March 26, 2022 • 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. Find out the extent of what we know in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey there, everyone has promised. It's me again, Josh. And
for Part two of this week's s Y s K Select,
we talked about Johnson and Johnson's response to one of
the biggest PR crises ever to grip an American company,
and we meet the suspects and talk about the effects
of the senseless Thailand All Poisonings. I hope you enjoy
Part two of two of this week's special two parts
(00:23):
Select Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer
Josh over there. Because enough with the pleasant trees, let's
(00:45):
get back to it. Chuck Thailand All Murders Part two.
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
(01:08):
and Johnson is the manufacturer. And part one of part
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
(01:30):
of dollars of Thailand all that they're selling every year,
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. It's literally called
(01:54):
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
(02:16):
some crazed person taking him 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
(02:37):
favor of a massive recall. Look well, it looks good
in one way but bad in another. And they actually
didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne hells her press
conference on Friday calling for a recall of the Thailand
all in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson did a little
face palm and yes, we're recalling all of the Thailand
(03:00):
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 the death the death um, Johnson and Johnson recalled
(03:21):
all of the Thailand all in Chicago. And that should
have been enough to them, that was enough. 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
a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra
(03:45):
strength Thailand 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
them was like, I don't know about this. They're one
of them said Okay, I'll take all the states west
(04:07):
of the Mississippi North Dakota, South Dakota in some Wyoming,
and 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 their Silver
and Bull Award for how they handle the crisis the
(04:27):
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 little jerks
in Detroit. And Uh. They won the Golden Anvil, which
(04:51):
is one higher than silver, because of how they handled
the pr crisis brought about by the copycats of the
actual Thailand all crisis, which was in fact really brought
about by two jerk kids in Detroit really not even copycats,
not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where those
kids are today, probably in the Senate. I bet one
(05:11):
of them was the guy who did our our lighting
at our Detroit show. There was a smoke Yeah, guys,
we we did a show in Detroit a few years
ago and um, very famously we still use that as
the standard bearer for a bad crew bad. We had
a guy that looked like a former roadie for your
(05:32):
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
stop the show and you had to ask him to
(05:53):
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 they wants smoke, will give them
some more smoke, And we got some more smoke like
a smoke machine man. And people ask us why we
haven't been back to Detroit. It's a big reason. It's
(06:14):
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 on. Yeah, they make
the pills again. The way this all the supply chain
works is really convoluted. Um. And uh, like you said,
(06:37):
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
were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were
convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.
(07:00):
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 thaile and all the public has lost faith
in Thailand all. So when Thailand all recalled thirty one million,
fifty count bottles of extra strength Taile and All and
(07:21):
destroyed at all. There was a chance that not only
were they losing a hundred 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 didn't necessarily
know that at the time. It was still up in
the air. Um so they it was basically thirty one
(07:43):
million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public
this tainted tail and All has gone forever. Your chances
of dying from taking Extra Strength Thaile and All are
now gone. You can go back to taking Thaile and All. Now,
that was one thing, and that was a big gesture,
but which is what it amounted to. It was a
gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson. But they did
(08:05):
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, putting out a
hundred thousand dollar reward for information change how much they
had lost already still jump change it's it is yeah,
(08:29):
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 of this. Like, yes, there were
they were seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson I
don't think ever tried to push them out of the spotlight.
(08:51):
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 take a huge hit because of this, and
they were a victim and we're able to generate public sympathy,
which is part of the road to regaining the public
trust right, which is why it's taught NPR classes. So, um,
(09:13):
we'll take you back to two. If you're if you
weren't around then or old enough to be taking uh
O t C pills and pain relievers is over the counter,
by the way. That's right, Okay, you're done with OTC.
Yeah you know me so dumb. Uh. I love that
you played along that I appreciate that you could have
made me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years
(09:35):
almost now, Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Right, Yeah, unbelievable.
So uh, I'm believing that, not in that way. Okay.
So 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
(09:56):
your thumb. Well 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
was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah.
Cotton originally was introduced to keep baar aspirin like the
(10:18):
hard tablets from getting crushed in transport. And since they
started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how
to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton
any longer, but because consumers expected it. Still today you'll
find cotton in your and your pills. There's no reason
for it to be there except because the companies know
(10:39):
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
should have micromodl in there. Right. It just comes with
a pair of me undy him bottle. You're like, these
(11:02):
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. That's what
you could do, and then closing it back and putting
(11:24):
it back on the shelf. There's a little 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. And that
sets up this tile and all poisoning. It really shows
(11:47):
how much of a jarring experience it was from America
because all of a sudden, like it's finally sunk in
in a couple of days, there's something wrong with the
tile and all. Somebody has gone out of their way
to poisoned the Thailand all in order to randomly kill people.
