Thinking Sideways: The Tylenol Murders

one was sent into us by Terry. She sent it to us on the Facebook page, So thank you Terry. Because what we're going to talk about today is a series of unsolved murders. Okay, well, the how is solved, the who and the why is not. And for anybody wasn't read the episode title, what we're gonna be talking about today are the Thailand all murders which happened in

late September early October. So here's our story. On the morning of September twenty nine, twelve year old Mary Kellerman complained to her parents that she wasn't feeling so well. She had a sore throat. She died later that day. Sore throat. You're give me a minute, You're a little out of the game there, sir, I think that's a drink for all of our listeners who are yeah, you know they're blowing it up. Yeah, the okay, back to the story. Sorry. The same day, Adam Janie or Janis

are not sure. Janice, who was supposed to worker, died of what appeared to be a massive heart attack. And he was like nine, right, Yeah, he was a young guy and his family, doing his family's will do they circled the wag and everybody gathered at his house for that that time of grief and go figure. A couple of them got headaches because well it's a stressful time. His brother and his sister in law both decided that they take something to take the edge off. Yeah, and

they both died. His brother, whose name was Stanley, died that very same day, and his sister in law, Teresa, died two days later. Several days later, Mary McFarlane, Paula Prince, and Mary Reiner each died unexpectedly. None of these people knew each other. They didn't have anything in common. Well, okay, they had one thing in common. They had taken each prior to their death an extra strength Thailand. All Yeah.

Mary Kellerman, the twelve year old girl, her parents because she had a sore throat, had given her an extra strength thailand All. I don't understand what this got to do with them dying how to die. No, I don't understand why anybody would like, first of all, give a twelve year old extra strength anything. But it was for a sore throat, like I think, I think that that wasn't her only symptom. I think that was the main time.

Adam Janice had taken the extra strength thailand All just before he died, and his brother and sister in law had also taken pills from the same bottle. Turned out, each of these seven people had unknowingly consumed a pill that was laced with potassium cyanide. That's not great. It's not really something the body craves, not at all. It's

it's extremely toxic to the human body. What potassium cyani does is it stops the tissues in your body from being able to take up the oxygen that's in your bloodstream, which means that you die from histotoxic hypoxia, which literally

is your body cannot absorb the oxygen. It's a lethal dose of potassium cyanide is somewhere between two or three hundred milligrams, which is a really really small dosage if we try and put that into a frame of reference for people to you know, think about it an everyday scenario. Two d milligrams is about three to four grains of sugar. That's not a lot, So it doesn't take a lot of this stuff to kill you. Now, Once it was determined by the investigators that tailing All was the link

between these people, panic broke out. People were throwing Thailand all the way, stores were yanking it off of the shelves. Johnson and Johnson who was the who is the parent company of McNeil Consumer Products who made tailent All at the time, And I honestly don't know if they're still the ones it well, but I mean McNeil Consumer Products was one who makes it, but I don't think they

do it anymore. I'm guessing they were in full blown damage control mode trying to figure out what was going on and why their product was killing people and how this poison got into their pills. They quickly Johnson and Johnson quickly put out a statement saying that the poison could not have been put in the pills in their manufacturing process, and it had to have happened somewhere after

the pills had left their hands. I think that's fair, it is, and they but they had they had great evidence because what they dis is they tracked the lot numbers on the medication, the lethal doses of medication, and they figured out that the lot numbers were from medication that was produced at two different plants, one in Puerto Rico and one in Pennsylvania. That would be really hard

to have it introduced to the manufacturing level. And besides which that stuff would have wind up being distributed all over the place, not just northeast Chicago exactly exactly. Because yeah, and that's a good point, thank you, Joe. I don't know if I specified here that this is all happening in a suburb or a larger area of Chicago, kind of around where the O'Hare airport is now. There's a bunch of suburban areas, and that's where this is all happening.

This is probably a good point to stop the story and explain something about Thailand. All for any of our listeners who aren't young enough to know this, like me, it's not just Thailand, all right, it's pills. Well, it's pills yes, it's pills in general, but this a lot of this is related to Thailand all a specific the theres seed a menafin is what they were using. Is there seeda menafin tablets or cablets I should say capsules

capsules capsules. Today, when you go into the store and you buy any medicine and you look at the bottle, there's usually a couple of seals on the bottle. We're talking about over the counter medica. Over the counter medication usually usually the bottles in a box that's sealed, and then there's a right well and and and the I looked at the regulations on what has to have what, and it's really too boring to go into. But typically there's one to two layers of protection before you get

to the box. But the point is when you buy over the counter medication now, typically there's some kind of plastic shrink wrap seal on the lid. Maybe it's got printing on it or perforations, so it's very obvious if it's been removed or messed with. And then when you open up the lid, there's some kind kind of seal on the top of the bottle which he has to get off, but it's you know, it's plastic or it's foil or paper or something like that. That is what

we are used to. Didn't used to be that way because in the up until that point, a bottle of pills was sealed with the lid and you opened the lid and there's that silly piece of cottony material and that was it. Yeah, yeah, that sounds safe back in the days when they were it's psychos poisoning your pills. Yeah. I think it speaks to some of the how naive industries were about people wanting to do harm to others via their products. People just didn't think it would would

