SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Tylenol Murders, Part I

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Now up is one of my favorite of our true crime episodes on the poisoning deaths of at least seven people in the Chicago area back in 1982. What makes this case so unsettling is that there doesn't seem to be any connection whatsoever between the victims and the killer. The murderer just seems to have been a mad poisoner. Like most good true crime mysteries, this one is also unsolved. Enjoy.

0:34Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

0:44Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. Not me twice. There's Chuck. Guest producer Josh is back in the house. Yeah, and there's little Chuck in your pocket. Remember little Elvis? I was just about to say that. You got that right, Tanya. Oh, man. What a great sketch. It really was. That was Nicolas Cage, wasn't it? Yeah, man. Did you ever see Mandy? Yes, it was terrible. I don't care what anybody else says. Did you hate it? Terrible. Terrible movie. Yeah. Noel and I talked about it on Movie Crush. He's seen it like four times. Thinks it's the best thing ever. Come on, Noel.

1:19And he was like, people either love it or hate it. And I was like, actually, I was kind of in the middle. Were you really? Yeah. I mean, I told him young Chuck, like 22-year-old college Chuck, would have probably liked it a lot more. Yeah. But today, Chuck was kind of like, eh, I get it. Like, sure. Sure. Parts of it were fine. Sure. To me, spending an hour doing character development, but not successfully making you care about the characters, just really irked me. Wow, you had structural issues. Yeah. That was really the big thing. I also thought Linus Roach was very, very odd for casting. Who's that?

1:58Which one was he? The main bad guy, the cult leader. That was weird. Very weird. I don't even know him, but I just— He's from Law & Order. And like some other stuff. You got to get into Law & Order, Chuck. See how much you're missing out on. That's becoming a bit. So, did we start recording yet? I think so. Oh, I already welcomed everybody to the podcast. That's right. So, Chuck, we are—this is some true crime stuff we're getting into here. That's right. But I feel like we need to set the tone, right? Because this didn't happen just yesterday. This happened way back in 1982 in Chicago, Illinois.

2:32And I remember this, even though I was like six at the time. It was one of my favorite years. Because of this? No. No. The opposite of that, right? Mainly because of movies. What was so great about 1982? Look it up, man. Well, I was kind of hoping you had. E.T., Blade Runner. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, yeah, that was a good year. Some of the best movies. Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until I was 40? That's not true. Yes, it is. Oh, really? Yes. The original. The original Blade Runner. Huh. Did you like it? Yeah, it was good. I liked the second one, too. You're like, but they spent way too much time on characters.

3:11Yeah, and I just did a little poking around about 1982, and it was a good year for an 11-year-old, but it was an uneasy time in America. Why? Well, a bunch of awful things happened that year, and I don't know if it was any more or less than other years. But Air Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River. Remember that? In Washington, D.C., the plane crashed in the river. Didn't it hit a bridge? Maybe, but there was like a daring icy river rescue. Oh, really? Yeah. 78 people died, though. That same day, a metro train in D.C. derailed, killed three people. Geez. February was when Wayne Williams was convicted.

3:54Gotcha. And that was just the end of a lot of unease, you know, for years. Klaus Van Bula was found guilty of attempted murder of his wife in March. I didn't make it to the end of Reversal of Fortune, so I honestly didn't know what happened to Klaus. Guilty. Okay. In June was the murder of Vincent Chin, who was a Chinese-American who was beaten to death by two men in Michigan thinking he was a Japanese, and they were, like, stealing their auto work. Oh, my God. I know, right? And then July 9th, Pan Am Flight 759 goes down in Louisiana, kills all 146 people on board, plus eight more on the ground.

4:39And then in September, early September. Please stop this. Was when, I know, man, remember planes used to just crash a lot. Yeah, that never happens now. Not as much, but yeah, weird that we're recording this in the midst of more plane crashes. And then early September was when that paper boy in Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again. Johnny Gauche. I don't know that one. That was a big deal, too, because it was, you know, the paper boy and there was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians. And that turned out not to be true. But he was never found again. So basically everything that's going on today is just a rehash of 1982, it sounds like.