And the reason they were able to do this because
there it's easy to to get into the tail and
(12:09):
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 the tamper resistant. New there's orange juice,
there's cereal, new there does um cottage cheese. Nothing does.
And America for wreaked out. And this is the reason
(12:30):
why this tile 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 tail in all or
any over the counter medicine, now they were petrified to
drink milk or give milk to their kids. Paula Prince,
(12:51):
the flight attendant who was the last one to die
in Chicago, she had a coworker who said like everything
look tainted. Now. I was afraid to give my kids milk.
I was afraid to get my kids cereal. If they
could get to the tile tile 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 got this coverage. Yeah.
(13:14):
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're 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 that was actually glued shut, so if your
(13:36):
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 the actual foil was over the mouth
of the bottle that we all have to poke through
(13:58):
now to pull out the and whatever still uses cotton.
None of that existed until the beginning of ninet. 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
(14:18):
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.
(14:40):
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
Thailand 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
(15:02):
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 and it's like a
shoe brand. Getty Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson Johnson, Yes, this,
(15:24):
I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy Johnson is
way far away from that. UM. But he became a
public face. 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. Yeah, And
it had had a huge effect. And then in Congress
(15:46):
got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Thailand All Bill,
which basically says, if you do something like this is
now a federal offense. A few years later, in nine UM,
the f d A actually established guidelines for manufacturers of
any product really to make it tamper proof. Yeah, because
it wasn't just the O. T C manufacturers that that
(16:07):
started doing this, they followed suit very quickly once Thailand
All came out with it, because they kind of had
to if they wanted to keep up with tile 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
(16:29):
the box 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
(16:49):
another break and we'll come back and talk a little
bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner
right after this stop. All right, So, uh, this was
(17:23):
a very 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
(17:44):
just make this stuff up. 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 you just
hear and go, yeah exactly. But deep in his in
the recesses of his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self
(18:06):
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 a psychiatrist thing. I want to be
on TV. Yeah, listen to me. Uh. They also speculated,
and this is just completely like conjecture was that he
(18:28):
had probably already taken his own life after the killings.
That was one specific person 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
that out there. I don't know if it was the
(18:49):
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 owner, parts 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, but
(19:11):
there has been a lot. There were a lot of suspects.
Remember Thailand. I'll 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 those down into actual tips
(19:34):
that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them,
they they deemed twelve hundred tips und 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 like that and whittled it
(19:57):
down to four hundred. Yeah, And the sort of the
sad part as as quickly as they sort of figured
a lot of this out 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. By the
(20:17):
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 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 with something
(20:37):
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 you're really easy,
you won't even go to the trouble of buying it. Yeah,
I guess that's a good point. Steal it and then
put it. But you know, people were using cash. If
there were UH cameras in a place, they were probably
(20:59):
trained on employee is. 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,
(21:20):
very interesting job. That's the one where I got a job.
I needed a job. I got a job at McDonald's
and I showed up. I 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 McDonald's. And I got the Golden
Pantry job later that day, which, hey man, sure, it's
like sign me up from Golden Arches to Golden Pantry.
(21:43):
That's like a rags 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 at
Golden Pantry. So the cameras trained on the register, they're
not they're not. You know, you could come and go
in a store and no one even knows it was
(22:05):
cops have nothing to go on. Most importantly, no motive.
That was a big one because remember this is just
a jekylin Hyde type who 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 just made zero sense whatsoever. So,
(22:27):
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
(22:48):
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 Richard Jewel of his day,
the Olympic bomber, who was not the bomber, right, but
whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as
(23:11):
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.
(23:35):
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
(23:57):
Hyde type. He's probably into chemistry. That's right. He was
a dock hand at jewel Foods at a warehouse west
of Chicago. Jewel Foods, a couple of different jewel foods
are where the 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. He has
(24:20):
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 threw
it out like at least six months before these murders.
(24:43):
He's like, 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 throw up one time. But again I
was it was probably due to over eating, and it
was just that once. That's the fact of the podcast.