ever happen. People didn't do that kind of crap. Yeah, until this this came along, and now that now it happens. As we all know, there are copycats of this happens all the It's hard not the ideas out there. You pretty much have to seal everything you have to and and all of the products that we get now that are sealed they were. There was laws passed, ironically enough, called the Thailand All Bill, which requires that be put into place. We should also while we're talking about the medication,

we should probably talk about the pills themselves. As we alluded to a little bit earlier, extra Strength Thailand all and a lot of other over the counter medication came in a capsule. It's not a solid pill, it's not a gel coded pill. It's not what we're used to now. It's like it's more like what you get vitamins, like specific vitamins and the days yea, and lots of stuff that comes in capsules. Still. Yeah, but it's it's not

nearly as common as it is. But for anybody who doesn't know, it's it's two pieces that go together, almost like a Russian nesting doll. They fit together and they seal. I guess it's one inside the other the ends. They're very easy to pull open. And you guys know what these things are, yes, everybody, Yeah, well it They became super popular because they were easy to swallow, unlike like a dry as bird. Yeah. They're also you can a lot of help nuts these days. You know, you can

fill your own capsules. You can just get whatever you want. And that is the achilles heel of the capsule when it comes to medication, is it can be opened in the medicine can be taken out or in this case added to exactly, which is a big problem. And that's the reason that a lot of things now or gel coats or whatever they are, so that these over the counter medications can't easily be tampered with. I think it also is worth noting that John's the way that Johnson

and Johnson handled this whole thing. I don't know if we were going to talk about this or not, but it's been praised as pretty much one of the best corporation handlings of a huge disaster like this at all times, and so I think that's probably worth mentioning a little bit. Hill went really well, we will talk about it was kind of disaster to them. Oh yeah, you're at the same time. I mean, you know, I would I would be looking at this and they'd be saying, Okay, I'm

pitching up my taile and all. And then and then I go to the store to buy some other pain reliever, and and I would say, no, Johnson and Johnson, But then I think to myself, well, what about the other manufacturers. I mean, it's just exactly that's and that's that's the issue that we'll talk about in a bit here, because we're gonna get into some of that copycat stuff. But

back to the story. So at this point in the story they figured out that thailand All is the culprit, and what we think is going was going on was someone was taking the bottles of extra strength thailand All, taking him out of the store, opening the capsules, adding the potassium cyanide to them on the order of magnitude

of thousands of times a lethal dose. So this person was dumping a lot of that stuff in there, then putting them back together, putting them back in the bottle, and somehow getting the bottle back on the shelf for some other unsuspecting person to buy and consume. It wasn't just pills, for it wasn't just a capsule full of that.

It also had a scene metaphine in it. I believe that based on the fact that it was you know, two is enough to kill you, and it was up to ten thousand times required dose, I have a feeling that it was probably no medication at all. Sides That would be my guest too, because I think a scene of meta few tailen All specifically is typically five hundred milligrams at least it is now. I don't know if it was then that's one of the differences between Thailand

and appall. I don't know if you know this or not, but advill is two d and fifty milligrams a pill and thailan All is five typically, so you can take more advil in like a dose, you can better whatever. But anyways, I just thought i'd ask if it was I'm pretty sure that it was nothing, but science hard to get that much into a capsule. I'm pretty sure that they were just dumping out all the medication. Probably

why not go for the gusto. It's not like the person is going to taste it in their food or something, because it is a pill you just swallow. It's kind of surprising that they whoever was, managed to do all this without poisoning themselves. Yeah, they had to have some working knowledge of it. You've got to presume that they knew how to handle this substance without killing themselves away to get it or how to make it. Yeah. Well, and there's some of that as as you know we've

been alluding to. We'll be getting into as always in the theories, of course. But the police in the FBI, Yeah, the FBI got involved, began collecting pain reliever from stores all over Chicago. Um. Now, because as we said, they were all in the same area of town. The investigators focused their first do you know what suburbs of Chicago names, the neighborhoods were there? There was five of them. It was elk Grove, Windfield, Arlington Heights, Elmhurst, and Lyle. Those

were the neighborhoods or the suburbs where this happened. I like that you can actually pronounce Lyle, Lyle. There's a weird there's a weird ass in there. I don't know, It's fine, it doesn't matter. Yeah, okay, cool. So that's a good good thing to know. We don't know exactly

how many bottles of this medicine were tainted. There was They found five stores that had tampered bottles, but I say we don't know the exact number because it's entirely possible that there were more, and people who bought them didn't end up taking them because they chucked them through this whole thing blew up. If they had held on to them, they could have sold them years later on eBay. Well, of course, because they knew eBay was coming. Uh. What what investigators had to do? And this had to be

just a horrible job. Is once they had collected all of those bottles, they had to test the pills, and they had to test each one because it wasn't every pill in the bottle was poisoned. It was a handful of them were poisoned in there, which makes it a bit of a game of Russian roulette, like a literal game of Russian roulette. Yeah, exactly, if not with a gun, so sorry, with a bottle of pills that are going

to kill you, yeah, or somebody. And so the Some of the bottles had just one pill, some of them had several. That's the way it worked. It was several per bottle, yes, and it seemed to have varied. Some would have two or three, some seemed to have five or six. The accounting, I mean, it's thirty some years later, it's been rewritten. As always, we find different interpretations of the numbers, so I'm not positive that's that's interesting about the case of one of the first ones who died,

