The Tylenol Mafia (54 page)

When the FBI interviewed Marylou on October 26, 1982, she told them that they had the wrong woman. Marylou said she was not the one who had turned in the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol to the Wheaton police. After a short search for the “mystery woman” who supposedly did actually turn that bottle in, Linda Morgan, the wife of Judge Lewis Morgan, came forward and took credit for turning in the eighth bottle.

At the time of the Tylenol murders, the Walters and Morgans had long been active in DuPage County politics. Marylou Walter was then working for Illinois State Representative, Donald Hensel, and was coordinating Jim Edgar’s election campaign. Duane Walter had been a committeeman for the Winfield Township until 1976. He became a judge in 1977. Lewis Morgan had been a state representative from Wheaton for 10 years before he became a judge in 1975. Lewis Morgan’s father had been the DuPage County superintendent of schools from the 1920s to the 1950s.

The Morgans lived in Wheaton, less than a mile from the Wheaton Police Station. The Walters lived in Winfield, just a few miles west of the Wheaton Police Station. The Wheaton Police Station was just a few blocks west of the 18
^th
Circuit Courthouse where Judge Duane Walter and Judge Lewis Morgan worked in 1982. Judge Walter was a traffic court judge at the time of the Tylenol murders. Surely, Wheaton Police Lieutenant Terry Mee had appeared before him at numerous hearings. It seems odd that Mee did not know either Linda Morgan or Marylou Walter.

The fact that all of the turmoil surrounding the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol was going on in the front yard of Johnson & Johnson’s local attorneys at the law firm of Rooks, Pitts and Poust, located right across the street from the 18
^th
Circuit Court near the Wheaton Police Station, raises obvious questions regarding Johnson & Johnson’s knowledge of the conspiracy to plant the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. It was an unlikely coincidence that the only two individuals ever identified as having turned in a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol were both married to DuPage County judges who lived and worked in the same geographic and legal community as Johnson & Johnson’s local attorneys, Paul Noland and Francis “Mike” Heroux, who, along with McNeil Chairman David Collins, were all natives of Oak Park, Illinois, and members of the same Fenwick High School graduating class of 1952. These connections, coupled with the sordid details about the planted eighth bottle, would have raised suspicion among jurors if the Tylenol murders liability lawsuits had ever gone to trial.

It is notable that Johnson & Johnson filed a motion seeking a closed trial in the Tylenol murders liability case. When Judge Wolfson denied Johnson & Johnson’s request for a secret trial, the company quickly settled the lawsuits out of court, and required the plaintiffs to sign confidentiality agreements. J&J then convinced Judge Wolfson to seal all of the documents that the company had turned over to the court. Johnson & Johnson obviously did not want the public to see any evidence related to the Tylenol tamperings and murders.

An FOIA request was submitted on June 16, 2011 to the Winfield Village FOIA Officer, Sharon Samuels, requesting case reports, incident reports, and all investigation reports and documents related to the poisoning of Lynn Reiner and her subsequent death. Samuels’ reply, which came back one day later, was written on a Winfield Police Department letterhead. Samuels denied the FOIA request, saying, “We no longer have any copies of reports – they were all turned over to the Illinois State Police (ISP) task force at that time [in 1982].” That statement was, of course, not true.

Winfield Police Lieutenant, Bill
Rizer
, had told the Chicago Tribune in 2002 that the Tylenol murders investigation had never been closed. He made that statement while standing in front of the boxes of Tylenol murders investigation documents stacked on shelves in the evidence room of the Winfield Police Department. Nevertheless, Samuels now claims that the boxes of Tylenol murders documents that were photographed by a
Chicago Tribune
photographer in the Winfield Police Department’s evidence room on September 24, 2002, had been turned over to the Illinois State Police in 1982.