(25:04):
So like he 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 you see this
guy like toying with his wife, like testing it out
on her just enough to make her sick, but not
to kill her, to see what happened, you know, see
(25:25):
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 said I actually think this guy did it.
I didn't find one person who thought Ronald Roger Arnold
actually did it. But in very short order he proved
(25:48):
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 Stenishaw Stanisha would say, yeah, I'm going with
that too, sons Slovak or something. Yeah, he was forty six,
he was a Chicago UM computer consultant, and that's saying
(26:10):
some 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
goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair, and
it's actually this just completely innocent random guy who gets
(26:33):
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
somebody on purpose, mistaken identity killing though right, and because
of this, because it was directly related to the taile
(26:53):
and all poisonings, John stanisha is Um frequently considered an
eighth victim of the tie in all killings, kind of
like an honorary um victim in this case. But it
is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim
of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like a
(27:16):
slightly different ring to it if it had been the
right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy
and the poor dude just happened to be in the
wrong bar and happened to look like the owner, that's
just it just it's perfect for this for this saga. Yeah,
I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll
bet he was not very happy, probably not, but probably
(27:36):
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. Yep,
so chuck. Before we go on to the main attraction,
(27:56):
as far as the suspects go, I propose that we
take break. Okay, we'll be right back. Stop alright, Chuck.
(28:27):
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
(28:49):
the Thailand All Task Force when a letter showed up
at Johnson and Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly
the Thailand All Poisoner, the Mad Poisoner. And in the
letter it said basically like I've spent fifty dollars so far,
and the whole thing is taking me about ten minutes
per bottle, and I've already killed seven people. I basically
(29:11):
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. No that's not the right word. Uh,
stupidly maybe, but is it. No, it's not. So this
letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account
(29:34):
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
didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can
(29:55):
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, Robert
Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this,
(30:17):
and was even more so the type of guy who
would write a letter to frame the owner of the
travel agency for the thaile and all murderers in retaliation
for that last paycheck. He was that kind of dude.
And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson
cat and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson
didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a
(30:37):
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 had
and this is just a strange, ironic twist. When he
(30:59):
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 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
(31:19):
for credit card fraud in Kansas City, UM. He was
indicted in ninety eight 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
(31:41):
of one of his clients was dismembered in his attic
with no good explanation as far as I've ever heard. Yeah,
so Joe, well what explanation would be good? Well, we
were playing poker and one thing I do another started
juggling swords and yeah, uh so his wife real name
was Leanne, the one who worked at the travel agency
(32:02):
and went unpaid. They 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. So
they're like, just bad people, not the postal inspectors. No. Great,
So they moved to Chicago. They changed their names to
(32:25):
Robert Nancy Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a
text 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
(32:45):
moved to New York before this happened before same month. Right,
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
(33:05):
mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide eight through the
gelatine capsules eventually, so I had a very very short
shelf 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 n they could not, no matter how hard they tried,
(33:28):
They could not put James Lewis or his wife in
Chicago that day. They just couldn't. And for his part,
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
(33:50):
been coy He's always been adamant that he did not
poison that title at all. Although the title in all
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 pulled an o J. He
(34:12):
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. 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 would have been I don't know, man, Yeah,
I'm innocent. I don't I can't figure this out. But
(34:34):
he's like, here's how I do I've been waiting for
you to ask me though. Uh. 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 look, we gotta say this. So the cups
figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis,
(34:58):
and it became part of the national media um circus.
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
(35:21):
of feel a little bit bad that this guy was
kind of being railroaded into, you know, the rap 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, and served thirteen years and
(35:45):
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 he 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 driven back to a hair
(36:05):
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, reserved thirteen
of the twenty years for that credit card fraud that
the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter. Um.
(36:27):
And like 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
(36:50):
Lewis fought 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 Thailand all murders. Yeah,
and you know, the d n A thing is an
interesting piece because, Um, they still have some samples of
(37:13):
the cyanide. I guess 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,
(37:34):
So I don't think so that was a 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.
(37:55):
So he was like, no, this is not me right. So, um,
the UNI bomber has been cleared. That's right from the
talent on Merbers. 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 in some DNA. It's is they're just sitting
around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every
(38:18):
suspect has been cleared, um, and 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 sawve a
(38:40):
forty five year old 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 and at the bottom
of the Chicago River in all wo to jail. But UM,
(39:02):
I could see the 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 was 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
(39:23):
their lives, they 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.
