September 26, 2025 • 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 (00:01):
In part two of our episode on the nineteen eighty
two Chicago Thailand All Murders, we look at the suspects
in the case and really zero in on one of them,
but to this day it's not clear if they were
behind it, and although there was a lot of weird
evidence around him, it's all circumstantial. I hope you enjoy
finishing up on the Thailand All Murders.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to Steff. You should know, a production of Iheartradios
How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
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 pleasantries. Let's get back to.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It Chuck Thailand All Murders, Part two, Park, if you
did not listen to the first part. In nineteen eighty two,
seven people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide,
all on the same day, all on the same day.
America and much of the world is super freaked out.
(01:04):
Johnson 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
(01:26):
of dollars of tile and all that they're selling every year.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And that's in nineteen eighty two dollars.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Like this, Like it's literally called a textbook example of
how it's done.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
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, it wasn't in their supply chain.
That it happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened
by some crazed person taking them out of the store
(02:15):
or 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 what
and us.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Right well at first though, and this gets overlooked and
left out of the college business courses and the PR courses.
At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of
a massive recall.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Sure, because that looks well, it looks good in one
way but bad in another.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
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. Yes, we're recalling all of
the Thailand all in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yes, what she said.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Right. So by Friday, the thirty first of September, is
there thirty one in September? Was this October first?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I think it was October first, anyway. By the Friday,
two days after the death yeah, the deaths, Johnson and
Johnson recalled all of the tail in 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
(03:31):
almost overnight. It was not enough. Yeah, And so Johnson
and Johnson, within a week of the deaths recalled every
bottle of extra strength TIL and all in the United States,
which is worth about one hundred million dollars at the time,
took it back to their factories and destroyed it.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
So they say, right, yeah, both Johnson and Johnson, right.
I wonder if one of them was like, know about this.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
One of them said, Okay, I'll take all the states
west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Somewayoming
and then you can take all the other states. That's
a part one, Joe.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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 Anvil Award for how they
handle the.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Crisis the tailan All poisoning, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And high grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad
Wieners in the first episode. The ballpark Frank Zip 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 they won the Golden Anvil,
(04:47):
which is one higher than.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Silver, because of how they handled the pr crisis brought
about by the copycats of the actual tailan All.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Crisis, which was in fact really brought about by two
jerk kids in Detroit, right, really, not even.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Copycats, not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where
those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I bet one of them was the guy who did
our our lighting at our Detroit show.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It was a smoke I'll go some more smoke.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah, guys, we did a show in Detroit a few
years ago and 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 Uriah
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
(05:38):
like dude, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter
had turned like brown and you could no longer see
the words. And you asked him, we had to stop
the show, and you had to ask him to use
a different colored light.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And his response, because you and me he was hanging
out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in
the sound with the guy. His response, according to them,
they want smoke, I'll give them some more smoke and
we got some more smoke.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Like a smoke machine.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Man, And people ask us why we haven't been back
to Detroit.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's a big reason. It's a big reason, not the
only reason.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Okay. So they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener
pr moves McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of
Johnson and Johnson.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
They actually make Til it All.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, they make the pills again. The way this all
this supply chain works is really convoluted, and 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, well, sure, because they'd found out the drugs
are actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
This is one hundred million dollars worth of stock that
they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That'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.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They had no choice, no, that was the only way
to do it was to lose a lot of money
in favor of future gains.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah. But even at the time, a lot of people
were like, this is it for tail and All. Sure,
the public has lost faith in Thailand All. So when
Thailandol recalled thirty one million, fifty count bottles of Extra
Strength tilent All and destroyed it all, there was a
chance that not only were they losing one hundred million dollars,
but that they were losing one hundred million dollars of
a brand that had already lost the public trust and
(07:29):
would never regain it. So which wasn't true. But yeah, no,
they didn't necessarily know that at the time. It was
still up in the air. So they it was basically
thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show
the public this taint of talent All has gone forever.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Your chances of dying from taking Extra Strength tilent All
are now gone. You can go back to taking Thailand All. Now.
That was one thing that was a big gesture, which
is what it amounted to. It was a gesture half
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
(08:08):
with this to save face and to win back public trust,
they started to do things right, like including like setting
up a hotline sure putting out one hundred thousand dollars
reward for information.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Jump change, considering how much they had lost already.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It's nineteen eighty two dollars.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well still jump change it is, yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It does they But because of all of 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 these which they were, I mean seven murder victims. Yeah,
and Johnson and Johnson. I don't think I ever tried to
push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed
(08:49):
to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner
who may or may not had something out for them.
