25: The Tylenol Murders | Red Thread
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For anyone who might be interested, I've been working with Stephen Hancock and Evan Royalty, the creators of the SCP films, to bring you a fan film based on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game franchise. Before it releases on YouTube, we are doing a limited theater tour throughout August and the first week of September.

We're going to be hitting Brooklyn, Tampa, LA, and Dallas in that order. So if you want to get in on the tour, show up, meet the cast and crew, watch the movie, and meet me, then you can do that at x1entertainment.com slash stalker tour, which hopefully there will be a link for in the description somewhere.

Thank you all so much for the support you've shown the film. Up until this point, thank you all for being amazing enough to allow me to follow my silly little movie-making dreams like this. And thank you so much to my friends for allowing me to invade the podcast for my ad spot. I appreciate it. But if you want to get in on that tour before it shows up on YouTube, check it out at the link in the description. Thank you so much for everything.

Your eyes open to the abrasive rays of light filtering through the curtains of your bedroom window. Why did you position your bed in such a way that the sun beams directly into your eyes while you're trying to sleep in the morning? You wonder for the upteenth time that week.

You turn the other way, attempting to ignore the nagging brightness of the daytime, but fail as you failed a million times before. You sit up in the bed, fully ready to accept the three hours of sleep as the only sleep you were destined to have when you notice something. An incessant feeling behind your eyes, like a wriggling parasite constricting around the circumference of your skull from inside. A headache. No, the constriction tightens more tense still and you find your vision blurring. Are

a migraine. Unfortunately, a regular occurrence that has haunted you chronically for many years now. With the frequency of the headaches you've been experiencing, you've done the responsible thing and prepared a tray of "easements" right next to your bed for the very occasion. Instinctively, your hand reaches over to a bottle, and you grip it as tight as the growing feeling itself grips the temple of your head, promising to squeeze you until you pop.

Salvation lies in the bottle, but there is just one final hurdle to cross before you begin on the path to eventual relief. You pop the bottle open and dump a pair of pills into your palm. You throw them into your mouth and close your eyes. Now begins the hard part. The part that separates the men from the boys.

And this is the red thread.

A beautiful twist. Yeah, Jackson can't take pills. He's like actually a four-year-old. So if there's a pill, he has to bite it in half so that way the medicine floods his throat. No. Jackson, no. No, I do. I can't swallow. I've been capable of swallowing pills. I've tried so many times. Why? Like with water?

Yeah, with anything. I've tried everything. I genuinely have tried orange juice. I've tried eating at the same time. I know something you haven't tried, though. Try it with thick water. If you do it with thick water, I actually bet it'll work.

I feel like I'll drown myself somehow. I'll actually die. What the fuck? The point of thick water is for people who can't swallow. It's literally made so you can drink water when you can't. Hold on, what do you mean you can't? Do you mean that you put the pills in your mouth, you drink water, and when you swallow, your throat just stops it? Closes off? It's literally some kind of mental hang-up that forces my throat closed and it just won't go down.

I don't know what it is, but it's been there since I was a child.

And I've tried, I try like continuously, like throughout the years, I've tried different tactics. I've tried the same tactics over and over again, tricking myself into thinking it'll work this time. But I don't know if I can continue working on this podcast. Why? It's cool. I'm like a X, X man mutant. Mr. No swallow. Yeah. Yeah. He shows up to professor X's school. What's your ability? I cannot swallow any pill. And he's, he just stunned. Like my God.

we found him we need a guy like you Cerebro could never locate you yeah that way if we're ever lined up to be executed and like they make you take a cyanide capsule you'll be the sole survivor until they shoot me in the head yeah until they shoot you in the head but by then you'll be long gone

Yes, but okay, so you're probably wondering why, like, what kind of relevancy that intro had to do with absolutely anything in this episode, and it is primarily because of just pills in general. Tylenol. We're talking about Tylenol, the Tylenol murders of the early 1980s, where a bunch of people mysteriously died without any connection to one another. Well, the only connection being that of they all had

taken Tylenol pills at some point earlier in the day due to headaches. So it's a very interesting case with a lot of unanswered questions still to this day that had enormous ramifications on how food packaging was handled from that point on.

But it's a terrifying case. It's absolutely terrifying. Because like, I mean, you could guess what motive might have been. But the idea of just like random acts of violence to this degree, it's horrifying.

It could have been anyone. It could have literally been anyone. And there was no kind of consideration for targets to what I could see. I mean, there could be, there could have been a target, but you know, like you're wildly sending out contaminated goods into the general public and you had no kind of idea of how many people would be taking those pills. Like the kill count could have been in like the tens of tens of hundreds, surely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, just an enormously scary situation. Charlie, do you know anything about this? No, everything about this, actually. It's the main reason why that old trend where you lick ice cream things and put them back is an actual felony. It's because contaminating products after this happened became a super serious offense because no one wants to take the chance of it happening again. Yeah, okay. The way you said that was very funny, though.

Where he's like, do you know anything about this? And you go, I know everything about this. I'm actually a preeminent expert. I tried to track this guy down. Charlie is the Tylenol murderer, actually. Oh, that's true. Imagine. That's a good one. I time traveled to change the FDA regulations on food product.

To make it safer for yourself in the future. But to do so, you had to cause it in the first place. I had to dirty my hands to protect myself from myself in the future. So far, we've determined that he was Jack the Ripper. There was something else we said he was. I can't remember.

So like Charlie, you're a pretty prolific serial killer, Charlie. I'm impressed. Yeah. We got to take these time traveling abilities off him. He can't be trusted. He keeps changing the world. Keeps using them for evil.

Yeah, I figured this might be something of a sore spot for you, Charlie, considering you're a hypochondriac. So I figured you might be scared of contaminated goods. Absolutely. What a pussy. But yeah, it's good to know that you're familiar with it.

Yep, and I am always fearful of contaminated goods, which is why usually if I get anything from anywhere, I'll always grab like a few back just in case there's some scoundrel before me, which I think most people do just out of safety.

I do that too, just because if it's chips or something, I assume the front one's been jostled so much. I just always prefer whatever's on the back. So yours is less about your safety and more about the quality of the chips? Yeah, because that's because I'm from the United States and have such a cushy lifestyle that that's my biggest problem I run into in the day. Broken up chips.

True. You can afford to take the extra effort of reaching towards the back of the chip aisle. Yeah, because I'm a man's man. I'm like classic America. I like to, you know, work for... No one wants to work anymore. I like to work for my unbroken chip bag. Some good old blue collar work of grabbing three chips back, baby. It ain't much, but it's honest work. Okay, Isaiah, would you say you're like kind of similar to Charlie in that you're fearful of things like that? I'm always fearful about strangers, I guess you could say.

I do have this kind of over-the-shoulder paranoia, I guess, when I'm in big crowds and stuff like that. But that's not so much because of food or something as much as it is, I guess, terrorism. Or mass shooters or something like that. That's more on my mind. But every now and then I'll get a little bit of, what if someone did something to this? It's more so violence, though, that I'm paranoid of.

Well, my next question was going to be, like, how do you guys deal with, like, eating out? Like, eating at restaurants or where your food is prepared by someone that you can't actually see? Like, that's always kind of made me a bit nervous. Yeah, I still do it, but yeah. Yeah, do you actually think about it much? Or do you try to just, like, push it to the back of your head as much as possible? No, I just try not to. I try not to think about it. Yeah, because you always hear, like, those horror stories of, like...

oh i like people people over at mcdonald's over here i've heard from several employees that are like i would never eat at mcdonald's knowing what goes on in the in the back rooms and that terrifies me and like you hear horror stories online of like people in offices like i don't know like blizzard officers like jacking off into like you know uh what would you call like office food basically

There's like a bunch of those stories out there. Yeah. What was the blizzard one? The breast food? Breast milk, I mean. They were stealing breast milk. Yeah. A bunch of like, food is scary. It's not funny. It's not funny. Wait, well, it's a little bit funny. It's bizarre. That's what's funny about it. The absurdity of it. Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant to say.

Yeah, Tylenol. Yeah, Tylenol. The Tylenol part is not funny. That's very scary. It's funny that you can't swallow them. That's what's funny. It's annoying. That's what it is. I feel like every single time... I'm going to hold on to that, by the way. I'm not forgetting that one. That is an absurd fact about Jackson Clark.

My life would be so much more efficient if I could do it because I wouldn't have to spend 15 minutes trying to chew through it and get it down. Do you grind them to dust? Do they even work at that point? That's what I was going to say. It can't be as effective. It just can't. Well, it is going in my stomach, so it is still effective. Or it's burning into your gums. You little goblin man. I don't let it sit in there for that long. I chew it as if it were normal food and then I just swallow it.

Oh, God, that's awful.

they just disintegrate as you oh i don't want to even think about it anymore it's gross just go just go to the thing yeah all right so uh big thank you to the sponsors of this episode doc doc and factor you'll hear about uh more from them later on in the episode also show notes below um document full of research and sources you can find it in the description and we're also on audio platform so please check us out there and recommend us to a friend and family and your moms and dads and all of those good things

Just share the show around. It helps out a lot. Really appreciate it. Now, let's talk about the Tylenol murders. Who wants to start with the chronological history?

