johnson and johnson tylenol case study

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Dr. Howard Markel Dr. Howard Markel

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/tylenol-murders-1982

How the Tylenol murders of 1982 changed the way we consume medication

Early on the morning of Sept. 29, 1982, a tragic, medical mystery began with a sore throat and a runny nose. It was then that Mary Kellerman, a 12-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, told her mother and father about her symptoms. They gave her one extra-strength Tylenol capsule that, unbeknownst to them, was laced with the highly poisonous potassium cyanide. Mary was dead by 7 a.m. Within a week, her death would panic the entire nation. And only months later, it changed the way we purchase and consume over-the-counter medications.

That same day, a 27-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, died of what was initially thought to be a massive heart attack but turned out to be cyanide poisoning as well. His brother and sister-in-law, Stanley, 25, and Theresa, 19, of Lisle, Illinois, rushed to his home to console their loved ones. Both experienced throbbing headaches, a not uncommon response to a death in the family and each took a Tylenol extra-strength capsule or two from the same bottle Adam had used earlier in the day. Stanley died that very day and Theresa died two days later.

As a result of the crime, makers of Tylenol developed new product protection methods. Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Over the next few days, three more strange deaths occurred: 35-year-old Mary McFarland of Elmhurst, Illinois, 35-year-old Paula Prince of Chicago, and 27-year-old Mary Weiner of Winfield, Illinois. All of them, it turned out, took Tylenol shortly before they died.

It was at this point, early October of 1982, that investigators made the connection between the poisoning deaths and Tylenol, the best-selling, non-prescription pain reliever sold in the United States at that time. The gelatin-based capsules were especially popular because they were slick and easy to swallow. Unfortunately, each victim swallowed a Tylenol capsule laced with A lethal dose of cyanide.

McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of the health care giant, Johnson & Johnson, manufactured Tylenol. To its credit, the company took an active role with the media in issuing mass warning communications and immediately called for a massive recall of the more than 31 million bottles of Tylenol in circulation. Tainted capsules were discovered in early October in a few other grocery stores and drug stores in the Chicago area, but, fortunately, they had not yet been sold or consumed. McNeill and Johnson & Johnson offered replacement capsules to those who turned in pills already purchased and a reward for anyone with information leading to the apprehension of the individual or people involved in these random murders.

READ: The ‘awful’ work of the real doctors who inspired M*A*S*H

The case continued to be confusing to the police, the drug maker and the public at large. For example, Johnson & Johnson quickly established that the cyanide lacing occurred after cases of Tylenol left the factory. Someone, police hypothesized, must have taken bottles off the shelves of local grocers and drug stores in the Chicago area, laced the capsules with poison, and then returned the restored packages to the shelves to be purchased by the unknowing victims.

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To this day, however, the perpetrators of these murders have never been found.

One man, James Lewis, claiming to be the Tylenol killer wrote a “ransom” letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million in exchange for stopping the poisonings. After a lengthy cat and mouse game, police and federal investigators determined that Lewis lived in New York and had no demonstrable links to the Chicago events. That said, he was charged with extortion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released in 1995 after serving only 13 years.

READ MORE: James Lewis, suspect in the 1982 Tylenol murders, dies at 76

Other “copy-cat” poisonings, involving Tylenol and other over-the-counter medications, cropped up again in the 1980s and early 1990s but these events were never as dramatic or as deadly as the 1982 Chicago-area deaths. Conspiracy theories about motives and suspects for all these heinous acts continue to be bandied about on the Internet to this day.

Before the 1982 crisis, Tylenol controlled more than 35 percent of the over-the-counter pain reliever market; only a few weeks after the murders, that number plummeted to less than 8 percent. The dire situation, both in terms of human life and business, made it imperative that the Johnson & Johnson executives respond swiftly and authoritatively.

For example, Johnson & Johnson developed new product protection methods and ironclad pledges to do better in protecting their consumers in the future. Working with FDA officials, they introduced a new tamper-proof packaging, which included foil seals and other features that made it obvious to a consumer if foul play had transpired. These packaging protections soon became the industry standard for all over-the-counter medications. The company also introduced price reductions and a new version of their pills — called the “caplet” — a tablet coated with slick, easy-to-swallow gelatin but far harder to tamper with than the older capsules which could be easily opened, laced with a contaminant, and then placed back in the older non-tamper-proof bottle.

Within a year, and after an investment of more than $100 million, Tylenol’s sales rebounded to its healthy past and it became, once again, the nation’s favorite over-the-counter pain reliever. Critics who had prematurely announced the death of the brand Tylenol were now praising the company’s handling of the matter. Indeed, the Johnson & Johnson recall became a classic case study in business schools across the nation.

In 1983, the U.S. Congress passed what was called “the Tylenol bill,” making it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products. In 1989, the FDA established federal guidelines for manufacturers to make all such products tamper-proof.

Sadly, the tragedies that resulted from the Tylenol poisonings can never be undone. But their deaths did inspire a series of important moves to make over-the-counter medications safer (albeit never 100 percent safe) for the hundreds of millions of people who buy them every year.

Editor’s note: This report has been updated to remove the reported amount of cyanide used.

Dr. Howard Markel writes a monthly column for the PBS NewsHour, highlighting momentous historical events that continue to shape modern medicine. He is the director of the Center for the History of Medicine and the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Secret of Life:  Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix” (W.W. Norton, September ’21).

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Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Tylenol Made a Hero of Johnson & Johnson: A Timeless Crisis Management Case Study

March 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Crisis needn’t strike a company solely because of its own neglect or disaster. Sometimes, situations emerge where the company can’t be blamed—but the company realizes quickly that it’ll get much blame if it fumbles the ball in its crisis-response.

Ever since cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol killed seven people in Chicago in 1982, corporate boards and business school students have studied the response of Johnson & Johnson (J&J,) Tylenol’s manufacturer, to learn how to handle crises . The culprits are still unknown almost 40 years later.

Successful Crisis Management: Full Responsibility, Proactive Stance

In 1982, Tylenol commanded 35 percent of the over-the-counter analgesic market in America. This over-the-counter painkiller was the drugmaker’s best-selling product, and it represented nearly 17 percent of J&J’s profits. When seven people died from consuming the tainted drug, Time magazine wrote of the tragedy’s victims,

Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village took Extra-Strength Tylenol to ward off a cold that had been dogging her. Mary Reiner, 27… had recently given birth to her fourth child. Paula Prince, 35, a United Airlines stewardess, was found dead in her Chicago apartment, an open bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol nearby in the bathroom. Says Dr. Kim [the chief of critical care at Northwest Community Hospital]: “The victims never had a chance. Death was certain within minutes.”

A panic ensued about how widespread the contamination may be. Moreover, Americans started to question the safety of over-the-counter medications.

Advertising guru Jerry Della Femina declared Tylenol dead:

I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name. There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and if they find him, I want to hire him because then I want him to turn our water cooler into a wine cooler.

The ‘Grand-Daddy’ of Good Crisis Response

• J&J acted quickly , with complete candidness about what had happened, and immediately sought to remove any source of danger based on the worst-case scenario. Within hours of learning of the deaths, J&J installed toll-free numbers for consumers to get information, sent alerts to healthcare providers nationwide, and stopped advertising the product. J&J recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves and offered replacement products free of charge in the safer tablet form. J&J did not wait for evidence to see whether the contamination might be more widespread.
• J&J’s leadership was in the lead and seemed in full control throughout the crisis. James Burke , J&J’s chairman, was widely admired for his leadership to pull Tylenol capsules off the market and his forthrightness in dealing with the media. (The Tylenol crisis led the news every night on every station for six weeks.)
• J&J placed consumers first . J&J spent more than $100 million for the recall and relaunch of Tylenol. The stock had been trading near a 52-week high just before the tragedy, dropped for a time, but recovered to its highs only two months later.
• J&J accepted responsibility . Burke could have described the disaster in many different ways: as an assault on the company, as a problem somewhere in the process of getting Tylenol from J&J factories to retail stores, or as the acts of a crazed criminal.
• J&J sought to ensure that measures were taken to prevent as far as possible a recurrence of the problem. J&J introduced tamper-proof packaging (supported by an expanded media campaign) that would make it much more difficult for a similar incident to occur in the future.
• J&J presented itself prepared to handle the short-term damage in the name of consumer safety. That, more than anything else, established a basis for trust with their customers. Within a year of the disaster, J&J’s share of the analgesic market, which had fallen to 7 percent from 37 percent following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30 percent.

Business Principles Should Hold True in Good Times and Bad

When the second outbreak of poisoning occurred four years after the first, Burke went on national television to declare that J&J would only offer Tylenol in caplets, which could not be pulled apart and resealed without consumers knowing about it.

Burke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. He was named one of history’s ten most outstanding CEOs by Fortune magazine in 2003. In Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times (2004,) Burke emphasized,

J&J credo has always stated that the company is responsible first to its customers, then to its employees, the community and the stockholders, in that order. The credo is all about the consumer. [When those seven deaths occurred,] the credo made it very clear at that point exactly what we were all about. It gave me the ammunition I needed to persuade shareholders and others to spend the $100 million on the recall. The credo helped sell it. Trust has been an operative word in my life. It embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business.

Idea for Impact: A Crisis Makes a Leader

The first few days after any disaster or crisis can be a make-or-break time for a company’s and its leaders’ reputation. The urgency experienced during a crisis often gives leaders the go-ahead to enact change faster than ever before.

Admittedly, the Tylenol case study is more clear-cut than most crises because, from the get-go, it is clearly evident that criminals, not Johnson & Johnson, were responsible for the poisoning and the withdrawal of Tylenol from stores was comparatively easier to execute.

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How Poisoned Tylenol Became a Crisis-Management Teaching Model

T he killer’s motives remain unknown, but his — or her, or their — technical savvy is as chilling today as it was 30 years ago.

On Sept. 29, 1982, three people died in the Chicago area after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol at the outset of a poisoning spree that would claim seven lives by Oct. 1. The case has never been solved, and so the lingering question — why? — still haunts investigators.

