Ten years after the seven poisoning deaths in the Chicago area caused by cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules sent shock waves across the country, the murders remain unsolved and the investigation open.
But there are few questions about the lingering message the tragedy left in the minds of millions of Americans:
– The safety of the most basic objects could no longer be taken for granted. A deranged mind had turned a popular remedy into a menace.
– If an over-the-counter drug could be so easily tampered with, weren`t other items, especially foods, even more vulnerable?
The killings inspired federal regulations that require protective seals over non-prescription drugs. It`s hard to find a package without some kind of shield, but manufacturers and public safety experts warn that no guard is completely tamper-proof.
”It`s very hard for people today to get away from the idea that they have to be alert,” said Stephen A. Greyser, professor of consumer marketing with the Harvard School of Business. ”This packaging reinforces the idea that the real way consumers protect themselves is through vigilance.”
On Sept. 29, 1982, most non-prescription capsules were sold in containers with only a cotton ball between them and the bottle`s flip-off plastic cap. That morning, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman, a 7th grader at Schaumburg`s Addams Junior High School, took two Extra Strength Tylenol capsules for a head cold. A short time later, she became violently ill and died in her home in Elk Grove Village.
She was the first of seven to die. The other victims also had taken Tylenol that day. Three were members of the same family.
Adam Janus, 27, a postal worker, complained of chest pains after driving his neighbor`s daughter home from nursery school in Arlington Heights. He took two capsules. By noon, he was dead.
In Winfield, Mary Reiner, 27, died two days after giving birth to her fourth child.
In Lombard, Mary McFarland, 31, the mother of two sons, collapsed at her telephone company job in the Yorkville shopping mall. Police found a bottle of Tylenol in her purse.
In Arlington Heights, Adam Janus` brother, Stanley, 25, and Stanley`s wife, Theresa, 19, had driven from Lisle to Adam`s home to make funeral arrangements. Distraught over the death, first Stanley, then his wife, took Tylenol, became violently ill, and died.
Chicagoan Paula Jean Prince, 35, a flight attendant, was the seventh victim. She was found dead Oct. 1 in her North LaSalle Street apartment after purchasing Tylenol at a drugstore in Old Town.
The killings were never solved, but one man, James W. Lewis, now 46, once a prime suspect, remains in prison. He was convicted of plotting to extort $1 million from the manufacturer of Tylenol in the aftermath of the poisonings.
He is serving two consecutive 10-year terms at the medium-security federal prison in El Reno, Okla. His mandatory release date is March 1996.
Lewis, an out-of-work accountant with an explosive temper, was arrested after he sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the parent of the Tylenol manufacturer, McNeal Laboratories, demanding $1 million ”to stop the killing.” He had been living in Chicago but moved shortly before the killings to New York.
In a phone interview last week, Lewis, an art instructor in prison, reiterated his claim that he is innocent of the murders and the extortion. But said he is no longer taking legal steps to clear himself.
Lewis was asked about an interrogation after his arrest in which he demonstrated how the killer might have put poison in the capsules.
”They (the police) asked me to show how it might have been done and I tried, as a good citizen, to help,” he said. ”It was a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that does not mean I was the killer.”
Lewis acknowledged that he had told how the killer might have infused the capsules with cyanide, spreading the poison onto a cutting board and then carefully brushing it through holes into capsules beneath the board.
”I have been put to some fairly severe tests by the government,” Lewis said several years ago. ”But even they must know by now I am not the big horrible person that some people . . . would have me be.”
Chicago attorney Dan Webb, who prosecuted Lewis in the extortion case, tended to agree.
”I think it is unfair to bring up his name” when the murders are discussed, Webb said last week. ”We cannot say he is the killer (because) no one else has ever surfaced” as a suspect.
Still, Webb said that while there was ”insufficient evidence to charge murder, there was a lot of evidence that pointed in his (Lewis`) direction.” In all probability, the killer purchased a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, took it home, poured out the medication, and refilled the capsules with potassium cyanide. He then made the rounds of food stores and drugstores, slipping several capsules out of Tylenol bottles and replacing them with the poisoned ones.
That is how many investigators saw the killer`s modus operandi.
The Tylenol Task Force, created to solve the mystery, surmised the killer put the contaminated capsules on store shelves on Tuesday, Sept. 28.
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All the tampered packages were up front on the shelves where a customer could reach them first.
”He wanted a lot of people to die in a short period of time,” said M/
Sgt. Richard Tetyk of the Illinois State Police.
All the contaminated capsules were purchased at retail outlets within a 50-mile radius in Cook and Du Page Counties. Police theorized that a lone killer, driving from store to store, needed at least seven hours to perform the tamperings.
While the case file of the Tylenol deaths remains open, Maj. Edward Cisowski of the state police said there are no plausible leads. Like many of his law-enforcement colleagues, Cisowski, the lead state police investigator in the case, said he believes that Lewis was the Tylenol killer because he wrote the extortion letter.
As soon as the police linked the deaths with the tampered Tylenol capsules, Johnson & Johnson sprang into action, recalling and destroying 31 million Tylenol capsules at a cost of more than $100 million.
That move and others by the manufacturer, including setting up a hot line and launching a public-education campaign, are still cited as a textbook example of how a consumer-products company should handle a public-relations disaster.
Not surprisingly, the Tylenol poisonings prompted the Food and Drug Administration to require at least one type of tamper-resistant seal on the capsule, bottle or box.
But the killings also raised questions about the vulnerability of other products, particularly food. Cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt, pickle and mayonnaise jars and loaves of bread were among the hundreds of packaged foods that seemed like fair game.
Consumers could no longer be sure that a jar was safe simply because the top made the familiar popping noise of an airtight seal being broken for the first time.
”I can remember, not that long ago, when people would open cottage cheese packages in the store to see if it seemed fresh,” said Isabel Wolf, spokeswoman for the National Center for Food Safety and Technology, which is part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
”Back then, people wouldn`t have thought much about it. Today, they wouldn`t be able to get it off because of the shrink wrap.”
Some consumers believe there are excesses in tamper-resistant packaging. One respondent complained to the Consumer Network Inc., a research firm, that the manufacturer had gone overboard when it wrapped Dial soap in a cellophane wrapper.
But they make up a small minority, even with growing concerns about overpackaging and its effect on waste disposal, said Mona Doyle, president of Consumer Network. ”Ninety-nine percent of consumers say there should be more” safety packaging.
Those concerns were confirmed in a 1992 survey by Packaging magazine. Ninety-one percent of the 750 respondents cited tamper-resistant packaging as an ”extremely or very important” characteristic in a non-prescription drug. And 85.1 percent said the same for food products. Nearly 48 percent said they had avoided buying a food or over-the-counter drug in a six-month period because it appeared to have been handled.
Though tragedies such as the Tylenol case inspired the creation of another line of defense in everyday living, people are still obviously willing to take risks. Hot-dog vendors, salad bars and restaurants, to name a few, remain vulnerable.
”People feel they have to take their chances,” Doyle said.