Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan, just one page, as a Google Doc, and send me the link? Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link.
But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff, here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the shade is always shadiest right here. Season six of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Giselle Bryan and Robin Dixon is here, dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives of Potomac, we're giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday.
Listen to Reasonably Shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 1982.
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 iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
There's Josh. Not me twice. There's Chuck. Guest producer Josh is back in the house. Yeah, and there's little Chuck in your pocket. I was just about to say that. You got that right, Tony. Oh, man. What a great sketch. It really was. That was Nicolas Cage, wasn't it? Yeah, man. Did you ever see Mandy? Yes, it was terrible. I don't care what anybody else says. Did you hate it? Terrible.
Terrible movie. Yeah, Noel and I talked about it on Movie Crush. He's seen it like four times. Thinks it's the best thing ever. Come on, Noel. And he was like, people either love it or hate it. And I was like, actually, I was kind of in the middle. Were you really? Yeah, I mean, I told him young Chuck, like 22-year-old college Chuck would have probably liked it a lot more. Yeah.
But today Chuck was kind of like, eh, I get it. Like, sure. Sure. Parts of it were fine. Sure. To me, spending an hour doing character development 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. Who's that? Which one was he?
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Chapter 2: What happened during the Tylenol murders in 1982?
Well, I was kind of hoping you had. E.T., Blade Runner.
Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, yeah, that was a good year. Some of the best movies.
Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until I was 40? That's not true. Yes, it is. Oh, really?
Chapter 3: Who were the victims of the Tylenol poisoning?
Yes. The original. The original Blade Runner. Huh. Did you like it? Yeah, it was good. I liked the second one, too. You're like, but they spent way too much time on characters. Yeah, and I just did a little poking around about 1982, and it was... It was a good year for an 11-year-old, but it was an uneasy time in America. Why? Well, 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 90 crashed into the Potomac River. Remember that? No. In Washington, D.C., the plane crashed in the river. Didn't it hit a bridge? Maybe, but there was like a daring— Icy River rescue. Oh, really? Yeah. 78 people died, though. That same day, a metro train in D.C. derailed, killed three people. Wow. Jeez.
February was when Wayne Williams was convicted. Gotcha. And that was just the end of a lot of unease, you know, for years. Yeah. Klaus Van Bulaw was found guilty of attempted murder of his wife in March.
Yeah.
I didn't make it to the end of Reversal of Fortune, so I honestly didn't know what happened to Klaus. Guilty. Okay. In June was the murder of Vincent Chin, 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 9th, Pan Am flight 759 goes down in Louisiana, kills all 146 people on board plus eight more on the ground. And then in September, early September. Please stop this. I know, man. Remember planes used to just crash a lot. Yeah, that never happens now. Uh, not as much, but yeah, weird that we're recording this in the midst of more plane crashes.
And then early September was when that, uh, paper boy in Iowa, Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again. Johnny gauche. I don't know that one. That was a big deal too. Cause it was, you know, the paper boy and there was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians. And that turned out to not to be true, but he was never found again. Um,
So basically everything that's going on today is just a rehash of 1982, it sounds like. I just remember being about that age and the nightly news sort of just being a horror show and not politically speaking. Like real bad incidences 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.
Because, you know, when you get on a plane, you think, maybe this plane will go down while I'm on it and that would be terrible. Although I wasn't flying at 11. 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.
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Chapter 4: What were the initial reactions to the sudden deaths?
Right. So it makes sense then that when a little girl named Mary Ann Kellerman complained that she had a sore throat and wasn't feeling too good at like 7 a.m. on Wednesday, September 29th, 1982, her parents said, just take an extra strength Tylenol and go back to bed. Man. For a sore throat. Can you imagine the guilt? Oh, no. These parents feel. Well, don't blow it.
We haven't said what happens to Marianne Kellerman yet. I think everybody knows. Yeah, she got up, said, I'm sick. He said, take this. The father said he heard her going to the bathroom and closed the door, then heard something drop and went to the door saying, are you OK? You're OK. No answer. Open the door. And there she is on the floor, taken to the hospital, but died very quickly.
