Tylenol Murders

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

It is not just a murder spree.

It is the reason why we have all those safety wraps on medicine bottles and anyone older than 40 won't use medicine that has anything amiss with the wrapping.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was watching distractedly but can anyone explain:

1. The one suspect that was actually a driver for the Jewel grocery store?

2. The post stamp on the Lewis letter and him saying he wrote it 2 days before? I thought they implied that he knew about the murders beforehand but I think it was more to show he was actually confused, is that correct?

This documentary was actually really poorly done though I did enjoy it. This was confusing and overblown. But yes, he postmarked the letter on October 1 which was two days after the reports of the first murder. So he absolutely could have written the letter and mailed it after hearing about it on the news. The problem was he had told police He worked on the letter for three days. Which would imply he started the day before the murders hit the news.

The police acted like that was a big gotcha. But this was an interview done years later and I just don’t believe it was the gotcha they thought it was. It’d be one thing if it was postmarked before the death became public, but it was postmarked two days after.

Anyway, I think the documentary sacrificed clearly explaining the facts because they wanted to keep throwing curveballs at us. But it blurred the facts. I just don’t see how you could watch this and not see that it was a quality control issue in the plant.

I agree. Also, it's amazing how J&J came out on top of all this. Didn't just get through the scandal, but has been made to be such champions of public safety. I remember this case being mentioned time and time again in B-school as how to handle a crisis effectively.

[Anonymous]

Is it possible that the 1986 poisonings were from old bottles?

Some people, like my parents and grandparents, would keep medicine around for years, especially if they were poor. Popping open a 4 year old bottle of tylenol would not have been unheard of in Grandma's house in the 80s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just want to weigh in as a person who was 10 years old when the Tylenol poisoning case unfolded and whose family medicine cabinet always had a bottle in it. It was VERY scary for regular Americans, and I think Tylenol did an excellent job handling the PR because they a well respected and successful brand more than 40 years later and obviously many folks who are much younger have never even heard of the case. I guess I'm not surprised it is taught as a case study in business schools.

+1 I remember it really impacted Halloween; my mom cut open all of my candy before allowing me to eat only a few pieces. And we really didn’t trick-or-treat again. I think it’s why medicine bottles are now child-proof, yes? I still prefer tablets to capsules.

It’s also around the same time when some family claimed there were drugs laced on a sticker they received from a random house on Halloween. For some reason, the kid put the sticker on their hand and had some kind of reaction. So I remember there was a whole anti-sticker Halloween situation Along with searching the candy for contamination.

I think it was the temporsry tattoos, not stickers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

How have you not heard of the tylenol murders? Are you very young?

Very easy for someone under 40 to have never heard of this incident IMO. Apparently it has legs if you went to business school but they’re really hasn’t been much coverage of it since.
- a 52-year-old PP who remembers when it happened

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

How have you not heard of the tylenol murders? Are you very young?

very young? For people with little kids right now they weren’t even born when this happened! I was born in 1979 (46) and only know about it because of business school. But separately, why it’s titled Tylenol murders I have no idea because honestly, when I saw that on Netflix, I didn’t put two and two together that it was about the Tylenol tampering. I thought maybe someone had gone on a rampage at a Tylenol facility. Sad state of where we are as a nation, I guess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

How have you not heard of the tylenol murders? Are you very young?

very young? For people with little kids right now they weren’t even born when this happened! I was born in 1979 (46) and only know about it because of business school. But separately, why it’s titled Tylenol murders I have no idea because honestly, when I saw that on Netflix, I didn’t put two and two together that it was about the Tylenol tampering. I thought maybe someone had gone on a rampage at a Tylenol facility. Sad state of where we are as a nation, I guess.

Conversely, I'm 39 and know about it from my Mom who works in Healthcare.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

How have you not heard of the tylenol murders? Are you very young?

very young? For people with little kids right now they weren’t even born when this happened! I was born in 1979 (46) and only know about it because of business school. But separately, why it’s titled Tylenol murders I have no idea because honestly, when I saw that on Netflix, I didn’t put two and two together that it was about the Tylenol tampering. I thought maybe someone had gone on a rampage at a Tylenol facility. Sad state of where we are as a nation, I guess.

