The Other Cyanide Murders
Contrary to the statements of authorities involved in the investigation; the 1982 Tylenol murders were not confined to the Chicago area, nor were they limited to that one horrific day on September 29, 1982.
The String of Cyanide Poisonings
July 26, 1982: Jay Mitchell died in Big Horn, Wyoming after swallowing a cyanide laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsule.
August 15, 1982: Marie Louise Watkins died in Chicago, Illinois from cyanide poisoning. She had acetaminophen (Tylenol) in her blood at the time of her death. The source of the cyanide is unknown.
September 15, 1982: Mark Husted died in Des Plaines, Illinois from cyanide poisoning. He had acetaminophen (Tylenol) in her blood at the time of his death. the source of the cyanide is unknown.
September 28, 1982: Kane County Deputies Al Swanson and Joseph Chavez became violently ill with symptoms matching sub-lethal cyanide poisoning minutes after handling Extra Strength Tylenol capsules strewn in a Howard Johnson’s parking lot in Elgin, Illinois.
September 29, 1982: Mary Kellerman, Adam Janus, Stanley Janus, Theresa Janus, Mary Lynn Reiner, Mary McFarland and Paula Prince died after swallowing cyanide laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area.
December 1, 1982: Galen Parriott died in Skokie, Illinois from cyanide poisoning. He had acetaminophen (Tylenol) in her blood at the time of his death. The source of the cyanide is unknown.
October 1982 to February 1986: FDA spokesperson William Grigg says several people died after swallowing cyanide laced Tylenol capsules since the 1982 Tylenol murders.
February 8, 1986: Diane Elsroth died in Yonkers, New York after swallowing a cyanide laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsule.
February 17, 1986: Johnson & Johnson stopped producing Tylenol in capsule form.
All of the above murders are unsolved.
Sheridan, Wyoming
Reporters learned on October 9, 1982 that Chicago police detectives had been dispatched to Sheridan, Wyoming over the weekend to help decide if the July 26 death of Jay Adam Mitchell was linked to the seven Tylenol murders in the Chicago area.
Mitchell, 19, from the town of Big Horn, failed to turn off the alarm clock that he had set to buzz at 6:30 a.m. on July 26; his father tried to awaken him, but Mitchell was dead. An older brother told the Chicago detectives that he thinks Mitchell took Tylenol from a bottle in the kitchen four hours before the unanswered alarm buzzed. The family long ago discarded the Tylenol bottle and the two or three capsules it contained.
Dr. William E. Doughty, a pathologist at the Sheridan County Memorial Hospital who was familiar with the case, became suspicious after the Chicago cyanide deaths. Dr. Doughty said in a telephone interview that he asked the youth's mother Thursday (October 1), if her son had taken any medication before his death. Doughty said she replied, "'Nothing, just a headache pill, some Extra-Strength Tylenol.' She said she thought she had purchased it at Buttrey-Osco, a local food & drug store, but she had since destroyed the bottle."
Doughty asked the local store where the Extra-Strength Tylenol came from and was told that since March 1982 the store purchased its Tylenol from the Jewel Tea Company of Chicago (Jewel Food).
Jane Armstrong, speaking for the Jewel Companies, said that she was uncertain how its subsidiary Buttrey-Osco in Sheridan receives its supplies of Tylenol, but she said Jewel stores near Chicago take shipments directly from the manufacturer, the McNeil Consumer Products Company, in Fort Washington, PA.*
*That's not accurate. J&J shipped the Tylenol to the Jewel Foods Repackaging and Distribution facility in Franklin Park, IL. From there it was moved to an unknown warehouse and later distributed to Jewel-Osco stores east of the Mississippi river and in Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
After talking to Mitchell's mother, Doughty called the toxicologist in Salt Lake City who originally found the cyanide and kept the blood, urine and stomach contents from Mitchell. That doctor, Bryan S. Finkle, director of the Center for Human Toxicology, tested the contents for Tylenol; the results were negative.* * Obviously the test results were negative. The capsule was filled completely with cyanide. All of the Tylenol had been poured out.
Dr. Finkle then conferred with Dr. Robert Stein, the Cook County Medical Examiner, who quoted the dose of cyanide found in the stomachs of the Chicago area victims. Dr. Doughty said, ''It was exactly the same as the Mitchell dosage. It's a very tight link. It would be very difficult for these different people to take exactly the same dosage of cyanide without having taken the same-sized capsule with the same-sized dosage.''
The Evidence
Sheridan County Coroner Jim Kane also confirmed that Mitchell had the same level of cyanide in his body as the Chicago victims.
Finkle compared the Wyoming death with those in Chicago. ''It turned out,'' he said, ''there were a lot of similarities toxicologically.'' The evidence ''as it stands in no way makes a case.'' But he said considerable further research was necessary in this case and others (There was, unfortunately, no further research done in this case or others).
