The Tylenol Mafia (53 page)
Authors: Scott Bartz
44
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Michelle decided to find out what she could about the investigation conducted more than 26 years earlier into her mom’s death. She first went to the Central DuPage Hospital and asked for her mom’s medical records. Officials there told her that the hospital had destroyed those records long ago. Michelle then went to the Winfield Police Station and asked Police Chief Frank Bellisario if she could see the documents from their investigation into her mom’s death. Bellisario told her that whatever documents they had not turned over to the FBI had been destroyed in “the flood.”
Flooding does occur in DuPage County from time to time, but the Winfield Police Station where the Tylenol murders documents were stored sits on top of a hill. An article that ran in the
Chicago Tribune
on September 29, 2002, marking the twentieth anniversary of the Tylenol murders, included a picture of the Winfield Police Department’s evidence room. The picture showed the documents from the Tylenol murders all neatly boxed up and sitting on shelves several feet above the floor. The caption below the
Chicago Tribune
picture read:
In 2002, Winfield Police Department Lt. Bill
Rizer
stands in the basement of the police station, which contained old case files stacked on shelves concerning the Tylenol investigation. The Winfield, Ill. police department was part of the Tylenol Task Force investigation of the murders.
Lieutenant
Rizer
told the
Tribune
, “To be up front with you, our case has never been closed… The case is downstairs in our archives - many, many volumes’ worth. But we’re not doing anything on it. There’s nothing for us to do.”
Chief
Bellisario’s
contention that the Winfield police had turned their files over to the FBI, but retained no copies for themselves, is further discredited by the fact that the Tylenol murders were not a federal crime. Why would the Winfield Police turn their files over to the FBI, when the federal government had no jurisdiction to bring charges?
FBI officials told the
Chicago Tribune
in 2002 that they were no longer involved in the Tylenol murders case. The FBI said the case was a murder investigation that falls under the jurisdiction of the police departments where the deaths occurred: Winfield, Lombard, Arlington Heights, Elk Grove Village, and Chicago.
Frank Bellisario was a rookie Winfield police officer in 1982. After the death of Lynn Reiner, he and another Winfield police officer made a concerted effort to spend time with the Reiner children. They took Michelle and her sister, Dawn, bowling, and seemed truly interested in helping the kids cope during that tough time. Now, 26 years later, when Chief Bellisario could offer Michelle some real help, he seemed uninterested. He told Michelle to talk to Scott Watkins, the Winfield police officer who was primarily responsible in 1982 for investigating her mom’s murder.
Watkins met with Michelle on March 9, 2010. He told her that because of the six Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in her mom’s bottle of Regular Strength Tylenol, authorities had no choice but to investigate her father. He then apologized to Michelle for treating her father as a suspect, but justified his actions by saying that those six red and white Extra Strength Tylenol capsules “stood out like a sore thumb” in her mom’s bottle of gray and white Regular Strength Tylenol capsules. Michelle suggested that her mom’s cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules might have been in a bag of pharmaceutical company freebies given to her at the hospital. Watkins agreed that this was a reasonable theory.
Michelle also met with Peter Siekmann, currently the DuPage County coroner; a position he was first elected to in 2004. Siekmann was the deputy coroner for DuPage County in 1982, and had conducted the death investigation of Michelle’s mom. Siekmann was very kind to Michelle when he spoke to her in 2010, spending probably a half hour with her when she stopped by the coroner’s office to get a copy of her mom’s coroner’s inquest report. However, he didn’t seem to remember much about the investigation. Siekmann, who has been involved in over 10,000 death investigations, including over 165 homicides during his 35 years at the DuPage County Coroner’s Office, indicated that he had very little knowledge about any evidence related to the death of Lynn Reiner.
