In part two of our episode on the nineteen eighty two Chicago Thailand All Murders, we look at the suspects in the case and really zero in on one of them, but to this day it's not clear if they were behind it, and although there was a lot of weird evidence around him, it's all circumstantial. I hope you enjoy finishing up on the Thailand All Murders.
Welcome to Steff. You should know, a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, There's guest producer Josh over there. Guess enough with the pleasantries. Let's get back to.
It Chuck Thailand All Murders, Part two, Park, if you did not listen to the first part. In nineteen eighty two, seven people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide, all on the same day, all on the same day. America and much of the world is super freaked out. Johnson and Johnson is the manufacturer, and part one of part two has a deal with Johnson and Johnson and how they handled this in a public relations sort of way.
Because there were and are a huge company. Like you said in the episode one, they held thirty seven percent of the market share, which was many hundreds of millions of dollars of tile and all that they're selling every year.
And that's in nineteen eighty two dollars.
Right, which is like gazillions now. So it was a very big deal for that company. And the way they handled it is taught in colleges and PR classes all over the world as exactly how to handle a big public relations crisis.
Like this, Like it's literally called a textbook example of how it's done.
Yeah, they did a good job because as you remember from the last episode, they found out pretty sure early on that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson, right, Like, it wasn't in their factory, it wasn't in their supply chain. That it happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened by some crazed person taking them out of the store or tainting them maybe in the store in the parking lot,
then putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson Johnson can't come out on the news and say hey what and us.
Right well at first though, and this gets overlooked and left out of the college business courses and the PR courses. At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of a massive recall.
Sure, because that looks well, it looks good in one way but bad in another.
And they actually didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference on Friday calling for a recall of the Thailand all in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm. Yes, we're recalling all of the Thailand all in Chicago.
Yes, what she said.
Right. So by Friday, the thirty first of September, is there thirty one in September? Was this October first?
I have no idea.
I think it was October first, anyway. By the Friday, two days after the death yeah, the deaths, Johnson and Johnson recalled all of the tail in all in Chicago. And that should have been enough to them, that was enough. But this PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast, and like we said earlier in Part one, became global
almost overnight. It was not enough. Yeah, And so Johnson and Johnson, within a week of the deaths recalled every bottle of extra strength TIL and all in the United States, which is worth about one hundred million dollars at the time, took it back to their factories and destroyed it.
So they say, right, yeah, both Johnson and Johnson, right. I wonder if one of them was like, know about this.
One of them said, Okay, I'll take all the states west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Somewayoming and then you can take all the other states. That's a part one, Joe.
They even got an award the Public Relations Society of America, which is a real thing, I believe it or not. They awarded them their Silver Anvil Award for how they handle the.
Crisis the tailan All poisoning, that's right.
And high grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad Wieners in the first episode. The ballpark Frank Zip supposedly had razor blades but did not. That still created a public relations crisis for them, even though they were just these little jerks in Detroit, And they won the Golden Anvil, which is one higher than.
Silver, because of how they handled the pr crisis brought about by the copycats of the actual tailan All.
Crisis, which was in fact really brought about by two jerk kids in Detroit, right, really, not even.
Copycats, not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
I bet one of them was the guy who did our our lighting at our Detroit show.
It was a smoke I'll go some more smoke.
Yeah, guys, we did a show in Detroit a few years ago and very famously we still use that as the standard bearer for a bad crew bad. We had a guy that looked like a former roadie for Uriah Heap that was running like a light show basically during the middle of our podcast, and like smoke came out. We were like, we had to stop the show, almost like dude, what are you doing?
Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter had turned like brown and you could no longer see the words. And you asked him, we had to stop the show, and you had to ask him to use a different colored light.
Uh huh.
And his response, because you and me he was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in the sound with the guy. His response, according to them, they want smoke, I'll give them some more smoke and we got some more smoke.
Like a smoke machine.
Yeah.
Man, And people ask us why we haven't been back to Detroit.
That's a big reason. It's a big reason, not the only reason.
Uh.
Okay. So they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener pr moves McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson.
They actually make Til it All.
