Now Up is one of my favorite of our true crime episodes on the poisoning deaths of at least seven people in the Chicago area back in nineteen eighty two. What makes this case so unsettling is that there doesn't seem to be any connection whatsoever between the victims and the killer. The murderer just seems to have been a mad poisoner. Like most good true crime mysteries, this one is also unsolved. Enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. Not me too, Why Chuck? Guest producer Josh is back in the house. Yeah, and there's a little Chuck in.
Your pocket, Remember little Elvis.
I was just about to say that you got that right, town.
Of Oh Man, what a great sketch. Really?
That was Nick Cage, wouldn't it.
Yeah?
Man, did you ever see Mandy?
Yes? It was terrible. I don't care what anybody else says.
You hate it.
Terrible, terrible movie.
Yeah.
Nolan and I talked about it on movie Crush. He's seen it like four times, thinks it's the best thing ever come on. No, he was like people the love it or hate it? And now it's like, actually, I was kind of in the middle.
Were you really Yeah?
I mean I told him young Chuck, like twenty two year old college Chuck sure would have probably liked it a lot more. Yeah, But today Chuck was kind of like, I get it, Like, sure, sure parts of it were fine.
Sure to me. Spending an hour doing character development, uh huh, but not successfully making you care about the characters just really irked me.
Wow, you had structural issues.
Yeah, that was really the big thing. I also thought Linus Roach was very very odd for casting. But is that which one was the main bad guy that called later?
That was weird, very weird. I don't even know him, but.
He's from law and like some other stuff you gotta get into. Wa see how what you're missing out on?
That's becoming a bit.
So did we start recording yet?
I think so?
Oh, I already welcomed everybody the podcast. That's right, So Chuck, we are. This is some true crime stuff we're getting into here, that's right. But I feel like we need to set the tone right because this isn't this didn't happen just yesterday. This happened way back in nineteen eighty two in Chicago, Illinois, And I remember this yea though I was like six at the time.
It was one of my favorite years.
Because of this, the opposite of that, right, mainly because of movies. What was so great about nineteen eighty two?
Look it up? Man? Well, I was kind of hoping to tea Blade Runner?
Oh really?
Yeah? Okay, yeah, that was the best movies.
Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until I was forty.
That's not true, Yes it is? Oh really, yes, the original.
The original Blade Runner?
H Did you like it good?
I like the second one too, you like?
But they spent way too much time on characters. Yeah. And I just did a little poking around about nineteen eighty two, and it was It was a good year for an eleven year old, but it was an uneasy time in America. Well for a bunch of awful things happened that year. And I don't know if it was any more or less than other years. But air Flight ninety crashed in into the Potomac River, remember that. No, in Washington, d C. The plane crash in the river.
Didn't hit a bridge maybe, but was there was like a daring icy river rescue. Oh really yeah, seventy eight people died. Though. That same day a metro train in d C derailed, killed three people.
Geez.
February was when Wayne Williams was convicted, and that was just the end of a lot of unease, you know, for years. Yeah, klaud savan but Law was found guilty of attempted murder his wife in March.
I didn't make it to the end of reversal of fortune, so I honestly didn't know what happened to Klaus guilty.
In June was the murder of Vincent Chen, who was a Chinese American who was beaten to death by two men in Michigan thinking he was a Japanese and they were like stealing his their auto work. Oh my god, I know, right. And then July ninth, pan Am flight seven five nine goes down in Louisiana, kills all one hundred and forty six people on board, plus eight more on the ground. And then in September, early September, this was when I know, man, remember planes used to just crash, yeah a lot.
Yeah, that never happens.
Now, not as much, but yeah, weird that we're recording this in the midst of more plane gratches. And then early September was when that paper boy in Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again. Johnny Ghosh, I don't know that one. That was a big deal too, because it was, you know, the paper boy, and there was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians and that turned out not to be true, but he was never found again.
So basically everything that's going on today is just a rehash of nineteen eighty two. It sounds like I.
Just remember being about that age and they're just the nightly news sort of just being a horror show. Yeah, and not politically speaking, you know, like a real bad incidence is occurring.
