Thinking Sideways: The Tylenol Murders

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking Sideways. I don't stories of things we simply don't
know the answer too. Hello everyone, and welcome back to
another episode of Thinking Sideways the podcast. As always, I

(00:27):
am Steve, joined by my favorite hosts. Yea favorite because
there's no other. Okay, well, once again, as always, we
have another mystery for you today, a really groovy mystery.
It's a groovy mystery. It's got death and everything. This

(00:48):
one was sent into us by Terry. She sent it
to us on the Facebook page, So thank you Terry.
Because what we're going to talk about today is a
series of unsolved murders. Okay, well, the how is solved,
the who and the why is not. And for anybody
wasn't read the episode title, what we're gonna be talking

(01:11):
about today are the Thailand all murders which happened in
late September early October. So here's our story. On the
morning of September twenty nine, twelve year old Mary Kellerman
complained to her parents that she wasn't feeling so well.
She had a sore throat. She died later that day.

(01:33):
Sore throat. You're give me a minute, You're a little
out of the game there, sir, I think that's a
drink for all of our listeners who are yeah, you
know they're blowing it up. Yeah, the okay, back to
the story. Sorry. The same day, Adam Janie or Janis

(01:54):
are not sure. Janice, who was supposed to worker, died
of what appeared to be a massive heart attack. And
he was like nine, right, Yeah, he was a young
guy and his family, doing his family's will do they
circled the wag and everybody gathered at his house for
that that time of grief and go figure. A couple

(02:15):
of them got headaches because well it's a stressful time.
His brother and his sister in law both decided that
they take something to take the edge off. Yeah, and
they both died. His brother, whose name was Stanley, died
that very same day, and his sister in law, Teresa,

(02:37):
died two days later. Several days later, Mary McFarlane, Paula Prince,
and Mary Reiner each died unexpectedly. None of these people
knew each other. They didn't have anything in common. Well, okay,
they had one thing in common. They had taken each

(02:58):
prior to their death an extra strength Thailand. All Yeah.
Mary Kellerman, the twelve year old girl, her parents because
she had a sore throat, had given her an extra
strength thailand All. I don't understand what this got to
do with them dying how to die. No, I don't
understand why anybody would like, first of all, give a
twelve year old extra strength anything. But it was for

(03:21):
a sore throat, like I think, I think that that
wasn't her only symptom. I think that was the main time.
Adam Janice had taken the extra strength thailand All just
before he died, and his brother and sister in law
had also taken pills from the same bottle. Turned out,
each of these seven people had unknowingly consumed a pill

(03:45):
that was laced with potassium cyanide. That's not great. It's
not really something the body craves, not at all. It's
it's extremely toxic to the human body. What potassium cyani
does is it stops the tissues in your body from
being able to take up the oxygen that's in your bloodstream,

(04:07):
which means that you die from histotoxic hypoxia, which literally
is your body cannot absorb the oxygen. It's a lethal
dose of potassium cyanide is somewhere between two or three
hundred milligrams, which is a really really small dosage if

(04:28):
we try and put that into a frame of reference
for people to you know, think about it an everyday scenario.
Two d milligrams is about three to four grains of sugar.
That's not a lot, So it doesn't take a lot
of this stuff to kill you. Now, Once it was
determined by the investigators that tailing All was the link

(04:51):
between these people, panic broke out. People were throwing Thailand
all the way, stores were yanking it off of the shelves.
Johnson and Johnson who was the who is the parent
company of McNeil Consumer Products who made tailent All at
the time, And I honestly don't know if they're still
the ones it well, but I mean McNeil Consumer Products

(05:15):
was one who makes it, but I don't think they
do it anymore. I'm guessing they were in full blown
damage control mode trying to figure out what was going
on and why their product was killing people and how
this poison got into their pills. They quickly Johnson and
Johnson quickly put out a statement saying that the poison

(05:37):
could not have been put in the pills in their
manufacturing process, and it had to have happened somewhere after
the pills had left their hands. I think that's fair,
it is, and they but they had they had great
evidence because what they dis is they tracked the lot
numbers on the medication, the lethal doses of medication, and

(06:03):
they figured out that the lot numbers were from medication
that was produced at two different plants, one in Puerto
Rico and one in Pennsylvania. That would be really hard
to have it introduced to the manufacturing level. And besides
which that stuff would have wind up being distributed all
over the place, not just northeast Chicago exactly exactly. Because yeah,

(06:23):
and that's a good point, thank you, Joe. I don't
know if I specified here that this is all happening
in a suburb or a larger area of Chicago, kind
of around where the O'Hare airport is now. There's a
bunch of suburban areas, and that's where this is all happening.
This is probably a good point to stop the story

(06:44):
and explain something about Thailand. All for any of our
listeners who aren't young enough to know this, like me,
it's not just Thailand, all right, it's pills. Well, it's
pills yes, it's pills in general, but this a lot
of this is related to Thailand all a specific the
theres seed a menafin is what they were using. Is

(07:05):
there seeda menafin tablets or cablets I should say capsules
capsules capsules. Today, when you go into the store and
you buy any medicine and you look at the bottle,
there's usually a couple of seals on the bottle. We're
talking about over the counter medica. Over the counter medication
usually usually the bottles in a box that's sealed, and

(07:26):
then there's a right well and and and the I
looked at the regulations on what has to have what,
and it's really too boring to go into. But typically
there's one to two layers of protection before you get
to the box. But the point is when you buy
over the counter medication now, typically there's some kind of

(07:47):
plastic shrink wrap seal on the lid. Maybe it's got
printing on it or perforations, so it's very obvious if
it's been removed or messed with. And then when you
open up the lid, there's some kind kind of seal
on the top of the bottle which he has to
get off, but it's you know, it's plastic or it's

(08:08):
foil or paper or something like that. That is what
we are used to. Didn't used to be that way
because in the up until that point, a bottle of
pills was sealed with the lid and you opened the
lid and there's that silly piece of cottony material and