Yeah, they make the pills again. The way this all this supply chain works is really convoluted, and like you said, they didn't want to recall Johnson Johnson everything at first. They want to kind of take it a little slower. I guess, well, sure, because they'd found out the drugs are actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland.
This is one hundred million dollars worth of stock that they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That's right. So they were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.
They had no choice, no, that was the only way to do it was to lose a lot of money in favor of future gains.
Yeah. But even at the time, a lot of people were like, this is it for tail and All. Sure, the public has lost faith in Thailand All. So when Thailandol recalled thirty one million, fifty count bottles of Extra Strength tilent All and destroyed it all, there was a chance that not only were they losing one hundred million dollars, but that they were losing one hundred million dollars of a brand that had already lost the public trust and would never regain it. So which wasn't true. But yeah, no,
they didn't necessarily know that at the time. It was still up in the air. So they it was basically thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public this taint of talent All has gone forever.
That's right.
Your chances of dying from taking Extra Strength tilent All are now gone. You can go back to taking Thailand All. Now. That was one thing that was a big gesture, which is what it amounted to. It was a gesture half of Johnson and Johnson. But they did other stuff too. They started to do things right out of their reluctance.
Once they finally said there, we have to just go with this to save face and to win back public trust, they started to do things right, like including like setting up a hotline sure putting out one hundred thousand dollars reward for information.
Jump change, considering how much they had lost already.
It's nineteen eighty two dollars.
Well still jump change it is, yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
It does they But because of all of this, Johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and actually managed to position itself as a victim in all of this, Like, yes, there were these which they were, I mean seven murder victims. Yeah, and Johnson and Johnson. I don't think I ever tried to push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner who may or may not had something out for them.
But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit because of this, and they were a victim and were able to generate public sympathy. Is part of the road to regaining the public trust.
Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes. So we'll take you back to nineteen eighty two if you're if you weren't around then or old enough to be taking OTC pills and pain relievers.
OTC is over the counter by the way. That's right, Okay, you down with OTC. Yeah, you know me so dumb.
I love that you played along, though, I appreciate that you could have made me feel stupid.
We've been partners for eleven years almost now.
Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Yeah right, yeah, unbelievable.
So uh I'm believable, Not not in that way. Okay.
So here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to take a pill, like a tile and all, you would get your bottle, you would pop it open with your thumb.
Well first, first it came in a little box.
Sure, but the box wasn't even glued shut. No, you would pop it open with your finger. You would take out the cotton in there, and you would take your pill. It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing. No, there was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time.
Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep bare aspirin like the hard tablets, yeah, from getting crushed in transport.
Yeah.
And since they started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton any longer. But because consumers expected it.
I know.
Still today you'll find cotton in your in your pills. There's no reason for it to be there except because the companies know that you want it to be there. You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills.
Imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that too.
Well, I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know, so big cotton.
They.
New, fancy otc pill should have Micromo doll in there, right.
It just comes with a pair of Meuni stuffed into your pill bottle like these have been warm.
And so this was a time. It was a very innocent time previous to this, where you could like and you pointed this out. I remember seeing this in grocery stores, like I remember seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food products and smelling them.
Yes, that's what you could do, and then.
Closing it back and putting it back on the shelf.
Mate.
Yeah, oh there's a little mold in this one. Yeah, and I'll just leave it for the next person.
Forget poisoning like these they could be spitting in this stuff. It was allowed.
That's just the way it was. Like, there was America was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived. And that sets up this Tile in All Poisoning. It really shows how much of a jarring experience it was from America, because all of a sudden, like it's finally sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong with the tile in all. Somebody has gone out of their way to poison the tail and all in order
to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able to do this is because it's easy to get into the tile in all, tamper with it, put it back, and no one will be any any more. The wiser and wait, it's not just tile and all. Milk doesn't have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Nei, there's orange juice, NEI, there's cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America
forreaked out. And this is the reason why this Tile in All Poisoning is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in the United States, because it was terrorism, pure and simple. America was terrified. They were petrified not only to take tail in all or any over the counter medicine. Now they were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids. Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one to die in Chicago, she
had a coworker who said, like, everything looked tainted. Now, I was afraid to give my kid's milk. I was afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get to the tail and all, they can poison anything. And that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks, Tyland all said we got this covered.