But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit
because of this, and they were a victim and were
able to generate public sympathy. Is part of the road
to regaining the public trust.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes. So
we'll take you back to nineteen eighty two if you're
if you weren't around then or old enough to be
taking OTC pills and pain relievers.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
OTC is over the counter by the way. That's right, Okay,
you down with OTC. Yeah, you know me so dumb.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I love that you played along, though, I appreciate that
you could have made me feel stupid.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
We've been partners for eleven years almost now.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Yeah right, yeah, unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So uh I'm believable, Not not in that way. Okay.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
So here's how it used to happen. If you wanted
to take a pill, like a tile and all, you
would get your bottle, you would pop it open with
your thumb.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Well first, first it came in a little box.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Sure, but the box wasn't even glued shut. No, 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. No,
there was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep bare aspirin like
the hard tablets, yeah, from getting crushed in transport.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Still today you'll find cotton in your in your pills.
There's no reason for it to be there except because
the companies know that you want it to be there.
You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in
your pills.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that too.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know,
so big cotton.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
They.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
New, fancy otc pill should have Micromo doll in there, right.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
It just comes with a pair of Meuni stuffed into
your pill bottle like these have been warm.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And so 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.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yes, that's what you could do, and then.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Closing it back and putting it back on the shelf.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Mate.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, oh there's a little mold in this one. Yeah,
and I'll just leave it for the next person.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Forget poisoning like these they could be spitting in this stuff.
It was allowed.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
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 in All Poisoning. It
really shows how much of a jarring experience it was
from America, because all of a sudden, like it's finally
(11:51):
sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong
with the tile in 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
to do this is because it's easy to get into
the tile in all, tamper with it, put it back,
and no one will be any any more. The wiser
(12:12):
and wait, it's not just tile and all. Milk doesn't
have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Nei, there's orange juice, NEI,
there's cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America
forreaked out. And this is the reason why this Tile
in All Poisoning is considered widely the first incident of
(12:32):
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, the flight attendant
who was the last one to die in Chicago, she
had a coworker who said, like, everything looked tainted. Now,
(12:54):
I was afraid to give my kid's milk. I was
afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get
to the tail and all, they can poison anything. And
that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that
everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks,
Tyland all said we got this covered.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, And I have a feeling they did this so
fast there had to have been this idea in place already.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, it was. I saw a reference that it was.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
And I imagine it was not done because they're like, well,
it's a lot of money, and why would we bother.
It's like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine, right,
And then that happened. So within six weeks they had
a box that was actually glued shut, so if your
little box had been opened, you would be able to tell.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, that was That was part one of three of
this tamper resistant packaging.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle
after you open it or no, no, no, the plastic is
over the cap on the outside of the bottle.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, like the plastic foil.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
And then the actual foil was over the mouth of
the bottle that you we all have to poke through
now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
None of that existed until the beginning of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
So all three of these are put in place within
six weeks. 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 capsule that you could literally pull apart, and
you could snort the tile in all if you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Sure, I'm quite sure some people did.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
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 I imagine you could tamper with it.
And even I even saw with all these things in place,
they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really
went a long way to restore the public, you know, well,
(14:43):
like the good feelings about what was going on.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, within about a year, Thailand all or Johnson and
Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Thailand.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
All that's hard to believe. Yeah, that was really fast, but.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
It also goes to show like just how perfectly they
did everything from that from the time they ca admitted
to it on.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, and I feel like I remember like commercials with
CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became sake.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
I can't remember his name. I want to say, Jeoffrey Beam.
That's like a shoe brand.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Gabby Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson, No, Jimmy Howard Johnson.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yes, this, I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy
Johnson is way far away from that. But he became
a public face. He would, you know, go on to
sixty minutes and he talked to Dan Reather and take
Copple and all those cats like he he was out
there like showing how much the company cared. Yeah, and
(15:39):
it had had a huge effect.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And then in nineteen eighty three, Congress got involved. They
passed what they dubbed the Tail and All Bill, which
basically says, if you do something like this is now
a federal offense. A few years later, in nineteen eighty nine,
the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any
product really to make it Tampa proof.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started
doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tail and
all came out with it, because they kind of had
to if they wanted to keep up with TIL and all.