(08:30):
that was it. Yeah, yeah, that sounds safe back in
the days when they were it's psychos poisoning your pills. Yeah.
I think it speaks to some of the how naive
industries were about people wanting to do harm to others
via their products. People just didn't think it would would

(08:50):
ever happen. People didn't do that kind of crap. Yeah,
until this this came along, and now that now it happens.
As we all know, there are copycats of this happens
all the It's hard not the ideas out there. You
pretty much have to seal everything you have to and
and all of the products that we get now that
are sealed they were. There was laws passed, ironically enough,

(09:14):
called the Thailand All Bill, which requires that be put
into place. We should also while we're talking about the medication,
we should probably talk about the pills themselves. As we
alluded to a little bit earlier, extra Strength Thailand all
and a lot of other over the counter medication came
in a capsule. It's not a solid pill, it's not

(09:37):
a gel coded pill. It's not what we're used to now.
It's like it's more like what you get vitamins, like
specific vitamins and the days yea, and lots of stuff
that comes in capsules. Still. Yeah, but it's it's not
nearly as common as it is. But for anybody who
doesn't know, it's it's two pieces that go together, almost

(09:58):
like a Russian nesting doll. They fit together and they seal.
I guess it's one inside the other the ends. They're
very easy to pull open. And you guys know what
these things are, yes, everybody, Yeah, well it They became
super popular because they were easy to swallow, unlike like
a dry as bird. Yeah. They're also you can a
lot of help nuts these days. You know, you can

(10:21):
fill your own capsules. You can just get whatever you want.
And that is the achilles heel of the capsule when
it comes to medication, is it can be opened in
the medicine can be taken out or in this case
added to exactly, which is a big problem. And that's
the reason that a lot of things now or gel

(10:41):
coats or whatever they are, so that these over the
counter medications can't easily be tampered with. I think it
also is worth noting that John's the way that Johnson
and Johnson handled this whole thing. I don't know if
we were going to talk about this or not, but
it's been praised as pretty much one of the best
corporation handlings of a huge disaster like this at all times,

(11:02):
and so I think that's probably worth mentioning a little bit.
Hill went really well, we will talk about it was
kind of disaster to them. Oh yeah, you're at the
same time. I mean, you know, I would I would
be looking at this and they'd be saying, Okay, I'm
pitching up my taile and all. And then and then
I go to the store to buy some other pain reliever,
and and I would say, no, Johnson and Johnson, But

(11:24):
then I think to myself, well, what about the other manufacturers.
I mean, it's just exactly that's and that's that's the
issue that we'll talk about in a bit here, because
we're gonna get into some of that copycat stuff. But
back to the story. So at this point in the
story they figured out that thailand All is the culprit,

(11:44):
and what we think is going was going on was
someone was taking the bottles of extra strength thailand All,
taking him out of the store, opening the capsules, adding
the potassium cyanide to them on the order of magnitude
of thousands of times a lethal dose. So this person
was dumping a lot of that stuff in there, then

(12:08):
putting them back together, putting them back in the bottle,
and somehow getting the bottle back on the shelf for
some other unsuspecting person to buy and consume. It wasn't
just pills, for it wasn't just a capsule full of that.
It also had a scene metaphine in it. I believe
that based on the fact that it was you know,

(12:29):
two is enough to kill you, and it was up
to ten thousand times required dose, I have a feeling
that it was probably no medication at all. Sides That
would be my guest too, because I think a scene
of meta few tailen All specifically is typically five hundred
milligrams at least it is now. I don't know if
it was then that's one of the differences between Thailand

(12:51):
and appall. I don't know if you know this or not,
but advill is two d and fifty milligrams a pill
and thailan All is five typically, so you can take
more advil in like a dose, you can better whatever.
But anyways, I just thought i'd ask if it was
I'm pretty sure that it was nothing, but science hard
to get that much into a capsule. I'm pretty sure

(13:13):
that they were just dumping out all the medication. Probably
why not go for the gusto. It's not like the
person is going to taste it in their food or something,
because it is a pill you just swallow. It's kind
of surprising that they whoever was, managed to do all
this without poisoning themselves. Yeah, they had to have some
working knowledge of it. You've got to presume that they

(13:35):
knew how to handle this substance without killing themselves away
to get it or how to make it. Yeah. Well,
and there's some of that as as you know we've
been alluding to. We'll be getting into as always in
the theories, of course. But the police in the FBI, Yeah,
the FBI got involved, began collecting pain reliever from stores
all over Chicago. Um. Now, because as we said, they

(14:00):
were all in the same area of town. The investigators
focused their first do you know what suburbs of Chicago names,
the neighborhoods were there? There was five of them. It
was elk Grove, Windfield, Arlington Heights, Elmhurst, and Lyle. Those

(14:21):
were the neighborhoods or the suburbs where this happened. I
like that you can actually pronounce Lyle, Lyle. There's a
weird there's a weird ass in there. I don't know,
It's fine, it doesn't matter. Yeah, okay, cool. So that's
a good good thing to know. We don't know exactly
how many bottles of this medicine were tainted. There was

(14:44):
They found five stores that had tampered bottles, but I
say we don't know the exact number because it's entirely
possible that there were more, and people who bought them
didn't end up taking them because they chucked them through
this whole thing blew up. If they had held on

(15:04):
to them, they could have sold them years later on eBay. Well,
of course, because they knew eBay was coming. Uh. What
what investigators had to do? And this had to be
just a horrible job. Is once they had collected all
of those bottles, they had to test the pills, and
they had to test each one because it wasn't every

(15:26):
pill in the bottle was poisoned. It was a handful
of them were poisoned in there, which makes it a
bit of a game of Russian roulette, like a literal
game of Russian roulette. Yeah, exactly, if not with a gun,
so sorry, with a bottle of pills that are going
to kill you, yeah, or somebody. And so the Some

