May 30, 2019 • 45 mins
The panic that began in Chicago spreads and begins to change the world. The investigation into the murders turns up leads and suspects, but still no one has ever been charged with the murders. It remains unsolved to this day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, There's guest
producer Josh over there. Guess enough with the pleasant trees.
Let's get back to it Chuck. Thailand All Murders, Part two.
(00:24):
If you did not listen to the first part, seven
people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide
on the same day, all on the same day. America
and much of the world is super freaked out. Johnson
and Johnson is the manufacturer, and part one of part
(00:46):
two has a deal with Johnson and Johnson and how
they handled this in a public relations sort of way,
because there were and are a huge company. Like you
said in the episode one, they held thirty seven percent
of the market share, which was many hundreds of millions
of dollars of Thailand all that they're selling every year,
(01:07):
and that's right, which is like gazillions now, So it
was a very big deal for that company. And the
way they handled it is taught in colleges and pr
classes all over the world as exactly how to handle
a big public relations crisis like this, like it's literally
(01:28):
called a textbook example of how how it's done. Yeah,
they did a good job because, as you remember from
the last episode, they found out pretty sure early on
that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson, right, Like,
it wasn't in their factory, wasn't in their supply chain.
That happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened by
(01:50):
some crazed person taking them out of the store, tainting
them maybe in the store in the parking lot, then
putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson Johnson can't
come out on the news and say, hey, wasn't us
right Well, at first, though, and this this gets overlooked
and left out of the college business courses, in the
PR courses. At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in
(02:11):
favor of a massive recall. Well, it looks good in
one way but bad in another. And they actually didn't
recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference
on Friday calling for a recall of the Thailand all
in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm,
(02:32):
and yes, we're recalling all of the Thailand all in Chicago. Yes,
what she said, right, So by Friday, uh, the thirty
one of September is their thirty one in September? Was
this October one? I have no idea. I think it
was October one. Anyway, By the Friday, two days after
(02:52):
the death, the death um Johnson and Johnson recalled all
of the Thailand all in Chicago. And that should have
been enough to them. That was in a but this
PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast, and
like we said earlier in Part one, became global almost overnight.
It was not enough. And so Johnson and Johnson, within
(03:13):
a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra
strength taile and all in the United States, which is
worth about a hundred million dollars at the time, took
it back to their factories and destroyed it. So they say, right, uh, yeah,
both Johnson and Johnson, right. I wonder if one of
(03:35):
them was like, I don't know about this. They're one
of them said Okay, I'll take all the states west
of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and some Wyoming,
and then you take all the other states. That's a
that's a Part one joke. Uh, they even got an
award the Public Relations Society of America, which is a
real thing, I believe it or not. They awarded them
(03:58):
their Silver and bul award. Or how they handle the
crisis the Thailand All poisoning, that's right, and um high
grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad Wieners in
the first episode the ballpark. Frank sip Um supposedly had
razor blades but did not. That still created a public
relations crisis for them, even though they were just these
(04:19):
little jerks in Detroit. And uh, they won the Golden Anvil,
which is one higher than silver because of how they
handled the pr crisis brought about by the copycats of
the actual taile in All crisis, which was in fact
really brought about by two jerk kids in Detroit really
not even copycats, not the thaile in All crisis. I
(04:41):
wonder where those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
I bet one of them was the guy who did
our our lighting at our Detroit show. There was a smoke. Yeah, guys,
we we did the show in Detroit a few years ago,
and um, very famously we still use that as the
standard or for a bad crew. Bad We had a
(05:03):
guy that looked like a former roadie for your Riyah
Heap that was running like a light show basically during
the middle of our podcast, and like smoke came out.
We were like, we had to stop the show, almost
like dude, what are you doing? Yeah, well the lighting
was so bad that your highlighter had turned like brown
and you could and you asked him, we had to
(05:25):
stop the show and you had to ask him to
use a different color light. And his response, because Umi
was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging
out in the sound booth with the guy, his response,
according to them, was who wants smoke. I'll give him
some more smoke. And we got some more smoke like
a smoke machine man. And people ask us why we
(05:45):
haven't been back to Detroit. That's a big reason. It's
a big reason. Not the only reason. Uh. Okay, So
they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener pr moves.
UM McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson
and Johnson. They actually make Thailand. All yeah, they make
the pills again. The way this all this supply chain
(06:07):
works is really convoluted. Um and uh, like you said,
they didn't want to recall Johnson Johnson everything at first.
They want to kind of take it a little slower,
I guess um, because they found out the drugs are
actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland. This is a
hundred million dollars worth of stock that they were kind
of feeling the pressure to recall it's right, So they
(06:28):
were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were
convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.
They had no choice, no, that was the only way
to do it was to lose a lot of money
and in favor of future gains. Yeah, but even at
the time, a lot of people were like, this is
it for taile and All. The public has lost faith
(06:48):
in thailan All. So when thailan All recalled thirty one million,
fifty count bottles of extra strength taile and All and
destroyed at All, there was a chance that not only
were they losing a hundred million million dollars, but that
they were losing a hundred billion dollars of a brand
that had already lost the public trust and would never
regain it. So, which wasn't true. But no, but they
(07:11):
didn't necessarily know that at the time it was still
up in the air. Um. So they it was basically
thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show
the public this tainted Title and All has gone forever.
Your chances of dying from taking extra strength Title and
All are now gone. You can go back to taking
tile and all. Now, that was one thing, and that
(07:33):
was a big gesture, but which is what it amounted to.
It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson.
But they did other stuff too. They started to do
things right out of their reluctance. Once they finally said
there we have to just go with this to save
face and to win back public trust, they started to
do things right, like including like setting up a hotline
(07:53):
putting out a hundred thousand dollar reward for information how
much they had lost already none ted. Two dollars still
jump change it's it is yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
It does. Um but they But because of all this,
Johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and
actually managed to position itself as a victim in all
(08:17):
of this. Like yes, there were these which they were
seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson I don't think
ever tried to push them out of the spotlight, but
they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of
a of a mad poisoner who may or may not
have something out for them, but either way, their brand
was taking a huge hit because of this, and they
were a victim. And we're able to generate public sympathy,
(08:39):
which is part of the road to regaining the public trust,
which is why it's taught NPR classes. So, um, we'll
take you back to two if you're if you weren't
around then or old enough to be taking uh OTC
pills and pain relievers. OTC is over the counter, by
the way. That's right, Okay, you're done with OTTC. Yeah
(09:00):
you know me so dumb. Uh. I love that you
played along, though I appreciate it, you could have made
me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years almost now. Yeah,
that'd be when next month or this month? Right? Yeah,
unbelievable So uh not not in that way. Okay. So
(09:21):
here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to
take a pill like a tail and all you would,
um get your bottle. You would pop it open with
your thumb first. First it came in a little box. Sure,
but the box wasn't even glued shut. Um, you would
pop it open with your finger. You would take out
the cotton in there, and you would take your pill.
It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing, there
(09:44):
was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah.
Cotton originally was introduced to keep bear aspirin like the
hard tablets from getting crushed in transport. Yeah, and since
they started using capsules and other stuff in figured out
how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the
cotton any longer, but because consumers expected it. Still today,
(10:07):
you'll find cotton in your and your pills. There's no
reason for it to be there except because the companies
know that you wanted to be there. You might be
weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills. Imagine
the cotton lobby had something to do with that too. Well,
I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know, so
um big cotton. They should uh new fancy otc pills
(10:29):
should have micromodal in there. Right, it just comes with
a pair of me and the stuffed into your film bottle.
You're like, these have been worn so uh, this was
a time. It was a very innocent time previous to
this where you could like and you pointed this out.
I remember seeing this in grocery stores, like I remember
seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food products and smelling them. Yes,
(10:55):
that's what you could do, and then closing it back
and putting it back on the shelf. There's a little
a mold in this one, yeah, and I'll just leave
it for the next person. Forget poisoning like that. These
they could be spitting in this stuff. It was allowed.
That's just the way it was like there was. America
was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived.
(11:16):
And that sets up this tail and all poisoning. It
really shows how much of a jarring experience it was
for America because all of a sudden, like it's finally
sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong
with the thaile and all. Somebody has gone out of
their way to poison the tail and all in order
to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able
(11:39):
to do this because there it's easy to to get
into the taile and all tamper with it, put it back,
and no one will be any any any more. The
wiser and wait, it's not just taile and all. Milk
doesn't have anything that that keeps it tamper resistant. New,
there's orange juice, new, there's cereal. New, there does um
cottage cheese? Enough does? And America for wreaked out. And
(12:04):
this is the reason why this Taile and All poisoning
is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in
the United States, because it was terrorism, pure and simple.
