Latest / Stuff You Should Know / SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Tylenol Murders, Part II

Transcript

SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Tylenol Murders, Part II · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: In part two of our episode on the nineteen eighty
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: two Chicago Thailand All Murders, we look at the suspects
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: in the case and really zero in on one of them,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: but to this day it's not clear if they were
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: behind it, and although there was a lot of weird
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: evidence around him, it's all circumstantial. I hope you enjoy
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: finishing up on the Thailand All Murders.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Steff. You should know, a production of Iheartradios
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: How Stuff Works.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Charles w Chuck Bryant, There's guest producer Josh over there.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Guess enough with the pleasantries. Let's get back to.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: It Chuck Thailand All Murders, Part two, Park, if you
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: did not listen to the first part. In nineteen eighty two,
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: seven people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide,
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: all on the same day, all on the same day.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: America and much of the world is super freaked out.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Johnson and Johnson is the manufacturer, and part one of
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: part two has a deal with Johnson and Johnson and
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: how they handled this in a public relations sort of way.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: Because there were and are a huge company. Like you
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: said in the episode one, they held thirty seven percent
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: of the market share, which was many hundreds of millions
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: of dollars of tile and all that they're selling every year.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: And that's in nineteen eighty two dollars.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: Right, which is like gazillions now. So it was a
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: very big deal for that company. And the way they
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: handled it is taught in colleges and PR classes all
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: over the world as exactly how to handle a big
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: public relations crisis.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Like this, Like it's literally called a textbook example of
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: how it's done.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they did a good job because as you remember
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: from the last episode, they found out pretty sure early
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: on that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson, right, Like,
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: it wasn't in their factory, it wasn't in their supply chain.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: That it happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: by some crazed person taking them out of the store
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: or tainting them maybe in the store in the parking lot,
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: then putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson Johnson
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: can't come out on the news and say hey what
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: and us.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Right well at first though, and this gets overlooked and
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: left out of the college business courses and the PR courses.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: a massive recall.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: Sure, because that looks well, it looks good in one
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: way but bad in another.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: And they actually didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: held her press conference on Friday calling for a recall
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: of the Thailand all in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: did a little face palm. Yes, we're recalling all of
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the Thailand all in Chicago.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: Yes, what she said.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Right. So by Friday, the thirty first of September, is
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: there thirty one in September? Was this October first?
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: I have no idea.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: I think it was October first, anyway. By the Friday,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: two days after the death yeah, the deaths, Johnson and
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Johnson recalled all of the tail in all in Chicago.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: And that should have been enough to them, that was enough.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: But this PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: and like we said earlier in Part one, became global
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: almost overnight. It was not enough. Yeah, And so Johnson
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: and Johnson, within a week of the deaths recalled every
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: bottle of extra strength TIL and all in the United States,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: which is worth about one hundred million dollars at the time,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: took it back to their factories and destroyed it.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: So they say, right, yeah, both Johnson and Johnson, right.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: I wonder if one of them was like, know about this.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: One of them said, Okay, I'll take all the states
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Somewayoming
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: and then you can take all the other states. That's
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: a part one, Joe.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: They even got an award the Public Relations Society of America,
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: which is a real thing, I believe it or not.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: They awarded them their Silver Anvil Award for how they
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: handle the.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Crisis the tailan All poisoning, that's right.
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: And high grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: Wieners in the first episode. The ballpark Frank Zip supposedly
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: had razor blades but did not. That still created a
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: public relations crisis for them, even though they were just
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: these little jerks in Detroit, And they won the Golden Anvil,
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: which is one higher than.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Silver, because of how they handled the pr crisis brought
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: about by the copycats of the actual tailan All.
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: Crisis, which was in fact really brought about by two
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: jerk kids in Detroit, right, really, not even.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Copycats, not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: I bet one of them was the guy who did
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: our our lighting at our Detroit show.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: It was a smoke I'll go some more smoke.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, guys, we did a show in Detroit a few
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: years ago and very famously we still use that as
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: the standard bearer for a bad crew bad. We had
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: a guy that looked like a former roadie for Uriah
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: Heap that was running like a light show basically during
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: the middle of our podcast, and like smoke came out.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: We were like, we had to stop the show, almost
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: like dude, what are you doing?
