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Just before sunrise on Wednesday, Sept. 29, 1982, a seventh-grader living near Chicago’s O’Hare airport woke up with a head cold and was given an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule by her parents. She was dead before 10 a.m., the first of seven people that day in the Chicago area who unknowingly took Tylenol capsules laced with fatal doses of cyanide. No one has ever been charged with the killings, and last month, the leading suspect, James Lewis, died at age 76 in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. The unsolved case had far-reaching implications for consumer safety. The way you open a bottle of over-the-counter medication is a direct result of authorities’ response to the crisis — and the fear that gripped the nation after it was revealed that someone had poisoned capsules in random bottles of Tylenol in what the Chicago medical examiner called a diabolical game of Russian roulette. The quick thinking of first responders, Chicago officials and Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, arguably saved the lives of an unknown number of potential victims.
Mary Kellerman, 12, lived with her parents, Dennis and Jeanna Kellerman, in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village. She was their only child. At 4 p.m. on Sept. 28, the day before her daughter’s death, Jeanna Kellerman bought a 50-count bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol at a nearby Jewel grocery store. The next morning, Mary took one of the capsules and collapsed on the bathroom floor. She was rushed to the hospital and died soon after.
Adam Janus, 27, was a postal worker in suburban Arlington Heights, about 7 miles north of the Kellermans’ home. An hour after Mary Kellerman was pronounced dead, he bought a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol at a different Jewel, in Arlington Heights. Janus, a Polish immigrant who was married with two kids, had taken a sick day because he was having mild chest pains. After taking the Tylenol for his pain, he collapsed in his bedroom. He died at Northwest Community Hospital at 3:15 p.m.
Mary “Lynn” Reiner, 27, had just given birth to her and her husband Edwin’s fourth child a week before. On Sept. 29, she bought a 50-count bottle of regular Tylenol at Frank’s Finer Foods in Winfield, the suburb 30 miles west of Chicago where the family lived. At 3:30 p.m., she took some Tylenol from the new bottle, became comatose and was transported to Central DuPage Hospital. The following morning, she was taken off life support and pronounced dead at the same hospital where she had just delivered her baby.
Stanley Janus, 25, joined other grief-stricken members of the Janus family, including his brother Joe — with whom he co-owned an auto parts store — at their brother Adam’s house hours after his death. There, Stanley and his 20-year-old wife of three months, Theresa Janus, each took capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol from the bottle Adam had purchased earlier. Immediately, the newlyweds indicated they had chest pains and were rushed to Northwest Community Hospital. Stanley was pronounced dead just after 8 p.m., at the same hospital where his brother had died five hours earlier. Theresa Janus was taken off life support just after noon on Friday, Oct. 1.
Mary McFarland, 31, a divorced mother of two young children, was working at Illinois Bell Telephone in Lombard — between Winfield and Elk Grove Village — when she told her co-workers she had a headache. At about 6:30 p.m., she took Extra-Strength Tylenol from a pill case in her purse and collapsed. She died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove the next morning just after 3 a.m.
Paula Prince, 35, was a United Airlines flight attendant. Shortly after 9 p.m. on Sept. 29, after landing at O’Hare, she stopped by a Walgreens near her home in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. There she bought a 24-count bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol, a purchase that was captured on the drugstore’s surveillance camera. (Unfortunately, security cameras were only installed near the cash registers, so there is no footage of anyone placing the tainted Tylenol on the shelves.) Prince died after taking a single capsule from that bottle, although the exact time is unknown — her sister and a friend discovered her body two days later in her apartment.
The Investigation
Stanley Janus’ death was at first determined to be a heart attack. After the other two deaths in his house, however, officials suspected carbon monoxide poisoning. Arlington Heights fire lieutenant Chuck Kramer — who had been treating Stanley when, he said, Theresa grabbed his arm and collapsed herself — was among the first to suspect that the Janus family members had been poisoned from the Tylenol they had all taken.
Kramer said he contacted his friend Helen Jensen, the Arlington Heights village nurse and public health official, who agreed poisoning was possible. Like a clichéd plot in a movie, however, the police and the medical examiner laughed at her and dismissed her concerns, Kramer and Jensen told CBS News in a September 2022 interview — even after she presented them with the Tylenol bottle from Janus’ home and the receipt for it she had found when searching through his trash.
“There are six capsules missing. There are three people dead. There has to be a correlation,” Jensen said she told authorities.
Later, Kramer spoke to another Arlington Heights fire lieutenant, Phil Cappitelli, who told him of another case of someone dying after taking Tylenol: 12-year-old Mary Kellerman. Their suspicions were confirmed in the early hours of Sept. 30, when a lab technician confirmed that blood tests taken of both Kellerman and Adam Janus contained lethal doses of cyanide. Shortly afterward, the coroner’s office, which was charged with testing the recovered Tylenol bottles from the victims, verified that it had found cyanide in the capsules. Officials took action. A task force comprising local, state and federal officials was formed to investigate the poisonings and locate what the attorney general called “a madman hell-bent on doing something like this.” In a midnight news conference on Oct. 2, Mayor Jane M. Byrne announced that all bottles of Tylenol were being yanked from store shelves in Chicago, urged residents not to take the Tylenol they had at home and to turn in any bottles they had to police or fire departments. Police passed out fliers and drove through Chicago-area streets with bullhorns, warning residents not to take Tylenol. Then Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s parent company, made an unprecedented decision: It recalled all its Tylenol capsule products in the U.S. — 31 million bottles valued at about $100 million (about $316 million in today’s dollars). Johnson & Johnson, the FDA and other government agencies had already begun testing Tylenol products for cyanide. In the end, they found only three more bottles that contained poisoned Tylenol capsules, including an unsold bottle at a drugstore in Schaumburg, where Mary Kellerman, the first victim, attended junior high, and two bottles turned in by residents in Wheaton (next to Winfield) and Chicago. Investigators ruled out the possibility that the capsules had been altered at plants or during the distribution process, but they remained stumped. Modern DNA testing on the bottles has proven to be virtually useless, because the bottles were handled by so many people who didn’t wear gloves, from consumers and scientists to investigators themselves.
James Lewis is escorted through Boston’s Logan Airport on Oct. 13, 1995, after being released from federal prison.Red Herrings
Police pursued disparate leads, including an eccentric longtime Jewel dockhand named Roger Arnold, who lived and worked in another western Chicago suburb and had previously made comments about wanting to poison people. When investigators searched his house, according to a Chicago Tribune investigation, they found white powder, chemical lab equipment, and guides on making explosives, drugs and poisons — including potassium cyanide. The white powder police found, however, was later identified as potassium carbonate, not cyanide.
At one point, Arnold worked at the same Melrose Park warehouse as Mary Reiner’s father…