The Tylenol Mafia (6 page)

Late Thursday morning, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy of Mary McFarland’s body ruled that her skull examination for CVA (Cerebral Vascular Accident, i.e., stroke) was inconclusive. By mid-Thursday afternoon, authorities had come to suspect that the deaths of Mary McFarland and Lynn Reiner might have been caused by cyanide-laced Tylenol. The Winfield police had already recovered the Tylenol capsules from Lynn Reiner’s home late Thursday morning.

The Lombard police called Mary McFarland’s father Thursday afternoon and asked him to check Mary’s belongings for analgesic capsules. When he looked through her purse, he found a small Dristan bottle. The bottle held ten Extra Strength Tylenol capsules - five contained cyanide.

Authorities then also found a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules marked with the lot number 1910MD in the medicine cabinet at McFarland’s home. Of the remaining 33 Tylenol capsules in that 50-count bottle, one contained cyanide. Police also found an empty Extra Strength Tylenol bottle, bearing lot number MB2738, in the trashcan at McFarland’s house. Police determined that the cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in Mary’s Dristan bottle had come from the Tylenol bottle marked with lot number 1910MD.

Authorities never disclosed the location where McFarland bought the poisoned Tylenol. However, they did in fact determine that she had purchased it at the Woolworth store in the Yorktown Mall where she worked. Detectives had checked the lot numbers on the bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in the stores surrounding McFarland’s home and work. The only local store carrying Tylenol from Lot 1910MD was the Woolworth store in Yorktown Mall. A lawsuit filed by the Tylenol victims’ families named Woolworth as a defendant and as the source of McFarland’s bottle of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. That lawsuit, as well as McFarland’s coroner’s report, confirmed that she had indeed purchased the poisoned Tylenol at the Woolworth store.

The Tylenol containers recovered from the homes of Reiner and McFarland were turned over and to the Illinois Department of Public Health in Wheaton early Thursday evening.
Joerg
Pirl
, the assistant chief toxicologist for the Illinois Department of Public Health, said on Friday that the cyanide used by the killer was potassium cyanide.
Pirl
said the particular potassium cyanide from the capsules he tested was a “technical grade,” which is an inexpensive, low purity grade of potassium cyanide typically used in heavy industry, as opposed to the more expensive high purity grade typically used in laboratories. The chemical profile of the cyanide was important, but largely ignored in
the
developing investigation.

David Collins had gone to bed one hour before the telephone in his hotel room rang at 3 a.m. on Friday morning, October 1
^st
. The caller informed him that the lot number on Mary McFarland’s Tylenol bottle, 1910MD, indicated that it had come from the McNeil manufacturing plant in Round Rock, Texas. Tylenol from that lot had been manufactured in May 1982 and then distributed to the Chicago area and states west of the Mississippi River. The Tylenol from Lot MC2880, which had been recalled Thursday afternoon, had been manufactured at McNeil’s Fort Washington plant in April 1982 and then distributed to states east of the Mississippi River and to North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Eastern Wyoming.

“The fact that the second batch came from Round Rock didn’t say a damn thing to me,” Collins recalled later, “Except that, oh Jesus, now I’ve got two lots to recall instead of one.”

However, J&J did not actually intend to recall Tylenol from lot 1910MD - at least not initially. A McNeil spokesperson told reporters on Friday morning that the company “wouldn’t make a decision on extending the voluntary withdrawal of its product to additional lot numbers until there was more definitive information about the capsules consumed by the DuPage woman [Mary McFarland].” J&J spokesperson, Marshall Malloy, then confirmed that the company was not issuing a recall for the Tylenol batch labeled Lot 1910MD. But later that day, J&J executives changed their minds and announced a recall of all Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from that lot.