I'll take the chronological history. 1982, there was a series of mysterious deaths that occurred in the Chicago area in a short duration of time after several individuals rushed to the hospital with symptoms that confused the doctors. The deaths were quickly linked to a single source, and from that point forward, massive nationwide panic ensued, leading to one of the most confounding and sensational mysteries from the 80s.

Despite extensive investigations and a few promising leads, those responsible have never been identified and the case remains unsolved. Yeah. I mean, it could have been anyone. It really could have been anyone. It could have been like a kid from the local elementary school just fucking around with cyanide that he found. It was like ridiculously easy to contaminate goods at the time. As kids were known to do, playing with cyanide at the local elementary school. Yeah.

I don't know. How hot is it to find cyanide? Sorry if you didn't live a little as a kid, Charlie. I guess. I'm 29 years old, Jackson. I've never seen a cyanide capsule, shockingly. That you've known of. That you've known of. True. Don't they use cyanide in, like, making pest control stuff? No.

I have to imagine it's somewhat readily available. It's also a common ingredient in like jeweler equipment and stuff like that because it works as a good polish and stuff. So like the chemicals around and it's traded. So I could definitely see there being an elementary school kid with maybe a pest problem or his dad's a jeweler maybe or he's a jeweler. Maybe he's got access to cyanide. He'd have to distill the cyanide. He'd separate it.

I'm almost sure that I made cyanide in a chemistry class in college. It wasn't like the final end product. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just... I think the chemical equation for it is just a carbon and a nitrogen. Oh, we've got plenty of those. Oh, no! Those are everywhere. Hold on, I might be really wrong. Let me check that.

But I think it was used as like a middle product. Yeah, it's just a carbon atom triple bonded to a nitrogen atom. Yeah. So we made that as some like middle step in a reaction we were doing in a liquid form, I believe. But yeah, like it's

It's not a super rare chemical. It's just lethal if you were to ingest it. Is it a controlled good? Do you need like a license to buy cyanide? You do in like concentrated forms and stuff like that.

Okay, so is there, like, a version of cyanide that's not necessarily, like, lethal that is more readily available? And then, like, this deluxe version of, you know, killing material? Yeah, I would think so. I'm pretty sure. Like most, you know, controlled substances. Like, when you go somewhere and you buy, like, bleach or something, right? That's, like, a heavily diluted form from, like, the raw ingredients that you would use to make, like, mustard gas at large levels.

yeah okay and they use cyanide in like a bunch of like actual like cyanide tablets and stuff like that in order to actually kill like spies and stuff that's where i know cyanide from right there you go that's the spirit what was i saying so our first victim was mary kellerman

On September 29, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman woke up before the sunrise on a Wednesday morning with a head cold and sore throat.

She made her way to her parents, Denise and Jenna, who decided to help... Or sorry, Dennis and Jenna. I was about to be like, wow, this is incredibly progressive for the 1980s. I thought you were way more knowledgeable about this case than I was, and I may have made a mistake, and I thought you were saying his name was French or something? Yeah, you may not know this, but no. Denise being a girl's name, of course. Jackson's committing LGBT erasure.

on this famous story. No, not in this one. Straight washing them to Dennis. I like how you say not in this one, implying you do it in other episodes. She made her way to her parents, Dennis and Jenna, who decided to help to keep her home from school.

They gave her two extra strength Tylenol tablets that they had bought the day before to help her feel better. Minutes later, Mary was heard making her way to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Nothing seemed out of ordinary until her father heard a loud bang. Dennis rushed to the bathroom to check on his daughter, but received no response. Opening the door, he found Mary laying on the floor, violently shaking and entirely unresponsive.

Dennis and Jenna quickly called 911 and Mary was rushed to Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village, but it was too late. Mary was pronounced dead by 7 a.m. that very morning. Mary was extremely young and had no prior symptoms that would explain her death.

investigators went to her home to question her parents, but nothing seemed abnormal at all. The paramedics that took her to the hospital had taken with them the Tylenol that Mary had ingested earlier before, but no one yet suspected that this could have been the reason Mary fell so ill so quickly. Doctors initially thought Mary might have just had an unexplained cardiac arrest.

Man, what a tragic death. It's just so tragic and terrifying. Just like, so unlucky. So unlucky that like, that tablet. Because I don't think all the tablets in the, in the

bottles were also contaminated i think a lot of them were but there were still normal tablets in there i think i remember reading that well yeah they didn't replace the whole bottle that that would have been an unbelievably difficult task to get away with because you think you'd easily have footage of or at least knowledge someone would have seen you emptying out like a whole bottle to replace every single one yeah

So extremely unlucky that... I mean, it's just unlucky all around. Like, so unlucky and so sad. Also, it...

7 a.m uh she was pronounced dead cyanide works fast that's like that's so quick from oh yeah her taking it to you know passing away well that's the reason it was used like in your example it's like a uh an unaliving pill because you know it can't ask questions to someone who just fell over as soon as you start right yeah i assume it just like literally burns your insides right

I actually don't know how it works. I'm pretty sure it causes a reaction because the triple bond... It's something about the triple bonded nitrogen, I think, is so reactive that it begins to dissolve other carbon molecules, i.e. cells in your body.

That just sounds like a fancy way of saying it burns away your insides. Yeah, but yours was very unintelligent sounding. Yeah, that one was far more nuanced. That's what a college degree will get you.

It binds to iron and cytochrome oxidase, which prevents cells from using oxygen and stops aerobic respiration. Oh, interesting. Okay, so it basically stops your cells from functioning. This prevents the body from producing ATP. So basically, it causes your cells to stop fueling your body. That's pretty interesting. Something from moving? Like you said, aerobic?

aerobics or something no no so there's two different kinds of cell uh existence there's aerobic respiration and anaerobic respiration so what aerobic respiration means is that the cells within your body uh have to constantly be bringing in oxygen and uh like h2o and stuff to

cause their series of machinery effectively to function that produces ATB, which is the fuel that moves cells within your body that keeps you alive, right? So if the cell is no longer able to produce ATP, then the cell doesn't get any fuel, which means the cell dies. And those cells are in your stomach, your heart, your blood vessels, your lungs, stuff like that. So effectively turns off the cells in your body very quickly.

yeah okay that makes sense that's pretty cool i'm so freaking stupid though i thought you said aerobics like the fucking cells well that well that's where the word aerobic comes from that's you're not you're not that stupid that's where it comes from because since the cell needs oxygen molecules and hydrogen molecules to go about their functions then that's why we as living creatures have to take in air because we need our

Our cells to have the oxygen To continue to run Which is why breathing in and stuff Is called aerobics Because the cells are aerobic So you're right We got to the bottom of the etymology of the word aerobics Which is what everyone was waiting for As opposed to anaerobic cells That don't need oxygen I love that people show up to these episodes And just get inundated with the most Obtuse, out of place Left field facts Possible

like the etymology of the word my biology dropout has to help me somewhere okay oh no i think that's great now baby that pretend degree that spot on the wall where a degree could have been is coming into play right now okay sorry i'm not a college boy like charlie over here but some of us make do middle of a red thread episode yeah how can you apply your college degree to this episode charlie huh

Uh, well, using what I know about human sciences, I can tell you cyanide's very bad for the human body. Oh, actually that is, your degree probably would be useful in this. A little bit. That is an exercise science answer, for sure. Yep. If you're taking cyanide, it's going to inhibit your ability to perform in the gym.

I do a bunch of like exercise science majors in college and that's exactly what they sound like that's accurate. Can you factor cyanide into my nutrition plan please? I need to make this work somehow. We can microdose you with cyanide so you can be immune to it. It makes you even stronger due to the cell's aerobics.

Dude, I... Well, hold on, hold on. I googled how fast a cyanide kill and the entire page became a suicide hotline link. It's like, help is available. Surely there were, like...

Surely that isn't actually a route people choose cyanide, because that has to be one of the most painful ways. I mean, it's not peaceful, death, at all. If that's true, you'd feel a lot of pain, but it would effectively be kind of like choking to death, sort of, I would think. Yeah, I would think so too, yeah. And that would make sense with the convulsions on the floor that the victims experienced.

So the next one comes from Adam Janus. Postal worker 27-year-old Adam Janus also woke up on the 29th of September unwell. He called in sick and made his way to the Jewel Osco store in Arlington Heights, Chicago at 11 a.m. where he bought some extra strength Tylenol to help relieve his symptoms. Walking around the grocery store with his children, he also picked up a bouquet of flowers for his wife. That's...