An FOIA request for documents from the Tylenol murders investigation was filed with the Illinois State Police in June 2011. Colonel Rob Haley denied this request on July 15, 2011, stating:

The case is still being investigated. The release of documents prior to an investigation being completed will negatively impact the investigation, including witnesses’ willingness to cooperate, and law enforcement’s ability to effectively complete its investigation. The requested information is withheld per the freedom act’s provisions regarding interference with pending or actually and reasonably contemplated law enforcement proceedings conducted by any enforcement or correctional agency (5 ILCS 140/7(1)(d)(
i
) and obstruct an ongoing investigation (5 ILCS 140/7(1)(d)(vii).

The FBI also promptly denied a June 2011 FOIA request seeking documents related to the Tylenol murders investigation. Since this investigation is, according to the FBI and the State of Illinois, “active,” the documents from the investigation will remain classified. Evidence from the Tylenol murders has been kept hidden from the public by the confidentiality requirements of the “active” investigation and the secrecy rules of grand jury proceedings.

The motivation of J&J and DuPage County authorities to keep evidence from the Tylenol murders hidden is obvious. J&J has its reputation and the reputations of its executives to protect. DuPage County authorities have their reputation, egos, and careers to protect. The truth about the planted eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol might cause major problems for officials from both Johnson & Johnson and DuPage County still today; possibly resulting in civil lawsuits against them for obstructing the investigation. But what is the FBI’s motive for taking such an active role in the reactivated Tylenol murders investigation?

45

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The FBI’s role as the front-man in the reactivated Tylenol murders investigation is odd, because the federal government has absolutely no jurisdiction to bring charges in the 1982 Tylenol murders case. In fact, the FBI had publicly declared in 2002 that it was no longer involved in the Tylenol murders investigation. So why did the FBI get so heavily re-involved?

Several factors, including the expiration dating and the distribution path of the Tylenol involved in the 1982 and 1986 poisonings indicate that there was something different about how the Tylenol in both tampering incidents was packaged. The expiration dating of that Tylenol may just be the smoking gun that the feds had hoped to keep hidden.

In 1982, the six lots known to have contained cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules were Lots MC2880, 1910MD, 1665LM, MC2884, 1801MA, and MC2873. The press briefly publicized the manufacturing and expiration dates for only two of these lots. The sudden end to the release of lot-specific information might have had something to do with the expiration dates already revealed for Lots MC2880 and 1910MD. The Tylenol from Lot MC2880 was in the Janus and Kellerman bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol, and had an expiration date of April 1987. The Tylenol from Lot 1910MD was in Mary McFarland’s bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol, and had an expiration date of May 1987. Incredibly, the two bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules from the 1986 Tylenol tamperings in Westchester County, New York, had those exact same expiration dates.

The first bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol recovered in 1986 (Diane Elsroth’s bottle) had an expiration date of May 1987; the same expiration date as McFarland’s Tylenol. The second bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol recovered in 1986 had an expiration date of April 1987; the same expiration date as Kellerman’s and Janus’s Tylenol. These identical expiration dates indicate that the 1986 Tylenol killer may have intended to send an ominous message to Johnson & Johnson, the government, and the public regarding his ability to poison medicine in the distribution channel. The public never got that message, because the press never reported that the expiration dates of the Tylenol involved in the 1982 and the 1986 tampering incidents were identical.

Though the expiration dates of the adulterated Tylenol from the 1982 and 1986 tampering incidents were the same; the manufacturing dates were not. The Tylenol involved in the 1986 tamperings was manufactured about three years after the Tylenol involved in the 1982 Tylenol murders.

The Tylenol from the 1982 tamperings, manufactured in the spring of 1982, had a shelf life of 5 years. The Tylenol from the 1986 tamperings, manufactured in May and July of 1985, had shelf lives of 24 months and 21 months. The Tylenol bottled at the McNeil Consumer Products Company plants, however, had a shelf life of 3 years.

The Tylenol Professional Monograph states: “Under room temperature storage conditions, TYLENOL acetaminophen solid formulations are generally stable for 3 years from the date of manufacture” for commercially available products. The source of the stability data for this expiration dating is a 1974 study: Fairbrother J. Acetaminophen. New York, NY: Academic Press; 1974.

