The Tylenol Mafia (2 page)

Lynn’s mother-in-law, realizing something was wrong, rushed to her side. Outside, Ed and Michelle, the Reiner’s 8-year-old daughter, had just pulled into the driveway. When they walked into the kitchen, Lynn was sitting at the table; her breathing had now become labored. Lynn’s mother-in-law told Lynn to lower her head between her legs, hoping to encourage the flow of oxygenated blood to her brain. Ed immediately grabbed the telephone. Now frantic, he fumbled with the phone, dropped it, then quickly snatched it back up and dialed the operator. As Ed instructed the operator to send an ambulance, Lynn fell onto the floor and went into convulsions.

Michelle’s most vivid memories of that day are the sounds. She can still hear the thump of her mom hitting the floor, her mom’s labored breathing, and the firm voice of her father commanding her to take the dog and go upstairs. She watched from her bedroom window as her mom was rushed away in an ambulance, sirens blaring. It took just a few minutes for Michelle’s mom to die in front of her eyes, two days for her father to find a way to explain that her mom wasn’t coming back, and almost nine years for Johnson & Johnson to settle the lawsuits filed by the Tylenol victims’ families.

Lynn was clinically dead when she was admitted to Central DuPage Hospital at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening, September 29
^th
. Nevertheless, the doctors hooked her up to a respirator, which they turned off 16 hours later at 9:05 a.m. on Thursday morning. Peter Siekmann, the deputy coroner for DuPage County, said cyanide was found in some of Lynn’s unused Tylenol capsules. She had bought a bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol at Frank’s Finer Foods at around 3:00 p.m. the same day she was poisoned. However, officials said Lynn had apparently put eight Extra Strength Tylenol capsules into her bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol. None of the Regular Strength Tylenol capsules contained cyanide. One of the two Extra Strength Tylenol capsules Lynn had taken contained cyanide, and four of the six remaining Extra Strength Tylenol capsules also contained cyanide.

Shortly after Lynn had been rushed to Central DuPage Hospital, 31-year-old Mary McFarland was at work in Lombard, 10 miles east of Winfield, searching through her purse for a small bottle containing Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. Mary had told her co-workers at the Illinois Bell Phone Center in Yorktown Mall that she’d been fighting a bad headache all day long. The previous day, she had bought a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules at the Woolworth store in Yorktown Mall. She had dumped 17 capsules from that new 50-count Tylenol bottle into a small Dristan bottle she kept in her purse. By Wednesday afternoon, Mary had consumed five of those Tylenol capsules.

Early Wednesday evening, Mary stepped into the break room at the Bell Phone Center store and took two more Tylenol capsules. A few minutes later, she walked over to a table where some of her co-workers were sitting. “I don’t feel good, guys,” she said, and then she fell forward onto the table. Her coworkers called an ambulance and Mary was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, arriving at 7:20 p.m. She was put on life support, but like the other victims, she was already dead within minutes of taking the cyanide-laced Tylenol. The doctors turned the life-support machines off at 3:18 a.m. Thursday. Initially, they suspected that Mary, who left two children, ages one and four, had died from a stroke.

*****

After Adam Janus had been pronounced dead at 3:15 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, his 24-year-old brother, Stanley, and Stanley’s 19-year-old new bride, Theresa, went with Adam’s now widow, Teresa, back to her home in Arlington Heights. Upon arrival, they walked into the kitchen where the bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol was still sitting on the kitchen countertop. They had all been crying, and both Stanley and his wife Theresa had developed headaches. Stanley picked up the Tylenol bottle, dumped two of the red and white capsules into his hand and then popped them into his mouth. Theresa picked up the telephone, called her parents, and delivered the sad news of her brother-in-law’s death. After a short conversation, Theresa hung up the phone and then she too opened the bottle of Tylenol, poured out two capsules, and swallowed them.

Stanley then took the Tylenol bottle into the bathroom, where he placed it on a shelf in the medicine cabinet above the sink. Upon returning to the kitchen, Stanley collapsed and went into convulsions.