According to TIME’s 1982 report, Food and Drug Administration officials hypothesized that the killer bought Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules over the counter, injected cyanide into the red half of the capsules, resealed the bottles, and sneaked them back onto the shelves of drug and grocery stores. The Illinois attorney general, on the other hand, suspected a disgruntled employee on Tylenol’s factory line. In either case, it was a sophisticated and ambitious undertaking with the seemingly pathological goal of killing strangers entirely at random. Their symptoms and sudden deaths confounded doctors until the link was discovered, traced back to identical pill bottles that each smelled like almonds — the telltale scent of cyanide. The perpetrator left no margin for error, filling the capsules with poison at thousands of times the amount needed to be fatal.

One victim, 27-year-old Adam Janus, took Tylenol for minor chest pain and died within hours. His younger brother and sister-in-law were killed after taking pills from the same bottle while grieving the sudden, shocking loss at Janus’ house.

TIME’s Susan Tifft wrote of the tragedy’s victims on Oct. 11, 1982:

Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village took Extra-Strength Tylenol to ward off a cold that had been dogging her. Mary Reiner, 27… had recently given birth to her fourth child. Paula Prince, 35, a United Airlines stewardess, was found dead in her Chicago apartment, an open bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol near by in the bathroom. Says Dr. Kim [the chief of critical care at Northwest Community Hospital]: “The victims never had a chance. Death was certain within minutes.”

Without a suspect to revile, public outrage could have fallen squarely on Tylenol — the nation’s leading painkiller, with a market share greater than the next four top painkillers combined — and its parent corporation, Johnson & Johnson. Instead, by quickly recalling all of its products from store shelves, a move that cost Johnson & Johnson millions of dollars, the company emerged as another victim of the crime and one that put customer safety above profit. It even issued national warnings urging the public not to take Tylenol and established a hotline for worried customers to call.

Tylenol relatively quickly reestablished its brand, recovering the entire market share it lost during the cyanide scare. Though things could have gone very differently, the episode’s most lasting legacy has been in the annals of public relations, not poison control: the case has since become a model for effective corporate crisis management.

Read the 1982 report on the poisonings, here in TIME’s archives : Poison Madness in the Midwest

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News | Tragedy, then triumph: How Johnson & Johnson made sure Tylenol survived the Tylenol murders

Diane Elsroth of Peekskill, New York, shown in a 1980 high school yearbook photo, died at age 23 in February 1986 after taking a cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule.

Kevin Boyd / Chicago Tribune

Less than two months after the murders, Johnson & Johnson introduced triple-sealed, tamper-resistant packaging.

Carl Hugare / Chicago Tribune

Three caskets are carried into St. Hyacinth Catholic Church in the Avondale neighborhood for the funeral of Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus, all victims of poisoned Tylenol.

Michael Budrys / Chicago Tribune

Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, center, blesses the Janus family caskets as they are carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Alojza Janus, center, is supported by son-in-law Marian Czyz and husband Tadeusz at the mass for her sons Adam and Stanley Janus, as well as for Stanley's wife, Terri. Another son, Joseph Janus, is seen at right.

A casket is carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church after the funeral Mass for Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus.

Chicago Tribune archive

Seven people died in 1982 from cyanide poisoning after ingesting tainted Tylenol. From clockwise top left are Adam Janus, Mary McFarland, Mary "Lynn" Reiner, Terri and Stanley Janus, Paula Prince and Mary Kellerman.

A crowd watches as one of three caskets containing members of the Janus family is carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Helena and Jan Tarasewicz, center left, the parents of Theresa "Terri" Janus, grieve at the funeral Mass for Terri, her husband Stanley and her brother-in-law Adam Janus at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Don Casper / Chicago Tribune

Chicago resident Paula Prince bought a tainted bottle of Tylenol at the Walgreens at Wells Street and North Avenue.

Phil Greer / Chicago Tribune

Ty Fahner, who was Illinois' attorney general and headed the multiagency task force investigating the Tylenol poisonings, recently described Johnson & Johnson as "a wonderful, willing partner" with law enforcement.

James Mayo / Chicago Tribune

Johnson & Johnson held a nationwide news conference via satellite on Nov. 11, 1982, to announce Tylenol's new tamper-resistant packaging. Journalists watched in Chicago at the Palmer House hotel.

Teresa Janus, the widow of Tylenol victim Adam Janus, is helped out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church with her daughter Kathy in hand after his funeral Mass.

Charles Osgood / Chicago Tribune

These Tylenol capsules were connected with one of the 1982 poisonings. Cook County doctors found that the capsule at right contained cyanide, which has a grainier texture than the medicine shown at left.

Dr. Edmund Donoghue, right, then the deputy chief medical examiner in Cook County, discusses the Tylenol poisonings on Sept. 30, 1982. At left are Michael Schaffer, the toxicologist who tested the capsules, and Dr. Barry Lifschultz.

Nancy Chen of the Cook County medical examiner's office holds up test tubes containing the analyzed contents of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. The darker specimen at right was found to contain cyanide.

Charlie Knoblock / AP

Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, center, blesses one of the three caskets containing members of the Janus family at a funeral Mass held Oct. 5, 1982, in Chicago.

A photograph of a television screen shows the specific lot number for a batch of Extra-Strength Tylenol that was the first to be recalled.

A still from a drugstore camera shows Paula Prince, center in suit, as she buys a bottle of tainted Tylenol in 1982 at the Walgreens near her home in Chicago.

Alojza Janus, center, who saw two sons fall victim to poisoned Tylenol, is helped by her son-in-law Marian Czyz, left, and her husband, Tadeusz, outside St. Hyacinth in Chicago.

Alojza Janus, center, grieves with her husband, Tadeusz, at right, at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church. They are the parents of Tylenol victims Adam and Stanley Janus.

Quentin C. Dodt / Chicago Tribune

Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, at right, holds a midnight news conference about a Chicago woman dying from tainted Tylenol. Chicago police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek is at left. Byrne is wearing a formal dress she'd donned for an evening event.

Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

Terri and Stanley Janus on their wedding day. "I thought they would have a long, good life together," said Terri's friend Sandy Botwinski, who was a bridesmaid.

Charlie Knoblock/AP

Chicago City Health Department employees test Tylenol capsules for cyanide at a city laboratory.

John Dziekan / Chicago Tribune

A pharmacist checks lot codes on boxes of Extra-Strength Tylenol. The initial recalls were limited to certain batches of the product.

Three hearses line up outside St. Hyacinth Catholic Church, where the Mass for Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus was held.

Chicago police Officer Sam Barsevich takes inventory of Tylenol bottles that residents turned in at his station.

Ernie Cox Jr. / Chicago Tribune

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke talks about Tylenol on "The Phil Donahue Show" in Chicago on Nov. 15, 1982. The company recalled all Tylenol capsules in the wake of seven deaths but soon sought to rebuild its bestselling brand.

Charles Knoblock / AP

Helena Tarasewicz, mother of Tylenol victim Terri Janus, weeps over her daughter's casket during graveside services at Maryhill Cemetery in Chicago.

Terri Janus' parents, Jan and Helena Tarasewicz, from left, grieve at the mass for their daughter at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke holds the tamper-resistant packaging developed for Tylenol in late 1982 in an attempt to save the brand.

Pharmacist Dennis Jordan, right, checks lot codes on bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol at the Westmont Pharmacy as he removes them from the shelves on Sept. 30, 1982.

The law firm Corboy & Demetrio sued Johnson & Johnson in 1983 over the Tylenol poisonings. A box of documents was photographed this year at the firm's offices.

Fred Jewell/AP

Jose Rosa, right, was one of hundreds of Chicago city employees and volunteers to distribute warnings about cyanide-laced Tylenol in fall 1982. Here, he offers a Spanish-language flyer to Luisa Acevada.

Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules had been laced with cyanide. And they were killing people in the Chicago area.

The news was already starting to get out, thanks to a dogged City News reporter, but there had been no public announcement. Someone needed to warn the public, Donoghue’s colleagues told him. Someone needed to hold a press briefing.

They looked at Donoghue, the 37-year-old deputy chief medical examiner who was in charge that day only because their boss was out of town. He didn’t disagree. He knew they couldn’t sit on this information, not with lives still at risk.

Before holding the briefing, he reached out to executives at McNeil Consumer Products, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that manufactures Tylenol. The company had learned about the poisonings only a short time earlier when a reporter called J&J for comment. Company leaders were still trying to wrap their heads around the situation.

They said they understood Donoghue had an important job to do. They just wanted to know: Did he have to say it was Tylenol, specifically? Wasn’t it a little premature?

Donoghue asked them to come up with a better alternative. The executives said they couldn’t.

“What I liked about it was when they said, ‘We can’t,’ ” Donoghue said. “That was practically giving me permission to do it.”

At 9 a.m., Donoghue and two colleagues stepped in front of television cameras and announced the Tylenol deaths.

The announcement sent Tylenol — the country’s top-selling pain reliever — into a tailspin from which many predicted it could not recover.

The fact that it did has become the subject of numerous books and college lectures, held up as a shining example of corporate ethics and crisis management. The safety seals the company introduced after the killings are found on all manner of over-the-counter medications and food products today, making tamper-evident packaging one of the horrific crime’s most enduring legacies.

A Johnson & Johnson spokesperson declined to answer Tribune questions about events related to the poisonings. Instead, she issued a statement lauding the company’s response.

“Our highest responsibility has always been the health and safety of our consumers,” the statement read. “While this tragic incident remains unsolved, this event resulted in important industry improvements to patient safety measures including the creation of tamper-resistant packaging.”

But as is so often the case, there’s more to the story.

‘You take care of this’

As Donoghue made his announcement, Johnson & Johnson executives huddled in CEO James Burke’s fifth-floor office in New Brunswick, New Jersey. J&J had acquired McNeil Laboratories in 1959 and soon began selling Tylenol over the counter through the newly formed McNeil Consumer Products. Its aspirin-free acetaminophen product now dominated the market for nonprescription pain relievers.

David Collins, the recently appointed chairman of McNeil Consumer Products, was among those in the meeting. As he remembers it, the executives had no idea what to do.

Crisis management hadn’t entered the corporate vernacular yet, but this was a crisis and they needed to manage it.

Burke turned and pointed to Collins.

“You take care of this,” Burke said, according to Collins. “This is your responsibility.”

An Oak Park native, Collins immediately took the corporate helicopter to the McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where a significant number of the company’s Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were produced. The executives established a war room at the plant, giving themselves a dedicated space to discuss potential strategies and options for internal investigations.