(39:43):
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
in a room in the case. Uh, and then two
black men in suits and glasses, we're laughing about how
they got away with murder. UM. Michelle Rosen, she's the
(40:05):
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 poisoner theory at all. No,
this is this is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it had
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
(40:27):
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
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
(40:48):
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
this that does under mind that mad poisoner theory. Yeah,
it was just a few years later a woman in
New York named Diane h ells Roth took two extra
(41:10):
strength tile in all capsules and died from cyanide poisoning. Um,
but they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was
it 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
(41:33):
block from where Mary ELL's Roth bought hers and Yonkers
that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles
of extra strength tileent 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,
(41:56):
I guess because the tamper the thing had not beenbviously
tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to 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 capulets anyway, but they
(42:16):
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
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
(42:39):
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. 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
(43:02):
to note that. Sure. So that's the Taile and all
poisonings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago, changed America, changed
the world, but definitely changed America. It was the 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
(43:22):
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,
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
(43:46):
talked about synthe 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. Not
allowed to curse right, no occur 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
(44:11):
a product, though. She said he found it on a
joke web website in ordered something and I have to
tell you it is the worst thing you've ever smelled.
I can't even describe it. It makes you 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 it
was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in the
radiator by my across the friend across the hall friends room,
(44:35):
not eating, thinking and not even thinking about what would
happen when the heat turned on. Well, the heat turned
on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly
disgusting and made us just about gag. Smell 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.
(44:57):
Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is
the first podcast I 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
(45:17):
on that one. Especially I wonder if you stepped up
and said, uh, that horrible smell. That was my bad. Right.
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 i heeart radio
(45:37):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hey there, everyone has promised. It's me again, Josh. And
for Part two of this week's s Y s K Select,
we talked about Johnson and Johnson's response to one of
the biggest PR crises ever to grip an American company,
and we meet the suspects and talk about the effects
of the senseless Thailand All Poisonings. I hope you enjoy
Part two of two of this week's special two parts
(00:23):
Select Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's guest producer
Josh over there. Because enough with the pleasant trees, let's
(00:45):
get back to it. Chuck Thailand All Murders Part two.
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
(01:08):
and Johnson is the manufacturer. And part one of part
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
(01:30):
of dollars of Thailand all that they're selling every year,
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. It's literally called
(01:54):
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
(02:16):
some crazed person taking him 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
(02:37):
favor of a massive recall. Look well, it looks good
in one way but bad in another. And they actually
didn't recall anything until Mayor Jane Byrne hells her press
conference on Friday calling for a recall of the Thailand
all in Chicago, and Johnson and Johnson did a little
face palm and yes, we're recalling all of the Thailand
(03:00):
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 the death the death um, Johnson and Johnson recalled
(03:21):
all of the Thailand all in Chicago. And that should
have been enough to them, that was enough. 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
a week of the deaths, recalled every bottle of extra
(03:45):
strength Thailand 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
them was like, I don't know about this. They're one
of them said Okay, I'll take all the states west
(04:07):
of the Mississippi North Dakota, South Dakota in some Wyoming,
and 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 their Silver
and Bull Award for how they handle the crisis the
(04:27):
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 little jerks
in Detroit. And Uh. They won the Golden Anvil, which
(04:51):
is one higher than silver, because of how they handled
the pr crisis brought about by the copycats of the
actual Thailand all crisis, which was in fact really brought
about by two jerk kids in Detroit really not even copycats,
not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where those
kids are today, probably in the Senate. I bet one
(05:11):
of them was the guy who did our our lighting
at our Detroit show. There was a smoke Yeah, guys,
we we did a show in Detroit a few years
ago and um, very famously we still use that as
the standard bearer for a bad crew bad. We had
a guy that looked like a former roadie for your
(05:32):
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
stop the show and you had to ask him to
(05:53):
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 they wants smoke, will give them
some more smoke, And we got some more smoke like
a smoke machine man. And people ask us why we
haven't been back to Detroit. It's a big reason. It's
(06:14):
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 on. Yeah, they make
the pills again. The way this all the supply chain
works is really convoluted. Um. And uh, like you said,
(06:37):
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
were kind of reluctant at first, especially if they were
convinced that there was nothing wrong with the rest of them.