5:19I just remember being about that age and they're just the nightly news sort of just being a horror show. Yeah. And not politically speaking. You know. Like real bad incidences occurring. Well, yeah, plane crash, like just about at any age, like that'll bring you down if you see that on the news for sure. Because, you know, when you get on a plane, you think, maybe this plane will go down while I'm on it. That would be terrible. Although I wasn't flying at 11. So all of those things you just mentioned, sweep them totally off the table. Okay. Because come the end of September of that year, nothing else mattered but what we're about to talk about now.

6:01That's right. Nothing. Nothing came close to taking over the national psyche like the deaths of seven people beginning on September 29, 1982 in Chicago, Illinois. Yeah, and one of the articles I read about this, I mean, are we trying to keep it a secret? It's a show title, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they're going to have to figure it out. So, yeah, go ahead. The Tylenol murders? Yeah. Okay. You're like, oh, no, no. But that comes up in part two. Oh, yeah. This is a two-parter as well. So buckle in, everybody. So I was doing some research, though, and I saw one article that said something about, you know, the first domestic terror incident in the United States that nobody's ever heard of.

6:48I was like, what? Who hasn't heard of this? A millennial wrote that headline. Well, I have to say, Josh on the way in here. Yeah. I told him Tylenol murders, and he went, huh? He goes, what's a Tylenol? You old codger. We should probably say what Tylenol is, huh? Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess just in case you are a millennial and you've never heard of Tylenol. But Tylenol was and still is an over-the-counter pain reliever. It's like you have aches and pains. And apparently what's crazy, people would take Tylenol, whatever was wrong with them. Because now you can go get like, you know, aspirin and Advil and Aleve.

7:28there was no Aleve back then. That was a 90s drug. There's way more over-the-counter pain relievers now than there were back then. Back then, Tylenol was basically it. Yeah. It's acetaminophen, which is different than aspirin. And I think a lot of people just think those are interchangeable. Right. The reason I believe Tylenol became so big is because aspirin upsets a lot of people's stomachs. Tylenol does not, or it's not supposed to. And that's why it came out of nowhere. just took over the aspirin market. I think by 1982, Tylenol had 37 % of the market. That's pretty good. Cornered. Yeah. Yeah.

8:06Almost half. Especially since like some of the other like aspirins have been around since, you know, 19th century. Right. So it makes sense then that when a little girl named Mary Ann Kellerman complained that she had a sore throat and wasn't feeling too good at like 7 a.m. on Wednesday, September 29th, 1982, her parents said, just take an extra strength Tylenol and go back to bed. Man. For a sore throat, for something like that. Can you imagine the guilt? Oh, no. These parents feel. Well, don't blow it. We haven't said what happens to Marianne Kellerman yet. I think everybody knows. Yeah, she got up, said I'm sick.

8:45He said, take this. The father said he heard her going to the bathroom and closed the door, then heard something drop and went to the door saying, are you OK? You're OK. No answer. opened the door and there she is on the floor, taken to the hospital, but died very quickly. Yeah, probably was dead when she went to the hospital, was pronounced there. And they suspected, this is just a little 12-year-old girl, middle school girl, went to Jane Addams Middle School. They think she died of a stroke. That's what they thought happened to her. They were just so baffled that they're like, it had to have been a stroke.

9:23That's the only thing that can come on like this. Yeah, so that's 7 a.m. The day is just beginning, and one atrocity has already happened. Yeah, this is a very bad day in the history of Chicago, September 29, 1982. Yeah, absolutely. And it started early. Adam Janis, who will detail his story, but put a pin in this one too, because he figures in even more prominently in a minute. But a little bit later that same morning, this gentleman, Adam Janis, he's 27 years old and lived in Arlington Heights, another Chicago suburb. And he died. And they think that this is a heart attack. He complained of chest pains after he had driven his daughter's neighbor home from school, said, I'm going to take the day off, comes home, eats a little lunch, takes two extra strength Tylenol that he bought from a local drugstore.

10:18collapses in front of his wife, and by, you know, a few minutes later when the paramedics arrive, he was dead. Right. And again, like you said, they said heart attack because he'd been complaining of chest pains, which had nothing to do with it. Right. But just like Marianne Kellerman took an extra strength of Tylenol for a sore throat, he took some extra strength of Tylenol for some chest pains. This is just what people did back then. Yeah, and that's what complicated it a little bit at first, was that, you know, if you take the Tylenol, it means you felt bad already. So obviously, you know, they're going to be saying like, wait a minute, chest pains or sore throat.