Though Collins said he didn’t know until 3 a.m. Friday morning that the Tylenol from Lot 1910MD had been manufactured at the Round Rock plant - he must have known all along where that Tylenol had been manufactured. That information was incorporated into the lot number, as required by the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Section 201.18, “Drugs; significance of control numbers,” which states:

The lot number on the label of a drug should be capable of yielding the complete manufacturing history of the package. An incorrect lot number may be regarded as causing the article to be misbranded.

The alpha characters in the lot numbers for the Tylenol manufactured in Round Rock came
after
the numeric characters (i.e. 1910MD), whereas alpha characters for the lots manufactured in Fort Washington came
before
the numeric characters (i.e. MC2880). However, it was the first numeric digit of each lot code that actually identified the manufacturing plant. The first numeric digit of the lot codes for Tylenol manufactured at Fort Washington was “2”, and for Round Rock it was “1”.

The 3 a.m. phone call to David Collins was obviously not made because someone had suddenly figured out that the Tylenol from Lot 1910MD had been manufactured in Round Rock. Collins likely received that phone call because someone at Johnson & Johnson had uncovered an extremely urgent problem regarding the distribution of Tylenol from Lot 1910MD.

Since the cyanide-laced Tylenol had come from two different lots, manufactured at two separate facilities, officials said they were confident that none of the poisoned Tylenol capsules had been adulterated at either of the McNeil plants. Larry Foster said the fact that the cyanide laced Tylenol came from two sources, but cropped up only in one area “leads us to believe strongly that the problem rests in Chicago.”

J&J’s initial public relations efforts focused on eliminating any suspicion that the tamperings may have occurred at the McNeil manufacturing plants. “Only if company officials were able to disprove the theory of in-plant tampering could they be sure the act of terrorism hadn’t happened on their watch,” explained Foster.

“In the beginning, they thought maybe the product had been poisoned [at the McNeil plant], “when in fact it turned out that because each lot has a [unique] number, the lot numbers in Chicago were traced back to Pennsylvania,” Foster later recalled. “But very soon thereafter, a lot number from Texas showed up, and that told us that this [Tylenol] could not have been poisoned at the factory.”

“Any plotter would have to have dumped huge amounts of the poisonous salt into the production process for it to end up in such a high concentration in capsules on drugstore shelves,” remarked Foster. “It was done outside the factory, and one of the engineers figured out that if it were to be poisoned at the factory, that the way these things were made in huge vats, mixed, and used in huge vats, that it would take a half ton of cyanide to do that and it was totally impractical,” said Foster.

A coordinated effort by multiple employees to poison Tylenol capsules at two separate plants was improbable, giving some support to Burke’s decision not to recall all Tylenol capsules nationwide. Yet the fact that the adulterated Tylenol capsules had been manufactured in two different plants was, according to David Collins, exactly what led J&J to expand the Tylenol recall to include all 171,000 bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from Lot 1910MD. With this second recall, J&J had now recalled 264,000 bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, representing 2.4 percent of the 11 million bottles of Tylenol capsules in the distribution system, retail stores, and hospitals.

Marshall Molloy said McNeil supplied Extra Strength Tylenol from plants in both Round Rock and Fort Washington to “100 or so” wholesale distributors in the Chicago area market. But McNeil did not ship Tylenol to those “100 or so” wholesalers directly from the McNeil manufacturing plants. The Tylenol was instead shipped to the wholesalers from one of J&J’s regional distribution centers. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson operated eleven regional distribution centers – a fact that the company’s executives never mentioned publicly. These distribution centers were, however, referenced in a 1983 Harvard Business School case study used still today to teach college students about the dynamics involved in Johnson & Johnson’s decision in September 1982 to centralize its order fulfillment and sales and logistics operations.

In February 1986, J&J spokesperson Robert Kniffin said Tylenol was distributed through three J&J regional distribution centers located in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania; Round Rock, Texas; and Glendale, California. These same three distribution centers also handled the distribution of Tylenol in 1982 – a fact confirmed by several Department of Defense (DOD) contracts retrieved from the National Archives database. The DOD entered into contracts with McNeil between 1977 and 1983 to buy Tylenol products from the J&J facilities in Round Rock, Glendale, Montgomeryville, and Fort Washington.

