The ‘Tylenol Murders’ That Rocked 1980s Chicago

On September 30, 1982, ambulances and police cruisers made their way through the Chicago suburbs, delivering a puzzling message from their loudspeakers and bullhorns: “Do Not Take Tylenol.”

It was a strange, but merited, warning: Within the previous 24 hours, a total of seven people in the area had inadvertently ingested Tylenol capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. The act, which led to all seven victims perishing, was malicious and intentional, triggering a nationwide panic over consumer product tampering and leading multiple law enforcement agencies to search for the culprit behind the largest mass product recall in American history.

The byzantine story is detailed in a new Netflix three-part docuseries, Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, as well as a 2023 series on Paramount+, Painkiller: The Tylenol Murders. Some 40 years on, both documentarians and investigators are still trying to come to terms with the most brazen act of consumer product terrorism to date.

1. Seven Victims
2. A Bitter Pill
3. The Legacy of the Tylenol Murders

Seven Victims

Mary Kellerman, 12, was home sick from school in Elk Grove Village when she took one Extra Strength Tylenol capsule. It was September 29, 1982, and her mother had just purchased the bottle the night before. At that time, Tylenol came in a flimsy cardboard box with loosely-sealed flaps; inside was a bottle with a red plastic cap that opened without any effort. The plastic capsules were filled with 500 milligrams of powdered acetaminophen, a pain reliever.

Kellerman collapsed within moments of taking the pill. Her father phoned for help, but paramedics couldn’t revive her, and she was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The cause of her cardiac arrest was by no means obvious, but a pattern would soon emerge.

“In what we call the ambulance report, the medications were listed as Tylenol,” firefighter and first responder Richard Keyworth told Chicago Magazine in 2012. “Well, everybody in the world took Tylenol. That didn’t seem out of order.”

Less than 10 miles away in Arlington Heights, a post office supervisor named Adam Janus felt a cold coming on and called out of work—and, like Kellerman, he reached for Tylenol, taking two capsules. He quickly deteriorated, managing to tell his wife he was having chest pain before he died. Doctors initially suspected a heart attack.

Janus’s brother, 25-year-old Stanley, and Stanley’s 19-year-old wife Terri went to be with Janus’s wife at home. Both reached for the same bottle of Tylenol, taking two capsules each, and both were soon rushed to the hospital. Stanley died that same day and Terri was on life support for two days before perishing.

A growing network of physicians, paramedics, and police exchanged curiosity about the rash of sudden deaths in the area, with particular attention paid to the fact three people from the same household had all suddenly collapsed. A public health nurse named Helen Jensen was asked by fire lieutenant Chuck Kramer to come to the hospital to try to figure out what was going on. After questioning Theresa, she went to the Janus household to see if anything seemed amiss. Jensen noticed that the Tylenol bottle was missing six of its 50 capsules. In a stroke of good fortune, she also found the receipt in the trash, proving it had just been purchased. Jensen inferred that three deaths in the same family might have been the result of taking the medication.

Jensen would later recall that her theory was met with skepticism by authorities—but as word spread of Mary Kellerman’s ingestion of the drug, it became impossible to ignore. Soon, three more victims surfaced: Flight attendant Paula Prince (35), Mary McFarland (31), and Mary Reiner (27) had all ingested Tylenol. All three died, bringing the total number of victims to seven.

But the possible source didn’t explain how they had died. Dr. Thomas Kim, who had treated the Janus family members, made an educated guess: cyanide. Laboratory examination of the capsules revealed small crystals not unlike rock salt that smelled of bitter almonds—the telltale signs of the highly toxic substance, which interferes with oxygen consumption and can prompt a rapid and fatal reaction. Blood tests of the victims confirmed the presence of cyanide. The capsules were thought to have contained up to 610 milligrams, or three times the amount needed to cause death in a human.

The medical examiner’s office of Cook County held a press conference on September 30 to make a public disclosure: Tylenol was no longer safe to consume. Retailers and consumers were expected to round up bottles and immediately cease any usage. The recall soon grew to a nationwide alert. On October 5, Johnson & Johnson, the company that owned Tylenol, recalled 31 million bottles, taking an estimated loss of $100 million.

Bottles weren’t always destroyed: Authorities wanted them for testing to see if cyanide could be found. At least a few bottles turned up positive, though fortunately they had been turned in by customers or remained unsold on store shelves.

There was also scrutiny directed toward Tylenol’s bottling plants in the event a factory worker might have been to blame. But the contaminated bottles had been made in different locations, making a single source of origin impossible.

Worse, it eliminated any chance of it being an unintentional mistake. If the Tylenol had come from different sources, that meant someone had poisoned the capsules after they had already arrived on shelves. Deliberately.

A Bitter Pill

The Tylenol case drew the attention of the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, and state and local law enforcement agencies. (While the FBI had no apparent jurisdiction, then-president Ronald Reagan directed them to join the investigation.) Victims’ relatives, current and former Johnson & Johnson employees, and others were interviewed and even subject to polygraph testing. Homes of the deceased were put under surveillance in case the killer wanted to witness the fallout of their actions. While there was some hope of retrieving fingerprints from the contaminated bottles, they had passed through a lot of hands. The investigation had no clear direction—virtually anyone could have handled the poisoned Tylenol packages.

“I have taught investigation for many years, and this was a traveling circus,” Keyworth said. “Everyone was grasping for straws, you know. Of course, that’s the business. Everyone wanted to break it and be the first one to have the latest information.”