(15:46):
of the bottles had just one pill, some of them
had several. That's the way it worked. It was several
per bottle, yes, and it seemed to have varied. Some
would have two or three, some seemed to have five
or six. The accounting, I mean, it's thirty some years later,
it's been rewritten. As always, we find different interpretations of
the numbers, so I'm not positive that's that's interesting about

(16:10):
the case of one of the first ones who died,
the girl. Now the second one, oh Adam Jess Janie,
yeah or Janie his name was pronounced. It's kind of
interesting that three pills came out of that bottle and
all three of them were poisonous. It's possible that more
than three pills came out of that bottle. It's possible

(16:31):
because they weren't all tainted, that other people took the
title at all and didn't suffer any el effects because
they didn't get the poison pilluck out. Huh. Well, anyway,
we can talk about that later. But well, no, I mean,
it's it's a it's a great point. It's just they're
not all gonna be poisoned. They were. That's a lot
of poison for somebody to sit there and painstakingly scoop

(16:54):
up and put into each pill, so it wouldn't be fun.
That was Adam Jannis married, by the way, I do
not believe he was, so it was just him. We
talked about this a little bit before, but the copycat
killings that happened because of this, this is another one
of those things where the media actually mahade the problem
worse because they told the world about this and exactly how,

(17:19):
exactly how it happened. Every yo yo with a grudge
poisoned pills. In the first month after this happened, two
hundred seventy cases of tampering. Oh my gosh, it was.
It was things as simple as somebody trying to kill
their spouse A lot of them did, or somebody they

(17:42):
didn't know, and then to cover their tracks, they all
fell followed the same path. I've got to cover my path.
So what do they do? They stick a bottle back
on the shelf and kill some other unsuspecting poor schlab.
It's a great way to cover your tracks, it is.
But it's freak and terrible, is what it is. Obviously,

(18:05):
murdering your spouse is kind of bad, too, ye, Murdering
anybody is bad. It's kind of bad. A lot of
these people, though, were not nearly as crafty about it
in terms of covering their tracks, because a bunch of
them got caught the Feds. They don't screw around about
this anymore. The puzz that went into effect are so stern.
There's a woman, what is her name, Stella Nickel. She

(18:29):
poisoned Eccedrian capsules with cyanide and killed her husband, and
then to again to cover her tracks, she poisoned some
other pills and stuck him in the bottom, stuck him
back on the shelf. She killed a woman named Susan
Snow and for those two deaths. She was sentenced to
ninety years in prison. Two people. Yea, she could potentially

(18:54):
have killed a lot more. Yeah, No, it's I'm not
I'm not questioning that sentence at all. It's just a
great example of once they put that rule in effect,
that they went after people like like a bulldog as
well they should. Yeah, as Devin had talked about earlier,
Johnson and Johnson through this whole thing came out like

(19:16):
the shining star. They're they're referenced in business books and
all this stuff about how to handle a consumer situation
because they were the first to institute the packaging regulations
on medication. Actually they did it before it became a regulation.
They just started doing it. They willingly pulled their products

(19:38):
from the shelves, They offered refunds, they pulled the hospitals
loved to use thailan, especially extra strength thailand all and
they yanked it all out of the hospitals willingly. They
didn't have to at the time that they did it.
Eventually the FDA came in and said, get that crap
out of here, but they had already gotten it out

(19:59):
of the stores and the hospitals. Um after things had
settled down, and they went on a huge pr campaign.
They offered coupons, they had refunded people already, they were
they were advertising how they had all these protections on
their pill bottles. In the end, one year after this happened,

(20:22):
they had only lost ten percent of their market share
and they were at the top to beginning now and
as you know they are, they're still going strong now.
But you know, I really, really it would have been
right after this whole thing happened, you know, right after
the whole they're pulling them off the shelves. You know,
you know that James J. Stock had to be tanking.
What a great time to buy Johnson and Johnson stock.

(20:44):
It would have been, Well, when we go back in
our time machine, that's what we'll do. But yeah, and
that might be part of this. Maybe the guy that
did this did it because he wanted to make their
stock tanks so you could buy a bunch of it.
Maybe I'm not going to well, this is that we're
at the theory. So that is a possible theory that
somebody did it to tank their stock. According to Joe,

(21:05):
Let's do you have any you want to flesh that
outn't also just occurred to me just I would say
that the yeah, it could have been a time traveler.
I don't know, but I would say that the FBI
needs to go back and just interview every stockbroker who yeah,
this sounds good. Our first theory, most of our theories

(21:27):
are going to be about specific people. The first theory
is about a guy named James Lewis, and James Lewis
is the name that you're gonna see more often than
not when you do any reading on this. The reason
is is that he didn't do the smartest thing ever.
When the story broke and everybody's freaking out, what does

(21:52):
he do? He writes a letter to Johnson and Johnson
requesting a million dollars to make the Kelly stop and
by the way, don't bring the cops in, and then
he signed his name to it, signed Bond. He didn't Joe,
but Johnson and Johnson didn't play ball. They immediately turned

(22:15):
over the letter to the authorities. I believe was the
FBI who figured out from the postmark where he was.
He was in New York and they went hunting for him. Yeah. Well,
they also had connected him to another letter that they
were looking into, which was a letter that he had
sent to Reagan threatening the life of the president because

(22:39):
Ronald Reagan was a president at the time. If Reagan
didn't change the tax code, I probably should have sent
that to Congress. Huh, because the tax showed Yeah, that
that really makes sense. Well, Lewis and his wife, they
were living in a hotel. I think it was a
short term stay hotel kind of situation if I understand

(23:01):
it correctly. Yeah, when they got wind or somehow they
got wind that the FEDS were after him, and they
went on the lamb because they didn't want to get arrested. Weird,
I know, crazy, um Louis and his wife were on
the lamb. Eventually a tip came in eight weeks after

(23:23):
they disappeared and he was arrested. His wife shortly thereafter
turned herself in, and of course the FBI went after
him full force because they were sure that he was
responsible for poisoning all of these people. In the end,
the only thing they could pin on him was the