''If the deaths were not clustered,'' said Dr. Finkle, ''there is every reason to believe they would all have been signed out as cyanide deaths and there would have been no connection made, meaning the method, modus operandi.''
Jay Adam Mitchell died after ingesting cyanide laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that went through the same distribution center as the cyanide laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules found in the Chicago area stores. The amount of cyanide in Mitchell's stomach exactly matched the amount of cyanide in the stomachs of the Chicago area victims, and when Mitchell's toxicology tests, which had been completed by a world renowned toxicologist, were compared to those of the seven Chicago area victims ''there were a lot of similarities toxicologically."
At least eight deaths in 1982, not seven, are linked to cyanide laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. In every case, the Tylenol had been processed at the same Jewel Foods warehouse.
How many unexplained deaths in 1982 were actually murders; the handiwork of the Tylenol killer(s)?
The Tylenol Task Force Assessment of the Wyoming Murder
Members of the Tylenol task force refused to acknowledge any possible connection between the Chicago Tylenol poisonings and Tylenol poisonings in other parts of the country. Chicago Police Sargeant Michael Invergo said a detective turned up nothing new after traveling to Sheridan, Wyoming, where authorities had reopened an investigation of the cyanide-related death in July of 19-year-old Jay Adam Mitchell. The Wyoming death was one of three poisonings with some connection to Tylenol that authorities determined had no bearing on the Chicago deaths.
Soures: New York Times, 1982; AP-Oct. 9, 1982; UPI-Oct. 9, 1982; AP-Oct. 11, 1982
The Cook County Medical Examiner's office has reopened investigations into three cocaine-related deaths that occurred this fall after cyanide also was found in the victims' systems.
One of the overdose victims, convicted drug dealer Mark A. Husted, 32, died Sept. 14 at the home of a friend in Des Plaines, two months before he was to face additional drug charges. His father, Carpentersville Village Attorney Richard Husted, apparently urged the re-investigation into the death because of a feeling that his son may have been murdered.
The original cause of death for Husted was listed as a massive overdose of cocaine But the re-examination showed that Husted's body tissues contained a lethal level of cyanide. Seven Chicago-area people died between Sept 29 and Oct. 1 after unknowingly taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules.
Dr Michael Schaffer, chief toxicologist in the medical examiner's office said on January 13, 1983 that officials were checking the deaths of Husted, Galen Parriott, 30, of Skokie, and Marie Louise Watkins, 21, of Chicago "because of the close proximity (in time) to the cyanide deaths."
Toxicology reports showed each of the three had ingested lethal doses of cyanide. Schaffer said Authorities found 3.54 micrograms of cyanide in Husted's system, and officials said 3 to 5 micrograms of cyanide is enough to kill an adult As a result of that test, toxicologists are testing all suspected victims of cocaine overdoses for cyanide.
"We are continuing these investigations because we are finding now that cyanide is an easy poison to obtain, and we don't want to overlook any possible cyanide poisoning case," said Medical Examiner Robert Stein. A detective on the task force looking into the Tylenol murders said it would be valuable to know if the cyanide reported to have caused these three deaths was the same type that killed the Tylenol victims, but he said it is impossible to conduct such a test.
Now the cyanide laced Tylenol death toll stands at between nine and twelve; not seven as officials insist.
OTHER CAPSULE POISONINGS
In Oroville, Calif., Greg Blagg, 27, a butcher in a meat market owned by his father, told a strange story. He said that on Sept. 30, the same day that the first Chicago-area poisonings became public knowledge, he had taken three capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol from a bottle that his wife Terry had bought two weeks earlier. "Everything became very blurry," he related. "I'm told I passed out and became real rigid."
Terry got him to a hospital, where he was treated for four hours and then released at his own request. Back home, Blagg related, he switched on the TV and caught reports of the Tylenol deaths near Chicago. He took apart some capsules from his own bottle, found pink flecks in the powder, and the next morning turned the bottle over to his physician, John Clay, for analysis. That evening, Greg and Terry returned to the drugstore where the first purchase had been made, found Tylenol still on sale and bought two more bottles; they discovered more pink flecks in the capsules. Last week word came back from laboratories in Rockville, Md., and San Francisco: strychnine, commonly sold as a rat poison, was found in the capsules, though in quantities too small to kill a human.
By week's end strychnine had been found in one more Tylenol bottle still in stock in the Oroville drugstore but nowhere else in the country. Investigators were wondering about the wild coincidences involved in Blagg's story. If it is true, he and his wife had bought the only bottles of strychnine-poisoned Tylenol purchased by anyone. Investigators doubted there had been either an attempt at a copycat murder or any link to the Chicago poisonings.