Collins told the Tribune he immediately recognized that the crisis couldn’t be managed from corporate boardrooms on the East Coast. He needed to be closer to the epicenter, which at that time was the Cook County morgue near the intersection of Polk and Wood.

“It was pretty clear to me that I had to go to Chicago, that this thing was so important we couldn’t rely on secondhand reports,” Collins said. “But obviously we needed to begin right away and establish some kind of communication with the key people on the West Side of Chicago.”

Collins called his college roommate Paul Noland, a Chicago-area attorney with connections to law enforcement and an understanding of how the city worked. Noland had just opened a law office in Wheaton with Francis “Mike” Heroux, whose friendship with Noland and Collins stretched back to their days at Fenwick, a Catholic high school in Oak Park.

He asked Noland and Heroux to find out whatever they could — and quickly.

Heroux hustled over to the morgue, arriving about 30 minutes after the news conference.

Donoghue took him into the lab, where the toxicologist who worked through the night analyzing capsules from two tainted bottles explained what he found. He had run tests on three capsules from each bottle, and two of those capsules — one from each bottle — had tested positive for cyanide. Heroux stayed about a half-hour and left.

“You know, my dear old mother always said, ‘Trust everybody, but cut the cards.’ All they wanted to do is see the cards we were holding,” Donoghue said. “And once they realized, they left very quickly. There was no point for them to be there.”

Heroux, who died in 2008, didn’t stop looking for answers, though. Two more cyanide-related deaths would soon be confirmed in DuPage County, and Heroux represented the hospital where one of those two victims died. With the health care privacy act known as HIPAA still 14 years away, he was able to use his contacts there to gather information.

“We had more facts than anybody,” Noland recently told the Tribune.

Indeed, Elmhurst Detective Jim O’Brien told the FBI on Oct. 2, 1982, that most of his knowledge about the death of Mary Sue McFarland — a divorced mother of two small boys — came from the coroner and an unnamed Johnson & Johnson attorney.

Law enforcement records show that a J&J attorney came to the Elmhurst Police Department on the morning of Oct. 1 and wanted to share the results of his own investigation. According to the police report, the attorney said he had determined that McFarland had an Anacin bottle in her purse with the tainted Tylenol inside.

In reality, it was a Dristan bottle that held the poisoned capsules, but otherwise the lawyer’s information was spot-on. And it bothered the detective.

“O’Brien expresses his own concern about the attorney conducting (an) investigation in this matter inasmuch as it appeared to him that the attorney may be destroying fingerprints or other valuable evidence during the course of his investigation,” the report stated.

It’s a rare piece of criticism of Johnson & Johnson among the thousands of police records obtained by the Tribune. Others involved in the original Tylenol investigation praised the company for its response. O’Brien died in 2002.

In the very beginning, Collins said, the authorities didn’t know how to deal with Johnson & Johnson, whose employees and plants still needed to be investigated. He says the corporation leaned on Noland and Heroux’s connections to local law enforcement to help form a relationship with the task force.

Collins said the company voluntarily provided lists of disgruntled current and former employees, as well as unhappy customers. It was a start of an unusual partnership between the police and a company amid an investigation that had not yet determined whether the murders had happened while the bottles were under J&J’s control.

“We were polite, but one of the points we made was, guys, look, you know squat about this business,” Collins said. “You have no idea where to look. You have no idea the questions to ask. We’re the only ones who do. And if you don’t allow us to work with you on this, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. And that really made sense to them.”

Ty Fahner, then the Illinois attorney general and head of the multiagency task force investigating the poisonings, described J&J as “a wonderful, willing partner” with law enforcement. At the request of state authorities, the company offered a $100,000 reward on Oct. 1 for information leading to the conviction of whoever was responsible for the poisonings.

“They couldn’t have been better,” Fahner said of company executives.

‘Pull all your product’

By the afternoon of Oct. 1, there were six confirmed cyanide deaths: McFarland, Mary “Lynn” Reiner, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman and Adam, Stanley and Theresa Janus.

Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled more than 93,000 bottles from the batch of Tylenol connected to the Janus and Kellerman deaths. The company later expanded it to another 171,000 bottles with the same lot number as the one McFarland purchased.

The company also shut down the production of all Tylenol capsules while executives debated its packaging and marketing strategy internally. Though the FDA was pushing for a nationwide recall on Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules, the federal agency also wanted to assure the public that it could trust over-the-counter pain medication.

A spokesperson for the FDA, Bill Grigg, went on “Nightline” on Oct. 1 and shot down the possibility that the tampering took place at the McNeil Consumer Products plants. In a recent interview with the Tribune, Grigg said he knew that more investigative work had to be done, but he also understood that Americans were panicking.

“I think we got about 5,000 calls just in the next couple of days,” he said. “And many people didn’t have anything in their medicine cabinets but Tylenol. And even if they did have something else, they were suspicious. We did try to promote the idea that tablets could be safe, but people were already frightened.”

Fahner and other Illinois public health officials went much further than either the federal government or the manufacturer, telling people to throw away their Tylenol or turn it in to their local police department.

“People were terrified,” Fahner said. “And as soon as we got the word out that Tylenol had been laced (with cyanide), people said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Well, if you’ve got any in your medicine cabinet, or if you have any anywhere, either put it in a plastic bag and keep it or throw it away. Do not use it.’ “

Fahner said Johnson & Johnson’s chairman, James E. Burke, called him during the early days of the investigation and asked how he could help. Fahner recalled having just one request:

“Pull all your product from the shelf,” he told Burke.

It took a few days, but Burke eventually agreed to recall all Tylenol capsules.

The final Tylenol death was confirmed on the evening of Oct. 1, when 35-year-old flight attendant Paula Prince was found dead in her Old Town condominium. Chicago police Detectives Jimmy Gildea and Charlie Ford discovered a bottle of Tylenol on her bathroom vanity and a Sept. 29 receipt from a nearby Walgreens on the kitchen counter.

Prince’s poisoning would bring the death toll to seven.

On the way to the medical examiner’s office, the detectives got a radio call. Dispatch wanted them to know that police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek and Mayor Jane Byrne would be meeting them at the morgue — a kind of attention they had never experienced in their careers.

Byrne and Brzeczek had been at a retirement party for a top-ranking police officer at Navy Pier. They arrived at the morgue wearing formal attire and grim expressions. Cook County Medical Examiner Robert Stein, who was also wearing a tuxedo from an earlier engagement, showed them some Tylenol capsules that appeared hastily put together.

Autopsy results would confirm the next day that Prince had been fatally poisoned with cyanide. By then, the public already knew that — because Byrne held a rare midnight news conference to announce the death.

Wearing a frilly evening gown, Byrne sat in front of the microphones and began talking. Brzeczek, dressed in a jacket and tie, stood next to her.

“It was getting to be somewhat of a media circus (that week) because everyone was running around doing press conferences. And she said, ‘We’re going to have a press conference too,’ ” Brzeczek said. “As it turned out, all the TV stations interrupted their network broadcasting and the press conference went live all over the country.”

Byrne made nationwide news again the next morning when she took the most aggressive step since the killings began:

She banned the sale and distribution of Tylenol in Chicago.

Noland, the attorney, was at a party in Glen Ellyn on the night of Oct. 1 when he received word that Byrne was looking to speak with him. When they connected, Byrne said she wanted to see him the next morning in her office.

Noland showed up at City Hall, where Byrne told him of her plan to ban Tylenol. Noland called his longtime friend Collins, who was in an emergency board meeting with other Johnson & Johnson executives.

They quickly formed a position: The company could support pulling Extra-Strength capsules from the store shelves, but they opposed a full ban. Under Byrne’s proposed order hospitals couldn’t use Tylenol 3, the country’s most prescribed analgesic.

Collins said he wanted to explain to the mayor that withdrawing all Tylenol-branded products would present health problems for a lot of people and cause difficulties for medical centers.

The men didn’t think it would help, but they knew the mayor casually. Byrne’s late husband, Bill, had been best friends with Collins’ older brother.

Bill Byrne, the Collins brothers and Noland all went to the University of Notre Dame together. In Chicago politics, there were few more powerful fraternities in 1982 than the Fighting Irish alumni. When they spoke, Collins said, Mayor Byrne greeted him warmly, even inquiring about the health of Collins’ mother.

Then she turned him down flat.

“She was pleasant but unyielding,” said Noland, who went on to become a DuPage County judge. “Let me put it that way.”

Saving the brand

From the start, law enforcement and FDA investigators publicly doubted the capsules had been contaminated at the production plant.

They doubled down on that position after Reiner and McFarland’s deaths because their bottles both came from a McNeil facility in Round Rock, Texas. The Kellerman and Janus bottles were manufactured in Pennsylvania.

Not until Oct. 5, 1982, nearly a week after the victims swallowed their fatal doses, did a task force representative visit one of the plants.

Michael Schaffer, chief toxicologist of the Cook County medical examiner’s office, toured the McNeil facility in Pennsylvania to see if the potassium cyanide kept on the premises could have crept somehow into the production line. The company used the chemical to test the lead content of an ingredient used to make the medication.

After spending a morning there, he ruled out the possibility that bottles were contaminated during manufacturing, telling reporters that “no human hands touch the Tylenol or its ingredients in the automated mixing and packaging process.”

However, he also found that the potassium cyanide was kept in three unlocked quality control laboratories. More than 1,000 people had unfettered access to those labs, according to the company.

FDA testing found the cyanide kept on the McNeil property didn’t have the same trace element pattern — a sort of chemical fingerprint — as the poison placed in the capsules. Either way, a McNeil spokesperson said the firm would keep the cyanide locked up going forward.

The early exoneration from both the FDA and the Tylenol task force proved invaluable to Johnson & Johnson, whose executives knew they couldn’t rebuild their bestselling brand if the public thought the poisonings occurred while the capsules were under their control.

“It couldn’t just be us. It had to be the FDA,” Collins told the Tribune. “The FDA had to come along and say, ‘No, this is not a product problem.’ “

On the same day as Schaffer’s visit, Johnson & Johnson recalled all Tylenol capsules. In addition to pulling the medicine off shelves, it sent 450,000 notices to health professionals, hospitals and customers saying they were taking it “all back, lock, stock and barrel,” records show.

The company also offered to replace the worrisome capsules with the safer tablet form for free. It marked the first mass recall in U.S. history, involving more than 31 million bottles and costing the company $100 million.