(07:00):
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 thaile and all the public has lost faith
in Thailand all. So when Thailand all recalled thirty one million,
fifty count bottles of extra strength Taile and All and
(07:21):
destroyed at all. There was a chance that not only
were they losing a hundred 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 didn't necessarily
know that at the time. It was still up in
the air. Um so they it was basically thirty one
(07:43):
million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show the public
this tainted tail and All has gone forever. Your chances
of dying from taking Extra Strength Thaile and All are
now gone. You can go back to taking Thaile and All. Now,
that was one thing, and that was a big gesture,
but which is what it amounted to. It was a
gesture on behalf of Johnson and Johnson. But they did
(08:05):
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, putting out a
hundred thousand dollar reward for information change how much they
had lost already still jump change it's it is yeah,
(08:29):
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 of this. Like, yes, there were
they were seven murder victims, and Johnson and Johnson I
don't think ever tried to push them out of the spotlight.
(08:51):
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 take a huge hit because of this, and
they were a victim and we're able to generate public sympathy,
which is part of the road to regaining the public
trust right, which is why it's taught NPR classes. So, um,
(09:13):
we'll take you back to two. If you're if you
weren't around then or old enough to be taking uh
O t C pills and pain relievers is over the counter,
by the way. That's right, Okay, you're done with OTC.
Yeah you know me so dumb. Uh. I love that
you played along that I appreciate that you could have
made me feel stupid. We've been partners for eleven years
(09:35):
almost now, Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Right, Yeah, unbelievable.
So uh, I'm believing that, not in that way. Okay.
So 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
(09:56):
your thumb. Well 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
was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time. Yeah.
Cotton originally was introduced to keep baar aspirin like the
(10:18):
hard tablets from getting crushed in transport. And since they
started using capsules and other stuff and figured out how
to strengthen tablets, there was no reason for the cotton
any longer, but because consumers expected it. Still today you'll
find cotton in your and your pills. There's no reason
for it to be there except because the companies know
(10:39):
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
should have micromodl in there. Right. It just comes with
a pair of me undy him bottle. You're like, these
(11:02):
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. That's what
you could do, and then closing it back and putting
(11:24):
it back on the shelf. There's a little 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. And that
sets up this tile and all poisoning. It really shows
(11:47):
how much of a jarring experience it was from America
because all of a sudden, like it's finally sunk in
in a couple of days, there's something wrong with the
tile and all. Somebody has gone out of their way
to poisoned the Thailand all in order to randomly kill people.
And the reason they were able to do this because
there it's easy to to get into the tail and
(12:09):
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 the tamper resistant. New there's orange juice,
there's cereal, new there does um cottage cheese. Nothing does.
And America for wreaked out. And this is the reason
(12:30):
why this tile 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 tail in all or
any over the counter medicine, now they were petrified to
drink milk or give milk to their kids. Paula Prince,
(12:51):
the flight attendant who was the last one to die
in Chicago, she had a coworker who said like everything
look tainted. Now. I was afraid to give my kids milk.
I was afraid to get my kids cereal. If they
could get to the tile tile 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 got this coverage. Yeah.
(13:14):
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're 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 that was actually glued shut, so if your
(13:36):
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 the actual foil was over the mouth
of the bottle that we all have to poke through
(13:58):
now to pull out the and whatever still uses cotton.
None of that existed until the beginning of ninet. 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
(14:18):
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.
(14:40):
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
Thailand 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
(15:02):
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 and it's like a
shoe brand. Getty Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson Johnson, Yes, this,
(15:24):
I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy Johnson is
way far away from that. UM. But he became a
public face. 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. Yeah, And
it had had a huge effect. And then in Congress
(15:46):
got involved. They passed what they dubbed the Thailand All Bill,
which basically says, if you do something like this is
now a federal offense. A few years later, in nine UM,
the f d A actually established guidelines for manufacturers of
any product really to make it tamper proof. Yeah, because
it wasn't just the O. T C manufacturers that that
(16:07):
started doing this, they followed suit very quickly once Thailand
All came out with it, because they kind of had
to if they wanted to keep up with tile 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
(16:29):
the box 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
(16:49):
another break and we'll come back and talk a little
bit more about the profile of the supposed mad poisoner
right after this stop. All right, So, uh, this was
(17:23):
a very 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
(17:44):
just make this stuff up. 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 you just
hear and go, yeah exactly. But deep in his in
the recesses of his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self
(18:06):
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 a psychiatrist thing. I want to be
on TV. Yeah, listen to me. Uh. They also speculated,
and this is just completely like conjecture was that he
(18:28):
had probably already taken his own life after the killings.
