The Tylenol murders launched a massive criminal investigation. With no apparent motive and little evidence to go on, it was a tough task.
Arlington Heights police Chief Rodney Kath, second from left, works with other members of the Tylenol task force at its Des Plaines headquarters in 1982.Several months have passed since the suburban detective made his pitch to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
In Illinois, some towns began pulling bottles from the store shelves and sent police officers down the street with bullhorns encouraging people to throw out their Tylenol. Police departments and fire stations“We were getting flooded with calls,” said John Fellmann, an Arlington Heights detective assigned to the case. “We had an absolute tsunami of Tylenol bottles. Our property guy, he couldn’t keep up with it.
Former Illinois Attorney General Ty Fahner stands on the former site of the Tylenol task force headquarters in Des Plaines, now an empty parking lot. Fahner left the dinner immediately and made calls throughout the drive home, taking advantage of his position as a statewide official with access to a car phone, then a relatively rare piece of technology. By the time he reached his house in Evanston, he was the de facto leader of what had quickly become the country’s highest-profile murder case.
As Fahner’s team made calls, a DuPage County deputy coroner named Pete Siekmann sat in an office at the Illinois Department of Public Health’s toxicology lab in Chicago and waited to see if the Tylenol capsules taken by Mary “Lynn” Reiner and Mary Sue McFarland were poisoned. The results came back positive for cyanide at 1:30 a.m. The death toll now stood at five: Reiner, McFarland, Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, his brother Stanley Janus of Lisle and 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village.
John Fellmann, whose last name was misspelled on his ID from 1980, was a young Arlington Heights police detective when he was assigned to the Tylenol murders. The White House, however, had ordered the FBI to find a way into the case amid growing public panic. Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, also saw its stock price drop after the news about the tainted capsules broke.
Among them was Lane, a well-respected federal agent who would help put away all kinds of criminals during his nearly 30-year career, including mob boss Sam Carlisi, former Illinois Gov. Daniel Walker and several Chicago aldermen convicted in Operation Silver Shovel. “So as we organized, there were about 10, 15 different avenues of investigations to pursue, like disgruntled employees, former employees, lawsuits,” Lane said. “Customers who had a problem, anybody that could make some money out of it.”
Arlington Heights police Chief Rodney Kath, second from left, works with other members of the Tylenol task force in an old state police bunker in Des Plaines. Helena Tarasewicz, mother of Tylenol victim Theresa"Terri" Janus, weeps over the casket containing her daughter's body during graveside services at Maryhill Cemetery in Niles in 1982.
“The effort was Herculean,” said Jeremy Margolis, a former U.S. attorney who was assigned to the task force. “We used every single technique available to us. And you had a lot of very experienced, very intelligent, very resourceful people thinking about this all the time, thinking about angles, thinking about ideas, testing them and implementing them wherever we possibly could. ... You know, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but we left no stone unturned.
“Only really frivolous things went in that other pile,” she said. “And you know, some agents are better than other agents and can really do a good job. And then there are agents who don’t. Some of those interviews may have gone to an agent who didn’t do a good job.” Investigators took the funeral guest books and jotted down license plates, then entered names into a newly developed computer program that allowed them to cross-check for anyone attending multiple memorials, according to the state police report. The program went far beyond any database previously used by law enforcement in Illinois. In the first year alone, the task force used it to track more than 35,000 individuals and 15,000 companies contacted as part of the investigation.
Severns worked on the case for three days before he realized no one had offered an update to young Mary Kellerman’s grieving parents. Forty years later, it still bothers him. “Every night, I would come home after my kids were in bed,” he said. “And I would wake them up just to say good night, you know?”Investigators quickly dismissed the possibility that the killer was targeting a single victim and the other bottles were contaminated to make it harder to solve that murder. Authorities were convinced the killer didn’t know any of the victims.
Security cameras were scarce in 1982, but investigators checked the images that existed, including this photograph from a drugstore camera showing Paula Prince, center, buying a bottle of tainted Tylenol. Lab technicians Nlada Marzette, left, and Lynn Pilaggi inspect the contents of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules for cyanide contamination at the Illinois Department of Public Health in 1982.