Are you alright there? I'm sorry. I hiccup while drinking coffee. I started choking. But I did not mean to be that dramatic. I apologize. I thought you were choking up over how sweet that is. That he was buying flowers for his wife. Sounds like a sweet man. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. When

When he returned home, he made some lunch for his kids when he took the two Tylenol and began to make his way to bed. Like Mary Kellerman, within minutes, Adam fell to the floor and started to convulse. In later interviews, his daughter, Kasia, who was four years old at the time, recalls her mother screaming for help above her unresponsive father. Extremely traumatic experience, you could imagine. They called 911.

Who quickly took Adam to the Northwest Community Hospital, who immediately got into action trying to resuscitate him. But again, it was unfortunately too late and Adam Janus was officially pronounced dead at 3.15pm. Doctors were unsure about what happened with Adam and initially thought that it may have been a heart attack. Unfortunately, the tragedy that the family would suffer would not end with Adam alone and more was sadly to come. Like...

Again, I mean, I'm going to continue to harp on on how unlucky these individuals were, but the Janus family, I couldn't believe the level of like bad luck they had because Adam's family went back to his house to recoup and mourn over Adam's death. It was 5 p.m.

and they were all exhausted from the day's events. Adam's younger brother, Stanley, and his new wife, Teresa, had joined the rest of the family. They had all been crying so much that they both felt unwell and, of course, headaches are a symptom of grief. So, of course, you're crying that much, your body is like crying out in pain, basically. You're stressed beyond belief, you get a headache, naturally. So, they had a headache. They spotted a bottle of extra strength Tylenol out on the bench from when Adam had taken some earlier before.

Stanley grabbed the bottle and took a dose first, followed by Teresa minutes later. Shortly after, Stanley began to clutch his chest, collapsing to the ground in the kitchen. They called 911, who quickly responded, and they began to try and resuscitate Stanley when Teresa suddenly also collapsed to the floor. Eight paramedics arrived at the Janus house, working to stabilize Teresa and Stanley as the rest of the family watched on in horror. Like, I can't imagine...

How confusing, just like confusing that day must have been to like the family members. Like you lose your dad in a tragic event that you witnessed. You get home and everyone's trying to like support each other. And then it happens two more times right in front of you. Like actual nightmare fuel, nightmare fuel. Yeah. This one in particular led me to believe that maybe they did actually replace the entire bottle with cyanide because it

Or at least a majority. Yeah, because that is unbelievably unlikely that if he just slipped in like maybe two or three tablets, whoever was responsible, slipped in like two or three tablets, it would be crazy that all of them were consumed from this one bottle. Yeah, so I think...

From what I remember reading, there were definitely different types of tablets or pills contaminated and uncontaminated in the bottles. So it's not all of them. Not all of them were replaced, but also I don't think it was some...

a small amount of pills that were put in there it was probably like some some odds like 70 percent were contaminated and the rest weren't maybe i'm not sure the direct which is super weird to think about because like i mentioned the beginning replacing the whole bottle be very hard to do without getting caught someone would absolutely see somebody like overturning a tylenol bottle in the aisle or something though i guess what they could have done is taken like buy the tylenol bottles take them home empty them out and bring them back which is another theory

But I don't know. That's also a lot of cyanide. That's a lot. So the pill containers, the Tylenol, came from different stores. So I think this was obviously a...

concerted effort and I think if you're going to go through that effort you're probably not doing it in the store aisles probably right you're not contaminating them in the store aisles I'm sure you have it in here but some of the research they were doing was checking the security camera footage for anyone that was doing it in the store aisles and one of their suspects was someone that lingered around the Tylenol aisle for quite a while I remember that one okay

At least I think that I could be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that was one of their suspects because they had like information or some kind of like evidence that they were standing around like hovering the like where the Tylenol was for an extended period of time. The doctor who had looked after Adam at the Northwest Community Hospital got an alert that the Janus family were on their way back in. Trying to think logically, he thought maybe Adam's parents were so overcome with grief that they were having heart troubles.

but was confused when he heard that it was actually Stanley and Teresa who had had the exact same symptoms as Adam.

Unfortunately, Stanley died at 8.15pm that evening and Teresa was put into a coma where she would later be taken off life support on October 1st. Adam's wife and kids were immediately put into quarantine at the hospital as the officials immediately suspected something in their home was causing the deaths. Investigators went to the family home and began to go through everything, the flowers that had been bought earlier that day, food in their kitchen, coffee grounds, absolutely everything.

everything how so how do you solve how do you cure like cyanide poisoning what is it too late once it's already happened i think it's too late uh probably too late i think the only thing you could do maybe is like somehow try and flush it out like get it out you'd have to overflow the system to try to get the cyanide out of the way like cyanide so i was like i was passively reading over here

to just know more about it the lead the ld50 which is what's legally like the lethal dose the ld50 of cyanide is only 1.5 mgs per kg or in other words it's 1.5 milligrams for every kilogram that the thing weighs so like jackson how many what do you weigh in kilograms you're the one who i weigh 70.

UA 70. Okay, so that means it would take about a little over 100 milligrams of cyanide to kill you. And an extra strength Tylenol is like, what, 250 milligrams? Yeah. So you're consuming two and a half times your lethal dose with one pill. Yeah, I think it's an even stronger concentration, though, because I did read reports that it was the strength of the cyanide in the pills...

was something like 10 times or even 100 times. Oh, God, yeah. So you're taking, like, an elephant's dose of lethal cyanide with one of those pills. Which means that it's probably not something that's going to be flushed out. Yeah, even if you add materials to flush something out of someone's system, you're not going to have enough. The body won't take enough for that. Yeah, you're dead as soon as you swallow it. Like, in order to...

immediately flush out the system you also have to be aware that the patient is suffering from a cyanide poisoning as well which is obviously not something that would be immediately obvious to a doctor upon first glance I assume because it would probably just look like a heart attack like they said. Yeah.

terrifying what up yeah like as soon as you swallow it you're gone because like cyanide kills quick um within like 10 minutes so it's not even enough time to really process what's happening much less do something about it not that you could at that dose you know horrifying death

so sad okay so then Stanley um yeah so Stanley and Teresa as well as Adam all tragically passed away so that makes four victims um

So the investigators thought that the family may have been poisoned, but didn't have any experience on how to move forward with the investigation. So they called the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Safety Center. So this center is specifically known for its expertise in toxicology, and they aided in providing crucial information to identify what was currently happening. And after analyzing the symptoms, suggested that they may have died from cyanide poisoning. Correctly, correctly suggested that.

and they got samples of the victim's blood to send for testing. They spoke to Adam's wife, Teresa, who mentioned that she could only recall three things that Adam had consumed in the day, peaches, coffee, and Tylenol. And peaches aren't usually sources for cyanide, but I guess also Tylenol isn't either. I know cherry pits have cyanide in them, but people don't know the pits. Yeah, apple cores, right? That's always like the rumor. That's right, apple cores, yeah.

So I wonder, peach pits might, but it's not enough to be lethal, you know? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know nearly enough about that. Yes, obviously the Tylenol is the weird thing out of the bunch. Peaches aren't lethal most of the time. Yeah. All right, before we move on to continuing along with the timeline, the chronological timeline, let's take a second to hear from the sponsors of this episode.

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So while all of this was happening, a 27-year-old Mary Reiner was at her home in Winfield, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago. And she had very recently given birth to her fourth child. And this was her first day home after being released from the hospital. After not feeling well, she took two extra-strength Tylenol at 3.45 p.m. in the afternoon. And within minutes, she also fell to the ground. Her husband, Ed, arrived home just as she collapsed, called 911, where she was taken to Central DuPage Hospital and pronounced dead at 9.30 a.m.,

There was another victim right after on the same day at 6.30 p.m., a 31-year-old single mother of two, Mary McFarland, working at the Bell Phone Center in Yorktown Mall when she began to complain of a headache. She went into the back room and took some extra-strength Tylenol to help her get through her shift, and within minutes she collapsed to the floor convulsing. She was immediately taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove where she was in critical condition until pronounced dead at 3.15 a.m. the next morning.

These people... So, Mary Rayner and Mary McFarlane, both, like, they must have been, like...

supported pretty well by the doctors to survive like a whole 12 hours almost with cyanide poisoning. I think the standard protocol is like being put into a coma like a vegetative state to try and fight it. Yeah. And then the final victim here the last victim is on the 29th of September a 35 year old flight attendant Paula Prince had

I just landed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. She went into a Walgreens at 9.30 p.m. with security footage showing her waiting in the checkout line with Tylenol. She then went to her home on North LaSalle Street where she took some of the Tylenol alone. No one was around to call 911 and she died by herself in her apartment. She wasn't found until 5 p.m. Friday, October 1st after her sister called the police when Paula didn't show up to a dinner they had planned.

God, that's sad. All of these situations are so fucking tragic. Horrible, horrible. So tragic. There's just no motive. It's just so unnecessary. Alright, so those were the victims of the Tylenol murders. No connections between each other other than the family, obviously. The three Janus individuals who...

who uh you know died on the same day they were obviously connected but there were no connections between anyone else as far as i could see so it was just basically a bad uh bad lottery draw and then isaiah would you like to take the investigation yes i would i'll also mention i looked it up because i was curious it would take about 13 to 15 raw peach pit kernels to kill you

That's quite a bit. That's actually less than I'd think. I was going to say, when I think of that, I think it would be like 100 peach pits, but that's not a crazy amount. What it is, is they contain...