Yeah, And I have a feeling they did this so fast there had to have been this idea in place already.
Yeah, it was. I saw a reference that it was.
And I imagine it was not done because they're like, well, it's a lot of money, and why would we bother. It's like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine, right, And then that happened. So within six weeks they had a box that was actually glued shut, so if your little box had been opened, you would be able to tell.
Yeah, that was That was part one of three of this tamper resistant packaging.
That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle after you open it or no, no, no, the plastic is over the cap on the outside of the bottle.
Yeah, like the plastic foil.
And then the actual foil was over the mouth of the bottle that you we all have to poke through now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
None of that existed until the beginning of nineteen eighty three.
So all three of these are put in place within six weeks. Not only that, they said, you know what, we're going to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now it was we didn't have them back then. Everything was a little capsule that you could literally pull apart, and you could snort the tile in all if you wanted to.
Sure, I'm quite sure some people did.
I'm sure someone did. But the caplet is, you know, a tablet coated with an easy to swallow a gelatine. It's solid, it's I imagine you could tamper with it. And even I even saw with all these things in place, they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really went a long way to restore the public, you know, well, like the good feelings about what was going on.
Yeah, within about a year, Thailand all or Johnson and Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Thailand.
All that's hard to believe. Yeah, that was really fast, but.
It also goes to show like just how perfectly they did everything from that from the time they ca admitted to it on.
Yeah, and I feel like I remember like commercials with CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became sake.
I can't remember his name. I want to say, Jeoffrey Beam. That's like a shoe brand.
Gabby Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson, No, Jimmy Howard Johnson.
Yes, this, I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy Johnson is way far away from that. But he became a public face. He would, you know, go on to sixty minutes and he talked to Dan Reather and take Copple and all those cats like he he was out there like showing how much the company cared. Yeah, and it had had a huge effect.
And then in nineteen eighty three, Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Tail and All Bill, which basically says, if you do something like this is now a federal offense. A few years later, in nineteen eighty nine, the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any product really to make it Tampa proof.
Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tail and all came out with it, because they kind of had to if they wanted to keep up with TIL and all. But also the uh, the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer product, started putting their products in like tamper proof packaging. Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside the box.
To trap the chemicals in.
I guess, but also to show like nobody's injected this with lie or something like that, although lie is used in the making the soap, isn't it. I remember my fight Club.
It's pretty funny someone injected soap into the soap. All right, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner. Right after this.
Stop you know, stop stop, should know no stop?
All right. So this was a very big case at the time. Obviously, like we've been saying, it was a landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles, which you know we should do one in profiling. Actually, have we done that.
I don't think so, it'd be a good one.
Yeah, because it always like seems like the trope in movies and TV. But it is kind of like that.
No, it is a thing for sure.
It's not like they just make this stuff up. But in the end they said, you know, this is probably a man in his twenties or thirties who was sort of a Jekyll and Hide type During the day, he's very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next to you and you wouldn't even know it.
Every once in a while uses here him go more.
Yeah, exactly. But deep in his in the recesses of his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self doubt and has an illusion that a random killing can boost a sense of self worth, which is just sounds like a straight out of a movie.
It sounds like a psychiatrist saying I want to be on TV. Yeah, listen to me.
They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture was that he had probably already taken his own life after the killings.
That was one specific person who was it that. Yeah, Yeah, it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County.
Yeah, he probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't worry about it.
Don't worry everybody. Yeah, yeah, he just threw that out there. I don't know if it was to calm people or not, but or maybe he's just throwing his two cents in. But I think you kind of said it earlier. I don't remember if it was part one or part two. The whole things is blurred and become a haze by now. But no one has ever been charged with the Thailand All murders.
Yeah that's the ending.