(23:43):
extortion attempt a New York and not Chicago. Yeah, that's
a very good point, and that does play into a
lot of the stuff about him. But he got sentenced
to twenty five years in prison. He served thirteen, but
he did get a I don't remember exactly what the
reason was he was parole, but he's a He's an

(24:04):
elderly guy at this point, and I don't know that
they thought he was a threat anymore. But he did
serve time for the extortion a loan. They're still trying
to hang the crime on him. They are because you know,
guilty of one crime or one is good enough for
the other. Right, No, no, it's not. Um. Here's the

(24:27):
problems with Louis being the perpetrator of this entire thing.
He was in New York. He was in New York.
He would have had to have somehow gotten to Chicago
to drop off all the poison pills. Well, we know
from his wife's co workers that he showed up every

(24:50):
day to have lunch with his wife for almost every day.
They don't remember him missing hardly ever, and it wasn't
ever a consecutive set of days. Now out thank you Google,
I figured out it takes today twelve plus hours by
car to drive from New York to Chicago by today's cars.

(25:11):
By today's cars were much slower in those days, were
they get like thirty Well, they were a little faster
than that. But the point is that is a full
twenty four hours of time just in driving, never mind
having to stop sleep, eating, drop off the poison. Yeah,
like smuggle them back onto the shelves exactly. He I

(25:33):
mean he, Okay, he could have flown there, But if
this guy's living in a short term s r oh
kind of situation, I don't think he's got a lot
of money for an airplane ticket. Plus at leads a
huge paper trail. It could have been under a false name,
but could they They probably it's probably too late to

(25:53):
check on this. But of the batch numbers, yeah, before
any of those distributed in New York, because that's odd
actually where he would have had to buy them and
tamper with them. He's not going to try to Chicago
spend twenty four hours tampering with pills. I'm going to
have to say, no, I don't think, because I would
imagine that the Feds would have tracked that down and

(26:16):
if there was anything link, they'd a slap the charges
on him for it. I don't think so. Yeah, it
doesn't make much. I know they're still interested in this
guy as a suspect. Absolutely, and yeah, it's recently, is
two thousand eleven. They collected DNA and fingerprints from him
and his wife. They have buff gets, but they tried

(26:38):
to track it, you know, to see if they could
pin anything to him. Yeah, and there's they have nothing.
Here's why I'm sure they're wrong about Lewis. What was
this is that he didn't need he didn't need to
really kill all these people to extore Johnson and Johnson.
He could have tampered with pills, put them on shelves
at stores, put them towards the back so they're not
less likely to get. But then send your letter to
Johnson and Johnson demanding a million dollars, telling him you

(27:00):
know you sent me a million bucks, I'll tell you
which stores have got poisonous tail and all the shows exactly. No,
there was no need for him to actually and he
didn't send his letter until everybody had died. Pretty much.
His letter was a crime of opportunity. I mean, this guy,
he was He ran scams, He did a lot of

(27:23):
shady things to make a box. And I am pretty
sure that that's the deal, is that it was another
way for him. Hey, honey, maybe I can make a
couple of bucks off. They may not give me the million,
but maybe they'll give me something. Oh oops, I'm thirteen
years later. I'm just getting out of jail. Work out
so well for him. I really do think the fb

(27:45):
I should stop wasting their time in this guy, though,
I agree. Next up on our Theories slash suspect suspect list. Wow,
that was a cool pronunciation. I have no idea. Yeah,
the suct list. Yeah, yeah, I think I was trying
to say suspect and unsub at the same time because
I watched one of those TV shows that uses unsub

(28:06):
all the time. Yeah. No, it's a terrible thing to say.
But you're you know, you're not jerking my chin. No,
I really don't. Um it's unknown subject unsub. It's a
dumb thing. Okay, can we We're going to just leave
that behind. Yes, please, Let's talk about our next crazy
suspect yep, which is a lady by the name of

(28:29):
Lori Dan. Here's her story. This is really tragic and
sad is She was a woman who, on the of
May seven, first tried to set up a firebomb in
an elementary school, then set fire to the home of

(28:52):
people who she baby sat for. By the way, the
mom and the two kids were in the basement, though
they did get out. How old is uh she was?
I don't think. I think she was not quite thirty
years old when that happened. What else did she do? Well,
she went to an elementary school with guns. She shot

(29:13):
and killed one boy and wounded several other children. She
then left that school, talked her way into the house
that was nearby, and then shot one of the people
who lived there before everybody got out, and in the
end she shot herself. That's quite the spree. It is

(29:35):
the spree. And and well, okay, so this lady went
on a spree. Why is everybody trying to pin this
tragic story of her back to the titland five years later? Well,
let's walk through the points of why it could be her,
which is, first, she lived in the Chicago area at
the time. She had tried to poison people before. And

(30:01):
if we look at what she did on the day
she died, she took snacks and juice boxes and laced
them with arsenic and then some of them she mailed,
something she had done several days prior to her spree,
and mailed them to people. Others she delivered by hand,
trying to poison these folks. It didn't kill anybody, thankfully,

(30:26):
because the arsenic was so deluded and it tasted terrible
that nobody would consume the entire cookie or juice or
whatever it might have been that she poisoned. But I mean,
not to speak ill of the dead, but this woman
who obviously had a mental condition, and I'm not being rude,
she did have a mental condition. She had some depression issues,

(30:50):
there were some things going on. But I just don't
see your organ being organized enough to have pulled off
the thailand On murders. I mean, well, also, you know,
she obviously knew how to make or procure or potassium cyanide.
Why bottled with arsenic? Arsenick is not actually that effective,
like a really weak dose of arsenic too, right, And

(31:12):
and whoever did this, they were pretty slick on getting
in and out of stores and nobody noticed anything was amiss.
She was not that good with her product tampering. Because
of the juice boxes, A bunch of people noticed that
the corners were pulled up and they were leaking. So
that's that's a giant problem obviously. I just I mean,

