The Tylenol Mafia (15 page)

Officials in California were suspicious of Blagg’s story from the start. Greg Blagg and his wife, Terry, agreed to take lie detector tests when police suggested that there were “discrepancies” in their story. In the end, everyone involved in this case decided it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. The feds were not interested in pursuing a case that would have kept the Tylenol tampering incident in the news. The FBI officially closed the Oroville tampering case about two months later without prosecution.

FBI Special Agent, Ray
Yelchak
, made a formal statement about the Blagg case on Friday, November 26, 1982. “There is insufficient reason to believe the matter is related to similar incidents in the Chicago area,” he said. “There is insufficient evidence to pursue federal prosecution of any individual or individuals.”
Yelchak
noted that Blagg and his wife voluntarily submitted to lie detector tests, and the results were turned over to the Blaggs’ attorney. “In the interest of their privacy, the results of the Blaggs’ polygraph exam will not be made public by the FBI.”

In September 1984, Greg Blagg was back in the news. This time he was facing criminal charges, along with his parents, for a March 16, 1984, fire that destroyed their meatpacking plant. The Butte County District Attorney’s office filed charges of arson, insurance fraud, and conspiracy against then 29-year-old Blagg, his 48-year old father, Alan, and his mother, Clara, age 47. According to Butte County Deputy District Attorney, Howard Abbott, the legal action was taken at the request of the state fire marshal. There is no readily available record of the outcome of this case.

*****

After the Oroville tampering incident made headline news, Burke recognized that his only viable option for curtailing the growing damage to the Tylenol brand was to recall all Tylenol capsules nationwide. The story about the strychnine-laced Tylenol poisoning in Oroville was reported in the news media on Tuesday, October 5
^th
. But Burke had known about that incident since Friday, October 1
^st
. He ordered the nationwide recall of all Tylenol capsules on Tuesday - not because he had just learned about the tampering incident in Oroville - but because the public had just learned about the Tylenol tampering in Oroville.

On Tuesday afternoon, a McNeil spokesperson announced: “In conjunction with the FDA, we are notifying retailers to discontinue the sale of Tylenol extra strength capsules and regular strength capsules throughout the country until further notice.”

It has been widely reported that Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules with a retail value of $100 million. However, two days after initiating the nationwide recall, J&J spokesperson, Robert Kniffin, said the company would destroy about 22 million bottles of Tylenol capsules with a retail value of $79.2 million. He said the recall included 11 million bottles previously sold to consumers and being returned and an additional 11 million bottles being returned by retailers and distributors.

The true number of recalled Tylenol bottles was confirmed in a lawsuit that J&J filed against its insurers, seeking to recover the costs associated with recalling 22 million bottles of Tylenol capsules. The genesis of the 31-million-bottle recall story was apparently the testimony of McNeil Chairman, David Collins, to the United States Congress on October 15, 1982, when he said Johnson & Johnson had withdrawn 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from the market.

Collins also used his testimony before Congress to remind the public to remain alert. “Not only the cap, and not only the bottle, but every capsule and every tablet should be examined, and in a good light,” advised Collins. “Then smell it to see if there are any peculiar odors.”

The tampering risk that Collins failed to address in his testimony before Congress was the use of unsealed capsules. It was too easy to pull the capsule-halves apart and replace the medicine with poison. The decision by Collins and other J&J executives to continue producing Tylenol in unsealed capsules was the solution also promoted by the Proprietary Association, the OTC drug manufacturers’ primary lobbying group.

The Proprietary Association was adamant that there should be no restrictions placed on the sale of capsules in the OTC market. The Association’s lobbyist, of course, had the ears of Washington politicians. In fact, it is fair to say that David Collins, in addition to representing Johnson & Johnson, was also acting on behalf of the Proprietary Association when he testified before Congress to assure its representatives that tamper-resistant packaging was the best solution to the tampering problem. Although the public didn’t know it, Collins was at that time a member of the Proprietary Association’s Board of Directors.