“We were trying our darndest to get them removed from the American market,” George Frazza, Johnson & Johnson’s general counsel, testified in 1983. “And, as it turned out, we did a pretty good job.”

The recall announcement, however, was unpopular on Wall Street, where J&J’s stock continued to drop and marketing experts predicted the quick demise of Tylenol. The medication’s share of the market dropped from 37% in September 1982 to about 7% in the following months.

Bottles of Tylenol that weren’t tossed out were sent to Johnson & Johnson, the FDA and various other government laboratories for testing. J&J performed its testing at a corporate distribution center in suburban Lemont, where more than 10 million capsules were checked for cyanide, according to federal records.

On Oct. 21, a Johnson & Johnson employee detected cyanide in a bottle that had been returned to a Dominick’s on Chicago’s North Side. Eleven of the 50 capsules inside were poisoned, according to a police report.

Days later, on Oct. 25, cyanide was detected in another 50-count bottle that had made its way back to McNeil Consumer Products as part of the recall, investigative records show. The wife of a DuPage County judge had bought the Extra-Strength Tylenol on Sept. 29 at Frank’s Finer Foods in Wheaton and later turned it in to her local police department.

James Zagel, who was head of the Illinois state police at the time of the murders, testified in 1983 that he had worked closely with Johnson & Johnson in the investigation’s earliest days. He said he approved of the decision to let the company test the capsules even as authorities were looking to see if a disgruntled J&J employee was behind the poisonings.

“They set this program up in consultation with members of the task force, so we would keep as good a record as we could of where the capsules came from,” he told a jury during the 1983 trial of James Lewis , who tried to extort money from J&J after the poisonings.

Testing eventually identified eight poisoned bottles — five connected to fatal poisonings and three that surfaced after the murders.

At this point, McNeil employees worried that Tylenol wouldn’t survive as a brand. Production was halted indefinitely, investigators had swarmed the campus and tainted capsules were still being found.

Prominent advertising executive Jerry Della Femina predicted consumers would not see the Tylenol name, in any form, on store shelves within a year. A name so closely associated with death, he said, was unsellable.

“There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and if they find him I want to hire him, because then I want him to turn our water cooler into a wine cooler,” Della Femina told The New York Times on Oct. 8, 1982.

McNeil executives printed and posted the quote all over their offices. Collins said they used it for inspiration as they developed strategies to restore public confidence. The company did consider renaming Tylenol, Collins said, but a name change was rejected largely because of the “stubborn Irish pride” of many of the company’s decision makers who didn’t want to admit defeat.

Instead, the company’s key initiative involved developing tamper-evident packaging to help consumers feel safe enough to take Tylenol again. The Cook County Board of Commissioners already had passed an ordinance requiring safety seals on all medicines, food products and some cosmetics, and the FDA had begun working on federal legislation, though it wouldn’t be passed until 1989.

Collins told the Tribune that the company had been considering these safety measures for years but the poisonings served as the impetus for finally adopting them.

In consultation with the FDA, Collins said, a McNeil task force worked in the company’s research lab to develop packaging that could not be sabotaged.

Less than two months after the murders, Johnson & Johnson introduced triple-sealed packaging that included a box with glued flaps, tight plastic wrap around the bottle cap and a foil seal covering the mouth of the bottle. Labeling on the box and bottle warned consumers not to use the medicine if “safety seals” were broken.

“It was a serious effort because we figured we know more about this package than anybody and if we can’t get into it, the chances are that somebody else can’t get into it either,” Collins said. “We came up with what we thought was effective, tamper-evident packaging and reintroduced the product to the market as capsules.”

In announcing the new packaging in November 1982, CEO Burke said Johnson & Johnson considered it a “moral imperative as well as good business” to restore Tylenol to the same prominence it held in the market prior to the poisonings.

“All of us can demonstrate a united determination not to allow our lives to be ruled by acts of terrorism, not to allow America to be poisoned the way these seven people were poisoned,” Burke told reporters.

To boost consumer interest, J&J launched a marketing blitz promoting the safer bottles and calling attention to the financial hit the company took from the country’s first mass recall. Burke and other executives gave interviews in which they spoke about corporate responsibility and the Johnson & Johnson credo, a mission statement that puts the people the company serves over profit.

McNeil also offered a free bottle of safety-sealed Tylenol to anyone who called the company and requested one. It installed scores of new phone lines, then recruited staff and their families to answer the phones. In a three-hour interview with the Tribune, Collins became emotional as he recalled the many husbands, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins and children of employees who came in to help.

“And we had a lot of people call us and say, ‘We don’t want a bottle. We just want to thank you.’ So that turned out to be quite a success,” Collins said. “And I think it was a major step forward in reestablishing the confidence of the public.”

Within a year of the murders, Tylenol regained its spot as the country’s top pain reliever. Its market share was 30% by the fall of 1983, a more than 300% increase over its post-poisonings nadir.

Tylenol’s advertising firm sent a barrel of wine to Della Femina, who admitted he was wrong.

“One of the greatest tragedies of my career happened to be one of the greatest triumphs,” Collins said. “To this day, I believe that.”

But 1982 wasn’t the end of fatal Tylenol tamperings.

And a few years later, J&J would be forced to make an even bigger decision than simply redesigning its boxes and bottles.

Another Tylenol death

Less than four years after tamper-evident packaging helped Tylenol regain control of the pain reliever market, another capsule poisoning occurred.

Diane Elsroth, a 23-year-old stenographer, took an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule while visiting the Yonkers, New York, home of her boyfriend’s parents in February 1986. She was found dead in bed the next day. Investigators later determined the capsule — which came from a newly opened, safety-sealed bottle — had been tainted with cyanide.

Another poisoned bottle was found in a nearby town, and stores began removing the product from shelves.

Johnson & Johnson had another public relations crisis on its hands.

Law enforcement inspected the McNeil plant in Pennsylvania and, unlike Illinois investigators in 1982, did not entirely rule out the possibility that the tainting occurred during the medicine’s production or distribution. However, they agreed it was unlikely.

“Until someone is charged with the crime, we can’t say definitively how it happened,” retired Yonkers police Detective Lt. Jack Roach, who oversaw the investigation, told the Tribune this year. “But it would have been hard, virtually impossible, to put (poisoned capsules) into the lots they were shipped in.”

Congress had passed a law in 1983 making product tampering a federal crime, so the FBI had jurisdiction over the case. The New York agents worked closely with their Illinois counterparts to determine whether the latest incidents could have been carried out by the same person responsible for the 1982 killings.

They reached no definitive conclusion.

The FBI and Yonkers police later concluded the poisoned capsules had been placed in bottles after they reached the store shelves. The feds, at one point, stated that their analysis indicated the killer had removed the bottom of the bottle and inserted the capsules that way.

Roach told the Tribune that his squad found it easy to remove safety seals and put them back on using a soldering iron. He said his detectives became so deft at tearing and repairing the seals, nobody could tell the difference.

Johnson & Johnson did not change its tamper-evident packaging after Elsroth’s death, but it did stop selling pull-apart capsules.

“In hindsight, which is 20-20, I wish we had never gone back to marketing these capsules,” Burke told a New York television station.

The statement offered little solace to Elsroth’s mother.

“It’s just three years too late,” Felicia Elsroth told UPI in response.

The lawsuits

While Wall Street and Madison Avenue celebrated Tylenol’s comeback, the families of the seven Chicago-area victims from the 1982 poisonings pushed to hold Johnson & Johnson accountable for their loved ones’ deaths.

In a lawsuit filed in Cook County, the families argued that Johnson & Johnson and McNeil were culpable for the deaths because they knew the capsules were susceptible to tampering. McNeil sold Tylenol to hospitals in tamper-evident packaging in 1982 but did not offer any such safeguards with its over-the-counter products.

The Kellerman and McFarland families were both represented by Corboy & Demetrio, a prominent firm with a national reputation for successfully taking on big corporations. As part of discovery in the case, J&J turned over records showing that it had received nearly 300 consumer complaints involving tampering, mix-ups or contamination before the killings, reports said.

“It should have alerted McNeil and Johnson & Johnson that any form of tampering was possible,” attorney Michael Demetrio told the Tribune this year. “The ability to have safety seals was already there, but guess what? It costs more to do these things, and that’s a big factor in how these corporations operate.”

Collins told the Tribune that executives could not have imagined such a horrific act before it happened.

“We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why didn’t we foresee this? Was this foreseeable?’ And we never really came up with an answer that persuaded us that we should have foreseen a conclusion,” Collins said. “I mean, this was so outrageous what was done. And look at the technique that was used. We just could not figure out how we could have foreseen this.”

On the eve of trial in 1991, Johnson & Johnson settled with the families of all seven victims. As part of the deal, the amount would remain secret and the corporation admitted no wrongdoing.

Noland told the Tribune that he was disappointed in Johnson & Johnson’s decision to settle.

Demetrio declined to discuss the amount, citing the settlement’s confidentiality clause. At the time the deal was announced, attorneys told reporters that the victims’ children would have their college tuition paid.

The 2012 book “The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder and Johnson & Johnson” states the families received between $200,000 and $990,000 each. Michelle Rosen, one of Reiner’s daughters, collaborated with author Scott Bartz on the book, which criticized authorities for quickly ruling out the possibility that the tampering occurred in the distribution and repackaging channels.

When investigators looked at the distribution and storage routes, they found no indication that the different batches had passed through the same spots at the same time. That, they concluded, made it highly improbable that the bottles would all end up on the shelves of different Chicago-area stores during the same 30-hour window.

Rosen has long pushed back against the investigators’ theory that a “madman” was responsible for placing the bottles on shelves.

“After 40 years, investigators still have been unable to produce a definitive conclusion as to how this crime happened and who did it,” she said in a statement to the Tribune. “By continuing the dead-end track that the investigation has been on, this case will remain unsolved.”

Rosen also has long questioned why Johnson & Johnson was allowed to test the returned capsules, giving the company a quasi-investigative role alongside law enforcement. Records and interviews state the company burned the capsules following testing.

Collins told the Tribune the company destroyed the capsules with law enforcement’s permission at a facility in North Carolina. The entire process, from testing to burning, was monitored by members of the task force, he said.

