Chicago Tylenol Murders (1982)

Wednesday 29 September 1982 is a day etched into the history of Chicago and the state of Illinois for all the wrong reasons.

With Survivor’s Eye Of The Tiger topping the charts, the NFL on hiatus due to a union-led strike and Cheers making its debut on NBC-TV, what would otherwise have been an average midweek day in the Windy City and surrounding metropolitan area ended in mass murder, panic and widespread disbelief.

Seven random victims were to die of cyanide poisoning after ingesting capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol that had been deliberately tainted with the lethal substance.

In an act of chilling cruelty, some anonymous figure had apparently placed contaminated bottles of the popular, over-the-counter painkiller onto the shelves of numerous stores across the metropolitan district.

Unbeknownst to the local population, they had been entered into a game of Russian roulette with pills instead of bullets.

In the days before social media and rolling 24-hour news, it took time for the individual authorities involved with each case to ascertain what was causing people to drop dead and then connect the dots to paint a fuller, more horrifying picture as to what had occurred on that now notorious Autumn day.

Nobody has ever been convicted of the killings.

Mary Kellerman (1970 – 1982)

At 6.30 am on the morning of the 29th in Elk Grove Village, situated in northeast Illinois adjacent to O’Hare International Airport and Chicago, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman – a seventh grader at Addams Junior High School in Schaumburg – awoke feeling ill.

Her parents decided to keep the young girl out of school, and Mary took some Extra-Strength Tylenol to help with her ailments.

Mary’s father, Dennis, heard her go into the bathroom, then heard something drop. After asking if she was OK but getting no reply from Mary, Dennis opened the bathroom door and found his daughter unconscious on the floor.

Unable to rouse Mary, the Kellermans called 911 and requested medical assistance.

Having arrived at the scene, Paramedic Dave Spung tried a number of drugs to try and bring Mary back to consciousness, but nothing worked.

The stricken girl was transferred into the back of an ambulance and rushed to the nearby Alexian Brothers Medical Center. To the horror of Mary’s parents, and despite the best efforts of doctors and medical staff, the young girl was pronounced dead at 9.56 am.

By the end of the day, Mary Kellerman would be known across the nation as the first of seven victims in a shocking crime that would bring together five families under the most bizarrely horrific of circumstances.

Adam Janus (1955 – 1982)

Adam Janus, a 27-year-old postal worker from the northwestern Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, had taken a day off from work after feeling the beginnings of a cold.

After picking up his kids from nursery, Janus stopped by a pharmacy and bought a bottle of Tylenol Extra-Strength capsules.

Having returned home and eaten lunch with his children, he took a couple of the painkillers and, within two minutes, was lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.

Rushed to the Northwest Community Hospital, Janus died early in the afternoon, and his death was initially attributed to cardiac arrest.

Janus’ parents, distraught wife Teresa and other close relatives returned to the house in Arlington Heights in a state of shock.

Stanley Janus (1957 – 1982) and Theresa Janus (1962 – 1982)

The already distressing afternoon would take an even more tragic turn at around 5 pm as the grieving family members were discussing plans for Janus’ funeral.

Adam’s younger brother, Stanley, and Stanley’s 19-year-old wife, also called Theresa, took some Tylenol capsules for a bad back and a headache, respectively.

Within minutes, both had collapsed.

Eight medical staff fought in vain to rouse Stanley and Theresa from unconsciousness.

With their suspicions now raised, Dr Thomas Kim, Nurse Helen Jensen, who had been on duty at the time of Janus’ admission, Deputy Medical Examiner Donoghue, and several members of the Arlington Heights Fire Department began to try to work out what linked the three mysterious deaths.

Mary ‘Lynn’ Reiner (1955 – 1982)

At around the time the Janus family returned to their house in Arlington Heights, Mary ‘Lynn’ Reiner from Winfield, DuPage County, Illinois, innocently took some Extra-Strength Tylenol.

The 27-yearold mother had given birth to her fourth child less than a week before and was feeling under the weather, but fate was to rob Mary of her life and her family of its wife and mother.

Arriving home and finding his wife collapsed on the floor, Ed Reiner immediately called for an ambulance, and Mary was taken to Central DuPage Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 9.30 am the next day.

Mary’s use of Extra-Strength Tylenol would become something of a ‘smoking gun’ in the investigations, as she was prescribed them at Central DuPage Hospital rather than purchasing them at a store.

Mary McFarland (1951 – 1982)

At around 6.30 pm that evening in Lombard, also in DuPage County, Mary McFarland told fellow staff members at the Bell Store where she was employed that she had a bad headache.

Her brother and co-worker Jack Eliason recalled that Mary went into a back room to take some Tylenol and, just like the other victims, collapsed shortly after doing so.

John Millner, the Commander of detectives at the police department in Elmhurst (the suburb where Mary lived), suspected that she had been poisoned, but could have had no idea of just how accurate his theory would prove to be.

Paula Prince (1946 – 1982)

The final unfortunate victim was United Airlines flight attendant Paula Prince. Arriving at O’Hare Airport on a flight from Las Vegas, Prince visited a Walgreens store and purchased another bottle of Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide.

After missing a dinner date with her sister and failing to show up for work on Friday 1 October, Prince’s body was discovered in her Old Town apartment.

Throughout the day, off-duty Fire Department Lieutenant Phil Cappitelli and Fire Investigator Richard Keyworth had been listening to the messages relayed across the airwaves around Illinois, and they both noticed that Tylenol
was mentioned in the spate of unusual deaths reported.

Once Nurse Jensen had been informed of their hunch, she recovered the Extra-Strength pills from the Janus household, and it was submitted for testing.