*****

On Wednesday, October 6
^th
, David Collins appeared on NBC’s
Today
show; partly to comment about the Tylenol recall, but mostly to tell the public that the poisonings were the work of a madman. “The confidence of the American consumer built this product. Nothing has changed,” Collins assured the
Today
show viewers. “What has changed”, he said, “is that we have an insane individual or individuals out there who have elected to contaminate this product ... and we hope to reemphasize and reestablish consumers’ confidence in this product.”

J&J President, David Clare, later commented about the reaction of J&J executives upon learning of the poisonings. In a 1985 interview for
Corporate Conscience Magazine
, Clare said the climate within Johnson & Johnson at that time was one of sheer disbelief and incredulity that this had happened. There was “absolute unhappiness associated with the obvious fact that people were dying, potentially through the use of one of our products, and we just didn’t know what had happened,” said Clare. “We did not know how extensive it was, what the cause was, what the problem was in any dimension. It appeared to be localized, but we weren’t sure.”

Two days after the poisonings, Larry Foster had said the fact that the adulterated Tylenol capsules came from two sources, but cropped up only in one area, “leads us to believe strongly that the problem rests in Chicago.” But twenty years later, when Foster was in a forum where he could calmly reflect back on that time, he said “We naturally wanted to protect the good name of J&J and McNeil, and we wanted to get the product off the market for fear that it might be a nationwide plot.”

I
n the days following the poisonings, J&J did not publically disclose its concern of a possible nationwide plot, because such a message would have worsened the prospects for the quick return of Tylenol sales to its pre-poisoning level. Better for J&J to work quietly behind the scenes to remove from the marketplace the Tylenol capsules that had passed through the warehouse where the tamperings actually occurred.

Clare said that for a period of about 48 to 72 hours there was a debate within Johnson & Johnson as to whether or not the Tylenol capsules should be withdrawn from the market. “So there was the argument,” said Clare, “We should not withdraw - ‘You’re going to enhance the copycats. You’re going to enhance the process of adulterating a product for copycats.’ And [we] finally came down on the side [that] there was no choice from our standpoint. We had to act to protect the public, whether it was more widespread than it appeared to be, whether it was a condition that could be repeated by other copycats using our product. So the first and foremost, we had to protect the public.”

In the lawsuit that J&J filed against its insurers; J&J suggested that company executives had treated the recall with far greater urgency than they actually had.
Judge Maryanne Trump Barry
, the older sister of real estate magnate Donald Trump, presided over this lawsuit. She said the “Plaintiff [J&J] itself admits, both in its complaint and in its briefs, that it would have been negligent or grossly negligent were any subsequent deaths caused by its retention of Tylenol on the market. It is a well settled proposition of law that an actor who has negligently imperiled the life of another has a duty to aid that person and save him or her if at all possible.”

J&J argued that company executives, to avoid an even greater catastrophe, acted immediately to recall all of the Tylenol capsules.
The transcript in re: McNeilab Inc. v. North River Insurance Co., et al., includes an interesting exchange regarding Johnson & Johnson’s after-the-fact reason for recalling all Tylenol capsules nationwide:

THE COURT: Well, what catastrophe were you stopping here?

COUNSEL FOR J&J: Stopping the death of the additional unknown numbers of people.

THE COURT: And that’s why you did it?

COUNSEL FOR J&J: That is a principal motivating factor for why we did it.

It was the contention of J&J’s lawyers that the company would have been negligent had it not recalled all Tylenol capsules nationwide. Judge Barry said, “[McNeil] and its parent [J&J] admit that they foresaw further poisoning incidents if they failed to act.”
Yet J&J executives did not recall Tylenol capsules nationwide, “to protect the public,” until five days after they had learned about the poisonings.

Public relations expert, Jack O’Dwyer, bemoans the myth of the immediate recall played up for decades by most of his industry-peers. “Although it took about a week for J&J to order the withdrawal, which was somewhat after the fact by that time,” says O’Dwyer, “that is not how the withdrawal has entered public lore thanks to a massive advertising and PR campaign conducted by the company.” O’Dwyer concludes: “J&J was just another case of normal corporate foot-dragging during a crisis.”

