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Chapter 1: What triggered the panic during the Tylenol murders?
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I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com for your nearest Total Wines or BevMo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. 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.
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Steph Curry redefined basketball. Now he's rewriting what it means to succeed. Order your copy of the New York Times bestseller Shot Ready today at stephencurrybook.com. In part two of our episode on the 1982 Chicago Tylenol 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Johnson & Johnson respond to the crisis caused by the Tylenol poisonings?
They even got an award, the Public Relations Society of America, which is a real thing, believe it or not. They awarded them their Silver Anvil Award for how they handled the crisis. The Tylenol poisoning. That's right. Okay. And high-grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad wieners in the first episode. Yeah. The ballpark franks that supposedly had razor blades but did not. Right.
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 Tylenol crisis. Which was, in fact, really brought about by two jerk kids in Detroit. Right. Really not even copycats.
Not the Tylenol crisis. I wonder where those kids are today. Probably in the Senate. I bet one of them was the guy who did our lighting at our Detroit show. You want some smoke? I'll give him 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 Heep that was running like, 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 color light. And his response, because Yumi was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in the sound booth with the guy. His response, according to them, was, you want smoke? I'll give him 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. Okay, so they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener PR moves. McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. They actually make Tylenol. Yeah, they make the pills. Again, the way all this supply chain works is really convoluted.
And like you said, they didn't want to recall Johnson & Johnson everything at first.
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Chapter 3: What were the key suspects in the Tylenol murders investigation?
They want to kind of take it a little slower, I guess. Well, sure. Because they'd found out the drugs were actually fine. Right. Thanks to Pinky McFarland. This is $100 million 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 Tylenol. Sure. The public has lost faith in Tylenol.
So when Tylenol recalled 31 million 50-count bottles of extra-strength Tylenol and destroyed it all, there was a chance that not only were they losing $100 million, but that they were losing $100 million of a brand that had already lost the— the public trust and would never regain it.
So, which wasn't true, but yeah, no, but they didn't necessarily know that at the time it was still up in the air. Um, so they, it was basically 31 million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public that, This tainted Tylenol is gone forever. That's right. Your chances of dying from taking extra strength Tylenol are now gone. You can go back to taking Tylenol now. That was one thing.
That was a big gesture. Yeah. Which is what it amounted to. It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson & Johnson. But they did other stuff too. They started to do things right.
Out of their reluctance, once they finally said, we have to just go with this to save face and to win back public trust, they started to do things right, including setting up a hotline, putting out a $100,000 reward for information. Jump change, considering how much they had lost already. It's $1982. Still jump change. It is. Yeah. And that remains unclaimed. It does.
But because of all of this, Johnson & 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 seven murder victims. Yeah. And Johnson & Johnson, I don't think, 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, which is part of the road to regaining the public trust. Yeah. Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes. Yeah.
So we'll take you back to 1982. 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. Cheers, buddy. You could have made me feel stupid. We've been partners for 11 years almost now.
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Chapter 4: How did the investigation into the Tylenol murders unfold?
Yeah, that'll be when? Next month? Or this month? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Unbelievable. So... Unbelievable. Not in that way. Okay. So here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to take a pill, like a Tylenol, 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 Bayer aspirin, like the hard tablets, 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, still today you'll find cotton 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.
I imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that, too. Oh, I'll bet they're not complaining. You know? Yeah. So... Big cotton. They should... New fancy OTC pills should have micromodal in there. Right.
Yeah.
It just comes with a pair of MeUndies stuffed into your pill bottle. That'd be a bonus. And you're like, these have been worn. 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 in grocery stores opening food products and smelling them. Yes, yes.
That's what you could do. And then closing it back and putting it back on the shelf maybe. Oh, there's a little mold in this one. Yeah, I mean... I'll just leave it for the next person. Forget poisoning. Like, 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 Tylenol poisoning. It really shows how much of a jarring experience it was for America. Because all of a sudden, like it's finally sunk in, in a couple of days, there's something wrong with the Tylenol. Somebody has gone out of their way to poison the Tylenol in order to randomly kill people.