10:50Like, how does that figure in? Yeah. And it didn't. Plus also what made this even more baffling is that Marianne Kellerman was 12 and healthy. Adam Janis was 27 and healthy. And all of a sudden they just dropped dead. People don't just drop dead. No matter what you see on TV or in the movies or whatever, dropping dead inexplicably is a really bizarre thing when you're a healthy person. It just doesn't happen. Next, we have Mary Reiner. Same day. Same day. This is still all on the same day. She's 27 years old. She's feeling a little dizzy. She had just come home from the hospital after having given birth to her fourth kid a couple of days before.

11:31Yeah. Super, super sad. All of these are, obviously. But being just a brand new mom for the fourth time is just so tragic. And then by 345, she was so ill, she was rushed back to the hospital and, again, died very, very quickly. Yeah, and like Adam Janus collapsed in front of his wife, she collapsed in front of her young 8-year-old daughter. One of her children saw her. And, yeah, when she was taken to the hospital, they pronounced her dead as well. This is mid-afternoon. Mary McFarland was up next. She was over in the suburb of Lombard, and she worked at an Illinois Bell phone center. Where do you remember, like, you'd go get your phone, like the rotary phone?

12:16You know, you would actually lease your phone? I wasn't involved in that process, but we had them in our home. Okay. Well, your parents went to a place. I never knew that. I figured they just bought that stuff. No, there was, like, a store where you would go. It's like the phone company's retail store, and you would go and be like that pink one. It's like smartphones today. Kind of. Same model. Kind of. Yeah, I guess so. But this was with a big clunky rotary phone, and you had to pay extra for the extra long court. Well, Mary McFarlane worked in one of these stores, and at about 4 o 'clock at the Illinois Bell Phone Center, she had a massive headache that just came on out of nowhere.

12:54And she went back and got some extra strength Tylenol out of her purse. took a couple of them, and within minutes collapsed in the store. Yeah, she was young as well. She was 31 years old, mother of two. And then, remember, I was talking about Adam Janis a few minutes ago. His family goes to the hospital. Obviously, everyone converges there. He passes away. And so the family makes their way home to begin mourning and just sort of trying to reconcile what had just happened. Yeah. His brother Stanley, who was only 25, and then his wife Teresa, who was only 19, are both just overcome and worn out and have headaches.

13:35So they're at Adam's house. They go to his medicine cabinet, get out the Tylenol that he took, completely unknowingly, obviously. And Stanley hits the ground. Foam comes from his mouth. His eyes roll back in his head. Everyone's freaking out. and a few minutes later, his wife collapses and they call the ambulance. By the time the ambulances get there, I think Stanley died that day and Teresa somehow managed to live a couple of days. Yeah, she hung on and I don't know if like her dose is lesser or what, but she survived for a couple of days after that. Yeah, I mean, my guess is that there just wasn't as much cyanide in the capsule she took.

14:19Right. Did I just give something else away? Yeah, you did. But so Stanley took his Tylenol first and then Teresa took hers. And one of the paramedics noted, like Teresa was the one that called the ambulance out to come out for Stanley. And when they get there, they're both like on the ground. And they're like, what's going on? And one of the paramedics said everything that was happening to the guy happened to the woman like a couple minutes later. Like she was just following him through this process of like basically systemic organ failure. And this is the same day that his brother had passed away.

14:52Yep. This is about five, six hours after Adam Janis had died. Then finally, I know this is all tough to go through, everyone. We almost selected this as our next live show. I'm really glad we did. It's probably a good idea. Because, I mean, can you imagine trying to liven this up with some jokes? I thought at the time, I was like, no, we can do that. But, yeah, the more I got into it, I was like, yeah, this is probably not good live material. Right. We should have a rule of thumb that any story that begins with the death of a 12-year-old girl is not live show material. I think you're right. So finally, we have Paula Prince, Paula Jean Prince.