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: had turned like brown and you could no longer see
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the words. And you asked him, we had to stop
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: the show, and you had to ask him to use
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: a different colored light.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: Uh huh.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: And his response, because you and me he was hanging
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: the sound with the guy. His response, according to them,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: they want smoke, I'll give them some more smoke and
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: we got some more smoke.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: Like a smoke machine.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: Man, And people ask us why we haven't been back
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: to Detroit.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: That's a big reason. It's a big reason, not the
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: only reason.
• 6:12
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: Okay. So they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: pr moves McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: Johnson and Johnson.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: They actually make Til it All.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they make the pills again. The way this all
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: this supply chain works is really convoluted, and like you said,
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: they didn't want to recall Johnson Johnson everything at first.
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: They want to kind of take it a little slower.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: I guess, well, sure, because they'd found out the drugs
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: are actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: This is one hundred million dollars worth of stock that
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That's right.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: So they were kind of reluctant at first, especially if
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: they were convinced that there was nothing wrong with the
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: rest of them.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: They had no choice, no, that was the only way
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: to do it was to lose a lot of money
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: in favor of future gains.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But even at the time, a lot of people
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: were like, this is it for tail and All. Sure,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: the public has lost faith in Thailand All. So when
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Thailandol recalled thirty one million, fifty count bottles of Extra
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Strength tilent All and destroyed it all, there was a
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: chance that not only were they losing one hundred million dollars,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: but that they were losing one hundred million dollars of
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: a brand that had already lost the public trust and
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: would never regain it. So which wasn't true. But yeah, no,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: they didn't necessarily know that at the time. It was
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: still up in the air. So they it was basically
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: the public this taint of talent All has gone forever.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Your chances of dying from taking Extra Strength tilent All
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: are now gone. You can go back to taking Thailand All. Now.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: That was one thing that was a big gesture, which
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: is what it amounted to. It was a gesture half
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: of Johnson and Johnson. But they did other stuff too.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: They started to do things right out of their reluctance.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: Once they finally said there, we have to just go
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: with this to save face and to win back public trust,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: they started to do things right, like including like setting
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: up a hotline sure putting out one hundred thousand dollars
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: reward for information.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: Jump change, considering how much they had lost already.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: It's nineteen eighty two dollars.
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: Well still jump change it is, yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: It does they But because of all of this, Johnson
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and actually
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: managed to position itself as a victim in all of this, Like, yes,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: there were these which they were, I mean seven murder victims. Yeah,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: and Johnson and Johnson. I don't think I ever tried to
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: who may or may not had something out for them.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: because of this, and they were a victim and were
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: able to generate public sympathy. Is part of the road
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: to regaining the public trust.
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes. So
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: we'll take you back to nineteen eighty two if you're
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: if you weren't around then or old enough to be
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: taking OTC pills and pain relievers.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: OTC is over the counter by the way. That's right, Okay,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: you down with OTC. Yeah, you know me so dumb.
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: I love that you played along, though, I appreciate that
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: you could have made me feel stupid.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: We've been partners for eleven years almost now.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Yeah right, yeah, unbelievable.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: So uh I'm believable, Not not in that way. Okay.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: So here's how it used to happen. If you wanted
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: to take a pill, like a tile and all, you
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: would get your bottle, you would pop it open with
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: your thumb.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Well first, first it came in a little box.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: Sure, but the box wasn't even glued shut. No, you
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: would pop it open with your finger. You would take
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: out the cotton in there, and you would take your pill.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing. No,
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: there was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep bare aspirin like
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: the hard tablets, yeah, from getting crushed in transport.
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And since they started using capsules and other stuff and
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: figured out how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: for the cotton any longer. But because consumers expected it.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: I know.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Still today you'll find cotton in your in your pills.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: There's no reason for it to be there except because
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: the companies know that you want it to be there.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: your pills.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: Imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that too.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: so big cotton.