Peter Siekmann and Scott Watkins were members of the Tylenol task force in 1982. Watkins and presumably Siekmann were interviewed by some of the un-named members of the new Tylenol task force before an 18
th
Circuit Court judge gave Joe Birkett the warrant he needed to search Lewis’s apartment. Birkett, the state’s attorney in DuPage County from 1995 to December 2010, was an assistant state’s attorney in DuPage County during the Tylenol murders investigation in 1982. He is now a judge in the Illinois Second Appellate Court. Several other individuals who held important government positions in DuPage County when the Tylenol case was reactivated in 2009 were also government employees in DuPage County in 1982.
Robert Schillerstrom, the commissioner of the DuPage County Board of Directors from 2003 to December 2010, was an assistant state’s attorney in DuPage County at the time of the Tylenol murders. Schillerstrom has been a DuPage County Republican committeeman since 1980. He entered the Illinois gubernatorial race in June 2009, but dropped out seven months later. Schillerstrom joined the law firm of Ice Miller in 2003 as a partner in the firm’s Public Affairs Group. Ice Miller is based in Indianapolis, Indiana, and has offices in Washington D.C., DuPage County, and Chicago. One of Ice Miller’s long-time clients is Johnson & Johnson. Ice Miller has represented Johnson & Johnson in a number of product liability lawsuits filed against the company.
On the same day the State’s Attorney’s Office in DuPage County served a search warrant on James and LeAnn Lewis, thus publicly reopening the Tylenol murders investigation, it became readily apparent that Johnson & Johnson also had a stake in this reactivated sham. While authorities were searching Lewis’s Cambridge apartment, former J&J Group Company Chairman, Wayne Nelson, spoke publicly to ABC’s Brian Ross about the Tylenol case. Not since 1982 had a current or former J&J executive spoken to the press about the Tylenol murders investigation. Nelson broke that silence; maybe in a desperate effort to save his legacy, as well as the legacy of many other J&J executives.
Nelson, the co-founder and former chairman of the McNeil Consumer Products Company, was a member of both J&J executive teams that had handled the issues related to the Tylenol murders in 1982 and 1986. Just days before the 1982 Tylenol murders, J&J had moved Nelson out of his position as chairman of McNeil, and into the position of vice president of J&J International – making way for Oak Park Illinois-native David Collins to take over as McNeil chairman.
Nelson owes Johnson & Johnson a big debt of gratitude. The company he founded in 1987, Nelson Communication, was built with Johnson & Johnson’s money, and still gets a lot of business from Johnson & Johnson. Nelson made a fortune in 2000 when he sold Nelson Communications to the
Publicis
Groupe
, pocketing an estimated $100 million or more for his 13.3 million shares of the company’s stock.
Publicis
then named Nelson chairman emeritus of Nelson Communications Worldwide, its newly created subsidiary.
Johnson & Johnson’s policy of media silence regarding the Tylenol murders had been set early on. In 1983, as the one-year anniversary of the Tylenol murders approached, Johnson & Johnson refused to respond to inquiries from reporters. Instead, a J&J spokesperson said they feared comments could trigger a round of copycat crimes. Johnson & Johnson’s only statement for the one-year anniversary articles was that the 1982 Tylenol tamperings drew company employees closer together and that it “still stimulates for us emotions of sadness about the deaths and indignation.”
During several speaking engagements over the years, a few select J&J executives have occasionally repeated snippets of the well-established company line about the company’s response to the tamperings. However, since 1982, they had never given a public statement about the actual investigation. Nelson’s statement on February 4, 2009 was the first.
Nelson’s interview with ABC’s Brian Ross was especially unusual in light of the fact that he had his own policy of media silence at Nelson Communications Worldwide. Nelson gave an interview in 1999 that represented a one-time break from that policy. The short interview appeared in the trade magazine,
Medical Marketing & Media
. The interviewer introduced Nelson by saying: “As Mr. Nelson will explain, this is the first time they [Nelson Communications] have “gone public,” breaking a long tradition of not talking to the press.”