Stanley’s wife, Theresa, called the Arlington Heights Fire Department at 6 p.m., and for the second time that day, paramedic Chuck Kramer and the Arlington Heights emergency team rushed back to the Janus house. While they worked on Stanley in the kitchen, Theresa, now panic-stricken, called her parents again - this time to tell them that Stanley was being rushed to the hospital. Theresa hung up the phone. Then, as Chuck Kramer watched in horror, she collapsed onto the living room floor. The rescue team attempted to resuscitate the young newlyweds as the ambulance once again sped toward Northwest Community Hospital. Despite their best efforts, the paramedics could do nothing to keep the lives’ of Stanley and Theresa from slipping away, following the exact same pattern they had just witnessed a few hours earlier while trying to revive Adam.

Shortly after Stanley and Theresa were wheeled into the emergency room, Helen Jensen, the Elk Grove Village public health nurse, was sitting down for a late dinner at home. Halfway through her meal, the phone rang. Helen picked up the receiver, and the caller asked her if she could please come to Northwest Community Hospital right away. Something strange is going on she said.

Jensen left her half-eaten dinner, and rushed to the hospital. When she arrived, the emergency staff was involved in an anxious discussion about what could have happened to the Januses. The most plausible theory seemed to be that the deaths were the result of a gas leak somewhere inside the Janus home. Helen looked around the emergency room and saw Adam’s widow standing in the corner. Helen introduced herself and asked Teresa to describe the events that led up to the deaths. Teresa spoke only Polish, so with her brother-in-law acting as a translator, Teresa told Helen every detail she could remember about the incidents. In each case, the Januses had taken Tylenol before they collapsed.

It was against all protocols, but Helen knew that she had to go to the Januses’ house. Her co-workers, concerned that a gas leak or some other toxic substance inside the house might have poisoned the Januses, warned her to stay away. Helen insisted on going anyway. She recruited two police officers to escort her to the Janus home.

It took only a few minutes to drive from the hospital to the Januses’ house. Once inside, Helen and the police officers headed straight for the bathroom medicine cabinet. One of the officers opened the cabinet door. The bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol immediately caught Helen’s eye. She brought the bottle back into the kitchen and then poured the capsules out onto the countertop. Helen and the police officers each counted the capsules, and they all came up with the same number - forty-four.
This has got to be it
, Helen thought. Six capsules were missing from the 50-count bottle. Three people taking the recommended dose of Tylenol would account for those missing capsules, and those three people were now dead.

Jensen returned to Northwest Community Hospital and told Dr. Kim and the emergency workers that she believed the Tylenol capsules had caused the Januses’ deaths. “They pooh-poohed me,” she said later. They were stuck on the theory that the Januses had probably died as a result of a gas leak.

Dr. Kim then made a phone call to John Sullivan, a poison expert at the Rocky Mountain Poison Center in Colorado. Kim described to him the symptoms presented by the Januses and explained his theory that the deaths were the result of a gas leak. That theory did not sound right to Sullivan. He said the symptoms sounded more like cyanide poisoning than anything else. Dr. Kim immediately ordered blood samples to be taken from the Januses and sent to the lab for testing.

Meanwhile, Philip Cappitelli, an off-duty Arlington Heights fireman, had been monitoring his police radio at home that day. He heard the first ambulance call to the Janus house shortly after lunchtime, but he thought it was nothing out of the ordinary. He was stunned when he heard the second call of the day to the Janus home end with the same tragic outcome. Cappitelli was now also suspicious about the sudden death of Mary Kellerman, which his mother-in-law had told him about that morning.

Cappitelli called his friend, Richard Keyworth, a firefighter and arson investigator for the Elk Grove Village Fire Department. Keyworth had also been monitoring emergency calls that day. Cappitelli mentioned that the paramedic’s report for Mary Kellerman showed that she had taken Tylenol before she died. Both men were struck by the fact that Tylenol had been mentioned in both reports. “This is a wild stab,” Keyworth said. “But maybe it’s the Tylenol.”