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: They.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: New, fancy otc pill should have Micromo doll in there, right.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: It just comes with a pair of Meuni stuffed into
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: your pill bottle like these have been warm.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: And so this was a time. It was a very
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: innocent time previous to this, where you could like and
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: you pointed this out. I remember seeing this in grocery stores,
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: like I remember seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: products and smelling them.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's what you could do, and then.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Closing it back and putting it back on the shelf.
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: Mate.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, oh there's a little mold in this one. Yeah,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: and I'll just leave it for the next person.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: Forget poisoning like these they could be spitting in this stuff.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: It was allowed.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: That's just the way it was. Like, there was America
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: And that sets up this Tile in All Poisoning. It
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: really shows how much of a jarring experience it was
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: from America, because all of a sudden, like it's finally
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: with the tile in all. Somebody has gone out of
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: their way to poison the tail and all in order
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: to do this is because it's easy to get into
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the tile in all, tamper with it, put it back,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: and no one will be any any more. The wiser
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and wait, it's not just tile and all. Milk doesn't
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Nei, there's orange juice, NEI,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: there's cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: forreaked out. And this is the reason why this Tile
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: in All Poisoning is considered widely the first incident of
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: domestic terrorism in the United States, because it was terrorism,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: pure and simple. America was terrified. They were petrified not
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: only to take tail in all or any over the
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: counter medicine. Now they were petrified to drink milk or
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: give milk to their kids. Paula Prince, the flight attendant
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: who was the last one to die in Chicago, she
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: had a coworker who said, like, everything looked tainted. Now,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: I was afraid to give my kid's milk. I was
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: to the tail and all, they can poison anything. And
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks,
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Tyland all said we got this covered.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And I have a feeling they did this so
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: fast there had to have been this idea in place already.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. I saw a reference that it was.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: And I imagine it was not done because they're like, well,
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: it's a lot of money, and why would we bother.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: It's like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine, right,
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: And then that happened. So within six weeks they had
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: a box that was actually glued shut, so if your
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: little box had been opened, you would be able to tell.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was That was part one of three of
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: this tamper resistant packaging.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: after you open it or no, no, no, the plastic is
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: over the cap on the outside of the bottle.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like the plastic foil.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: And then the actual foil was over the mouth of
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: the bottle that you we all have to poke through
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: None of that existed until the beginning of nineteen eighty three.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: So all three of these are put in place within
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: six weeks. Not only that, they said, you know what,
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: we're going to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: it was we didn't have them back then. Everything was
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: a little capsule that you could literally pull apart, and
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: you could snort the tile in all if you wanted to.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Sure, I'm quite sure some people did.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: I'm sure someone did. But the caplet is, you know,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: a tablet coated with an easy to swallow a gelatine.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: It's solid, it's I imagine you could tamper with it.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: And even I even saw with all these things in place,
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: went a long way to restore the public, you know, well,
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: like the good feelings about what was going on.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, within about a year, Thailand all or Johnson and
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Thailand.
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: All that's hard to believe. Yeah, that was really fast, but.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: It also goes to show like just how perfectly they
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: did everything from that from the time they ca admitted
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: to it on.
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I feel like I remember like commercials with
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became sake.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: I can't remember his name. I want to say, Jeoffrey Beam.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: That's like a shoe brand.
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: Gabby Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson, No, Jimmy Howard Johnson.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Yes, this, I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Johnson is way far away from that. But he became
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: a public face. He would, you know, go on to
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: sixty minutes and he talked to Dan Reather and take
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Copple and all those cats like he he was out
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: there like showing how much the company cared. Yeah, and
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: it had had a huge effect.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: And then in nineteen eighty three, Congress got involved. They
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: passed what they dubbed the Tail and All Bill, which
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: basically says, if you do something like this is now
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: a federal offense. A few years later, in nineteen eighty nine,
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: product really to make it Tampa proof.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tail and
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: all came out with it, because they kind of had
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: to if they wanted to keep up with TIL and all.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: But also the uh, the manufacturers of everything, like every product,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: every consumer product, started putting their products in like tamper
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: proof packaging. Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: the box.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: To trap the chemicals in.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: I guess, but also to show like nobody's injected this
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: with lie or something like that, although lie is used
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: in the making the soap, isn't it. I remember my
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: fight Club.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: It's pretty funny someone injected soap into the soap. All right,
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: let's take another break and we'll come back and talk
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: a little bit more about the profile of the supposed
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: mad poisoner. Right after this.
