The Tylenol Mafia (33 page)

“We fought our way back from the Chicago tragedy... thanks to the fairness and good judgment of consumers, said Burke. “We will do it again this time,” he declared. “While this decision is a financial burden to us, it does not begin to compare to the loss suffered by the family and friends of Diane Elsroth,” Burke remarked, his voice reportedly quivering. Burke then said he had expressed, on behalf of the company, “our heartfelt sympathy to Diane’s family and loved ones.”

“The so-called terrorist made no demands on us, said Burke. “We have not given in to any demands.” Then, speaking directly to the killer, Burke said, “What we’ve really done here is say to whoever made this act: ‘You’re not going to defeat us.’ We’re coming back again.”

FDA Deputy Commissioner John Norris praised Johnson & Johnson. “This Company has figured out if you do poorly by the American public, they won’t respect you; and if you do well by them and look out for their interests, they’ll give you a second chance.” Johnson & Johnson has acted in “enlightened self-interest,” said Norris. “The agency did not direct or pressure Johnson & Johnson to take this action.”

Frank Young called Johnson & Johnson’s decision “a responsible action under tough circumstances.” Young cautioned that it would be “premature” for the rest of the industry to follow suit.

Even before Burke had finalized his decision to discontinue Tylenol capsules, he had begun to promote Tylenol caplets during his many media appearances. Burke readily admitted that he wasted no opportunity to promote the message that Tylenol caplets were a safe alternative to capsules. “I am an aggressive marketing person,” Burke said. “I’ve never denied that.”

David Collins, as a J&J company group chairman and the chairman of McNeil, endorsed the elimination of capsules. But Collins was now also the Vice President of the Proprietary Association’s Board of Directors. In that role, Collins was among those industry leaders who were adamantly opposed to the elimination of capsules. Johnson & Johnson withdrew capsules from the OTC market, but the industry as a whole did not.

The 18 states that had banned capsules indefinitely, soon acquiesced; and unsealed capsules remained on the market in all 50 states. The Proprietary Association had easily won the great capsule debate. It would take several well publicized deaths later that year from poison-filled capsules before most manufacturers would grudgingly begin to withdraw OTC drugs packaged in unsealed capsules from the marketplace.

The beginning of the end of unsealed OTC capsules came in June 1986 when cyanide-laced Excedrin capsules turned up in stores in the Seattle, Washington area. In that tampering incident, authorities targeted a suspect relatively quickly. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney in Seattle, Joanne Maida, said Stella Nickell had poisoned her husband with cyanide-laced Excedrin capsules and then planted bottles of cyanide-laced Excedrin and Anacin in Seattle area stores so investigators would think her husband’s death was one of several random murders committed by an unknown madman.

Prosecutors charged Stella with the murders of her husband Bruce, and Sue Snow - just as investigators had hoped to charge Lynn Reiner’s husband four years earlier for the 1982 Tylenol murders, and just as the FBI had hoped to charge Diane Elsroth’s boyfriend for her murder in February 1986. Federal prosecutors never had any physical evidence connecting Stella to the poisoned capsules or to the cyanide. Their entire case was based on an unsubstantiated hypothesis. Still, it was enough to get a conviction. The prosecution’s star witness was Stella’s estranged daughter, Cindy Hamilton, who told the jury that prior to Bruce Nickell’s death, Stella had talked to her about killing him. No one corroborated her story.

The Proprietary Association paid Hamilton a reward of $250,000 for the testimony that led to her mother’s conviction. The Association paid an additional $50,000 to eight others who also came forward with unsubstantiated hearsay that served as the primary “evidence” used by the Justice Department to convict Stella Nickell.

James D. Cope, the president of the Proprietary Association, said on June 18, 1986, “Twelve confirmed deaths since 1982 have been associated with drug products in capsule form. And all 12 deaths were caused by cyanide put into those products, whether for criminal tampering or for murder or suicide in the home.” He then added, “In light of its recent popularity as a tool for suicide and murder, we think it’s time to take a hard look at cyanide’s perhaps too-easy availability.” Cope had thus evaded the real problem, which was not the “too-easy availability” of cyanide, but rather the too easily adulterated capsules.

