The Tylenol Mafia (29 page)

“He was pale,” Burke said later. “He didn’t have to tell me what it was. We’ve got lots of serious problems with a company this big and this complicated, but I could tell it was a Tylenol problem because of the look on his face.”

Burke ordered what turned out to be a continuous polling of consumers to monitor their fears, perceptions, and intentions toward all Tylenol products. Just like in 1982, Burke hired his own private investigators and sent his lawyers and public relations people out to the scene of the crime. He sent representatives to Yonkers to attempt to learn more and “assist” in the investigation. J&J executives also began conferring by telephone with the FDA and the FBI in Washington D.C. and at their respective field offices, just as they had done in 1982.

At a news conference late Monday afternoon, Yonkers Police Commissioner Joseph
Fernandes
, said, “The medical examiner’s office has indicated that [Elsroth’s] death was caused by cyanide, which may have been introduced by way of ingestion of a Tylenol capsule.” He said the capsules were believed to have come from a factory in Pennsylvania, but he did not know the name of the town. “It is not known where or when the cyanide may have been introduced into the Tylenol capsule.”

As “a precautionary measure,” the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) ordered the removal of Tylenol from all of its more than 1,000 stores in 24 states, most in the Eastern half of the nation. Late Monday afternoon, company spokesperson Michael
Rourke
said, “If this turns out to be an isolated incident, we’ll put it back on the shelves.”

Officials from the FBI, the FDA, and J&J dusted off the “approved theory” script from the 1982 Tylenol murders case and began once again to promote the madman-in-the-retail store scenario. This time the madman would be portrayed as a sick criminal mastermind.

The FDA immediately assured the public that the tampering was a local, isolated incident. FDA Commissioner Frank Young, who had been in that position since August 1984, said consumers in the Bronxville area should avoid taking Tylenol capsules, and people nationally should not take Tylenol from the batch in question. He said people did not need to be unduly concerned about Tylenol tablets or any other Tylenol medications.

Johnson & Johnson - in a statement released Monday evening - said, “While Johnson & Johnson has no reason to believe that this is more than an isolated event, we endorse the recommendation of the FDA and local authorities. We recommend that people in the Bronxville-Yonkers area not take any Tylenol capsules until the investigation has been completed.”

Burke said the company believed that no Tylenol capsules had been tampered with at the plant, and J&J was proceeding as though the tampering occurred near where Elsroth died. “We do believe what happened in Westchester is a local situation,” said Burke. He said he was “confident” the cyanide did not come from a company plant.

J&J spokesperson James Murray further reassured consumers that the tampering had no occurred within Johnson & Johnson. “We checked with our retained samples, and there was no problem there,” said Murray. “We’re reasonably certain that it’s not going to come out of our plant, but we had to be sure.”

New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, advised: “I have instructed my immediate family to discontinue the use of all Tylenol capsules until further notice. I make the same recommendation to everyone in this state.” Westchester County officials then embargoed the sale of Tylenol capsules and asked consumers to return the containers they had bought within the past two months to the store where they had purchased them so they could be returned to McNeil.

The Westchester Medical Examiner’s Office tested the capsules in the 24-count bottle removed from the Notarnicola’s home. Westchester County Medical Examiner, Dr. Millard Hyland, said the test results showed that the Tylenol compound had been replaced in three of the remaining 21 capsules by a brown mixture containing 60 percent potassium cyanide and 40 percent inert materials, including silver and iron. Hyland said the examination showed that Elsroth took two Tylenol capsules, one containing the poison and “perhaps one” with just acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. He said the potassium cyanide would be expected to eat through the gelatin capsules within 8 to 10 days, so the poison presumably was placed in the bottles within the last 10 days.

Westchester County Executive, Andrew O’Rourke, confirmed Hyland’s timeline, saying officials believed that Elsroth had been murdered by someone who placed the poison inside the package within the last 10 days. “We are dealing with a case of murder,” he added.