The McNeil manufacturing plants in Fort Washington and Round Rock shipped Tylenol to J&J’s Montgomeryville facility for distribution to warehouses located primarily east of the Mississippi River. J&J’s regional distribution centers in Round Rock and Glendale received Tylenol from McNeil’s manufacturing plant in Round Rock for distribution to wholesalers located west of the Mississippi River. J&J’s regional distribution centers shipped the Tylenol to third party distributers. These third party distributors then shipped the Tylenol to secondary distributors and institutional and retail buyers.

Prior to the Tylenol murders, most Americans did not know that Tylenol was a Johnson & Johnson product. James Burke was rightfully concerned that the negative publicity from the Tylenol tamperings might damage Johnson & Johnson’s stellar reputation. He had initially hoped the news media would identify Tylenol only as a McNeil product. That’s why he told David Collins to fly out to McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington to manage the crisis and handle the media from there. However, the Tylenol problem was never just a McNeil problem; it was always primarily a Johnson & Johnson problem. Johnson & Johnson was in charge of the distribution of Tylenol from its regional distribution centers.

When Tyrone Fahner held his press conference on Friday evening, October 1
^st
, it appeared that he did not necessarily agree with the J&J executives and the FDA officials who contended that an anonymous madman had put the cyanide-laced capsules into Tylenol bottles at the Chicago area retail stores. “We’re investigating stereotypes of disgruntled employees… all along the production chain,” Fahner said. He said authorities were seeking lists of all employees of retailers and all people in the distribution chain who could have handled the tainted Tylenol. Investigators had already identified 20 to 30 potential suspects and had begun combing the personnel files of people who might have had access to the Tylenol.

Fahner never revealed publicly that the suspects at the top of his list were members of the victims’ families. Statements by members of the victims’ families, and testimony by local police officers given under oath during a coroner’s inquest, reveal that the relatives who were considered suspects eventually took lie-detector tests after being pressured to do so by authorities. Members of the Tylenol task force focused their investigative efforts on several peculiarities they hoped might connect one of the victims’ relatives to the murders.

The Reiner case stood out because of the six red and white Extra Strength capsules in her bottle of gray and white Regular Strength Tylenol capsules. Mary McFarland’s cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules were found in a Dristan bottle in her purse. This also caught the attention of investigators. Three members of the Janus family had all taken cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from one 50-count bottle that had contained twelve poisoned capsules. These unique circumstances were viewed by investigators as their best leads for solving the murders.

The New York Times
said that Mr. Fahner appeared to switch, for unannounced reasons, between theories favoring a single disturbed individual and another theory suggesting a conspiracy. Fahner said that some of the capsules appeared to have been put together sloppily, whereas others showed no signs that they had been adulterated, suggesting that more than one person was involved in the tamperings. Mostly, though, Fahner went along with the story portraying the killer as a lone random murderer who did not know any of his victims.

“We’re trying to understand what kind of person could do these things,” said Fahner. “It is an act of a random murderer who then placed them [the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules] in the stores.” Fahner said investigators were trying “to find the madman or madmen responsible for this sick behavior.”

7

________

While Fahner was holding his Friday morning press conference in Illinois, J&J executives in New Jersey were cleaning up a bit of a public relations mess. The Associated Press had learned that Johnson & Johnson’s top PR man, Larry Foster, and McNeil’s Public Relations Director, Elsie Behmer, had released erroneous information regarding the use of cyanide at the McNeil plants. Now Johnson & Johnson executives had to call several reporters and make the astonishing admission that contrary to the statements they had made the previous day, cyanide was in fact stored and used at the McNeil manufacturing plants. McNeil used cyanide on a daily basis to test
Povidone
, the primary binder used in making Tylenol.