(31:37):
everything she did called attention to what she did, and
I just don't think she had the wherewithal to be
sneaky enough to get away with it the in between
the original poisonings and her crimes for here did she
was she institutionalized for any like the time? I don't
think she was. She she had been a lot of

(31:58):
stuff that happened prior to her spree. She had been married,
the marriage had fallen apart, she was in having a
really rough time, But I don't remember her having been
put into an institutional situation at all. Yeah, it just
seems odd. That's if she would she like to poison people,
that there'd be this five year gap between the original
poisonings and then this crime spree. Yeah no, And it's

(32:21):
being institutionalized would explain why there was a gap, But
I don't. I don't remember seeing anything about her having
been locked up. But we'll go on to our next suspect,
which I'll be honest, this one's a bit of a
kookie outlandish one, but that's the Yeah. HiT's the unit
bomber ted Kazinski where uh in a prison? Uh? The

(32:46):
FBI collected DNA evidence from Kazinski several years ago because
they wanted to see if maybe he had been responsible
for this. It's understandable in the late seventies early eighties
he had been active in the Chicago area. I think
he had done a couple of things, a couple of

(33:08):
bombings or something like that. I can't remember what he
did in the early eighties, but they knew that's where
he was. Plus his family had a home in that area,
so they checked him. His specialty was sending letter bombs
to people. Yeah, I was gonna say it seems like
the m O was a little different there. Well, and
go figure. His DNA didn't match anything that they have,

(33:29):
and as whatever they have, he also singled out specific
people for his letter bombs for whatever reasons. Not that's
not justifiable ones, obviously, but he didn't just necessarily kill
people randomly. Yeah. Well, he vehemently denied that he was
involved with this. I mean, he's fest up to most
of what he did, but he vehemently denies that he
was ever involved in this. So that theory, I'm not

(33:52):
going to give it any I'm not going to give
it legs the bottom of the stack. Now we're going
to go on to our next suspect, and that is
a guy by the name of Roger Arnold. Roger Arnold,
This guy's story is really kind of sad. He was
a dockhead at the time in the Chicago area who

(34:13):
went out one night, had a couple of drinks, maybe
one too many, and made a couple of statements while
he was at the bar about the poisonings, which gave
some people around him pause and go figure. Somebody called
the cops. Yeah, I don't know, but I don't know
exactly what he said either. I couldn't ever really pin

(34:36):
that down. But it doesn't really matter. The point is
he said something that alarmed folks. There were some and
when he got arrested, the cops started looking into him.
What do they find? Will they find some weak connections
between him and some of the victims. There was the
connection between Mary Reiner and him. The connection between them

(35:01):
was that Arnold had worked at a jewel warehouse where
her father also worked. There was also the fact that,
according to some newspaper research, the police had gotten a
tip that his ex wife had been committed to a
psychiatric ward at a hospital which just happened to be

(35:23):
across the street from the store where Mary Reiner purchased
her taile at all, so this is two connections to her.
Oh and by the way, he was a do it
yourself chemist because when they searched his house they found
unregistered guns and chemicals and beakers and funnels. Oh my,

(35:47):
probably or something. I don't know exactly what he was doing,
but what they found was not what they wanted. And
by they, I mean the cops because he didn't have
potassium cyanide. He had potassium carbonate, which is harmless. I'm
not gonna do anything to you know. I don't know
what he was using it for. And he never said.

(36:10):
This is a quote. This is the greatest quote ever
from somebody who's in trouble. I'm not saying what the
chemicals were used for, but it was nothing illegal. Yeah,
he got charged. He got charges for the weapons and
um assault. I don't I think the assault was something

(36:31):
related to his wife, prior issues between he and his wife.
But he didn't take this so well. He got pretty
worked up and he carried a huge grudge about it
for a while. Uh he one of the invested interrogators
actually said that they quoted him as saying, I'd like

(36:53):
to be on the homic side of the guy that
turned me in for what he did to me. So
he's got a huge beef. Whoever called him in Probably
forgiveness would have been a better path for him. It
all turned up for him. I'm just looking up uses
of potassium chloride carbonate, carbonate. Sorry, okay, let me know
what you find. I'm going to China production, Okay, drawing agents.

(37:18):
You can use it to make grass jelly, which is
a Chinese and Southeast Asian food. It's kind of myriad
number of uses, but nothing. You can make meat or
wine with it. You can suppress fires, that's the thing. Yeah,
that's uh. You see it in fire extinguishers. Yeah, yeah,

(37:38):
that's so. There are a couple of things. None of
them seem particularly interesting treacherous, No, not at all, but
it's interesting. What you know, I'm not going to tell
you what it is, but I'm not going to tell
you what to use it for. But it wasn't illegal,
Like why wouldn't you just tell him what it is? Then?
I don't know. I mean, for all I know, the
guy was using it to cut coke. Yeah, I mean

(37:58):
he could have been doing stuff in this is that
as he was selling cocon on the side it's illegal.
Oh yeah, it's just why you wouldn't say anything. Yeah, absolutely, Well,
it's not illegal to use a potassium carbonade until you
actually cut the coke with it. Yes, it's true, until
the cocaine comes into the equation. Technically. Joe's right. Well,

(38:23):
here's where everything kind of creamed off track for him.
There was a guy by the name of John Stanisha.
I want to say, I want to pronounce it anybody, okay.
Stanisha didn't know Arnold. He had been out, he'd had

(38:43):
some drinks. It was last call and he was leaving
the Lincoln Avenue bar on the eighteenth of June three,
So this is a full year or not quite a
year after the poisonings Arnold saw. I'm believed that he
was the same heavy set man that he remembered, probably

(39:06):
being the one that ratted him out of the dude
he was drunkenly saying stuff too. So he walked up
to him. He yelled at him, you turned me in
at a shot ing point blank. That's not great, and
killed him. Not smart, not the best idea. Arnold was
trying and convicted and sentenced to thirty years for murder

