The Tylenol Mafia (16 page)

“It turned out,” said Dr Finkle, “that there were a lot of similarities toxicologically” with the Mitchell case and the poisoning cases in Illinois. “It was exactly the same as the Mitchell dosage, said Dr. Finkle. “It’s a very tight link. It would be very difficult for these different people to take exactly the same dosage of cyanide without having taken the same-sized capsule with the same-sized dosage.”

The evidence “as it stands in no way makes a case,” said Dr. Finkle, but he also felt that considerable further research was necessary in this case and others. “If the deaths were not clustered, there is every reason to believe they would all have been signed out as cyanide deaths [not linked to Tylenol capsules] and there would have been no connection made, meaning the method, modus operandi.”

Investigators in Illinois would not comment about the Mitchell case, but another well-informed source close to the investigation said, “If the link through the distributor is confirmed, that would be big news.”

Officials never found the source of the cyanide that killed Mitchell – or if they did, they never disclosed that source. When the Chicago detective returned home from Wyoming on Sunday, October 10
^th
, Chicago Police Sergeant, Michael
Invergo
, announced that investigators had turned up nothing new after traveling to Sheridan. Authorities quickly dismissed the similarities between the poisonings in Wyoming and Illinois, declaring them unrelated. In so doing, authorities had ignored an awful lot of evidence, as well as the advice of Dr Finkle who had said considerable further research was necessary in this case.

*****

In addition to the cyanide deaths linked to Tylenol capsules in Wyoming and Philadelphia, there were also other cyanide poisonings in Cook County around the time of the Tylenol murders. Robert Stein announced on October 1
^st
that the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office had begun to review all sudden unexplained deaths that had occurred after September 1, 1982. Stein said they were re-testing frozen blood samples from recent unexplained deaths in Cook County in cases where the victim had died suddenly and initial autopsy results showed the presence of Tylenol in the bloodstream.

Stein’s decision to use Tylenol (acetaminophen) as a qualifier for determining whether blood samples should be re-tested makes it clear that autopsies conducted in Cook County routinely tested for acetaminophen. That makes sense, because there are hundreds of deaths each year caused by acetaminophen poisoning. Acetaminophen is second only to alcohol as the most common drug involved in suicides from drug overdoses. Hundreds of people also die each year from accidental acetaminophen overdoses.

On January 13, 1983, Robert Stein said his office had reviewed the autopsy results from 17 unexplained deaths in Cook County. When the blood samples were retested, the Medical Examiners found that three of these deaths were from cyanide poisoning. Autopsies conducted in Cook and DuPage Counties did not routinely screen for the presence of cyanide, so the examiners in Cook County had initially misclassified rather innocently the cause of death for these three individuals.

Cyanide, as it turns out, is a good choice of a murder weapon for a killer interested in covering his or her tracks. According to Dr. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist and author of
Unnatural Death, Confessions of a Medical Examiner
, time can erase traces of poison like cyanide. When describing his testimony in one murder case, Dr. Baden explained, “The defense was saying that no cyanide was found in the bodies, but the absence of cyanide didn’t mean they weren’t given it. After a few days, you can’t find cyanide in a body. That’s one of the reasons it’s such a good murder weapon.” That being said, investigators, upon reviewing 19 unexplained deaths, found five of them, all young adults, had died in 1982 from cyanide poisoning – the cyanide deaths of Jay Mitchell in Wyoming, William Pascual in Philadelphia, and three more cyanide deaths in Cook County.

The three reopened death investigations in Cook County came about because toxicologists had retested the blood samples recently taken from individuals suspected to have overdosed on cocaine. It turned out that they had actually died from cyanide poisoning. Michael Schaffer, the Cook County Chief Toxicologist, said officials were checking the deaths of Mark Husted, age 32, originally from West Dundee, IL; Galen
Parriott
, age 30, of Skokie, IL; and Marie Louise Watkins, age 21, of Chicago, “because of the close proximity [in time] to the cyanide deaths [of the Tylenol victims].”

