← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
The Tylenol Murders: How Seven Strangers Were Killed in One Night Pt. 1
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Katie Ring
Foreign.
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Narrator
In the fall of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol. They weren't connected. They didn't know each other. They weren't targeted. They just reached for something they'd taken a hundred times before. A bottle of pills that had been sitting on a drugstore shelf. And it killed them. What made this case so terrifying wasn't just the body count. It was the method. Because whoever did this didn't need to get close to their victims. They didn't need to plan for weeks, case a neighborhood, or wait for the right moment. All they had to do was walk into a store, slip something into a few bottles, and put them back on the shelf. And then wait. Today, I'll introduce you to the case that changed the way Americans think about the products they buy, the stores they trust, and the things they take for granted every single day. It forced an entire industry to change its approach, and it created a wave of fear so powerful that it reached the White House. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today. I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's get into the series of bizarre deaths that investigators quickly realized were part of something far more dangerous and the case we now know as the Tylenol murders.
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Narrator
On September 29, 1982, 27 year old postal worker Adam Janis had the kind of ordinary Tuesday that most of us don't even think twice about. He picked up his four year old daughter from preschool, then stopped at the grocery store near their home in Arlington Heights, a quiet suburb just northwest of Chicago. He grabbed a couple of steaks, some flowers for his wife, Teresa, and a bottle of Tylenol. It was nothing out of the ordinary, just a young father running errands, trying to do something nice for his family. But Adam was feeling a bit under the weather. So after he got home and got their daughter settled, he went into the bathroom and took a couple pills of Tylenol. A moment later he walked out, clutching his chest. Teresa could immediately tell that something was wrong and she called for help. When EMTs arrived on the scene, they were pretty sure that Adam was having a heart attack. But something about that didn't sit right. Because Adam was young, he was healthy, he didn't have a history of heart problems. And yet here he was, 27 years old, crumpling to the floor. While Adam was rushed to the hospital, Teresa called his brother Joe, who got there as fast as he could. Joe then called their third brother, Stanley, and he and his wife Terry, dropped everything and raced to the hospital to be with the family. And then Dr. Thomas Kim, the hospital's chief of critical care, walked into the waiting room and delivered the worst news a family can get. Adam was dead. His family didn't understand how this could happen. He was 27 years old, in perfect health, with a little girl at home and a wife who'd been waiting up for him. And now he was gone. With nowhere else to go, the Janices went back to Adam and Teresa's house in Arlington Heights to be together in Their grief. But the night wasn't over yet. A little while later, Adam's brother Stanley walked down the hall to the bathroom. A minute went by, then Stanley stumbled back into the room where the family was gathered and collapsed. He was foaming at the mouth and his brother Joe noticed a cloudy white film had come over his eyes. Paramedics were called back to the Janices home. And in a strange and unsettling coincidence, it was the same crew that had responded to Adam's call just hours earlier. And when Fire lieutenant Chuck Kramer arrived at the scene, someone told him what happened. The exact same symptoms, the exact same progression. In the same house, in the same family, on the same night. Kramer had been thinking about Adam's case ever since the first call came in. Something had been nagging at him. The chest pain tracked with cardiac arrest, but other things didn't. Adam's breathing had been shallow and rapid. His eyes were fixed, dilated and non responsive. That wasn't a typical heart attack. And now here was his brother with the same exact symptoms. The scene was chaotic. Paramedics were working to keep Stanley alive. And his wife Terry was beside herself, clutching Lt. Kramer's arm as she wept. And then mid sob, she let go. She let out a small groan and collapsed to the floor. Kramer pulled out a flashlight and shined it into her eyes. They were fixed and dilated, just like the others. Whatever this was, it was not a heart attack. Stanley and Terri were loaded into ambulances and rushed to Northwest Community Hospital. The same hospital that had just declared Adam dead. Dr. Kim was on his way out for the night when he spotted the two new patients being rushed in on stretchers. He couldn't leave things like that. So Dr. Kim stopped, turned around and walked straight back into the icu. He couldn't wrap his head around what he was looking at. Three people from the same family, all struck down in the