Tylenol Murders

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Welcome to Rainy Day Rabbit Holes.

We'll re-take the history of the West off the rails.

If you like your history unhinged, you are in the right place.

I'm Shay, and I'm Jody.

Let's fall down the rabbit hole.

It begins with a throbbing in the temples.

Maybe a feeling like an ice pick behind your eyes.

You rub the bridge of your nose, but it's getting worse.

So what do you do, Jody?

Get some Tylenol.

That's right.

You pop a Tylenol.

Oh, I was right.

You were right.

Yeah.

Good old Assa-meda.

Let's see.

How do we say this?

I see a benefit.

I see a benefit.

Look, it's not that hard, guys.

It's a seat a benefit.

So Tylenol's name is being dragged through the mud by a bunch of claims made

without real scientific backing.

But, you know, that's never stopped Captain Cankels or Dr. Brainworm before.

Nope.

And even though this shifts blame on to women once again,

and once again restricts their choices, you know,

let's just put the current nightmare that is our country aside for a moment.

Let's travel back in time to another nightmare.

A darker time when taking a Tylenol for a simple headache was like playing Russian roulette.

A time when an innocuous bottle of Tylenol could kill.

Jody, that's your cue.

Oh.

Dun, dun, dun.

I was like thinking in my head.

I was here.

I mean, I remember this all going down.

I already know where you're headed.

And I was remembering it all on my head.

It's September 1982 in Chicago.

The hair was big.

The pizza was deep.

There wasn't a federal national guard person to be seen.

Ice wasn't snatching people off the street.

And a series of terrifying deaths would grip the nation.

And lead to massive changes in the United States.

In the early morning of September 28th,

12-year-old Elk Grove resident Mary Kellerman had a bit of a sore throat and a runny nose.

No big deal, normal type of complaint, the beginning of a little cold.

So her mom gave her a single extra strength Tylenol capsule to soothe her aching throat.

Mary collapsed on the bathroom floor and was dead by 7 a.m.

Wow, how long after she took it?

It's very short.

They didn't give an actual time, but I think it's within minutes.

Wow.

The same day.

Well, however long it would take for that gelatin capsule to dissolve in your stomach.

Less than 20 minutes, for sure.

The same day, less than 10 miles away in Arlington Heights,

a 27-year-old postal worker named Adam Janice took two extra strength Tylenol capsules.

He hadn't been feeling well when he woke up for work that day,

so on his way home he stopped at the Jewel Oscostor in Arlington Heights

and bought a bottle of pain reliever.

He took the pills and began to feel strange very shortly after.

He went to lay down, but when he became unresponsive, he was rushed to the hospital.

He died that afternoon.

Doctors told his grieving family that it had been a heart attack.

The family wept over Adam's body and then went back to Adam's house.

His brother Stanley Janice, 25 years old,

and Stanley's brand new wife Teresa, 20 years old,

both in shock and feeling terrible with massive headaches,

found a bottle full of Tylenol capsules in the house and took a couple each.

A third brother, Joe, watched in horror as his brother Stanley felt the floor,

white foam coming out of his mouth, eyes rolled backwards,

and Joe called an ambulance.

When the paramedics were loading Stanley into the ambulance,

Teresa stumbled after them, calling her husband's name, and collapsed.

Both were taken to the hospital and later died.

At their funeral, both caskets were carried into the same church

where they had been married just three months earlier.

Three months.

Sorry, I don't know why that like all of a sudden got me choked up.

It was just so tragic.

Both caskets being carried in one after the other.

Can you imagine?

Over the next few days, three more strange deaths would rock the community.

35-year-old Mary McFarland of Elmhurst, 35-year-old Paula Prince of Chicago,

and 27-year-old Mary Reiner of Windfield,

who had just delivered her fourth child.

Besides dying tragically young and living in the greater Chicago area,

what did these three women have in common?

Well, they all took Tylenol shortly before dying.

At this point, investigators were making the connection between the deaths,

thanks in part to some savvy people,

firefighter Chuck Kramer, and plucky nurse Helen Jensen.

She worked in Arlington Heights Village,

and they both worked to put two and two together.

Tylenol was at the time the most popular non-asperine pain reliever in the United States,

and these gelatin capsules were especially popular because they were easy to swallow.

