How The Tylenol Murders Changed The Way We Take Medication

LOADING ERROR LOADING This is an excerpt from our true crime newsletter, Suspicious Circumstances, which sends the biggest unsolved mysteries, white collar scandals, and captivating cases straight to your inbox every week. A task force comprising local, state and federal officials was formed to investigate the poisonings and locate what the attorney general called “a madman hell-bent on doing something like this.” In a midnight news conference on Oct. 2, Mayor Jane M. Byrne announced that all bottles of Tylenol were being yanked from store shelves in Chicago, urged residents not to take the Tylenol they had at home and to turn in any bottles they had to police or fire departments. Then Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s parent company, made an unprecedented decision: It recalled all its Tylenol capsule products in the U.S. — 31 million bottles valued at about $100 million. The Extortion Letter Investigators largely discounted Arnold — and other supposed “copycats” — after the arrival of a letter at Johnson & Johnson’s headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, first reported on Oct. 8 — one week after the last Tylenol poisoning death. After his death on July 9, the man who successfully prosecuted Lewis for attempted extortion, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Margolis, said in a statement to the Chicago Tribune, “I was saddened to learn of James Lewis’ death, not because he’s dead, but because he didn’t die in prison.” Chicago City Health Department employees test Tylenol medicines for cyanide content at a city lab, Oct. 4, 1982.