How many apple cores to kill you? Hold on. What it is, is they contain amygdalin, which the body converts into cyanide. However, if you were to take a peach seed... Wait, what? Our body converts it into cyanide? Yeah, because it's a biochemical process that breaks down chemicals in there. And one of the byproducts of taking amygdalin and mixing it with your natural chemicals is it creates cyanide as a byproduct. Your body creates cyanide as a byproduct...

Kind of a lot, actually, but it's in such trace doses it doesn't do anything. Oh, my body's such a fucking idiot. But when there's that much amygdalin, it creates a lot of cyanide and your body digests it and makes it lethal. Because of that, you're actually fine. Like, you could consume way more than 15 peach seeds if you just swallow it because seeds are really good at passing through things digestive tract and not breaking up. If you were to chew up

13 to 15 peach seeds and then swallow them that's what could kill you okay great luckily there's no one here with any issues swallowing small little pit shaped things so we should all be fine yeah yeah of course as long as you're not jackson yeah that's how you kill jackson swallow these 13 seeds no i can't do it surely okay wait so surely if 13 seeds are enough to kill you if chewed up uh like two or three would be enough to like cause some real damage though

Well, okay. 13 to 15 can kill you.

That's probably the LD50. I'd say you could take like five and get like kind of stomach upset. So it's actually a thing like growing up around like Appalachia, the kids would like chew on like peach twigs and stuff like that and get sick. And the reason they'd get sick is because they were like they were micro dosing cyanide. But there's stories of kids dying from like chewing up seeds like apple seeds and stuff like that.

I'm assuming this is stupid but I'm assuming there's no kind of natural tolerance you can build up to cyanide by like chewing on the peach bits

So you can, like some toxins, you can build up a tolerance because it's all about your body recognizing it. But where cyanide like starves out the aerobic process, I would think what happens is when you like consume cyanide, some of your cells die, but it's not enough that other cells can't fill in in their place. So...

I think those cells would just die and new ones would come in. I don't think you could build up a tolerance. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. So I could be wrong about coming with like the learned knowledge of the previous death. Exactly. Yeah. Hypothetically new games. It would be new game plus. But so yeah dude imagine if you could have an immunity to like cyanide though. Imagine the things you could do all the peach pits you could eat but

God, you'd be so strong. You'd be so strong. Invincible. Some emperor or Caesar or something had micro-dosed poison his whole life so that if anyone tried to assassinate him, they couldn't. And then he was being attacked by an enemy army and tried to poison himself to kill himself, and it didn't work. He was brutally tortured and murdered.

Is that a joke or did that actually happen? That actually happened. I swear that actually happened. Well, according to the historical texts, and we can't trust those. According to the rule of two, the sacred text. So true.

That Roman emperor was Darth Plagius. Yeah, he was microdosing on Sith poison. It was Darth Maul, that's who I'm thinking of. Legend has it that King Mithridates VI, who ruled in northern Anatolia around 120 BC, so feared being poisoned that he built up immunity by ingesting small doses of multiple toxins over time. Yes, and then he was being attacked by an enemy army and then couldn't poison himself.

Yeah, his cell aerobics must have been insane then. When he was finally defeated by Pompeii, he attempted to poison himself but was unsuccessful because he had built up such an immunity to said poisons. Couldn't even kill himself via poisoning. That's nuts. That's great. What a tragedy. Jackson spends all this time building up a tolerance to swallowing pills, but it's the pill that kills him. Yeah.

All right. You want to start with the investigation? Yes. Sorry. I have this tangent. The victims had all been taken to different hospitals, so there was a delay in connecting the deaths. In fact, it wasn't until a fireman named Philip Capitelli, which is the most Italian guy ever. Hey, anybody hear about this whole Tylenol thing going on? The most stereotypical name ever made, basically. Yeah, Philip Capitelli. Yeah.

My God, it's all coming together. Hey, yo, we got a case on our hands.

A lieutenant of the fire department, Chuck Kramer, was also on the... These are fake names. They're not. They're real. It was the 80s. It was a different time in America where people had cool names. What city was this in again? This was all in Chicago. Yeah. Okay. We need to come up with the Chicago fire captain. What's his name? Chuck Kramer. Even like Stanley. Stanley is like a really typical 80s name in my eyes. Yep.

was also at the scene when Stanley and Teresa collapsed and has said that it was, quote, one of the worst calls I've been on in my life. He had called and spoke to nurse Helen Jensen, who then took their notes to the medical examiner and police who initially didn't take what she was saying seriously. Helen, frustrated at not being listened to, desperately attempted to make them listen to reason. It's got to be the Tylenol. The three people took the Tylenol.

She even went to Jace's home and found the bottle of Tylenol, where she opened it up and counted the number of pills. There were six pills missing and three people who had taken two pills, each dead, confirming that they had all taken Tylenol from the same bottle.

She continued to search in their garbage and found the receipt and took it to the medical examiner, but this avenue was still not taken seriously. Why wouldn't they take it seriously, like, immediately? No, I mean, I guess they're operating on the assumption that this kind of stuff can't be tampered with, and they're like, no, no, no, you silly Helen, or whatever her name was. Helen, Tylenol is good for you. It's safe for you. I mean, like, frankly, it's probably the absurdity of it all, right? Like,

We have three family members poisoned. Someone in the family must be poisoning them. And then someone's like, what if it was someone who never met the family and was just poisoning various Tylenol bottles? You know?

Yeah, but the contention point here is that they were poisoned. They didn't even assume that they were poisoned, even though all three of them had died. Well, I guess they assumed that they had been poisoned, but not the source. Not from the Tylenol. And then Helen was saying, it's the Tylenol. And then they couldn't conceive of it being the Tylenol, potentially, even though that is literally a chemical compound that could be tampered with and could cause some kind of upset tummy to the point of death, literally. Even if it was just normal Tylenol, I assume if it was like...

concocted incorrectly it could cause that so you know i don't see why they just like threw that out immediately they oh also because charlie asked uh depending on the variety of apple the lowest possible lethal dose is 150 seeds that's quite a bit more than a peach yeah and they need to be crushed they need to be crushed too

Oh, okay. So like crush it into some kind of like smoothie. So you get 150 apple cores. Crush them up. Make a nice smoothie out of it. Well, each apple core contains several seeds. So you'd realistically need like what? Like 30 apple cores?

I remember hearing about that, you know, that fun fact when I was a kid and then being terrified of apples from that point on. I would not eat apples when I was younger due to the fear that I would die. And maybe that's why to this day you can't swallow pills because you're thinking about the apple seeds. It's all to do with that. It's all connected. Eventually, the investigators ended up seizing the two bottles of Tylenol, but when they looked at them, everything appeared to be perfectly normal, but they did have the same batch number.

They then smelled the bottles of Tylenol and discovered that they had a soft scent of almonds. Cyanide does not always give off this bitter almond odor, but not everyone is able to detect the scent, so it is interesting that they were able to during the investigation, perhaps an indication of the strength of the cyanide in the pills. Yeah, that's a, you know, the thing you hear. Cyanide smells like almonds.

Well, a little fun fact. There's something called bitter almonds, and those are like basically untreated almonds or some shit. And if you consume like 12 of those, you die. Oh. Yeah. That is a fun fact. That was a really fun fact, Charlie. Thank you. I've actually been afraid of almonds because of that, because it can happen. It's not common, but it can definitely happen. Yeah. Consuming six to 10 bitter almonds can cause severe poisoning.

So bitter almonds are like untreated almonds. So they have to like take the almonds and make them consumer ready by like

treating them yep so they're raw almonds so basically the almonds that you get are like not raw i guess what do they do with those almonds to make them safe to eat i have no fucking clue they put them through a chemical process that that degrades the cyanide connection i imagine give them a carbon talking to they say don't hurt anyone out there okay

You gotta give that company a bad name. Yeah, well, 50 of them is like a confirmed lethal dose regardless of age. The specific dose is, depending on the strain of almond, 0.5 to 3.5 mg per kg. So, wow, 0.5 mg to kgs at times. Like you said, you were 70 kgs. Why are we so hyper-focused on this?

Because you're Australian. I have no idea how many kigs I weigh. I have absolutely no idea. You're Australian. You're metric. So you're just giving everyone an idea of how much food they would need to kill me. I'm not saying that if someone also lives in Australia and comes across Jackson, this is the exact number of almonds that would be needed to kill him. Or feed me 15 untreated almonds. And that'll do the job. If you're 70, that means you would only need to consume 35 milligrams.

of uh bitter almonds to uh die okay great good to know i'll try to consume under that 35 milligrams is like nothing wow yeah that's wild basically yeah man that's super lethal dang

Alright, well, that's good to know. Wait, what is the most lethal compound then? Like, the thing that you need the least amount of to kill? Like, out of any compound? Yeah, is it the one that the Russians use to assassinate people on foreign soil? You mean that Novichok gas? Yeah, maybe, or something starting with S, like Sarachin or something? Oh, you're talking about, um... Oh, God, what is it? I know exactly what you're referring to, I can't remember now.