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: Stop you know, stop stop, should know no stop?
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: All right. So this was a very big case at
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: the time. Obviously, like we've been saying, it was a
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles,
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: which you know we should do one in profiling. Actually,
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: have we done that.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: I don't think so, it'd be a good one.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because it always like seems like the trope in
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: movies and TV. But it is kind of like that.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: No, it is a thing for sure.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: It's not like they just make this stuff up. But
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: in the end they said, you know, this is probably
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: a man in his twenties or thirties who was sort
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: of a Jekyll and Hide type During the day, he's
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: to you and you wouldn't even know it.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: Every once in a while uses here him go more.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. But deep in his in the recesses of
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self doubt and has
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: an illusion that a random killing can boost a sense
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: of self worth, which is just sounds like a straight
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: out of a movie.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: It sounds like a psychiatrist saying I want to be
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: on TV. Yeah, listen to me.
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: was that he had probably already taken his own life
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: after the killings.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: That was one specific person who was it that. Yeah, Yeah,
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: worry about it.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Don't worry everybody. Yeah, yeah, he just threw that out there.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it was to calm people or not,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: but or maybe he's just throwing his two cents in.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: But I think you kind of said it earlier. I
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: don't remember if it was part one or part two.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: The whole things is blurred and become a haze by now.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: But no one has ever been charged with the Thailand
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: All murders.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah that's the ending.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: But there has been There were a lot of suspects
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: that remember Thailand All set up a hotline and this
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Thailand All Task Force, one hundred and forty person strong
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: the hotline. Thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in. Yeah,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: they were trying to whittle those down into actual tips
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: they deemed twelve hundred tips or twelve hundred leads worth
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: checking out. There's a lot of leads for a case,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: even considering yet one hundred and forty people working them.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: And I read somewhere that they started out with like
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: twenty thousand suspects or something like that and whittled it
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: down to four hundred.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And sort of the sad part is as quickly
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: as they sort of figured a lot of this out
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: and had that one hundred and forty person task force,
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: they almost just as quickly within a few months, realized that, like,
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: we don't have a very good chance at finding this person.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it became clear very quickly.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they whittled that down. By the last week of October,
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: the task force was down to forty people. By the
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: end of the year, it was down to twenty. And
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: it was a situation again in nineteen eighty two where
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you didn't have credit
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: lot easier back then to get away with something like this,
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: slip some tilin all into your pocket, go out to
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: the parking lot and come back in and slip them
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: back on the shelf. Yeah, if you're really easy.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: You won't even go to the trouble of buying it.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess that's a good point, steal it and
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: then put it. But you know people were using cash.
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: If there were cameras in a place, they were probably
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: trained on employees. I worked at a golden pantry in College.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: Only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: at the catch register.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: Alps. No, ok, the one on the east side College
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: Station Road. I think, okay, yeah, very interesting job. That's
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: the one where I got a job. I needed a job.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: I got a job at McDonald's and I showed up.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: I took the one hour training video and they got
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: my uniform number. I went home and I was supposed
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: to show up the next day and I was just like,
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: I can't do it. I can't go work at McDonald's.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: And I got the Golden pantry job later that day.
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: Here you go, which, hey man, sure, it's like sign
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: me up.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: From Golden arches to golden pantry. That's like a rags
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: of riches story.
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: I was selling beer and cigarettes.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: It was pretty great.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: You're like one for you, one for me.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: Oh, I would never do that, all right? Where was I?
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: Oh?