(39:28):
but there was never any strong connection to him for
the title and all. No, no, he was. It was
a matter he just he was opened his mouth at
the wrong place in time. He probably just made a
stupid joke. He gets drunk and it's like, oh yeah,
I did that to cover up my wife's murder. You
know that he knew the girl and was like, oh yeah,

(39:52):
that girl was a blip blie blee and she got
what she deserved. And people like, wait, what, okay, hang
on here as simple as at okay, we're ready to
keep going. Yes, is the next one up on our
list of suspects? Isn't really it's a terrible name because
it's based on a profile. It is an unknown, anti social,

(40:16):
slash angry at society male, likely white. Let's be fair, though,
that's probably the profile of whoever did this. It is
typically guys are more likely to murder than women are,
and you have to be anti social and angry at
society to do something like this. I mean, the thing

(40:37):
that I shake my head at every time about this
profile is profiles work because they help you pin it
down on somebody. This profile is so vague it borders
on useless. It was I was never nowhere near Chicago

(40:59):
at anytime. In Okay, here's here's the profile. The profile
of was of someone who was angry at society and
wanted to lash out at it. And they believed that
that person was at the time or possibly had received
psychiatric care, so all of Chicago. This uh, this subject

(41:24):
could have also complained about how society was wronging him
and probably tried to contact someone that he considered to
be in a position of power. That person didn't recognize
his communication or basically refused to listen to him crazy,
which made him angrier. The thailand all killer would have lived. Obviously,

(41:48):
I think we've established this in the Chicago area and
had a decent knowledge of at least the neighborhoods that
this took place in. This is where I go. This
is really a borderline profile. He had to own a
vehicle to get to the distances between each store up.

(42:11):
I don't know. I mean, I don't think that's true,
but okay, I don't either could have taken a bus.
I could have happened over months. I mean, I mean,
there's a million ways to get around in Chicago. So
it's it's really it's it's funny. The things that actually
really stand out to me for this profile that I

(42:32):
think have some validity are that they figure that this
person had to have worked in a job or industry
that gave access to potassium cyanide. Those are the gold
and silver mining industries, film processing at the time, or

(42:53):
some form of chemical manufacturing, which also means that it's
a low wage job, which would fuel the anger issue
that they talked about because they had said in this
profile making low wage, so therefore in kind of a
semi poverty situation. But why would it be a low
wage job and there's lots of good paying jobs, and
you know, the chemical industry and things like that, it

(43:15):
would be what somebody would consider a menial job. This
is what the profiler believes. Yes, yes, but I can
see somebody if I work in a chemical factory and yeah,
I make an okay living, but this job sucks, then
they're angry because their lot in life is terrible to them.

(43:36):
I want to address the fact that somebody could walk
out of their job with something like that. That seems wrong.
That's a little scary, really scary. It's a good question
about how tightly they control that stuff seems like something
that's that lethal, maybe you put a lock on it.
I've got one thing to see it about that two words,

(43:57):
Aldrich James, A big Russian ball was walking out of
CIA headquarters with grocery bags full cloth, secret documents. You know,
it seems like they should have kept a lock on
that too. What do you think about this chemical company
over there? Yeah? Yeah, to think that, if this is right,

(44:21):
this person could have at any time lashed out again
in some method using this poison. I think we're lucky
that they didn't. I don't know why it didn't happen again,
but it's scary that there's a good question as to
why it didn't happen again. Yeah, I don't know. Um.

(44:42):
I mean, it could be as simple as one of
the people And this isn't something that I've seen in
the theories, and this is me just kind of spitballing.
But it's possible that one of the people that was
involved in this whole thing made themselves a victim. If
you think about it, one of the ways to be
remembered is to die with everybody else. Also a good

(45:03):
way to not get caught. What I was what I
was actually thinking, is that is that one of the
people here, the person who did it, wanted to kill
one person who was probably one of the early people
to die, because you know, the question is is why
Thailand all why do you pick Thailand all from for
the delivery vehicle, and why is it? Why is it

(45:23):
that a certain number of people die? But then it's
all quote from the shelves, and then you don't do
it again. This is always Joe's theory, though with any
like big murder, it's always that one person was the
victim and then you just kind of did a couple
other people for fun. But the copycats proof that that's
actually what happened. There's there's the woman. Uh, there was

(45:46):
a woman that oh gosh, I can't remember what pills
she poisoned, but she poisoned her husband and then stuck
a couple of bottles back on the shelves to cover
her tracks. To me, it looked like her husband was
the first victim. People continually did that. Now with the
woman that I'm thinking of specifically, she and a lot

(46:08):
of these these people didn't know what they were doing,
and they left trace evidence behind, whether it was in
the pills that were poisoned or stuff in their house,
But I don't. I didn't see anything that said that
something like that was found in the victims houses. And
you would think that if it was somebody who was

(46:28):
trying to kill that person and then covered up, there
would have been something discovered. Because people tend to be
sloppy and not think about all the angles, especially at
a time when crime c s I Shows were not
the thing and everybody didn't consider themselves an expert. They
just didn't think anybody would know. Yeah, but it may

(46:48):
be some people are smarter than other people. You know,
criminals get busted pretty readily and fast because they tend
to be kind of dumb. But if somebody was a
little smarter than the average bear, then they could have
probably covered their tracks a little more or just took
more time with it. Yeah, so let's let's let's let's
think about this for a second. Now, you want to
murder your say, or your your husband or your wife

(47:09):
for the life insurance money or whatever, and you have
to take away. So if so, let's say you get
your wife, you're gonna kill your husband. Your husband has
chronic back pain. He's taking that he's taking pills pretty
much constantly for it, and like if it wasn't chronic
back pain, say, for example, your husband has severe allergies
and he's having to take manatorial capsules for well, that's