Helen visited the Janice's home and noticed the almost full bottle of Tylenol

extra-strength capsule sitting on a counter.

She counted the capsules and noticed that six were missing.

Two for each death.

She immediately brought this to the attention of the medical examiner and the police,

but they laughed at her.

Kramer, the firefighter, tracked down a paramedic who had responded to the 12-year-old Mary Keller's death,

who said she had also taken Tylenol.

He also reported his findings, but nobody believed him either.

They both just kept pounding the police and the medical examiner,

who eventually agreed to look into it, and shortly it was discovered that the capsules

in the bottle contained lethal doses of potassium cyanide powder,

enough to kill a person many times over.

Do you know was it the whole bottle or was it a Russian roulette situation?

I don't think every single capsule was contaminated.

I can't remember.

That's a lot of product, and you had to take each of those pills apart,

dump them out, put them back together, and a lot of effort.

When I was looking into this story, I listened to an amazing podcast

all about the Tylenol murders, and it was done by the Chicago News Tribune.

Incredible investigative journalism.

We'll get into it later, but the one person that they really were focusing on

as a suspect later on, at one point, was saying that he was helping the investigators

and describing how they might contaminate the capsules by using, like,

he called it the breadboard method, where it was something about creating a channel

in a plank of wood and putting the capsules in there,

and you could dump the cyanide on the board and just scrape it into this channel

with a knife, and it would fill the capsules.

Oh, got it.

I mean, yeah, it's time-consuming to fill all those capsules,

but, you know, it was doable.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I mean, if you're dedicated to your mission, it probably is not a problem at all.

Right.

You know, if you're really serious about what you're about to do,

and you need the result that you're after.

Right, right.

A nationwide panic ensued, obviously.

Law enforcement drove through neighborhoods with loudspeakers

telling all of the residents to throw any Tylenol.

Johnson and Johnson recalled at least 31 million bottles.

It was the first mass recall in American history.

Oh, really?

Yep.

And it started a murder investigation that would span over 40 years

and had more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel,

which we will get into after this quick break.

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Seven innocent people were now dead.

All after ingesting deadly cyanide-tainted tylidol capsules.

But how did the cyanide get in there?

Both law enforcement and Johnson and Johnson were digging into the case.

J&J quickly established that the cyanide lacing happened after the tylidol left the factory.

And police found receipts for the purchase of tylidol by several of the victims.

Jewel food stores in Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village,

Walgreens in Chicago's Old Town, Asco Drug at the Woodfield Mall,

Dominics finer foods in Old Town and Woolworths in Lombard.

The police hypothesized that the bottles had been taken off the store shelves,

most likely stolen, the capsules laced with cyanide,

and then the packages returned to the shelves.

So for our younger listeners, you may not know this,

but back in the day, there were no safety seals on bottles.

That's a new invention.

Because of this.

I remember as a child that they had to add that.

You had a flimsy paper cardboard box.

Most likely not glued shut.

It was just a flap that you could pull open.

And then you just screw off the top.

And all that is in there protecting your medicines from the rest of the world is a ball of cotton.

That's it.

And these gelatin capsules were popular because they were easy to swallow.

Unlike, you know, your regular tablets, they kind of get stuck as soon as they get sticky when they get wet.

And it's harder to swallow to be popular.

But they were just a gelatin capsule that you could just break open

and dump all the contents out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just a recipe right there for disaster.

Exactly.

In early 1983, at the FBI's request,

a trap was set to lure the killer in.

Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Green published the home address and grave location

of 12-year-old Mary Kellerman.

And then they kept a 24-hour surveillance on the Kellerman's home

and Mary's gravesite for several months,

just hoping that the killer would show up, but to no avail.

And I am really surprised that the family of Mary Kellerman went along with this.

It was their home address that they were rushing the paper.

So any weirdo...

Oh, and they were part of it.

I was wondering when you said it, like, ooh, like, that is not kind to the family,

but they were aware of it, huh?

They went along with it.

Yeah, I mean, they went along with it, which is very surprising.

I mean, yeah, of course, they want to know why this happened to their daughter

and catch the person responsible.

But, you know, that's...

That's first scary.

No, no.

Doxxings meant something different back then.

Maybe it didn't seem as scary.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, but remember back in our research, back in the olden days,

when somebody was reporting on a story

and somebody just, you know, they interviewed somebody on the street,

they would publish their name and address.

