anti-Tampering Act. It criminalized the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: threats to tamper with products and knowingly making false claims
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: that products had been contaminated. The penalties for this were severe.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: If someone dies as a result of product tampering, the
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: law allowed for imprisonment up to life. There were other
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: copycats years after this, which is awful, but it kind
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: of circles us back to the main question. Who killed
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: those seven people? Was it James Lewis? Was it somebody
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: else that they haven't even looked at? There's temptation with
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: famous unsolved cases to eventually turn the best suspect into
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: the answer. James Lewis becomes the Tylenol killer simply because
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: his name is the one we've heard the most. But
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: nobody ever proved that he poisoned a single Tylenol capsule,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: and he died in 2023. According to the most recent
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: detailed public reporting, the Chicago Tylenol Murder Investigation remains open
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: with the Arlington Heights Police Department. The fact that it's
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: still an active investigation is actually part of the reason
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: so much of the underlying case file still isn't available
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: to the public. Investigators have continued looking at the physical
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: evidence using technology that continues to grow and that didn't
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: exist in 1982. As recently as 2020, Arlington Heights Police
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: were collecting elimination DNA from people known to have handled
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: contaminated bottles. The department also began working with OTHRUM, a
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: private forensic laboratory that specializes in extracting and analyzing tiny
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: or degraded DNA samples and using advanced genetic techniques in
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: cold cases. So technically, there is still evidence being examined.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: Could some future technology finally tell us who touched one
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: of those capsules before a victim did? Maybe. 44 years
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: after these murders, no one has ever been charged with
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: killing the seven victims. We don't know exactly why, and
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: we may never know. But Mary Kellerman, Adam Janus, Stanley Janus,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Teresa Janus, Mary McFarland, Mary Reiner, and Paula Prince deserve
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: to be remembered as more than the seven names attached
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: to a bottle of Tylenol. They were seven people whose
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: ordinary lives crossed paths with someone they may never have
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: even seen. Someone who, as far as we know, got
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: away with murder. Seven of them, here in Illinois, and
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: the case is still unsolved. Okay, before we finish this episode,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: I actually have a very new update. And I know
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: this episode's already long, but just bear with me. When
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: I say new update, I mean this information came out
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: after I had already recorded this episode. So on September 23rd, 2026...
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: Less than a week before this episode was scheduled to
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: come out, authorities in Idaho announced that they had finally
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: identified a mysterious man who had been known for more
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: than four decades as the, quote, unknown wanderer. And somehow,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: his story may intersect with the Chicago Tylenol murders. The
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: man's name was Dr. Matthew Francis Batowski. Batowski was an
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: organic chemist, and on December 4th, 1982, Just over two
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: months after the Tylenol murders, he was found dead inside
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho. He had died
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: from cyanide poisoning. He carried no identification and apparently had
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: taken steps to conceal who he was. For more than
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: 40 years, nobody knew his real name, but Idaho investigators
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: have now identified him through DNA and records. And while
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: researching his life, they uncovered some details that understandably caught
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: their eye. Former co-workers reportedly remembered Betkowski talking about using
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: poison to commit what he described as the, quote, perfect crime.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: A scientist who worked with him at the White Sands
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: Test Facility in New Mexico also recalled Betkowski discussing how
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: poison could be introduced into over-the-counter medication capsules. Earlier in 1982,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: he reportedly had an incident at a pharmacy where he
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: was attempting to obtain pills or capsules for an experiment.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: And when investigators searched belongings his family had kept, they
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: had found a hand-drawn map of Chicago. They also found
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: photographs showing that Betkowski had actually been in the Chicago area.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: And they found a small bottle of homemade cyanide. Now,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: this is where I need to put a giant asterisk
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: on all of this. Authorities are not calling Matthew Betkowski
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: the Tylenol killer. They cannot currently place him in Chicago
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: during the final week of September 1982 when the contaminated
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: bottles would be circulating. the photographs investigators found appeared to
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: show him in Chicago in late 1981, months before the murders.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: And the cyanide found among his possessions was sodium cyanide,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: while the poison used in the Tylenol murders was potassium cyanide.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: So at this point, this is a potential lead, but
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: not a solution. Idaho investigators have shared what they found
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: with law enforcement in Illinois, and both Chicago and Arlington
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: Heights investigators are aware of the information. And honestly, The
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: timing of this is kind of incredible. We've spent this
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: entire episode talking about a case that has been open
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: for 44 years, about James Lewis, about Roger Arnold, DNA
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: that hasn't given investigators the answer they hoped for, and
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: the possibility that the person responsible may have never really
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: appeared on investigators' radar at all. And then literally, days
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: before the 44th anniversary, another name enters the story. Does
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: Matthew Betkowski actually have anything to do with the Tylenol murders?
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: We don't know. Maybe investigators eventually rule him out completely.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe this becomes another strange coincidence in a case filled
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: with them. Or maybe there's something here that investigators haven't
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: been able to see until now. But as of the
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: day this episode is being released, the Chicago Tylenol murders
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: are still unsolved. And apparently, the story is still changing.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: And that's it for episode 50 of Cat Has Questions.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: And genuinely, if you've been listening since the beginning or
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: if you just found this podcast somewhere along the way,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: thank you so much for listening. It's very cool to
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: be able to get to 50 episodes. But getting to
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: use this milestone to tell an Illinois case that still
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: has unanswered questions for more than four decades feels pretty
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: fitting for the show. As always, I'll have sources used
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: for this episode linked in the show notes. And until
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: next time, stay curious. Thanks for listening to Cat Has Questions.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: If you liked this episode, follow the show and share
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: it with someone who loves a good spiral. See you
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: next week.