(47:30):
your delivery vehicle. So if I was going to look
at this, because if you're planning on killing a specific person,
you can't get these all out there on the shelves
and then into this guy's medicine cabinet waiting because by
the time, because I have ad my medicine cabinet, I
take it rarely because I rarely get a headache or
anything like that. So in other words, if you're planning

(47:53):
I'm murdering somebody with the title and all, you've got
to be pretty certain that he's gonna eat that he's
gonna eat the poison pill very shortly before the whole thing.
It's the news stands. So if I were the FBI,
I'd go back and I'd look at all the victims
and all their families and friends and loved ones and stuff.
Find out the victim of the chronic pain issues and
ask yourself who wanted him to be dead? And I

(48:14):
think that we might have the person there that's that's
that's I mean, that's that's that's a course of action.
But unfortunately, I imagine at this point, thirty some years later,
that course of action has probably been run dry a
hundred times. I'm sure. I don't know. I don't know.
But let's let's go to our final suspect. Our last

(48:37):
suspect is Johnson and Johnson's potential cover up. They did
have access to the pills. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Because
remember we talked about here when we were going through this,
is that Johnson and Johnson appeared from the beginning to
be as much a victim of the entire thing as

(49:00):
of people who died. And they they did seem to
do everything right. They were taking all the steps. Everybody
thought they were great, and their pr folks were working overtime,
and that might be what they wanted you to believe,
is that they were the innocent victims. Yeah, they a lot.
It's it's really interesting. I had never ever thought about this.

(49:24):
There's a guy by the name of Scott Barts. He
wrote a book called The Tailing All Mafia, and I'm
really sad I wasn't able to get ahold of it
ahead of time. And I'm gonna track this book down,
but he brings up some points about this story. They're
really hard to ignore and all in all rather disturbing.
First off, do you remember how I said that all

(49:47):
those bottles of Thailand all were gathered up from the
stores and and had to be tested. Johnson and Johnson
did the testing. It wasn't the FBI or the police
or some independent lab. It was Johnson and Johnson who
was doing it, which means that they could technically control
the results that got published about how much was found. Well,

(50:09):
are you sure about that? Because I find it hard
to believe that the FBI would turn over criminal evidence
and not keep it in their in their own possession.
I find that really really hard to believe. This is
based on if you want to use that at a trial,
once it's once it's left the chain of evidence, it's
useless in a trial. I'm not going to disagree with
you at all, Joe. This is this is based on
the research that Barts is saying he did. He's saying

(50:33):
that Johnson and Johnson was doing all of the testing
and that it wasn't a crime lab. I mean, it's conceivable,
but I still find it really hard to believe. So
they were the ones who did the recall, So they
were the ones who had a lot of the pills,
and that might be, Hey, we've already got them all here,
let us just test them and we'll save you the
time and will incur No, I know, I know. I

(50:55):
read an interview with this guy and which he said
that the FBI just chipped all this stuff straight to
Johnson and Johnson who destroyed it. And but I'm really funny.
That hard to believe. It's it does make you lift
and eyebrow. Here's the next thing. There was a victim.
We talked about her a couple of times. Now, Mary Reiner. Yeah, okay,

(51:16):
here's the thing with Mary. She had just come home
from the hospital because she had just had a baby. Yeah,
congratulations Mary. It's really depressing now, yeah, I know, it's
not not so happy. Thailand All was the major brand
used by hospitals for pain relief. It was their go

(51:38):
to and they liked the extra strength Thailand All. Mary
didn't have in her home a bottle of extra strength
Thailand All. She had a bottle of regular Thailand All,
which was her preferred Yeah, yeah, it was her. It
was the one that she liked. The pills were in

(52:00):
that bottle. We're not regular strength. They were extra strength Thailand.
All Bart speculates that what happened is that she was
sent home from the hospital with a single days dosage
of extra strength Thailand all and said, well, I can

(52:20):
keep him in this little thing and you gave me,
or I can just drop him in my tail at
all bottle. So she put him in the bottle that
she already had in her home. How many pills were
in the bottle there was There would have been a
day's dosage. I think it's one dose every four hours,
typically four to six two pills every four to six hours,

(52:41):
twenty four hours. That's like ten pills, ten plus pills
somewhere in there, minus what she took, of course. But
the thing is, all of the pills that were found
and identified to have been laced with the potassium cyanide
we're in stores. No hospital stock was listed as tampered

(53:04):
and contaminated with Where the rest of the pills in
her regular pill bottle, extra strength or regular, They were
all the extra strength. It was almost as if it
was an empty bottle. So I do this. I don't
know if you guys do this or not, But like
when I go to the store, it's cheaper and more
effective to just buy like a big bottle of the pills.
And but you don't want to keep that in your

(53:25):
medicine cabinet, so you keep that someplace ELTs, but you
just keep refilling and it's just whatever bottle you had.
So I guess it's possible that she was doing that. Yeah,
and that's why I'm thinking that she must have well,
and that's why Bart says she must have taken the
hospital pills that she was given, purchased extra strength. I mean,
she was pregnant. She was nine months pregnant. You kind

(53:45):
of bump it up a little bit. I feel like
that's probably true. You know, we're getting a little more
pat a large bottle of extra strength, but she had
her regular bottle leftover. Math I don't know, I don't know,
I don't know. I never saw anything saying that that
was in her house. But here's here's here's what the
problem is. Sure this begs to say that the tampering

(54:06):
happened somewhere than other than between store and the consumers
from the hospital because she had pills from the hospital. Yeah,
I know, it's it raises issues because everything we've told
was somebody pulled him off the shelf, tampered and put

(54:27):
him back bottle. No. I mean it's also possible that
you grab an extra or a regular strength Helen instead
of an extra strengthle pills. Yeah, and you're just throwing
pills back in bottles and yeah, you know you got
a bunch of extra strength and a regular one. Yeah,
that's that's absolutely Boston as I don't know, and also

(54:50):
Barts rose book, and he probably should know that he
used to work for Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, he's a
whistleblower and he was he was fired, but so he
might have a bit of a we might have a
bit of a bias there. But this does suggest that
it was the pills were tampered with, but before they
hit distribution exactly. It would suggest that except for like

(55:10):
what what Devon says, but also where did Barts get
that from? Was it is that actually an FBI report?
I don't know where. I don't know where Bart's got
that information. That's why I wanted to get the book,
and I haven't been able to track down a copy
of it yet. Johnson and Johnson believe I understand it's
a self published book. You probably got to go to
his website. Well, that would explain why I couldn't find

(55:32):
it in Amazon. Well, no, I was actually looking like
the library and places like that for free copies, just
to be able to get electronic copy to read fast.
But so a lot of problems. He Barts is basically
saying that what Johnson and Johnson has told us isn't
our right lie if this whole hospital poison connection is true.