But there has been There were a lot of suspects that remember Thailand All set up a hotline and this Thailand All Task Force, one hundred and forty person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on the hotline. Thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in. Yeah, they were trying to whittle those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them, they deemed twelve hundred tips or twelve hundred leads worth
checking out. There's a lot of leads for a case, even considering yet one hundred and forty people working them. And I read somewhere that they started out with like twenty thousand suspects or something like that and whittled it down to four hundred.
Yeah, And sort of the sad part is as quickly as they sort of figured a lot of this out and had that one hundred and forty person task force, they almost just as quickly within a few months, realized that, like, we don't have a very good chance at finding this person.
Yeah, it became clear very quickly.
Yeah, they whittled that down. By the last week of October, the task force was down to forty people. By the end of the year, it was down to twenty. And it was a situation again in nineteen eighty two where you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you didn't have credit
cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a lot easier back then to get away with something like this, to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe slip some tilin all into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and come back in and slip them back on the shelf. Yeah, if you're really easy.
You won't even go to the trouble of buying it.
Yeah, I guess that's a good point, steal it and then put it. But you know people were using cash. If there were cameras in a place, they were probably trained on employees. I worked at a golden pantry in College. Only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down at the catch register.
It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway.
Alps. No, ok, the one on the east side College Station Road. I think, okay, yeah, very interesting job. That's the one where I got a job. I needed a job. I got a job at McDonald's and I showed up. I took the one hour training video and they got my uniform number. I went home and I was supposed to show up the next day and I was just like, I can't do it. I can't go work at McDonald's. And I got the Golden pantry job later that day. Here you go, which, hey man, sure, it's like sign me up.
From Golden arches to golden pantry. That's like a rags of riches story.
I was selling beer and cigarettes.
Nice.
It was pretty great.
You're like one for you, one for me.
Oh, I would never do that, all right? Where was I?
Oh?
Yeah, I was at Golden pantry. So the cameras trained on the register. They're not. You know, you could come and go in a store and no one even knows. In nineteen eighty two, right, it ops of nothing to go on. Most importantly, no motive.
That was a big one, because remember, this is just a Jekylin Hyde type who you'd never suspect.
Who's probably at the bottom of the Chicago.
River, right, who also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people, anonymous poisoning killing, not even shooting. It just made zero sense whatsoever. So, like we said earlier, the cops figured out within about a month, within the first month of the investigation, that this was they were not going to have a break in this case. But it's not to say that they didn't have some suspects. Some people definitely did kind of come to come to the fore, but not many of them.
Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in and of themselves.
For sure.
The first guy's name was last name Arnold.
First name Roger. That's right, I call him Richard, That's all right, but for good reason.
Oh sure, because you said he was like the Richard Jewel of his day. Yeah, the Olympic bomber who was not the bomber.
Right, but whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as the Olympic bomber.
Right, the same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he was one of the first named suspects. Forty nine year old guy.
So put yourself in the position. Okay, the media is going berserk on the story. Everybody hears about it. It's a mad anonymous poisoner. And now all of a sudden there's a name and a face associated with it. Who's a suspect, But he's the first person named. Oh yeah, it's like people going crazy, like trying to get to this guy to interview him.
Yeah.
I have my doubts about this guy, not that he did that, but there are a lot of hinky things that they found out about him. Sure, and then how it all ended up. Yeah, as you're about to see. So he was a diy chemist.
It's a big one.
There's a big thing right there, because into chemistry.
He said, he's a jekylin Hyde type who's probably into chemistry.
That's right. He was a dockhand at Jewel food just at a warehouse west of Chicago.
And Dual Foods. There are a couple of different jewel foods are where the tyran was bought. It's like a grocery store of food market.
It's all checking out so far. So the cops look into him and go to his house. He has a book, a handbook rather on methods of killing people.
How to kill people A to Z. I don't know if that's a title, but okay, that's a good one.
He had five unregistered guns.
That's a big one.
He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said I threw it out like at least six months before these murders.
He's like, when were the murders again? Oh, yeah, six months before that. That's fine, it was.
And then his wife said, uh, you know they're investigating her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what, Actually I did take some tyl and all and felt really sick and threw up one time. But again I was it was probably due to overeating and it was just that once.
As the fact of the podcast, So like, you.
Can't blame cops for saying this guy's a pretty good lead.