But also the uh, the manufacturers of everything, like every product,
every consumer product, started putting their products in like tamper
(16:20):
proof packaging. Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside
the box.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
To trap the chemicals in.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I guess, but also to show like nobody's injected this
with lie or something like that, although lie is used
in the making the soap, isn't it. I remember my
fight Club.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
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 about the profile of the supposed
mad poisoner. Right after this.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Stop you know, stop stop, should know no stop?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
All right. So this was a very big case at
the time. Obviously, like we've been saying, it was a
landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles,
which you know we should do one in profiling. Actually,
have we done that.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I don't think so, it'd be a good one.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, because it always like seems like the trope in
movies and TV. But it is kind of like that.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
No, it is a thing for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
It's not like they 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 Jekyll and Hide type During the day, he's
very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next
to you and you wouldn't even know it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Every once in a while uses here him go more.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Yeah, exactly. But deep in his in the recesses of
his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self doubt and has
an illusion that a random killing can boost a sense
of self worth, which is just sounds like a straight
out of a movie.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It sounds like a psychiatrist saying I want to be
on TV. Yeah, listen to me.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture
was that he had probably already taken his own life
after the killings.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
That was one specific person who was it that. Yeah, Yeah,
it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, he probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't
worry about it.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Don't worry everybody. Yeah, yeah, he just threw that out there.
I don't know if it was to calm people or not,
but or maybe he's just throwing his two cents in.
But 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 no one has ever been charged with the Thailand
(19:05):
All murders.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah that's the ending.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
But there has been There were a lot of suspects
that remember Thailand All set up a hotline and this
Thailand All Task Force, one 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. Yeah,
(19:28):
they were trying to whittle those down into actual tips
that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them,
they deemed twelve hundred tips or twelve hundred leads worth
checking out. There's a lot of leads for a case,
even considering yet one hundred and forty people working them.
And I read somewhere that they started out with like
(19:50):
twenty thousand suspects or something like that and whittled it
down to four hundred.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, And sort of the sad part is as quickly
as they sort of figured a lot of this out
and had that one 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.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, it became clear very quickly.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Yeah, they whittled that down. 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 nineteen eighty two where
you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you didn't have credit
cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a
lot easier back then to get away with something like this,
(20:34):
to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe
slip some tilin all into your pocket, go out to
the parking lot and come back in and slip them
back on the shelf. Yeah, if you're really easy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You won't even go to the trouble of buying it.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, I guess that's a good point, steal it and
then put it. But you know people were using cash.
If there were cameras in a place, they were probably
trained on employees. I worked at a golden pantry in College.
Only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down
at the catch register.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Alps. No, ok, the one on the east side College
Station Road. I think, okay, yeah, 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.
(21:32):
And I got the Golden pantry job later that day.
Here you go, which, hey man, sure, it's like sign
me up.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
From Golden arches to golden pantry. That's like a rags
of riches story.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
I was selling beer and cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Nice.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
It was pretty great.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You're like one for you, one for me.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Oh, I would never do that, all right? Where was I?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, I was at Golden pantry. So the cameras trained
on the register. They're not. You know, you could come
and go in a store and no one even knows.
In nineteen eighty two, right, it ops of nothing to
go on. Most importantly, no motive.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
That was a big one, because remember, this is just
a Jekylin Hyde type who you'd never suspect.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Who's probably at the bottom of the Chicago.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
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, 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
(22:33):
it's not to say that they didn't have some suspects.
Some people definitely did kind of come to come to
the fore, but not many of them.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in
and of themselves.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
For sure.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
The first guy's name was last name Arnold.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
First name Roger. That's right, I call him Richard, That's
all right, but for good reason.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Oh sure, because you said he was like the Richard
Jewel of his day. Yeah, the Olympic bomber who was
not the bomber.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Right, but whose life was ruined because he basically was
implicated as the Olympic bomber.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Right, the same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he
was one of the first named suspects. Forty nine year
old guy.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
So put yourself in the position. Okay, the media is
going berserk on the 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 named. Oh yeah,
it's like people going crazy, like trying to get to
this guy to interview him.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
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. Sure, and then how
it all ended up. Yeah, as you're about to see.