And the reason they were able to do this is because it's easy to get into the Tylenol, tamper with it, put it back, and no one will be any more the wiser. And wait, it's not just Tylenol. Milk doesn't have anything that keeps it tamper-resistant. Neither does orange juice. Neither does cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America freaked out.
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Chapter 5: What evidence connected suspects to the Tylenol poisonings?
Sure. I'm quite sure some people did. I'm sure someone did. But the Kaplet is, you know, a tablet coated with an easy-to-swallow gelatin. It's solid. I imagine you could tamper with it. And 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, Johnson & Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Tylenol. That's hard to believe. A year. That was really fast. But it also goes to show just how perfectly they did everything from the time they committed to it on. Yeah, and I feel like I remember commercials with CEOs and stuff addressing the public, if I'm not mistaken. I can't remember his name.
I want to say Geoffrey Beam, but it's like a shoe brand. Gabby Johnson? No. Bill Johnson? No. Jimmy Johnson? Yes. Yes. 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 60 Minutes and he talked to Dan Rather and Ted Koppel and all those cats. Like he was out there like showing how much the company cared. Yeah.
And it had a huge effect. And then in 1983, Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Tylenol Bill, which basically says if you do something like this, it's now a federal offense. A few years later, in 1989, the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any product, really, to make it tamper-proof.
Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tylenol came out with it because they kind of had to if they wanted to keep up with Tylenol. But also the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer product started putting their products in like tamper-proof packaging. They had to.
Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside the box. Wow. To trap the chemicals in. I guess. But also to show like nobody's injected this with lye or something like that. Although lye is used in the making of 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.
I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com for your nearest Total Wines or BevMo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
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Chapter 6: How did the public react to the Tylenol murders and subsequent safety measures?
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 said that.
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 thing's just blurred and become a haze by now. But no one has ever been charged with the Tylenol murders. Yeah, that's the ending. But there has been a lot, there were a lot of suspects.
Remember, Tylenol set up a hotline and this Tylenol task force, 140 person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads, taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls that were coming in. They were trying to whittle those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing. And out of all of them, they deemed 1,200 tips or 1,200 leads worth checking out.
That's a lot of leads for a case, even considering you had 140 people working them. And I read somewhere that they started out with like 20,000 suspects or something like that and whittled it down to 400. Yeah, and sort of the sad part is as quickly as they sort of figured a lot of this out and had that 140-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 40 people. By the end of the year, it was down to 20. And it was a situation, again, in 1982, 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... To be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe slip some Tylenol into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and come back in and slip them back on the shelf. It was really easy. You won't even go to the trouble of buying it. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. You just steal it and then put it back.
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, and the only camera we had was directly above us pointing down at the cash register. It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway? Alps. No. Okay. The one on the east side. College Station Road, I think. Okay. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What were the long-term impacts of the Tylenol murders on product safety regulations?
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 were 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 if you're into chemistry. They said he's a Jekyll and Hyde type who's probably into chemistry. That's right.
He was a dockhand at Jewel Foods at a warehouse west of Chicago. In Jewel Foods, there are a couple different Jewel Foods are where the Tylenol was bought. It's like a grocery store, a food market. It's all checking out so far. Yeah. 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 that's a good one. He had five unregistered guns. It'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 when it was.
And then his wife said, you know, they were investigating her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what? Actually, I did take some Tylenol 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. That's 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 Tylenol, be 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. Yeah. Who knows?
But the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There's not a person associated with the story that I came across who 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 Stanisza. Stanisza. Stanisza, I would say. Yeah, I'm going with that too. Sounds Slovak or something. Yeah. He was 46. He was a Chicago computer consultant. That's saying something in 1982.
Yeah, probably so. So here's what happened. Arnold, there was this bartender name or bar owner named Marty Sinclair who Arnold had thought had initially turned him into the cops.
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Chapter 8: Why is the Tylenol case still considered unsolved today?
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com for your nearest Total Wines or BevMo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened? I just fell and started screaming. If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way? I said that to y'all 22 times. The police, right? But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of? This dude is the devil. He's a snake. He'll hurt you. I got you, I got you, I got you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends Untouchable. Detective Roger Golubsky spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing Black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence. This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Golubsky, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die. Listen to The Girlfriends, Untouchable, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us. Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
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. He 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.
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