Yeah, because you can kind of start to see, like if you add all the other stuff together. And then hear about the wife throwing up from tailand all we like, could you see this guy like toying with his wife, like testing it out on her, just enough to make her sick, but not to kill her, to see what happened, you know, see if she would notice? Who knows. But
the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There's a there's not a person associated with the story that I came across who thought, he said, I actually think this guy did it. I didn't find one person who thought Roger Arnold actually did it. But in very short order he proved that he was more than capable of murder, because six months after he was cleared as a suspect, he was brought in for the murder of somebody else,
a guy named John Stenishaw Stanisha. I would say, yeah, I'm going with that too, some Slovak or something.
Yeah, he was forty six. He was a Chicago computer consultant.
And that's saying something in nineteen eighty two.
Yeah, probably. So, So here's what happened Arnold. There was his bartender name or bar owner named Marty Sinclair, who Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops and ruined his life essentially, so he goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair and it's actually this just completely innocent, random guy who gets shot point blank. And so he in fact did kill somebody. He did because of what had happened to his life.
It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person. He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed somebody on.
Purpose mistaken identity killing though.
Right, and because of this, because it was directly related to the Titlan All poisonings, John Stanisha is frequently considered an eighth victim of the Titlan All killings. Yeah, kind of like an honorary victim, right in this case. But it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like a slightly different ring to it if it had been
the right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy and that poor dude just happened to be in the wrong bar and it happened to look like the owner, that's just it just is perfect for this saga.
Yeah, I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that.
I'll bet he was not very happy.
Probably not, but probably also very relieved and probably also guilt.
Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that.
A range of emotions, I would imagine, yeah, all over the place. So Arnold ended up serving fifteen years of a thirty year sentence, was released in ninety nine, and died nine years later.
Yep, So, chuck, Before we go on to the main attraction, as far as the suspects go, yeah, I propose that we take a break. Agreed. Okay, We'll be right back.
Stop you know, stop stop stop, should know no, stop?
All right, Chuck. So this dude, there was basically two suspects in this whole case. Over all these years, there are basically two people. And again no one was ever actually charged with the murders. But this guy came awfully close. And his name was James Lewis. It was it, it turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the attention of the Chicago p D and the Thailand All Task Force when a letter showed up at Johnson and Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly the Thailand All Poisoner,
the mad Poisoner, and in the letter. It said basically like, I've spent fifty so far, and the whole thing has taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop. Pay me one million dollars and then I will stop the killings. And it hired.
He gave a bank account number, right, he said, wire me this money.
Very very presiently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly maybe, but is it. No, it's not. So this letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account is associated with a travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, Okay, this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but let's go check it out. And they find the owner of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under, and this guy is like, oh my god, you're kidding me.
He's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can tell you who did is a guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson, who had worked at the travel agency, and when the travel agency went belly up, Nancy lost her job and never got
her last paycheck. Well, Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this, right, and was even more so the type of guy who would write a letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for the tailan all murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck.
He was that kind of dude, right, And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson cat and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis.
Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his real name, and you said it was, it was?
It was.
His name was not Robert Richardson though, that was an alias. So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant. He and this is just a strange, ironic twist, when he was twenty years old, he tried to take his own life by swallowing aspirin.
Thirty six of them.
Yeah, so that's just neither here nor there. But an interesting little side note.
Yeah, the fact that, like most people don't have that as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that it came.
Up, so he had a pretty long rap sheet. He was wanted by postal inspectors for a credit card fraud in Kansas City. He was indicted in nineteen seventy eight. And this one is just mind blowing. Yeah, he's indicted for murder after police found remains of one of his former clients in bags in his attic, and he got let loose because it was an illegal search.
But he was caught with the body of one of his clients. He was dismembered in his attic with no good explanation as far as I've ever heard.
Yeah, well, what explanation would be good?
Well, we were playing poker and one thing I.
Do another juggling swords and yeah. So his wife's real name was lee Anne, the one who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in December of eighty one, and this was as US Postal inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme. So they're like, just bad people.
Not the postal inspectors, No, no, no, the Lewises.