“They were destroyed because, even in those days, the risk of theft and black market was very real,” Collins said. “So the last thing in the world we wanted to have happened was a story to come out that, you know, 10,000 bottles were stolen.”

Demetrio, a former Cook County prosecutor, challenged the wisdom of letting the corporation play an active role in a police investigation involving its products. However, he said his firm spent nine years looking into the poisonings and shared law enforcement’s view that the poisonings occurred at the store level.

In a war room equipped with a giant map that denoted where each victim bought a tainted bottle, the attorneys practiced how quickly they could pull apart the capsules, pour out the medicine and put them back together. It took most of them about 30 seconds, Demetrio said.

But the families quickly grew tired of theories, he said. They wanted answers about who was responsible for the death.

Neither Demetrio nor law enforcement had any.

“And every time a so-called lead was announced, or a potential suspect was announced, I would get a phone call and they would ask me what I thought,” Demetrio said. “I would constantly caution them not to get too high or too low. I made it clear to them that there was a law enforcement army out there trying to solve these murders.”

The lawsuit, Demetrio said, helped the families understand why Tylenol was susceptible to tampering. But civil cases can only do so much.

“They wanted to know who poisoned the pills, and the police could never definitively say,” he said. “And unfortunately, for the families, they still don’t have any concrete answers.”

Though Tylenol regained the public’s trust, several relatives and friends of the victims told the Tribune they still avoid taking it. A few said they habitually check to see if the seals on bottles are intact; others make sure — when grabbing any item off a shelf — to pick the one farthest back in case those in front have been tainted.

Joseph Janus, whose two younger brothers and new sister-in-law were among the victims, said he doesn’t even like to go into pharmacies and see Tylenol displayed on shelves.

He and his daughter, Monica, said the safety packaging on medicines, food and other grocery items that resulted from their family tragedy is a double-edged sword. Tamper-evident packaging has become such a part of the American consumer experience that they can’t open a sealed jar of peanut butter or a gallon of milk without thinking about the killings.

It’s a near-daily reminder that although the deaths led to a great public benefit, they came at a deep personal cost.

“You look at it and you’re like, ‘That’s because of them,’ ” Monica Janus said of her slain uncles and aunt. “Unfortunately, it happened to our family, but it saved many lives.”

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Johnson & Johnson: The Tylenol Tragedy

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Retro report

How an Unsolved Mystery Changed the Way We Take Pills

The origins of tamper-resistant packaging — exasperating yet reassuring — lie in a deadly episode in 1982, when cyanide-laced Tylenol killed seven people.

By Clyde Haberman

A Trusted Pill Turned Deadly. How Tylenol Made a Comeback.

How do companies regain public trust after something goes seriously wrong we looked at how tylenol responded after someone inexplicably spiked its pills with poison in the 1980s..

“The backlash over the ad was immediate” To rebuild trust, corporations in trouble follow a familiar script. “I am deeply sorry.” “This was a major breach of trust.” One written nearly 40 years ago, when a deadly crisis gripped America. “The first to buy was the first to die.” “Tylenol changed the crisis landscape.” But have all the lessons been learned? “Anger is boiling over on social media with the hashtag ’#boycott.’” “I was 8 years old and my mom had just gotten back from the maternity ward, went to the grocery store and bought Tylenol from the grocery store, that was doctor’s orders. And the next thing I knew I just saw my mom go out on a stretcher from my upstairs window and that was the last that I saw her.” Mary Reiner’s Tylenol had been inexplicably spiked with poison. “Three people are dead and another is in critical condition tonight.” “One of the victims took the pills he bought to his home.” “His brother and sister-in-law were so upset by his death that they went back to the house and took some Tylenol from the same bottle.” As the death toll hit seven, the terrifying randomness of the poisonings shocked the nation. “That bizarre mystery of Tylenol laced with cyanide still has not been solved tonight.” “Investigators say they are searching for, quote, ‘a madman.’” “People were terrorized. They didn’t know what product they had in their home that could possibly be lethal if they ingested it.” “Scared, really, that something, somebody could have tampered with some of the other products.” “Cyanide-contaminated Tylenol...” “We had police riding around with their bullhorns yelling, ‘Throw out your Tylenol. Flush it down the toilet.’” “Do not take any Tylenol until further notice.” “People were checking themselves into the E.R. thinking they’d been poisoned.” “I was just nervous for the baby.” “It was absolute chaos.” “Flush it all down the commode, O.K.?” “There is no single person or even a group of single persons that stand out above the rest at this point in time.” “We had no clues as to the motivation, except the taking of human life. It made no sense, there was no clear and intended victim, but just anyone — anyone who happened to have the misfortune to buy a bottle of Tylenol.” “Police are looking for disgruntled employees, angry customers, anybody with a grudge against the stores or Tylenol.” “Police are even checking stock transactions to see whether someone was trying to push down the value of Johnson & Johnson stock.” “This was not a cockroach-in-a-box kind of an issue. People had lost their lives. That really created that vulnerability, that sense of risk, that sense of threat that I think really scared a lot of people, and justifiably.” Alan Hilburg worked for Johnson & Johnson’s outside public relations firm, one that was increasingly focused on a new type of business: crisis management. “I remember asking lots of questions. The conversation was, ‘Well, we need to recall.’ O.K. Do we recall from the store? Do we recall from the city? Do we recall from the region?” “All the bottles of Extra Strength capsules were removed Friday as part of the nationwide recall.” “Now, not only is Extra Strength Tylenol off the shelves, Tylenol commercials are off the air.” “The race is on for Tylenol’s competitors.” “They didn’t worry about the money. They didn’t worry about the impact on the company. They stopped shipment, ordered all their distribution chains to pull it back in so that we could figure out what was going on. And that sticks out in my mind. It was not a negotiation or discussion. In fact, they stepped forward and volunteered it.” “Some analysts predict the Tylenol brand name will disappear within a year.” “We concluded we were never going to be judged by what caused the problem. We were always going to be judged on how we responded to it.” Meanwhile, the criminal investigation seemed stuck in first gear. “The 130-man, multimillion-dollar investigation, according to sources, hasn’t lifted a promising fingerprint.” “We did receive hundreds, indeed, thousands of tips. And would investigate and run down every single one of those tips.” “A stolen car with Tylenol in it. The body of a man found with Tylenol in a coat pocket. The reports of a Tylenol shoplifter.” “We got there, we said, ‘Now, where did you get this information?’ and she says, ‘I have a magic pen and it made me write these things out and I told you about it.’” “Hundreds of leads to the cyanide killer but most of them bum and bizarre.” Then, there was a new development: an extortion letter threatening to do it again. “Authorities today stepped up their search for the man accused of demanding a million dollars from the makers of Tylenol to prevent further murders.” “The extortion letter when received was an obvious point of interest to the law enforcement authorities.” “James Lewis is said to have made that demand...” “He maintained as many as 20 aliases and described himself variously as a salesman, computer specialist, importer and freelance writer.” “We were trying to determine whether or not the person that sent the letter was indeed the one that had put the cyanide in all the capsules, or whether it was just some lookalike or screwball taking advantage.” “Common sense would tell you this is an important thing that we are looking at.” As the police searched for Lewis, Johnson & Johnson grappled with a $100 million recall and the future of one of its most lucrative brands. “The question became, ‘How do we regain trust?’ It wasn’t in the efficacy of the medicine. Tylenol works. Trust was lost in the packaging, because the packaging had enabled the poison, the cyanide, to be entered into the medicine.” “Six weeks to the day since the Tylenol murder story broke, Johnson & Johnson held a news conference in New York to reintroduce Tylenol.” “Tylenol capsules...” “It had the cotton ball, it had aluminum over the top, it had a child-proof cap, it had plastic over the child-proof cap. Those levels of safety became the levels of trust.” “I think they’re going the extra mile to make it sure that it’s consumer safe.” “Tylenol, the so-called eighth victim, of this tragedy is continuing to recover.” “A business turnaround one analyst calls the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” “Packaging now had become a competitive advantage. Everything from food products to pharmaceuticals were favorably affected.” “If I take the cap off the milk carton — you have to stick your finger in there, and grab the ring, and pull the ring out, along with the seal — I think of Tylenol still to this day.” Today, although crisis management has become a multibillion-dollar industry, Hilburg says many companies seem to miss an important lesson: come clean with the public right away. “We’re seeing too many examples of companies, whether it’s Volkswagen or Wells Fargo or Equifax, where situations actually exacerbate simply because they forgot the lesson that you’re going to not be judged by what caused the crisis but by how you respond.” “J & J has...” Johnson & Johnson has also stumbled since the Tylenol case. In 2010, it faced a public backlash after a series of drug recalls, including one the company conducted without letting regulators or consumers know. “Mr. Chairman, I know that we let the public down.” “The single most important metric of a company’s value is trust. And that’s what crises threaten. They threaten trust.” “Faced with worldwide outrage over these images showing a passenger forcibly removed from a plane, United Airlines’ C.E.O. issued his third apology on Tuesday.” “You said you were sorry. Where are you going from here? That’s how I’m going to judge whether I trust you or not.” Almost 40 years after the Tylenol murders, the case remains unsolved. While Lewis served 12 years in prison for the attempted extortion of Johnson & Johnson, he has long denied any involvement in the tampering and no one has ever been charged with the deadly crime. “Lewis made himself a suspect because he tried to shake down money with the implication being that he had done it and would do it again. But we had several other suspects, none of which would answer the question of why, and there was no direct link as to the indiscriminate taking of life.” “The investigation continues...” “There was no evidence to pin it on anybody at that time, and there still hasn’t been any evidence to pin it on anyone. So, that’s where this all stands. It’s the perfect crime.”

Odds are that you have had moments of frustration trying to open new bottles of aspirin or other over-the-counter medications. Perhaps your fingernails are not up to the task of breaking the seal on the plastic wrap. Or maybe the pop-up cap is a challenge, seemingly designed to be not only childproof but also adultproof. The foil covering the lip of the bottle may defy neat tearing. Then you struggle to remove every wisp of the cotton wad standing between you and the medicine.

But odds are also good that, even if a bit annoyed, you are reassured. All those layers of protection mean you may reasonably trust that the pill you are about to pop is safe.