So he was a diy chemist.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It's a big one.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
There's a big thing right there, because into chemistry.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
He said, he's a jekylin Hyde type who's probably into chemistry.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
That's right. He was a dockhand at Jewel food just
at a warehouse west of Chicago.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And Dual Foods. There are a couple of different jewel
foods are where the tyran was bought. It's like a
grocery store of food market.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
It's all checking out so far. So the cops look
into him and go to his house. He has a book,
a handbook rather on methods of killing people.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
How to kill people A to Z. I don't know
if that's a title, but okay, that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
He had five unregistered guns.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
That's a big one.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said
I threw it out like at least six months before
these murders.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
He's like, when were the murders again? Oh, yeah, six
months before that. That's fine, it was.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
And then his wife said, uh, you know they're investigating
her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what,
Actually I did take some tyl and all and felt
really sick and threw up one time. But again I
was it was probably due to overeating and it was
just that once.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
As the fact of the podcast, So like, you.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Can't blame cops for saying this guy's a pretty good lead.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
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 tailand 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 if she would notice? Who knows. But
the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There's
(25:30):
a there's not a person associated with the story that
I came across who thought, he said, I actually think
this guy did it. I didn't find one person who
thought Roger Arnold 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,
(25:52):
a guy named John Stenishaw Stanisha. I would say, yeah,
I'm going with that too, some Slovak or something.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, he was forty six. He was a Chicago computer consultant.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And that's saying something in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah, probably. So, So here's what happened Arnold. There was
his bartender 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 shot point blank.
(26:31):
And so he in fact did kill somebody. He did
because of what had happened to his life.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.
He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed
somebody on.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Purpose mistaken identity killing though.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Right, and because of this, because it was directly related
to the Titlan All poisonings, John Stanisha is frequently considered
an eighth victim of the Titlan All killings. Yeah, kind
of like an honorary victim, right in this case. But
it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to
(27:07):
be in the wrong place at 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 that poor dude just happened to be in
the wrong bar and it happened to look like the owner,
that's just it just is perfect for this saga.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah, I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I'll bet he was not very happy.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Probably not, but probably also very relieved and probably also guilt.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Yep, So, chuck, 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.
Speaker 4 (28:01):
Stop you know, stop stop stop, should know no, stop?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
All right, Chuck. 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 was it, it
turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the
(28:44):
attention of the Chicago p D and 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 so far, and the whole thing has
taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already
(29:06):
killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop.
Pay me one million dollars and then I will stop
the killings. And it hired.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
He gave a bank account number, right, he said, wire
me this money.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Very very presiently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly maybe,
but is it. No, it's not. So this letter has
a New York postmark, but the bank account is associated
with a travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, Okay,
this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but
(29:39):
let's go check it out. And they find the owner
of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under,
and this guy is like, oh my god, you're kidding me.
He's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I
can guarantee I can tell you who did is a
guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was
the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson, who had
(30:02):
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, right, and was even
more so the type of guy who would write a
letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for
the tailan all murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck.
(30:23):
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 didn't actually exist,
that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his
real name, and you said it was, it was?
Speaker 1 (30:42):
It was.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
His name was not Robert Richardson though, that was an alias.
So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was
a tax consultant. He and this is just a strange,
ironic twist, when he was twenty years old, he tried
to take his own life by swallowing aspirin.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Thirty six of them.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Yeah, so that's just neither here nor there. But an
interesting little side note.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, the fact that, like most people don't have that
as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that
it came.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Up, so he had a pretty long rap sheet. He
was wanted by postal inspectors for a credit card fraud
in Kansas City. He was indicted in nineteen seventy eight.
And this one is just mind blowing. Yeah, he's indicted
for murder after police found remains of one of his
former clients in bags in his attic, and he got
(31:32):
let loose because it was an illegal search.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
But he was caught with the body of one of
his clients. He was dismembered in his attic with no
good explanation as far as I've ever heard.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah, well, what explanation would be good?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Well, we were playing poker and one thing I.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Do another juggling swords and yeah. So his wife's real
name was lee Anne, the one who worked at the
travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in
December of eighty one, and this was as US Postal
inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme.