America was terrified. They were petrified not only to take
Thailand All or any over the counter medicine, now they
were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids.
(12:24):
Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one
to die in Chicago, she had a coworker who said,
like everything looked tainted now, I was afraid to give
my kids milk. I was afraid to give my kids cereal.
If they could get to the title tail and all,
they could poison anything. And that was really emblematic of
the the attitude, the shock that everybody went through. And
as a result, within six weeks, Thailand all said we
(12:47):
got this coverage. Yeah, and I have a feeling they
did this so fast. There had to have been this
idea in place already. It was I saw, I saw
a reference that it was, and I imagine it was
not done because they were like, well, that's a lot
of money, and why why would we bother. It's like,
it's not like someone's gonna poison the medicine. And then
that happened. So within six weeks they had a box
(13:08):
that was actually glued shut, so if your little box
had been opened, you would be able to tell yeah,
that was that was part one of three of this
tamper resistant packaging. That little plastic seal over the top
of the bottle after you open it. Uh oh no, No,
the the plastic is over the cap on the outside
of the bottle. Yeah, like the plastic foil, and then
the uh, the actual foil was over the mouth of
(13:30):
the bottle that we all have to poke through now
to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
None of that existed until the beginning of nine. So
all three of these are put in place within six weeks. Uh.
Not only that, they said, you know what, we're going
to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now it was
we didn't have them back then. Everything was a little
(13:52):
capsule that you could literally pull apart and you could
snort the Thailand all if you wanted to. Quite sure
some people did. I'm sure someone did. But the caplet is,
you know, a tablet coated with an easy to swallow
a gelatine. It's solid, it's um. I imagine you could
tamper with it. And even I even saw with all
these things in place, they said, nothing is tamper proof.
(14:14):
But these measures really went a long way to restore
the public, uh, you know, well, like the good feelings
about what was going on. Yeah, within about a year,
tailand all Or Johnson and Johnson managed to win the
public's trust back in Thailand. All that's hard to believe. Yeah,
that was really fast. But it also goes to show
like just how perfectly they did everything from that from
(14:36):
the time they committed to it on. Yeah, and I
feel like I remember like commercials with CEOs and stuff
addressing the public. He became I can't remember his name.
I want to say Geoffrey Beam. It's like a shoe brand.
Gabby Johnson. No, um, Bill Johnson. You know, Howard Johnson.
Yes this I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy
(15:00):
Johnson is way far away from that UM. But he
became a public face. He he would, you know, go
on to sixty minutes and and he talked to Dan
Rather and take Copple and all those cats. Like he
he was out there like showing how much the company cared.
And it had had a huge effect. Uh. And then
in Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the
(15:22):
Thailand All Bill, which basically says, if you do something
like this is now a federal offense. A few years
later in UM, the f d A actually established guidelines
for all manufacturers of any product really to make it
tamper proof. Yeah, because it wasn't just the O. T
C manufacturers that that started doing this. They followed suit
(15:43):
very quickly once Thailand all came out with it, because
they kind of had to if they wanted to keep
up with tail and all. UM. But also the UH,
the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer products
started putting their products in like tamper proof packaging. Dial
soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside the box to
(16:04):
trap the chemicals in I guess, but also to show
like nobody's injected this with lie or something like that,
although lie is used in the making a soap, isn't it.
I remember my Fight Club. It's pretty funny someone injected
soap into the soap. All right, let's take another break
and we'll come back and talk a little bit more
(16:27):
about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner right after this.
Stop stop. Al Right, So, uh, this was a very
(16:57):
big case at the time, obviously, like we've been saying,
it was a landmark case. Um, so of course you're
going to get um psychological profiles, which you know, we
should do one in profiling. Actually have we done that?
I don't think so it'd be a good one because
it always like seems like the trope in movies and TV.
But it is kind of like that. It is a thing,
for sure. It's not like they just make this stuff up.
(17:19):
But in the end they said, you know, this is
probably a man in his twenties or thirties who was
sort of a Jekyl and Hide type during the day.
He's very ordinary. You could be in the desk cubicle
next to you and you wouldn't even know it. Every
once in a while, he's just hearing go Yeah exactly.
But deep in his in the recesses of his brain, everyone,
(17:39):
he's plagued with self doubt and has an illusion that
a random killing can boost his sense of self worth
self worth. Um, which is just sounds like a straight
out of a movie. It sounds like as psychiatrist thing
I want to be on TV. Yeah, listen to me. Uh.
They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture
(18:01):
was that he had probably already taken his own life
after the killings. That was one specific person who said that. Yeah,
it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County. Yeah, um,
he probably already jumped off the bridge, So don't worry
about it. Don't worry everybody. Uh yeah, he just threw
(18:22):
that out there. I don't know if it was the
calm people or not, but or maybe he's just throwing
his two cents in. But um, I think you kind
of said it earlier. I don't remember if it was
part one or part two. The whole things is blurred
and become a haze by now. But um, no one
has ever been charged with the Thailand All murders. Yeah,
(18:44):
that's the ending. But there has been a lot. There
were a lot of suspects. Remember Thailand all set up
a hotline and this Thailand All task force, a hundred
and forty person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads,
taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls
that were coming in. Um, they were trying to whittle
(19:06):
those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing, and
out of all of them, they they deemed twelve hundred
tips leads worth checking out. There's a lot of leads
for a case, um, even even considering yet a hundred
and forty people working them. And I read somewhere that
they started out with like twenty thousand suspects or something
(19:29):
like that and whittled it down to four hundred. Yeah,
And sort of the sad part is as quickly as
they sort of figured a lot of this out, uh
and had that hundred and forty person task force, they
almost just as quickly within a few months, realized that, like,
we don't have a very good chance at finding this person. Yeah,
it became clear very quickly. Yeah, they whittled that down.
(19:51):
By the last week of October, the task force was
down to forty people. By the end of the year
it was down to twenty. And it was a situation
again in where you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you
didn't have credit cards and debit cards, um creating paper trails.
It was a lot easier back then to get away
(20:11):
with something like this too, um to be completely unknown.
To walk into a store, maybe slip some Thailand all
into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and
come back in and slipping back on the shelf. If
it's really easy, you won't even go to the trouble
of buying it. Yeah, I guess that's a good point
to steal it and then put it back. But you
know people were using cash. If there were cameras in
(20:31):
a place, they were probably trained on employees. I worked
at a golden pantry in College and the only camera
we had was directly above us, pointing down at the
catch register. It was the one of alps in in
Atlanta Highway Alps No, the one on the east side
College Station Road. I think, yeah, very interesting job. That's
(20:55):
the one where I got a job. I needed a job.
I got a job at McDonald's and I showed up,
took the one hour training video, and they got my
uniform number. I went home and I was supposed to
show up the next day, and I was just like,
I can't do it. I can't go work at mcdoults.
And I got the golden pantry job later that day, which,
hey man, sure, it's like sign me up from Golden
(21:15):
arches to golden pantry. That's like a ragster richest story.
I was selling beer and cigarettes. Nice, it was pretty great.
You're like one for you, one for me. Oh, I
would never do that. Um, all right, where was I? Oh? Yeah,
I was a golden pantry. So the cameras trained on
the register. They're not they're not. You know, you can
come and go in a store and no one even
(21:37):
knows it was cops have nothing to go on. Most importantly,
no motive. That was a big one because remember this
is just a Jekylin Hyde type. You'd never suspect who's
probably at the bottom of the Chicago River, right, who
also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people,
anonymous poisoning killing, not even shooting. It made zero sense whatsoever. So,
(22:02):
like we said earlier, the cops figured out within about
a month. Within the first month of the investigation that
this was. They were not going to have a break
in this case. But it's not to say that they
didn't have some suspects. Some people definitely did kind of
come to come to the four, but not many of them. Yeah,
but these two are really interesting sub stories in and
(22:22):
of themselves. The first guy's name was last name Arnold,
first name Roger, Roger, that's right, I call him Richard,
that's all right, But for good reason? Oh sure, because
you said he was like the richer jewel of his day,
the Olympic bomber, who was not the bomber, right, but
whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as
(22:46):
the Olympic bomber. The same thing happened to this guy. Yeah,
he was one of the first named suspects, forty nine
year old guy. So so put yourself in the position. Okay,
the media is going berserk on this story. Everybody hears
about it. It's a mad anonymous poisoner, and now all
of a sudden there's a name and a face associated
with it. Who's a suspect, but he's the first person name.