Well yeah, plane crash like just about at any age, like that'll bring you down if you see that on the news, for sure, Yeah, because you know, when you get on a plane, you think, huh, maybe this plane will go down while I'm on it, and that would be terrible.
Although I wasn't flying at eleven.
So all of those things you just mentioned sweep them totally off the table, okay, because come the end of September of that year, nothing else mattered. But what we're about to talk about now, that's right. Nothing nothing came close to taking the over the national psyche like the deaths of seven people beginning on September twenty, nineteen eighty two in Chicago, Illinois. Yeah.
And one of the articles I read about this, I mean, are we trying to keep it a secret? It's a show title, right, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think they're going to have to figure it out.
So yeah, go ahead, the tailan all murders.
Yeah, okay, you're like, oh no, no, but that's that comes up in part two.
Oh yeah, this is a two parter.
Yeah as well, so buckle in everybody.
So I was doing some research though when I saw one article that said something about, you know, the first domestic terror incident United States that nobody's ever heard of? Was like, what, who hasn't heard of this?
A millennial wrote that headline.
Well, I have to say, Josh on the way in here, yeah, I told him Thailand murders and he went, huh.
He goes, what's the tailand all? You old coger, we.
Should probably say what tailandill is?
Huh oh okay, yeah, I guess just in case you are a millennially you've never heard of Thailand All, but tailand All was and still is an over the counter pain reliever. It's like you have aches and pains and apparently what's crazy? People would take tailand All whatever was wrong with them, right, because now you can go get like, you know, aspirin, and you can get advil and a leave. There was no leave back then. That was a nineties drug. There's way more over the counter pain relievers now than
the we're back then. Back then, tailand All was basically it.
Yeah, it's a set of minifin, which is different than aspirin, and I think a lot of people just think those are interchangeable.
Right. The reason I believe Thailand All became so big is because aspirin upsets a lot of people's stomachs, right, tailand All does not, or it's not supposed to, And that's why it came out of nowhere and just took over the asper market. I think by nineteen eighty two, tailand All had thirty seven percent of the market. It's pretty good cornered. Yeah, yeah, almost half.
Especially since like some of the other like aspirins have been around since you know, nineteenth century, right.
So it makes sense then that when a little girl named Mary Anne Kellerman complained that she had a sore throat and wasn't feeling too good at like seven am on Wednesday, September twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two, her parents said, just take an extra strength title and all and go back to bed man her sore throat.
You imagine the guilt. Oh no, these parents feel.
Well, don't blow it. We haven't said what happens to Mary Anne Kellerman yet.
I think everybody knows. Yeah, she got up, said him sick. He said, take this. The father said he heard her go into the bathroom and closed the door, then heard something drop and went to the door, saying, are you okay, You're okay? No answer, opened the door and there she is on the floor. Taking to the hospital. But died very quickly.
Yeah, probably was when she went to the hospital. Was pronounced there and they suspected And this is just a little twelve year old girl of middle school girl into Jane Adams Middle School. They think she died of a stroke. That's what they thought happened too. They were just so baffled that they're like it had to have been a stroke. That's the only thing that can come on like this.
Yeah, so that's seven am. Just the day is just beginning, and one atrocity has already happened.
Yeah, this is a very bad day in the history of Chicago. September twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two.
Yeah, absolutely, and it started early. Adam Janis, who will detail his story, but put a pin in this one too, because he figures in even more prominently in a minute. But a little bit later that same morning, this gentleman, Adam Janis, he's twenty seven years old and lived in Arlington Heights, another Chicago suburb, and he died. And they
think that this is a heart attack. He complained of chest pains after he had driven his daughter's neighbor home from school, said I'm going to take the day off, comes home, eats a little lunch, takes two extra strength tile and all that he bought from a local drug store. Collapses in front of his wife and by you know, a few minutes later, when the paramedics arrived, he was dead.
Right, And again, like you said, they said heart attack because he'd been complaining of chess pains, which had nothing to do with it. Right, But just like Marian Kellerman, took an extra strength tilent all for a sore throat. He took some extra strength tilent off for some chest pains. This is just what people did back then.
Yeah, And that's what complicated it a little bit at first, was that you know, if you take the tile and all, it means you felt bad already. So obviously you know they're going to be saying, like, wait a minute, chest pains or sore throat, Like, how does that figure in? Yeah, and it didn't.
