The Tylenol Mafia (24 page)

Jim Cummins, reporting for NBC-News in Chicago on Monday, October 25, 1982, said, “Investigators say that since the negotiations [between Tyrone Fahner and Roger Arnold’s attorney] began, they’ve learned that at least two more bottles of cyanide contaminated Tylenol were planted in the Chicago area and have not yet been recovered. And they now believe the cyanide used in the murders was purchased in a store in Racine, Wisconsin.”

The two bottles “not yet recovered” were the eighth and ninth bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol. The “ninth bottle,” which was actually Lynn Reiner’s unit dose package of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, was never mentioned again. The “eighth bottle,” however, became a major news story.

The eighth bottle reportedly had been purchased at Frank’s Finer Foods. Consequently, almost every news story about that bottle included the erroneous report that Lynn Reiner had also purchased a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol at Frank’s Finer Foods.

The cyanide-laced capsules in the eighth bottle were discovered when a litmus test conducted by laboratory technicians at the McNeil Consumer Products facility in Fort Washington indicated the probable presence of cyanide. McNeil officials turned the contaminated bottle over to FBI agents who took the bottle to the FBI’s laboratory in Washington D.C. for an extensive forensic analysis that included laser analysis to detect fingerprints.

On Monday night, a law enforcement source in Washington who asked not to be identified by name or department said the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol had been purchased by a woman from West Chicago, in Winfield Township, and then turned in to police “some time ago, perhaps weeks ago,” but was “just processed today.” He said the bottle was sent with “a notation that it might be contaminated,” and subsequent tests had confirmed the presence of cyanide.

The source said the woman - later identified as the wife of DuPage County Circuit Court Judge, Duane Walter - had given the bottle to the Wheaton police who then mailed it to a lab operated by the McNeil Consumer Products Company. However, the Wheaton police had actually mailed the bottle to The Maple Plain Company in Maple Plain, Minnesota, which then mailed it to the McNeil Consumer Products Company in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. The Maple Plain Company was handling the reverse distribution of Tylenol capsules.

Reverse distribution is industry terminology for the return of a product in the marketplace back to the manufacturer. When consumers mailed their Tylenol capsules to the Maple Plain Company, the company sent them a coupon for $2.50 toward the purchase of a replacement Tylenol product. The company then shipped the bottles of returned Tylenol to McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington where, with the exception of the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, they were destroyed. J&J had used the Maple Plain Company for many years to manage coupon programs for its products.

Previously, the Wheaton police, just like the other Chicago-area police departments, had been forwarding all the bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules turned in by area residents, to Johnson & Johnson’s distribution center in Lemont.
 
In fact, the seventh bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol was discovered by J&J toxicologists at the company’s temporary lab in Lemont, just four days before the eighth bottle of poisoned Tylenol was discovered by J&J lab workers at the McNeil plant in Fort Washington. In mailing the eighth bottle to the Maple Plain Company, the Wheaton police had simply followed the directive in the “Dear Doctor” letter J&J had sent to retailers and wholesalers on October 13
^th
, the same day the eighth bottle reportedly was turned over to the Wheaton police. The “Dear Doctor” letter, written by McNeil Medical Director, Dr. Thomas Gates, said:

In response to this rapidly changing situation, McNeil has established the following policy pertaining to hospital, wholesale, and retail customers and consumers:

In agreement with the FDA, McNeil Consumer Products Company is voluntarily withdrawing all non-blistered TYLENOL® capsule products (including Regular Strength TYLENOL® Capsules, Extra-Strength TYLENOL Capsules, non-blistered
CoTYLENOL
® Capsules, and Maximum-Strength TYLENOL® Sinus Medication Capsules) from hospital, wholesale, and retail accounts nationally….. Consumers are urged to return all TYLENOL capsule products to the place of purchase, or to mail bottles to Tylenol Exchange, P.O. Box 2000, Maple Plains, Minnesota 55348.