Nothing led to a credible lead until someone phoned a police tip line with information about a dock worker named Roger Arnold. Arnold, the tipster alleged, had bragged in a bar about being in possession of cyanide. Authorities quickly cornered Arnold and discovered he had an indirect connection to the case. He handled goods at the docks for Jewel, a chain of grocery stores where some of the poisoned Tylenol had been sold. He was also in possession of books about anarchist activities and there was laboratory equipment in his home.

But nothing directly linked Arnold to the case. While he had admitted to purchasing cyanide, he didn’t have any on his property.

Arnold ultimately wasn’t charged with the Tylenol murders, but he was nonetheless a killer: He was so incensed that he’d been identified as a potential suspect that he later fatally shot an innocent bystander whom he had confused for the tipster.

But police soon had another lead. Just days after the murders made headlines, a letter was mailed to Johnson & Johnson demanding a payment of $1 million in order for the poisonings to stop. It read:

“Gentlemen,

As you can see, it is easy to place cyanide (both potassium and sodium) into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little, and there will be no time to take counter measures.

If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far, I have spent less than fifty dollars. And it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.

If you want to stop the killing then wire $1,000,000 to bank account [redacted] at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, IL.

Don’t attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter. A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything you could possibly do.”

Investigators traced the note to a man in New York named James Lewis, who had used an ex-employer’s postage meter that had a distinctive postal mark. Lewis continued writing, sometimes sending letters to The Chicago Tribune. Police found where the Tribune was distributed in New York and soon located Lewis in a library.

But Lewis wouldn’t prove an easy man to pin anything on. While he had a highly dubious history—he was once accused of the murder and dismemberment of a man in 1978, but the case was dismissed due to improperly-obtained evidence—he didn’t seem to be tied to the killings in any meaningful way. He denied any involvement, instead spinning a tale in which he was hoping to have a ransom payment sent to his wife’s former employer’s bank account (he felt she was owed money after the business had gone bankrupt without a final paycheck) in order for him to get in legal trouble. In what might be a prosecution’s largest stumbling block, Lewis was not in Chicago at the time the bottles were thought to be tampered with and placed on store shelves—he was living in New York.

But Lewis was nonetheless an unsettling suspect. Time and again, he offered to assist investigators by speculating about what the hypothetical Tylenol killer might have done. He even drew detailed illustrations of how one could tamper with the packaging. Lewis, police said, seemed to relish the morbid situation he found himself in.

While Lewis’s arrogance was irksome to investigators, there was no prosecutable connection to the tampered capsules. Instead, prosecutors could corner him only on the extortion letter, a crime for which he served roughly 13 years in prison. He was released in 1995.

One of the most provocative details concerning Lewis wasn’t made public until 2007, when, according to The Chicago Tribune, it was discovered the extortion letter had a postmark of October 1, 1982. Lewis had previously told authorities that the letter had taken him three days to compose. If he began writing it in late September, it would have been before news of the murders had begun to spread. In addition, authorities said Lewis had been in possession of a book on poison—and his fingerprints were on the pages relating to cyanide.

Lewis remained suspicious in the eyes of the law for years to come, and not only for the Tylenol case. In 2004, he was charged with rape and kidnapping and was incarcerated while awaiting trial. Because the alleged victim wouldn’t testify, the case was dropped. Amidst a renewed investigation in 2009, his personal computer was seized; in 2010, his DNA was collected. Investigators spoke to him yet again in September 2022. That same month, The Chicago Tribune reported that investigators were petitioning prosecutors to act on what it termed a “chargeable, circumstantial case.” Yet at the time of his death at age 76 in 2023, Lewis had not been charged in connection with the murders.

Not everyone was confident in Lewis being the killer. “It wasn’t James Lewis,” Richard Brzeczek, Chicago Police Department superintendent at the time of the murders, said in 2012. “James Lewis was an a**hole, an opportunist. He tried to extort some money from Johnson & Johnson, and he went to jail. He was in the joint a long time. When someone is in the penitentiary, you can go and talk to him, with or without his lawyer present. In all those years, all the work on James Lewis to put it together: nothing.”

The Legacy of the Tylenol Murders

The Tylenol murders had far-reaching consequences. A rash of copycat product tampering crimes led to more tragedies: In 1986, a Seattle woman named Stella Nickell took inspiration from the Tylenol killings when plotting to kill her husband for insurance money. She placed cyanide in his Excedrin and later tampered with store bottles to make it look like a poisoner was on the loose.

Nickell succeeded in killing both her husband and a consumer who took one of the tainted pills. She received a 90-year prison sentence and was the first person convicted under the newly-created Federal Anti-Tampering Act, which made altering consumer products a federal crime.

The Tylenol murders prompted regulators and drug companies to introduce tamper-evident and tamper-resistant product packaging. Over-the-counter and prescription medication now come in foil-sealed bottles, making deliberate and undetectable contamination a challenge. The perpetrator had brought the retail industry to a halt before forcing it to make radical changes to how medication is manufactured.

That may have been the point. “I personally think that the person or persons involved in this—my gut feeling was that their purpose was to bring the United States to its knees,” Keyworth said. “ ’Look at the power we have. We can shut down the entire economy. We can control the world.’ And for a short period of time, they did. In today’s world, it would be domestic terrorism. We didn’t have that terminology back then. But it was actually the first case of domestic terrorism in the country.”

Today, Lewis remains a strong suspect in the eyes of some investigators; those who have studied the case find the circumstantial evidence compelling. It’s also worth noting that of his many jobs over the years, Lewis worked as a salesman. In addition to jewelry and real estate, he also sold pharmaceutical machinery.

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A version of this story ran in 2023; it has been updated for 2025.