(23:09):
It's like people going crazy, like trying to get to
this guy, to interview him. Yeah, I have my doubts
about this guy. Not that he did that, but there
are a lot of hinky things that they found out
about him and then how it all ended up as
you're about to see. So he was a d i
y chemist. It's a big one. There's a big thing
right there, because into chemistry. He said, he's a Jacqueline
(23:31):
Hide type who's probably into chemistry. That's right. Uh. He
was a dock hand at jewel Foods at a warehouse
west of Chicago, and jewel foods to a couple of
different jewel foods are where the tyl was bought, like
a grocery store, food market. It's all checking out so far. Um.
So the cops look into him and go to his house.
(23:53):
He has a book, a handbook rather on methods of
killing people? How did kill people? A dizzy? I don't
know if that's the title, but okay, that's a good one.
He had five unregistered guns, it's a big one. He
admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said I
(24:14):
threw it out like at least six months before these murders.
He's like, when we are the murders again, Oh, yes,
six months before that that's and then his wife said,
you know, they're investigating her and interviewing her. She was like,
you know what, actually I did take some tile in
all and felt really sick and threw up one time.
But again I was it was probably due to over eating,
(24:35):
and it was just that once. That's the fact of
the podcast. So like, you can't blame cops for saying
this guy is a pretty good lead, yeah, because you
can kind of start to see, like if you add
all the other stuff together and then hear about the
wife throwing up from Thailand, all we like, could could
you see this guy like toying with his wife, like
testing it out on her, just enough to make her sick,
(24:57):
but not to kill her, to see what happened, you know,
see if she would notice. Who knows. But the cops
thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There there's not
a there's not a person associated with the story that
I came across who I actually think this guy did it.
I didn't find one person who thought Ronald Roger Arnold
(25:19):
actually did it. But in very short order he proved
that he was more than capable of murder because six
months after he was cleared as a suspect. He was
brought in for the murder of somebody else, a guy
named John Stanisha. Stanisha would say, yeah, I'm going with
that too, sons Slovak or something. Yeah, he was forty six,
(25:39):
he was a Chicago UM computer consultant, and that's saying
something yeah, probably so um. So here's what happened Arnold.
There was his bar gender name or bar owner named
Marty Sinclair, who Arnold had thought had initially turned him
into the cops and ruined his life essentially. So he
(26:00):
goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair and
it's actually this just completely innocent, random guy who gets
shot point blank. And so he in fact did kill somebody.
He did because of what had happened to his life.
It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.
He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed
(26:21):
somebody on purpose, mistaken identity killing though right. And because
of this, because it was directly related to the Thaile
and All poisonings, John Stanisha is um frequently considered an
eighth victim of the Taile and All killings, kind of
like an honorary um victim in this case. But it
is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be
(26:45):
in the wrong place, of the wrong time, a victim
of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like a
slightly different ring to it if it had been the
right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy
and poor dude just happened to be in the wrong
bar and happened to look like the owner, that's just,
it's just it's perfect for this for this saga. Yeah,
I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll
(27:07):
bet he was not very happy, probably not, but probably
also very relieved and probably also guilt. Yeah, I would
guess there's a touch of that, a range of emotions
I would imagine, Yeah, all over the place. So Arnold
ended up serving fifteen years of a thirty year sentence,
was released in ninety nine, and died nine years later. So, Chuck,
(27:28):
before we go on to the main attraction, as far
as the suspects go, Yeah, I propose that we take
a break, agreed, Okay, We'll be right back. Stop you stop, alright, Chuck.
(28:01):
So this dude, there was basically two suspects in this
whole case, over all these years, there are basically two people.
And again no one was ever actually charged with the murders.
But this guy came awfully close, and his name was
James Lewis, it turns out it was. But James Lewis
came under the attention of the Chicago p D and
(28:23):
the Thailand All Task Force when a letter showed up
at Johnson and Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly
the Thailand All Poison or the Mad Poisoner. And in
the letter it said basically like I've spent fifty dollars
so far, and the whole thing has taken me about
ten minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people.
(28:44):
I basically see no reason to stop. Pay me one
million dollars and then I will stop the killings. And
he gave a bank account number. He said, wire me
this money very very presidently. Now that's not the right word. Uh,
stupid maybe, but is it. No, it's not. So this
(29:05):
letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account
is associated with the travel agency in Chicago. And so
the cops go, Okay, this seems like it was dropped
in our lap, but let's go check it out and
they find the owner of this travel agency that had
closed up and gone under um. And this guy is like,
oh my god, you're kidding me. It's like, no, I
(29:26):
didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can
tell you who did, as a guy named Robert Richardson.
Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a
woman named Nancy Richardson who had worked at the travel
agency and when the travel agency went belly up, Nancy
lost her job and never got her last paycheck. Well,
(29:47):
Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate
on this, and was even more so the type of
guy who would write a letter to frame the owner
of the travel agency for the Thailand all murderers in
retaliation for at last paycheck. He was that kind of dude, right,
And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson
cat and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson
(30:09):
didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a
man named James Lewis. So when we joked earlier about
is that his real name, and you said it was,
it was? It was. His name was not Robert Richardson.
Though that was an alias. So what they found out
was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant. UM. He
(30:29):
had and this is just a strange, ironic twist. When
he was twenty years old, he tried to take his
own life by swallowing aspirin thirty six of them. Yeah,
so that's just neither here nor there. But an interesting
little side note. Yeah, the fact that, like most people
don't have that as part of their past. Yeah, it
is interesting that it came up. So he had a
pretty long rap sheet. He was wanted by postal inspectors
(30:53):
for a credit card fraud in Kansas City. UM. He
was indicted in ninety for And this one is just
mind blowing. He's indicted for murder after police found remains
of one of his former clients in bags in his attic,
and he got let loose because it was an illegal search.
But he he was caught with the body of one
(31:16):
of his clients dismembered in his attic with no good
explanation as far as I've ever heard. Yes, So Joe, well,
what explanation would be good? Well, we were playing poker
and one thing like doing another started juggling swords, and yeah,
uh so his wife's real name was Leanne, the one
who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid. They
(31:37):
fled Kansas City in December of eighty one. Um, and
this was as US Postal inspectors were converging on them
about this credit card scheme. Right, So they're like, just
bad people, not the postal inspectors. No. Great, So they
moved to Chicago. They changed their names to Robert Nancy
(32:00):
Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a tax preparer,
but then he was fired after a violent outburst in
his office against his co workers. Um. And then she
lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago, and this
turns out this is what got them exonerated from the time.
All thing is they left Chicago and moved to New
York before this happened, right before those same month. Right.
(32:24):
But if the theory held up that this person went around,
most likely in one day and did all this stuff,
then it couldn't have been them. No, And here's why,
because the cops had decided that it was done locally.
And one of the other things that supported that local
mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide through the gelatine
capsules eventually, so I had a very very short shelf
(32:47):
life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush
of cyani powder and melted gelatine. So, like you said,
it had to have been done basically the day before
they nine. They could not, no matter how hard they tried,
they could not put James Lewis or his wife in
Chicago that day. They just couldn't. And for his part,
(33:10):
James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote
the letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy.
But I did not. I did not poison the title
at all. He's always been adamant about that. He's never
toyed around with it. He's never messed around, he's never
been coy He's always been adamant that he did not
poison that title at all. Although the title and all
(33:32):
task force tried to trip him up once. I guess
to just get this on the record that he'd done this,
But they asked him, like in an in an interview, Okay,
let's say you had done it, how would you have
done it? And he actually he showed them how he
would have done it. Yeah, he just didn't write a
book about it. He just showed him in an interview. Yeah.
(33:52):
And he defends this later on by saying it was
just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius
Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer.
I think the answer for me it would have been
I don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I don't I
can't figure this out. But he's like, here's how I do.
I've been waiting for you to ask me though. Uh.
(34:12):
He's eventually found in New York City. He's at the
public library um with a reference book, copying names and
addresses of newspapers. Uh. I would imagine to send them
letters like zodiac style. Yeah, because so we gotta say this.
So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before
they found James Lewis, and it became part of the
(34:34):
national media um circus hunt. While they were looking for
James Lewis, this guy was writing letters to newspapers. He
called in a radio talk show. He was really relishing
the fact that there was a national man hunt out
for him. Who Like, that's That's what I'm saying. On
the one hand, you gotta kind of feel a little
(34:56):
bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded
into you know, the wrap for these murders. After his
extortion attempt, that's where the feeling bad firms. You're like, oh, yeah,
that's right. He totally brought this on himself. Yeah. So
they hauled him out of the New York Public Library.