the girl. Now the second one, oh Adam Jess Janie, yeah or Janie his name was pronounced. It's kind of interesting that three pills came out of that bottle and all three of them were poisonous. It's possible that more than three pills came out of that bottle. It's possible because they weren't all tainted, that other people took the title at all and didn't suffer any el effects because they didn't get the poison pilluck out. Huh. Well, anyway, we can talk about that later. But well, no, I mean,

it's it's a it's a great point. It's just they're not all gonna be poisoned. They were. That's a lot of poison for somebody to sit there and painstakingly scoop up and put into each pill, so it wouldn't be fun. That was Adam Jannis married, by the way, I do

not believe he was, so it was just him. We talked about this a little bit before, but the copycat killings that happened because of this, this is another one of those things where the media actually mahade the problem worse because they told the world about this and exactly how, exactly how it happened. Every yo yo with a grudge poisoned pills. In the first month after this happened, two hundred seventy cases of tampering. Oh my gosh, it was.

It was things as simple as somebody trying to kill their spouse A lot of them did, or somebody they didn't know, and then to cover their tracks, they all fell followed the same path. I've got to cover my path. So what do they do? They stick a bottle back on the shelf and kill some other unsuspecting poor schlab. It's a great way to cover your tracks, it is. But it's freak and terrible, is what it is. Obviously, murdering your spouse is kind of bad, too, ye, Murdering

anybody is bad. It's kind of bad. A lot of these people, though, were not nearly as crafty about it in terms of covering their tracks, because a bunch of them got caught the Feds. They don't screw around about this anymore. The puzz that went into effect are so stern. There's a woman, what is her name, Stella Nickel. She poisoned Eccedrian capsules with cyanide and killed her husband, and then to again to cover her tracks, she poisoned some other pills and stuck him in the bottom, stuck him

back on the shelf. She killed a woman named Susan Snow and for those two deaths. She was sentenced to ninety years in prison. Two people. Yea, she could potentially have killed a lot more. Yeah, No, it's I'm not I'm not questioning that sentence at all. It's just a great example of once they put that rule in effect, that they went after people like like a bulldog as well they should. Yeah, as Devin had talked about earlier, Johnson and Johnson through this whole thing came out like

the shining star. They're they're referenced in business books and all this stuff about how to handle a consumer situation because they were the first to institute the packaging regulations on medication. Actually they did it before it became a regulation. They just started doing it. They willingly pulled their products from the shelves, They offered refunds, they pulled the hospitals loved to use thailan, especially extra strength thailand all and

they yanked it all out of the hospitals willingly. They didn't have to at the time that they did it. Eventually the FDA came in and said, get that crap out of here, but they had already gotten it out of the stores and the hospitals. Um after things had settled down, and they went on a huge pr campaign. They offered coupons, they had refunded people already, they were they were advertising how they had all these protections on

their pill bottles. In the end, one year after this happened, they had only lost ten percent of their market share and they were at the top to beginning now and as you know they are, they're still going strong now. But you know, I really, really it would have been right after this whole thing happened, you know, right after the whole they're pulling them off the shelves. You know, you know that James J. Stock had to be tanking. What a great time to buy Johnson and Johnson stock.

It would have been, Well, when we go back in our time machine, that's what we'll do. But yeah, and that might be part of this. Maybe the guy that did this did it because he wanted to make their stock tanks so you could buy a bunch of it. Maybe I'm not going to well, this is that we're at the theory. So that is a possible theory that

somebody did it to tank their stock. According to Joe, Let's do you have any you want to flesh that outn't also just occurred to me just I would say that the yeah, it could have been a time traveler. I don't know, but I would say that the FBI needs to go back and just interview every stockbroker who yeah, this sounds good. Our first theory, most of our theories

are going to be about specific people. The first theory is about a guy named James Lewis, and James Lewis is the name that you're gonna see more often than not when you do any reading on this. The reason is is that he didn't do the smartest thing ever. When the story broke and everybody's freaking out, what does he do? He writes a letter to Johnson and Johnson requesting a million dollars to make the Kelly stop and by the way, don't bring the cops in, and then

he signed his name to it, signed Bond. He didn't Joe, but Johnson and Johnson didn't play ball. They immediately turned over the letter to the authorities. I believe was the FBI who figured out from the postmark where he was. He was in New York and they went hunting for him. Yeah. Well, they also had connected him to another letter that they were looking into, which was a letter that he had sent to Reagan threatening the life of the president because

Ronald Reagan was a president at the time. If Reagan didn't change the tax code, I probably should have sent that to Congress. Huh, because the tax showed Yeah, that that really makes sense. Well, Lewis and his wife, they were living in a hotel. I think it was a short term stay hotel kind of situation if I understand it correctly. Yeah, when they got wind or somehow they got wind that the FEDS were after him, and they

went on the lamb because they didn't want to get arrested. Weird, I know, crazy, um Louis and his wife were on the lamb. Eventually a tip came in eight weeks after they disappeared and he was arrested. His wife shortly thereafter turned herself in, and of course the FBI went after him full force because they were sure that he was responsible for poisoning all of these people. In the end, the only thing they could pin on him was the

extortion attempt a New York and not Chicago. Yeah, that's a very good point, and that does play into a lot of the stuff about him. But he got sentenced to twenty five years in prison. He served thirteen, but he did get a I don't remember exactly what the reason was he was parole, but he's a He's an elderly guy at this point, and I don't know that they thought he was a threat anymore. But he did serve time for the extortion a loan. They're still trying

to hang the crime on him. They are because you know, guilty of one crime or one is good enough for the other. Right, No, no, it's not. Um. Here's the problems with Louis being the perpetrator of this entire thing. He was in New York. He was in New York. He would have had to have somehow gotten to Chicago to drop off all the poison pills. Well, we know from his wife's co workers that he showed up every day to have lunch with his wife for almost every day.