In an attempt to paint a more detailed portrait of the killer, the FBI turned to a relatively new technique at the time called criminal profiling, in which agents try to identify the personality and behavioral characteristics of an offender based on an analysis of the crime. The Tylenol case marked one of the earliest uses of the approach. Some investigators on the case, including a few still involved with it, considered the rendered profile too vague to be of any real use.
That thrill, however, would eventually diminish over time and the killer would seek more excitement, according to the profilers. When that happened, the suspect would make contact with an investigator and offer to help solve the case. Flight attendant Paula Prince bought a tainted bottle of Tylenol at the Walgreens at Wells Street and North Avenue in Chicago.
A photograph of a television screen shows the recall of Extra-Strength Tylenol with the specific lot number MC2880 on the box on Sept. 30, 1982. That testing uncovered three more poisoned bottles: two turned in by customers in Wheaton and Chicago and one found on a Schaumburg pharmacy shelf. After eliminating the possibility that the poisonings happened at the plant level, investigators scoured the backgrounds of workers at trucking companies and storage warehouses involved in the distribution of the tainted bottles, as well as other company records. They came up with nothing.
The killer may have salted the bottles with cyanide-laced capsules while standing in the store aisle, investigators thought. Another theory was that whoever poisoned the medication did it at home or in a car, then placed the bottles back on the shelves.See where the eight tainted Tylenol bottles were purchased or discoveredDespite the passage of time — and, in a way, because of it — the bottles still may offer clues as to who poisoned the capsules.
The discovery, so far, has been more of a curse than a blessing for present-day investigators, who have spent years obtaining DNA samples from investigators, public health officials, scientists and medical professionals who came in contact with the poisoned Tylenol. “Here, you go, Pete,” the police chief said, passing the bottle to him without the type of evidence bag that would now be standard in any investigation.
Chicago police Detective Charlie Ford, assigned to the Prince murder, recalled being stunned when Cook County Medical Examiner Robert Stein showed up at the victim’s Old Town condo and immediately asked to see the Tylenol. Six suburbanites had already died from cyanide poisoning by that time, but this was Chicago’s first — and, in the end, only — victim.
“You shove those up my nose again, you’re going to get socked in the face. You understand?” Ford said he told Stein.“I tell you, this wasn’t a CSI show,” he said.In those early days, there were so many agencies involved, so many people desperate to solve the case. Tensions flared, even among law enforcement personnel sincerely dedicated to the job.
Fahner had worked for James Thompson in the U.S. attorney’s office, handling some of the city’s biggest federal corruption cases. When Thompson, a Republican, became governor in 1977, Fahner followed him to Springfield to lead the Illinois state police. And when the sitting attorney general was indicted on tax fraud charges, Thompson appointed Fahner to fill the post.
“A lot of people who didn’t like me or didn’t like Thompson or my association were taking shots,” Fahner said. “It wasn’t a grab for authority. I had people dropping dead all over the place.” “If you stopped a thousand people on the street, you’d be lucky if one of them could tell you who Ty Fahner was. You know, because Ty was just a classy lawyer, and he never was a politician,” he said. “Thompson put him in charge of the investigation to get TV time. You know, boost exposure and stuff like that.”with the state police who had worked for Fahner when he was director, acknowledged it was an unorthodox setup. Still, in his opinion, Fahner was exactly what the task force needed.
When the column ran, Severns knew instantly that the authorities had planted the story. His task force partners — the FBI and state police — had blindsided the Elk Grove Village detective, and he was angry. “Most working detectives really don’t trust the FBI, and the FBI doesn’t trust us,” Ford said. “It’s a one-way street for information back and forth. It all goes to them, and you get nothing in return.”
Four decades later, task force leaders downplay accusations of tensions among the agencies, suggesting history has been revised in an effort to explain why no one has been charged with the murders. “Look, like any other series of government bureaucracies, there’s always tension between agencies,” he said. “Marquette 10 is one of a thousand reasons why there’s tension, personal jealousy, personal ambition, jurisdictional turf fights. I mean, there’s 10,000 reasons why people compete with each other. … That’s just human nature. What happens in most cases, and certainly what happened here beyond any question, was a 100% selfless, unified devotion to a very important mission.
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