I feel like I got it right. I think it's sarin. I think it's just sarin. Oh, yeah. It's sarin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sarin. Is that the most lethal? It might be. It's a nerve agent. Now I'm just interested. We're just reading into the... Yeah, okay. So botulinum toxin. Botulism, yep.

botulinum toxin you remember how the other things I've been reading are like 5mg to kill like 10mg per kg to kill botulinum is 1.5 to 2 nanograms per kg yeah you want to know a fun fact about that toxin it's what they use in Botox yeah that's why it works because it like kills the cells it like freezes them in your face

Yeah, you want to know another fun fact about that toxin?

You can get that from consuming poorly processed, not poorly processed, poorly handled foods. So like, you know that old expression of don't eat a can that has a dent in it? It's because you can get botulism. And botulism is that toxic. It is that toxin. And it's fundamentally just going to kill you. Like, you can survive. Like, there was a case of gas station nachos leading to like eight or so cases of botulism. And a few of them actually pulled through after they were paralyzed for a few months.

Wow. So then it's less effective than cyanide. So in that instance, it is, yeah. Because you consumed a lower amount of it than the cyanide. Right, okay. It was in the nacho cheese. Avoid nacho cheese then. Avoid gas station nachos, yeah.

Alright, do you want to continue Isaiah? Yeah, so just in case anyone needs to know, if you're at a skin care clinic looking for botulism injections and Jackson Clark walks in, you need about 100 nanograms to kill him dead. How many facelifts do I need? That's .01 milligrams. Yes.

To just absolutely send Jackson to heaven. I am. I'm never going outside again. You've given people too much information. Everyone's a threat now. Even the local grocer is a threat with the amount of apples he has.

I could read. Okay, hold on. I'm getting like autistic about this. I'll quit. This was my entire college career. Chemistry classes and biochem classes and stuff. I could go on, but I'll go back to this. The entire reason you did that was just to find out how much... I got into it and was like... Because I went in thinking I'd be super interested in like the medicine side of it. And I wasn't. I was super interested in like the chemical process side of, you know, like...

side but biochem side stuff like that um right i thought that was really cool and then i dropped out because of my silly little youtube career um just cryptids but way cooler than the cryptids are way cooler than botulism like they are

about being honest but like getting to look at some of this now i feel like i feel like a child but i'll go back i'll go back to the story okay when looked into more closely some of the pills in the bottles did look distinctly different to the majority they were bigger and the powder inside clumpier and the capsule encasing had begun to deteriorate from the cyanide northwest community hospital ended up getting the results back from the blood samples they sent to the lab

And it confirmed the cause of death as cyanide poisoning caused by a massive amount of cyanide found in the victim's systems. They were found to have had 100, even 1,000 times more than needed to kill someone. They began to contact all of the other hospitals and the link between the victims and Tylenol was confirmed. Yeah, you're not getting a 1,000 times dose out of your system. Oh, no way. Absolutely not. Yeah, no.

Which makes sense why some of the individuals perished quicker than others as well, because I think there were different strengths in each of the pills, basically. So it wasn't like a...

The person doing it didn't have a perfect process. He was just dumping cyanide inside. Because what the tablets are, for those of you at home that don't know, they're the types of tablets that you can pop apart to pour the powder into your water if you need to do it that way. Or you can swallow them whole like a normal person. I wouldn't know anything about the other route. Um...

So what they would do is like they'd pop the capsule open, replace the powder of the actual Tylenol compound, like just flush it out and then replace it with the cyanide compound inside. Screw the cap back up, put them in the pill bucket, whatever you call it, and then seal it back up and put it on the store shelf. That's the route they took to conduct this. That sounds about right.

Tylenol, name derived from the drug N-acetyl paraaminophenol, is owned by Johnson & Johnson. Man, getting to say a name like that, it's been so long. It's owned by Johnson & Johnson, a company founded in 1886 by three brothers, James, Robert, and Edward Johnson.

Tylenol was manufactured by McNeil Laboratories in 1955. It avoided competing with aspirin by using the ingredient paracetamol. Australians also have access to paracetamol. We call it Panadol over here. Oh, interesting. So are you saying you don't get Tylenol because Tylenol includes paracetamol and then you guys have a different way of getting paracetamol?

So Tylenol, I think is like the brand name, right? It's like, it's not the actual drug itself. The Tylenol over there uses paracetamol, which we also have over here just as a different brand name, which is Panadol over here. I think we just, I think it's like a few years ago, we just started to get Tylenol as a brand as well. So it's coming over.

Okay, cool. And then you have a note here that says I tend to prefer ibuprofen though. Yeah, just for people out there who might suffer from headaches as much as I do. I've had more success getting rid of them through ibuprofen. Not sponsored. At first they marketed the product for children to reduce fevers. It was a package like a fire truck and the catchphrase was for little hotheads.

Look how cute that is. Look how cute the little fire trucks are. Why don't they do shit like that with medicine anymore? All right. It's probably because it's easy contaminated. I don't know. You know, maybe sometime we could talk about this thing called the Tylenol murders that explain why they don't do that anymore. Yeah, immediately made sense why they wouldn't want to make medicine all cute and like you realized midway through the sentence. Why don't they? Oh, still, it is cute though. Like I can't

A kid has, like, a fever, and it's like, oh, here comes the fire truck to help you, you know? It's cute. Yeah, I prefer that over how, like, medicine looks now. All boring and, like, uh, yeah, lame. White pack. You know what? I want more consumer-marketed medicine. Yeah. Make me care about the medicine. There you go. Give me feelings. I want it to be, like, Borderlands. Like, they're all, like, these punk names and stuff, like...

In 1959, Johnson & Johnson bought the company and started to manufacture the over-the-counter pills in 1960. At the time of the poisoning scare, Tylenol held approximately 37% of the American market for paracetamol, and it was responsible for 19% of Johnson & Johnson's corporate profits at the time. They were, by all metrics, the most trusted brand on the market, especially the gelatin capsules as they were easier to swallow.

At the time, Tylenol was the best seller in non-prescription pain medication in America, and it was immediately obvious that they were about to have a huge crisis on their hands. Johnson & Johnson's Assistant Director for Public Relations, Robert Andrews, later said that he had received a call from a news reporter in Chicago. He was told that a medical examiner had just done a press conference and warned the public that people had died from ingesting cyanide-poisoned Tylenol.

This was the first that they had been made aware of the incident, and they were forced into action from this point forward. Former Chairman James Bork created a strategy team with seven important members of the business. They had two immediate important lines of thinking. First, the most important, how do we protect the people? And second, how do we protect the product?

That's very generous of you to put their priorities in that order. Yeah, I mean, that's what they said. The cynic in me is like, yeah, right. Okay, sure. Word was spreading quickly about the deaths. Stores were removing either all Tylenol or the ones with the same batch number from their shelves.

Police were driving around neighborhoods of Chicago with horns and speakers alerting the community not to take Tylenol as it was responsible for what they knew at the time, three deaths, that being the deaths inside the Janus family. Charlie, how crazy, just imagine this, like back then, cops roaming the streets with megaphones, like shouting out, don't take Tylenol. Whatever you do, don't take Tylenol. Tylenol is bad for you. Flush out your Tylenol. And people just like complied. Broadly speaking, everyone did what they said.

I actually cannot imagine that happening in this day and age. I was just about to say. People would be taking that Tylenol and downing it because the police stopped at the video. I'll show you. There would be viral Twitter threads about, like, don't listen to them. We have to take this Tylenol. We can't trust their word. They're trying to take that Tylenol away from us. Yeah, they're stepping on our freedom. Exactly.

there's twitter threads that are like thread how tylenol actually affects your iq and increases your brain capacity the elites don't want you to know yeah they don't want us to break free from the programming don't listen to them yeah like literally i could absolutely see that happening now whereas back then it was like like communities obviously came together and we're like yeah this obviously is probably true

Which pill is it people figured out recently makes your eyes lighter color? I'm pretty sure it was Benadryl. That if you take enough Benadryl, if you have dark colored eyes, it bleaches them effectively over time. Oh, that's cough syrup. I love cough syrup. Okay, sweet.

You love cough syrup? That's interesting. Is that your official opinion? I mean, don't you? No. What are you talking about? Jax are just admitting to, like, doing lean on the show. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I don't drink it for fun. It's just like, if I have a cough, it tastes good. You know people...

Oh, you drink the liquid cough syrup, I see. Oh, is that something different? Yeah, usually an adult takes a pill. Oh, well then yeah, no, I don't do that. I meant the liquid. People frequently, you know people frequently drink cough syrup to like get high, right?