A sense of security was not something that could be always taken for granted. Say the word “Tylenol” and even today, more than three decades later, many Americans will recall a time when the pain reliever and fear were almost synonymous. This installment of Retro Report , the first in a new series of video documentaries exploring the continuing impact of major news stories from the past, harks back to that time.

In 1982, someone tampered with capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol, turning them lethal with potassium cyanide. Seven people in the Chicago area died. Copycat attacks around the country caused several more deaths.

As grim as the Tylenol deaths were, they endure as an example of how a corporation, Johnson & Johnson in this instance, took control of the calamity, came up with a strategy and, with surprising swiftness, regained trust it had lost.

“We concluded we were never going to be judged by what caused the problem,” said Alan Hilburg, a communications and branding consultant who was part of a public relations team enlisted by Johnson & Johnson. “We were always going to be judged on how we responded to it.”

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School of Public Health

People, politics and poison: the tylenol® murders revisited forty years later.

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Michael Petros, DrPH ’11, MPH ’84,  is a clinical assistant professor at the UIC School of Public Health and core faculty in SPH’s Doctor of Public Health Leadership (DrPH) program. Petros served 38 years at the City of Chicago and State of Illinois public health laboratories, first as a senior microbiologist in serology/virology and later, as chief of operations for newborn screening. During his tenure in the laboratory, Dr. Petros became a recognized expert in fluorescent microscopy and conducted training seminars for local health department laboratory staff. He developed quality control processes for high throughput population-focused screening technologies and contributed to national consensus documents on the subject. In this op-ed, he reflects on his experiences leading the public health response to the Tylenol murders of 1982.

Introduction Heading link Copy link

Wednesday, September 29, 1982 at 6:30am CDT, the nightmare that was to be known as the “Tylenol® Murders” began 1 . At first, the story focused in the Chicago/Cook County area but soon spread to the entire country and around the world.

The story would eventually involve law enforcement on local, state and federal levels, emergency responders, the medical examiner’s office, the hospital medical care system, and to its credit, local public health.

Once the story broke, the call volume at Illinois Poison Center (which normally averaged about 40-60 calls per 24 hours), approached 800 calls in a similar time period 2 .

The product in question was Extra Strength Tylenol® capsules, manufactured by the McNeil Consumer Healthcare division of Johnson & Johnson. Seven fatalities were linked to ingestion of this over-the-counter medicine. The victims (5 female, 2 male) ranged in age from 12 – 35 years. Three members of the same family succumbed after sharing the same bottle of capsules. The products were purchased at different retail locations in the Chicago area and were manufactured at two different out-of-state facilities (Pennsylvania and Texas). Clearly, the products were tampered with after manufacture. Analysis determined that the capsules were laced with crystals of potassium cyanide, which can be lethal within 15 minutes of ingestion. Potassium cyanide interferes with the electron transport chain in the mitochondria of cells and the body becomes unable to generate adenosine triphosphate for cellular respiration 3,4 .

Eventually, one individual was brought to justice, but not for the actual product tampering and poisoning. A week after the first deaths, a handwritten letter arrived at Johnson & Johnson headquarters. It read in-part: “ Since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. … So far, I have spent less than $50 and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle .” James William Lewis was accused of sending the letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to stop the cyanide murders. Lewis was arrested, charged, tried and convicted of extortion and served more than ten years in federal prison 5 .

No further deaths beyond the seven were linked to this particular incident. However, concerns on the part of the public continued for some time after. It was reported that Halloween candy sales were down approximately 20 percent in 1982 6 .  “Copycat” incidents continued from time to time 7 .

Johnson & Johnson established a communication relationship with the Chicago Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Food and Drug Administration. The company remained an active partner in the investigation 8 .

If there is any “good” to emerge from this incident, it is the increased protection offered by tamper-resistant packaging of consumer products such as over-the-counter medications and prepared food products.

The incident is also a case study in how a corporate entity could respond to a criminal incident, affecting confidence in a manufactured product. About 31 million bottles of Tylenol® capsules were removed from store shelves and recalled. The response by Johnson & Johnson became a model for crisis management. Johnson & Johnson’s approach was successful in that it was later able to re-release Tylenol® capsules in triple-sealed containers, now a pharmaceutical industry standard. Eventually, two-piece capsules were replaced with solid caplets.

Shortly thereafter, the so-called “Tylenol bill” was passed, making it a federal offense to tamper with products.  In 1989, the FDA established tamper-proof guidelines for consumer products 9 .

In 2011, the FBI requested DNA samples from Ted Kaczynski (AKA: the “Unabomber”), who is serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for murder and related crimes 10 .  In 1982, Kaczynski occasionally stayed at his parents’ home in suburban Chicago 11 .

The case remains open and unsolved to this day 12 .

Author's reflections Heading link Copy link

On Friday, October 1, 1982, 48 hours after the first reported death, there was an emergency meeting for all the section chiefs of the Chicago Department of Health, Division of Laboratories. At this time, I was serving as the acting section chief of serology and virology.  The Division of Laboratories was located in the lower level of the R.J. Daley Center in downtown Chicago and consisted of approximately 80 laboratory professional and support staff, organized into the microbiology, virology/serology, clinical chemistry/hematology, chemistry/toxicology, hemoglobinopathy and gynecologic cytology sections.

We had all been following the escalating and alarming news stories about the multiple deaths, apparently being related to ingestion of adulterated Tylenol®. To those of us familiar with capacity of the various local laboratories (Chicago Police Crime Lab, Illinois Department of Public Health Toxicology Lab, Illinois State Police Crime Lab, etc.) including our own Chemistry/Toxicology unit, we knew that sooner or later, our labs would become involved.  Indeed, after a relatively brief discussion, the section chief team proposed a plan to provide support to local laboratories involved in the Tylenol® investigation. It was agreed that our team would be able to provide emergency “surge capacity” to the investigation for 48 uninterrupted hours. We would move to 12 hour shifts around the clock for the weekend, with re-evaluation on Monday October 4 th . Everyone was “on deck”, including clerical and support staff. Those of us section chiefs used our best people and leadership skills to mobilize our staff. We were successful. This spoke volumes about the dedicated nature of the skilled public servants we supervised.

For those 48 plus hours, we opened and checked innumerable containers of Extra Strength Tylenol®. Mayor Jane Byrne called a press conference to update Chicagoans on the situation and announced that all Tylenol® products would be removed from the store shelves in Chicago. The removed products were delivered to the our labs by Chicago Police and Health Department messengers.

Acetaminophen, the primary active ingredient in Tylenol®, is a white powder and should have been the only contents of the capsules. The tedious checking process consisted of physically pulling-apart capsules and looking for crystals of potassium cyanide.  While potassium cyanide has a distinct aroma (i.e., ‘bitter almonds’), this ability is genetic, and only about 50 percent of the population is able to detect that by smell 13 . It is also important to note that as group, cyanides are potential chemical weapons agents, and air concentrations of 200 parts per million can be rapidly fatal 14 .  So the painstaking process of carefully separating the sections of the capsules and visually inspecting the contents of thousands of those capsules was the order of the day.

On Monday, October 4, we re-evaluated the emergency situation. Doing this was critical because the daily routine work would be delivered to CDOH-DOL beginning mid-day. There was no additional surge capacity available to do the routine work and continuing the Tylenol® response. For perspective of the normal workload, each day, the Department of Laboratories processed approximately 1000 syphilis serology specimens, 1200-1400 gonorrhea cultures, 200 – 400 strep throat cultures, hundreds of pre-natal rubella tests, pediatric blood lead, hematology and clinical chemistry specimens, various food product complaints, routine milk quality tests and animal rabies tests involving human exposure 15 . Given the realities of daily throughput and turn-around-time commitments for analytical results, it was determined to continue a scaled-back Tylenol® response, but shift focus to the routine analytical responsibilities. “Scaled-back” being a relative term, as by this time, there was palpable panic in the public’s mind, so the department began receiving non-Tylenol® over-the-counter products, street drugs and related accoutrements, such as used syringes, razor blades and pipes. Triage at specimen receipt was instituted.

Gradually, Department of Laboratories testing life returned to normal over the next weeks. But the memories of those who were “there”, remain. Consumer products were subsequently marketed in tamper-resistant packaging. The question remains, “Why?”  Why would someone commit such a series of horrific, random acts? How could public health and law enforcement prepare to respond in the future?

On December 31, 1993, the Chicago Department of Health, Division of Laboratories ceased operations and most testing responsibilities transferred to the State of Illinois Public Health Laboratory. On that last day, there remained a secure storage room containing the Tylenol® investigation materials processed by the CDOH-DOL eleven years earlier, awaiting disposition. The person or persons who committed this act of domestic chemical terrorism remain unknown.

This article is dedicated to the staff of the Chicago Department of Health, Division of Laboratories, many now deceased, who rose to the call to protect and reassure our Chicago residents.

References Heading link Copy link

• https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2012/Chicago-Tylenol-Murders-An-Oral-History/
• https://ipcblog.org/2010/02/02/recollections-of-the-1982-chicago-tylenol%c2%ae-cyanide-poisonings/
• https://forensicsciencesociety.com/thedrip/the-cold-case-tylenol-murders
• https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-tylenol-murders-changed-the-way-we-take-medicine
• https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/chicago_tylenol_murders
• Victor, Daniel; Ortiz, Aimee (October 27, 2021). “That Tainted Halloween Candy Myth Just Won’t Go Away”. The New York Times.
• http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1878063,00.html
• Andrews, Robert V. (2005). “Crisis Communications and the Tylenol Poisonings”. In Heath, Robert (ed.). Encyclopedia of Public Relations. SAGE Publications, Inc. pg. 225–226. doi:10.4135/9781412952545.n105. ISBN 9780761927334.
• https://www.corboydemetrio.com/cases-tylenol-tampering-litigation
• Woolner, Ann (May 19, 2011). “FBI Wants Unabomber’s DNA for 1982 Tylenol Poisoning Probe” . Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on May 22, 2011 .
• “ FBI wants to test Unabomber DNA in Tylenol killings “ . Daily Herald. May 19, 2011. Archived from the original on June 24, 2011 . http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110519/news/705199967
• https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/chicago/press-releases/2009/feb04_09.htm
• Jane’s Chem-Bio Handbook. 2 nd ed. Jane’s Information Group. 2002. pg 101.
• PDR Guide to Biological and Chemical Warfare Response, Thomson/Physicians’ Desk Reference, 2002. pg 55-56. ISBN: 1-56363-426-0
• 150 Years of Municipal Health Care in the City of Chicago. Official publication. Shirley Haas, Director of   Community Education, CDOH, editor.  1985.