Oh, yeah, right.

They're, like, according to Miss Ethel Hefferman,

who resides at one, two, eight, six, five Grove Courts Northwest

in Tacoma, Washington, and the Blue House with the red shutters, you know.

Ad legitimacy to the story by giving exact details.

Right.

We didn't make her up.

You could just go to her house and knock on the door and ask her.

And she said these things.

And, like, I just can't imagine doing that right now, you know.

So there was also one surveillance photo of another victim, Paula Prince.

And then she was purchasing her bottle of Tylenol at Walgreens.

There's this bearded man in the video just behind her.

And they surmise that maybe that was the killer.

But that was literally it.

That's all they had to go on.

They had nothing.

Just real guesses is all they're working with.

Yeah, exactly.

But then, in October of the same year, law enforcement received a chilling letter.

It included details of the investigation that had not been made public.

And it demanded $1 million to stop the killings.

It was signed by a man named Robert Richardson.

And here's what it said.

Gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to play cyanide.

Both potassium and sodium into capsules sitting on store shelves.

And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill.

Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly.

It takes so very little.

And there will be no time to take countermeasures.

If you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing.

So far, I have spent less than $50.

And it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.

If you want to stop the killing, then why are $1 million to bank account number 844957

at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, Illinois?

Don't attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter.

A couple of phone calls by me will undo anything you can possibly do.

Wow.

So did they look into this bank account?

It feels like that would be very easy for them to identify someone.

This was really interesting.

So Robert Richardson owned a travel agency called Lakeside Travel.

And one, and they had recently shut down.

One of the people he used to work there was a woman named Leanne Lewis.

And when Lakeside Travel closed its doors, it had a lot of back pay owed to its employees and never paid them.

Leanne was an accountant at Lakeside Travel.

So she would have had access to their bank account information and where that money went or if there is any.

So this letter led them back.

Obviously they looked into that and they looked into the employees.

That bank account belonged to Lakeside Travel.

But it wasn't Robert Richardson.

He didn't do this and sign his own name.

Look, that would be very dumb.

But it led them to the husband of Leanne James W. Lewis.

And they linked him through handwriting and fingerprints on the letter.

When they talked to James Lewis about this,

he said that it was an attempt to embarrass his wife's former employer because they didn't pay her her back pay.

And also to bring attention to Johnson and Johnson's vulnerability.

He denied any involvement in the Tylenol murders.

But he was convicted for attempted extortion and served 12 years in prison for this.

But they, at that time, were not able to link him to the Tylenol murders.

He was just trying to make money off this.

Well, but they haven't ruled it out that it wasn't him.

Oh, got it.

They just didn't have enough evidence to actually tie him.

All they had was this letter.

But something interesting that they found out James Lewis's daughter,

who was born with Down syndrome, was born with a lot of heart defects.

Had a lot of surgeries.

And she passed away in 1974 from complications from this congenital heart defect.

She's found that the sutures used in her heart during this most recent surgery had ripped.

And those sutures were under a patent held by J&J.

Okay.

Yep.

So suture business to this day.

Right.

So they suspected that maybe this was, you know, some retribution for the death of his daughter, though he denied it forever.

So Lewis was the investigator's main suspect for decades.

But they were never able to pin it on him.

The case went cold.

Now remember, this was 1982 that this happened.

It was reopened in 2009 by the FBI.

But despite having a search warrant for James Lewis's house and seizing a ton of potential evidence,

including computers and documents and DNA analysis,

they were still not definitively able to tie him to the murders.

And unfortunately, to this day, we will never know if James Lewis was indeed the Tylenol killer,

because he died in July of 2023.

Oh, recently ish.

Yeah.

But side note, it's not that he was just an innocent bystander.

Like, obviously, we already know about the extortion letter that he served 12 years for.

He was also convicted of mail fraud.

So he dabbled.

Yeah.

He sent a threatening letter to President Reagan threatening to use a radio controlled model airplane

to interfere with secret service operations at the White House.

In 2004, he was arrested and charged with multiple felonies, including rape, kidnapping, assault,

and administering drugs with intent to commit a crime.

So broad.

Yeah.

An area of illegal organizations.

Yes.

So in that one, he allegedly lured a young woman into his home, drugged her, and assaulted her.

I don't know.

Obviously not potassium cyanide.