same way within hours of each other. He turned over every possibility in his mind. Carbon monoxide poisoning, botulism, some rare infection, but nothing quite fit. Whatever this was, Dr. Kim couldn't let it spread any further. Once he stabilized Stanley and Terry, he made a judgment call. He quarantined everyone who had been in contact with him. The family, the paramedics. Everyone was directed into a conference room and told to stay put until he could rule out a deadly virus. No one was allowed to leave. Chuck Kramer sat in that conference room and felt the frustration of a man who knows something is wrong but can't prove it yet. So he picked up the phone and Called his friend Helen Jensen, the only public health official in Arlington Heights, and told her what he'd seen. Helen didn't wait. She drove straight to the hospital and found Teresa, Adam's wife, who was the one person who had witnessed the entire course of the day. The Janices were Polish immigrants, so it wasn't easy to communicate. But through a translator, Teresa was able to walk Helen through everything. The school pickup, the grocery store, the steaks, the flowers and the Tylenol. Helen had a hunch, and she needed to see the house for herself. When she got there, everything was neat and undisturbed. She moved through the rooms methodically, looking for anything that seemed out of place. She checked the home. Jarred fruits on the counter, the lilies Adam had bought, a pot of black coffee and some cherry juice. She opened the refrigerator and looked for anything spoiled. Nothing. The house was clean and ordinary in every way. Then she went into the bathroom. On the counter she found a bottle of Tylenol and a store receipt from that day. There was a pill count on the outside, so Helen tipped it over and counted what was left. Six capsules were missing. Two for Adam, two for Stanley, two for Terry. The Tylenol was the only thing all three victims had in common. Helen brought her theory to an investigator from the medical examiner's office, but he dismissed it. Millions of people took Tylenol every day. That couldn't possibly be the connection. But Chuck Kramer heard her out, and he agreed. As terrifying as the idea was, it was the only explanation that made any sense. And if it was true, they had a much bigger problem on their hands. By then, Dr. Kim had already ruled out a contagious virus and lifted the quarantine. But the danger was just getting started. Later that night, Kramer got a phone call from a fellow fire lieutenant named Phil Cappotelli. Phil had heard about the Janices case on the dispatch radio, and it stopped him cold because earlier that same day, he'd responded to a call with the same symptoms. The same rapid collapse, the same fixed and dilated eyes. And the patient was already dead. What they did to your family. You're lucky to make it out alive. Streaming on Peacock.
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Narrator
on The night of September 29, 1982, fire Lieutenant Chuck Kramer was still sitting with the uncomfortable weight of Helen Jensen's theory about poisoned Tylenol pills when Phil Cappotelli called. And what Phil told him only made things worse. Earlier that same morning, before Adam Janis ever walked through his front door, before Stanley and Terry collapsed before any of it, a 12 year old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up in the neighboring suburb of Elk Grove Village with a sore throat. It didn't seem all that serious, so Mary went into the bathroom and grabbed some Tylenol from a bottle her mom had just bought the day before. Just a few minutes later, her dad heard a thump from down the hall. He called out to Mary, but there was no answer. He called out again, but still nothing. So he pushed the door open and found his daughter unconscious on the bathroom floor. Mary was rushed to the hospital, but there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. When Chuck Kramer heard that story, whatever doubt he had left evaporated. He called the medics who'd responded to Mary Kellerman's house and they confirmed it. The same symptoms, the same sudden collapse, and the same fixed and dilated eyes. He picked up the phone, called the hospital and told them that there's something wrong with the Tylenol. And he was right in that theory, because he would quickly find out that Mary Kellerman and the Janis family were weren't the only victims in the Chicago suburbs. That Same day, a 27 year old woman named Mary Reiner had taken Tylenol at home while recovering from childbirth. She was in the first days of new motherhood, reaching for something to ease her pain, and she was dead before the day was out. A 31 year old woman named Mary McFarland had also taken Tylenol at work for a headache, collapse at her desk, and died shortly after. Five people one day, all of them killed by something millions of people take regularly. By the end of September 29, 1982, Adam Janis, Mary Kellerman, Mary Reiner and Mary McFarland were all dead. Terry Janis was on life support and Stanley Janis was clinging to survival. But unfortunately, neither ended up surviving. Back at the hospital, Dr. Kim was trying to make sense of it all. The thing all of these patients had in common was the Tylenol. But it