Plus, also, what made this even more baffling is that Marian Kellerman was twelve and healthy. Adam Janis was twenty seven and healthy. Yeah, and all of a sudden, they just dropped dead. People don't just drop dead, no matter what you see on TV or in the movies or whatever. Dropping dead inexplicably is a really bizarre thing. When you're a healthy person, it doesn't happen.
Next, we have Mary Reiner, same day, same day. This is still all on the same day. She's twenty seven years old. She's feeling a little dizzy. She had just come home from the hospital after having given birth to her fourth kid a couple of days before. Super Super Sad. All of these are obviously, but being just a brand new mom for the fourth time, it's just so tragic. And then by three forty five she was so ill she was rushed back to the hospital and again died very very quickly.
Yeah, and like Adam Janis collapsed in front of his wife, she collapsed in front of her young eight year old daughter. One of her children saw and Yeah, when she was taking the hospital, they pronounced her dead as well. This is mid afternoon. Mary McFarlane was up neck. She was over in the suburb of Lombard and she worked at an Illinois Bell phone center where you remember, like you go get your phone, like the rotary phone, you know, you would actually lease your phone.
I wasn't involved in that process, but we had them in our home.
Okay, Well your parents knew that.
Play figured they just bought that stuff.
No, there was like a store where you would go it's like the phone company's retail store, and you would go and be like that pink one that's.
Like smartphones today, kind of same model.
Kind of yeah, I guess so, but this was with a big, clunky rotary phone and you had to pay extra for the extra long court. Well, Mary McFarlane worked in one of these stores, and at about four o'clock at the Illinois Bell Phone Center, she had a massive headache that just came on out of nowhere, and she went and back and got some extra strength tile and all out of her purse, took a couple of them, and within minutes collapsed in the store.
Yeah, she was young at well, she was thirty one years old, mother of two. And then remember I was talking about Adam Janis. A few minutes ago, his family goes to the hospital. Obviously, everyone converges there. He passes away, and so the family makes their way home to begin morning and just sort of trying to reconcile what had just happened. His brother, Stanley, he was only twenty five, and then his wife Teresa, who was only nineteen, are both just overcome and worn out and have headaches. So
they're at Adam's house. They got to his medicine cabinet, get out the tile on all that he took completely unknowingly, obviously, and Stanley hits the ground, Foam comes from his mouth, his eyes roll back in his head. Everyone's freaking out, and a few minutes later his wife collapses and they call the ambulance. By the time the ambulances get there, I think Stanley died that day and Teresa somehow managed to live a couple of days.
Yeah, she hung on and I don't know if like her dose was lesser or what, but she survived for a couple of days after that.
Yeah.
I mean my guess is that there just wasn't as much cyanide and the capsule she took, right, did I just give something else away?
Yeah, you did it. But so Stanley took his titlan off first, and then Teresa's occurs, and one of the paramedics noted like Teresa was the one that called the
ambulance out to come out for Stanley. And when you get there, they're both like on the ground, like what's going on, And one of the paramedics that everything that was happening to the guy happened to the woman like a couple of minutes later, right like she was just following him through this process of like basically systemic organ failure.
And this is the same day that his brother had passed away.
Yep, this is about five six hours, six hours after Adam Janis had died.
Then finally I know this is all tough to go through everyone. We almost selected this as our next live show.
I'm really glad we did.
He'll be a good cause.
I mean, can you imagine trying to liven this up with some jokes?
I thought the whole time I was like, nah, we can do that. But yeah, the more I got into it, I was like, yeah, it's probably not good live material.
Right, we should have a rule of thumb that any story that begins with the death of a twelve year old girl probably not live show material.
I think you're right. So finally we have Paula Prince, Paula Jean Prince. This is a couple of days later. This is not the same day. This is on Friday evening. She was a thirty five year old flight attendant and she was found dead in her apartment after police responded for a welfare check that her sister called in saying, hey, you know, I know she's a flight attendant and all, but no one knows where she is. Can you go check on her a welfare check up? And they finally
found her and she was gone. Yes, very very sad.
She was found in her bathroom with a bottle of extra strength tile and all still open. On the counter and she They looked into her receipts and found that she had purchased it on Wednesday, September twenty ninth.