Watkins had died on August 15
^th
, six weeks before the Tylenol murders;
Parriott
had died December 1
^st
, two months after the murders; and Mark Husted had died Tuesday, September 14
^th
, two weeks before the Tylenol murders. Cook County medical examiners had found acetaminophen (Tylenol) and lethal levels of cyanide in the blood samples taken from all three victims.

“We are continuing these investigations [into other unexplained deaths] because we are finding now that cyanide is an easy poison to obtain,” Stein explained, “and we don’t want to overlook any possible cyanide poisoning case.”

An un-named detective on the Tylenol task force said it would be valuable information to know if the cyanide that caused these three deaths was the same type that had killed the Tylenol victims, but he said it was impossible to conduct such a test.

When Cook County medical examiners conducted an autopsy on Mary Watkins, following her death on August 15, 1982, they found only traces of metabolized cocaine in her body. They had ruled her death a cocaine overdose nonetheless. Upon retesting Watkins’s blood samples in October, authorities determined that cyanide, not cocaine, had caused her death. Toxicology tests found both cyanide and acetaminophen in her body, yet
Jaye
Schroeder, a Chicago police spokesperson, said on October 27
^th
that the Tylenol task force was not investigating Watkins’s death because it was not clear whether her death was a homicide.

One day later, Kathryn
Kajari
, the director of news affairs for the Chicago police detectives, said they had obtained a two-page suicide note written by Watkins.
Kajari
said Ms. Watkins’s sister had recently turned in the letter, but
Kajari
did not reveal the letter’s contents. Officials obviously did not have this “suicide letter” ten weeks earlier when they ruled, erroneously, that Watkins had died from a cocaine overdose. That letter conveniently turned up just when it appeared that Watkins might be another victim of the Tylenol killer.

Dr.
Mitra
Kalelkar
, the assistant medical examiner for Cook County who had examined Watkins’s remains, said, “We cannot definitely find a link between the other Tylenol cyanide cases and this case because we have not determined the source of the cyanide.”
Kalelkar
said she and her associates had not determined conclusively that there was no connection between the cyanide-poisoning death of Watkins and those of the seven victims officially linked to the Tylenol murders. “Anything is possible,” she said.

*****

The Mark Husted cyanide poisoning case is also interesting. Husted was a convicted drug dealer who was to appear in the U.S. District Court in Chicago on November 8, 1982, on charges of conspiring to sell cocaine. Husted and Louis Tedesco had both been charged in a 79-count indictment on December 3, 1980, along with thirteen others, for their involvement in a cocaine smuggling operation. Numerous hearings were held in the U.S. District Court in Chicago from July through November 1982 for various defendants in the case. Several defendants cut deals with government prosecutors who gave at least one defendant immunity. In December 1982, Tedesco was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.

Mark Husted had recently completed a three-year prison term in Florida on a marijuana drug smuggling conviction. He was serving that sentence when he was indicted on charges of operating a $10-million-a-year cocaine ring from his Florida prison cell. The standard sentence for Husted’s marijuana conviction was five years, but Florida Circuit Court Judge, Charles Carlton, reduced the sentence to three years after receiving letters from then Illinois gubernatorial candidate Jim Thompson, U.S. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, U.S. Representative Robert
McClory
of the 13
^th
District in Illinois, and Elgin Mayor Richard
Verbic
. Those letters to Judge Carlton from such well-placed politicians can be attributed to the powerful connections of Mark Husted’s father, Richard Husted, who had been a state’s attorney in Greene County, Illinois, in the 1950s. At the time of his son’s death, Richard Husted was the Village Attorney for Carpentersville, Illinois, and had a private practice.

Mark Husted had flown to Chicago O’Hare International Airport from his home in Florida on Tuesday, September 14, 1982. He then drove to Louis Tedesco’s house on Anita Street in Des Plaines, Illinois. Husted was expected the next day at his father’s home in West Dundee, but he died Tuesday night. Tedesco told police that he had found Husted slumped over on the back porch, and he then called the paramedics.