I'm a good boy. I don't know anything about how people take drugs or anything like that. I don't do drugs at all. It's a benzo, right? I believe it's a benzo. So if you drink it, it makes you super... I mean, not really high. It's like a depressant more than anything. It's like super drunk, basically. Drowsy. Yeah, I got addicted to Night Nurse, which I think is along the same lines. You were

Jackson got addicted to lean. Night nurse actually had a huge problem because of that. People like Jackson. People abusing it. It wasn't so much the feeling, it was the sleep that it gave me. It was like the most rested I had ever felt afterwards. So I don't know if it was like an actual high or anything. It was just like I finally experienced sleep, which was really nice.

It gave me a warm feeling. But yeah, I had to stop, obviously, in terms of using it whenever I'm sick, because it's probably not good for you. Jackson over here like, no, I'm crazy. I take cough syrup all the time. Love it. Can't get enough. Yeah, that's my weak point. It's cough syrup. Yeah, it's full of dextro. That's great.

Good job, dude. All right, where were we before I admit to any other cough syrup that I like to drink? People were justifiably sent into a panic.

Poison control centers were struggling to keep up with the amount of calls that were coming in from people trying to get answers on if they were going to be okay or if their Tylenol bottle was affected. Over 90% of the American population knew about the Tylenol poisonings within the first week. The media and officials were very effective in ensuring the general public knew of the situation. Yeah. And then there's footage here. I'll make sure that it goes in the video of this episode. Footage of like police driving around alerting the community and stuff. Just very cool archive footage. Mm-hmm.

Different time, different time. Before nowadays, where it's like, I actually took the forbidden Tylenol, and it actually makes your genitalia larger, and that's what the government wants to stop you from. Well, the issue is, like, you get all your information out from the internet, or, like, you wouldn't have the police roaming around the streets, like, you know, yelling at you through megaphones anymore. It's all through the internet, and then, obviously, if you're on the internet, you're open to misinformation in general, so...

Johnson & Johnson had originally warned not to take any Tylenol from the batch number MC2880, but as I started to hear about the other deaths, it was discovered that the bottle Mary Reiner had was a different batch, 1833MB. And then Paula Prince's bottle was 1801MA.

They immediately warned the public not to take any Tylenol until the investigation into the tampering had been completed, even putting out paid advertisements telling people not to use any of their products. They halted all production and withdrew the capsules from every store in Chicago and the surrounding area. In doing this, they actually found two more contaminated bottles, which led them to order withdrawal of 31 million bottles across the entire country. Fuck me.

Holy shit. The entire process of recalling the product and reestablishing the brand later on cost Johnson & Johnson over $100 million, which is around $260 million in today's dollars. Overnight, their market share dropped to just 7%. Yeah, crazy. All over like maybe I think eight contaminated bottles in total.

Which is, obviously they had no other option though because... I mean, you can't just leave it out there. Who knows how many there are. I mean, it could be a guy at a factory, it could be a guy at a packaging warehouse within Tylenol. They have no idea, right? Yeah.

uh well wait wait due to the different batches that were uh contaminated like there were different batch numbers that were contaminated they very quickly ruled out that it wasn't something that happened at like a manufacturing level it would need to happen at a consumer facing level like someone someone picking it up from the stores themselves yeah because obviously it came from a bunch of different factories it wouldn't make sense yeah that makes sense

After testing 10 million bottles, Johnson & Johnson found 50 lace pills from 8 bottles in total. 5 belonged to the victims, 2 had been bought and were unused, and 1 was an unsold bottle sent back.

During this time, they set up an $1,800 line for customers to call with questions regarding the safety of their products. And they also set up another line for the news and media, which would be updated daily with pre-recorded statements and messages about the ongoing investigation.

They also offered a $100,000 reward for any information on who did it, although this has never been claimed. Yeah. So let's go over the theories.

I'll take it. Theory time. The first theory is about a disgruntled Johnson & Johnson employee. The theory suggests that the Tylenol murders were committed by an employee with a grudge against the company or one of its suppliers. This person would have insider knowledge of the company's products and processes that could have poisoned the Tylenol capsules and act as revenge or sabotage.

The methodical nature of the tampering involving putting cyanide into the capsules indicates a level of familiarity with pharmaceutical production and packaging that an employee might possess. There are endless motives for why an insane person who feels they were scorned by the company might have done this. While the motive could have stemmed from the employee being fired or passed over for promotion, it's entirely possible that they were just disgruntled because they didn't get invited to a Christmas party. It's impossible to know, out of the million of potential reasons, why someone would do this unless they're caught.

One of the more believable motives could be that it was motivated by stock shorting. This doesn't even necessarily need to be an employee, but it could be a general motivation. Johnson & Johnson was an absolute powerhouse at the time and stock plummeting was guaranteed after the events that transpired. The murderer could have been motivated by taking advantage of this fact. However, this would of course create a very obvious trace to investigators and no one was found to have benefited from the stock disruption in this way.

Which is a really smart way of looking at that. That's a very creative method of trying to identify who it could have been through that. Like, yeah, checking out who would benefit financially from... Yeah, like if anyone made a killing off the stock market during that dip. Yeah, which is why I think it's a dumb thing, like a dumb way of doing that anyway. Because surely that's the first thing they would look at is like who benefits from Johnson & Johnson being, you know, taken down to this degree.

Following the poisonings, Johnson & Johnson and law enforcement conducted extensive interviews and background checks on numerous employees to identify anyone who might have had a motive for revenge. Despite this, no concrete evidence emerged linking any employee to the tampering, and there was no suspicious behavior or criminal history that could point to a potential suspect within the company. They also found no physical evidence such as cyanide or tampering equipment in possession of any Johnson & Johnson employee.

One significant challenge to this theory is that tampering likely occurred at the retail level rather than during production or distribution. The bottles were purchased from various stores across the Chicago area, suggesting that the tampering happened after the products were already on the shelves. It's unlikely that it was a store employee as well, considering the bottles were purchased from different stores. Yeah, so it's like... Yeah, it's hard.

the the your your your part about uh the stock market thing's funny could you imagine if like the day after all this comes out some like random joe invests four million dollars yeah

How did they catch me? Impossible. Really just hated Johnson and Johnson, so they decided to place a bet, basically, just for fun. And then the next day, that happens. And then you're the final suspect. Oh, no, no. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, no, I didn't mean it. The next theory is James William Lewis for extortion.

So here's a quote here saying... Wait, this is from the extortion letter. Oh yeah, sorry, I meant from the extortion. The quote, Gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to place cyanide, both potassium and sodium, into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill.

Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little. And there will be no time to take countermeasures. If you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far, I have spent less than $50 and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle. If you want to stop the killing, then wire a million dollars to bank account 8449597 at Continental Illinois Bank Chicago. Don't attempt to involve FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter.

A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything you can possibly do. My God, he's too powerful. He's got the power of cyanide on his side. The writer of this letter was a man named James William Lewis. He had sent the letter to Johnson & Johnson right after the news broke of the deaths and recall. When he was arrested, he denied having any part of the deaths, even though he had owned a book about poison and his fingerprints were found on the page that talked specifically about cyanide. Ha ha ha!

I mean, it's not funny, but it is also funny that he's this stupid. He admitted that he spent three days crafting the extortion letter and talked to the police on how he thought the killer most likely conducted the killings, buying bottles of Tylenol, adding cyanide to them and returning to the store and putting them on the shelves for others to buy.

While he admitted to writing the extortion letter, he said he never intended to collect the money. He said he wanted to embarrass his wife's former employer by having the money sent to the employer's bank account. God, this guy's a fucking imbecile. Just say it was just a prank. Like, literally the first example of it's just a prank, bro. Basically. Today, we're going to be spiking eight Tylenol bottles with cyanide. Let's see how Chicago police react. To prank my wife's former employer.

What the heck? What the hell?

This guy accidentally got in trouble? What? Yeah. This guy most likely dismembered and murdered this guy, but we obtained the evidence illegally, so he's free to go. How is that bad? That's so fucking ridiculous.

He was also charged with six counts of mail fraud in 1981, where he used the name and background of a former tax client, unsure if it was Raymond West, to obtain 13 credit cards. Finally, Lewis was charged in 2004 with rape and kidnapping on a woman in Cambridge. He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was to begin as the victim refused to testify.

Bro, lock this guy up. I don't care if he did it to the murders. What the heck? He did get locked up for 20 years. Not on that final charge. Wait, no. I think it was like 10 years for the fraud stuff. What the heck?

In the end, he wasn't found guilty for the murders, but was convicted of extortion and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Later, in 2007, investigators again looked over the timeline James gave them and realized that if he spent three days writing the letter, then he would have begun working on it before the first news broke about the death. They took this information back to James, who recounted his timeline. Recanted. Recanted. He, like, dismissed his original timeline and gave them a new one. Changed his mind. My bad.

Moving forward again to 2009, documents that were released from the Department of Justice showed that investigators thought that James was responsible for the Tylenol murders, but they simply didn't have enough evidence. He continued to deny any involvement and even submitted DNA samples and fingerprints to the authorities in 2010, which did not match any DNA on the bottles that contained the poison.