didn't make sense from a medical perspective. The active ingredient in Tylenol was acetaminophen. And acetaminophen poisoning didn't look anything like this. If you overdose on it, your liver fails over days, not hours. These people had been dead or critically ill within minutes. Dr. Kim pulled out his medical books and went through them page by page. And then something clicked. What if it wasn't the Tylenol itself? What if the capsules had been opened? What if someone had emptied them out and replaced what was inside with something else entirely? These people might not be dying from what was on the label. They may be dying from something that had been put in there deliberately. Dr. Kim took blood samples from Stanley and Terry and sent them to an overnight lab. If he was right, the results would confirm his theory and the implications would be enormous. Word was starting to spread within the medical and law enforcement community and it reached the Deputy Chief Medical examiner for Cook County, Dr. Edmund Donahue. When Donahue heard the Tylenol theory, one poison immediately came to cyanide. It shuts down the body's ability to use oxygen at the cellular level and it does it within minutes. The timeline and incredibly quick onset of patients symptoms fit perfectly. Luckily, there is also a pretty quick way to check. Cyanide has a very distinctive smell. It's a sharp bitter almond scent that's unmistakable once you know it. Donahue asked one of his investigators to open one of the victim's Tylenol bottles and smell the pills. Sure enough, bitter almonds. The capsules were rushed to the toxicologist who found that each tampered pill contained nearly three times the lethal dose of potassium cyanide. And when Dr. Kim's lab results came back, they confirmed it. Stanley and Terry Janis had lethal concentrations of cyanide in their blood. The victims hadn't just died because of the Tylenol itself. They had been deliberately poisoned. Someone had walked into a store, opened Bottles of over the counter medication right there on the shelf, swapped out the capsules and put them back like nothing had happened. What followed was a level of public panic that's difficult to fully comprehend. Within hours, the story was everywhere. Store clerks pulled Tylenol off of their shelves by the armful. The FDA issued an emergency warning against using Tylenol in any form. Chemists across the city were testing samples in their labs. Public health workers fanned out across Chicago neighborhoods, going door to door and telling people to throw out anything they had at home. Police drove down the streets with bullhorns, broadcasting the warning to anyone who could hear it. Johnson and Johnson, the company that made Tylenol, launched what would become the first mass product recall in American history, pulling 31 million bottles from shelves and testing more than 10 million capsules. The case even reached the White House. President Ronald Reagan tasked the FBI to investigate. The Illinois State Police were also brought in. And on September 30, 1982, just one day after Adam Janis died, detectives from every affected suburb joined the federal and state investigators to form what became known as the Tylenol task force. Almost 100 people showed up for the first meeting, and they all had the same question. When did the cyanide get into the bottles? Because the answer to that question would determine how widespread this was. If the pills had been contaminated during manufacturing, then the problem wasn't just limited to Chicago. It would be a national emergency, because any bottle on any shelf in any store in the country could be tampered with or contaminated. Thankfully, there was a way to figure it out. The task force pulled the lot numbers off the four poison bottles they'd recovered so far and traced them back to their origins. The bottles had come from two separate factories, one in Texas and one in Pennsylvania. They were made at different times in different places, which ruled out a single factory floor. They then traced the distribution chain for each bottle, the warehouses, the shipping routes, and the stops along the way. But none of the contaminated bottles had ever been in the same place at the same time during shipping. The poison hadn't been introduced during distribution either. That left one the store shelves. In 1982, a bottle of Tylenol came in a simple cardboard box with a pill bottle inside that was unsealed. There was nothing but a cotton ball between the consumer and the capsules inside. No tamper evidence seal, no foil lining, no plastic wrap around the cap. There was nothing to stop someone from opening a box, pulling out a bottle, swapping the capsules, and walking away. In a way the task force told themselves this was almost good news. If the tampering had happened at the retail level, it meant the contamination was local. It meant that this was a Chicago problem, not a national one. So they could focus their investigation, and the rest of the country could take a breath. But the people of Chicago still had to be on high alert because the poison bottle still could be out there in someone's medicine cabinet or bathroom shelf waiting to be opened. And there was no way of knowing how many bottles were out there.