In a statement given Monday night to the City News Bureau of Chicago, Tyrone Fahner said the eighth bottle was from Lot MC2873 and had been purchased at the Frank’s Finer Foods in Wheaton. The next day, however, Wheaton Police Lieutenant, Terry Mee, insisted that the woman who turned in the eighth bottle said she had purchased it at Frank’s Finer Foods in Winfield, not Wheaton.

Mee said the woman brought the bottle in to the police station on October 13
^th
and identified herself as the wife of a DuPage County Circuit Court judge. The woman “definitely said she bought it [the eighth bottle] in Winfield sometime in the past. We are speculating that she bought it one to two weeks earlier,” said Mee. “She told us she intended to turn it in right after this [Tylenol murders story] broke, but that she just let it go by.”

Since there seemed to be some confusion about where the eighth bottle was purchased, the sensible thing to do was to ask the woman who turned the bottle in, the wife of Judge Duane Walter, where she had actually bought it. But that posed another problem.

When the FBI interviewed Mrs. Walter on Tuesday, she told them she was not the person who had turned in the eighth bottle. “We don’t know why she [the woman who actually turned the bottle in] used that name, and now we are obviously concerned with determining who that person is,” said Mee. “We are looking for a woman between 40 and 50 years old.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the woman who actually had turned in the eighth bottle called the Wheaton Police Department and identified herself as Linda Morgan, the wife of Judge Lewis V. Morgan Jr. The Wheaton Police had gotten it wrong. They knew the woman was the wife of a judge in the 18
^th
Circuit Court in DuPage County, but they apparently had picked the wrong judge. Wheaton Police Chief, Carl Dobbs, said a “clerical error” had led to the incorrect identification of the “mystery woman” as the wife of Judge Duane Walter.

Linda Morgan said she had purchased the Tylenol on the morning of the murders, but then didn’t turn it in to the Wheaton police until October 14
^th
.

“I believe now in the theory that if God wants you to go, it’s going to be your turn; and for some reason it wasn’t mine,” said Morgan. “We had discovered the news of the poisonings the next day (the day after the poisonings) and we put it (the Tylenol) aside.” She said family matters prevented her from turning in the bottle earlier, but she never revealed what those family matters were.

Fahner held a news conference on Wednesday, October 27
^th
, and provided an update on the forensic analysis of the cyanide-laced capsules from the eighth bottle. Earlier that day, an unidentified source in Washington had said that the FBI had found a fingerprint on the inside flap of the box from the eighth bottle. Fahner now said that the FBI had also found a fingerprint on a capsule inside the eighth bottle and that the results from these fingerprint tests were about to be released.

Fahner then said, we are “closer than we have ever been” to solving the Tylenol murders case.

Fahner’s confidence was dashed later that day when the likely source of the fingerprints on the capsules and box from the eighth bottle became apparent. Linda Morgan came forward that afternoon and revealed that she had opened the box for the eighth bottle, as well as the bottle itself. Amazingly, she said she had even opened one of the capsules inside the eighth bottle.

“I opened the capsule,” said Morgan. It didn’t look odd, she remembered. Yet, when the Wheaton police mailed Morgan’s Tylenol bottle to the Maple Plain Company in Minnesota, they attached a note to the bottle, saying it might be contaminated. If the capsules in that bottle did not look odd, as Morgan claimed, then why did the Wheaton police mail the bottle with a note saying the capsules might be contaminated? More importantly, why didn’t the Wheaton police turn that bottle over to the FBI or IDLE for testing?

According to Tyrone Fahner, the cyanide-laced capsules in Morgan’s Tylenol bottle did look odd. “The [eighth] bottle is clearly different than the other seven,” he said. “Some [of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules] were put together
unartfully
.” The poisoned medicine in the capsules from the eighth bottle had an “
orangish
” color, whereas the contents in the cyanide-laced capsules from the other seven bottles were off-white in color. In addition, the poisoned capsules in the eighth bottle contained a mixture of cyanide and acetaminophen, but the poisoned capsules in all the other bottles contained only microscopic trace levels of acetaminophen.