That's right. So at the end of this very short span of time in the Chicago area, we have seven people dead, and I feel like that's a good time to take a message break.
Yeah, yeah, all right.
Stop, you know, stop stop stopping here, shouldn't no, no, stop?
Okay, Chuck, So you said, Cyan, I how did you know that?
Because I was eleven years old and I watched the nightly news, like all eleven year old stead He just called it right, just me and broke off. Dan Rather yeah, Copple, yep. Who else?
That was it?
Peter Jennings.
He came a little later, but sure was he? Yeah? Yeah, he came after somebody.
Well, I mean, Cronkite wasn't still around, was he? Or was he? I don't know.
I don't think so. I was.
I was kind of into the news as a kid a little bit.
Well, yeah, I mean that was that was where you got your news back then.
Yeah, you would watch the evening news. It's very strange to think about now, right with the up to the minute news cycle.
So, oh yeah, I know how much more innocent things were back then.
I know.
So remove yourself from the benefit of hindsight or the benefit of Dan Rather's insight, and put yourself in the shoes of the people in Chicago. Right, Yeah, these are five. These are seven different deaths I think, from five different townships in the greater Chicago area, including Chicago. Paula Prince, the last person to die, lived in Chicago. These people aren't talking. These people have no idea what's going on. It's just that there were five, seven separate, baffling deaths.
You keep saying five. You want to fewer people to be.
Dead, Yeah, I do.
That's good.
My wishes aren't working though. It just so happens that the ambulance, the paramedics that showed up to attend to marry Mary Anne Kellerman, the first girl to die, they were just logging everything because it was such a baffling thing, and they logged her tail in all.
Yeah, logged isn't collected.
Right, Yeah, took it as evidence to maybe look into who knows sure, But they took the extra strength tile and all that she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stopped.
Yeah, I'm sure the dad was like, you know, she went in, took some tilan on, dropped dead, right, So it probably made sense, even though it's just tilent All to say like, well, hey, let's at least take this in.
Yes, and that tilent all that right, you know, because that bottle of tail and All made its way into the hands of a medical examiner whose name was Michael Shaffer, and Michael Shaeffer tested the tile in All and was rather surprised to find that some of the capsules had not tile in all in it, but sixty five milligrams of potassium cyanide. Yeah, and it takes about fifty milligrams to kill a healthy adult.
Yeah, I mean some of them. I don't think they were all exactly the same, but some of them had been completely emptied of any aced of menifin and completely filled with cyanide.
With cyanide right.
Yeah, I mean it was someone intent on for sure killing people.
Yes, because cyanide is no joke. No, It's a really really small molecule and it normally attaches to metals outside of the body, which is why you have or minerals, I guess, which is why you have potassium cyanide right when it goes into the body when you ingest it. However, you ingest it, whether it's from a tile in all capsule or breathing cyanide gas like they used to use to execute people with.
Yeah, like they stopped using it for executions because it was such a brutal death.
Yeah, it's a very cruel, painful way to die. In the body. It detaches from its its mineral or metal, and it attaches to a protein in the body called cytochrome c oxidase, which doesn't sound like could be a big problem, but it turns out that that's about the worst protein that cyanide could attach itself to, because we really need cytochrome c oxidase to breathe.
Yeah, basically it I mean, this sounds like such a cruel thing because it's just rapid cell death and it's not like your throat closes up and you can't breathe, like you're inhaling oxygen and you are technically taking breaths, but the oxygen is not getting in the cells.
No, it's not because c or that cytochrome c oxidase is what helps transport the oxygen and allows the oxygen to be used for energy. So if the potassium is clinging to it, the oxygen can it just stays in the blood stream and it doesn't get used by the cells. And since your central nervous system is the most oxygen hungry system in your entire body, it.
Does a lot of work.
It starts to shut down first, and when your brain and your spinal cord starts shutting down, all sorts of things happen. Your lungs starts shutting down. Your heart, God bless it keeps beating for minutes after the rest of your body's shut down can so you're not technically dead.
They're not sure exactly how long the pain and excruciation of dying from cyanide lasts, but they think you're probably conscious, in away and freaked out for about a minute at least, and your heart may continue beating for three or four minutes after that. So it's not a pleasant death at all.