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Johnson & Johnson: The Tylenol Tragedy

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Publication Date: October 12, 1982

Industry: Pharmaceutical industry

Source: Harvard Business School

In October 1982, Johnson & Johnson was confronted with a major crisis when seven deaths were attributed to poisoned Tylenol. The case reviews the facts as known a week after the incident occurred, and raises a wide range of questions regarding consumer behavior, corporate responsibility, and competitive reaction.

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Corporate Governance: Principles, Policies and Practices, 3e by A.C. Fernando

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Case Study 5

The tylenol crisis: how ethical practices saved johnson & johnson from collapse.

(This case is developed from published reports, and is purely meant for class room discussion. It is not intended to serve as endorsement of sources of primary data or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.)

Company Background

Robert Wood Johnson along with his two brothers, James Wood and Edward Mead Johnson, formed a partnership in 1885 to make commercial use of the discoveries of Sir Joseph Lister, a reputed English surgeon, who identified airborne germs as the invisible assassins that caused infection in the operating room. This partnership firm was incorporated as Johnson & Johnson in 1887 and began its operations in New Brunswick, ...

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Why values matter in business: five key lessons from Tylenol Crisis from the “Tylenol Man” himself

Alan Hilburg is credited with the textbook case for successful management of a reputational crisis. Three decades back, the US-based communications guru crafted what was then an extremely innovative response to the famous Tylenol Crisis. The decision to remove $100m worth of the pain killers off shelves worldwide initially drew criticism as a massive over-reaction. That soon changed to praise for not only the right moral decision, but a coup for a business that showed it put people above profits. In its actions not just words. When he was in SA recently, the “Tylenol Man” appeared on CNBC Africa Power Lunch, where I asked him for some suggestions on how to handle reputational challenges this country faces. He later agreed to write a piece for Biznews.com. In it he takes us back to the disaster which Johnson & Johnson turned to triumph – and reflects on how its approach is more relevant than ever today. – AH  

By Alan Hilburg*

Johnson & Johnson recalled all of its product and over the following week, every Tylenol product) was removed from every store around the world and destroyed. That’s all 31 million capsules values at $100 million.

The Tylenol crises soon became the benchmark, the gold standard of how to view and manage crises.  More importantly, Tylenol is really the benchmark on why values matter. The Tylenol success story is currently the most widely taught case study of effective crises management in business schools in the US.

It is remarkable, but through more than 200 crises I’ve been involved with, every CEO had one common objective. They say, “We want to come through it like Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol.” More than merely surviving the crisis, Tylenol demonstrates how crises, when well managed, build a stronger business, culture and reputation. Crises tell you that something is wrong that needs to be fixed. It’s, therefore, an opportunity to be better. As former US President Kennedy said, “Crises are opportunities in waiting.”

The company embarked on a two pronged strategy built around two key questions. How to return a safer product to the marketplace and how to earn back the trust of fearful customers?

The solution was not limited to developing safer packing for Tylenol, but it looked at how to address the more important issue of consumer confidence in product safety. As a result, the Johnson & Johnson team challenged itself to revolutionise packaging.  The product safety solution was also the catalyst for reversing consumer fear and winning back trust.

Larry Foster, Corporate Vice President of Public Relations at Johnson & Johnson said, in reflecting on the astute management of the crises, “What began as Johnsons & Johnson’s darkest hour turned out to be its brightest in terms of corporate reputation.”  When probed further, did you respond to a plan?  His response was visionary.

“No, not really.  We responded from our values,” he said.  The company’s values, written in the mid-1940’s by Robert Wood Johnson, stated that the company‘s responsibilities were to the consumers and medical professionals using its products, employees, the communities where its people work and live, and its stockholders. Therefore, it was essential to maintain the safety of its publics to ensure business continuity. Johnson & Johnson’s responsibility to its publics became the compass which guided the company’s decisions.

Chairman James Burke appeared on commercials, did more than 50 interviews and was the chief trust-builder. A press event was held concurrently by satellite in 100 cities in the US to introduce the new packaging, a new technology innovation in itself for its time.

Tylenol was re-launched with a revolutionary tamper proof packaging seal and introduced caplets. The solution, however, was less about innovative packaging or a great crises plan. It was more about a crises solution that focused on public safety and consumer peace of mind.  Innovative packaging was a rational driven solution.  Public safety and peace of mind was the emotional driven solution which, from more than 200 crises I’ve managed, always resonates with customers or victims.

What is also significant is that while a crises plan protects you brand and reputation, crises are more about the victims. It’s what I refer to as an “outside- in” instead of “inside-out” viewpoint. I’ve seen this cardinal mistake being made time and time again, most recently in the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico when CEO Tony Howard famously proclaimed, “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.”

Tylenol’s market share spiked from 33% before the crisis to 48% 90 days after the re-launch. Consumer trust in Tylenol increased three fold compared to the period prior to the crisis, restoring confidence in the brand.

So what are the five key learning from Tylenol’s experience?

1.   Values based brands outperform non-values based brands on trust, credibility and listenability. In other words, great companies and great brands stand on a platform of great values. In a crises I’d rather defend the values than the facts.

2. Crisis management is not about public relations driven ‘damage control’. It’s about business continuity. About affirmative strategic, business-centric action with a strong focus on the victims in a crises.

3. Assume responsibility for the solution, even if you don’t have to, because it’s about the publics’ trust in your brand and the test of your character.

4.  Act quickly, honestly and decisively.

5. Good behavior delivers great returns. Remember the high cost of low trust.

Nothing good happens without trust.  One of the most overlooked concepts in crisis management and mitigation is forgetting about the ‘speed of trust .’  It’s a concept that reflects the speed of gaining or losing the trust that communities have in your brand.  In crisis management, trust changes everything.  Why?  Because it’s the only thing that means everything.

* Alan Hilburg is President of Hilburg Associates SA a global specialist on crisis mitigation and management. He is the author of two New York Times best-sellers on leadership; Twelve Hats of a Company President and Russell Rules: Eleven Lessons in Leadership From the Greatest Winner of the 20th Century.

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How Did Johnson and Johnson's Corporate Responsibility Policy Pay Off in 1982?

Johnson & Johnson is one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, and Tylenol is one of its most popular brands of medicine. In late September 1982, Johnson & Johnson recalled all of its Tylenol products after seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. The company's chair at the time, James E. Burke, abided by corporate responsibility and made the difficult and expensive decision to recall 30 million Tylenol products voluntarily. This cost the company over $100 million.

How did Johnson and Johnson's commitment to corporate social responsibility remedy the situation and place the company in a positive light, even after suffering a financial loss by their swift actions to fix the problem?

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is part of a company's business model. It focuses on a company taking accountability for all of the decisions it makes as well as the impact that all of its goods and services have. It concentrates on a business being socially accountable to itself, the public, and all stakeholders .

A strong corporate social responsibility policy is good for a company's brand . If the company takes responsibility for all of its actions that impact all areas of society as a whole, including economic, environmental, and social, it can be seen in a positive light that individuals are happy and comfortable doing business with. In the long term, this helps the growth of the company.

Corporate social responsibility does not only need to include the day-to-day operations of a business but can also include any volunteer work the company does or philanthropy projects it is a part of.

Johnson & Johnson's Product Recall

Johnson & Johnson was not deemed responsible for the contamination of its product. The pills were tampered with after the products had reached the market shelves. The perpetrator(s) introduced enough potassium cyanide in each altered capsule to kill thousands of people. This crime caused nationwide panic, copycat crimes, and even the suspicion that Halloween candy might be poisoned as well. No one was ever found guilty of adding the poison into the capsules. Time magazine lists this as one of its top unsolved crimes.

The company's actions epitomized the true meaning of corporate social responsibility. Even though Tylenol products were generating approximately 17% of Johnson & Johnson's annual income, the company acted quickly and decisively to remedy the situation. It removed the products from shelves, offering refunds and safer tablets as replacements, free of charge.

Chair Burke adhered to the company's credo that outlines its ideal of corporate social responsibility. The first sentence of this, written by former chair Robert Wood Johnson, states, "We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses, and patients, to mothers and fathers, and all others who use our products and services."

The end result of these incidents was that Johnson & Johnson became the first manufacturer to begin using tamper-proof packaging. When Tylenol products were reintroduced into the market two months later, they included seals around and beneath a child-proof cap. The company also launched an extensive marketing campaign touting the new packaging.

Many believed these events would deal a devastating blow to Johnson & Johnson, but the company's quick, honest, and responsible handling of the incident was viewed extremely positively by both the general public and investors. As a result, the company quickly recovered from the financial losses incurred, and regained the trust of consumers.

The Bottom Line

Corporate social responsibility is when a company takes ownership of the impact it has on the larger public and all of its stakeholders. It includes social, economic, and environmental issues that a company attempts to have a positive effect on.

Johnson & Johnson taking ownership of the situation that arose with its Extra-Strength Tylenol product is one of the best examples of corporate social responsibility, where a company takes ownership of its own product, even if the issue was not caused by the company, and demonstrates leadership in rectifying the situation.

Though in the short run, fixing the situation as Johnson & Johnson did, can be financially devastating to a company, in the long run, it creates goodwill with the public and stakeholders, painting the company in a positive light, that inadvertently sets it up for financial success.

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Acetaminophen (tylenol): johnson & johnson and consumer safety.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Controversies associated with the use of Tylenol (acetaminophen) are not new to Johnson & Johnson. Reported cases of poisoning in 1982 and 1986 raised serious concerns about both the life of the analgesic and the well-being of consumers. In 1994, the results of two clinical studies raised product safety concerns about acetaminophen-based over-the-counter (OTC) analgesics, suggesting development of hepatotoxicity, and an increased risk of end-stage renal disease (ESRD). The alarm created by the studies is not of the same magnitude as the 1980s poisonings and the circumstances differed in that the findings did not only apply to acetaminophen-based analgesics; nonetheless, the implications of the latter are equally significant. Still operating by the same company credo, how Johnson & Johnson has handled the link between acetaminophen and hepatotoxicity and ESRD is of interest (especially when contrasted with its response to the 1980s poisonings); in particular, management's efforts to reassure both consumers and company shareholders.

