In fall 1982, Chicagoland was shocked when multiple victims died after consuming Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with the poison potassium cyanide. The first victim to die was 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, grew ill after taking pills and died in a hospital soon after. While mourning Adam’s death, his brother Stanley and sister-in-law Theresa died as well. They had consumed pills from the same poisoned bottle.

When three additional victims all had died in a similar fashion, investigators put together the Tylenol connection. Police and city officials spread urgent warnings throughout the Chicago area, broadcasting on radio and TV as well as delivering warnings in surrounding suburbs.

Enter the FBI

Once the poisoned Tylenol was discovered, the FBI entered the case and started an intensive investigation. They discovered that while a number of Tylenol bottles had been tampered with, the bottles had been manufactured at different factories. Instead of tampering with the capsules when they were manufactured and packaged, as investigators had first thought, the psychopath had bought Tylenol bottles from multiple grocery stores and pharmacies, added poison to the capsules, and then placed the bottles back on the shelf. As the investigation continued, another three tainted Tylenol bottles were discovered.

Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of McNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, blared warnings to hospitals and distributors, brought Tylenol production to a halt, and issued a nationwide recall of Tylenol products; a big job because more than 30 million bottles were out there. Of course, the company warned people not to ingest any Tylenol or other products that contained acetaminophen.

After continued investigation, officials learned that only gel capsules had been poisoned. Solid pills were safe so Johnson & Johnson soon was offering bottles of solid pills in exchange for capsules that were turned in.

Mini Mystery: Psychopath

No question that Stella Nickell has had a tough life. She grew up in a poor family in the Pacific Northwest, and at sixteen, when most girls are thinking about next year’s prom or their new boyfriend, Stella got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Over the next dozen years she married and had a second daughter, but her marriage went down in flames.

Then life seemed to take an upswing. At thirty-two, she fell for Bruce Nickell, and they were wed in 1976. Ten years later, on a balmy June evening, Bruce got home from work, told Stella he had a headache, and took four Excedrins. He took a short stroll out on the deck, and then he collapsed.

Stella called 911. When the EMTs arrived, they saw Bruce was in bad shape and got him to a helicopter where he was airlifted to a Seattle hospital. The diagnosis was emphysema, a condition that makes breathing difficult and enlarges the heart.

Wrong Diagnosis!

When Bruce died, Stella said that emphysema didn’t make sense as a diagnosis. It must have been something else.

Then Stella heard about the case of Sue Snow, a bank manager. Snow had died of poisoning, in fact, from cyanide-laced Excedrin. Stella alerted the police, who realized that Bruce Nickell had also taken Excedrin and probably had been poisoned. Cops immediately focused their investigative attention on Sue’s husband, Paul Webking, but he passed a polygraph test.

Then something happened that turned their suspicion toward Stella. She showed them two bottles of Excedrin she had bought, and both were tainted with cyanide. Cops had found only five tainted bottles of Excedrin anywhere, so the idea of her having two of them seemed highly unlikely.

The question was: Why should she prefer to have Bruce die of poisoning rather than emphysema? Because Bruce’s insurance policy would pay an extra $100,000 for an accidental death, including from poisoning.

“I think that she probably killed Bruce and expected them to find out that he died from cyanide poisoning,” said Detective Mike Dunbar. Investigators in Seattle say her plan was foiled when Bruce was diagnosed as having died from natural causes, so she spiked three more bottles and put them on store shelves. Then, when bank manager Snow died of cyanide poisoning, Stella could step forward and say, “See. Look at what happened to her and Bruce.”

But Stella forgot one thing. The FBI found green crystals in the cyanide that turned out to be algae destroyer used to kill algae in a fish tank. Stella had an aquarium but said she never used algae destroyer. However, a local fish-store manager, Tom Noonan, says she did.

She likely mixed the algae crystals in a bowl but forgot to clean it completely before she mixed cyanide in it.

A year and a half after her husband and Snow died, Stella went on trial. A surprise witness against her was her own daughter, who said she had heard her mother talking about murdering her father.

The jury found Stella guilty, and the judge sentenced her to ninety years in jail. One of the assistant district attorneys suggested that it would not be a “good idea to get a headache around her and ask for an aspirin.”

Suspects

The police uncovered a number of suspects in the course of investigation. James W. Lewis sent Johnson & Johnson a letter asking for $1 million. In exchange, he said he would stop poisoning bottles. However, investigators never came up with enough evidence to pin him to the crimes. He was convicted of extortion instead and spent thirteen years in prison, released on parole in 1995. One TV station reported that police considered him guilty of the crimes but couldn’t prosecute him because they didn’t have enough evidence. Lewis continues to deny responsibility for the poisonings.

Another suspect, Roger Arnold, was cleared but suffered a nervous breakdown during the process. Another tragedy ensued out of Arnold’s belief that he had been turned in by a bartender named Marty Sinclair. In 1983 he shot and killed a man whom he mistook for Sinclair. Arnold was convicted in January 1984 and served fifteen years of a thirty-year sentence.

Another suspect was Laurie Dann, who shot and poisoned people in May 1988 in and around Winnetka, Illinois, but no direct connection was found.

Real-Life Drama

Author Agatha Christie used thallium as a murder weapon in her 1961 novel The Pale Horse. Each victim in the novel suffered hair loss, which was a clue to discovering the type of murder. Her novel is credited with saving at least a few lives after readers recognized the symptoms of thallium poisoning that her novel describes.

