The Tylenol Mafia (13 page)

Rack jobbers came into prominence in the grocery industry in the 1950s with the entry of supermarkets into non-food product-lines. Rack jobbers, principally in the grocery store trade, developed the “health and beauty care” category for a section of a supermarket or discount store that featured non-prescription drugs and a variety of other products, previously sold primarily in pharmacies. Rack jobbers provide retailers the opportunity to earn additional revenue while relieving them of all responsibility for warehousing, reordering, and re-stocking the products. Rack jobbers create the displays, guarantee the sale of all merchandise, and re-stock the displays. In return, the supermarket supplies the space and collects a percentage of the gross sales.

Sav
-A-Stop was a privately held company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. The company had incorporated shell companies in Illinois and dozens of other states, under the
Sav
-A-Stop and Scottie Stores banners, so it could do business in those states. The vast majority of the company’s revenue, however, came from its rack jobber operation.
Sav
-A-Stop had four main distribution centers located in Salem, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia; Jacksonville, Florida; and McKinney, Texas.
Sav
-A-Stop described itself in a 1966 trademark registration with the U.S. Patent Office as follows:

For: Rack jobbing services – Namely filling and stocking shelves of various retail stores with sundry and drug merchandise manufactured by others, maintaining inventory, accounting and tax records for such stores, and advertising such merchandise displayed and sold from such stocked shelves.

Sav
-A-Stop supplied Tylenol to stores throughout the country, including the Chicago area. On July 30, 1982, two months before the Tylenol murders,
Sav
-A-Stop ran a help-wanted ad in the
Daily Herald
, seeking a non-food merchandiser for stores located in malls in Chicago’s northwest suburban area:

The nation’s leading non-food merchandiser,
Sav
-A-Stop, Inc., is in need of permanent part-time help in Woodfield [Mall], Spring Hill Mall, Stratford Square, Hawthorne Center, Northbrook Court,
Deerbrook
Mall - to merchandise health and beauty aids in major Department Stores. Duties include writing orders, merchandising and maintaining shelves.

The geography covered by driving to these malls encompasses the entire Tylenol murders crime scene. It’s interesting that
Sav
-A-Stop was hiring rack jobbers to cover stores in Chicago-area malls. One of the many facts that did not fit the madman-in-the-retail–stores theory was that some of the contaminated bottles of Tylenol were found in stores in two different malls. Mary McFarland had purchased her Tylenol at the Woolworth store in Yorktown Mall in Lombard. Two unsold bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol were recovered from the Osco Drug store in Woodfield Mall, the largest mall in America at the time. If there really had been a madman stalking Chicago area retail stores, it is unlikely that he would have taken the additional risk of planting poisoned Tylenol capsules at stores in high-traffic malls filled with security cameras and staffed with security guards. For a rack jobber, the delivery of Tylenol bottles to stores located in malls was just business as usual.

The person or persons who stocked Chicago area stores with bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules was likely working for
Sav
-A-Stop or some other third-party rack jobber company. Now it is clear how so many bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules turned up in Chicago area stores all at the same time. One or more rack jobbers or merchandisers, working their normal sales route, restocked the stores’ shelves with bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, some containing cyanide.

Officials mapped out the locations where the victims’ bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules had been purchased, and surmised that the killer had driven
Highways 90/94, 290, and 294, following a near circular route. Investigators further concluded that the killer had probably placed the tampered product on store shelves on Tuesday afternoon, September 28
^th
,
suggesting that he had no daytime employment or at least no full-time employment.
However, this daytime delivery
actually suggested that the bottles containing cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were delivered to the stores by a gainfully employed rack jobber making his normal deliveries.

The Tylenol task force never acknowledged the existence of the merchandisers and rack jobbers that restocked the shelves of Chicago area stores with bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules.
 
Maybe this lack of disclosure had something to do with the well-connected chairman of
Sav
-A-Stop, Inc. - Chicago power broker, Bernard Brennan.