That was one specific person 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
that out there. I don't know if it was the
(18:49):
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 owner, parts 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, but
(19:11):
there has been a lot. There were a lot of suspects.
Remember Thailand. I'll 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 those down into actual tips
(19:34):
that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them,
they they deemed twelve hundred tips und 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 like that and whittled it
(19:57):
down to four hundred. Yeah, And the sort of the
sad part as as quickly as they sort of figured
a lot of this out 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. By the
(20:17):
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 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 with something
(20:37):
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 you're really easy,
you won't even go to the trouble of buying it. Yeah,
I guess that's a good point. Steal it and then
put it. But you know, people were using cash. If
there were UH cameras in a place, they were probably
(20:59):
trained on employee is. 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,
(21:20):
very interesting job. That's the one where I got a job.
I needed a job. I got a job at McDonald's
and I showed up. I 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 McDonald's. And I got the Golden
Pantry job later that day, which, hey man, sure, it's
like sign me up from Golden Arches to Golden Pantry.
(21:43):
That's like a rags 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 at
Golden Pantry. So the cameras trained on the register, they're
not they're not. You know, you could come and go
in a store and no one even knows it was
(22:05):
cops have nothing to go on. Most importantly, no motive.
That was a big one because remember this is just
a jekylin Hyde type who 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 just made zero sense whatsoever. So,
(22:27):
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
(22:48):
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 Richard Jewel of his day,
the Olympic bomber, who was not the bomber, right, but
whose life was ruined because he basically was implicated as
(23:11):
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.
(23:35):
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
(23:57):
Hyde type. He's probably into chemistry. That's right. He was
a dock hand at jewel Foods at a warehouse west
of Chicago. Jewel Foods, a couple of different jewel foods
are where the 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. He has
(24:20):
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 threw
it out like at least six months before these murders.
(24:43):
He's like, 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 throw up one time. But again I
was it was probably due to over eating, and it
was just that once. That's the fact of the podcast.
(25:04):
So like he 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 you see this
guy like toying with his wife, like testing it out
on her just enough to make her sick, but not
to kill her, to see what happened, you know, see
(25:25):
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 said I actually think this guy did it.
I didn't find one person who thought Ronald Roger Arnold
actually did it. But in very short order he proved
(25:48):
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 Stenishaw Stanisha would say, yeah, I'm going with
that too, sons Slovak or something. Yeah, he was forty six,
he was a Chicago UM computer consultant, and that's saying
(26:10):
some 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
goes to kill who he thinks is Marty Sinclair, and
it's actually this just completely innocent random guy who gets
(26:33):
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
somebody on purpose, mistaken identity killing though right, and because
of this, because it was directly related to the taile
(26:53):
and all poisonings, John stanisha is Um frequently considered an
eighth victim of the tie in all killings, kind of
like an honorary um victim in this case. But it
is kind of appropriate that he just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim
of mistaken identity. You know, it would have like a
(27:16):
slightly different ring to it if it had been the
right guy. The fact that it was the wrong guy
and the poor dude just happened to be in the
wrong bar and happened to look like the owner, that's
just it just it's perfect for this for this saga. Yeah,
I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that. I'll
bet he was not very happy, probably not, but probably
(27:36):
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. Yep,
so chuck. Before we go on to the main attraction,
(27:56):
as far as the suspects go, I propose that we
take break. Okay, we'll be right back. Stop alright, Chuck.
(28:27):
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
(28:49):
the Thailand All Task Force when a letter showed up
at Johnson and Johnson headquarters and it was from allegedly
the Thailand All Poisoner, the Mad Poisoner. And in the
letter it said basically like I've spent fifty dollars so far,
and the whole thing is taking me about ten minutes
per bottle, and I've already killed seven people. I basically
(29:11):
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. No that's not the right word. Uh,
stupidly maybe, but is it. No, it's not. So this
letter has a New York postmark, but the bank account
(29:34):
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
didn't write this letter, but I can guarantee I can
(29:55):
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, Robert
Richardson was the type of guy who would fixate on this,
(30:17):
and was even more so the type of guy who
would write a letter to frame the owner of the
travel agency for the thaile and all murderers in retaliation
for that last paycheck. He was that kind of dude.