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was at Golden pantry. So the cameras trained
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: on the register. They're not. You know, you could come
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: and go in a store and no one even knows.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty two, right, it ops of nothing to
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: go on. Most importantly, no motive.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: That was a big one, because remember, this is just
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: a Jekylin Hyde type who you'd never suspect.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: Who's probably at the bottom of the Chicago.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: River, right, who also is engaged in some senseless random
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: killings of people, anonymous poisoning killing, not even shooting. It
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: just made zero sense whatsoever. So, like we said earlier,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: the cops figured out within about a month, within the
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: first month of the investigation, that this was they were
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: not going to have a break in this case. But
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: it's not to say that they didn't have some suspects.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Some people definitely did kind of come to come to
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the fore, but not many of them.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: and of themselves.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: For sure.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: The first guy's name was last name Arnold.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: First name Roger. That's right, I call him Richard, That's
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: all right, but for good reason.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: Oh sure, because you said he was like the Richard
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: Jewel of his day. Yeah, the Olympic bomber who was
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: not the bomber.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Right, but whose life was ruined because he basically was
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: implicated as the Olympic bomber.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: Right, the same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: was one of the first named suspects. Forty nine year
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: old guy.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: So put yourself in the position. Okay, the media is
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: going berserk on the story. Everybody hears about it. It's
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: a mad anonymous poisoner. And now all of a sudden
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: there's a name and a face associated with it. Who's
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: a suspect, But he's the first person named. Oh yeah,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: it's like people going crazy, like trying to get to
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: this guy to interview him.
• 23:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: I have my doubts about this guy, not that he
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: did that, but there are a lot of hinky things
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: that they found out about him. Sure, and then how
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: it all ended up. Yeah, as you're about to see.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: So he was a diy chemist.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: It's a big one.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: There's a big thing right there, because into chemistry.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: He said, he's a jekylin Hyde type who's probably into chemistry.
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: That's right. He was a dockhand at Jewel food just
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: at a warehouse west of Chicago.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: And Dual Foods. There are a couple of different jewel
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: foods are where the tyran was bought. It's like a
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: grocery store of food market.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: It's all checking out so far. So the cops look
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: into him and go to his house. He has a book,
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: a handbook rather on methods of killing people.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: How to kill people A to Z. I don't know
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: if that's a title, but okay, that's a good one.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: He had five unregistered guns.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: That's a big one.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: I threw it out like at least six months before
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: these murders.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: He's like, when were the murders again? Oh, yeah, six
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: months before that. That's fine, it was.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: And then his wife said, uh, you know they're investigating
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what,
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: Actually I did take some tyl and all and felt
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: really sick and threw up one time. But again I
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: was it was probably due to overeating and it was
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: just that once.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: As the fact of the podcast, So like, you.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: Can't blame cops for saying this guy's a pretty good lead.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because you can kind of start to see, like
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: if you add all the other stuff together. And then
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: hear about the wife throwing up from tailand all we like,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: could you see this guy like toying with his wife,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: like testing it out on her, just enough to make
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: her sick, but not to kill her, to see what happened,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: you know, see if she would notice? Who knows. But
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There's
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: a there's not a person associated with the story that
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: I came across who thought, he said, I actually think
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: this guy did it. I didn't find one person who
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: thought Roger Arnold actually did it. But in very short
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: order he proved that he was more than capable of murder,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: because six months after he was cleared as a suspect,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: he was brought in for the murder of somebody else,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: a guy named John Stenishaw Stanisha. I would say, yeah,
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I'm going with that too, some Slovak or something.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he was forty six. He was a Chicago computer consultant.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: And that's saying something in nineteen eighty two.
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, probably. So, So here's what happened Arnold. There was
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: his bartender name or bar owner named Marty Sinclair, who
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: and ruined his life essentially, so he goes to kill
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: who he thinks is Marty Sinclair and it's actually this
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: just completely innocent, random guy who gets shot point blank.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: And so he in fact did kill somebody. He did
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: because of what had happened to his life.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: somebody on.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: Purpose mistaken identity killing though.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Right, and because of this, because it was directly related
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: to the Titlan All poisonings, John Stanisha is frequently considered
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: an eighth victim of the Titlan All killings. Yeah, kind
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: of like an honorary victim, right in this case. But
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: victim of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: a slightly different ring to it if it had been
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: the right guy. The fact that it was the wrong
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: guy and that poor dude just happened to be in
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: the wrong bar and it happened to look like the owner,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: that's just it just is perfect for this saga.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: I'll bet he was not very happy.