Owen McClain, the Yonkers deputy police chief, took charge of the 15-member task force assigned to investigate the death of Elsroth as a homicide. The investigative team included ten Yonkers detectives, a few state troopers, and a couple of federal agents. “We don’t intend to start a national scare,” said McClain. “We don’t believe the nation is smothered with tainted Tylenol. We are looking at it as an isolated case because we have no evidence it’s anything else.”

When asked if any members of the Notarnicola family were suspects, Chief McClain responded, “We’re obviously exploring the relationship between anyone who was involved with either of the two families.” Michael Notarnicola and his family are considered “witnesses” in the homicide case, said McClain. “We do not have any suspects.” He also said that investigators were checking suppliers of potassium cyanide. “I’ve been led to believe it can be bought quite easily.”

Bruce Bendish, the chief of the homicide squad at the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, also responded to reporters’ questions about the possible suspects and motive. “We have no reason to believe that she [Elsroth] was a target particularly,” he said. “While there are no suspects, we are not ruling anybody out. We have to find out if the tampering occurred pre-selling or post-selling before we decide on our next step.”

After a jurisdictional dispute among the local authorities, FDA officials obtained two of the three remaining poisoned capsules. An FBI agent put them in a brown paper bag, hopped on a Johnson & Johnson corporate jet, and delivered the capsules to the FDA’s lab in Cincinnati. The FDA completed its analysis of the cyanide sample by the end of the day Monday. Fred Fricke, the director of the FDA’s Elemental Analysis Research Center in Cincinnati, said, “The chemical profile of the cyanide in Elsroth’s adulterated capsules was not the same as the profile of the cyanide in the Chicago poisonings. The two compounds were different. There were no parallels,” said Fricke. FDA spokesperson William Grigg said the compounds had a different chemical structure, though both were potassium cyanide. He also said that the chemical profile was not similar to anything that was in the area of the McNeil plant in Fort Washington.

Tuesday, February 11, 1986

On Tuesday, toxicologists from both Johnson & Johnson and the FDA began testing the bottles of Tylenol capsules that had been shipped from the A&P stores to the FDA’s lab in Brooklyn, New York. FDA Commissioner Frank Young announced that the lab had examined all of the Tylenol capsules from the Bronxville
A&P
store, and no poison or tampering had been found in any other Tylenol bottles from that store. “There is no evidence of any bottles being involved beyond the particular one,” he said.

According to William Grigg, the Extra Strength Tylenol packaging made the capsules among the most protected in the industry. Grigg said that the FDA’s “negative findings” added to a number of other findings suggest there was “not a broad problem” with tainted Tylenol elsewhere or “any manufacturing problems.” Joseph
Valiquette
, an FBI spokesperson in New York City, said their investigation had turned up no evidence that poison had been placed in any packages of Tylenol other than the one used by Ms. Elsroth.

The Proprietary Association, the primary lobbying group for non-prescription drug manufacturers, also chimed in. The incident appeared to be “a single, isolated case of poisoning,” not part of a broader plot, said John Walden, the senior vice president of the Proprietary Association. He said there is no evidence that this was the kind of random tampering on the store shelf, as was the case in Chicago in 1982. Walden had thus implied that someone had targeted Diane Elsroth specifically.

William Grigg said it was unlikely that the Tylenol had been tampered with during manufacturing. Federal officials based this opinion on two main elements, he said. First, the bottle was part of a batch of 200,000 units manufactured in May 1985; second, the lot was shipped for sale in August 1985, and because it is a popular item, most of the lot units were likely sold within a month. If other bottles in the shipment had been tainted, said Grigg, officials would probably have known about it long ago. Johnson & Johnson concurred, stating that other people would have reported problems months ago if the batch had been tainted either at the manufacturing plant or at the distribution sites.

Officials from J&J and the FDA apparently had not considered the possibility that these “other people” might have been “too dead” from cyanide-laced Tylenol to report a problem with the drug. Unexplained deaths, especially of older persons, would not typically have resulted in a ruling of a homicide; thus, medical examiners would not have done toxicology tests for cyanide.

“Everything seems to point to a local perpetrator,” said J&J spokesperson James Murray.

“Everyone involved believes this is a local situation,” parroted FDA spokesperson William Grigg.

