Seven People Died From Tylenol in 1982. The Killer Was Never Caught. The Chicago Tylenol Murders.

In the last days of September 1982, a twelve-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, woke up with a sore throat.

Her name was Mary Kellerman. Her parents gave her an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule.

She died.

That same day, a postal worker in nearby Arlington Heights named Adam Janus took Tylenol and died. That night, his brother and his sister-in-law, grieving at his house, took Tylenol from the same bottle. They died too.

Within days, seven people were dead.

Someone had put cyanide in Tylenol capsules and placed the bottles back on store shelves, for anyone to buy.

Every time you struggle to open a sealed bottle of medicine, you are living with the aftermath of this case. And the person who did it has never been caught.

Seven names

These are the seven people who died.

Mary Kellerman, twelve.

Adam Janus, twenty-seven. His brother Stanley Janus, twenty-five. And Stanley's wife, Theresa Janus, nineteen.

Mary McFarland, thirty-one.

Paula Prince, thirty-five.

Mary Reiner, twenty-seven.

None of them had anything to do with each other. They simply bought, or were given, the wrong bottle.

The bitter almond smell

At first, nobody saw the connection. People were dying suddenly, in different towns, with no obvious cause.

The break came from a nurse and an investigator.

Helen Jensen, the public health nurse for Arlington Heights, went to the Janus home. She found a bottle of Tylenol with a receipt from that same day, and six capsules missing. She gave it to an investigator named Nick Pishos.

Pishos called Edmund Donoghue, a deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County. Donoghue asked him to smell the bottle.

Pishos noticed a scent like almonds. That is a known sign of cyanide.

A toxicology team led by Michael Schaffer tested the remaining capsules. Some of them contained about three times the amount of cyanide needed to kill a person.

Meanwhile, paramedics at the Kellerman home had written down the details of Mary's bottle. It came from the same production lot as the bottle in the Janus home.

The city panics

Once the link was clear, the alarm went out fast.

Within forty-eight hours, Chicago's mayor, Jane Byrne, had Tylenol pulled from local stores for testing. People were told to throw out what they had.

The other victims were found to have bought their bottles at different stores around the Chicago area. Jewel Foods stores. An Osco Drug. A Walgreens. A Dominick's. A small market in Winfield.

The capsules had been made at two different plants, one in Pennsylvania and one in Texas. So investigators concluded the poison was not added at the factory.

Someone had gone into stores, bought the bottles, opened the capsules, added cyanide, and put them back on the shelves.

Then waited.

The recall

Tylenol's maker, Johnson and Johnson, responded quickly.

On October 5, 1982, the company recalled Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules nationwide. About thirty-one million bottles, worth more than a hundred million dollars at retail. It was one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls in history.

The company stopped making and advertising the product. It warned hospitals. It offered to swap people's capsules for solid tablets.

Tylenol's share of the painkiller market collapsed, from about thirty-five percent to about eight percent.

In November 1982, Tylenol came back, in a new package with three separate seals.

How it changed everything

The killings changed the entire industry.

Medicine makers started using tamper-evident packaging. Foil seals under the cap. Plastic bands around the lid. Many companies moved away from capsules that could be pulled apart and refilled, and started making solid caplets instead.

In 1983, Congress passed a law, sometimes called the "Tylenol Bill," that made tampering with consumer products a federal crime. The FDA put new rules in place too.

And there were copycats. Hundreds of tampering incidents were reported across the country in the weeks that followed. Many towns even canceled trick-or-treating that Halloween, and Halloween candy sales reportedly fell by more than twenty percent. For the record, a case of a stranger poisoning Halloween candy has never actually been documented. But in the fall of 1982, nobody was taking the chance.

The copycats did not stop in 1982. In 1986, a woman in Yonkers, New York, died after taking tainted Tylenol capsules. That same year, in Washington state, people died after taking poisoned Excedrin capsules. In 1991, there was a poisoning case involving Sudafed capsules, also in Washington state.

Each case pushed the industry further away from capsules that could be opened and closed again.

The photo

Investigators did have one possible lead on camera.

Paula Prince, one of the seven victims, bought her bottle of Tylenol at a Walgreens in Chicago. Investigators later released a surveillance photo of her purchase. People have long wondered whether the killer could be somewhere in that frame, watching to see who would buy a bottle he had planted.

Nobody in the image was ever identified as the killer.

And one more detail shows how random it all was. One poisoned bottle was found unused. The woman who bought it said she sensed something was off, and never took a capsule. That instinct may have saved her life.

The families of the victims sued. In 1991, Johnson and Johnson settled the Chicago-area lawsuits for an amount that was never made public.

The letter

While the investigation was underway, Johnson and Johnson received a letter. The writer demanded one million dollars to stop the deaths.

Investigators tracked down the man who wrote it. He admitted he wrote the letter. He denied having anything to do with the poisonings. He was convicted of extortion and sent to prison.

We are not naming him. He was never charged with the murders.

That extortion conviction is the only conviction ever connected to this case.

The investigation

Investigators looked at a long list of people over the years. We will not name any of them, because none was ever charged with the murders.

One was a man who had worked at a store near Chicago and talked about having cyanide. Police held him several times but never charged him. Later DNA testing did not match the evidence from the bottles.

In 1983, the FBI tried something unusual. They had a newspaper columnist publish where Mary Kellerman was buried, hoping the killer might come to visit. Agents watched the grave for months. Nobody suspicious came.

In 2009, Illinois authorities reopened the case. Federal agents searched a home connected to the man who wrote the extortion letter. They collected DNA. It did not match the evidence from the bottles.

That man died in July 2023, never charged with the murders.

What we still don't know

More than forty years later, nobody has ever been charged with poisoning the Tylenol bottles.

We do not know who did it. We do not know why. We do not know if the killer chose those stores for a reason, or just walked in. We do not know if the killer is still alive.

What we know is this. Seven people, ages twelve to thirty-five, took a common painkiller and died. Their deaths changed the way every medicine in America is sold. And the person responsible walked into stores, left the poison on the shelves, and walked away.

Mary Kellerman. Adam Janus. Stanley Janus. Theresa Janus. Mary McFarland. Paula Prince. Mary Reiner.

Who do you think was behind the Tylenol murders? And do you think DNA will ever solve it?