They don't remember him missing hardly ever, and it wasn't ever a consecutive set of days. Now out thank you Google, I figured out it takes today twelve plus hours by car to drive from New York to Chicago by today's cars. By today's cars were much slower in those days, were they get like thirty Well, they were a little faster than that. But the point is that is a full twenty four hours of time just in driving, never mind having to stop sleep, eating, drop off the poison. Yeah,

like smuggle them back onto the shelves exactly. He I mean he, Okay, he could have flown there, But if this guy's living in a short term s r oh kind of situation, I don't think he's got a lot of money for an airplane ticket. Plus at leads a huge paper trail. It could have been under a false name, but could they They probably it's probably too late to

check on this. But of the batch numbers, yeah, before any of those distributed in New York, because that's odd actually where he would have had to buy them and tamper with them. He's not going to try to Chicago spend twenty four hours tampering with pills. I'm going to have to say, no, I don't think, because I would imagine that the Feds would have tracked that down and if there was anything link, they'd a slap the charges on him for it. I don't think so. Yeah, it

doesn't make much. I know they're still interested in this guy as a suspect. Absolutely, and yeah, it's recently, is two thousand eleven. They collected DNA and fingerprints from him and his wife. They have buff gets, but they tried to track it, you know, to see if they could pin anything to him. Yeah, and there's they have nothing. Here's why I'm sure they're wrong about Lewis. What was this is that he didn't need he didn't need to really kill all these people to extore Johnson and Johnson.

He could have tampered with pills, put them on shelves at stores, put them towards the back so they're not less likely to get. But then send your letter to Johnson and Johnson demanding a million dollars, telling him you know you sent me a million bucks, I'll tell you which stores have got poisonous tail and all the shows exactly. No, there was no need for him to actually and he didn't send his letter until everybody had died. Pretty much.

His letter was a crime of opportunity. I mean, this guy, he was He ran scams, He did a lot of shady things to make a box. And I am pretty sure that that's the deal, is that it was another way for him. Hey, honey, maybe I can make a couple of bucks off. They may not give me the million, but maybe they'll give me something. Oh oops, I'm thirteen years later. I'm just getting out of jail. Work out so well for him. I really do think the fb I should stop wasting their time in this guy, though,

I agree. Next up on our Theories slash suspect suspect list. Wow, that was a cool pronunciation. I have no idea. Yeah, the suct list. Yeah, yeah, I think I was trying to say suspect and unsub at the same time because I watched one of those TV shows that uses unsub all the time. Yeah. No, it's a terrible thing to say. But you're you know, you're not jerking my chin. No, I really don't. Um it's unknown subject unsub. It's a dumb thing. Okay, can we We're going to just leave

that behind. Yes, please, Let's talk about our next crazy suspect yep, which is a lady by the name of Lori Dan. Here's her story. This is really tragic and sad is She was a woman who, on the of May seven, first tried to set up a firebomb in an elementary school, then set fire to the home of people who she baby sat for. By the way, the mom and the two kids were in the basement, though they did get out. How old is uh she was? I don't think. I think she was not quite thirty

years old when that happened. What else did she do? Well, she went to an elementary school with guns. She shot and killed one boy and wounded several other children. She then left that school, talked her way into the house that was nearby, and then shot one of the people who lived there before everybody got out, and in the end she shot herself. That's quite the spree. It is the spree. And and well, okay, so this lady went on a spree. Why is everybody trying to pin this

tragic story of her back to the titland five years later? Well, let's walk through the points of why it could be her, which is, first, she lived in the Chicago area at the time. She had tried to poison people before. And if we look at what she did on the day she died, she took snacks and juice boxes and laced them with arsenic and then some of them she mailed, something she had done several days prior to her spree, and mailed them to people. Others she delivered by hand,

trying to poison these folks. It didn't kill anybody, thankfully, because the arsenic was so deluded and it tasted terrible that nobody would consume the entire cookie or juice or whatever it might have been that she poisoned. But I mean, not to speak ill of the dead, but this woman who obviously had a mental condition, and I'm not being rude, she did have a mental condition. She had some depression issues,

there were some things going on. But I just don't see your organ being organized enough to have pulled off the thailand On murders. I mean, well, also, you know, she obviously knew how to make or procure or potassium cyanide. Why bottled with arsenic? Arsenick is not actually that effective, like a really weak dose of arsenic too, right, And and whoever did this, they were pretty slick on getting in and out of stores and nobody noticed anything was amiss.

