The Chicago Poisonings

0:00 Speaker 1: The afternoon of September twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two, in

0:03 Speaker 1: the quiet suburbs of Chicago, began with a minor nuisance.

0:07 Speaker 1: Twelve year old Mary Kellerman woke up with a scratchy

0:10 Speaker 1: throat and a slight runny nose. Her parents, wanting to

0:14 Speaker 1: comfort her before school, gave her a single extra strength

0:18 Speaker 1: capsule from a fresh bottle in the medicine cabinet. Within minutes,

0:22 Speaker 1: Mary collapsed on the bathroom floor. By the time the

0:25 Speaker 1: ambulance reached the hospital, she was dead. The doctors were

0:29 Speaker 1: baffled she was a perfectly healthy child, but as the

0:33 Speaker 1: hospital staff scrambled to understand her sudden cardiac arrest, the

0:37 Speaker 1: emergency room doors burst open again. A frantic family from

0:41 Speaker 1: a neighboring town brought in twenty seven year old Adam Janis.

0:45 Speaker 1: He had complained of a sudden chest pain at work,

0:48 Speaker 1: taken a couple of capsules for relief, and dropped dead

0:51 Speaker 1: in his kitchen. While Adam's devastated family gathered at his

0:54 Speaker 1: house later that evening to mourn, his brother Stanley and

0:59 Speaker 1: sister in law Teresa, developed stress headaches from the shock.

1:03 Speaker 1: They walked into Adam's bathroom, found the same bottle of

1:07 Speaker 1: medicine he had used earlier, and each swallowed a capsule.

1:11 Speaker 1: Stanley collapsed before he could leave the room, Teresa fell

1:14 Speaker 1: beside him. By midnight, seven people across the Chicago metropolitan

1:19 Speaker 1: area were dead. They had no connection to one another.

1:23 Speaker 1: They lived in different towns, worked different jobs, and ranged

1:27 Speaker 1: in age from a twelve year old schoolgirl to a

1:29 Speaker 1: thirty five year old flight attendant. But as a frantic

1:32 Speaker 1: late night task force of detectives and toxicologists cross referenced

1:36 Speaker 1: the victim's homes, they found one terrifying common denominator sitting

1:40 Speaker 1: on every single counter, a red and white bottle of

1:43 Speaker 1: extra strength tilanol, the smell of bitter almonds. The breakthrough

1:47 Speaker 1: came when a sharp eyed investigator named Nick Pichot's noticed

1:51 Speaker 1: a strange detail while cataloging Adam Janis's personal effects. When

1:56 Speaker 1: he opened the victim's bottle of tilanol, a faint, peculiar

2:00 Speaker 1: odor drifted out of the plastic neck. It smelled distinctly

2:03 Speaker 1: of bitter almonds. Pischots immediately rushed the bottle to a

2:07 Speaker 1: state toxicology lab. The chemist who analyzed the contents didn't

2:12 Speaker 1: find a seat of minifin. Instead, the capsules were packed

2:15 Speaker 1: to the brim with a massive lethal dose of potassium cyanide,

2:19 Speaker 1: enough to kill a human being ten times over. The

2:22 Speaker 1: realization sent a wave of absolute panic through the highest

2:25 Speaker 1: levels of American government and corporate leadership. This wasn't a

2:29 Speaker 1: manufacturing defect. A defect would mean a bad batch of

2:33 Speaker 1: chemicals mixed evenly across thousands of bottles, diluting the effect.

2:38 Speaker 1: This was pure concentrated poison placed inside individual capsules by hand.

2:43 Speaker 1: Someone was using the most trusted over the counter medication

2:47 Speaker 1: in the United States as a delivery system for mass murder.

2:50 Speaker 1: The terror on the airwaves on October first, nineteen eighty two,

2:54 Speaker 1: the world changed. Police cars cruised slowly through the streets

2:58 Speaker 1: of Chicago, using loudspeakers to blare a chilling warning to residence,

3:03 Speaker 1: do not take tailan al, flush it down the toilet immediately.