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: Probably not, but probably also very relieved and probably also guilt.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: A range of emotions, I would imagine, yeah, all over
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: the place. So Arnold ended up serving fifteen years of
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: a thirty year sentence, was released in ninety nine, and
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: died nine years later.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Yep, So, chuck, Before we go on to the main attraction,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: as far as the suspects go, yeah, I propose that
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: we take a break. Agreed. Okay, We'll be right back.
• 28:01
  Speaker 4: Stop you know, stop stop stop, should know no, stop?
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: All right, Chuck. So this dude, there was basically two
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: suspects in this whole case. Over all these years, there
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: are basically two people. And again no one was ever
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: actually charged with the murders. But this guy came awfully close.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: And his name was James Lewis. It was it, it
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: attention of the Chicago p D and the Thailand All
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Task Force when a letter showed up at Johnson and
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly the Thailand All Poisoner,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: the mad Poisoner, and in the letter. It said basically like,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: I've spent fifty so far, and the whole thing has
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Pay me one million dollars and then I will stop
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: the killings. And it hired.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: He gave a bank account number, right, he said, wire
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: me this money.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Very very presiently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly maybe,
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: but is it. No, it's not. So this letter has
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: a New York postmark, but the bank account is associated
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: with a travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, Okay,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: let's go check it out. And they find the owner
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under,
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: and this guy is like, oh my god, you're kidding me.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: He's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: can guarantee I can tell you who did is a
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson, who had
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: worked at the travel agency, and when the travel agency
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: went belly up, Nancy lost her job and never got
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: her last paycheck. Well, Robert Richardson was the type of
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: guy who would fixate on this, right, and was even
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: more so the type of guy who would write a
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: the tailan all murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: He was that kind of dude, right, And so the
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson cat and they
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson didn't actually exist,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: real name, and you said it was, it was?
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: It was.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: His name was not Robert Richardson though, that was an alias.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: a tax consultant. He and this is just a strange,
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: ironic twist, when he was twenty years old, he tried
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: to take his own life by swallowing aspirin.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Thirty six of them.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's just neither here nor there. But an
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: interesting little side note.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the fact that, like most people don't have that
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: it came.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: Up, so he had a pretty long rap sheet. He
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: was wanted by postal inspectors for a credit card fraud
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: in Kansas City. He was indicted in nineteen seventy eight.
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: And this one is just mind blowing. Yeah, he's indicted
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: for murder after police found remains of one of his
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: former clients in bags in his attic, and he got
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: let loose because it was an illegal search.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: But he was caught with the body of one of
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: his clients. He was dismembered in his attic with no
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: good explanation as far as I've ever heard.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, what explanation would be good?
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: Well, we were playing poker and one thing I.
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: Do another juggling swords and yeah. So his wife's real
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: name was lee Anne, the one who worked at the
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: December of eighty one, and this was as US Postal
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: So they're like, just bad people.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Not the postal inspectors, No, no, no, the Lewises.
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: Sure great. Yeah, so they moved to Chicago. They changed
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: their names to Robert Nancy Richardson. He got that job
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: as a tax preparer. But then he was fired after
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: a violent outburst in his office against his co workers,
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: and then she lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago,
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: and this turns out this is what got them exonerated
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: from the title. All thing is, they left Chicago and
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: moved to New York before this.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: Happened, right before those same month, right.
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: But if the theory held up that this person went around,
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: most likely in one day and did all this stuff,
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: then it couldn't have been them.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: No, And here's why, because the cops had decided that
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: it was done locally. And one of the other things
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: that supported that local mad poisoner theory was because the
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: cyanide ate through the gelatin capsules eventually, so I had
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: a very very short shelf life before the whole bottle
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: just turned into a mush of cyanid powder and melted gelatin. So,
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: like you said, it had to have been done basically
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: the day before the twenty ninth. On the twenty eighth,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: they could not, no matter how hard they tried, they
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: could not put James Lewis or his wife in Chicago
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: that day. They just couldn't. And for his part, James
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: But I did not I did not poison the title.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: In all. He's always been adamant about that. He's never
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: toyed around with it. He's never messed around, he's never
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: been coy he's always been adamant that he did not
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: poison that tile in all. Although the Talent All Task
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: Force tried to trip him up once, I guess to
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: just get this on the record that he done this,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: but they asked him, like, in an interview, Okay, let's
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: say you had done it, how would you have done it?