James Burke described the torment he experienced after learning that Tylenol capsules had once again been used as a murder weapon: “The main anguish that any human being feels is that, somehow and some way, after doing everything we knew how to do, there’s another person dead out there - and that our product was an instrument of that death, a murder weapon. That is very painful for us.”

When Burke was asked during a February 17, 1986 interview on WABC-TV if he was sorry he had not discontinued the capsules after the 1982 murders, he responded, “Yes, Indeed I am. In hindsight, which is 20-20, I wish we had never gone back to marketing these capsules.” Burke’s newfound enlightenment came only after J&J’s market research showed that consumers no longer trusted capsules. They wanted an alternative.

The national concern generated by the death of Diane Elsroth provided Burke the ideal platform to launch a new marketing campaign to promote caplets as the tamper-proof replacement for capsules. As luck would have it, Johnson & Johnson was already prepared to fill the shelf-space left open by the withdrawal of Tylenol capsules. Shortly before Diane Elsroth died, Johnson & Johnson had manufactured a large batch of caplets that it had planned to market in the fall of 1986. With this head start, the company now prepared its manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico, Texas, and Pennsylvania for bigger production runs and added new shifts of workers.

One day after announcing the elimination of capsules and publicly proclaiming his sorrow over the death of Diane Elsroth, Burke went on the Donahue show and suggested that Elsroth’s death was a case of premeditated murder. Burke said the same person who tampered with the pills that killed Miss Elsroth later took another “package off the shelf'” of some store and “then did a very professional job of putting five capsules in, putting it back on the shelf, probably to mislead people from the first bottle.” Burke implied that someone who knew Diane Elsroth had given her the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules and then planted a second bottle of poisoned Tylenol to “mislead” investigators into believing that her murder was the work of an anonymous madman. Burke’s premeditated murder scenario, if it had been believed, would have put suspicion right back on Diane’s boyfriend, Michael Notarnicola.

Publicly, officials had said all along that Elsroth had not been specifically targeted. The FBI, however, did initially treat the Notarnicolas as suspects. Their friends and relatives would later reveal that before the second bottle turned up, the Notarnicolas were on the wrong side of a witch-hunt to convict anyone - just to get a conviction. The public consensus was that the second bottle of poisoned Tylenol, because the packaging was intact, proved that Elsroth was not a specific target, thus exonerating Michael.

Two of Michael’s friends - Joseph
Granda
and Peter
Tripodi
- were actually relieved when they heard that more poisoned Tylenol capsules had turned up. They viewed this finding as a fortuitous event, at least for Michael, because they believed the cloud of suspicion would then be taken off their long-time friend. “Thank God they found another one,” said
Granda
. “Just for that reason,” meaning the presumptive rumors would hopefully end.
Tripodi
said the whole incident and the speculation about it were “atrocious.”

Yonkers Deputy Police Chief, Owen McClain, later described the speculative theories that had been batted around regarding the Notarnicolas. “Automatically, you assume it has to happen in the house,” said McClain. “Police were immediately besieged with theories from numerous tipsters of dubious credibility, including fortunetellers and psychics. Everyone said the mother did it or the father did it or the son did it,” he said. “They said the mother was jealous of the son, the father had it out for the mother, the son wanted to kill the girl because she was pregnant,” McClain recalled.

Television crews had camped out in front of the Notarnicola home while FBI agents questioned the family on Tuesday, February 11
^th
. A headline in the next day’s newspaper said, “Police Interview Yonkers’ Family,” and the story stated that investigators had “focused their attention” on the Notarnicola family. As the investigation progressed, all of the suggested motives for murdering Elsroth were discredited. Police discovered that a reported family argument was a meaningless, minor dispute. Elsroth was not pregnant. None of the theories checked out at all, said McClain.

“They have gone through everything,” said Felicia Elsroth, Diane’s mother. “Everybody who was a friend - everybody - was investigated.” The Notarnicolas, especially Michael, were the victims of a witch-hunt.