Well, she would be dead.

Yeah.

He was held for three years, and released when the charges were dismissed,

because the woman refused to testify.

He was also, this was very interesting.

He was also charged with the murder and dismemberment of one of his tax clients in 1978.

But that case was dropped, because the original arresting officers failed to properly Mirandaize him.

And therefore, all of his testimony and everything that came after that was not admissible.

Insane.

Yeah.

So the DA had to just drop it.

That was a really sad part of this story.

It was this old man who James Lewis was his tax man, and everybody in the town knew this old man.

And he had been talking about how my tax guy just keeps hanging around.

He keeps showing up at my house.

He's getting in my business in a way that I don't like.

And then this guy just disappeared.

Nobody could get ahold of him.

They went to his house, and there was a padlock on the door.

They couldn't find him anywhere.

And then finally, they went up into the attic, and there was his dismembered body in the attic.

What?

Go ahead.

Like, just who was this body?

This man, that I'm talking about, this old man.

His body was in his own attic.

And a few days after he disappeared, a $5,000 check made out to James Lewis,

was attempted to be cleared through his bank.

Wow.

There was a lot of evidence tying this guy to this murder.

That's.

But because these officers were so gung ho, and they did not.

That's unfortunate.

Holy Miranda is him.

That's poor guy.

They had to just in his family who won't ever see any consequences.

Right.

But back in 1986, James Lewis was on the radar, but hadn't been just, you know,

he was there and nothing really had happened.

The case was still open.

So investigators, even though they suspected James Lewis, they still did not know for sure who had committed the murders.

Maybe it was Lewis, but maybe the real killer was still out there.

And maybe the killer had moved to the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Yeah.

But before we go on and come to our region, let's take a quick break.

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Before we get back to the story, if you're listening to this episode before Christmas of 2025,

we want to announce a special gift we're giving to our listeners for the holiday season.

We're going to choose one lucky listener to get their own piece of bespoke fan fiction.

Now, normally this is reserved for our Patreon supporters, but we want you to join in on the fun.

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Alright, let's get back to the story.

So it's 1986 Auburn, Washington.

The hair is still big, although slightly more damp.

A young Jody King is emptying a bottle of aqua net on her bangs.

For sure, actually it was an Aussie sprunch spray, probably a bottle of Aussie sprunch spray.

Preparing to go out and decimate some poor little girl in the softball field.

Hit with a pitch for sure if you're nasty.

On June 5th, Stella Nichol called the fire department.

Her husband Bruce, a heavy machinery operator, had collapsed.

Emergency personnel rushed to their single wide trailer in Auburn, where the unconscious Bruce lay on the floor.

He was rushed by helicopter to Harborview Hospital in Seattle, but died shortly after.

The autopsy declared the cause of death to be infosima.

Stella said that Bruce had come home from work that day with a headache.

He took four extra strength, etc. cap, caplets, which cap souls, which I think is more than the recommended dose.

That seems like, I mean, if they're the same as they are today, yes, that's twice the dose.

Yeah.

Well, and wouldn't is extra strength so that you can just take one?

Yes, but Max dose is, there are 500 milligrams each, and Max dose is 1000 at a time.

Yeah, so anyway.

Yeah.

So he popped four of these puppies, walked out onto the back deck to watch the birds and collapsed within minutes.

Then, six days later, on June 11th, 15-year-old Haley Snow found her mother Sue unconscious on the floor of the bathroom in their Auburn home.

She was also taken to Harborview by helicopter, but tragically died.

But this time, pathologists had a clue.

They could smell bitter almonds during the autopsy, so tested for cyanide poisoning.

Soon, the FDA announced that cyanide-laced extra strength and sedron capsules had been found in her home.

The FBI was notified, and at that point, they took over the investigation.

So, just like in 1982, with the Tylenol deaths, the Bristol Myers company initiated a nationwide recall of the drug and halted production.

At this point, the drug manufacturing conglomerate was also really alarmed.

So, they banded together to offer a $3,000, $300,000 reward.

Yeah, 3,000 saw that much.

I don't remember.

I didn't realize the price difference.

Yeah, inflation really is.

No, $300,000.

So, Jody, what is, in 1986, $300,000, what would that be today?

That's got to be at least double, if not more.

I'm working now.

Maybe more like a million dollars.

Oh, very close.