No, I mean, you're gasping for air, You're breathing in air, and nothing's happening. Like I said Stanley Janis, he was foaming at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head in front of his family. It's just like it's awful, like writhing on the floor, gasping for air. You're breathing, but it's not doing anything. It's just I can't imagine anything more horrifying.
Right, because your central nervous system has kind of fallen out of its out of controller rhythm convulsions are usually a hallmark of cyanide poisoning.
And then you turn bright red at the end of it.
Yeah, your skin a cherry red, they said, because when your body has gotten rid of oxygen to your cells, and the oxygen becomes depleted, your skin kind of turns like a rusty brownish red. But because it can unload that oxygen when you're dead, it stays a bright red and your skin turns bright red. And then the other real telltale sign is your breath will smell a bit like almonds.
Yeah, I mean not a bit. I mean these bottles supposedly were really pungent with bitter almond, And unless you know what that means, then you're probably not clued in, you know, Like I wouldn't have known. I opened a bottle of eiland on and it smelled like or almend. I'd probably be like, huh right, it's a nice smell.
Actually, yeah, I like this tilant a. Yeah, I guess they have a new almond flavor.
Awful.
So, Michael Schaeffer, that medical examiner has just realized that this little girl has been poisoned, but he knows nothing about these other deaths. Yeah, there's nothing like that. It's not entirely clear how everything became connected or who connected it.
But what I find just particularly astonishing is that within just a few hours, by that evening, by the evening of September twenty ninth, people were saying, there's something up with the tail and all in these mysterious deaths that have been going on all around Chicago.
Yeah.
I mean, we'll get into the drag net they cast. But within a few days they had kind of solved everything. But who did it and how it may have happened?
Who done it?
Who done it? So yeah, very quickly they figured out the tilent on. There are a couple of different stories on like you said, on who who was the first person to point this out. One story is that a reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago was doing the reporter thing and then doing some deep diving and investigating and called up a deputy coroner and said, hey, I think this is what's happening. They told the police.
Another story is that two people who didn't know each other kind of came together independently to let people know. One was a fire captain named Philip Capitelli.
I knew it. I knew you were going to do that. There was like a ninety percent chance.
You know why, because we got a lot of support from people that wrote in saying I'm Italian and I love it. Keep doing it right, And only one guy who hated it.
But ironically it was fire captain Philip Capitelli written in and said no.
So he uh here was his deal. His His mother in law was friends with Mary Kellerman, the victim's mother. Yeah, the first of the little girl, and she said, hey, would you mind looking into this because I'm friends with this little girl's mom.
And it's weird that she dropped it at twelve and.
He's a fire captain and they're all connected to, you know, the police, into the medical community.
Everybody knows you want something done, ask a fire captain. I would sure, because they'll bust into the room with an axe. Get everybody's attention.
So he's he's investigating. And then there's this, Uh, there's a nurse named Helen Jensen and she I don't do you know why she was so into this case?
Was she just a no no? No? She was the public health nurse for Cook County I.
Believe, Okay, so she had an official designation to investigate.
Yes, but unfortunately no one would listen to her because this is nineteen eighty two, and she was a nurse, right, even though she was like a public health director, she was still a nurse, and people wouldn't listen to her. And she recalled in an oral history I read about this, yeah, that she was stomping her feet out of frustration, saying like, there's something wrong with the tail and all, like the tail and all is behind all us, and people wouldn't listen to her.
It's amazing.
Supposedly she and Philip got it, Teddy got together and joined forces, and I guess we're able to convince everybody that no, there's something wrong with the with the tail in all. And by this time people started talking. Sure, and you know the idea that Michael Schaeffer had identified Tylan All. I don't know if it was the same day or the day after something like that. But all this is within a span of thirty six forty eight hours, toss.
It was really fast that all of this is going on, that the dots are being connected, right.
So then what follows is Cook County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, doctor Edmund Donahue, holds a presser. I've either watched this one or one of the other ones. Like I remember specifically seeing this press conference on the news.
Probably saw Jane Burns.
That would have been the nationwide one, I guess.