Bernard Brennan, better known today as the former CEO of Chicago-based Montgomery Ward, was the chairman and CEO of
Sav
-A-Stop in September 1982. Interestingly, Brennan had a special bond with the newly appointed chairman of the McNeil Consumer Products Company, David Collins. Brennan and Collins had both grown up in Oak Park, Illinois. They had even gone to the same private Catholic high school - Fenwick. Collins graduated in 1952, and Brennan graduated in 1956.

Brennan had joined Sears as a management trainee in 1964 after attending the College of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He worked his way up through executive positions at the company’s Chicago headquarters for 12 years before leaving in 1976 to become the chairman of
Sav
-A-Stop. Brennan described
Sav
-A-Stop as the ideal training ground for a turn-around artist. By 1982, Brennan had closed
Sav
-A-Stop’s poorly focused retail stores and nearly tripled its wholesaling business. It was one of the largest distributors of non-food items to supermarkets and convenience stores in the nation.

Bernard Brennan is the brother of Edward Brennan, the former CEO of the Chicago-based Sears Roebuck Company. Edward Brennan was chairman of the Sears Company Retail Group in 1982, and went on to become the CEO of Sears in 1986. Ed Brennan also went to Fenwick High School, graduating in 1951, one year ahead of David Collins.

In 1982,
Sav
-A-Stop route salespersons were responsible for stocking the health and beauty care departments at Sears’ stores throughout the country. The Brennan brothers, two of the most powerful retail businesspersons in Chicago – in the nation even – were probably not too keen on seeing an investigation conducted into the middlemen like
Sav
-A-Stop that distributed Tylenol and other health and beauty care products to supermarkets, drugstores, and mass merchandisers like Woolworth, Sears, and Montgomery Ward.

On September 10, 1982, Chicago-based Consolidated Foods, known today as Sara Lee, purchased
Sav
-A-Stop for $79 million. Shortly after the deal closed, Stephen
Pistner
, the CEO of Montgomery Ward, hired Brennan as the company’s executive vice president of store operations.

In the category of strange coincidences, the timing of Brennan’s departure from
Sav
-A-Stop ranks right up there with the fortuitous promotion of Oak Park native, David Collins, to chairman of McNeil Consumer Products less than thirty days before the Tylenol murders. Brennan left
Sav
-A-Stop, Inc., for Chicago-based Montgomery Ward on Monday, September 27, 1982. On that same day, while Brennan was settling in at his new office in Chicago, one or more rack jobbers were delivering at least some of the bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to Chicago area stores. An employee at the Jewel store in Elk Grove Village told NBC-News that the Tylenol display at that store had been restocked with bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules on Monday night, September 27
^th
. Mary Kellerman’s mom purchased a bottle of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from that store the following night.

Sav
-A-Stop did not own a distribution center in Illinois, so it must have had an arrangement with a local distribution company to receive the products that its rack jobbers delivered to local stores. It was standard practice in the 1980s, just as it is today, for national and regional retail chains to contract with third-party distributors to handle the warehousing and distribution of health and beauty care products.

Spokespersons for J&J and the FDA never succinctly described the true manufacturing, packaging, or distribution process of the Tylenol found poisoned in the Chicago area. They said the Tylenol was packaged at the “factory,” but they never actually said the Tylenol from the poisoned lots had been packaged at the “McNeil factory.” A brief news-clip that slipped into the public domain in 2001 provides a glimpse of what was also going on in with the packaging of Tylenol in 1982.

On June 28, 2001, the FDA’s district office in San Juan, Puerto Rico monitored the destruction of 16 drums of Tylenol 80mg Fruit Chewable Tablets that had been manufactured at McNeil’s plant in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico. The bulk containers of Tylenol had arrived at the San Juan port on April 22, 2000, and stood unclaimed by McNeil for over a year. The U.S. Customs Service, interested in auctioning off the Tylenol, contacted the FDA. An investigation found that the Tylenol tablets had been shipped to Canada to undergo the packaging process, but were returned intact because the repackager was unable to complete the process before the product expiration date. Representatives of the McNeil Consumer Products Company decided to destroy the Tylenol because it had been stored for more than one year under uncontrolled temperature conditions.