He was sentenced to ten years for extortion attempt in
ten years for credit that original credit card fraud uh
(35:17):
and served thirteen years and lives in the Greater Boston
area today. So still today there. I think there are
a few people who are like, I could see this guy,
maybe maybe he could. He could be at some Some
detectives maintain that the Thailand All murder could have flown
into O'Hare running a car, done that circuit, flown or
(35:38):
driven back to a hair and flown out all on
the same day the day before, but they could never
put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day. UM.
So he was cleared finally, although he did serve two
consecutive ten years sentences. He served thirteen of the twenty
years for that credit card fraud that the Postal Inspectors
wanted him for and for extortion letter um and like
(36:02):
you said, he lives in Cambridge, mass now. But then
in two thousand nine, the case, after basically having gone
dormant in the early eighties, was reignited by the FBI
because they worked up they thought a DNA profile from
the capsules and they rated James Lewis's house. Um demanded
a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and Leanne Lewis fought
(36:25):
it in court. The judges like, no, you have to
do this. Before leaving the courthouse, they gave him the
samples and nothing has come of it. So I guess
that means tacitly that the Lewises were cleared once and
for all of the tail and all murders. Yeah, and
you know, the DNA thing is an interesting piece because um,
they still have some samples of the cyanide. I guess
(36:49):
that the capsules have have worn away by now if
it had the cyanide in there. But there was and
still his hope, um, that DNA could could crack this case. Um,
just like eight or nine years ago, the unibomber ted Kazinski.
Is that a two parter? No, No, it's just one parter,
good podcast, So I don't think. So that was a
(37:09):
good episode. Uh, he grew up in Chicago and his
parents were living in the Greater Chicago area in eight two,
and he is the UNI bomber. So they said we
might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him,
and um, he was cleared. I don't think he was
ever a super strong suspect and he probably would have
admitted it. So he was like, no, this is not
(37:31):
me right. So, UM, the UNI bomber has been cleared.
That's right from the talent on mers. But that remains
the case remains unsolved to this day. I think they
also have a fingerprint work up that they found on
one of the bottles and that and some DNA. It's
is they're just sitting around with that. There's there are
no suspects there. Every suspect has been cleared. Um, and
(37:55):
there's nobody on the horizon. It's just an unsolved random
series of killings that happened. Yeah, they're still working on
it though. Um. There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkleman
who has been on this task force for a long
time and he says he thinks it's solvable. Um and
his department did just saw a forty five year old
(38:16):
murder case cold case. Man, if they solved this one,
that would be the biggest cold case ever solved. I
think so. I think. I mean, who knows, but I
could see maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something
one day, Like I don't know if they're going to
catch someone in at the bottom of the Chicago River
in all of to jail, but I could see the
(38:36):
truth coming out one day, I hope so for the
families because um Monica Janie, she's the niece of Adam
Stanley and Teresa. She said, her family to this day.
This is from an article like last year, I think
um said that they have still not gotten over it.
She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said,
literally every day for the rest of their lives, they
(38:58):
just cried about, uh, the fact that they didn't know
who did it. Um. She grew up. It has been
a therapy therapy her whole life because um, there were
all victims. You know that this post traumatic stress disorder
kicks in where she grew up fearing that any of
her family members could die at any time. Um. Oh.
In that article, by the way, it was really good.
(39:20):
It was called the Thailand All Murders Colin is it
too late to solve the famous cold case? And that
was from any real crime and written by Jamie Bartas
Joseph manus Her. Her dad says that he still has
dreams like you know on the rag about these murders. Um.
He said he had one recently where everyone involved was
(39:41):
in a room in the case. Uh, and then two
black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how
they got away with murder. Um. Michelle Rosen, she's the
daughter of Mary Reiner. Um. She has dedicated her life
to investigating this on her own, and she doesn't agree
with the loan the mad pois in her theory at all. No,
this is this is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it had
(40:04):
something to do with the supply chain and that Johnson
and Johnson knew this and covered it up. Um. One
of the things, one of the things that people who
believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson recalled
all of that Thailand, all thirty one million bottles, and
then destroyed them allegedly without testing any of it. So
(40:24):
we will never know whether it was Pinky had the
day off right, whether whether it was beyond Chicago or
just local in Chicago, seems like it took long enough
that other people would have died in that week before
the national recall was undertaken. But um, there was something
very very interesting that was a post script to all
(40:44):
this that does undermine that mad poisoner theory. Yeah, it
was just a few years later a woman in New
York named Diane els Roth took two extra strength thaile
and all capsules and died from cyanide pisoning. Um, but
they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was it
(41:04):
another copycat case well, or or the original poisoner? Maybe?
So this different cyanide, right, the cyanide was definitely not
the same size some from the same batch. It was
chemically different. But there was another bottle found around the
block from where Mary els Roth bought hers and Yonkers
that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles
(41:26):
of extra strength tilent all two years later in another
state that had been UM tampered with. The problem is
this was after the three pronged tamper resistant packaging had
been UM introduced, which means it was an inside job, right,
I guess because the tamper the thing had not been
obviously tampered with then Thailand all was never able to
(41:48):
explain what happened. Yeah, and then within five days of
her death, eight states outright band the capsules, Thailand All Capsules, right,
and Thailand all for its part, was like, we've been
trying to get everybody to take caplets anyway, but they
keep taking capsules, so we're making it. And then a
guy wrote a book, right, Um Scott Bart's Yeah, a
former Johnson and Johnson employee, Um wrote in two thousand
(42:13):
eleven a self published book, UM on the Time of
All Poisonings, And he said what we were talking about earlier.
He's like, the supply chain is so convoluted, Um, basically
like it could definitely could have happened at any point
along the way. And his his idea is that that
Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution
network and they covered it up self published book. Yeah,
(42:37):
you gotta you gotta note that for sure. I'm not
knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy. It does if there's
like any hint of journalistic integrity and us that feels
like we have to note that. So that's the title,
and All Poisonings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago changed America,
changed the world, but definitely changed America. It was the
(42:59):
end of some form of innocence that we still had. Absolutely,
if you want to know more about the tile and
all poisonings, go online. There's stuff all over the place
and you can go down that rabbit hole and it's
deep and wide. Since I said that, it's time for listener,
ma'am uh. This is from Gin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys,
(43:20):
been listening for several years and never thought I'd have
a never thought a perfect time right to write in
would be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode
we talked about synth synthetic parts. It's a real thing.
When I was in high school, my dad came across
the stuff online called liquid a s s as horrible.
(43:43):
Not allowed to curse right that ourson would spell it
out though, um or, I guess maybe you should have
said like a asterisk asterisk. Yeah, there you go, good
name for a product, though she said he found it
on a joke web website in order to and I
have to tell you it is the worst thing you've
ever smelled. I can't even describe it. It makes you
(44:05):
want to not breathe anymore. The tiniest little drop is deadly,
So of course I took it to college with me
to play pranks, and boy did it backfire. I thought
I was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in
the radiator by my across the friend across the hall
friends room, not eating things, and not even thinking about
what would happen when the heat turned on. Well, the
(44:25):
heat turned on, and the whole floor of the dorm
was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag. Smells
took almost a week to finally go away, and I
have not used it again in the ten year since.
It's probably it's called learning your lesson. But she still
has the bottle. She's like, but I kept it just
in case. Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast.
(44:45):
This is the first podcast ever listened to and it's
still always on the top of my download list. Thanks
for giving this twenty eight year old woman a platform
on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that
is not completely out of place. Signed anonymous that is
Jen Green. Thanks Jen Green, very brave you to put
your name on that one. Especially I wonder if you
stepped up and said that horrible smell. That was my bad.
(45:09):
If you have a great story about college pranks, we
want to hear about it. Um You can get in
touch with this via our social links by going to
stuff you Should Know dot com, or you can send
us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(45:31):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, There's guest
producer Josh over there. Guess enough with the pleasant trees.
Let's get back to it Chuck. Thailand All Murders, Part two.