The results were shocking: each contaminated capsule of Tylenol contained 65mg of cyanide – between 100 and 1,000 times the dose required to kill someone.

The investigation

The various police departments worked together with medical staff to quickly establish that they and metropolitan Chicago faced a nightmare scenario; all the mysterious deaths were connected, and a major crime of mass murder had been committed.

The investigations into the killings, code-named TYMURS by the FBI, began in earnest, as fears that further deaths may happen were foremost in the minds of the authorities.

By Monday 4 October 1982, the cyanide poisoning murders were international news.

Johnson & Johnson, though initially reluctant, recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol from shelves across America at a cost to the company of over $100 million.

While these measures were implemented to protect and reassure the public, they also pointed to the very real possibility that the tampering of the bottles occurred somewhere in Johnson & Johnson’s production line.

This possibly business-ending theory was, however, swiftly and somewhat dubiously discredited by both the pharmaceutical company and the FBI.

Eventually, eight tainted bottles containing 50 cyanide-laced capsules were recovered from five stores around the Chicago metropolitan area. The number of contaminated bottles may have been much higher, but the true figure will never be known because citizens were advised to dispose of any Extra-Strength Tylenol they had at home.

The story pushed in the media was that a ‘lone madman’ was responsible for the murders, carrying out the sick deed by purchasing bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol, lacing them with cyanide elsewhere and then travelling around the metropolitan Chicago region and slipping the now lethal painkillers back onto the shelves of stores picked at random.

Over 100 law enforcement officers worked with the FBI and the Illinois Attorney General to try and crack the disturbing case. More than a thousand potential leads were investigated – from prank callers claiming responsibility to terminated former employees of Johnson & Johnson – but no firm evidence was forthcoming.

James William Lewis

An extortion letter arrived at the offices of Johnson & Johnson on 6 October demanding $1 million to stop the Tylenol killings. The investigative team traced the letter to James William Lewis, a New York City resident with ties to work in Chicago.

Arrested in December of 1982, Lewis’ handwriting was matched with the letter and one sent to the White House threatening to bomb it and continue the poisonings.

A con man with a troubled past, Lewis  (pictured) was convicted of extortion and credit card fraud and sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Frustratingly for the law enforcement agencies, no direct links to the Tylenol killings have ever emerged, with Lewis himself resolutely stating that he didn’t commit the crimes.

James Lewis died in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 2023, aged 76.

Suspects

Efforts to find the actual killer(s) continued, and a number of other suspects were considered at different times.

Firstly, Chicago resident Roger Arnold would be accused, investigated and cleared early in 1983, with his story taking a dramatic, fatal turn later that year.

In May 1988, Laurie Dann, from Winnetka, Illinois, embarked on a shooting rampage that ended with Dann taking her own life after holding a family hostage.

A person with a history of mental illness and poisoning attempts, Dann was considered a potential suspect in the Tylenol murders, though no link was ever found.

‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski (pictured at right) was also considered a suspect as his first four crimes took place in Chicago, and his parents lived there during the poisonings in 1982.

Kaczynski volunteered a DNA sample to the FBI in 2011, and the results proved that he was not the culprit.

Allegations against Johnson & Johnson

In 2011, the book The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder and Johnson & Johnson was published, which contained damning allegations that the investigation into the crimes was deliberately controlled by Johnson & Johnson with the full cooperation of the FBI.

The book was written by Scott Bartz, a former employee of a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary with many years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

After three years of research and the analysis of over 8,000 documents pertaining to the crimes and the investigation, Bartz concluded that the bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol were almost certainly tampered with somewhere along the distribution and repackaging supply chain – not at the store, pharmacy, or hospital.

The author also concluded that Johnson & Johnson, fearing financial liability and a major blow to its reputation, took every possible measure to steer the investigation and media coverage away from this possibility.

Rather than actively trying to solve the case, Bartz also attests that the authorities colluded with Johnson & Johnson to perpetuate the ‘lone madman’ theory in the media, knowing full well that the real Tylenol killer most likely came from within the ranks of the giant pharmaceutical company itself.

The ‘smoking gun’ in the ‘lone madman’ theory that has dominated the investigation for nearly 40 years is Mary ‘Lynn’ Reiner and her use of Extra-Strength Tylenol. Reiner was discharged from Central DuPage Hospital one day prior to the killings after recently giving birth.

She was prescribed a ‘unit-dose package’ of eight Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules from the hospital pharmacy.

On the day that she died, Reiner was found to have taken two of the capsules. No ‘lone madman’ could have had access to a closed store pharmacy within a hospital; only someone working within the distribution and repackaging supply chain would have been able to lace the Extra-Strength Tylenol that killed Reiner.

A cover-up was entirely possible, as the CEO of Johnson & Johnson at the time of the killings was one James Burke, who counted FDA chief Arthur Hayes and the head of the FBI, William Webster, among his personal friends.

Additionally, Burke’s brother was a powerful player in the media, with controlling stakes in several TV stations and newspapers.

In a clear conflict of interest, representatives of Johnson & Johnson worked closely with the FBI from day one, and the company was allowed to test the recalled Tylenol. Only one per cent of the recalled capsules were ever tested, and the rest were destroyed.

The only response Johnson & Johnson has ever given regarding Bartz’s exposé has been a blanket ‘no comment’.

Aftermath

No one has ever been charged and convicted with the Chicago Tylenol Murders, and there’s no imminent chance of that changing. Johnson & Johnson’s $100,000 reward remains unclaimed, and in 2013, the FBI formally stood down from leading the investigation.

No physical evidence linking anyone to the murders has ever been uncovered, and Bartz’s distribution line theory, covered in his book The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder and Johnson & Johnson, has yet to be followed up by either Johnson & Johnson or the FBI.