The condition of the cyanide laced capsules in the eighth bottle provided additional evidence that these capsules were not the work of the Tylenol killer. The cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the Kellerman and Janus bottles, inspected one day after the murders, were “swollen and discolored,” the result of corrosion caused by moist cyanide. The cyanide-laced capsules in the seventh bottle were in an “advanced state of deterioration” when inspected 22 days after the murders. Conversely, the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the eighth bottle, inspected 26 days after the murders, showed no signs of corrosion at all.

Fahner said the seven cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the eighth bottle were “substantially different” from previous bottles. This difference suggested that this bottle “may be unrelated to the other bottles so far recovered,” he explained. The logical conclusion from these findings was that someone, not the Tylenol killer, had put cyanide into seven Tylenol capsules in the eighth bottle
after
the Tylenol murders occurred.

Ever since they found the poisoned Extra Strength capsules in Lynn Reiner’s Regular Strength Tylenol bottle on September 30, 1982, investigators had been working under the assumption that Ed Reiner had somehow gotten those cyanide-laced capsules into a Tylenol bottle at Frank’s Finer Foods. This investigative strategy was evident on October 8
^th
when NBC reported: “Investigators think Winfield may not have been chosen at random - that someone in a deliberate effort came here to make the switch at Frank’s Finer Foods.” The NBC report further implied that the Tylenol killer knew in advance that Lynn Reiner would go to Frank’s Finer Foods at 3 p.m., where, “as usual,” she would buy Regular Strength Tylenol.

It made no sense that someone who intended to murder Lynn Reiner would plant eight red and white Extra Strength capsules, with only five capsules containing cyanide, into a bottle of gray and white Regular Strength Tylenol capsules at Frank’s Finer Foods.
 
This scenario would have required Lynn to purchase the one and only bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules that the killer had supposedly planted for her to buy.

This implausible scenario relied completely on luck and would have been extremely difficult to sell to a jury. To remedy this problem, local authorities evidently planted the evidence they needed - the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol - to get the conviction they wanted. The Wheaton police then claimed that the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol was purchased at the Frank’s Finer Foods in Winfield on September 29
^th
. But it wasn’t.

What the local authorities did not know then – and what they still may not know today - is that it would have been impossible for anyone to purchase the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol at any of the Frank’s Finer Foods stores.

All of the Tylenol shipped to the Frank’s Finer Foods stores was manufactured at McNeil’s plant in Round Rock, Texas. But the Tylenol in the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, bearing lot number MC2873, was manufactured at McNeil’s plant in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Linda Morgan could not have purchased that bottle at Frank’s Finer Foods, because there was never a bottle of Tylenol with lot number MC2873 sitting on the shelves of any of the Frank’s Finer Foods stores.

Under Title 21, Section 201.1 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, drug containers must bear lot numbers that are formatted to indicate the identity of the plant where the drug was manufactured. “The lot number on the label of a drug [container] should be capable of yielding the complete manufacturing history of the package.”

As described earlier, the lot numbers for the Tylenol manufactured in Fort Washington began with two alpha characters followed by four numeric characters. The lot numbers for the Tylenol manufactured in Round Rock began with four numeric characters, followed by two alpha characters. The alpha characters represented the year and month of manufacture, the first numeric character identified the plant where the Tylenol was manufactured, and the last three numeric digits were the batch number.

The first numeric digit in the lot numbers for the Tylenol manufactured in Round Rock was “1”, whereas the first numeric digit in the lot numbers for the Tylenol manufactured in Fort Washington was “2”. The Tylenol in the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, bearing lot number MC2873, was thus manufactured in Fort Washington.

Tylenol manufactured in McNeil’s Fort Washington plant was distributed only through J&J’s regional distribution center in Montgomeryville, PA. Tylenol manufactured in McNeil’s Round Rock plant was distributed through J&J’s regional distribution centers in Round Rock, TX; Montgomeryville, PA; and Glendale, CA.