Agents from the DEA reported on September 16
^th
that Husted’s death was believed to have been caused by a drug overdose, but they said the autopsy conducted on September 15
^th
was inconclusive. It was only because Richard Husted asked authorities to reopen the investigation of his son’s death that medical examiners went back and re-tested Mark’s blood and tissue samples for cyanide. Husted had urged the re-investigation because of “a feeling that his son may have been murdered.”

The second set of toxicology tests showed that Mark Husted’s body tissues contained a lethal level of cyanide. Results from those tests were known shortly before the Tylenol murders case broke, but they were not made public until January 13, 1983. Officials delayed publicizing the coroner’s findings for ten weeks, apparently to keep Husted’s case separate from the Tylenol murders.

Members of Mark Husted’s family said he had been mixed up with a Colombian drug cartel. He was facing a potentially long prison term for his alleged involvement in a drug smuggling operation. However, if someone related to drugs had wanted to murder him, they would probably not have used cyanide. Authorities never found the source of the cyanide that killed Husted.

Was Mark Husted murdered to keep him from talking - or was he another victim of the Tylenol killer? Husted had a habit that suggests the latter. Family members said he “ate Tylenol like candy.”

Some of the Tylenol killer’s cyanide-laced capsules may have already been in Tylenol bottles on the shelves of Chicago area stores when Mark Husted flew into O’Hare International Airport on September 14
^th
. From that airport, Husted had driven to Tedesco’s house in Des Plaines, passing the exits to the Osco Drug store in Schaumburg and the Jewel-Osco store in Elk Grove Village where bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were found or purchased two weeks later. Maybe Husted stopped to pick up a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules on the way to Tedesco’s house.

On the day of the Tylenol murders, an investigation of cyanide poisonings in the Chicago area may already have been underway. The
New York Times
reported that “Investigators independently examining some unexplained deaths Wednesday [September 29
^th
] in two adjacent suburbs here [in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago] were alerted to the Tylenol threat by two firemen.” At that time, authorities were reviewing the unexplained death of Mark Husted in Des Plaines.

Cook County medical examiners found cyanide and acetaminophen in the blood or body tissues of cyanide-poisoning victims Mark Husted, Mary Watkins and Galen
Parriott
. In addition, Jay Mitchell had died of cyanide poisoning in Wyoming shortly after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been purchased at a store in Sheridan, Wyoming that received its Tylenol from the same Illinois warehouse that distributed Tylenol to the Jewel-Osco stores in the Chicago area. The official Tylenol murders death toll is seven, but there is no evidence that has ever excluded any of these four individuals as additional victims of the Tylenol killer.

17

________

On Wednesday, October 6, 1982, Johnson & Johnson’s head of security brought a letter into the boardroom where the members of J&J’s Executive Committee were meeting. The word “TYLENOL” was written on the letter’s envelope. The letter itself said, in part: “If you want the killing to stop,
then
wire $1 million to #84-49-597 at Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago.” That bank account, closed five months earlier, had belonged to Frederick Miller McCahey, an heir to the Miller Brewing fortune.

Investigators from the FBI and IDLE questioned McCahey, and quickly determined that he had not written the letter. Authorities then asked McCahey to put together a list of names of the individuals who might have a grudge against him. One of the names on that list was Robert Richardson. Seven days after J&J received the extortion letter; authorities identified its author as Robert Richardson, aka James Lewis.

James Lewis was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Theodore and Opal Wilson. His given name was Theodore Wilson, Jr. In 1948, when Jim was just two years old, Theodore, Sr., left the family. Social workers soon intervened after determining that Opal was ill-equipped to take care of her son and two daughters, ages seven and nine. The siblings were separated, and Theodore was adopted by Floyd and Charlotte Lewis, and given the new name of James William Lewis.