After 26 years of media silence about the Tylenol murders, Nelson came out of the woodwork and put the spotlight back on James Lewis by suggesting that investigators had some kind of evidence linking him to the murders. “There were a lot of people who believed that what was available in terms of evidence pointed towards him [Lewis],” said Nelson. “But that was the extent; it wasn’t enough to convict or even prosecute.” Nelson spun his innuendo to imply guilt.
ABC news consultant, Brad Garrett, a retired 20-year FBI veteran of numerous investigations involving terrorism on United States soil, also contributed to Ross’s story. Garrett said that Lewis “was dismissed as a suspect because it was felt the cyanide, since it eats through the capsule, would have had to have been put in close to the time they were purchased, and the FBI could not put him [Lewis] in Chicago at the time.”
Once again, the FBI was promoting the bogus claim that the cyanide could eat through the gel-based capsules in just a few days – a claim that Garret should have known was false. Even Garrett’s statement that the FBI could not put Lewis in Chicago at the time of the Tylenol poisonings, was evidently just a set up for Wayne Nelson, who then suggested that he had some sort of special knowledge of a scheme that could explain how Lewis could have committed the Tylenol murders in Chicago while living in New York City.
“Based on an analysis of the stores where the tainted Tylenol was purchased,” said Nelson, “many close to the case believed that whoever dropped the drugs off had flown into Chicago, rented a car, gone and distributed the pills, and then flown back out of O’Hare airport.”
Nelson never mentioned that in October 1982, and again in December 1982, the New York City police and the FBI said James and LeAnn Lewis had not left the City since checking into the Hotel Rutledge on September 6, 1982. Nelson also never explained how Lewis, who was broke at the time, could have paid for airline tickets and carried out such an incredible feat without leaving behind a single clue of this purported one-day journey to Chicago and back to New York City. James and LeAnn do not wear wedding bands today because they had to hock them at a New York City pawnshop in the fall of 1982 so they could buy food.
Why would a powerful corporate executive like Wayne Nelson take time out of his busy day to make unsubstantiated claims, falsely implicating an innocent man for the Tylenol murders - unless Johnson & Johnson had something to hide? The planted eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol is the smoking gun that could, still today, cause big problems for a number of organizations, including Johnson & Johnson.
One person who might be able to clarify the circumstances surrounding the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol is Marylou Crane. She has been a Winfield resident since 1954 and has been active in DuPage County politics since the 1970s. Marylou was the administrative assistant to State Representative Donald Hensel from 1982 to 1989. She was also the coordinator of Jim Edgar’s successful 1982 election campaign for Illinois secretary of state. Marylou served as the assistant to Secretary of State Jim Edgar (from 1987 to 1991) and George Ryan (from 1991 to 1993). Edgar went on to become Governor of Illinois from 1991 to 1998, and Ryan was the Illinois Governor from 1999 to 2003.
Marylou was a Winfield Village trustee from 1986 to 1993 and president of the Village of Winfield from 1993 to 1997. In March 2008, DuPage County Chairman, Robert Schillerstrom, reappointed Marylou to the DuPage County Fair and Exposition Authority. Marylou has served on several DuPage County Boards over the past few decades and has also served as the president of the Winfield Chamber of Commerce. While president of the Village of Winfield, she even wrote a monthly column, called “Municipal Matters,” in the Arlington Heights newspaper,
The Daily Herald
. Marylou is the chairperson of the Winfield Board of Fire & Police Commissioners, which makes appointments to the Winfield Police Department, and conducts and holds all entrance and promotional examinations. The Board decides who gets fired and hired at the Winfield Police Department.
Interestingly, Marylou Crane had her own moment of notoriety during the Tylenol murders investigation back in 1982. Marylou took on the last name of Crane in 1989 when she married J. Alan Crane. But in October of 1982, Marylou Crane, was Marylou Walter - the estranged wife of Judge Duane Walter. Marylou is the person who Wheaton Police Lieutenant Terry Mee identified on October 25, 1982 as the woman who had turned in the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol.