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: he would have done it.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: just showed him in an interview.
• 34:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: And he defends this later on by saying it was
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer, right.
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: I think the answer for me would have been I
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out.
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: But he's like, here's how I do it.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: I've been waiting for you to ask me.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: Though he's eventually found in New York City. He's at
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: the public library with a reference book, copying names and
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: addresses of newspapers. I would imagine to send them letters
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: like zodiac style.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because so we got to say this. So the
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Yeah,
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: he was really relishing the fact that there was a
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: national manhunt out for him. Who Like, that's what I'm saying.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: On the one hand, you got to kind of feel
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: a little bit bad that this guy was kind of
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: being railroaded into, you know, the rap for these murders.
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: After his extortion attempt, that's where the.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: Feeling bad forms is. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: He totally brought this on himself.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So they hauled him out of the New York
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: Public Library. He was sentenced to ten years for extortion
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: attempt in ten years for credit that original credit card fraud,
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: and served thirteen years and lives in the Greater Boston
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: area today.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: So still today there, I think there are a few
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: people who are like, I could see this guy, maybe
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: maybe he could, he could be at Some detectives maintain
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: that the Tailanhall murder could have flown into O'Hare, rented
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: a car, done that circuit, flown or driven back to
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: here and flown out all in the same day the
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: day before, but they could never put James Lewis in
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: Chicago at all that day. So he was cleared finally,
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences. He
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: served thirteen of the twenty years for that credit card
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: fraud that the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge,
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: mass now. But then in two thousand and nine, the case,
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: after basically having gone dormant in the early eighties, was
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: reignited by the FBI because they worked up they thought
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: a DNA profile from the capsules, and they raided James
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: Lewis's house demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judges like, no,
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: gave him the samples and nothing has come of it.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: So I guess that means tacitly that the Lewises were
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: cleared once and four all of the tailent all murders.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, the DNA thing is an interesting
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide.
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: I guess that the capsules have worn away by now
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: if it had the cyanide in there. But there was
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: and still his hope that DNA could could crack this case,
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: just like eight or nine years ago. The unibomber ted Kazinski.
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: Is that a two parter? No, No, just one part
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: good podcast, So I.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: Don't think so. That was a good episode.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: in the Greater Chicago area in eighty two, and he
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: is the unibomber. So they said we might as well
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: get a DNA sample and talk to him, right, and
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: super strong suspect, no, and he probably would have admitted it.
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: So he was like, no, this is not me.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: Right, So the unibomber has been cleared. That's right from
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: the talent on. But that remains. The case remains unsolved
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: to this day. I think they also have a fingerprint
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: work up that they found on one of the bottles
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: and that and some DNA it is they're just sitting
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: It's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're still working on it though. There's a police
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: sergeant named Scott Winkelmann who has been on this task
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: force for a long time and he says he thinks
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: is solvable and his department did just save a forty
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: five year old murder case cold case.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: Man, if they solved this one, that would be, I know,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the biggest cold case ever solved.
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: I think. I mean, who knows, But I could see
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day,
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: maybe like I don't know if they're going to catch someone.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: At the bottom of the Chicago River and hull them.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Off to jail. But I could see the truth coming
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: out when day. I hope so for the families because
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: Monica Janis she's the niece of Adam Stanley and Teresa.
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: She said her family to this day, this is from
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: an article like last year, I think, said that they
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: have passed now, but she said, literally every day for
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: the rest of their lives, they just cried about me,
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: the fact that they didn't know who did it. She
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: grew up and has been a therapy therapy her whole
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: life because there were all victims. You know that this
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: post traumatic stress disorder kicks in sure where she grew
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: up fearing that any of her family members could die
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: at any time. Joseph Manus, her dad, says that he
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: still has dreams like you know on the rag about
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: involved was in a room in the case and then
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen, she's the
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: daughter of Mary Reiner. She has dedicated her life to
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: investigating this on her own and she doesn't agree with
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: the Loane the mad poisoner theory at all.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: No, this is interesting.
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she thinks it had something to do with the
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: supply chain.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: And that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: Up.