J&J spokesperson Robert Kniffin said the Tylenol batch in question consisted of 200,000 bottles of 24 capsules each. The batch shipped August 22, 1985, from Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, to retail stores east of the Mississippi River. By now, most of that batch has probably been sold and used, he said. The company was of course checking with its distributors yesterday [Monday] to try to track down bottles marked with lot number ADF916, said Kniffin, but only a few had been found so far.

When asked if any product could survive two bouts with fatal tampering incidents, Burke relied, “Yes, of course. When the poisonings in Chicago occurred, we cashed in on over 95 years of trust that we had built with the consumer. Everybody in the country believed in us because of our history, because of what Johnson & Johnson was. Anyone who’d ever used the baby powder or a Band-Aid or whatever had that attitude toward the company. And what our research shows us is that even today, after having gone through one of these scares previously, the public still feels that trust. And that’s why we’re bringing Tylenol back.”

After giving no press conferences during the 1982 Tylenol murders investigation, J&J held three press conferences at corporate headquarters during the first week of the 1986 Tylenol murder investigation, and a fourth in Washington D.C, the following week. At the recommendation of Harold Burson, the chairman of Burson-Marsteller, J&J held its first press conference on Tuesday, February 11th. “We had nothing new to say,” Burson said. “But with the company [J&J] having trouble returning the deluge of calls, I was alarmed that we were jeopardizing our credibility.”

Burke put Joseph Chiesa, the president of the McNeil Consumer Products Company, in charge of managing the company’s response to the tampering incident. Burke himself, however, once again took on the role of primary spokesperson. “I really don’t like this personal publicity,” Burke said later. “I don’t feel comfortable with it. Still, as chief executive, I felt I had no choice but to act as the corporate spokesman because Johnson & Johnson can’t be faceless; it [the situation] has to be personalized.”

At Tuesday’s press conference, Burke responded to questions about the vulnerability of capsules to tampering, by declaring his intent to keep capsules on the market. Burke said he thought consumers would continue to want medication in the form of capsules because they were easy to swallow. When asked about the safety of the packaging, Burke replied, “The bottles are tamper-resistant, not tamper-proof.”

Burke said that at least 95 percent of the bottles in question had moved through stores, and about 50 percent to 60 percent of the 200,000 capsules probably had been consumed. Clearly, Johnson & Johnson had a great deal of data documenting the movement of Tylenol through the distribution channel.

Joseph Chiesa, flanked by Burke, explained the relevance of Millard Hyland’s assertion that the cyanide would have eaten through the Tylenol capsules in 8 to 10 days. Chiesa said cyanide breaks down the gelatin-based capsules, and the deterioration becomes evident “in less than a month.” He then added, “We have conviction that none of the poison was put in the capsules by a worker at the plant.”

J&J spokesperson, James Murray, then further highlighted the alleged super-corrosiveness of cyanide. Based on Medical Examiner Milliard Hyland’s findings that the cyanide would have eaten through the capsules, the company feels the tampering “did not take place at the factory,” said Murray. He said the cyanide must have been added to the Tylenol recently because the poison would have corroded through the gelatin capsule “within about two weeks.”

Westchester County District Attorney, Carl Vergari, was not at all convinced of the truthfulness of Murray’s statement. Soon, the executives of Johnson & Johnson would learn that the views of Carl Vergari should not be dismissed lightly.

Carl Vergari belongs to that rare class of individuals who choose careers in the government sector to actually serve the public. He retained that same altruistic goal throughout a long career as the Westchester County district attorney. Vergari was born in Yonkers, New York. He graduated from Fordham University and St. John’s Law School, taking time out for combat as a Marine in World War II. For ten years, he had been a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and for another ten years, he had served on the State Investigation Commission. In 1968, New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, appointed Vergari as the Westchester district attorney to fill a vacancy. The extremely popular Vergari, who was a Republican, then won an unprecedented seven election victories in a row, almost all with 65 percent or more of the vote. He was credited with streamlining the criminal justice system in Westchester County during a record 26 years as district attorney until his retirement in 1993. During that time, the number of assistant district attorneys in that county grew from 17 to 109.