The Tylenol Mafia (21 page)

In later years, Zahn Drug was the target of other notable criminal schemes. On April 6, 1987, Art Walker, a driver for Zahn Drug, was found guilty of stealing $125,000 worth of drugs by placing bogus orders and then keeping the drugs himself. On December 9, 1992, William R. Deacon was sentenced to six months in prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud for accepting more than $416,000 in bribes from James E. Wells, the owner of Wells Trucking Company. Deacon had been the director of transportation at Zahn Drug when he took those bribes.

Zahn Drug also had a history of making some really bad hires. In the mid-1970s, Zahn Drug hired PDM Contracting of Norwood Park, Illinois to remodel drugstores that belonged to its group of Family Drug Centers. The firm’s owner, John Gacy, worked as an independent contractor for Zahn Drug for 2 1/2 years. Gacy often gained contracts by undercutting his competitors’ bids. He stayed profitable by hiring a number of teenage boys at low wages. Gacy was in the midst of a remodeling job for Zahn Drug FDC affiliate, Nisson Pharmacy, in Des Plaines, Illinois, when on December 13, 1978 police followed a man they believed had abducted a missing boy, last seen at Nisson Pharmacy. That man, John Wayne Gacy, was a politically active, prominent businessman who sometimes performed as a clown for children in local hospitals. He also had a secret history of luring young men to his home to strangle, rape, and kill them. He buried
twenty-nine of
his victims in the crawl space below his house, dumped two more into the Des Plaines River and two others into the Illinois River. At least five of Gacy’s teenage employees at PDM Contracting became his victims. On May 10, 1994, after a final meal of fried chicken, French fries, Coke, and strawberry shortcake, Gacy was executed by lethal injection. His final words were “Kiss my ass.”

Prior to Gacy’s arrest, he had employed Robin Gecht to work on some of the remodeling jobs he received from Zahn Drug. In 1981, Gecht, 28-years-old at the time, became the leader of a small satanic cult that became known as the Chicago Rippers. Gecht and three associates, 23-year-old Edward
Spreitzer
and two brothers, 20-year-old Andrew and 23-year-old Thomas
Kokoraleis
, were suspected of murdering as many as 18 women in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs between May 1981 and October 8, 1982. The gang spent many nights driving around in their van in the Villa Park area looking for prostitutes to sacrifice in
Gecht’s
apartment. They claimed to have removed one breast from each victim and eaten it as Gecht read passages from the Satanic Bible. They were arrested
in October of 1982
.

Gecht took the witness stand on September 21, 1983, and insisted that he had killed no one. He did, however, confess to the October 1982 attack on Beverly Washington, who had barely escaped with her life. Washington had been raped, beaten, and her left breast cut off before she was thrown into a dumpster and left for dead. Gecht was convicted of attempted murder, rape, deviate sexual assault, aggravated battery, and armed violence.
 
He was sentenced to 120 years in prison.

Gecht was never convicted for murder, but the other three members of the Chicago rippers were each convicted of one or more of the murders. Tom
Kokoraleis
received a sentence of life imprisonment. Andrew
Kokoraleis
and Edward
Spreitzer
were sentenced to death.
 
Andrew
Kokoraleis
was executed by lethal injection on March 16, 1999
.
Spreitzer’s
execution was commuted when Governor George Ryan enacted a moratorium on the death penalty shortly before leaving office in 2003.

The history of Zahn Drug is marred by scandalous incidents. There seems to have been a criminal element always connected to this company’s operation – a criminal element that the Tylenol killer may have exploited. Authorities from the Tylenol task force spent a lot of time at Zahn Drug in the early days of the investigation; a good indication that this company had indeed distributed cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to Chicago-area outlets.

There is a continuum in the drug distribution business in the Chicago area that begins with Zahn Drug and ends with McKesson. Zahn Drug, with $200 million in annual sales, was the largest distributor in the Midwest when FoxMeyer acquired it in 1989. FoxMeyer went bankrupt in 1996 and McKesson then bought the company’s remaining assets, which included Zahn Drug.

McKesson was the sole supplier of pharmaceuticals to Jewel-Osco stores in the 1990s and received supply management income for purchasing $1.5 billion annually of branded and repackaged pharmaceuticals for Osco Drug warehouses in La Habra, CA, and Elk Grove Village, IL. The five-year distribution agreement between McKesson and Jewel was renewed in 1998. The distribution agreement between McKesson and Jewel-Osco was renewed again in 2003. Distribution agreements tend to be renewed repeatedly, often for decades, so the genesis of the agreement between McKesson and Jewel might have been an agreement between Jewel Companies and Zahn Drug dating back to before 1982. McKesson is also the current pharmacy service provider for Central DuPage Hospital.

No one ever named Zahn Drug as the possible distributor of any of the Tylenol implicated in the poisonings. Nonetheless, officials from the FBI, IDLE, and the FDA spent a great deal of time at Zahn Drug’s headquarters and warehouse in Melrose Park. Officials from these agencies visited Zahn Drug a number of times, and questioned the company’s employees on multiple occasions.

On October 6, 1982, ABC aired an interview with Jim Dempsey, the vice president of operations at Zahn Drug. Dempsey described the scope of several recent visits to the company’s warehouse by government officials. “We’ve had the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement, we’ve had the FBI and we’ve had the FDA all come in,” said Dempsey. “They were principally interested in the lots of Tylenol Extra Strength capsules that we had, and they were also interested in what customers had purchased them, how many, and when.”

