Who Laced Tylenol With Cyanide? Nearly 40 Years On, It’s Still a Mystery.

After the third sudden and unexpected death was confirmed on Sept. 29, 1982, Arlington Heights Fire Department captain Philip Capitelli began to suspect something was not right in his small suburb of Chicago.

For Dr. Thomas Kim at Northwest Community Hospital, it was when a young couple was admitted on an early fall day in critical condition with dim prospects for recovery. Kim was shocked when he recognized them: just a few hours earlier, he had been speaking to the pair at the bedside of the husband’s brother, explaining that he had no idea why the young, fit man had suddenly died. Now these family members were also on their deathbeds for no obvious reason.

As the two men began to look into the suspicious deaths, they realized an unusual connection: all of the victims—four so far—had taken Extra Strength Tylenol just before falling ill.

In the fall of 1982, panic swept the country as news spread that seven people had died in Illinois after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. The young faces of the victims, none older than 35, made the tragedy even more heartbreaking.

The first was 12-year-old Mary Kellerman, who had stayed home from school with a cold. Then, there were the three family members who were treated by Dr. Kim—Adam, Stanley, and Teresa Janus. Mary “Lynn” Reiner had just given birth to her fourth child a week earlier. Mary McFarland collapsed after taking a Tylenol to treat a headache at work. And Paula Prince had picked up some painkillers while driving home from her latest shift as a flight attendant.

Johnson & Johnson immediately issued a recall of the painkiller in an aggressive crisis response that would later be praised; the authorities launched an investigation and a search to find the perpetrator; and Congress began to discuss how to prevent another tragedy like this from happening. The next year, a law known as the “Tylenol Bill” would pass which would institute the tamper-proof packaging that is an unquestioned part of life—and a minor annoyance to many—today.

But these moves weren’t enough to stem the fear that plagued parents in late 1982, fear that was not unfounded as more than 270 copycat incidents quickly sprung up. (It would also lead to a new Halloween tradition that continues today: the parental inspection of all Trick-or-Treat loot.)

Thirty-nine years later, this tragedy isn’t top of mind for most of us who live with the changes it wrought, this despite one shocking fact: the culprit has never been found.

By the night of Sept. 29, nurses, emergency personnel, investigators, and doctors were all working to get to the bottom of the mystery. Each seemed to have a piece of the puzzle. The first responders were noticing the open pill bottles. Dr. Kim thought poison, and particularly cyanide, was the only explanation for the symptoms he was seeing, including the extremely rapid deaths.

While blood samples were being sent away for testing, an investigator at the local medical examiner’s office smelled the Tylenol bottles from the Kellerman and Janus homes. “You know, the first one smells like the second one: almonds,” he remembers saying.

The realization was immediate: there had to be cyanide in the Tylenol. Blood tests from the Janus’s confirmed the presence of “a massive amount [of cyanide]—100 or 1,000 times more than was necessary to kill them,” Dr. Kim told Chicago Magazine.

A press conference was scheduled, and police officers took to the streets with loudspeakers warning residents not to touch any Tylenol they may have. Pharmacies cleared their shelves, and Johnson & Johnson recalled every bottle of the product, ultimately spending $100 million to take 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules out of circulation.

But as the potentially deadly painkillers disappeared and authorities began to hope that the immediate danger had passed, the biggest question still remained: how had cyanide gotten into the Tylenol? Who was responsible for poisoning the painkillers? Despite the aggressive response and investigation that followed, some today believe that the powers that be were deliberately looking in the wrong place.

At the beginning of the investigation, the police knew only a few things. While all of the victims had died from consuming the same brand of the drug, the Extra Strength Tylenol in question had been made in different facilities and had been purchased at different stores. Because of this seemingly random pattern of contamination, though all occurring in the same general area of Illinois, they concluded that someone had been inserting the cyanide-laced pills into bottles that were already on store shelves. (Thus, the tamper-proof packaging law that followed.)

As the police searched for a culprit, the spotlight turned on James William Lewis, who sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million in exchange for stopping “the killing.” Lewis was arrested and ultimately spent 13 years in prison for extortion, though it quickly became clear that the ransom demand was the extent of the evidence that he might have been involved in the murders.

“They asked me to show how it might have been done and I tried, as a good citizen, to help,” he told the Chicago Tribune while in prison in 1992. “It was a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that does not mean I was the killer.”

But beyond Lewis, no firm leads turned up. The FBI reopened the case in 2007, and in 2011 announced it was looking into the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski as a possible suspect, though two years later, it decided to turn the case back over to local authorities.

Despite this activity, the investigation continues to be hampered by decisions that were made in its earliest days. Of the 31 million bottles of capsules that Johnson & Johnson recalled, only around 1 percent were examined before the entire lot was returned to the company and destroyed. This means that the extent of the poisoning and any further connections—from production to packing to distribution—between contaminated pills cannot be made.

Other pieces of evidence also appear to have been overlooked.

In 2011, a former Johnson & Johnson employee and whistleblower on an unrelated case, Scott Bartz, self-published a book called The Tylenol Mafia in which he claims that the drugstore poisoning was a far-fetched theory and that it was much more likely that the criminal was someone involved in distribution at the company.

He says one of the overlooked pieces of evidence is the pills that Reiner took. While she owned a bottle of regular Tylenol, it was Extra Strength Tylenol that killed her, pills Bartz believes she received from the hospital after giving birth, which would mean her death wasn’t connected to a drugstore purchase.

Today, Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 reaction to the Tylenol murders is taught in business schools, and held up as an exemplar of how companies should behave in a crisis. But if a company employee were responsible for the murders, as Bartz believes, that would all change and Johnson & Johnson would instead be liable for the deaths. While law enforcement seems to be doing everything they can to keep the case active, it is this activity that is also concerning to some.

Michelle Rosen, the daughter of Reiner who was 8 at the time of her mother’s death, says it was the FBI’s 2007 decision that caused her to question the random drugstore “madman theory” that she had always accepted. By reopening the case, the FBI ensured that all documents related to the investigation would remain sealed.

“Not one bit of evidence ever supported the store shelf theory except for the only fact that people bought Tylenol and they died. That was it. Nothing else,” Rosen writes.

The fatal 1982 Tylenol poisonings spurred a complete revamping of the nation’s product safety standards. But while life may be safer for all Americans in its wake, family members of the victims continue to mourn their lost loved ones and live with the fact that, nearly 40 years after the tragedy, the case of the cyanide-laced painkillers remains unsolved.