James was never charged with the murder and he passed away in July 2023. Helen Jensen, the nurse who was one of the first to piece together the connection between deaths and Tylenol tablets, firmly accepts that James William Lewis was the one responsible for it. Yeah, I, oh man, I don't know. I mean, I think he's probably the most believable.

Yeah, worth mentioning there is an interview with James, a video from 1982, where he's calling the cops stupid for missing the big blunder. I mean, he's got like a kind of history of being a bad person, obviously. And he was like, I don't know, but the person responsible for this really like try to extort the people in this way.

I don't know. It just feels like extremely stupid. This guy's insane. Yeah. He writes a letter saying that he did it and to send the money to this bank account. He gets arrested and then he says the bank account was his wife's former employer.

Yeah, so what happened there was his wife's former employer had basically scammed her and not paid her her final severance check or something along those lines. And so he was extremely resentful of that person, that employer. And so he hatched a scheme to get back at them. That's what his recollection of the events are. So he said the whole letter was to make him look like the Tylenol killer. Yeah, so it was written on paper.

papers from their office and obviously the bank account. So he's like framing them basically. That's what he says anyway. Also, important to note, they weren't in Chicago at the time of the Tylenol murders. Him and his wife, they were in New York at the time and there was no evidence that he had traveled back to Chicago, which is a bit of a stick in the mud for that theory, potentially.

Another theory is a man named Roger Arnold. A week after the Tylenol murders, Roger Arnold found himself in a bar in Lincoln Park where he apparently began to make strange comments about being the killer behind the murders and showing off a small bag filled with cyanide. He claimed getting cyanide wasn't hard to do. Roger also, in a case of it being a small world, worked at the same warehouse as one of the victims, Mary Reiner's father. The bar owner called the police who began investigating Arnold.

Searching his apartment only three days later, on the 11th of October, they discovered five guns, books on explosives, poisons, including one that detailed how to make cyanide, vials, beakers, test tubes, and white granulated powder.

While Roger admitted to possessing cyanide, police never found any during their search of his home. At the time of the murders, Roger's wife was undergoing care at Central DuPage Hospital, the same hospital that Mary Reiner had given birth to a week before she died, where she purchased the pills from was just across the road from the hospital.

He denied having any connection to the murders, however, several months later, he was arrested and charged with murdering a man at a bar in Chicago. He believed that the man had been the one who turned him in to the police. The man he murdered had nothing to do with anything with the Tylenol investigation and was completely innocent. For this, Roger was sentenced to 30 years in prison where he served 15 and died in June of 2008.

Isn't it crazy that this spawned two people that were like actually insane and killed people? Actual murderers, yeah. Yeah, fucking... Even if they weren't the ones that had anything to do with the actual Tylenol murders, they were somehow involved in this. It's crazy. Also, do you think they look similar? I feel like they look similar as well. Only slightly because they actually have crazy person eyes. Like both of them very clearly are mentally fucked.

Yeah. Roger's eyeglasses prescription is the worst thing I've ever seen. His eyes are four times larger than they should be and I hate it. Yeah, true. He's got the bug eyes. Look. They need to kill that guy. Well, he's dead. He's been dead for a while now. Thank God.

Another theory is just a random act of terrorism. The theory posits that the poisonings were never committed by an individual with a personal vendetta, but rather just an act of violence intended to cause widespread fear and chaos, and that the perpetrator aimed to create a sense of insecurity among the general public by attacking a common everyday product. The seemingly random nature of the attacks, with victims having no apparent connection to each other, aligns with the characteristics of a random terror act.

The randomness of the poisonings and a lack of clear motive or suspect perhaps indicates broader intent to terrorize rather than targeted act of murder. I don't know. Like, I feel like if it was a terrorist attack, like, those are usually, like, followed by some kind of, like, announcing of it, right? Not always. Taking credit. I feel like most cases, though. I don't know. Maybe Isaiah take this one since he loves the Unabomber so much. Woo!

Let's go. That's my boy. Unabomber. I will say real quick about the random acts of terrorism. It's very rare that like a terrorist attack occurs and someone doesn't claim it for a purpose, right? That's what I was saying. Yeah. Like, so I think, I think it's unlikely. Unabomber connection. Let's go, Mr. Teddy K. In 2011, the FBI conducted a review of the Tylenol murder case in which they began to look into if Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, could be connected.

could be contacted uh this well i guess you meant to say connected there right yeah because he's in jail they can contact he's off the grid we don't know where he is ted was so funny like journalists would always be like hey can i have an interview with you and he'd be like sure but i'm pretty busy it'll have to be like two years from now and then when that date came he'd be like i'm sick i don't want to have to reschedule

This request was part of a broader effort to revisit cold cases with new forensic technologies. Kaczynski, who was already serving a life sentence for his own series of mail bombings, initially...

That's such a funny line. He was already serving for his own side project. It's like there was some big math paper because Ted Kaczynski was a big mathematician. There's some math research paper that he contributed to and it's credited as Dr. Kaczynski and when you go to the glossary in the back, it says Dr. Kaczynski better known for other works. Yeah.

for his own mail bombings, initially refused to provide a sample voluntarily. The interest in Kaczynski came from the similarities in his pattern of random lethal attacks aimed at creating public fear, which bore some resemblance to the Tylenol poisonings. Kaczynski's parents had also lived in Chicago, in the Chicago area where the Tylenol murders occurred during the time of the poisonings. Kaczynski denied having involvement in the murders, writing that he, quote, never even possessed cyanide.

He also agreed to provide DNA samples if the government halted the auction they were planning to sell his personal effects. The auction went ahead with the profits planned to go to Kaczynski's victims.

While the idea is interesting that Kaczynski was also behind the Tylenol murders, it doesn't match his MO as closely as it may appear at first. The Unabomber picked specific targets and was ideologically motivated to do what he did, whereas the ideological impetus behind the Tylenol murders doesn't seem to be the same, if it even exists in the first place.

Authorities were also unable to establish a direct link between Kaczynski and the Tylenol case, and while no result regarding his DNA was made public, the case is still open and no charges relating to this case were brought against him. Kaczynski had a total of 16 bombs, claimed all of them, talked about them, and gave specific reasons for why he felt they were important. He would never do something that can only kind of tangentially be related to technology and then not claim it.

Yeah, he was definitely the person to claim that kind of stuff, especially if he's already in jail. He was pretty open to talk about all that. Yeah, I don't think that that has any bearing at all on the Tylenol murders at all.

They may have been inspired by one another to some degree, maybe. I'm not sure. So this one is a disguised murder. So this theory is that someone was attempting to commit a murder and wanted it to be disguised in the overall mystery of the mass killing. Interestingly enough, the Tylenol murders would eventually go on to inspire copycat killing when Stella Modine-Nickel poisoned Excedrin capsules with cyanide.

This resulted in the deaths of her husband, Bruce, and a complete stranger in that of Sue Snow. Stella had poisoned a batch of the medicine in order to trick the police into thinking his death was unrelated to her, and Sue was unfortunately caught in the crossfire.

Ironically enough, the police were quick to rule Bruce's death a death by natural causes with the attending physician citing emphysema. But Stella insisted that Bruce had been killed by a mass murderer slash poisoner because she'd get a bigger insurance payout if that were the case. You fucking idiot.

yeah it wasn't until they discovered sue snow had died in the same way less than a week later that the investigators were forced to reconsider bruce's death and explore the idea that stella was pushing which eventually led to her downfall how stupid like the moral of the story agreed is bad don't like she was ahead she could have got away with it well yeah murder is also bad well yeah yeah yeah yeah but she literally she

She could have got away with it. She genuinely could have got away with it. They already ruled it as an actual, just natural death somehow. And she was like, no, it's a mass murderer. Don't ask me how I know.

Regardless, it's entirely possible that these murders were conducted as an overall attempt to target one individual. A sort of smokescreen to conceal the intended target in a sea of chaotic, seemingly unconnected murders. There were more bottles that went unused, so it's possible that the person they had intended to murder was lucky enough to avoid the bottle of contaminated pills, or that the person they intended to kill was lucky enough to avoid the bottle of contaminated pills.

or potentially one of the victims in the murder was legitimately the target for reasons we may never know. It's definitely a compelling idea. I think that's probably the most likely if it's not someone. I think it's either that or someone just randomly wanted to murder people. Just cause chaos. Not necessarily like terrorism. No, I don't even think necessarily terrorism. Just like a serial killer that wanted to kill people.

It's kind of just... You're saying the same thing, just like a different way. It's a random act that someone committed because they're an evil fucking person. Do you think there's a distinction between those two things I say? Between like a direct one you're saying, kind of non-directional? No, a difference between like...

How would you describe it? So the difference between it being like a terrorist attack or just wanting to kill indiscriminate people just because you're a serial killer. I feel like there's a difference there. One is like ideologically driven, whereas the other is like...