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Narrator
In the days after the poisonings, the city of Chicago was living under a cloud of fear. People were taking safety measures and throwing out their Tylenol, but they were also second guessing everything else in their medicine cabinets. Every headache felt like a threat. Every bottle felt like a question mark. The task force was working around the clock, but they were chasing a killer who'd left almost no trace behind. No fingerprints on the bottles, no witnesses, no motive that anyone could identify. Just six people dead who, with the exception of the Janus family, had no connection other than the city that was now overtaken by fear. But on Oct. 1, investigators learned the body count was already higher than they knew. That evening, Chicago police detectives Charlie Ford and Jimmy Gilday got a call about a mysterious death at a high rise apartment building in the city. They were met in the lobby by a woman named Jean Levengood, who looked like she hadn't slept in two days, because she hadn't. The victim in question was Jean's best friend, Paula Prince. They'd been close friends for 15 years. They were both in their mid-30s. Both worked as flight attendants for United Airlines, and they also lived in the same building, which meant that on most nights after work, they would head home together and would hang out, swapping stories about their days over drinks. On the evening of Wednesday, September 29, the same night Adam Janis died, Jean's last flight of the day landed at o', Hare, and she made her way to the gate expecting to find Paula waiting. But Paula had already landed earlier and left a note in Jean's locker, telling her she had gone ahead but that she had some exciting news and to call her when she got home. Jean called as soon as she walked through the door, but Paula didn't answer. She tried again. Still nothing. Then she called the next day and the day after that, but Paula didn't pick up, didn't call back, and didn't show up at work. None of their co workers had heard from her. Paula and Jean talked almost every day, and she almost never missed a shift. She wasn't the type of person to just disappear like that. By October 1st, Jean was terrified that something was wrong. So she went down to the building's parking garage to check for Paula's car, thinking maybe she'd taken a spontaneous trip trip somewhere and forgotten to mention it. But the car was still right where Paula had left it. Jean called Paula's sister Carol to see if she had heard from her, but she said she hadn't been able to reach Paula either. On top of that, she said they were supposed to have dinner that night, but she wasn't answering. Jean told Carol she had a spare key and wanted to go check on her. Carol told her to not go alone because she didn't want Jean to be by herself in case there was something bad. So she said she'd come. When they opened the door to Paula's apartment and looked down the hall, Jean's worst fears came true. Paula was lying lifeless on the floor. The two women were terrified and didn't know if whoever had done this was still inside. So they ran back to the lobby and called the police. Detectives Ford and Gilday arrived within minutes, and the moment they stepped into the apartment, something struck them. It didn't look like any crime scene they'd worked before. There was no sign of a struggle, it wasn't ransacked, and nothing had been broken. Gilday would later describe it as looking neat as a pin. But the way Paula's body was positioned didn't make sense for a natural death either. She was on her back halfway between the bathroom and the hallway, head and shoulders in the hall, legs still on the tile, like she'd been standing at the bathroom sink and fallen straight back without ever putting her hands out. The detectives worked carefully around the body and stepped into the bathroom. The counter was tidy. There were cotton balls and cold cream out, which made them think she may have been in the middle of taking off her makeup. But then they saw it. A bottle of Tylenol sitting on the counter with the cap off. Ford and Gilday looked At each other. And they already knew. They moved through the rest of the apartment and found their confirmation in the kitchen. An open Tylenol box with a store receipt sent sitting next to it. On the Evening of Wednesday, September 29, 1982, Paula Prince had stopped into a walgreens on her way home from o'. Hare. She paid $2.39 for what she believed was a simple pain reliever. She brought it home, took it into the bathroom, opened the cap, and never walked back out. Paula Prince was the seventh victim. She'd bought the bottle just hours before she died, which meant the poison pills had been sitting on the Walgreens shelf in plain sight on one of the busiest travel corridors in the country. Anyone who had walked past that display could have picked up the same bottle. Hundreds of people probably passed right by it. Paula had just happened to be the one who stopped. That thought, that it could have been anyone