Cappitelli next called Chuck Kramer, who had been on both calls to the Janus home. Kramer confirmed that Adam, Stanley, and Theresa had all taken Tylenol right before collapsing. Cappitelli relayed this information to his supervisor who then called the police to report their suspicions. Investigators examining other unexplained deaths in two adjacent suburbs were then alerted to the deaths of Kellerman and the Januses. Both of the bottles of Tylenol found at the Kellerman and Janus homes were taken to Northwest Community Hospital for testing late Wednesday night. Investigators concluded that both bottles contained cyanide.

The sun had not yet risen on Thursday, September 30, 1982, when Michael Schaffer, the chief toxicologist at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, began examining the remaining capsules in the Tylenol bottles recovered from the Janus and Kellerman homes the previous day. Ten of the capsules were slightly swollen and discolored. Instead of the dry white acetaminophen powder that should have been inside the capsules, they contained a moist, off-white, chunky crystalline substance that he quickly identified as cyanide. These capsules contained only a trace amount of Tylenol.

“I could smell the cyanide as soon as I opened the containers,” Schaffer said. He also said that the cyanide would have deteriorated the gelatin shell of the capsule rather quickly.

When cyanide is moist, a chemical reaction called hydrolysis occurs in which molecules of water are split into hydrogen protons and hydroxide anions. A small amount of hydrogen cyanide is then emitted that smells like bitter almonds. Not everyone can smell this odor. The ability to do so is a genetic trait found in about 40 percent of the population. During hydrolysis, polymers like those found in the gelatin-based shells of Tylenol capsules will corrode. The corrosion process is essentially irreversible. The discolored and swollen appearance of ten of the capsules inspected by Schaffer was the result of moisture being transferred from the cyanide to the gelatin-based capsule-shells. The corrosion was not terribly evident though, so the victims did not notice that something looked wrong with their Tylenol capsules.

The toxicology tests for Adam, Stanley, and Theresa Janus came back Thursday morning, confirming that all three had consumed a lethal dose of cyanide. Dr. Kim said the poison had taken effect so quickly that none of them experienced the usual symptoms, such as vomiting, nausea, or dizziness. Later in the morning, the Cook County Medical Examiner confirmed that Mary Kellerman had also died of cyanide poisoning.

Years later, Richard Keyworth reflected on the events of that day. He marveled at the deadly implications of what could have been a much greater tragedy. “This could have gone on for years without someone knowing about it,” said Keyworth. “Without talking to each other, the chances of these deaths being connected were slim to none. Who knows how many could have died.”

Keyworth’s astute conclusion that “this could have gone on for years,” leaves a more troubling question left unanswered. Had this
already
gone on for years? At the time of the Tylenol murders, autopsies conducted in Cook and DuPage Counties did not check for the presence of cyanide unless specifically requested to do so. This was also the case in most coroners’ offices throughout the country. The local emergency workers uncovered the Tylenol killer’s deadly plot so quickly only because of the sudden deaths of three members of the Janus family on the same day, in the same house, which raised questions immediately.

Theresa Janus’s father, Jan Tarasewicz, recognized the importance of the sacrifice that had befallen the Januses and their friends and families. “Our Theresa is gone,” he said. “Nothing will bring her back. But all is quiet now. Our people were the victims. They seemed to die for somebody else, so other people could be saved.”

Officials have long cited the scarcity of physical evidence and apparent lack of motive as the reasons why they failed to capture the Tylenol killer. But now, new revelations and information not previously disclosed tell a very different story of a crime that should have been solved. To unravel the Tylenol murders mystery today, it is essential to first take a good look at the peculiar investigation that took place in Chicago in 1982 and the somewhat murky history of the company glorified for its handling of the “Tylenol crisis.”

3

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Johnson & Johnson acquired McNeil Laboratories in 1959 along with its non-aspirin pain-reliever Tylenol. McNeil had first marketed prescription drugs containing acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, in 1953. J&J launched Tylenol as an over-the-counter (OTC) medication in 1960, but continued to market Tylenol primarily to hospitals where it was used extensively. In 1961, J&J moved the McNeil Laboratories headquarters from Philadelphia to a newly constructed facility in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.