In 1982, just as in 2001, not all Tylenol was bottled at McNeil’s manufacturing plants. Some Tylenol was loaded into bulk containers and then shipped to third-party repackagers and contract manufacturers. These repackagers bottled and packaged the Tylenol and then sold it to distributors or distributed it themselves.

J&J said the Tylenol from Lot MC2880, which was in the Janus and Kellerman Tylenol bottles, had been delivered to a Franklin Park warehouse between August 19
^th
and 25
^th
. Larry Foster said the bottles of poisoned Tylenol probably had been shipped directly from Pennsylvania to Jewel’s warehouse in Franklin Park, and then directly to the stores. However, Jane Armstrong, the vice president of consumer relations at Jewel Companies, described a slightly different distribution route.

Armstrong said on October 1, 1982 that Tylenol products for all the Jewel stores came from the company’s central warehouse in Melrose Park – not the Franklin Park warehouse as Foster had suggested. Then, seven days later, Armstrong told a different story. October 8th, Armstrong was asked about the distribution of Tylenol to a Sheridan, Wyoming Buttrey-Osco store – a Jewel subsidiary store suspected of having received cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules months earlier. Armstrong said she was uncertain of how the Buttrey-Osco store in Sheridan received its supplies of Tylenol, but she said the Jewel stores near Chicago took their shipments of Tylenol directly from the manufacturer in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, the McNeil Consumer Products Company. Armstrong had now indicated that Jewel did not handle the distribution of Tylenol to its own stores. The facts about the distribution of Tylenol were kept hidden, and the evidence that should have allowed investigators to uncover the true source of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules had a habit of disappearing.

The local Arlington Heights-based newspaper,
The Daily Herald
, accurately reported that the first poisoned capsules to turn up during the inspection of Tylenol bottles in Chicago-area stores had been discovered on Friday, in at least two unsold bottles of Tylenol confiscated from the shelves of the Osco Drug store in the Woodfield Shopping Center. The
New York Times
also reported that two unsold bottles of contaminated Tylenol had been recovered from that Osco Drug store. Fahner said these bottles would be “particularly helpful, because they had not been sold and may provide some fingerprints.”

Then, on Friday night, an FDA spokesperson said that seven cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were found in one of the bottles removed from the Osco Drug store in Schaumburg, and seven more capsules from the
same
bottle were suspect. He made no mention of the second unsold bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol.

On Saturday, the story changed a little more. FDA spokesperson William Grigg now said that investigators had found seven cyanide-filled Tylenol capsules in just one of the bottles seized from the Osco Drug store in Schaumburg, making no mention of the seven suspect capsules or the second unsold bottle of poisoned Tylenol. Grigg said the bottle was from Lot MC2880, which was the same lot as the Tylenol in the Kellerman and Janus bottles.

WMAQ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Chicago, reported Friday night that cyanide had been found in Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from four lots: MC2880, MC2884, 1910MD, and 1665LM. On Saturday, lot numbers MC2884 and 1665LM mysteriously disappeared from the danger list of contaminated lot numbers. In addition, what may have been the most important evidence in the case, the boxes of Tylenol capsules from the Howard Johnson’s parking lot, had also disappeared.

Reporters got an opportunity on Monday, October 4
^th
, to question Deputies Al Swanson and Joseph Chavez about the cartons of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules they had found in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot in Elgin 28 ½ hours before the poisonings began. The deputies had heard about the poisonings the day after they occurred and only then realized the importance of those capsules. Officials from the Tylenol task force and the Kane County Sheriff’s Office went out to the Howard Johnson’s on Friday, October 1
^st
, but the cartons of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules were gone.