Yeah, And I was like, how would that have been nationwide? And then I looked it up. WGN was a superstation starting in nineteen eighty. Oh you know it, man, So everybody saw it because WGN could broadcast nation Why by nineteen eighty two.
I watched Cubs Games kid just because it was on.
Yep, that was it, like that embraced games where all you can.
Yeah, man. So doctor Donahue has a presser, a local presser. Of course there is panic initially.
Yeah, he scares the s out of everybody because he comes out of nowhere and says stop taking the tile and all.
Oh yeah, sure, and so anyone. I mean, imagine how many people in Chicago had taken tiland all within two hours of that press conference, right, and are thinking like should I go to the hospital?
Right?
And as a matter of fact, the poison control lines for basically every in every city where somebody saw this started to light up right after that, and people were like I just took tile and all, am I okay?
Or gave my kid?
Yeah?
Can you imagine?
And what came to be the pat response was if you are still standing and talking to us, you're probably okay.
Which is sort of a double edged sword. It's like, don't worry, you die super fast, right kind of, So just relax.
So just hold the line for five minutes and then I'm going to come back and check on you. And if you're still talking, you're fine.
Oh man, all right. So then the Chicago Mayor's office gets involved, Like you said, Mayor Jane Byrne, she gets says, you know, print a bunch of flyers, print them in a bunch of languages.
Maybe on golden Rod and cornflower blue.
Sure, why not really catch people's attention that she had police drive through with loud speakers on their car, literally saying yeah, like don't take tyl and all.
Re enacting that scene from The Blues Brothers where I.
Was thinking Slacker and that's funny. Two different movies.
But do you remember they're driving through in the police car with the loud speaker talking about their show.
Yeah, same and Slacker.
I don't remember. I don't. I guess I didn't make it the end of slack Er either.
It was in the middle.
Ish, it was no days inconfused, huh oh.
Just different movies. Okay, so they're they're posting flyers, cops are driving around blaring it through neighborhoods, and then she has a press conference. She has all Thailand All removed from the Chicago area.
She calls for it.
Well, sure she didn't go around with her.
Basket, right, No, I'm not one hundred percent clear if she was actually able to demand that the tail and all be removed. I think she was more warning.
Yeah, I mean, I doubt if there was any law she could invoke.
I wonder though, seems like you would afterward.
I would imagine, yeah, that's you know, we'll talk about that later. Okay, So the TV and the radio, you know, obviously everyone picks us up, not just in Chicago or the United States. It goes worldwide and so you know there's people in Europe and Asia pulling Thailand all off the shelves.
Yeah, so this is a big deal and there was a lot of attention lavished on this. There was a poll that was taken the next month in October that found that nine this was in cities all over the country, that found that ninety percent of respondents were aware of this tile and all poisoning story.
Yeah.
Some press agency like a news clipping service said that it's the number of the number of stories dedicated to it were second only to the number of stories dedicated to the assassination of JFK. That's how big this story became overnight. And again one of the reasons why is because everybody took tail and all for everything all the time. That's just what you did. It was just something everyone took and that same product was now killing people.
So the most chilling part of all this to me, and this is all chilling, maybe the copycat stuff, because almost immediately copycat incidences started popping up all over the country. There were two hundred and seventy reports of product tampering in the month after thirty six were quote hardcore true tamperings.
And that's what's the most chilling to me, is like, there were that many people, at least thirty six, let's go in the low end, thirty six people across the country that wanted to kill people and just saw an idea. And I'm like, oh, that's what I'll do now.
I should have thought of that myself.
I mean, that's scary, man.
Yeah. What's what's scary but also infuriating is that there's such terrible self starters that they had to be a copycat murderer in that, right, you know what I'm saying. Sure, Like it's bad enough that they're trying to kill somebody, Yeah, randomly kill somebody, anonymously kill somebody. They didn't even think of it themselves. I know that is a pathetic murderer right there.
It's pretty pathetic.
Put my foot down.
Etceterrin extra strength etcrin capsule were found poison with mercuric chloride and that almost killed a man in Colorado. His name was William Sinkovic and he he had liver and kidney failure, but he did survive.
This one gets me so more than one person thought Oh, well, you know people spray and like drop things in their eyes and nose, I'll put acid in there. So tampered CinEx and tampered vizine both turned up after they had burned people with acid. Chemical burn up your nose.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, that's a bad one.