15:28This is a couple of days later. This is not the same day. This is on Friday evening. She was a 35-year-old flight attendant, and she was found dead in her apartment after police responded for a welfare check that her sister called in saying, hey, you know, I know she's a flight attendant and all, but no one knows where she is. Can you go check on her? A welfare checkup. And they finally found her and she was gone. Yes. Very, very sad. She was found in her bathroom with a bottle of extra strength Tylenol still open on the counter. And they looked into her receipts and found that she had purchased it on Wednesday, September 29th.

16:10That's right. so at the end of this very short span of time in the Chicago area we have seven people dead and I feel like that's a good time to take a message break yeah? yeah alright

16:45Okay, Chuck. So you said cyanide. How did you know that? Because I was 11 years old, and I watched the nightly news like all 11-year-olds did. You just called it, right? Just me and Brokaw, Dan Rather, Koppel. Yep. Who else? That was it. Peter Jennings. He came a little later, but sure. Was he? Yeah. Yeah, he came after somebody. Well, I mean, Cronkite wasn't still around, was he, or was he? I don't know. I don't think so. I was kind of into the news as a kid a little bit. Well, yeah, I mean, that was where you got your news back then. Yeah, you would watch the evening news. It's very strange to think about now.

17:24Right. With the up-to-the-minute news cycle. So, oh, yeah, I know how much more innocent things were back then. I know. So remove yourself from the benefit of hindsight or the benefit of Dan Rather's insight. and put yourself in the shoes of the people in Chicago, right? Yeah. These are five, these are seven different deaths. I think from five different townships in the greater Chicago area, including Chicago, Paula Prince, the last person to die, lived in Chicago. These people aren't talking. These people have no idea what's going on. It's just that there were five, seven separate baffling deaths.

18:04You keep saying five. If you want too few fewer people to be dead. Yeah, I do. That's good. My wishes aren't working, though. It just so happens that the ambulance, the paramedics that showed up to attend to Mary Ann Kellerman, the first girl to die, they were just logging everything because it was such a baffling thing. And they logged her Tylenol. Yeah, logged as in collected. Right. Yeah. Took it as evidence to maybe look into. Who knows? Sure. But they took the extra strength Tylenol that she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stuck.

18:41Yeah, I'm sure the dad was like, you know, she went in, took some Tylenol and dropped dead. Right. So it probably made sense, even though it's just Tylenol, to say like, well, hey, let's at least take this in. Yes. And that Tylenol. Right. You know. Because that bottle of Tylenol made its way into the hands of a medical examiner whose name was. Michael Schaefer. And Michael Schaefer tested the Tylenol and was rather surprised to find that some of the capsules had not Tylenol in it, but 65 milligrams of potassium cyanide. Yeah. And it takes about 50 milligrams to kill a healthy adult. Yeah. I mean, some of them, I don't think they were all exactly the same, but some of them had been completely emptied of any acetaminophen and completely filled with cyanide.

19:29With cyanide, right? Yeah, I mean, it was someone intent on for sure killing people. Yes, because cyanide is no joke. No. It's a really, really small molecule, and it normally attaches to metals outside of the body, which is why you have – or minerals, I guess, which is why you have potassium cyanide. Right. When it goes into the body, when you ingest it, however you ingest it, whether it's from a Tylenol capsule or breathing cyanide gas like they used to use to execute people with. Yeah, like they stopped using it for executions because it was such a brutal death. Yeah, it's a very cruel, painful way to die.

20:07In the body, it detaches from its mineral or metal, and it attaches to a protein in the body called cytochrome C oxidase, which doesn't sound like it'd be a big problem. But it turns out that that's about the worst protein that cyanide could attach itself to because we really need cytochrome C oxidase to breathe. Yeah. Basically, I mean, this sounds like such a cruel thing because it's just rapid cell death. And it's not like your throat closes up and you can't breathe. Like you're inhaling oxygen and you are technically taking breaths, but the oxygen is not getting in the cells. No, it's not because that cytochrome C oxidase is what helps transport the oxygen and allows the oxygen to be used for energy.