She was not that good with her product tampering. Because of the juice boxes, A bunch of people noticed that the corners were pulled up and they were leaking. So that's that's a giant problem obviously. I just I mean, everything she did called attention to what she did, and I just don't think she had the wherewithal to be sneaky enough to get away with it the in between the original poisonings and her crimes for here did she was she institutionalized for any like the time? I don't

think she was. She she had been a lot of stuff that happened prior to her spree. She had been married, the marriage had fallen apart, she was in having a really rough time, But I don't remember her having been put into an institutional situation at all. Yeah, it just seems odd. That's if she would she like to poison people, that there'd be this five year gap between the original poisonings and then this crime spree. Yeah no, And it's being institutionalized would explain why there was a gap, But

I don't. I don't remember seeing anything about her having been locked up. But we'll go on to our next suspect, which I'll be honest, this one's a bit of a kookie outlandish one, but that's the Yeah. HiT's the unit bomber ted Kazinski where uh in a prison? Uh? The FBI collected DNA evidence from Kazinski several years ago because they wanted to see if maybe he had been responsible for this. It's understandable in the late seventies early eighties

he had been active in the Chicago area. I think he had done a couple of things, a couple of bombings or something like that. I can't remember what he did in the early eighties, but they knew that's where he was. Plus his family had a home in that area, so they checked him. His specialty was sending letter bombs to people. Yeah, I was gonna say it seems like the m O was a little different there. Well, and

go figure. His DNA didn't match anything that they have, and as whatever they have, he also singled out specific people for his letter bombs for whatever reasons. Not that's not justifiable ones, obviously, but he didn't just necessarily kill people randomly. Yeah. Well, he vehemently denied that he was involved with this. I mean, he's fest up to most of what he did, but he vehemently denies that he was ever involved in this. So that theory, I'm not going to give it any I'm not going to give

it legs the bottom of the stack. Now we're going to go on to our next suspect, and that is a guy by the name of Roger Arnold. Roger Arnold, This guy's story is really kind of sad. He was a dockhead at the time in the Chicago area who went out one night, had a couple of drinks, maybe one too many, and made a couple of statements while he was at the bar about the poisonings, which gave some people around him pause and go figure. Somebody called the cops. Yeah, I don't know, but I don't know

exactly what he said either. I couldn't ever really pin that down. But it doesn't really matter. The point is he said something that alarmed folks. There were some and when he got arrested, the cops started looking into him. What do they find? Will they find some weak connections between him and some of the victims. There was the connection between Mary Reiner and him. The connection between them was that Arnold had worked at a jewel warehouse where

her father also worked. There was also the fact that, according to some newspaper research, the police had gotten a tip that his ex wife had been committed to a psychiatric ward at a hospital which just happened to be across the street from the store where Mary Reiner purchased her taile at all, so this is two connections to her. Oh and by the way, he was a do it yourself chemist because when they searched his house they found unregistered guns and chemicals and beakers and funnels. Oh my,

probably or something. I don't know exactly what he was doing, but what they found was not what they wanted. And by they, I mean the cops because he didn't have potassium cyanide. He had potassium carbonate, which is harmless. I'm not gonna do anything to you know. I don't know what he was using it for. And he never said. This is a quote. This is the greatest quote ever from somebody who's in trouble. I'm not saying what the chemicals were used for, but it was nothing illegal. Yeah,

he got charged. He got charges for the weapons and um assault. I don't I think the assault was something related to his wife, prior issues between he and his wife. But he didn't take this so well. He got pretty worked up and he carried a huge grudge about it for a while. Uh he one of the invested interrogators actually said that they quoted him as saying, I'd like to be on the homic side of the guy that turned me in for what he did to me. So he's got a huge beef. Whoever called him in Probably

forgiveness would have been a better path for him. It all turned up for him. I'm just looking up uses of potassium chloride carbonate, carbonate. Sorry, okay, let me know what you find. I'm going to China production, Okay, drawing agents. You can use it to make grass jelly, which is a Chinese and Southeast Asian food. It's kind of myriad number of uses, but nothing. You can make meat or wine with it. You can suppress fires, that's the thing. Yeah,

that's uh. You see it in fire extinguishers. Yeah, yeah, that's so. There are a couple of things. None of them seem particularly interesting treacherous, No, not at all, but it's interesting. What you know, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I'm not going to tell you what to use it for. But it wasn't illegal, Like why wouldn't you just tell him what it is? Then? I don't know. I mean, for all I know, the

guy was using it to cut coke. Yeah, I mean he could have been doing stuff in this is that as he was selling cocon on the side it's illegal. Oh yeah, it's just why you wouldn't say anything. Yeah, absolutely, Well, it's not illegal to use a potassium carbonade until you actually cut the coke with it. Yes, it's true, until the cocaine comes into the equation. Technically. Joe's right. Well, here's where everything kind of creamed off track for him. There was a guy by the name of John Stanisha.