So food was also on the list of things being tampered with, orange juice, chocolate milk. Very high profile incident with ballpark hot dogs. Yeah, they pulled a million pounds of wieners off the shelves.
And ran them through a metal detector.
Yeah, because this was a scare all. You know, the old urban legend of razor blades and Halloween candy. Don't Did they actually find pins and needles and things for sure?
Yes?
Okay, because I thought that had literally never happened.
It hadn't. It was an urban legend that became true.
Okay, But nothing in the wieners.
No, some boys I think in Detroit claimed to have found razor blades in their ballpark wieners, and like you said, a million pounds were recalled and then the boys were like, we were just kidding.
Wow.
Yeah, and ballpark. We'll talk about how ballpark was treated after that, but they were put on shoulders and carried around for how great they handled everything.
And you know, there were a lot of hoaxes. There were a lot of tips called in about other tampering and it had to really like it. If the purpose of this was to induce panic and fear and terror, then it absolutely worked.
Absolutely.
Should we take another break?
I think so, Man, we're gonna come back and talk about the investigation.
Stop, you know, stop stop stop, No, no.
Okay, Chuck. I also want to point this out Time magazine. You know how I'm like super into like going back and reading contemporary news articles about an event. Yeah, this one, I mean, it's all over the place. But Time wrote about the copycat incidents back in nineteen eighty two, and they said that the copycats were trying to quote emulate their demonic hero, the still unknown poisoner, their demonic hero. That's what the journalists from Time decided to go with.
That's funny, I guess. I mean, that seems like a very twenty nineteen thing to write, That's what I'm saying.
I feel like we're reverting back to nineteen eighty two right now. I guess. So after that intro of yours. I'm now convinced. So everybody's freaked out. There are whole towns that canceled Halloween because remember this happened like a month before Halloween, and everyone was very scared about candy tampering because of the urban legend. Sure in some places it turned out to be true, a self fulfilling prophecy. There were all these hoaxes, there are all these actual
true product tampering copycats. People were freaked out and the cops needed to do something. And initially, these seven different deaths in five different towns in the Chicago area were being treated as five different investigations. Yeah, that didn't last very long. Within two days, by Friday, by the time Mayor Byrne holds her press conference on WGN, what came to be called the Tailan All Task Force was formed.
All five of those investigations got folded into not just local investigations, the FBI, the Illinois State.
Police, FDA of course, Yeah.
The FDA was involved, and then the whole thing was led by the Illinois District Attorney's office, who was the nominal head of the investigation.
Yeah, so they figured out pretty quickly that you know, like I said earlier. They cast their drag net, they come up with about a fifty mile radius of where all this stuff was bought and sold, and go investigate drug store after drug store, and they did find more bad tile and all that are still sitting on the shelves thankfully.
Yeah, yeah, I don't want to skim past that. They found more tailentol waiting to be bought, that's right, like just sitting there like, hey, come buy me. Within two days of these first deaths, that's right, these first murders, we keep calling them death These were murders.
That's right. And they name their case. There are always code names for all these cases. This one ranks pretty low in my opinion. Timers T Y m U R S short obviously for title mall murders.
At the very least, the s should have been a Z timers Yeah, you know, yeah, just give it a little flavor.
Agreed. So the cops are there was some confusion about how this went down because they're trying to figure out, you know, did it happen at the factory, did it happen after the factory? What's the supply chain?
Like, well, that's that's huge. It's like the crux of the investigation. Oh yeah, absolutely, Where did the tainting occur?
Yeah, so they found out that all of the containers were from lot number MC twenty eight eighty, which was pushed out in August. Again, this is the end of September yep in states east, all states east of the Mississippi, plus the Dakota's, Nebraska, and a bit of Wyoming.
Just a touch of Wyoming for flavor, like the z for.
That mesquite flavor.
Right.
However, they were from different production plants and they were sold in different drug stores.
Which is weird. It's tough to wrap your head around there because it's the same lot, but they came from different plants, right. And it turns out Tailanol has also a really weird convoluted distribution network.
I think that's every company.
Okay.