(00:24):
If you did not listen to the first part, seven
people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide
on the same day, all on the same day. America
and much of the world is super freaked out. Johnson
and Johnson is the manufacturer, and part one of part
(00:46):
two has a deal with Johnson and Johnson and how
they handled this in a public relations sort of way,
because there were and are a huge company. Like you
said in the episode one, they held thirty seven percent
of the market share, which was many hundreds of millions
of dollars of Thailand all that they're selling every year,
(01:07):
and that's right, which is like gazillions now, So it
was a very big deal for that company. And the
way they handled it is taught in colleges and pr
classes all over the world as exactly how to handle
a big public relations crisis like this, like it's literally
(01:28):
called a textbook example of how how it's done. Yeah,
they did a good job because, as you remember from
the last episode, they found out pretty sure early on
that this had nothing to do with Johnson and Johnson, right, Like,
it wasn't in their factory, wasn't in their supply chain.
That happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened by
(01:50):
some crazed person taking them out of the store, tainting
them maybe in the store in the parking lot, then
putting them back on the shelf. But Johnson Johnson can't
come out on the news and say, hey, wasn't us
right Well, at first, though, and this this gets overlooked
and left out of the college business courses, in the
PR courses. At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in
(02:11):
favor of a massive recall. Well, it looks good in
one way but bad in another. And they actually didn't
recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne held her press conference
on Friday calling for a recall of the Thailand all
in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson did a little face palm,
(02:32):
and yes, we're recalling all of the Thailand all in Chicago. Yes,
what she said, right, So by Friday, uh, the thirty
one of September is their thirty one in September? Was
this October one? I have no idea. I think it
was October one. Anyway, By the Friday, two days after
(02:52):
the death, the death um Johnson and Johnson recalled all
of the Thailand all in Chicago. And that should have
been enough to them. That was in a but this
PR crisis was so massive and spread so fast, and
like we said earlier in Part one, became global almost overnight.
It was not enough. And so Johnson and Johnson, within
(03:13):
a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra
strength taile and all in the United States, which is
worth about a hundred million dollars at the time, took
it back to their factories and destroyed it. So they say, right, uh, yeah,
both Johnson and Johnson, right. I wonder if one of
(03:35):
them was like, I don't know about this. They're one
of them said Okay, I'll take all the states west
of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and some Wyoming,
and then you take all the other states. That's a
that's a Part one joke. Uh, they even got an
award the Public Relations Society of America, which is a
real thing, I believe it or not. They awarded them
(03:58):
their Silver and bul award. Or how they handle the
crisis the Thailand All poisoning, that's right, and um high
grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad Wieners in
the first episode the ballpark. Frank sip Um supposedly had
razor blades but did not. That still created a public
relations crisis for them, even though they were just these
(04:19):
little jerks in Detroit. And uh, they won the Golden Anvil,
which is one higher than silver because of how they
handled the pr crisis brought about by the copycats of
the actual taile in All crisis, which was in fact
really brought about by two jerk kids in Detroit really
not even copycats, not the thaile in All crisis. I
(04:41):
wonder where those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
I bet one of them was the guy who did
our our lighting at our Detroit show. There was a smoke. Yeah, guys,
we we did the show in Detroit a few years ago,
and um, very famously we still use that as the
standard or for a bad crew. Bad We had a
(05:03):
guy that looked like a former roadie for your Riyah
Heap that was running like a light show basically during
the middle of our podcast, and like smoke came out.
We were like, we had to stop the show, almost
like dude, what are you doing? Yeah, well the lighting
was so bad that your highlighter had turned like brown
and you could and you asked him, we had to
(05:25):
stop the show and you had to ask him to
use a different color light. And his response, because Umi
was hanging out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging
out in the sound booth with the guy, his response,
according to them, was who wants smoke. I'll give him
some more smoke. And we got some more smoke like
a smoke machine man. And people ask us why we
(05:45):
haven't been back to Detroit. That's a big reason. It's
a big reason. Not the only reason. Uh. Okay, So
they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener pr moves.
UM McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of Johnson
and Johnson. They actually make Thailand. All yeah, they make
the pills again. The way this all this supply chain
(06:07):
works is really convoluted. Um and uh, like you said,
they didn't want to recall Johnson Johnson everything at first.
They want to kind of take it a little slower,
I guess um, because they found out the drugs are
actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland. This is a
hundred million dollars worth of stock that they were kind
of feeling the pressure to recall it's right, So they
(06:28):
were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were
convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.
They had no choice, no, that was the only way
to do it was to lose a lot of money
and in favor of future gains. Yeah, but even at
the time, a lot of people were like, this is
it for taile and All. The public has lost faith
(06:48):
in thailan All. So when thailan All recalled thirty one million,
fifty count bottles of extra strength taile and All and
destroyed at All, there was a chance that not only
were they losing a hundred million million dollars, but that
they were losing a hundred billion dollars of a brand
that had already lost the public trust and would never
regain it. So, which wasn't true. But no, but they
(07:11):
didn't necessarily know that at the time it was still
up in the air. Um. So they it was basically
thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show
the public this tainted Title and All has gone forever.
Your chances of dying from taking extra strength Title and
All are now gone. You can go back to taking
tile and all. Now, that was one thing, and that
(07:33):
was a big gesture, but which is what it amounted to.
It was a gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson.
But they did other stuff too. They started to do
things right out of their reluctance. Once they finally said
there we have to just go with this to save
face and to win back public trust, they started to
do things right, like including like setting up a hotline
(07:53):
putting out a hundred thousand dollar reward for information how
much they had lost already none ted. Two dollars still
jump change it's it is yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
It does. Um but they But because of all this,
Johnson and Johnson managed to regain the public trust and
actually managed to position itself as a victim in all
(08:17):
of this. Like yes, there were these which they were
seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson I don't think
ever tried to push them out of the spotlight, but
they also managed to portray themselves as the victim of
a of a mad poisoner who may or may not
have something out for them, but either way, their brand
was taking a huge hit because of this, and they
were a victim. And we're able to generate public sympathy,
(08:39):
which is part of the road to regaining the public trust,
which is why it's taught NPR classes. So, um, we'll
take you back to two if you're if you weren't
around then or old enough to be taking uh OTC
pills and pain relievers. OTC is over the counter, by
the way. That's right, Okay, you're done with OTTC. Yeah
(09:00):
you know me so dumb. Uh. I love that you
played along, though I appreciate it, you could have made
me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years almost now. Yeah,
that'd be when next month or this month? Right? Yeah,
unbelievable So uh not not in that way. Okay. So
(09:21):
here's how it used to happen. If you wanted to
take a pill like a tail and all you would,
um get your bottle. You would pop it open with
your thumb first. First it came in a little box. Sure,
but the box wasn't even glued shut. Um, you would
pop it open with your finger. You would take out
the cotton in there, and you would take your pill.
It was that easy. There was no tamper proofing, there
(09:44):
was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah.
Cotton originally was introduced to keep bear aspirin like the
hard tablets from getting crushed in transport. Yeah, and since
they started using capsules and other stuff in figured out
how to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the
cotton any longer, but because consumers expected it. Still today,
(10:07):
you'll find cotton in your and your pills. There's no
reason for it to be there except because the companies
know that you wanted to be there. You might be
weirded out if there wasn't cotton in your pills. Imagine
the cotton lobby had something to do with that too. Well,
I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know, so
um big cotton. They should uh new fancy otc pills
(10:29):
should have micromodal in there. Right, it just comes with
a pair of me and the stuffed into your film bottle.
You're like, these have been worn so uh, this was
a time. It was a very innocent time previous to
this where you could like and you pointed this out.
I remember seeing this in grocery stores, like I remember
seeing mothers and grocery stores opening food products and smelling them. Yes,
(10:55):
that's what you could do, and then closing it back
and putting it back on the shelf. There's a little
a mold in this one, yeah, and I'll just leave
it for the next person. Forget poisoning like that. These
they could be spitting in this stuff. It was allowed.
That's just the way it was like there was. America
was innocent enough that that was fine. That's how we lived.
(11:16):
And that sets up this tail and all poisoning. It
really shows how much of a jarring experience it was
for America because all of a sudden, like it's finally
sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong
with the thaile and all. Somebody has gone out of
their way to poison the tail and all in order
to randomly kill people. And the reason they were able
(11:39):
to do this because there it's easy to to get
into the taile and all tamper with it, put it back,
and no one will be any any any more. The
wiser and wait, it's not just taile and all. Milk
doesn't have anything that that keeps it tamper resistant. New,
there's orange juice, new, there's cereal. New, there does um
cottage cheese? Enough does? And America for wreaked out. And
(12:04):
this is the reason why this Taile and All poisoning
is considered widely the first incident of domestic terrorism in
the United States, because it was terrorism, pure and simple.
America was terrified. They were petrified not only to take
Thailand All or any over the counter medicine, now they
were petrified to drink milk or give milk to their kids.