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James Lewis, the suspect in the deadly 1982 Tylenol poisonings, dies at 76

The Associated Press

James Lewis is shown being escorted through Boston's Logan Airport, Friday Oct. 13, 1995, after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma. Charles Krupa/AP hide caption

James Lewis is shown being escorted through Boston's Logan Airport, Friday Oct. 13, 1995, after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.

The suspect in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings that killed seven people in the Chicago area, triggered a nationwide panic, and led to an overhaul in the safety of over-the-counter medication packaging, has died, police said on Monday.

Officers, firefighters and EMTs responding to a report of an unresponsive person at about 4 p.m. Sunday found James W. Lewis dead in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Cambridge Police Superintendent Frederick Cabral said in a statement. He was 76, police said.

"Following an investigation, Lewis' death was determined to be not suspicious," the statement says.

Tylenol Bottles: Hard To Open For 30 Years

No one was ever charged in the deaths of seven people who took the over-the-counter painkillers laced with cyanide. Lewis served more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, demanding $1 million to "stop the killing." He and his wife moved to Massachusetts in 1995 following his release. Listed numbers for his wife were not in service.

When Lewis was arrested in New York City in 1982 after a nationwide manhunt, he gave investigators a detailed account of how the killer might have operated. Lewis later admitted sending the letter and demanding the money, but he said he never intended to collect it. He said he wanted to embarrass his wife's former employer by having the money sent to the employer's bank account.

Lewis, who had a history of trouble with the law, always denied any role in the Tylenol deaths, but remained a suspect and in 2010 gave DNA samples to the FBI. He even created a website in which he said he was framed. Although the couple lived briefly in Chicago in the early 1980s, Lewis said they were in New York City at the time of the poisonings.

In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Lewis explained that the account he gave authorities was simply his way of explaining the killer's actions.

"I was doing like I would have done for a corporate client, making a list of possible scenarios," said Lewis. He called the killer "a heinous, cold-blooded killer, a cruel monster."

The FBI seized a computer and other items from Lewis' home in February 2009 after Illinois authorities renewed the investigation.

The FBI's Chicago office at the time cited "advances in forensic technology" and said it, along with the Illinois State Police and local police departments, was conducting a "complete review of all evidence developed in connection" with the killings.

In a span of three days beginning Sept. 29, 1982, seven people — including a 12-year-old girl — who took cyanide-laced Tylenol in the Chicago area died, triggering a nationwide recall of the product. The poisonings led to the adoption of tamperproof packaging for over-the-counter medications.

Helen Jensen, a nurse who helped treat the first victims at a suburban Chicago hospital, said in a phone interview Monday with the AP she hoped Lewis' death would be a final coda to a tragedy that has haunted her for four decades. She also hoped it would bring victims' families some closure.

"His death is a conclusion. Not necessarily the conclusion everyone wanted," said Jensen, who is retired. "But it is an end. I'm 86 now. And I am glad I got to see the end before I die."

Jensen said she was the first to figure out that a bottle had been tampered with. Investigators laughed at her.

"I was a woman and I was a nurse," she said. "I understood the attitudes of that time. But I was proven right by the next day."

Jensen said Lewis, who she accepts was responsible, "changed the world because of what he did."

"We lost our innocence," she said. "We have become less trusting of everyone else. We can blame it all on him. ... He was a terrorist and we have suffered from his terror for 40 years."

Lewis had prior run-ins with the law.

In 1978, he was charged in Kansas City, Missouri, with the dismemberment murder of Raymond West, 72, who had hired Lewis as an accountant. The charges were dismissed because West's cause of death was not determined and some evidence had been illegally obtained.

He was convicted of six counts of mail fraud in a 1981 credit card scheme in Kansas City, accused of using the name and background of a former tax client to obtain 13 credit cards.

Lewis was charged in 2004 with rape, kidnapping and other offenses for an alleged attack on a woman in Cambridge. He was jailed for three years while awaiting trial, but prosecutors dismissed the charges on the day his trial was scheduled to begin after the victim refused to testify, the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office said at the time.

Police in 1983 described Lewis as a "chameleon" who lived in several states, used at least 20 aliases and held many jobs, including computer specialist, tax accountant, importer of Indian tapestries and salesman of jewelry, pharmaceutical machinery and real estate.

The lack of accountability in the case has long frustrated victims' families.

Monica Janus, who was 8 years old when three members of her family died after taking the tainted medication, told CBS Chicago in 2022 that she thought the investigation was "really sloppy."

Lewis' wife was out of town and contacted a neighbor when she could not get a hold of her husband, and the neighbor contacted police, Cabral said.

• 1982 tylenol

Johnson & Johnson and Tylenol - Crisis Management Case Study

08 September 2008

Crisis need not strike a company purely as a result of its own negligence or misadventure. Often, a situation is created which cannot be blamed on the company - but the company finds out pretty quickly that it takes a huge amount of blame if it fumbles the ball in its response.

One of the classic tales of how a company can get it right is that of Johnson & Johnson, and the company's response to the Tylenol poisoning.

What happened

In 1982, Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol medication commanded 35 per cent of the US over-the-counter analgesic market - representing something like 15 per cent of the company's profits.

Unfortunately, at that point one individual succeeded in lacing the drug with cyanide. Seven people died as a result, and a widespread panic ensued about how widespread the contamination might be.

By the end of the episode, everyone knew that Tylenol was associated with the scare. The company's market value fell by $1bn as a result.

When the same situation happened in 1986, the company had learned its lessons well. It acted quickly - ordering that Tylenol should be recalled from every outlet - not just those in the state where it had been tampered with. Not only that, but the company decided the product would not be re-established on the shelves until something had been done to provide better product protection.

As a result, Johnson & Johnson developed the tamperproof packaging that would make it much more difficult for a similar incident to occur in future.

Cost and benefit

The cost was a high one. In addition to the impact on the company's share price when the crisis first hit, the lost production and destroyed goods as a result of the recall were considerable.

However, the company won praise for its quick and appropriate action. Having sidestepped the position others have found themselves in - of having been slow to act in the face of consumer concern - they achieved the status of consumer champion.

Within five months of the disaster, the company had recovered 70% of its market share for the drug - and the fact this went on to improve over time showed that the company had succeeded in preserving the long term value of the brand. Companies such as Perrier, who had been criticised for less adept handling of a crisis, found their reputation damaged for as long as five years after an incident.

In fact, there is some evidence that it was rewarded by consumers who were so reassured by the steps taken that they switched from other painkillers to Tylenol.

The features that made Johnson & Johnson's handling of the crisis a success included the following:

• They acted quickly, with complete openness about what had happened, and immediately sought to remove any source of danger based on the worst case scenario - not waiting for evidence to see whether the contamination might be more widespread
• Having acted quickly, they then sought to ensure that measures were taken which would prevent as far as possible a recurrence of the problem
• They showed themselves to be prepared to bear the short term cost in the name of consumer safety. That more than anything else established a basis for trust with their customers

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J&J hit with new class action over talc seeking medical monitoring for cancer

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Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot

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Brendan Pierson reports on product liability litigation and on all areas of health care law. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Johnson & Johnson faces new class action lawsuit on behalf of talc users

J&j has already tried and failed twice to resolve talc claims through bankruptcy and has another bankruptcy proposal on the table.

Johnson & Johnson to stop selling talc-based baby powder in US; United teams up with Clorox

Fox Business Briefs: Johnson & Johnson says it will stop selling talc-based baby powder in the United States.

• A new class action against Johnson & Johnson seeks damages and medical monitoring on behalf of women who have been diagnosed with cancer, or might develop it in the future, allegedly as a result of using the company's baby powder and other talc products.
• Johnson & Johnson says its talc is safe, asbestos-free and does not cause cancer, and that plaintiffs' lawyers are pushing the new lawsuit to thwart the company's proposed settlement so that the lawyers can collect more fees.

Both the proposed settlement and the new class action concern claims that talc caused ovarian and other gynecological cancers, which make up the vast majority of cases. A smaller number of claims have been brought by people who developed mesothelioma, most of which have settled.

Johnson & Johnson is facing a new proposed class action seeking damages and medical monitoring on behalf of women who have been diagnosed with cancer, or might develop it in the future, allegedly as a result of using the company's baby powder and other talc products.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday in New Jersey federal court, is the first to seek medical monitoring, or regular testing meant to catch cancer early, on behalf of talc users. The proposed class could include thousands of women, but would not include the more than 61,000 people who have already filed personal injury lawsuits over J&J's talc, claiming it contains cancer-causing asbestos.

J&J maintains its talc is safe, asbestos-free and does not cause cancer.

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The law firms behind the new case are opposed to J&J's proposal to settle nearly all talc claims against it for $6.48 billion through a prepackaged bankruptcy. The same firms are also pursuing a separate class action seeking a court order blocking the bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy proposal needs support from 75% of talc claimants, with a three-month voting period ending on July 26.

Erik Haas, J&J's worldwide vice president of litigation, said in a statement that plaintiffs' lawyers brought Monday's "meritless" lawsuit to thwart the bankruptcy plan because they can collect more fees outside of bankruptcy, putting their own interests ahead of their clients.

Bottles of Johnson & Johnson baby powder line a drugstore shelf in New York on October 15, 2015. Despite a newly proposed class action lawsuit on behalf of women who have been diagnosed with cancer, or might develop it in the future, allegedly as (Reuters/Lucas Jackson/File Photo / Reuters)

"The plaintiff firms should cease the obstructionist behavior, and let their clients decide for themselves whether to accept the pending offer," he said.

Lawyers opposed to the deal have denied that they are motivated by higher fees and said the bankruptcy proposal would not adequately compensate their clients.

Chris Tisi, one of the lawyers bringing the new lawsuit, said in a statement that medical monitoring was necessary because the "inadequate funding" of the bankruptcy plan "doesn't realistically address the needs of women who could develop ovarian cancer in the future because of past baby powder use."

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J&J has already tried and failed twice to resolve current and future talc claims through bankruptcy.

The legal strategy, known as a Texas two-step, involves creating a subsidiary to absorb the company's talc liability, which then declares bankruptcy to settle the cases. The previous efforts failed because courts found that the new subsidiary lacked the "financial distress" to justify bankruptcy.