And so the cops started sniffing into this Robert Richardson
cat and they figured out pretty quickly that Robert Richardson
didn't actually exist, that he was actually somebody else, a
(30:37):
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 had
and this is just a strange, ironic twist. When he
(30:59):
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 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
(31:19):
for credit card fraud in Kansas City, UM. He was
indicted in ninety eight 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
(31:41):
of one of his clients was dismembered in his attic
with no good explanation as far as I've ever heard. Yeah,
so Joe, well what explanation would be good? Well, we
were playing poker and one thing I do another started
juggling swords and yeah, uh so his wife real name
was Leanne, the one who worked at the travel agency
(32:02):
and went unpaid. They 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. So
they're like, just bad people, not the postal inspectors. No. Great,
So they moved to Chicago. They changed their names to
(32:25):
Robert Nancy Nancy Richardson. He got that job as a
text 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
(32:45):
moved to New York before this happened before same month. Right,
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
(33:05):
mad poisoner theory was because the cyanide eight through the
gelatine capsules eventually, so I had a very very short
shelf 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 n they could not, no matter how hard they tried,
(33:28):
They could not put James Lewis or his wife in
Chicago that day. They just couldn't. And for his part,
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
(33:50):
been coy He's always been adamant that he did not
poison that title at all. Although the title in all
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 pulled an o J. He
(34:12):
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. 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 would have been I don't know, man, Yeah,
I'm innocent. I don't I can't figure this out. But
(34:34):
he's like, here's how I do I've been waiting for
you to ask me though. Uh. 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 look, we gotta say this. So the cups
figured out who James Lewis was before they found James Lewis,
(34:58):
and it became part of the national media um circus.
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
(35:21):
of feel a little bit bad that this guy was
kind of being railroaded into, you know, the rap 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, and served thirteen years and
(35:45):
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 he 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 driven back to a hair
(36:05):
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, reserved thirteen
of the twenty years for that credit card fraud that
the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for the extortion letter. Um.
(36:27):
And like 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
(36:50):
Lewis fought 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 Thailand all murders. Yeah,
and you know, the d n A thing is an
interesting piece because, Um, they still have some samples of
(37:13):
the cyanide. I guess 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,
(37:34):
So I don't think so that was a 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.
(37:55):
So he was like, no, this is not me right. So, um,
the UNI bomber has been cleared. That's right from the
talent on Merbers. 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 in some DNA. It's is they're just sitting
around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every
(38:18):
suspect has been cleared, um, and 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 sawve a
(38:40):
forty five year old 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 and at the bottom
of the Chicago River in all wo to jail. But UM,
(39:02):
I could see the 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 was 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
(39:23):
their lives, they 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.
(39:43):
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
in a room in the case. Uh, and then two
black men in suits and glasses, we're laughing about how
they got away with murder. UM. Michelle Rosen, she's the
(40:05):
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 poisoner theory at all. No,
this is this is interesting. Yeah. She thinks it had
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
(40:27):
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
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
(40:48):
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
this that does under mind that mad poisoner theory. Yeah,
it was just a few years later a woman in
New York named Diane h ells Roth took two extra
(41:10):
strength tile in all capsules and died from cyanide poisoning. Um,
but they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated. Was
it 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
(41:33):
block from where Mary ELL's Roth bought hers and Yonkers
that did match that cyanide. So there were two bottles
of extra strength tileent 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,
(41:56):
I guess because the tamper the thing had not beenbviously
tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to 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 capulets anyway, but they
(42:16):
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
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
(42:39):
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. 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
(43:02):
to note that. Sure. So that's the Taile and all
poisonings of nineteen eighty two in Chicago, changed America, changed
the world, but definitely changed America. It was the 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
(43:22):
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,
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
(43:46):
talked about synthe 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. Not
allowed to curse right, no occur 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
(44:11):
a product, though. She said he found it on a
joke web website in ordered something and I have to
tell you it is the worst thing you've ever smelled.
I can't even describe it. It makes you 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 it
was pretty funny putting a couple of drops in the
radiator by my across the friend across the hall friends room,
(44:35):
not eating, thinking and not even thinking about what would
happen when the heat turned on. Well, the heat turned
on and the whole floor of the dorm was amazingly
disgusting and made us just about gag. Smell 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.
(44:57):
Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is
the first podcast I 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
(45:17):
on that one. Especially I wonder if you stepped up
and said, uh, that horrible smell. That was my bad. Right.
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 i heeart radio
(45:37):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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