I want to say, I want to pronounce it anybody, okay. Stanisha didn't know Arnold. He had been out, he'd had some drinks. It was last call and he was leaving the Lincoln Avenue bar on the eighteenth of June three, So this is a full year or not quite a year after the poisonings Arnold saw. I'm believed that he was the same heavy set man that he remembered, probably being the one that ratted him out of the dude he was drunkenly saying stuff too. So he walked up

to him. He yelled at him, you turned me in at a shot ing point blank. That's not great, and killed him. Not smart, not the best idea. Arnold was trying and convicted and sentenced to thirty years for murder but there was never any strong connection to him for the title and all. No, no, he was. It was a matter he just he was opened his mouth at the wrong place in time. He probably just made a stupid joke. He gets drunk and it's like, oh yeah,

I did that to cover up my wife's murder. You know that he knew the girl and was like, oh yeah, that girl was a blip blie blee and she got what she deserved. And people like, wait, what, okay, hang on here as simple as at okay, we're ready to keep going. Yes, is the next one up on our list of suspects? Isn't really it's a terrible name because it's based on a profile. It is an unknown, anti social, slash angry at society male, likely white. Let's be fair, though,

that's probably the profile of whoever did this. It is typically guys are more likely to murder than women are, and you have to be anti social and angry at society to do something like this. I mean, the thing that I shake my head at every time about this profile is profiles work because they help you pin it down on somebody. This profile is so vague it borders on useless. It was I was never nowhere near Chicago

at anytime. In Okay, here's here's the profile. The profile of was of someone who was angry at society and wanted to lash out at it. And they believed that that person was at the time or possibly had received psychiatric care, so all of Chicago. This uh, this subject could have also complained about how society was wronging him and probably tried to contact someone that he considered to

be in a position of power. That person didn't recognize his communication or basically refused to listen to him crazy, which made him angrier. The thailand all killer would have lived. Obviously, I think we've established this in the Chicago area and had a decent knowledge of at least the neighborhoods that this took place in. This is where I go. This is really a borderline profile. He had to own a vehicle to get to the distances between each store up.

I don't know. I mean, I don't think that's true, but okay, I don't either could have taken a bus. I could have happened over months. I mean, I mean, there's a million ways to get around in Chicago. So it's it's really it's it's funny. The things that actually really stand out to me for this profile that I think have some validity are that they figure that this person had to have worked in a job or industry

that gave access to potassium cyanide. Those are the gold and silver mining industries, film processing at the time, or some form of chemical manufacturing, which also means that it's a low wage job, which would fuel the anger issue that they talked about because they had said in this profile making low wage, so therefore in kind of a semi poverty situation. But why would it be a low wage job and there's lots of good paying jobs, and you know, the chemical industry and things like that, it

would be what somebody would consider a menial job. This is what the profiler believes. Yes, yes, but I can see somebody if I work in a chemical factory and yeah, I make an okay living, but this job sucks, then they're angry because their lot in life is terrible to them. I want to address the fact that somebody could walk out of their job with something like that. That seems wrong.

That's a little scary, really scary. It's a good question about how tightly they control that stuff seems like something that's that lethal, maybe you put a lock on it. I've got one thing to see it about that two words, Aldrich James, A big Russian ball was walking out of CIA headquarters with grocery bags full cloth, secret documents. You know, it seems like they should have kept a lock on that too. What do you think about this chemical company

over there? Yeah? Yeah, to think that, if this is right, this person could have at any time lashed out again in some method using this poison. I think we're lucky that they didn't. I don't know why it didn't happen again, but it's scary that there's a good question as to why it didn't happen again. Yeah, I don't know. Um. I mean, it could be as simple as one of the people And this isn't something that I've seen in the theories, and this is me just kind of spitballing.

But it's possible that one of the people that was involved in this whole thing made themselves a victim. If you think about it, one of the ways to be remembered is to die with everybody else. Also a good way to not get caught. What I was what I was actually thinking, is that is that one of the people here, the person who did it, wanted to kill one person who was probably one of the early people to die, because you know, the question is is why Thailand all why do you pick Thailand all from for

the delivery vehicle, and why is it? Why is it that a certain number of people die? But then it's all quote from the shelves, and then you don't do it again. This is always Joe's theory, though with any like big murder, it's always that one person was the victim and then you just kind of did a couple other people for fun. But the copycats proof that that's

actually what happened. There's there's the woman. Uh, there was a woman that oh gosh, I can't remember what pills she poisoned, but she poisoned her husband and then stuck a couple of bottles back on the shelves to cover her tracks. To me, it looked like her husband was

the first victim. People continually did that. Now with the woman that I'm thinking of specifically, she and a lot of these these people didn't know what they were doing, and they left trace evidence behind, whether it was in the pills that were poisoned or stuff in their house, But I don't. I didn't see anything that said that something like that was found in the victims houses. And you would think that if it was somebody who was trying to kill that person and then covered up, there

would have been something discovered. Because people tend to be sloppy and not think about all the angles, especially at a time when crime c s I Shows were not the thing and everybody didn't consider themselves an expert. They just didn't think anybody would know. Yeah, but it may be some people are smarter than other people. You know, criminals get busted pretty readily and fast because they tend

to be kind of dumb. But if somebody was a little smarter than the average bear, then they could have probably covered their tracks a little more or just took more time with it. Yeah, so let's let's let's let's think about this for a second. Now, you want to murder your say, or your your husband or your wife for the life insurance money or whatever, and you have to take away. So if so, let's say you get your wife, you're gonna kill your husband. Your husband has

chronic back pain. He's taking that he's taking pills pretty much constantly for it, and like if it wasn't chronic back pain, say, for example, your husband has severe allergies and he's having to take manatorial capsules for well, that's

your delivery vehicle. So if I was going to look at this, because if you're planning on killing a specific person, you can't get these all out there on the shelves and then into this guy's medicine cabinet waiting because by the time, because I have ad my medicine cabinet, I take it rarely because I rarely get a headache or