The three–year shelf life of Tylenol was mentioned in February 1986 by
Jack Ogun, the director of the Division of Drugs, Devices and Cosmetics for the Pennsylvania State Health Department. Ogun told the Philadelphia
Inquirer
that the May 1987 expiration date of Elsroth’s tainted bottle of Tylenol indicated that it would have been in stores for about two years, because non-prescription pain-relievers generally have a shelf life of about three years
.

In October 1982, Dean Mickelson, a pharmacist at the Revco drugstore in Taos, New Mexico, had also mentioned the three-year shelf life of Tylenol. Mickelson told
The Taos News
on October 6, 1982 that Tylenol has a shelf life to 1985, meaning the Tylenol manufactured in 1982 would expire three years later, in 1985.

An FOIA request was filed with the FDA in June 2011 seeking documents describing the expiration dating of Tylenol produced in McNeil’s manufacturing plants in 1982. The FDA responded, stating: “Tylenol and other acetaminophen products are marketed and labeled under the OTC drug monograph and without an approved application housing such records.” The FDA did not produce the requested information, but it did confirm that the Tylenol expiration dating is based on the acetaminophen/Tylenol monograph. The Tylenol monograph says that Tylenol manufactured and bottled at the McNeil plants has a shelf life of three years. The three year shelf life has not changed since the launch of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in 1975.

A drug’s shelf life is based on stability testing. The stability of a drug varies depending on the container-closure system in which the drug product is being sold. A drug that is packaged and sold to repackagers in bulk containers typically has a shorter shelf life than the same drug bottled at the manufacturing plant. The Tylenol that was bottled at the McNeil plants in the containers that were sold in retail stores had a shelf life of three years. The Tylenol involved in the 1986 tampering incident, because it had been shipped in bulk containers to repackagers, had a shorter shelf life; about two years.

The five-year shelf life of the Tylenol involved in the 1982 Tylenol murders was well outside the shelf life of any Tylenol product - with the notable exception of the Tylenol that Johnson & Johnson sold to the United States Department of Defense (DOD).

In 1973, the DOD sought to defer drug replacement costs for date sensitive stockpiles of prescription and OTC drugs by extending their useful life beyond the manufacturer’s original expiration date. Subsequently, the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office completed studies to determine the feasibility of a “shelf life extension program.” These agencies found that the shelf life of OTC drugs, generally two to three years, could safely be extended to five years under properly controlled storage conditions.

On July 1, 1975, the FDA and the Veterans Administration (VA) entered into a “Memo of Understanding” implementing a program to extend the expiration dates of the prescription and non-prescription drugs that the VA purchased. The expiration dating on most drugs was extended to five years for prescription and OTC drugs sold to all branches of the DOD. The FDA was charged with monitoring this program, which applied only to drugs purchased by the DOD for use in military facilities, and for sale in military commissaries.

Throughout the 1980s, the DOD contracted with the McNeil Consumer Products Company to buy Tylenol from all three of the Johnson & Johnson facilities that distributed Tylenol. The DOD purchased Tylenol in bulk containers for use in Military treatment facilities and VA hospitals and clinics. The DOD also purchased Tylenol for sale in the retail class of trade through its military commissaries. Because of the shelf-life extension program, all of the Tylenol sold to the DOD was given a shelf life of five years. This required separate bottling production runs so that the labels on the Tylenol bottles being sold to the DOD reflected the 5-year shelf life rather than the typical 3-year shelf life of the Tylenol bottled at the McNeil manufacturing plants. The 5-year shelf life of the Tylenol involved in the 1982 Tylenol murders indicates that it may have been intended for the DOD.

At the time of the Tylenol murders, military commissaries were indeed selling bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from the lots involved in the poisonings. On October 1, 1982, State officials in Kansas said at least 180 bottles of Tylenol from the contaminated lots were found at Fort Riley. A Fort Riley spokesperson, Milt
Sheeley
, said Tylenol capsules were removed from the commissary and other shops that Friday. “We’re yanking it. We’re advising everybody to throw the capsules away,” said
Sheeley
.