Sure great. Yeah, so they moved to Chicago. They changed their names to Robert Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a tax preparer. But then he was fired after a violent outburst in his office against his co workers, and then she lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago, and this turns out this is what got them exonerated from the title. All thing is, they left Chicago and moved to New York before this.
Happened, right before those same month, right.
But if the theory held up that this person went around, most likely in one day and did all this stuff, then it couldn't have been them.
No, And here's why, because the cops had decided that it was done locally. And one of the other things that supported that local mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide ate through the gelatin capsules eventually, so I had a very very short shelf life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush of cyanid powder and melted gelatin. So, like you said, it had to have been done basically
the day before the twenty ninth. On the twenty eighth, they could not, no matter how hard they tried, they could not put James Lewis or his wife in Chicago that day. They just couldn't. And for his part, James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy. But I did not I did not poison the title. In all. He's always been adamant about that. He's never
toyed around with it. He's never messed around, he's never been coy he's always been adamant that he did not poison that tile in all. Although the Talent All Task Force tried to trip him up once, I guess to just get this on the record that he done this, but they asked him, like, in an interview, Okay, let's say you had done it, how would you have done it? And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how he would have done it.
Right.
Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He just showed him in an interview.
Yeah.
And he defends this later on by saying it was just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer, right. I think the answer for me would have been I don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out. But he's like, here's how I do it.
I've been waiting for you to ask me.
Though he's eventually found in New York City. He's at the public library with a reference book, copying names and addresses of newspapers. I would imagine to send them letters like zodiac style.
Yeah, because so we got to say this. So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus. While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Yeah, he was really relishing the fact that there was a national manhunt out for him. Who Like, that's what I'm saying.
On the one hand, you got to kind of feel a little bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded into, you know, the rap for these murders.
After his extortion attempt, that's where the.
Feeling bad forms is. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right. He totally brought this on himself.
Yeah, So they hauled him out of the New York Public Library. He was sentenced to ten years for extortion attempt in ten years for credit that original credit card fraud, and served thirteen years and lives in the Greater Boston area today.
So still today there, I think there are a few people who are like, I could see this guy, maybe maybe he could, he could be at Some detectives maintain that the Tailanhall murder could have flown into O'Hare, rented a car, done that circuit, flown or driven back to here and flown out all in the same day the day before, but they could never put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day. So he was cleared finally,
although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences. He served thirteen of the twenty years for that credit card fraud that the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge, mass now. But then in two thousand and nine, the case, after basically having gone dormant in the early eighties, was reignited by the FBI because they worked up they thought a DNA profile from the capsules, and they raided James
Lewis's house demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judges like, no, you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They gave him the samples and nothing has come of it. So I guess that means tacitly that the Lewises were cleared once and four all of the tailent all murders.
Yeah, and you know, the DNA thing is an interesting piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide. I guess that the capsules have worn away by now if it had the cyanide in there. But there was and still his hope that DNA could could crack this case, just like eight or nine years ago. The unibomber ted Kazinski. Is that a two parter? No, No, just one part good podcast, So I.
Don't think so. That was a good episode.
He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living in the Greater Chicago area in eighty two, and he is the unibomber. So they said we might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him, right, and he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a super strong suspect, no, and he probably would have admitted it. So he was like, no, this is not me.
Right, So the unibomber has been cleared. That's right from the talent on. But that remains. The case remains unsolved to this day. I think they also have a fingerprint work up that they found on one of the bottles and that and some DNA it is they're just sitting around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon. It's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened.
Yeah, they're still working on it though. There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkelmann who has been on this task force for a long time and he says he thinks is solvable and his department did just save a forty five year old murder case cold case.
Man, if they solved this one, that would be, I know, the biggest cold case ever solved.
I think. I mean, who knows, But I could see maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day, maybe like I don't know if they're going to catch someone.
At the bottom of the Chicago River and hull them.