$850,000.

That's what I'm going to guess.

Are you serious?

What?

It's $886,000, $795.

I'm good at guessing.

That is real good.

You were off by $36,795 and 62 cents.

So specific.

All right.

So, a sweep of grocery and pharmacy shelves in King County produced another bottle of tainted

pills from Johnny's Market in Kent.

So, this was put out on the news.

You know, don't take a sudden throw it out.

And the next day, Bruce Nichols' widow Stella called the FBI to tell them that she

too had bottles of Etc.

And that Bruce had taken some right before collapsing.

When investigators showed up at her home to collect the bottle, she produced two bottles,

saying that she had purchased them on two occasions from two different locations.

Both bottles contained tainted capsules.

Whoa.

Blood test showed that Bruce, like Sue Snow, had died from cyanide poisoning.

And by the way, I've just got to insert something here.

So, one of these articles I read.

It said, one of Stella's neighbors characterized her as a washed-up, honky-tonk girl.

Oh, my God.

So, that paints a picture.

It's a burn.

So, this was suspicious.

It's pretty unlikely that she could have purchased two contaminated bottles from two different locations,

given that there were only four known, four or five by the end of this.

Known contaminated bottles.

One more tainted bottle was found, a bottle of a nascent three in the same store that she had bought one of her bottles of Etc.

So, a different brand, but same store that she had bought this Etc.

So, although investigators were suspicious of Stella, they needed more evidence.

They were also suspicious of Sue Snow's husband, Paul Webking, as he claimed to have taken two pills from the same bottle

as Sue when he left for work, but he was fine.

Both Stella and Paul Webking brought wrongful death lawsuits against Bristol Myers.

Now, when examining the cyanide powder in the poison bottles, they found these flecks of some unknown green substance.

And it turns out that it was an algae side called algae destroyer, which is used in home aquariums to, you know, help with algae problems.

Now, knowing that the deaths were now characterized as murder, investigators turned their attention to their two prime suspects, Paul Webking and Stella Nichol.

Both were asked to take polygraph tests, which Paul agreed to, but Stella was a bit more cagey.

She had started drinking heavily after Bruce's death, and she said she was too shaken up to take the test.

Well, drinking also will make it so it's not an accurate test. I mean, as accurate as it already is, right?

But I mean, it will impact those physiological things, so I'm not sure if it would have changed anything.

But it is suspicious when people say, nope, I don't want to do it.

Well, no, I don't actually think it...

Well, maybe back then, but today you should not agree to a polygraph test ever.

Well, I have actually taken one for a case. I was not the accused. I was the victim.

And when I gave my testimony, it said that I was not truthful, and I was telling the truth.

Right. It's junk scientific.

It should never take a truth.

And I was not the one accused, so it's like I didn't have much to...

Yeah, and there were certain sections.

I think really what it was, I'd put myself in a position to be a victim.

And so I felt guilty about that.

And so it was coming across on the machine that I was not being truthful about the case.

Does that make sense?

It's not reading.

It's not picking up the right story.

Yeah, there is a physiological change, but it's not what you think.

No, don't...

Yeah, I've watched enough true crime to know.

Do not...

Yeah, don't ever take a polygraph test.

It's junk science. It's not admissible in court, but it can certainly take the investigation.

If people are like, if you're innocent, why wouldn't you take a polygraph test?

It's like because they fail all the time.

It's junk science. I'm not going to do it.

Anyway, that's either here or there.

So with more digging, detectives turned up incriminating evidence against Stella.

Prior to the death of her husband, Bruce, she had taken out a $76,000 life insurance policy on her husband.

And here's the kicker.

It paid out an additional $100,000 if the death was accidental.

So even before Sue Snow died and gave investigators some idea that the deaths were linked,

Stella insisted that Bruce's death was suspicious.

He had no history of infosima.

And then detectives found two insurance policies with Bruce's forged signature.

And what about the flex of algae side in the cyanide?

Well, Stella had an aquarium.

Now, she insisted up and down that she had never purchased an algae side.

But investigators talked to the owner of the local pet store who said that Stella had ordered such a large amount of algae destroyer that he had to make a special order for it.

Yes.

So it was speculated that Stella used the same container to crush the algae side as she did to crush the cyanide, hence the contamination.

Now, Stella finally consented to a polygraph in 1986 but failed.

