At 6:15 in the morning on September 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman took a single Extra Strength Tylenol at her family’s home in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
Before 10 o’clock that morning, she was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. It was the beginning of a nightmare that claimed at least seven lives and changed the way medication is packaged, handled, and sold.
1982: The Chicago Tylenol Murders
Within hours, six other people were dead, three of them from within the same family. Previously healthy people were suddenly dropping dead with no apparent cause.
“Our first job is to resuscitate, and we couldn’t even do that,” said Thomas Kim, the medical director of intensive care at Northwest Community Hospital, describing 27-year-old Adam Janus, the second victim. “His heart just would not resuscitate.”
By 3:15 pm, Janus was dead. He was followed by his brother and his sister-in-law, as well as three strangers from different households, all of whom experienced the same symptoms.
“Doctor, we’ve got something unusual going on,” one of the staff told Deputy Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue.
“I was very frustrated—and I was very desperate,” recalled Dr. Kim. “How come I can’t figure out what is wrong with these people?” It was Helen Jensen, a public health nurse for Arlington Heights, who first made the connection.
“I found a bottle of Tylenol, and six capsules were missing—and three people dead,” she later recalled. “In my mind, it had to be something to do with the Tylenol.”
She was soon proven right. Lab tests from both the Kellerman and Janus households showed massive amounts of cyanide—“100 or 1,000 times more than was necessary to kill.”
Cyanide blocks red blood cells from utilizing oxygen.
“You can be in an atmosphere with plenty of oxygen, and you can breathe it in, but it doesn’t get picked up by the red blood cells, and you asphyxiate,” Deputy Medical Examiner Donoghue explained. “It causes brain damage and cardiac arrest. It happens very quickly.”
Victims Stanley and Theresa Janus
Photo Credit: CBS NewsA Halloween Scare: More Than Isolated Incidents
When it was determined that the poisoned Tylenol came from different lots, in different towns, it became apparent that they had been tampered with.
Before long, an attorney from Johnson & Johnson was in the offices of the county medical examiner, and by the following morning, press conferences had been called to warn people not to take Tylenol.
By October 5, a nationwide recall of Tylenol products was underway, one of the largest of its kind in history.
Johnson & Johnson voluntarily took out ads across the country warning people not to consume any Johnson & Johnson products containing acetaminophen, and offering to exchange capsules for solid tablets after it was determined that only capsules had been tampered with.
Photo Credit: Denise Chan“Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster,” wrote The Washington Post, and the company’s response is still taught as an example today.
The scare had knock-on effects that reached beyond just Johnson & Johnson, however.
While Tylenol isn’t exactly a popular Halloween treat, the poisoning deaths coming so close to the trick-or-treating holiday led to increased fears of poisoned candy (a problem that is largely an urban myth), with grocery stores reporting that candy sales dropped as much as 20% during the 1982 Halloween season.
Chicago Tylenol Murders: Victims and Copycats
In all, seven people died as part of the initial bout of Tylenol poisonings in and around Chicago. They ranged in age from 12-year-old Mary Kellerman to 35-year-old Paula Prince, a flight attendant with United Airlines.
The others were 20-year-old Theresa Janus, her 25-year-old husband Stanley, Stanley’s brother Adam, as well as 27-year-old Mary Reiner and 31-year-old Mary McFarland. All were dead within hours of consuming the tainted pills.
There were literally hundreds of copycat attacks in the months and years following the Chicago Tylenol murders of 1982, several of which claimed additional victims.
Despite nationwide manhunts, however, the culprit of the initial Chicago Tylenol murders was never found, with a psychologist allegedly describing the crimes as so bizarre that their normal guidelines “just don’t work.”
Shortly after the first of the Chicago Tylenol murders, Johnson & Johnson received a letter demanding $1 million to “stop the killing.”
This letter was eventually traced to James William Lewis, who, upon his arrest, claimed not to have actually committed the murders, but to have simply been attempting extortion to draw publicity.
While Lewis remains a popular suspect, he was never actually charged with the poisonings themselves, though he did spend 13 years in prison for extortion and died in 2023, at the age of 76.
James William Lewis, 1984
Photo Credit: The Kansas City StarIn the years since, the Chicago Tylenol murders of 1982 have received considerable media attention, remaining one of the nation’s most notorious unsolved crimes.
Most recently, Netflix is premiering Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, a true crime docu-series investigating the tragedy, its aftermath, and the most likely culprits.
Watch the Trailer for Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, a new documentary on Netflix
Tamper-Proof: Chicago Tylenol Murders Lead to Changes in Product Safety
The most lasting legacy of the Chicago Tylenol murders has been in how products are packaged, handled, and sold. Back then, “there was no protective sealing on this or any over-the-counter drugs. They just had cotton tucked in there.”
All that was about to change. Johnson & Johnson worked with FDA officials to pioneer new kinds of tamper-proof packaging, including the foil seals and other features that we all know today.
“These packaging protections soon became the industry standard for all over-the-counter medications,” and by 1983, Congress had passed what was called the “Tylenol bill,” making it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products.
“In today’s world, it would be domestic terrorism,” said one firefighter involved in the investigation. “We didn’t have that terminology back then.”
Even years later, the motives and the perpetrator of one of America’s most terrifying instances of mass murder remain elusive, but the legacy of the Chicago Tylenol murders is still with us today, every time we open a bottle of pills.
Featured images: Wikimedia Commons ; Additional images: CBS News ; Denise Chan / Unsplash, Kansas City Star