Yeah, probably was dead when she went to the hospital. It was pronounced there. And they suspected, and this is just a little 12-year-old girl, a middle school girl, went to Jane Addams Middle School. They think she died of a stroke. That's what they thought happened to her. 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 7 a.m. The day is just beginning and one atrocity has already happened. Yeah, this is a very bad day in the history of Chicago, September 29, 1982. 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 27 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 Tylenol that he bought from a local drugstore, collapses in front of his wife, and by, you know, a few minutes later when the paramedics arrive, he was dead. Right. And again, like you said, they said heart attack because he'd been complaining of chest pains, which had nothing to do with it. Right.
But just like Marianne Kellerman took an extra strength Tylenol for a sore throat, he took some extra strength Tylenol for some chest pains. This is just what people did back then. Yeah, and that's what complicated it a little bit at first. Right. Was that, you know, if you take the Tylenol, 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 Marianne Kellerman was 12 and healthy. Adam Janus was 27 and healthy. Yeah. And all of a sudden they just drop 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 just doesn't happen. Next we have Mary Reiner. Same day. Same day. This is still all on the same day. She's 27 years old. She's feeling a little dizzy.
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Chapter 5: How did the authorities connect the deaths to Tylenol?
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 kind of into the news as a kid a little bit. Well, yeah. I mean, 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 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 Mary Ann Kellerman, the first girl to die, they were just logging everything because it was such a baffling thing. And they logged her Tylenol. Yeah, logged as in collected. Right. Yeah. Took it as evidence to maybe look into. Who knows? Sure.
But they took the extra-strength Tylenol that she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stuck. Yeah, I'm sure the dad was like, you know, she went in, took some Tylenol and dropped dead. Right. So it probably made sense, even though it's just Tylenol, to say like, well, hey, let's at least take this in. Yes. And that Tylenol. Right.
Because that bottle of Tylenol made its way into the hands of a medical examiner whose name was? Michael Schaefer. And Michael Schaefer tested the Tylenol and was rather surprised to find that some of the capsules had not Tylenol in it, but 65 milligrams of potassium cyanide. Yeah. And it takes about 50 milligrams to kill a healthy adult.
Right.
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 acetaminophen 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.
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Chapter 6: What role did the media play in the Tylenol case?
No, no, no. She was the public health nurse for Cook County, I believe. Oh, okay. So she had an official designation to investigate. Yes. But unfortunately, no one would listen to her because this is 1982 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 that she was stomping her feet out of frustration saying like there's something wrong with the Tylenol. Like the Tylenol is behind all this and people wouldn't listen to her. Amazing. Supposedly she and Philip – Capitale. Got together and joined forces.
Right.
And I guess were able to convince everybody that, no, there's something wrong with the Tylenol. And by this time, people started talking. Sure. And, you know, the idea that Michael Schaefer had identified Tylenol, I don't know if it was the same day or the day after or something like that, but all this is within a span of 36, 48 hours tops. Yeah, it was really fast.
That all of this is going on, that the dots are being connected.
Yeah.
Right. So then what follows is Cook County's deputy chief medical examiner, Dr. 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. You 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 1980. Oh, you know it, man. So everybody saw it because WGN could broadcast nationwide by 1982. I watched Cubs games as a kid just because it was on. Yep. That was it. Like that and Braves games were all you could see. Yeah, man. So Dr. 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 Tylenol. Oh, yeah. Sure. And so anyone, I mean, imagine how many people in Chicago had taken Tylenol within two hours of that press conference. Right. And are thinking like, should I go to the hospital? Right.
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Chapter 7: How did the investigation unfold in the following days?
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas. 32 years total law enforcement experience. But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy. He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You're going to push that line for the cause.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it. When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole other life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot. The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family, and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way. Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 1982. 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 mean, that seems like a very 2019 thing to write. That's what I'm saying. I feel like we're reverting back to 1982 right now. Are we? I guess so. After that intro of yours, I'm now convinced. All right. 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. In some places, it turned out to be true, a self-fulfilling prophecy. There were all these hoaxes. There were all these actual true product tamperings, 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 Tylenol Task Force was formed.
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