anything like that. So in other words, if you're planning I'm murdering somebody with the title and all, you've got to be pretty certain that he's gonna eat that he's gonna eat the poison pill very shortly before the whole thing. It's the news stands. So if I were the FBI, I'd go back and I'd look at all the victims and all their families and friends and loved ones and stuff. Find out the victim of the chronic pain issues and

ask yourself who wanted him to be dead? And I think that we might have the person there that's that's that's I mean, that's that's that's a course of action. But unfortunately, I imagine at this point, thirty some years later, that course of action has probably been run dry a hundred times. I'm sure. I don't know. I don't know. But let's let's go to our final suspect. Our last suspect is Johnson and Johnson's potential cover up. They did

have access to the pills. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Because remember we talked about here when we were going through this, is that Johnson and Johnson appeared from the beginning to be as much a victim of the entire thing as of people who died. And they they did seem to do everything right. They were taking all the steps. Everybody thought they were great, and their pr folks were working overtime, and that might be what they wanted you to believe,

is that they were the innocent victims. Yeah, they a lot. It's it's really interesting. I had never ever thought about this. There's a guy by the name of Scott Barts. He wrote a book called The Tailing All Mafia, and I'm really sad I wasn't able to get ahold of it ahead of time. And I'm gonna track this book down, but he brings up some points about this story. They're really hard to ignore and all in all rather disturbing.

First off, do you remember how I said that all those bottles of Thailand all were gathered up from the stores and and had to be tested. Johnson and Johnson did the testing. It wasn't the FBI or the police or some independent lab. It was Johnson and Johnson who was doing it, which means that they could technically control the results that got published about how much was found. Well,

are you sure about that? Because I find it hard to believe that the FBI would turn over criminal evidence and not keep it in their in their own possession. I find that really really hard to believe. This is based on if you want to use that at a trial, once it's once it's left the chain of evidence, it's useless in a trial. I'm not going to disagree with you at all, Joe. This is this is based on

the research that Barts is saying he did. He's saying that Johnson and Johnson was doing all of the testing and that it wasn't a crime lab. I mean, it's conceivable, but I still find it really hard to believe. So they were the ones who did the recall, So they were the ones who had a lot of the pills, and that might be, Hey, we've already got them all here, let us just test them and we'll save you the

time and will incur No, I know, I know. I read an interview with this guy and which he said that the FBI just chipped all this stuff straight to Johnson and Johnson who destroyed it. And but I'm really funny. That hard to believe. It's it does make you lift and eyebrow. Here's the next thing. There was a victim. We talked about her a couple of times. Now, Mary Reiner. Yeah, okay, here's the thing with Mary. She had just come home from the hospital because she had just had a baby. Yeah,

congratulations Mary. It's really depressing now, yeah, I know, it's not not so happy. Thailand All was the major brand used by hospitals for pain relief. It was their go to and they liked the extra strength Thailand All. Mary didn't have in her home a bottle of extra strength Thailand All. She had a bottle of regular Thailand All, which was her preferred Yeah, yeah, it was her. It was the one that she liked. The pills were in

that bottle. We're not regular strength. They were extra strength Thailand. All Bart speculates that what happened is that she was sent home from the hospital with a single days dosage of extra strength Thailand all and said, well, I can keep him in this little thing and you gave me, or I can just drop him in my tail at all bottle. So she put him in the bottle that she already had in her home. How many pills were in the bottle there was There would have been a

day's dosage. I think it's one dose every four hours, typically four to six two pills every four to six hours, twenty four hours. That's like ten pills, ten plus pills somewhere in there, minus what she took, of course. But the thing is, all of the pills that were found and identified to have been laced with the potassium cyanide

we're in stores. No hospital stock was listed as tampered and contaminated with Where the rest of the pills in her regular pill bottle, extra strength or regular, They were all the extra strength. It was almost as if it was an empty bottle. So I do this. I don't know if you guys do this or not, But like when I go to the store, it's cheaper and more effective to just buy like a big bottle of the pills.

And but you don't want to keep that in your medicine cabinet, so you keep that someplace ELTs, but you just keep refilling and it's just whatever bottle you had. So I guess it's possible that she was doing that. Yeah, and that's why I'm thinking that she must have well, and that's why Bart says she must have taken the hospital pills that she was given, purchased extra strength. I mean, she was pregnant. She was nine months pregnant. You kind of bump it up a little bit. I feel like

that's probably true. You know, we're getting a little more pat a large bottle of extra strength, but she had her regular bottle leftover. Math I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I never saw anything saying that that was in her house. But here's here's here's what the problem is. Sure this begs to say that the tampering happened somewhere than other than between store and the consumers

from the hospital because she had pills from the hospital. Yeah, I know, it's it raises issues because everything we've told was somebody pulled him off the shelf, tampered and put him back bottle. No. I mean it's also possible that you grab an extra or a regular strength Helen instead of an extra strengthle pills. Yeah, and you're just throwing pills back in bottles and yeah, you know you got

a bunch of extra strength and a regular one. Yeah, that's that's absolutely Boston as I don't know, and also Barts rose book, and he probably should know that he used to work for Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, he's a whistleblower and he was he was fired, but so he might have a bit of a we might have a bit of a bias there. But this does suggest that it was the pills were tampered with, but before they

hit distribution exactly. It would suggest that except for like what what Devon says, but also where did Barts get that from? Was it is that actually an FBI report? I don't know where. I don't know where Bart's got that information. That's why I wanted to get the book, and I haven't been able to track down a copy of it yet. Johnson and Johnson believe I understand it's a self published book. You probably got to go to his website. Well, that would explain why I couldn't find

it in Amazon. Well, no, I was actually looking like the library and places like that for free copies, just to be able to get electronic copy to read fast. But so a lot of problems. He Barts is basically saying that what Johnson and Johnson has told us isn't our right lie if this whole hospital poison connection is true.