was what made the Tylenol murders unlike almost anything investigators had encountered before. This wasn't a targeted killing. There was no grudge, no motive tied to any specific victim, no relationship between the killer and the dead. Seven people from completely different walks of life were all killed by the same invisible hand without ever knowing they were in danger. And that hand was somewhere out there in Chicago, yet to be identified. The task force had their work cut out for them. They had seven victims, four recovered bottles, and a killer who'd managed to walk into multiple stores, tamper with multiple products, and walk back out without a single person noticing. Finding the perpetrator seemed like an impossible job. But the task force was just getting started. At the end of each episode, I like to share my thoughts and answer any questions, so feel free to comment below.
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Katie Ring
First off, what would cause someone to do something like this? What could possibly be in it for the killer?
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Narrator
Since these deaths were so random and the victims, for the most part, weren't connected at all? My initial thought on this case is that whoever was poisoning these pills was mainly targeting Johnson and Johnson and had a beef with them and was willing to kill people to get revenge. There was no clear motive or victim profile or victim name or connection that this person was targeting. So that's why, in my mind, that this was kind of a personal grudge that this person had with Tylenol or the brand and the company instead of individuals.
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Katie Ring
What must it have been like to be in Chicago when this was happening? Imagine the cloud of fear you'd be living under.
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Narrator
I would have definitely been terrified if I was living in Chicago at this time. I Think the scariest part is that you could avoid buying Tylenol or throw out what you had. But if this was an individual, there was a lingering possibility that he or she could target another medication or maybe even a food item next. So, you know, you could throw away the Tylenol, but who knows if this person just had a random grudge and was killing people randomly, if other items you may be purchasing at the store could be tampered with. I know a lot of people outside of Chicago were also weary, and I think a certain level of skepticism lingered because for some reason, I thought this happened when I was alive, but it happened well before I was born. So it's kind of a testament how this case has affected everyone. Even after this happened.
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Katie Ring
What was being an investigator on the task force like? Imagine knowing there were murder weapons out there that could take months or years to claim another victim.
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Narrator
I think it would have been extremely frustrating to be an investigator on this case because crimes without a clear connection between the victims and the offender are often the hardest ones to solve. There's no immediate suspect pool. There's usually no clear motive, fewer leads and witnesses, and no solid pattern to connect multiple incidents, at least at first. And also in the early 80s, forensic and DNA testing weren't as advanced as they are now. In this case, there were also jurisdictional beefs going on between the FBI and the police and a lot of pressure internally and from the public to solve this case as quickly as possible.
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Katie Ring
Think of the massive coordinated campaign it must have taken to warn every single resident of Chicago not to trust their Tylenol.
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Narrator
Yeah, I think up until this point, this was one of the biggest, you know, scandals or recalls that was happening because millions of people took this medication every single day, and they needed to get the news out as fast as possible, especially in Chicago. And one thing that I thought was pretty smart, but probably took a lot of time and manpower was going through the streets with police cars and blasting the announcement to residents warning them to throw away their Tylenol. They also made announcements on national tv. And I did see a comment on another video about this case that a woman said she remembers at school. The teachers were passing them papers to take home to their families. So it really spoke to the urgency of this case. And there are definitely pros and cons to social media, but one of the things that I'm thankful for is how quickly information can spread in cases like this. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together and to get all episodes at once. Ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Come back tomorrow for our next episode on the Tylenol Murders. Thank you for supporting the show.