3:07 Speaker 1: Television networks broke into regular programming with emergency broadcasts. Johnson

3:13 Speaker 1: and Johnson, the parent company, faced an unprecedented nightmare. They

3:18 Speaker 1: made a historic one hundred million dollar gamble. They issued

3:21 Speaker 1: a nationwide recall of thirty one million bottles of medicine,

3:25 Speaker 1: effectively pulling every single product bearing their name off every

3:29 Speaker 1: shelf from New York to California. The FBI launched a

3:32 Speaker 1: massive federal investigation code named Timers. They quickly determined that

3:38 Speaker 1: the tampering hadn't happened at the factories. The targeted bottles

3:41 Speaker 1: came from different manufacturing plants across the country, but they

3:45 Speaker 1: had all been sold at a handful of specific grocery

3:48 Speaker 1: and drug stores in the Chicago area. The killer had

3:51 Speaker 1: walked into regular stores, casually pulled bottles off the shelves,

3:55 Speaker 1: taken them home, filled the capsules with cyanide, and then

3:58 Speaker 1: quietly walked back into the stores to slip the lethal

4:01 Speaker 1: traps back into the front of the display racks. It

4:04 Speaker 1: was a completely random, anonymous crime. Anyone who walked down

4:07 Speaker 1: the aisle could have been the target. The extortionist in

4:11 Speaker 1: the shadows. Just as the nation was gripping itself for

4:14 Speaker 1: a potential second wave of poisonings, a handwritten letter arrived

4:18 Speaker 1: at the corporate offices of Johnson and Johnson. The author

4:21 Speaker 1: claimed responsibility for the seven deaths and demanded one million

4:25 Speaker 1: dollars to be wired to a specific bank account. If

4:28 Speaker 1: the money wasn't paid, The letter warned the poisonings would

4:32 Speaker 1: continue nationwide. The FBI immediately tracked the bank account. It

4:37 Speaker 1: didn't belong to a criminal mastermind. It belonged to a

4:40 Speaker 1: completely innocent travel agency that had recently gone out of business.

4:44 Speaker 1: The owner of the agency had no idea his account

4:47 Speaker 1: was being used, but investigators dug into the agency's past

4:51 Speaker 1: employees and found a bidder deeply strange man named James Lewis.

4:56 Speaker 1: Lewis was a brilliant but deeply disturbed individual who had

4:59 Speaker 1: a history of financial fraud and a dark past. Investigators

5:03 Speaker 1: discovered that he had used a sophisticated web of fake

5:06 Speaker 1: names and forged signatures to set up the extortion plot,

5:09 Speaker 1: specifically trying to frame his former boss at the travel

5:12 Speaker 1: agency out of pure spite. When the FBI rated Lewis's

5:16 Speaker 1: temporary apartment, they found a chilling archive newspaper clippings of

5:20 Speaker 1: the tailenal deaths, chemical diagrams, and notebooks detailing the effects

5:25 Speaker 1: of various poisons on the human body. The Unbroken Seal.

5:29 Speaker 1: James Lewis was arrested after a massive nationwide manhunt. He

5:33 Speaker 1: was convicted of extortion and sentenced to thirty years in

5:36 Speaker 1: federal prison, but the justice system hit a devastating wall.

5:41 Speaker 1: While the government could easily prove he wrote the million

5:43 Speaker 1: dollar extortion letter, they could never find a single shred

5:47 Speaker 1: of physical forensic evidence linking him to the actual store

5:50 Speaker 1: shelves in Chicago. No fingerprints were ever recovered from the

5:54 Speaker 1: poison bottles, no witnesses ever saw him planting the medicine.

6:00 Speaker 1: Maintained until his death that he was merely a con

6:02 Speaker 1: man capitalizing on a tragedy, not the killer himself. He

6:07 Speaker 1: took his secrets to the grave, and to this day,

6:10 Speaker 1: no one has ever been charged with the seven murders.

6:13 Speaker 1: The Chicago tailenol murders remain one of the most infamous

6:17 Speaker 1: unsolved mysteries in American history. But the monster who walked

6:21 Speaker 1: those drug store aisles inadvertently reshaped the modern world. Because

6:25 Speaker 1: of those seven random victims, the pharmaceutical and food industries

6:29 Speaker 1: completely abandoned the old easily open glass and plastic containers.

6:33 Speaker 1: Every time you twist off a plastic breakaway band, peel

6:37 Speaker 1: back a foil seal, or pop open a vacuum packed lid,

6:40 Speaker 1: you are interacting with a safety system born directly from

6:43 Speaker 1: the dark autumn of nineteen eighty two, a permanent shield

6:46 Speaker 1: built to protect the innocent from an anonymous killer who

6:49 Speaker 1: was never caught.