Conversely, I'm 39 and know about it from my Mom who works in Healthcare.

Well 39 isn't "young".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is it possible that the 1986 poisonings were from old bottles?

Some people, like my parents and grandparents, would keep medicine around for years, especially if they were poor. Popping open a 4 year old bottle of tylenol would not have been unheard of in Grandma's house in the 80s.

No, in both cases (1982 and 1986) it was someone who emptied the capsules and filled them with cyanide. You could actually see the color difference in the bottles. The 1986 case was only found because the mortician smelled almonds otherwise no one would have known.

[Anonymous]

So I think it absolutely could have been him in 1982 and the 2nd batch of deaths in 1986 could have been an inside job copycat.

At the time I was something like 11 or 12 and it was widely believed that an individual had wanted to kill a family member but tampered with multiple bottles in order to make the deaths look random, while also disposing of said relative. I was fully expecting to hear this theory in the show, but didn't.

[Anonymous]

an individual had wanted to kill a family member but tampered with multiple bottles in order to make the deaths look random

This was also theorized to be the motive of sniper John Allen Muhammad, that he was planning on killing his ex-wife but shot a lot of other people first so hers would look like a random killing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So I think it absolutely could have been him in 1982 and the 2nd batch of deaths in 1986 could have been an inside job copycat.

At the time I was something like 11 or 12 and it was widely believed that an individual had wanted to kill a family member but tampered with multiple bottles in order to make the deaths look random, while also disposing of said relative. I was fully expecting to hear this theory in the show, but didn't.

But how could a copycat re-create the plastic red packaging and the white label print, and get through the foil barrier? It would be impossible for some Rando to do that.

In 1982, it was completely possible to tamper with Tylenol. In 1986 it was really not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. It's on Netflix. I literally just turned it on. I have never heard this story, but Netflix describes it as a poisoning spree with laced Tylenol from the 80s. And several people died and the case is unsolved.

How have you not heard of the tylenol murders? Are you very young?

very young? For people with little kids right now they weren’t even born when this happened! I was born in 1979 (46) and only know about it because of business school. But separately, why it’s titled Tylenol murders I have no idea because honestly, when I saw that on Netflix, I didn’t put two and two together that it was about the Tylenol tampering. I thought maybe someone had gone on a rampage at a Tylenol facility. Sad state of where we are as a nation, I guess.

Conversely, I'm 39 and know about it from my Mom who works in Healthcare.

Why are you being nasty? The PP didn’t say she was young. Just that she knew about the murders. She was probably born in 1986 so she didn’t live through them. I think that was her point. Now go and find some other place to enact your bitterness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So I think it absolutely could have been him in 1982 and the 2nd batch of deaths in 1986 could have been an inside job copycat.

At the time I was something like 11 or 12 and it was widely believed that an individual had wanted to kill a family member but tampered with multiple bottles in order to make the deaths look random, while also disposing of said relative. I was fully expecting to hear this theory in the show, but didn't.

But how could a copycat re-create the plastic red packaging and the white label print, and get through the foil barrier? It would be impossible for some Rando to do that.

In 1982, it was completely possible to tamper with Tylenol. In 1986 it was really not.

Yes, the packaging is the issue, which is why I suggested an "inside" job, aka someone at the factory.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So I think it absolutely could have been him in 1982 and the 2nd batch of deaths in 1986 could have been an inside job copycat.

At the time I was something like 11 or 12 and it was widely believed that an individual had wanted to kill a family member but tampered with multiple bottles in order to make the deaths look random, while also disposing of said relative. I was fully expecting to hear this theory in the show, but didn't.

But how could a copycat re-create the plastic red packaging and the white label print, and get through the foil barrier? It would be impossible for some Rando to do that.

In 1982, it was completely possible to tamper with Tylenol. In 1986 it was really not.

Yes, the packaging is the issue, which is why I suggested an "inside" job, aka someone at the factory.

But there’s no evidence that there was a maniac working for J&J. All the evidence points to a simple quality control issue - manufacturing was totally different back in the 80s, not nearly as many safety protocols - the fact that there was cyanide testing for lead just feet away from where the actual fit for consumption pills were being made and bottled is nuts.