However, as we all know, polygraphs are junk science, so that means nothing.

They couldn't prove that she had purchased the cyanide or tainted the capsules, even though there were those suspicious insurance policies.

But finally, in 1987, something crazy happened that broke the case.

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Back to 1987, Stella's grown daughter Cynthia went to the police with information about her family.

Now, little history, Stella and Bruce both had checkered backgrounds.

Stella had her first child Cynthia at the age of 16.

Not long after, she became pregnant with a second child by a different man.

And knowing that it would be tough to attract a husband with two kids from two different fathers,

she gave up the new baby for adoption.

She was for that reason.

So that she could attract a man in the future.

Oh my galley.

Now, according to her children and other people who knew her,

she was a neglectful and sometimes cruel mother to Cynthia.

When Cynthia was nine, Stella beat her legs with a curtain rod.

And when Cynthia reported her to the police,

she claimed that the child was lying.

At one point, she just abandoned her child to one of her husbands.

She's a lovely lady.

Yeah, she's great.

So she spent a lot of time not actually having Cynthia in her life.

Stella also had us.

Yeah, they weren't close.

It wasn't until Cynthia was a teenager that she actually went back to live with her mother.

She had a long history of fraud, forgery, and drinking.

So she met Bruce in 1974 and they bonded over going to bars.

When Bruce decided to get sober some 10 years later,

Stella found herself bored with the marriage.

They used to have so much fun together going to bars.

Now they had nothing in common.

And her own drinking became much worse.

She picked up what he dropped off.

Exactly.

According to Cynthia, Stella told her that if Bruce was out of the picture,

she and Cynthia would have enough money to open a tropical fish store

or maybe a ceramic store.

I mean, why would she have all these algae or aquarium supplies?

Yeah, she.

Oh, my God.

But one store opened a tropical fish store.

Right.

But no, I would never order that.

That's right.

So she checked out several books from the Auburn Library that included information about poisonous plants.

She even confided to Cynthia that she had tried to poison Bruce in the past

with fox, glove, hidden, and capsules.

But all that happened is he got suddenly very sleepy.

Records from the Auburn Public Library showed that Stella had checked out several books about poisons,

including Human Poisonings from Native and Cultivated Plants and Deadly Harvest.

Does it seem like that should be a book that exists?

I know.

That's what I was just thinking.

Anybody who checks that out, you should be suspicious.

How to kill people with what's in your yard.

Right?

That does sound like a terrible book.

Well, the other thing is she'd never returned the book to the library.

Oh, my gosh.

And Stella's fingerprints were found on several books she had checked out.

And she'd also left fingerprints and palm prints on entries about cyanide poisoning

in three encyclopedias of the library.

This woman was meant to commit crime, clearly.

She was meant to get caught.

Stella was indicted in federal court and found guilty of product tampering, not murder.

Whoa.

And with sentenced to 90 years in prison.

Just from product tampering.

I think it was product tampering that caused death with the extreme.

Okay.

Okay.

And we'll get to that.

So not murder, but kind of.

Yeah.

Her own daughter, Cynthia, was a star witness against her own mother.

And she received $250,000 of the Drug Industry Award.

Oh, wow.

Now, this, of course, led to some speculation that perhaps it was a conspiracy

between Cynthia and Stella to get that money, but that was never verified.

I mean, why would you have a conspiracy where you go to prison?

Right.

Now, Stella maintained her innocence insisting that her daughter lied on the stand

in exchange for the reward money.

Now, I, I mean, I think Stella, I mean Stella's obviously guilty.

Yeah.

But do I also think that maybe this woman who was raised by somebody who has

a, is not an honest person could have maybe come forward to capitalize

on that.

Right.

Between genetics and environment.

Yeah.

Provided by her mother.

Right.

Either way.

So I, I don't know, but yeah, it is Stella did this.

I mean, allegedly.

No, she was convicted of it.

She did.

Right.

No longer a legend.

So over the years, she's filed multiple appeals and even petitioned for compassionate

release, but all have been denied.

So she remains incarcerated at FCI Hazelton in West Virginia with a projected

release date of March 7th, 2043.

Wow.

2043.

So that's.

Yeah.

Yeah.

70 years then ish.

Before she can even seek release.

That's crazy.

Well, good.

2043.

Less than, less than 20 years.