(32:11):
So they're like, just bad people.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Not the postal inspectors, No, no, no, the Lewises.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Sure great. Yeah, so they moved to Chicago. They changed
their names to Robert 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,
and then she lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago,
and this turns out this is what got them exonerated
(32:39):
from the title. All thing is, they left Chicago and
moved to New York before this.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Happened, right before those same month, right.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
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 ate through the gelatin capsules eventually, so I had
a very very short shelf life before the whole bottle
just turned into a mush of cyanid powder and melted gelatin. So,
(33:16):
like you said, it had to have been done basically
the day before the twenty ninth. On the twenty eighth,
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, James
Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the
letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy.
(33:38):
But I did not I did not poison the title.
In 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 tile in all. Although the Talent All Task
Force tried to trip him up once, I guess to
just get this on the record that he done this,
(34:00):
but they asked him, like, in an interview, Okay, let's
say you had done it, how would you have done it?
And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how
he would have done it.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He
just showed him in an interview.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
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, right.
I think the answer for me would have been I
don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out.
But he's like, here's how I do it.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I've been waiting for you to ask me.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Though he's eventually found in New York City. He's at
the public library with a reference book, copying names and
addresses of newspapers. I would imagine to send them letters
like zodiac style.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yeah, because so we got to say this. So the
cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found
James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus.
While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was
writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Yeah,
he was really relishing the fact that there was a
(35:10):
national manhunt out for him. Who Like, that's what I'm saying.
On the one hand, you got to kind of feel
a little bit bad that this guy was kind of
being railroaded into, you know, the rap for these murders.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
After his extortion attempt, that's where the.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Feeling bad forms is. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right.
He totally brought this on himself.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
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 lives in the Greater Boston
area today.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
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 detectives maintain
that the Tailanhall murder could have flown into O'Hare, rented
a car, done that circuit, flown or driven back to
here and flown out all in the same day the
day before, but they could never put James Lewis in
(36:07):
Chicago at all that day. So he was cleared finally,
although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences. He
served thirteen of the twenty years for that credit card
fraud that the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for
the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge,
mass now. But then in two thousand and nine, the case,
(36:29):
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 raided James
Lewis's house demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and
Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judges like, no,
you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They
(36:52):
gave him the samples and nothing has come of it.
So I guess that means tacitly that the Lewises were
cleared once and four all of the tailent all murders.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, and you know, the DNA thing is an interesting
piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide.
I guess that the capsules have worn away by now
if it had the cyanide in there. But there was
and still his hope that DNA could could crack this case,
(37:22):
just like eight or nine years ago. The unibomber ted Kazinski.
Is that a two parter? No, No, just one part
good podcast, So I.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Don't think so. That was a good episode.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living
in the Greater Chicago area in eighty two, and he
is the unibomber. So they said we might as well
get a DNA sample and talk to him, right, and
he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a
super strong suspect, no, and he probably would have admitted it.
So he was like, no, this is not me.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Right, So the unibomber has been cleared. That's right from
the talent on. 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 is they're just sitting
around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every
suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon.
(38:19):
It's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah, they're still working on it though. There's a police
sergeant named Scott Winkelmann who has been on this task
force for a long time and he says he thinks
is solvable and his department did just save a forty
five year old murder case cold case.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Man, if they solved this one, that would be, I know,
the biggest cold case ever solved.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I think. I mean, who knows, But I could see
maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day,
maybe like I don't know if they're going to catch someone.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
At the bottom of the Chicago River and hull them.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Off to jail. But I could see the truth coming
out when day. I hope so for the families because
Monica Janis 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, said that they
have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents
have passed now, but she said, literally every day for
(39:19):
the rest of their lives, they just cried about me,
the fact that they didn't know who did it. She
grew up and has been a therapy therapy her whole
life because there were all victims. You know that this
post traumatic stress disorder kicks in sure where she grew
up fearing that any of her family members could die
at any time. Joseph Manus, her dad, says that he
(39:44):
still has dreams like you know on the rag about
these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone
involved was in a room in the case and then
two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about
how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen, she's the
daughter of Mary Reiner. She has dedicated her life to
(40:06):
investigating this on her own and she doesn't agree with
the Loane the mad poisoner theory at all.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
No, this is interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, she thinks it had something to do with the
supply chain.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
And that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Up.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
One of the things, one of the things that people
who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson
recalled all of that tail and 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
(40:41):
or just locals in Chicago. Seems like it took long
enough that other people would have died in that week
before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very,
very interesting that was a PostScript to all this that
does undermine that mad poisoner theory.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, it was just a few years later, in nineteen
eighty five, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsroth
took two extra strength Tilon all capsules and died from
cyanide poisoning. But they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated.