Off to jail. But I could see the truth coming out when day. I hope so for the families because Monica Janis she's the niece of Adam Stanley and Teresa. She said her family to this day, this is from an article like last year, I think, said that they have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said, literally every day for the rest of their lives, they just cried about me,
the fact that they didn't know who did it. She grew up and has been a therapy therapy her whole life because there were all victims. You know that this post traumatic stress disorder kicks in sure where she grew up fearing that any of her family members could die at any time. Joseph Manus, her dad, says that he still has dreams like you know on the rag about
these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone involved was in a room in the case and then two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen, she's the daughter of Mary Reiner. She has dedicated her life to investigating this on her own and she doesn't agree with the Loane the mad poisoner theory at all.
No, this is interesting.
Yeah, she thinks it had something to do with the supply chain.
And that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it.
Up.
Yeah.
One of the things, one of the things that people who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson recalled all of that tail and all thirty one million bottles and then destroyed them allegedly without testing any of it. So we will never know whether it was Pinky had the day off right, whether whether it was beyond Chicago or just locals in Chicago. Seems like it took long enough that other people would have died in that week
before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very, very interesting that was a PostScript to all this that does undermine that mad poisoner theory.
Yeah, it was just a few years later, in nineteen eighty five, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsroth took two extra strength Tilon all capsules and died from cyanide poisoning. But they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was it another copycat case well, or the original poisoner maybe? So this is a different cyanide.
Right, The cyanide was definitely not the same side from the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was another bottle found around the block from where Mary Elswroth bought hers and Yonkers that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles of extra strength til and All two years later in another state that had been tampered with.
Yeah.
The problem is this was after the three prong tamper resistant packaging had been introduced.
Which means it was an inside job, right.
I guess because the tamper the thing had not been obviously tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to play what happened?
Yeah, and then within five days of her death, eight states outright banned the capsules, Thailand all capsules.
Right, and Thailand All, for its part, was like, we've been trying to get everybody to take capl it's anyway, but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it.
And then a guy wrote a book, right, Scott Bart's Yeah, a former Johnson and Johnson employee wrote in twenty eleven a self published book on the timel in All poisonings. And he said, you know what we were talking about earlier. He's like, this supply chain is so convoluted, right, basically, like it could definitely could have happened at any point right along the way.
And his idea is that that Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution network and they covered it.
Up self published book.
Yeah, you gotta note that for sure.
I'm not knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy.
It does if there's like any hint of journalistic integrity in US, that feels like we have to note that.
Sure.
So that's the tailanol poisonings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago changed America, changed the world, but definitely changed America. Was the end of some form of innocence that we still had.
Absolutely, if you.
Want to know more about the tail and Al poisonings, go online. There's stuff all over the place and you can go down that rabbit hole and it's deep and wide. Since I said that, it's time for listener, ma'am.
This is from Jin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys, been listening for several years and never thought I'd have a never thought a perfect time would to write. End would be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we talked about synthetic parts. It's a real thing. When I was in high school, my dad came across the stuff online called liquid ass.
That's horrible.
Not a lot occurs, right, No, that occursion.
We can spell it out, though, sure, or I guess maybe you should have said, like ask asterisk.
Yeah, there you go. A good name for a product, though. She said. He found it on a joke web website and ordered some. And I have to tell you it is the worst thing you've ever smelled. I can't even describe it, and it makes you want to not breathe anymore. The tiniest little drop is deadly. So of course I took it to college with me to play pranks, and
boy did it backfire. I thought I was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in the radiator by across the friend across the hall friends room, not eating, thinking and not even thinking about what would happen when the heat turned on. Well, the heat turned on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag. Smell took almost a week to finally go away, and I have not used it again in the ten years since.
That's probably it's called learning your lesson.
But she still has the bottle.
She's like, but I kept it right just in case.
Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is the first podcast ever listened to, and it's still always on the top of my download list. Thanks thanks for giving this twenty eight year old woman a platform on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that is not completely out of place.
Signed anonymous that is Jengreen. Thanks Jengreen, very brave for you'd put your name on that one. Especially. I wonder if you stepped up and said that horrible smell that was my bad.
Right.
If you have a great story about college pranks, we want to hear about it. You can get in touch with this via our social links by going to stuff youshould Know dot com, or you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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