Elsroth’s Aunt, Debbie
Marcano
, called the public “vicious” for suspecting Michael. When the second bottle of poisoned Tylenol was discovered,
Marcano
said that the family acted “like we had won the lottery,” because the Notarnicolas would no longer be viewed as suspects.

31

________

James Burke gave the best performance of his entire Tylenol media tour when he appeared on the
Donahue
show on Tuesday, February 18, 1986. The studio audience applauded him repeatedly. J&J spokesperson James Murray said there would probably be more television appearances for Burke because “You can actually discuss and present your information in its context.” Murray said the benefit of doing shows such as
Donahue
was that, “You don’t get disjointed snippets.”

 
The highlight of Burke’s
Donahue
appearance came when a sympathetic viewer called in and referred to the Tylenol tamperings as an act of terrorism. Burke responded by thrusting his clenched fist into the air in jubilant support of the caller’s point of view. The
Donahue
studio audience erupted into loud applause. Burke then went on to describe a discussion that had recently taken place between J&J executives regarding what the public’s reaction might have been if it was determined that the tamperings had occurred at one of J&J’s facilities.

“I’m not sure it would be all bad if it was discovered that this did happen in our plant or did happen in the warehouses,” said Burke. “If it happened there, we would be able to narrow the number of suspects appreciably, and I think we’d have very little trouble finding who did it.” Burke said that
when he raised this hypothetical notion to his colleagues, they said the public would ‘never forgive us for a lack of quality control.’ – “I don’t believe that,” said Burke.

Shortly after his
Donahue
appearance, Burke sat down and wrote a “personal letter” to Elsroth’s family. “I didn’t attempt to call, because I didn’t think they would find it a particularly helpful thing. I just tried to express my sympathies as best I could, Burke said. “Diane’s mother has said that when we took the capsules off [the market] - that we took them off three years too late, and I don’t blame her for saying that. I would too. It’s so easy to identify when you think about your own family. That’s very hard for us to take emotionally. That adds to the burden,” said Burke. “That’s the nightmare.”

The nightmare was about to get a lot worse for Burke if Carl Vergari continued to uncover evidence pointing to tampering within Johnson & Johnson’s manufacturing and distribution network. At the time of Burke’s
Donahue
appearance, it looked like Vergari was about to break the Tylenol poisoning case wide open. Vergari had made a string of evidentiary disclosures between February 12
^th
and 15
^th
that served to debunk every assertion J&J and the FDA had made in support of their declaration that the tamperings occurred
after
the Tylenol was delivered to the retail stores.

At the top of the list of fabricated evidence was the claim that the cyanide would have eaten through the gel-based Tylenol capsules in less than two weeks. J&J and the FDA contended that because the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules showed no signs of degradation, they had to have been filled with cyanide recently and at the retail stores - not during manufacturing or distribution. Carl Vergari disagreed.

On Wednesday, February 12
^th
, Vergari told reporters that tampering at the factory had not been ruled out.
 
He rejected Medical Examiner Millard Hyland’s contention that the cyanide would eat through the gel-based Tylenol capsules in 8 to 10 days and that the tampering had thus occurred recently and in the retail stores. The contamination of the capsules “could have happened anywhere,” he said. Johnson & Johnson, of course, argued otherwise.

On Friday, February 14
^th
, Vergari pressed the issue further. I have it “on good authority,” said Vergari, “that given the right storage circumstances, the right conditions, it [cyanide-filled capsules] could have an indefinite shelf-life.” Vergari’s “good authority” was the FBI and the FDA.

The cyanide from the Tylenol poisonings in both 1982 and 1986 was analyzed at the FBI’s Cincinnati lab, its most sophisticated lab for analyzing poisons. According to Theresa
Hoog
, the consumer affairs director for the FDA’s Cincinnati office, the lab was especially proficient in analyzing chemicals like cyanide. “We have a small group of scientists who possess rather specific expertise,” she said. “That, coupled with some unique equipment we have, means we can offer a unique kind of expertise not available in other places.”