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: One of the things, one of the things that people
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: recalled all of that tail and all thirty one million
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: bottles and then destroyed them allegedly without testing any of it.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: So we will never know whether it was Pinky had
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: the day off right, whether whether it was beyond Chicago
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: or just locals in Chicago. Seems like it took long
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: enough that other people would have died in that week
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very,
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: very interesting that was a PostScript to all this that
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: does undermine that mad poisoner theory.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just a few years later, in nineteen
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: eighty five, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsroth
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: took two extra strength Tilon all capsules and died from
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: cyanide poisoning. But they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: Was it another copycat case well, or the original poisoner maybe?
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: So this is a different cyanide.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Right, The cyanide was definitely not the same side from
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: another bottle found around the block from where Mary Elswroth
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: bought hers and Yonkers that did match that cyanide. So
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: there were two bottles of extra strength til and All
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: two years later in another state that had been tampered with.
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: The problem is this was after the three prong tamper
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: resistant packaging had been introduced.
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: Which means it was an inside job, right.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: I guess because the tamper the thing had not been
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: obviously tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: play what happened?
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and then within five days of her death, eight
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: states outright banned the capsules, Thailand all capsules.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: Right, and Thailand All, for its part, was like, we've
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: been trying to get everybody to take capl it's anyway,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it.
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: And then a guy wrote a book, right, Scott Bart's Yeah,
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: a former Johnson and Johnson employee wrote in twenty eleven
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: a self published book on the timel in All poisonings.
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: And he said, you know what we were talking about earlier.
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: He's like, this supply chain is so convoluted, right, basically,
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: like it could definitely could have happened at any point
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: right along the way.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: And his idea is that that Johnson and Johnson knew
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: that it was in their distribution network and they covered it.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: Up self published book.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta note that for sure.
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: I'm not knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: It does if there's like any hint of journalistic integrity
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: in US, that feels like we have to note that.
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: Sure.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: So that's the tailanol poisonings of nineteen eighty two in
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Chicago changed America, changed the world, but definitely changed America.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: Was the end of some form of innocence that we
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: still had.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, if you.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Want to know more about the tail and Al poisonings,
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: go online. There's stuff all over the place and you
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: can go down that rabbit hole and it's deep and wide.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: Since I said that, it's time for listener, ma'am.
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: This is from Jin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys, been
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: listening for several years and never thought I'd have a
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: never thought a perfect time would to write. End would
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: talked about synthetic parts. It's a real thing. When I
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: was in high school, my dad came across the stuff
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: online called liquid ass.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: That's horrible.
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: Not a lot occurs, right, No, that occursion.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: We can spell it out, though, sure, or I guess
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: maybe you should have said, like ask asterisk.
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go. A good name for a product, though.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: She said. He found it on a joke web website
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: and ordered some. And I have to tell you it
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: is the worst thing you've ever smelled. I can't even
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: describe it, and it makes you want to not breathe anymore.
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: The tiniest little drop is deadly. So of course I
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: took it to college with me to play pranks, and
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: boy did it backfire. I thought I was pretty funny
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: putting a couple of drops in the radiator by across
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: the friend across the hall friends room, not eating, thinking
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: and not even thinking about what would happen when the
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: heat turned on. Well, the heat turned on and the
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: whole floor of the dorm was amazingly disgusting and made
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: us just about gag. Smell took almost a week to
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: finally go away, and I have not used it again
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: in the ten years since.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: That's probably it's called learning your lesson.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: But she still has the bottle.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: She's like, but I kept it right just in case.
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: the first podcast ever listened to, and it's still always
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: on the top of my download list. Thanks thanks for
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: giving this twenty eight year old woman a platform on
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: which to tell a story of synthetic farts that is
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: not completely out of place.
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: Signed anonymous that is Jengreen. Thanks Jengreen, very brave for
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: you'd put your name on that one. Especially. I wonder
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: if you stepped up and said that horrible smell that
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: was my bad.
• 45:20
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: If you have a great story about college pranks, we
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: want to hear about it. You can get in touch
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: with this via our social links by going to stuff
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: youshould Know dot com, or you can send us an
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of Iheartradios How
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.