21:00Yeah. So if the potassium is clinging to it, the oxygen can't. It just stays in the bloodstream and it doesn't get used by the cells. And since your central nervous system is the most oxygen-hungry system in your entire body. Does a lot of work. It starts to shut down first. And when your brain and your spinal cord start shutting down, all sorts of things happen. Your lungs start shutting down. Your heart, God bless it, keeps beating for minutes after the rest of your body shut down. So you're not technically dead. They're not sure exactly how long the pain and excruciation of dying from cyanide lasts.

21:37But they think you're probably conscious and aware and freaked out for about a minute at least. and your heart may continue beating for three or four minutes after that. So it's not a pleasant death at all. No. I mean, you're gasping for air. You're breathing in air. Nothing's happening. Like I said, Stanley Janus, he was foaming at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head in front of his family. It's just like it's awful, like writhing on the floor, gasping for air. You're breathing, but it's not doing anything. It's just I can't imagine anything more horrifying. Right, because your central nervous system has kind of fallen out of control or rhythm.

22:15Convulsions are usually a hallmark of cyanide poisoning. And then you turn bright red at the end of it. Yeah, a cherry red, they said, because when your body has gotten rid of oxygen to your cells and the oxygen becomes depleted, your skin kind of turns like a rusty brownish red. but because it can't unload that oxygen when you're dead, it stays a bright red and your skin turns bright red. And then the other real telltale sign is your breath will smell a bit like almonds. Yeah, I mean, not a bit. I mean, these bottles supposedly were really pungent with bitter almond. And unless you know what that means, then you're probably not clued in, you know?

23:00Like I wouldn't have known. If I opened a bottle of Tylenol and it smelled like bitter almond, And I'd probably be like, huh. Right. It's a nice smell, actually. Yeah, I like this Tylenol. Yeah. I guess they have a new almond flavor. Awful. So Michael Schaefer, that medical examiner, has just realized that this little girl has been poisoned. But he knows nothing about these other deaths. Yeah. There's nothing like that. It's not entirely clear how everything became connected or who connected it. But what I find just particularly astonishing is that within just a few hours, by that evening, by the evening of September 29th, people were saying there's something up with the Tylenol in these mysterious deaths that have been going on all around Chicago.

23:45Yeah. I mean, we'll get into the dragnet they cast. But within a few days, they had kind of solved everything but who did it and how it may have happened. Who done it. Who done it. So, yeah, very quickly they figured out the Tylenol. And there are a couple of different stories on, like you said, on who was the first person to point this out. One story is that a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago was doing the reporter thing and doing some deep diving and investigating and called up a deputy coroner and said, hey, I think this is what's happening. They told the police. Another story is that two people who didn't know each other kind of came together independently to let people know.

24:30One was a fire captain named Philip Capitelli. I knew it. I knew you were going to do that. There was like a 90 % chance. You know why? Because we got a lot of support from people that wrote in saying, I'm Italian and I love it. Keep doing it. Right. And only one guy who hated it. But ironically, it was fire captain Philip Capitelli who had written in and said no. So he, here was his deal. His mother-in-law was friends with Mary Kellerman, the victim's mother. Yeah, the first little girl. And she said, hey, would you mind looking into this? Because I'm friends with this little girl's mom. And it's weird that she dropped dead at age 12.

25:11And he's a fire captain, and they're all connected to, you know, the police and to the medical community. Everybody knows you want something done, ask a fire captain. I would. Sure. Because they'll bust into the room with an axe and get everybody's attention. So he's investigating, and then there's a nurse named Helen Jensen. And she, I don't, do you know why she was so into this case? Was she just a do-gooder? No, no, no. She was the public health nurse for Cook County, I believe. Oh, okay. So she had an official designation to investigate. Yes, but unfortunately, no one would listen to her because this is 1982 and she was a nurse.

25:52Right. Even though she was like a public health director, she was still a nurse and people wouldn't listen to her. And she recalled in an oral history I read about this that she was stomping her feet out of frustration, saying like there's something wrong with the Tylenol. Like the Tylenol is behind all this and people wouldn't listen to her. Amazing. Supposedly she and Philip. Capitale. Got together and joined forces. Right. And I guess we're able to convince everybody that, no, there's something wrong with the Tylenol. And by this time, people started talking. Sure. And, you know, the idea that Michael Schaefer had identified Tylenol, I don't know if it was the same day or the day after or something like that.