I have a friend that works in supply chain management and I was like, huh.
So supposedly they'll take boxes and open them up and repackage them in smaller boxes and it happens at like differ different companies at different points around the country.
Yeah, it's pretty complicated. It is from a product from factory to your mouth, like what happens to kind of everything. Yeah, I would think simplicity would be safer.
Much, you know, probably not cheaper, though, you're probably right.
So what they finally figured out was, here's what we think happened is this stuff was not tainted at the factory. This stuff was not tainted in the supply chain. But this stuff was tainted it from the store and then returned back to the store.
Right, because these pills were sold in different stores, which is a big one, because it not only could it have been like part of the factory, it could have been one of the local stores distribution centers where there was somebody messing with it. But since they were sold in Jewel food stores, in Walgreens and other places too around the Chicago area, that didn't make any sense. It
couldn't have just been like the jewel distribution center. And also because they were coming from different production plants, it really couldn't have been the production plant or the factory where it came from. It had to be, like you said, happening at the stores.
Yeah, And there were a lot of initial theories, you know, was it someone who like a former disgruntled employee of Johnson and Johnson? Was it someone was it just a serial killer who just picked til and all and wanted to randomly kill people.
Right, and this is that's weird. That's a weird idea at the time, Like now it just seems normal, Like, yeah, probably that's sad, but this but this was two years before the Sanuel Sidro McDonald's massacre, which is one of the very one of the next random killings of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was kind of the first of that, but it was still so new and remote. An alien that's that didn't seem like a realistic idea at the time.
Yeah, some of the other ideas they thought maybe this was someone that was targeting a specific person or people and then randomly poisoned other people to cover their tracks. One of the weird one of the weird theories that came out later after an spoiler alert, we now have tamper proof medicines. I'm sure everyone's noticed. There was one theory that it was someone who had a financial stake in tamper proof technology.
Yeah, I saw something like that too.
I don't think that was ever a ton of credens put into that one. But the point is there were a lot. I mean they were flying blind basically because it was just such an unexpected, odd, random thing, that were basically coming up with kind of any idea they could think of.
But the one that the cops settled on and the one that Johnson and Johnson also settled on too, because they went back and tested samples from lot MC twenty eight eighty and found that there was no no, there was no taining of the of the lot that their samples were pure. So the cops and Johnson and Johnson both decided they settled on what's called the mad poisoner theory.
That somebody went around this fifty mile radius in the Chicago area in about seven hours is what the cops calculated it would have taken either bought a bunch of tile and all and then took it back to their house and poisoned it, repackaged it and then drove around and redistributed it, or went from store to store, went in, bought some tile and all, took it out to the car, poisoned, and then repackaged it and brought it back in. But that it was local and it was specific to Chicago.
That was the mad poisoner theory. And again why. Still, no one has any idea why. It could have been random. They could have been targeting somebody. It could have been a disgrunel Johnson and Johnson employee. But the main theory for the tail in all killings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago is the mad poisoner theory.
Yeah, and do you know how they tested that the rest of that lot. They got Detective John Pinky McFarland, who had the best drug pinky in all of Illinois, and he went around and dipped that pinky in, touched it to his tongue. Yeah, he said it's good.
He's like, I can't feel my face right now.
The guy's a legend.
Yeah, his pinky is his pinky ring is so significant and barely lift his finger. He only lifts it to test drugs.
I told you we'd find some jokes.
Sure.
So by mid October, this is sort of the fine bit of part one here there was another bottle that people that they found another tainted bottle.
This is so crazy.
That was purchased on September twenty ninth, So it fit the bill, and it was a woman who was feeling bad and went to go get that tail in all, and her sister was like, no, I've got some buffering right here, just go ahead and take that. And the lady presumably said, well, I really prefer seat of benefit, but I guess I'll take an aspirin.
See. Yeah, her sister in law saved her by offering her buffer instead. You believe that she was steps away from dropping dead at a family gathering.
Unbelievable.
Yeap, that is a good place to stop hun Yeah. So that's part one of the Thailand All Murders or Timers with an S, and we're going to come back with part two after this. If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime, you can go on to stuff youshould Know dot com and check out our social links, or you can send us a good old fashioned email. Nineteen eighty two version to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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