The other thing that Barts says is that there is illusion between the f d A and Johnson and Johnson that is specifically related to evidence that was given by the f d A about how long it would take for the potassium cyanide to corrode and break through the walls of the capsule. It's probably pretty caustic. Yeah, he has said that their timeline of it, he's hinted at that they may have fudged it so that it said

that it acted faster than it really could have. In other words, he's saying that Johnson and Johnson said, oh yeah, no, you'd be able to tell the pills would be rotting away in a matter of days. I'm making this part up a presumption of just using this as an example, where an actual fact, it would be a matter of weeks before the corrosion would be enough to destroy the pills. Sure, I think the timeline that you've just used it is probably off. But yeah, yeah, no, and I know that

timeline is off, but I'm just using that. That's what he's saying, because he's saying Johnson and Johnson put that out so that they could say that it wasn't in the pill before it left their hands. It's important to note that the FBI initially didn't think that the bottles that had the poison pills had been opened before they reached those consumers. So the FBI was curious. There was a DA who looked into this but got shut down. They didn't they had some reasonably the bottles had not

been opened before they were bought. That is according to him, yes, according to parts. How could they possibly know that, because but by the time they have examined the bottles, the bottles have been opened. I know that they pulled from the shelves other ones that were but even that, I mean, but if they tell yeah, if it's a plastic snap lid and that's it, it's really hard to take understand that, and the only way they were able to have to find out that those bottles had poison pills and was

to open them. Right. Yeah, well but you know, I guess the presumption is right is that you get you have you in the lab, you get all these bottles and you go, Okay, bottle one open, Okay, it was sealed. Test all the pills and nothing in there. Okay, cool, bottle too open, Okay it was sealed. Oh there's poison

and knees. Right. But I again, I have literally never encountered a pill bottle that didn't have the five different millions of seals, So I have no idea what I remember the old ones where it was with the cotton that's in there to keep the pills from rattling around so they don't destroy themselves. Yeah, that used to be in It was kind of a tube of cotton that

was bent in the middle. So let's just say it was I don't know, four inches long, so it folded half was a two inch strip because you could tell that a machine pushed it into the bottle to fold it and then pulled back out, so it could be as simple as well, this is weird that cotton is just jammed into the bottle and doesn't look like it should be. So I don't know. I mean, this is speculation on my part as much as yours, But that's

the only thing that I can guess. The thing that I think that we should also bring up so that folks understand some of why maybe there's issues with what Barts is saying is how Thailand all was produced because there was the manufacturing plant, like we said before, Pennsylvanian Puerto Rico, and they made the raw stuff what was in the middle or what was in the capsule. They then sent that in a drum to another plant where that plant put it in the capsule, put him in

the bottle, and then shipped them. What a tedious job it would be filling those capsules. Now, yeah, yeah, one guy with a little with a little spoon at a time. But so it's it's possible that at that second step where the mix was put into the capsule, it could have been poisoning inserted at that point. Now I don't I don't buy what Barts is saying. Yeah, he sounds kind of like a disgruntled X employee. He's a whistleblower and he seems to have taken on a crusade against

the pharmaceutical industry in general. Yeah, and also I just don't see how I don't see how that it could have been tainted at this particular point, at that that production facility or that packaging facility and then wind up only in a very small, small area of Chicago. I'm not going to disagree with that at all. That again, that's the problem. But I think that's the problem with a lot of these conspiracy theories is that it is cause and effect, a focused to be focused without looking

at all the surrounding factors. That, unfortunately is all of our potential suspects. I I don't know which one to go to. I mean, unfortunately, that silly FBI profile is the most likely. But yeah, but we'd he would have continued it for a lot longer, probably, you would think, unless, as you said, that person was locked up for some reason.

Is a psychiatry or just a prison scenario. Yeah, I'm still liking the idea that it was actually somebody who knew one of the original people who died and wanted to kill them. And I would say, FBI, go find out which victim had chronic pain issues, find out who wanted to feel that person, and there you go. Well, if you are listeners have any theories of your own, feel free to share those with us. If you go to our website, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com,

you can leave a comment. On the website. Of course, we will have links to some of our research as well as this and every other episode that we've had for you to listen to. Their Most folks don't listen to it on our website. A lot of folks go to iTunes. If you're at iTunes, do please take the time to leave a comment and a rating that helps

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just as a fun little Oh yeah, that's right. We do have that on there, and I keep forgetting Uh think if I bought it, thinking side shirt, I could wash that shirt? Yeah that shirt? Brother, Yeah yeah, please do alright, gang, Well, that is all of the pertinent facts and details that I can think that we have to give to everybody. We're going to go ahead and wrap this one up and we will talk to you next week. Everybody. Bye, guys. Do you have a ton all? I got a headache,