The initial recall of 93,000 bottles from Lot MC2880 was a small price to pay to restore consumer confidence. As the number of lots implicated in the poisonings grew; the cost to recall those lots apparently exceeded the threshold acceptable to James Burke.
Even so,
Burke was not so careless that he would risk leaving cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in stores and warehouses where they could get into the hands of consumers and cause even more deaths.

J&J’s knowledge about the Tylenol killer’s true modus operandi is betrayed by the manner in which the company selectively recalled Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from only a fraction of the lots known to have contained cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. By the time J&J executives initiated the national recall, they had evidently already tracked down the facility where the tamperings occurred, and confiscated the Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been shipped from that warehouse.

The Tylenol murders investigation was one-week old when reports began to emerge indicating that the Tylenol poisonings may not have been the one-time local incident that officials had claimed it was.

One week after the Tylenol poisonings in Chicago, local authorities in Pennsylvania and Wyoming reopened investigations into two cyanide poisoning deaths, possibly linked to Tylenol. William Pascual, of Philadelphia, had died in April 1982 from a cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsule. Pascual’s death appears to have been a suicide, but there is substantial evidence indicating that the July cyanide-poisoning death of Jay Mitchell in Wyoming may have been the work of the Tylenol killer.

On Friday, October 8, 1982, a Wyoming FBI agent and a Chicago police detective went to Sheridan, Wyoming, to help local authorities determine whether the death of Jay Adam Mitchell was linked to the Tylenol murders in Illinois. Mitchell, a 19-year-old school janitor from the town of Big Horn, had failed to turn off his alarm clock when it went off at 6:30 a.m., July 26, 1982. His father tried to wake him, but Mitchell was dead. An older brother told the Chicago detective that he thought Mitchell took Tylenol from a bottle in the kitchen four hours before his alarm went off. Mitchell’s mother also said he had taken Extra Strength Tylenol shortly before his death.

Sheridan County Coroner Jim Kane said the Tylenol capsules were not suspected until after Mitchell’s toxicology test results came back from Utah, three weeks before the Tylenol murders. By then, Mrs. Mitchell had thrown out the Tylenol bottle.

Dr. William E. Doughty, a pathologist at the Sheridan County Memorial Hospital who was familiar with the case, became suspicious about Mitchell’s death after hearing on Thursday, September 30
^th
, about the deaths from cyanide-filled Tylenol capsules in Illinois. Dr. Doughty then asked the youth’s mother if her son had taken any medication before his death. She replied, ‘Nothing, just a headache pill; some Extra-Strength Tylenol,’ Doughty said. “She said she thought she had purchased it at Buttrey-Osco, a local food & drugstore, but she had since destroyed the bottle.”

Doughty asked the manager at the local Buttrey-Osco store where the Extra Strength Tylenol came from, and was told that since March 1982 the store has purchased its Tylenol from the Jewel Tea Company of Chicago - aka Jewel Companies, Inc., of Melrose Park. The Buttrey-Osco stores were part of Jewel’s Osco Drug subsidiary. Cyanide-laced Tylenol had now been linked to four Jewel Companies stores - the Buttrey-Osco store in Sheridan, the Jewel-Osco stores in Elk Grove Village and Arlington Heights, and the Osco Drug in Schaumburg.

A second analysis of the contents of Mitchell’s stomach, conducted the first week of October 1982, revealed the exact same dosage of cyanide as was found in the stomach contents of the Chicago victims. Dr. Bryan S. Finkle, Director of the Center for Human Toxicology at the University of Utah, compared the Wyoming death with the deaths in Illinois. Finkle conferred with Dr. Robert Stein in Chicago who told him that the dose of cyanide found in the stomachs of the Illinois victims, matched the amount found in Mitchell’s stomach.