High Marks

The media gave Johnson & Johnson kudos for the way the company handled the Tylenol murders. The Washington Post said, “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.” The article complimented the company for its honesty and for establishing good relations with the Chicago police, the FBI, and the Food and Drug Administration. Tylenol sales plunged in the aftermath but managed to rebound within a year.

A horrific event like this always brings its share of copycat psychos out of the woodwork, and a number of similar attacks occurred in the years after. Murder was involved in three Excedrin attacks, and fear of attacks brought one product, Encaprin, to an end. Additionally, the problem led the pharmaceutical industry to move away from capsules, and the FDA established stricter packaging requirements.

Copycat Killers

Years ago, I remember hearing about a guy who went berserk in a school and started shooting whoever he could. The police came and finally were able to put him down, but a few days later, a similar school shooting occurred, and a day or so after that, another.

When I looked through some records, I got a surprise. Violent acts like these tend to occur in threes, and the criminal act doesn’t necessarily have to be a school shooting. It can be one of a wide variety of acts, all violent.

I have a theory about why violent copycat behavior like this occurs. That is, other people filled with angst and rage are looking for a solution to their problems, just as the first person who went berserk in a school was. These people see the first person’s solution, which answers their need for violence, so they simply copy it.

Twenty-five years after the killings, in January 2009, investigators reviewed the Chicago Tylenol murder case. They had received numerous tips leading up to the anniversary. In a written statement, the FBI explained:

This review was prompted, in part, by the recent twenty-fifth anniversary of this crime and the resulting publicity. Further, given the many recent advances in forensic technology, it was only natural that a second look be taken at the case and recovered evidence.

In January 2010, both James W. Lewis and his wife submitted DNA samples and fingerprints to authorities. Lewis stated, “If the FBI plays it fair, I have nothing to worry about.”

Who Am I?

1. Whenever I came on staff in a hospital, the cold-case count—dead bodies—mysteriously went up, baffling authorities.
2. I had a terrible relationship with my father. When he died in 1982, my mother gave me a book of his that bulged with all kinds of horrific stories involving violence and death. It pleased me greatly, and for the first time I thought my father wasn’t such a bad guy.
3. The book inspired me to collect more ghoulish stories and photos, and when one of my father’s colleagues commented, I said, “If I’m ever accused of murder, this will prove I’m mentally unstable.”
4. I went to medical school and did well when I graduated. Someone asked me why I loved the idea of being a doctor, and I said, “It gives me the opportunity to come out of the emergency room with a hard-on and tell some parents that their kid had just died.”
5. On another occasion I gave a woman medication to increase her blood pressure and then had trouble getting her elderly mother out of the room. After her daughter died, it gave me great pleasure to tell the mother, “She’s dead now. You can go look at her.”
6. I’ve always liked to read detective novels. And I liked making up stories for the various girlfriends I had. They though my stories were sick and sordid, which is exactly why I liked telling them.
7. I also loved Jim Jones, the religious leader who made his congregation drink poisoned Kool-Aid.
8. I once described a fantasy I had that went like this: “Picture a school bus crammed with kids smashing head on with a trailer truck loaded with gasoline. We’re summoned. We get there in a jiffy, just as another gasoline truck rams the bus. Up in flames it goes. Kids are hurled through the air everywhere, on telephone poles, on the street, especially along an old barbed-wire fence along the road. All burning.”
9. I worked in a VA hospital where author Tom Philbin used to be treated.

Answer: I am Dr. Michael Swango, a so-called angel of death who worked in a variety of hospitals. When I wasn’t treating people, I was murdering them.

Poison, a Cold Case’s Best Friend

Murderers, particularly female murderers, favor poison as a means of killing their victims. In some cases, the poison is not detected, either because of a lack of lab expertise or because the body is cremated before it can be examined. In those situations, the cases go cold and never will be solved.

The following are some frequently used poisons.

• Arsenic. This tasteless, liquid-soluble solid can be added easily to and dissolved in liquid. Its popularity goes back to Roman times and perhaps even earlier. Arsenic is a by-product of lead and copper and became popular in the 1800s in Italy where it was known, almost comically, as “inheritance powder.” It later was used on flypaper and in controlling various rodents and weeds. From there, it became popular as a murder weapon.
• Atropine, also known as belladonna, is taken from the juice of the berries of the nightshade bush. It was a favored poison in medieval Europe. It causes flu-like symptoms, so if someone died, the assumption could be that the death was because of a disease. It also is taken in small amounts for its hallucinogenic qualities.
• Strychnine is extracted from the seeds of a Southeast Asian tree called the nux vomica, which was actually used by doctors as a tonic to help people who were convalescing. In large doses, it is a good poison for rats and other animals. While strychnine is not a well-known murder device, it is easily available and may have been a killer in murders that were never identified as such.
• Cyanide. Years ago, a contract killer named Richard Kuklinski used cyanide to kill people, but not by dropping it into food or drink. Rather, he sprayed victims in the face with it. Cyanide is the fastest acting of all poisons and can kill within minutes. Cyanide was used in the Tylenol and Excedrin murders, as detailed earlier in this chapter. It also was the poison the Nazis used to gas people in concentration camps.
• Thallium. This was the poison of choice years ago. It is water soluble and its effect takes a couple of days, so killing someone with thallium may make it seem like the cause of death was something else. Thallium is frequently used by professional spies.