(12:24):
Paula Prince, the flight attendant who was the last one
to die in Chicago, she had a coworker who said,
like everything looked tainted now, I was afraid to give
my kids milk. I was afraid to give my kids cereal.
If they could get to the title tail and all,
they could poison anything. And that was really emblematic of
the the attitude, the shock that everybody went through. And
as a result, within six weeks, Thailand all said we
(12:47):
got this coverage. Yeah, and I have a feeling they
did this so fast. There had to have been this
idea in place already. It was I saw, I saw
a reference that it was, and I imagine it was
not done because they were like, well, that's a lot
of money, and why why would we bother. It's like,
it's not like someone's gonna poison the medicine. And then
that happened. So within six weeks they had a box
(13:08):
that was actually glued shut, so if your little box
had been opened, you would be able to tell yeah,
that was that was part one of three of this
tamper resistant packaging. That little plastic seal over the top
of the bottle after you open it. Uh oh no, No,
the the plastic is over the cap on the outside
of the bottle. Yeah, like the plastic foil, and then
the uh, the actual foil was over the mouth of
(13:30):
the bottle that we all have to poke through now
to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
None of that existed until the beginning of nine. So
all three of these are put in place within six weeks. Uh.
Not only that, they said, you know what, we're going
to introduce the caplet, which everyone knows now it was
we didn't have them back then. Everything was a little
(13:52):
capsule that you could literally pull apart and you could
snort the Thailand all if you wanted to. Quite sure
some people did. I'm sure someone did. But the caplet is,
you know, a tablet coated with an easy to swallow
a gelatine. It's solid, it's um. I imagine you could
tamper with it. And even I even saw with all
these things in place, they said, nothing is tamper proof.
(14:14):
But these measures really went a long way to restore
the public, uh, you know, well, like the good feelings
about what was going on. Yeah, within about a year,
tailand all Or Johnson and Johnson managed to win the
public's trust back in Thailand. All that's hard to believe. Yeah,
that was really fast. But it also goes to show
like just how perfectly they did everything from that from
(14:36):
the time they committed to it on. Yeah, and I
feel like I remember like commercials with CEOs and stuff
addressing the public. He became I can't remember his name.
I want to say Geoffrey Beam. It's like a shoe brand.
Gabby Johnson. No, um, Bill Johnson. You know, Howard Johnson.
Yes this I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy
(15:00):
Johnson is way far away from that UM. But he
became a public face. He he would, you know, go
on to sixty minutes and and he talked to Dan
Rather and take Copple and all those cats. Like he
he was out there like showing how much the company cared.
And it had had a huge effect. Uh. And then
in Congress got involved. They passed what they dubbed the
(15:22):
Thailand All Bill, which basically says, if you do something
like this is now a federal offense. A few years
later in UM, the f d A actually established guidelines
for all manufacturers of any product really to make it
tamper proof. Yeah, because it wasn't just the O. T
C manufacturers that that started doing this. They followed suit
(15:43):
very quickly once Thailand all came out with it, because
they kind of had to if they wanted to keep
up with tail and all. UM. But also the UH,
the manufacturers of everything, like every product, every consumer products
started putting their products in like tamper proof packaging. Dial
soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside the box to
(16:04):
trap the chemicals in I guess, but also to show
like nobody's injected this with lie or something like that,
although lie is used in the making a soap, isn't it.
I remember my Fight Club. It's pretty funny someone injected
soap into the soap. All right, let's take another break
and we'll come back and talk a little bit more
(16:27):
about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner right after this.
Stop stop. Al Right, So, uh, this was a very
(16:57):
big case at the time, obviously, like we've been saying,
it was a landmark case. Um, so of course you're
going to get um psychological profiles, which you know, we
should do one in profiling. Actually have we done that?
I don't think so it'd be a good one because
it always like seems like the trope in movies and TV.
But it is kind of like that. It is a thing,
for sure. It's not like they just make this stuff up.
(17:19):
But in the end they said, you know, this is
probably a man in his twenties or thirties who was
sort of a Jekyl and Hide type during the day.
He's very ordinary. You could be in the desk cubicle
next to you and you wouldn't even know it. Every
once in a while, he's just hearing go Yeah exactly.
But deep in his in the recesses of his brain, everyone,
(17:39):
he's plagued with self doubt and has an illusion that
a random killing can boost his sense of self worth
self worth. Um, which is just sounds like a straight
out of a movie. It sounds like as psychiatrist thing
I want to be on TV. Yeah, listen to me. Uh.
They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture
(18:01):
was that he had probably already taken his own life
after the killings. That was one specific person who said that. Yeah,
it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County. Yeah, um,
he probably already jumped off the bridge, So don't worry
about it. Don't worry everybody. Uh yeah, he just threw
(18:22):
that out there. I don't know if it was the
calm people or not, but or maybe he's just throwing
his two cents in. But um, I think you kind
of said it earlier. I don't remember if it was
part one or part two. The whole things is blurred
and become a haze by now. But um, no one
has ever been charged with the Thailand All murders. Yeah,
(18:44):
that's the ending. But there has been a lot. There
were a lot of suspects. Remember Thailand all set up
a hotline and this Thailand All task force, a hundred
and forty person strong task force investigating this, chasing down leads,
taking calls on the hotline, thousands and thousands of calls
that were coming in. Um, they were trying to whittle
(19:06):
those down into actual tips that were worth pursuing, and
out of all of them, they they deemed twelve hundred
tips leads worth checking out. There's a lot of leads
for a case, um, even even considering yet a hundred
and forty people working them. And I read somewhere that
they started out with like twenty thousand suspects or something
(19:29):
like that and whittled it down to four hundred. Yeah,
And sort of the sad part is as quickly as
they sort of figured a lot of this out, uh
and had that hundred and forty person task force, they
almost just as quickly within a few months, realized that, like,
we don't have a very good chance at finding this person. Yeah,
it became clear very quickly. Yeah, they whittled that down.
(19:51):
By the last week of October, the task force was
down to forty people. By the end of the year
it was down to twenty. And it was a situation
again in where you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you
didn't have credit cards and debit cards, um creating paper trails.
It was a lot easier back then to get away
(20:11):
with something like this too, um to be completely unknown.
To walk into a store, maybe slip some Thailand all
into your pocket, go out to the parking lot and
come back in and slipping back on the shelf. If
it's really easy, you won't even go to the trouble
of buying it. Yeah, I guess that's a good point
to steal it and then put it back. But you
know people were using cash. If there were cameras in
(20:31):
a place, they were probably trained on employees. I worked
at a golden pantry in College and the only camera
we had was directly above us, pointing down at the
catch register. It was the one of alps in in
Atlanta Highway Alps No, the one on the east side
College Station Road. I think, yeah, very interesting job. That's
(20:55):
the one where I got a job. I needed a job.
I got a job at McDonald's and I showed up,
took the one hour training video, and they got my
uniform number. I went home and I was supposed to
show up the next day, and I was just like,
I can't do it. I can't go work at mcdoults.
And I got the golden pantry job later that day, which,
hey man, sure, it's like sign me up from Golden
(21:15):
arches to golden pantry. That's like a ragster richest story.
I was selling beer and cigarettes. Nice, it was pretty great.
You're like one for you, one for me. Oh, I
would never do that. Um, all right, where was I? Oh? Yeah,
I was a golden pantry. So the cameras trained on
the register. They're not they're not. You know, you can
come and go in a store and no one even
(21:37):
knows it was cops have nothing to go on. Most importantly,
no motive. That was a big one because remember this
is just a Jekylin Hyde type. You'd never suspect who's
probably at the bottom of the Chicago River, right, who
also is engaged in some senseless random killings of people,
anonymous poisoning killing, not even shooting. It made zero sense whatsoever. So,
(22:02):
like we said earlier, the cops figured out within about
a month. Within the first month of the investigation that
this was. They were not going to have a break
in this case. But it's not to say that they
didn't have some suspects. Some people definitely did kind of
come to come to the four, but not many of them. Yeah,
but these two are really interesting sub stories in and
(22:22):
of themselves. The first guy's name was last name Arnold,
first name Roger, Roger, that's right, I call him Richard,
that's all right, But for good reason? Oh sure, because
you said he was like the richer jewel of his day,
the Olympic bomber, who was not the bomber, right, but
whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as
(22:46):
the Olympic bomber. The same thing happened to this guy. Yeah,
he was one of the first named suspects, forty nine
year old guy. So so put yourself in the position. Okay,
the media is going berserk on this story. Everybody hears
about it. It's a mad anonymous poisoner, and now all
of a sudden there's a name and a face associated
with it. Who's a suspect, but he's the first person name.