ABC aired the interview with Dempsey on October 6
^th
, but the video footage of the Zahn Drug warehouse shown in that clip had been taken on October 1
^st
, so the interview with Dempsey had evidently been taped back then. By Friday, October 1
^st
, investigators had apparent.ly learned that Lynn Reiner’s Extra Strength Tylenol capsules had been dispensed at Central DuPage Hospital. They must also have learned that Central DuPage Hospital received its Tylenol from Zahn Drug. That explains why investigators from the FBI, the FDA, and IDLE were so interested in Zahn Drug.

Johnson & Johnson executives had evidently already identified Zahn Drug as the probable source of the cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, when, on Thursday morning, September 30
^th
, a McNeil executive phoned Kesling Drug and commanded
Estel
Kesling to remove all bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from the store’s shelves while he waited on the line for her to confirm that she had done what he had asked. At that time, the only two bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules recovered so far had been purchased at the Jewel-Osco stores in Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village. J&J executives should have had no reason to suspect that Zahn Drug had delivered cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to Kesling Drug –
unless
they knew that Zahn Drug had also distributed bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to the Jewel-Osco stores in Elk Grove Village and Arlington Heights.

As the Tylenol task force entered the second week of its investigation, the available evidence pointed to a warehouse in the distribution channel as the location where the tamperings had occurred. But the FBI and IDLE were stuck on the tampering-in-the-retail-stores theory. They were focused on building a case against the man they had targeted on the first day of the investigation as the prime suspect.

In the first few days of the Tylenol murders investigation, the Tylenol task force interviewed about 1,000 people and developed list of about 24 suspects. Investigators quickly eliminated two-thirds of the names on that list. On Tuesday, October 5
^th
, Fahner said there were only “eight or nine” prime suspects.
 
They all were Illinois residents, and some had a history of mental illness. “All were available to the location, exhibited peculiar behavior, or had a grudge as a possible motive,” Fahner revealed. “They are not being sought. We know who they are.”

One day later, Fanner said “the list of suspects has been narrowed,” but he refused to specify by how many. “I’ve been advised by investigators not to play a numbers game,” he explained.

Fahner was back in the numbers game again on October 9
^th
, however, when he said investigators had cut their list of eight or nine suspects to “four main suspects.” Two had been interviewed, and some were under constant surveillance. By the end of that same day, authorities eliminated another suspect, leaving only three main suspects. Fahner said the six suspects were eliminated because they had recently passed lie detector tests.

Jerome Howard, the man removed from Fahner’s suspect list on October 9
^th
, had left a letter on a receptionist’s desk at Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park on Thursday, October 7
^th
, warning that patients would be poisoned with cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol unless a package containing $8,000 was left near the hospital’s maternity ward. The letter read, “Me and my gang put cyanide in every bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol to see what it will do. ... Like seven deaths isn’t funny, but eight more will be.”

Howard, a 20-year-old former Gottlieb Memorial Hospital employee, was picked up on October 8
^th
near the hospital maternity ward when he attempted to retrieve the ransom packet. A joint statement released by Tyrone Fahner and Edward Hegarty, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office, said, “There is no credible evidence to indicate directly or indirectly” that Howard played any role in the Chicago area poisonings. Later that day, Fahner said the Howard case was “unrelated totally” to the Tylenol deaths, though he did admit Howard once had been one of their “main suspects.”

*****

The Tylenol task force got off the track early in the investigation, when they misinterpreted the evidence recovered at Lynn Reiner’s home. Lynn, after returning home from Frank’s Finer Foods on Wednesday afternoon, had swallowed two of the Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from her unit-dose package and dumped the other six capsules into her new bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol. She had then tossed the empty unit-dose package and the box for the Regular Strength Tylenol bottle into the trash can below her kitchen sink. Only Lynn Reiner knew about the unit-dose package of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. And she threw away the only evidence of its existence minutes before she died.

The Winfield police would not confirm or deny whether they recovered the unit-dose package for Lynn’s Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. However, on March 9, 2010, Scott Watkins told Lynn’s daughter, Michelle, they had indeed found the box for Lynn’s bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol capsules in the trash can at Reiner’s home. They likely also found the unit-dose package bearing the lot number 1665LM and the name “Central DuPage Hospital” in the same trash can.

When investigators found six Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in Lynn’s bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol, they immediately became suspicious. They fixated on where those capsules were at the time of Lynn’s death, ignoring the relevance of where the capsules had been two days earlier. Their imaginations kicked in, and they hypothesized that the murder of Lynn Reiner was premeditated. Investigators then targeted a couple of Lynn’s relatives as the prime suspects.

On October 9
^th
, an unidentified member of the Tylenol task force told reporters from
USA Today
that authorities knew who had committed the Tylenol murders. The source told
USA Today
that investigators had targeted a Chicago-area man as the prime suspect. “We know who did it. We just have to prove it.
 
If this guy doesn’t work out, we’re pretty much down to the end of the rope.”

USA Today
held off reporting the story until March 1983, when the newspaper debuted in Chicago. When asked about the
USA Today
report, IDLE Commander Edward Cisowski said, “I really couldn’t make a comment either way about it. Our official stance is no comment.”

FBI Agent, Anthony DeLorenzo, commenting on the
USA Today
report in March 1983, said, “I don’t know where the heck they’re getting that from.” But he stopped short of calling the report false. “I don’t want to say it’s erroneous; that’s not proper to do,” he said. “The [newspaper] may have talked to somebody who said something like that. We have suspects, just like in any other case. But we don’t have any hot suspects like this article would indicate.”

On October 8, 1982, NBC led off its
Nightly News
broadcast with a story that, in retrospect, provides insight into what the unidentified investigator who talked to
USA Today
on October 9
^th
meant when he said, “We know who did it. We just have to prove it.”

James Polk, reporting for NBC in Chicago, said, “Police believe the poisoned capsules [that killed Lynn Reiner] were placed in the Frank’s Finer Food store in Winfield on Wednesday.”