Just a serial killer. I think it's the same as far as the evilness of it goes, but within the individual, I do think it's different in that some people are so convinced of the ends justifying the means. Whereas in the other case of a direct murder, it is the ends and the means being one and the same. Like you want this person dead, so you kill them versus I want this thing to happen and people have to die to make it happen. Both are murder. Both are unspeakable.

but it's a different psychology. Yeah, that's it, basically. I think it's just a different psychological drive to do it. And I think it's more geared towards a serial killer, honestly, because there was just no kind of

anything loud about like the person reaching out to authorities or media to like brag about it basically will be like yeah i'm claiming responsibility for it and here's why like ted kids as he did with his kind of stuff so i don't know i feel like it's more likely a serial killer or someone with those kind of tendencies wanting to just kill as many people as possible um without you know

being caught. Okay, so the long-term effects. How Johnson & Johnson handled this crisis has actually become a major case study due to how effectively they handled the situation. Many predicted that the tragedy would end the Tylenol brand for good. Many going so far as to say the brand would be gone within the year, but they continued on. They persevered. Just six months after everything happened, Tylenol became the first brand to use a new tamper-resistant packaging, something that is a standard today.

So you have the Tylenol murders to thank for how difficult it is to get into your pills now.

Which is good. It's a good thing. Definitely a good thing. They revealed a triple safety seal. The bottle would be in a box that was glued together. A plastic seal was to be placed over the neck and cap of the bottle. And the mouth of the bottle would have a foil seal stuck on. They knew that now consumers needed to trust the packaging. Hence the complete revamp to the product design and new three-step security. When reintroducing the product, they also lowered the price and changed the pill into a caplet, making it harder for people to compromise. They also announced that the product would be available in a box that was glued together.

They almost entirely changed the product from the ground up and how it was designed in order to sidestep the stigma the modus had garnered. So, I mean, at least something... I mean, they kind of have to, right? Yeah, they absolutely had to.

And luckily, like, luckily it happened because it's crazy to me that we lived up until the 80s and these like medicines were so easy to contaminate to that degree where you could just easily like open a pill bottle and change the contents of it and then put it back on a store shelf. Like absolutely madness how nothing to this degree happened before that. Yeah.

So not only did they successfully sidestep the disaster, they also somehow came out positioning themselves to be better than before. This was a huge win for Johnson & Johnson, with the public now seeking out their brand because they saw them as the safest with their new packaging designs.

So they kind of beat the industry to it. They realized that they needed to do it, but they did it in such a way that it made them also the most attractive offer on the market because it looked like a company that wanted to take customer safety seriously now. So people appreciated that.

So, yeah, a year later, the Tylenol bill, the Federal Anti-Tampering Act, the one that Charlie was celebrating before, was passed, making it illegal to maliciously cause or attempt to cause injury or death to any person or injury to any business's reputation by...

you know, changing a food, drug, cosmetic or other product. So like tampering with it. I don't know why that wasn't legal before that. It seems like something that was pretty common sense and should have been illegal. It shouldn't have taken this, but I guess whatever.

The victim's family ended up suing Johnson & Johnson, saying that the anti-tampering packaging should have already been in place, as there had already been numerous complaints with bottles being tampered with. They called Johnson & Johnson negligent and that they should have at least known and warned customers that the product was vulnerable to being tampered with. It didn't go to court, though, Tylenol choosing to settle for an undisclosed amount.

Again, the public took this positively as it seemed as though the company was at least attempting to fix an issue that many people didn't even know existed in the first place. They also said, quote, I mean, yeah, I mean...

I don't necessarily lay blame at Johnson & Johnson for this one. Do you guys? No. It just wasn't something anyone... It's something no one really could have seen coming at the time. That was just the norm. Like the TSA, right? Like

before the TSA, people just walk up to the airport and get on their plane, right? And now that's like an unthinkable process here in the States. It's just, I don't know. It's just one of those things, man. Like you could argue, oh, well, they should have done this earlier, should have done that earlier. But no one had imagined like, oh, what if someone just decides to load medicine bottles with cyanide? Like that wasn't even a...

register. Like Charlie said, just like no one's gonna steal a plane to ram into a skyscraper. It's inconceivable. And that's what the criminals obviously take advantage of. Right now, I'm sure that happens. What if, say...

you know, a few months from now, someone uses, like they blow up a gas station or something, right? And people are like, oh, well, it's kind of insane how easy it is to access huge amounts of gasoline at a pump or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now we have to line up. We have to go through security checks to like drive into a gas station. Or it'll be like the way it is in New Jersey or maybe it's Oregon. There's a couple states where someone has to pump for you. You can't do it yourself. Like...

Yeah. Like, again, we don't know what to be afraid of until something happens. I would assume that's more to do with, like, theft probably, right? Like, people driving off. I'd imagine. I'm pretty sure, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I wonder, like, how many things there are out there like that that will change in 20 years due to some big event that's yet to come.

So, yeah, they wanted to put the tragic event behind us and behind us they did put it. You may not believe it, but Tylenol is still around to this very day and it's still one of the most popular over-the-counter pain relief drugs in America and the world. Fun fact, it only came to Australia three years ago. So I'm still getting used to Tylenol. My body wasn't designed for it. The murders prompted...

A major overhaul in how over-the-counter medications and other consumer goods are packaged and secured, with many medications going the route of the early Tylenol packaging redesign. In response, tamper-evident packaging became the industry standard, ensuring consumers, that's you guys, could easily identify whether a product had been compromised. It also started the implementation of tighter regulations and oversight by the FDA, the

These changes not only restored public trust, but also set a global precedent for product safety, influencing packaging practices and regulatory policies worldwide.

That's all fine and dandy, but we've still never come across a definitive answer as to why this happened in the first place. Why someone wanted to murder indiscriminately and randomly, and to what ends they benefited from it in the first place. Due to the length of time since the event, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll ever know for sure. And the situation is just one of the many 80s cold cases that will still stand the test of time as one of the most bizarre mass murders ever committed. Yeah, I mean, kind of sad that we'll never know what actually caused this, but...

is probably just a mass murderer. Honestly, like what? That's my gut feeling. Yeah, I don't think we know the I don't think we even know the name of the suspect who did it, which is terrifying. Like this guy, whoever it is, they show up. They, you know, randomly kill like five people they've never met and then they're never heard from again.

Well, the thing that makes me think that it might have been James William Lewis and a lot of people like connected to the case, like, like, like it said in the script, like the department of justice believed it was him to some degree. Um, they just didn't have the evidence to back it up, but they believed it was him. The reason why I think it is most likely him maybe is because like, it did stop. Like surely if a mass murderer had that level of success from doing it, wouldn't they do it again?

I guess. Do something similar to that again? See, that's what scares me about this stuff because there's so many unidentified or unsolved murders across the country every year that it's like, yeah, maybe. And we don't know about any of it, right? Or I really hope it was that guy, the one you said. I really hope it was him because the alternative is terrifying. James Warren, yeah. Yeah, like potentially if this mass murderer...

was successful with the Tylenol murders, then went on to murder other people in different ways and we don't know that it's connected. Look, all I'm saying is the rule for all of these, like any case we ever cover, is never trust someone with three first names. Wait, yeah, it has been a recurring theme. It's true. Suspects have had three names. James William Lewis, okay? James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald, like John Wayne Gacy,

Dude, it actually keeps going. Jack the Ripper. Oh yeah, here's my buddy The. An old friend of mine. And his friend Ripper. Ripper Jameson. To wrap this episode up though, do you guys have any outlandish theories that you've got? Any kind of conspiracy theories about it? I don't. I think it's truly just a random psychopath that realized they could do this, so did it.

I think it's a tragedy. It's absolutely. Yeah. That's not a conspiracy. That's the human feeling. It's terrifying what kind of person could exist assuming they didn't do any killings after it that they could just randomly murder a few people they never met then just quit and go about a normal life. That's so weird.

Yeah, the fact that potentially the person that did do it didn't face retribution is extremely aggravating to me. Yeah, so hopefully it was that. I'm going to choose to believe it was James William Lewis because that makes me feel better. Yeah, because the rest of his life sounded like it was pretty awful. Yeah, and I didn't like him. Yeah. Alright, that's going to do it for this episode. I hope you guys at home learned something about it. Maybe you learned now why your Tylenol is so hard to get into. It's to prevent you from

dying from cyanide poisoning. So you should thank your lucky stars for that. And thank you guys for watching the episode. Really do appreciate the support. The continued support means a lot to all of us here over at the Red Thread.

Other than that, I'm done. I'm all good. We've got through everything to do with the Tylenol murders and all of the chemistry lessons. Yeah, thank you very much, Isaiah, for educating us. Appreciate knowing. Any excuse I have to drop random ways people can die, more than happy to. All right. Thank you very much, guys. We'll see you next time.

Bye, everybody. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Bye. And remember, it only takes six of those seeds to kill Jackson if you run into him. So remember that. Bye. Don't kill me, please. I don't even like apples that much. Don't listen to him. He's going to eat almonds. Bye.