Day 299: A Headache remedy to die for.

     In the Fall of 1982, a panic swept the Chicagoland area as several different people in several different suburbs took Tylenol capsules-and promptly died.  In one tragic case, a man took the tainted medicine, and soon died in the hospital.  While his relatives were meeting to grieve his death, two of them took pills from the same bottle, and eventually died as well.  In total, 7 people were victimized in this method.  Investigators soon connected the dots and realized that the Tylenol(which had been laced with cyanide) was the common link.  Soon there were warnings broadcast about the tainted pills, and the police drove through area neighborhoods warning people not to take the medicine.  In addition to the warnings on the local level, action was taken on a national stage as well.  Johnson & Johnson(the distributors of Tylenol) immediately warned hospitals of the risk, and then proceeded to issue a nationwide recall, taking roughly 31 Million bottles of Tylenol off of the market.

     When the investigations kicked into high gear, they soon ruled out contamination at the factory, so they realized that the capsules must have been poisoned when they were already on the shelves.  Soon the focus turned to finding the one responsible, which was right about the time that James William Lewis sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 Million to stop the poisonings.  However, Lewis was ruled out as the direct perp because he had been living in NYC at the time of the deaths.  Nonetheless, Lewis was booked on extortion charges, and was sent up the river until 1995.  Oddly enough, a document released by the Department of Justice in 2009 showed that the authorities did indeed have evidence connecting Lewis to the poisonings, but didn't charge him.  For his part, Lewis has steadfastly denied all responsibility for the murders.  The other suspect at the time was Roger Arnold, who was arrested and later cleared.  He later had a mental breakdown, killing an innocent bystander and getting booked in the joint for the next 15 years.  Whatever he knew about the crime is now lost forever, as he died in 2008.

     In the wake of the deaths, Johnson & Johnson earned high praise for their adroit handling of the case.  Additionally, this marked the beginning of the end of placing medicines into capsules, as these could be easily tampered with, and moving towards the caplet, a capsule-shaped tablet.  This also helped to spark the rise of tamper-resistant packaging on medications.

     In the past few years, some more inroads have been made on the criminal investigation.  In the wake of the DOJ's 2009 release, the FBI again stepped up scrutiny of James Lewis.  In January of 2010, both him and his wife took polygraph tests, and that is the most current information as to their status.  The next year, the investigation got even more interesting, when on May 19, 2011, the FBI asked for DNA samples from none other than The Unabomber(who actually got his start in Chicago) in order to research a possible connection to the 1982 killings.  Once again, no inroads have been made on the case.  31 years later, the true circumstances of the Tylenol Murders remain shrouded in mystery.