No, from 1987.

Oh, yeah.

Both the Tylenol murders and the Accedron Poisonings had a profound impact on product safety

regulations and how tampering cases are handled in the United States.

Before 1982, over the counter medications like Tylenol or Accedron were packaged, like I

said, in simple plastic bottles, often with nothing more than a thin cardboard box and

a lot of cotton stuffed inside the neck of the bottle to protect your pills.

There were no seals, no shrink wrap, no real way to know if a product had been opened or altered.

It's interesting.

We've become so used to this, like all our products, toothpaste, whatever it is, anything

that we're going to put in our body or on our body, having some sort of seal.

Right.

That when it doesn't, you are immediately suspicious.

Right.

And I ordered a bunch of stuff from Korea and they just have different product packaging

regulations.

And when I got the products and they didn't have that little foil seal over the, like skin

care product thing, I was like, but then I got online and read.

And they're like, yeah, they just don't do that with this brand.

And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm going to take the chance of rubbing but arsenic on it.

So far so good.

I'm fine.

I mean, look at this skin.

Yeah, you can definitely tell you've been using Korean skin care.

All of this changed after the Tylenol murders.

Working with the FDA, Johnson and Johnson pioneered tamper evident packaging.

Introducing foil seals, shrink bands and other security features that made it immediately

obvious if a product had been opened.

The company also redesigned its capsules to make them more resistant to tampering.

These innovations quickly became the industry standard.

And in 1983, Congress passed the Federal Anti-Tampering Act, better known as the Tylenol

Bill, making it a federal crime to tamper with consumer products.

This new law gave federal authorities the power to investigate and prosecute such crimes

carrying penalties of up to life in prison if deaths occurred.

So when Stella Nicholl plays cyanide-laced exedering capsules on store shelves in 1986, prosecutors

used this very law to bring her to justice.

The Tylenol Bill had allowed federal jurisdiction over her case and made the product tampering

resulting in death a serious federal offense.

She was one of the first major tests of the law and set the standard for how similar cases

would be handled in the future.

And thanks to these tragedies and the lessons learned from them, today's consumers can buy

medications with far greater confidence in their safety.

Foil seals, shrink wraps and safety caps might seem like a small annoyances.

But they exist because people once really did have reason to fear what was in the bottle.

Yeah, I remember because I was like, you know, 86, I was 14-ish.

That is terrifying to think that you could go pick up this bottle at the store in a box,

take it home, and somebody's tampered with it.

So it was scary.

And while today Tylenol and Asimita, oh no, I did it.

I see a bit of it.

It's because you got autism from taking it.

I did.

Well, today Tylenol and Asimita.

I can't say it at all.

I'm just like, I'll do it for you.

You say Tylenol.

I'll say Asimita Minivan.

Yeah.

And while today Tylenol and Asimita Minivan are being demonized in some corners of the internet

and the press despite the flimsiest of Korea,

despite the flimsiest of evidence,

because like who needs facts anymore, right?

Science is for gommies.

I just feel like it, you know, that's advice.

Yeah, that's vibes.

There was a brief moment in the 1980s

when that fear was actually kind of justified a little bit.

For a few terrifying years,

reaching for a bottle of painkillers

really could end all your pain forever.

Boom, boom, boom.

Definitely.

Okay.

And so if you guys haven't guessed yet,

this was my shameless attempt to take advantage of the headlines.

Yeah.

You're welcome.

Nice work.

Why me?

It is a hot topic right now.

Well, and it does have length to where we live.

I mean, right now we are literally sitting

probably 15 minutes away from where this happened.

Yeah.

In the Auburn ones, not Chicago, obviously.

So this is one of those things.

If you're a true crime nut

and you live in the Pacific Northwest,

you know this story.

Like, it saw you, you like,

immediately.

I knew immediately.

I was, I forgot it was Auburn though.

Yeah, right here.

Because at the time I lived farther away from Auburn.

You guys probably have been to the same bars

that Stella Nickel has been to.

Yeah, we'll have to talk about.

Yeah.

Yeah, we need to figure that out.

Yeah.

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She feels like there's people pointing at her yelling shame.

Shame.

Look, I will shame myself.

I don't need you to do it too.

If you don't have something, remember,

if you don't have something nice to say,

don't say anything at all.

Yeah.

Keep it to yourself.

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