(23:09):
It's like people going crazy, like trying to get to
this guy, to interview him. Yeah, I have my doubts
about this guy. Not that he did that, but there
are a lot of hinky things that they found out
about him and then how it all ended up as
you're about to see. So he was a d i
y chemist. It's a big one. There's a big thing
right there, because into chemistry. He said, he's a Jacqueline
(23:31):
Hide type who's probably into chemistry. That's right. Uh. He
was a dock hand at jewel Foods at a warehouse
west of Chicago, and jewel foods to a couple of
different jewel foods are where the tyl was bought, like
a grocery store, food market. It's all checking out so far. Um.
So the cops look into him and go to his house.
(23:53):
He has a book, a handbook rather on methods of
killing people? How did kill people? A dizzy? I don't
know if that's the title, but okay, that's a good one.
He had five unregistered guns, it's a big one. He
admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said I
(24:14):
threw it out like at least six months before these murders.
He's like, when we are the murders again, Oh, yes,
six months before that that's and then his wife said,
you know, they're investigating her and interviewing her. She was like,
you know what, actually I did take some tile in
all and felt really sick and threw up one time.
But again I was it was probably due to over eating,
(24:35):
and it was just that once. That's the fact of
the podcast. So like, you can't blame cops for saying
this guy is a pretty good lead, yeah, because you
can kind of start to see, like if you add
all the other stuff together and then hear about the
wife throwing up from Thailand, all we like, could could
you see this guy like toying with his wife, like
testing it out on her, just enough to make her sick,
(24:57):
but not to kill her, to see what happened, you know,
see if she would notice. Who knows. But the cops
thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There there's not
a there's not a person associated with the story that
I came across who I actually think this guy did it.
I didn't find one person who thought Ronald Roger Arnold
(25:19):
actually did it. But in very short order he proved
that he was more than capable of murder because six
months after he was cleared as a suspect. He was
brought in for the murder of somebody else, a guy
named John Stanisha. Stanisha would say, yeah, I'm going with
that too, sons Slovak or something. Yeah, he was forty six,
(25:39):
he was a Chicago UM computer consultant, and that's saying
something yeah, probably so um. So here's what happened Arnold.
There was his bar gender name or bar owner named
Marty Sinclair, who Arnold had thought had initially turned him
into the cops and ruined his life essentially. So he
(26:00):
goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair and
it's actually this just completely innocent, random guy who gets
shot point blank. And so he in fact did kill somebody.
He did because of what had happened to his life.
It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.
He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed
(26:21):
somebody on purpose, mistaken identity killing though right. And because
of this, because it was directly related to the Thaile
and All poisonings, John Stanisha is um frequently considered an
eighth victim of the Taile and All killings, kind of
like an honorary um victim in this case. But it
is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be
(26:45):
in the wrong place, of the wrong time, a victim
of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like a
slightly different ring to it if it had been the
right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy
and poor dude just happened to be in the wrong
bar and happened to look like the owner, that's just,
it's just it's perfect for this for this saga. Yeah,
I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll
(27:07):
bet he was not very happy, probably not, but probably
also very relieved and probably also guilt. Yeah, I would
guess there's a touch of that, a range of emotions
I would imagine, Yeah, all over the place. So Arnold
ended up serving fifteen years of a thirty year sentence,
was released in ninety nine, and died nine years later. So, Chuck,
(27:28):
before we go on to the main attraction, as far
as the suspects go, Yeah, I propose that we take
a break, agreed, Okay, We'll be right back. Stop you stop, alright, Chuck.
(28:01):
So this dude, there was basically two suspects in this
whole case, over all these years, there are basically two people.
And again no one was ever actually charged with the murders.
But this guy came awfully close, and his name was
James Lewis, it turns out it was. But James Lewis
came under the attention of the Chicago p D and
(28:23):
the Thailand All Task Force when a letter showed up
at Johnson and Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly
the Thailand All Poison or the Mad Poisoner. And in
the letter it said basically like I've spent fifty dollars
so far, and the whole thing has taken me about
ten minutes per bottle, and I've already killed seven people.
(28:44):
I basically see no reason to stop. Pay me one
million dollars and then I will stop the killings. And
he gave a bank account number. He said, wire me
this money very very presidently. Now that's not the right word. Uh,
stupid maybe, but is it. No, it's not. So this
(29:05):
letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account
is associated with the travel agency in Chicago. And so
the cops go, Okay, this seems like it was dropped
in our lap, but let's go check it out and
they find the owner of this travel agency that had
closed up and gone under um. And this guy is like,
oh my god, you're kidding me. It's like, no, I
(29:26):
didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can
tell you who did, as a guy named Robert Richardson.
Robert Richardson, it turned out, was the husband of a
woman named Nancy Richardson who had worked at the travel
agency and when the travel agency went belly up, Nancy
lost her job and never got her last paycheck. Well,
(29:47):
Robert Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate
on this, and was even more so the type of
guy who would write a letter to frame the owner
of the travel agency for the Thailand all murderers in
retaliation for at last paycheck. He was that kind of dude, right,
And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson
cat and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson
(30:09):
didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a
man named James Lewis. So when we joked earlier about
is that his real name, and you said it was,
it was? It was. His name was not Robert Richardson.
Though that was an alias. So what they found out
was that Robert Richardson was a tax consultant. UM. He
(30:29):
had and this is just a strange, ironic twist. When
he was twenty years old, he tried to take his
own life by swallowing aspirin thirty six of them. Yeah,
so that's just neither here nor there. But an interesting
little side note. Yeah, the fact that, like most people
don't have that as part of their past. Yeah, it
is interesting that it came up. So he had a
pretty long rap sheet. He was wanted by postal inspectors
(30:53):
for a credit card fraud in Kansas City. UM. He
was indicted in ninety for And this one is just
mind blowing. He's indicted for murder after police found remains
of one of his former clients in bags in his attic,
and he got let loose because it was an illegal search.
But he he was caught with the body of one
(31:16):
of his clients dismembered in his attic with no good
explanation as far as I've ever heard. Yes, So Joe, well,
what explanation would be good? Well, we were playing poker
and one thing like doing another started juggling swords, and yeah,
uh so his wife's real name was Leanne, the one
who worked at the travel agency and went unpaid. They
(31:37):
fled Kansas City in December of eighty one. Um, and
this was as US Postal inspectors were converging on them
about this credit card scheme. Right, So they're like, just
bad people, not the postal inspectors. No. Great, So they
moved to Chicago. They changed their names to Robert Nancy
(32:00):
Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a tax preparer,
but then he was fired after a violent outburst in
his office against his co workers. Um. And then she
lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago, and this
turns out this is what got them exonerated from the time.
All thing is they left Chicago and moved to New
York before this happened, right before those same month. Right.
(32:24):
But if the theory held up that this person went around,
most likely in one day and did all this stuff,
then it couldn't have been them. No, And here's why,
because the cops had decided that it was done locally.
And one of the other things that supported that local
mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide through the gelatine
capsules eventually, so I had a very very short shelf
(32:47):
life before the whole bottle just turned into a mush
of cyani powder and melted gelatine. So, like you said,
it had to have been done basically the day before
they nine. They could not, no matter how hard they tried,
they could not put James Lewis or his wife in
Chicago that day. They just couldn't. And for his part,
(33:10):
James Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote
the letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy.
But I did not. I did not poison the title
at all. He's always been adamant about that. He's never
toyed around with it. He's never messed around, he's never
been coy He's always been adamant that he did not
poison that title at all. Although the title and all
(33:32):
task force tried to trip him up once. I guess
to just get this on the record that he'd done this,
But they asked him, like in an in an interview, Okay,
let's say you had done it, how would you have
done it? And he actually he showed them how he
would have done it. Yeah, he just didn't write a
book about it. He just showed him in an interview. Yeah.
(33:52):
And he defends this later on by saying it was
just a speculative scenario. I could tell you how Julius
Caesar was killed, but that doesn't mean I was the killer.
I think the answer for me it would have been
I don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I don't I
can't figure this out. But he's like, here's how I do.
I've been waiting for you to ask me though. Uh.
(34:12):
He's eventually found in New York City. He's at the
public library um with a reference book, copying names and
addresses of newspapers. Uh. I would imagine to send them
letters like zodiac style. Yeah, because so we gotta say this.