(55:55):
The other thing that Barts says is that there is
illusion between the f d A and Johnson and Johnson
that is specifically related to evidence that was given by
the f d A about how long it would take
for the potassium cyanide to corrode and break through the

(56:20):
walls of the capsule. It's probably pretty caustic. Yeah, he
has said that their timeline of it, he's hinted at
that they may have fudged it so that it said
that it acted faster than it really could have. In
other words, he's saying that Johnson and Johnson said, oh yeah, no,

(56:43):
you'd be able to tell the pills would be rotting
away in a matter of days. I'm making this part
up a presumption of just using this as an example,
where an actual fact, it would be a matter of
weeks before the corrosion would be enough to destroy the pills. Sure,
I think the timeline that you've just used it is
probably off. But yeah, yeah, no, and I know that
timeline is off, but I'm just using that. That's what

(57:03):
he's saying, because he's saying Johnson and Johnson put that
out so that they could say that it wasn't in
the pill before it left their hands. It's important to
note that the FBI initially didn't think that the bottles

(57:24):
that had the poison pills had been opened before they
reached those consumers. So the FBI was curious. There was
a DA who looked into this but got shut down.
They didn't they had some reasonably the bottles had not
been opened before they were bought. That is according to him, yes,

(57:46):
according to parts. How could they possibly know that, because
but by the time they have examined the bottles, the
bottles have been opened. I know that they pulled from
the shelves other ones that were but even that, I mean,
but if they tell yeah, if it's a plastic snap
lid and that's it, it's really hard to take understand that,
and the only way they were able to have to

(58:07):
find out that those bottles had poison pills and was
to open them. Right. Yeah, well but you know, I
guess the presumption is right is that you get you
have you in the lab, you get all these bottles
and you go, Okay, bottle one open, Okay, it was sealed.
Test all the pills and nothing in there. Okay, cool,
bottle too open, Okay it was sealed. Oh there's poison

(58:29):
and knees. Right. But I again, I have literally never
encountered a pill bottle that didn't have the five different
millions of seals, So I have no idea what I
remember the old ones where it was with the cotton
that's in there to keep the pills from rattling around
so they don't destroy themselves. Yeah, that used to be

(58:50):
in It was kind of a tube of cotton that
was bent in the middle. So let's just say it
was I don't know, four inches long, so it folded
half was a two inch strip because you could tell
that a machine pushed it into the bottle to fold
it and then pulled back out, so it could be
as simple as well, this is weird that cotton is

(59:13):
just jammed into the bottle and doesn't look like it
should be. So I don't know. I mean, this is
speculation on my part as much as yours, But that's
the only thing that I can guess. The thing that
I think that we should also bring up so that
folks understand some of why maybe there's issues with what

(59:35):
Barts is saying is how Thailand all was produced because
there was the manufacturing plant, like we said before, Pennsylvanian
Puerto Rico, and they made the raw stuff what was
in the middle or what was in the capsule. They
then sent that in a drum to another plant where

(59:59):
that plant put it in the capsule, put him in
the bottle, and then shipped them. What a tedious job
it would be filling those capsules. Now, yeah, yeah, one
guy with a little with a little spoon at a time.
But so it's it's possible that at that second step

(01:00:24):
where the mix was put into the capsule, it could
have been poisoning inserted at that point. Now I don't
I don't buy what Barts is saying. Yeah, he sounds
kind of like a disgruntled X employee. He's a whistleblower
and he seems to have taken on a crusade against
the pharmaceutical industry in general. Yeah, and also I just

(01:00:46):
don't see how I don't see how that it could
have been tainted at this particular point, at that that
production facility or that packaging facility and then wind up
only in a very small, small area of Chicago. I'm
not going to disagree with that at all. That again,
that's the problem. But I think that's the problem with
a lot of these conspiracy theories is that it is

(01:01:09):
cause and effect, a focused to be focused without looking
at all the surrounding factors. That, unfortunately is all of
our potential suspects. I I don't know which one to
go to. I mean, unfortunately, that silly FBI profile is

(01:01:33):
the most likely. But yeah, but we'd he would have
continued it for a lot longer, probably, you would think, unless,
as you said, that person was locked up for some reason.
Is a psychiatry or just a prison scenario. Yeah, I'm
still liking the idea that it was actually somebody who
knew one of the original people who died and wanted

(01:01:54):
to kill them. And I would say, FBI, go find
out which victim had chronic pain issues, find out who
wanted to feel that person, and there you go. Well,
if you are listeners have any theories of your own,
feel free to share those with us. If you go
to our website, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com,

(01:02:15):
you can leave a comment. On the website. Of course,
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(01:02:37):
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(01:02:58):
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(01:03:20):
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(01:03:42):
If you like the shirt, you want a shirt, buy
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just as a fun little Oh yeah, that's right. We
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think if I bought it, thinking side shirt, I could
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(01:04:06):
do alright, gang, Well, that is all of the pertinent
facts and details that I can think that we have
to give to everybody. We're going to go ahead and
wrap this one up and we will talk to you
next week. Everybody. Bye, guys. Do you have a ton all?

(01:04:31):
I got a headache,