So the cops figured out who James Lewis was before
they found James Lewis, and it became part of the
(34:34):
national media um circus hunt. While they were looking for
James Lewis, this guy was writing letters to newspapers. He
called in a radio talk show. He was really relishing
the fact that there was a national man hunt out
for him. Who Like, that's That's what I'm saying. On
the one hand, you gotta kind of feel a little
(34:56):
bit bad that this guy was kind of being railroaded
into you know, the wrap for these murders. After his
extortion attempt, that's where the feeling bad firms. You're like, oh, yeah,
that's right. He totally brought this on himself. Yeah. So
they hauled him out of the New York Public Library.
He was sentenced to ten years for extortion attempt in
ten years for credit that original credit card fraud uh
(35:17):
and served thirteen years and lives in the Greater Boston
area today. So still today there. I think there are
a few people who are like, I could see this guy,
maybe maybe he could. He could be at some Some
detectives maintain that the Thailand All murder could have flown
into O'Hare running a car, done that circuit, flown or
(35:38):
driven back to a hair and flown out all on
the same day the day before, but they could never
put James Lewis in Chicago at all that day. UM.
So he was cleared finally, although he did serve two
consecutive ten years sentences. He served thirteen of the twenty
years for that credit card fraud that the Postal Inspectors
wanted him for and for extortion letter um and like
(36:02):
you said, he lives in Cambridge, mass now. But then
in two thousand nine, the case, after basically having gone
dormant in the early eighties, was reignited by the FBI
because they worked up they thought a DNA profile from
the capsules and they rated James Lewis's house. Um demanded
a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and Leanne Lewis fought
(36:25):
it in court. The judges like, no, you have to
do this. Before leaving the courthouse, they gave him the
samples and nothing has come of it. So I guess
that means tacitly that the Lewises were cleared once and
for all of the tail and all murders. Yeah, and
you know, the DNA thing is an interesting piece because um,
they still have some samples of the cyanide. I guess
(36:49):
that the capsules have have worn away by now if
it had the cyanide in there. But there was and
still his hope, um, that DNA could could crack this case. Um,
just like eight or nine years ago, the unibomber ted Kazinski.
Is that a two parter? No, No, it's just one parter,
good podcast, So I don't think. So that was a
(37:09):
good episode. Uh, he grew up in Chicago and his
parents were living in the Greater Chicago area in eight two,
and he is the UNI bomber. So they said we
might as well get a DNA sample and talk to him,
and um, he was cleared. I don't think he was
ever a super strong suspect and he probably would have
admitted it. So he was like, no, this is not
(37:31):
me right. So, UM, the UNI bomber has been cleared.
That's right from the talent on mers. But that remains
the case remains unsolved to this day. I think they
also have a fingerprint work up that they found on
one of the bottles and that and some DNA. It's
is they're just sitting around with that. There's there are
no suspects there. Every suspect has been cleared. Um, and
(37:55):
there's nobody on the horizon. It's just an unsolved random
series of killings that happened. Yeah, they're still working on
it though. Um. There's a police sergeant named Scott Winkleman
who has been on this task force for a long
time and he says he thinks it's solvable. Um and
his department did just saw a forty five year old
(38:16):
murder case cold case. Man, if they solved this one,
that would be the biggest cold case ever solved. I
think so. I think. I mean, who knows, but I
could see maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something
one day, Like I don't know if they're going to
catch someone in at the bottom of the Chicago River
in all of to jail, but I could see the
(38:36):
truth coming out one day, I hope so for the
families because um Monica Janie, she's the niece of Adam
Stanley and Teresa. She said, her family to this day.
This is from an article like last year, I think
um said that they have still not gotten over it.
She said her grandparents have passed now, but she said,
literally every day for the rest of their lives, they
(38:58):
just cried about, uh, the fact that they didn't know
who did it. Um. She grew up. It has been
a therapy therapy her whole life because um, there were
all victims. You know that this post traumatic stress disorder
kicks in where she grew up fearing that any of
her family members could die at any time. Um. Oh.
In that article, by the way, it was really good.
(39:20):
It was called the Thailand All Murders Colin is it
too late to solve the famous cold case? And that
was from any real crime and written by Jamie Bartas
Joseph manus Her. Her dad says that he still has
dreams like you know on the rag about these murders. Um.
He said he had one recently where everyone involved was
(39:41):
in a room in the case. Uh, and then two
black men in suits and glasses were laughing about how
they got away with murder. Um. Michelle Rosen, she's the
daughter of Mary Reiner. Um. She has dedicated her life
to investigating this on her own, and she doesn't agree
with the loan the mad pois in her theory at all. No,
this is this is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it had
(40:04):
something to do with the supply chain and that Johnson
and Johnson knew this and covered it up. Um. One
of the things, one of the things that people who
believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson recalled
all of that Thailand, all thirty one million bottles, and
then destroyed them allegedly without testing any of it. So
(40:24):
we will never know whether it was Pinky had the
day off right, whether whether it was beyond Chicago or
just local in Chicago, seems like it took long enough
that other people would have died in that week before
the national recall was undertaken. But um, there was something
very very interesting that was a post script to all
(40:44):
this that does undermine that mad poisoner theory. Yeah, it
was just a few years later a woman in New
York named Diane els Roth took two extra strength thaile
and all capsules and died from cyanide pisoning. Um, but
they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was it
(41:04):
another copycat case well, or or the original poisoner? Maybe?
So this different cyanide, right, the cyanide was definitely not
the same size some from the same batch. It was
chemically different. But there was another bottle found around the
block from where Mary els Roth bought hers and Yonkers
that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles
(41:26):
of extra strength tilent all two years later in another
state that had been UM tampered with. The problem is
this was after the three pronged tamper resistant packaging had
been UM introduced, which means it was an inside job, right,
I guess because the tamper the thing had not been
obviously tampered with then Thailand all was never able to
(41:48):
explain what happened. Yeah, and then within five days of
her death, eight states outright band the capsules, Thailand All Capsules, right,
and Thailand all for its part, was like, we've been
trying to get everybody to take caplets anyway, but they
keep taking capsules, so we're making it. And then a
guy wrote a book, right, Um Scott Bart's Yeah, a
former Johnson and Johnson employee, Um wrote in two thousand
(42:13):
eleven a self published book, UM on the Time of
All Poisonings, And he said what we were talking about earlier.
He's like, the supply chain is so convoluted, Um, basically
like it could definitely could have happened at any point
along the way. And his his idea is that that
Johnson and Johnson knew that it was in their distribution
network and they covered it up self published book. Yeah,
(42:37):
you gotta you gotta note that for sure. I'm not
knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy. It does if there's
like any hint of journalistic integrity and us that feels
like we have to note that. So that's the title,
and All Poisonings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago changed America,
changed the world, but definitely changed America. It was the
(42:59):
end of some form of innocence that we still had. Absolutely,
if you want to know more about the tile and
all poisonings, go online. There's stuff all over the place
and you can go down that rabbit hole and it's
deep and wide. Since I said that, it's time for listener,
ma'am uh. This is from Gin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys,
(43:20):
been listening for several years and never thought I'd have
a never thought a perfect time right to write in
would be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode
we talked about synth synthetic parts. It's a real thing.
When I was in high school, my dad came across
the stuff online called liquid a s s as horrible.
(43:43):
Not allowed to curse right that ourson would spell it
out though, um or, I guess maybe you should have
said like a asterisk asterisk. Yeah, there you go, good
name for a product, though she said he found it
on a joke web website in order to and I
have to tell you it is the worst thing you've
ever smelled. I can't even describe it. It makes you
(44:05):
want to not breathe anymore. The tiniest little drop is deadly,
So of course I took it to college with me
to play pranks, and boy did it backfire. I thought
I was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in
the radiator by my across the friend across the hall
friends room, not eating things, and not even thinking about
what would happen when the heat turned on. Well, the
(44:25):
heat turned on, and the whole floor of the dorm
was amazingly disgusting and made us just about gag. Smells
took almost a week to finally go away, and I
have not used it again in the ten year since.
It's probably it's called learning your lesson. But she still
has the bottle. She's like, but I kept it just
in case. Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast.
(44:45):
This is the first podcast ever listened to and it's
still always on the top of my download list. Thanks
for giving this twenty eight year old woman a platform
on which to tell a story of synthetic farts that
is not completely out of place. Signed anonymous that is
Jen Green. Thanks Jen Green, very brave you to put
your name on that one. Especially I wonder if you
stepped up and said that horrible smell. That was my bad.
(45:09):
If you have a great story about college pranks, we
want to hear about it. Um You can get in
touch with this via our social links by going to
stuff you Should Know dot com, or you can send
us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(45:31):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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