Was it another copycat case well, or the original poisoner maybe?
(41:20):
So this is a different cyanide.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Right, The cyanide was definitely not the same side from
the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was
another bottle found around the block from where Mary Elswroth
bought hers and Yonkers that did match that cyanide. So
there were two bottles of extra strength til and All
two years later in another state that had been tampered with.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
The problem is this was after the three prong tamper
resistant packaging had been introduced.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Which means it was an inside job, right.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I guess because the tamper the thing had not been
obviously tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to
play what happened?
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah, and then within five days of her death, eight
states outright banned the capsules, Thailand all capsules.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Right, and Thailand All, for its part, was like, we've
been trying to get everybody to take capl it's anyway,
but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
And then a guy wrote a book, right, Scott Bart's Yeah,
a former Johnson and Johnson employee wrote in twenty eleven
a self published book on the timel in All poisonings.
And he said, you know what we were talking about earlier.
He's like, this supply chain is so convoluted, right, basically,
(42:35):
like it could definitely could have happened at any point
right along the way.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
And his idea is that that Johnson and Johnson knew
that it was in their distribution network and they covered it.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Up self published book.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah, you gotta note that for sure.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
I'm not knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
It does if there's like any hint of journalistic integrity
in US, that feels like we have to note that.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
So that's the tailanol poisonings of nineteen eighty two in
Chicago changed America, changed the world, but definitely changed America.
Was the end of some form of innocence that we
still had.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Absolutely, if you.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Want to know more about the tail and Al 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.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
This is from Jin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys, been
listening for several years and never thought I'd have a
never thought a perfect time would to write. End would
be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we
talked about synthetic parts. It's a real thing. When I
was in high school, my dad came across the stuff
(43:48):
online called liquid ass.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
That's horrible.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Not a lot occurs, right, No, that occursion.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
We can spell it out, though, sure, or I guess
maybe you should have said, like ask asterisk.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah, there you go. A good name for a product, though.
She said. He found it on a joke web website
and ordered some. And I have to tell you it
is the worst thing you've ever smelled. I can't even
describe it, and 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 I was pretty funny
(44:25):
putting a couple of drops in the radiator by across
the friend across the hall friends room, 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
(44:46):
in the ten years since.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
That's probably it's called learning your lesson.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
But she still has the bottle.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
She's like, but I kept it right just in case.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is
the first podcast ever listened to, and it's still always
on the top of my download list. Thanks 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.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Signed anonymous that is Jengreen. Thanks Jengreen, very brave for
you'd put your name on that one. Especially. I wonder
if you stepped up and said that horrible smell that
was my bad.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
If you have a great story about college pranks, we
want to hear about it. You can get in touch
with this via our social links by going to stuff
youshould Know dot com, or you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of Iheartradios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
In part two of our episode on the nineteen eighty
two Chicago Thailand All Murders, we look at the suspects
in the case and really zero in on one of them,
but to this day it's not clear if they were
behind it, and although there was a lot of weird
evidence around him, it's all circumstantial. I hope you enjoy
finishing up on the Thailand All Murders.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to Steff. You should know, a production of Iheartradios
How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
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 pleasantries. Let's get back to.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It Chuck Thailand All Murders, Part two, Park, if you
did not listen to the first part. In nineteen eighty two,
seven people were murdered by ingesting Thailand, all tainted with cyanide,
all on the same day, all on the same day.
America and much of the world is super freaked out.
(01:04):
Johnson 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
(01:26):
of dollars of tile and all that they're selling every year.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And that's in nineteen eighty two dollars.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Like this, Like it's literally called a textbook example of
how it's done.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
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, it wasn't in their supply chain.
That it happened almost certainly, and that it probably happened
by some crazed person taking them out of the store
(02:15):
or 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 what
and us.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Right well at first though, and this gets overlooked and
left out of the college business courses and the PR courses.
At first, Johnson and Johnson was not in favor of
a massive recall.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Sure, because that looks well, it looks good in one
way but bad in another.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
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. Yes, we're recalling all of
the Thailand all in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yes, what she said.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Right. So by Friday, the thirty first of September, is
there thirty one in September? Was this October first?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I think it was October first, anyway. By the Friday,
two days after the death yeah, the deaths, Johnson and
Johnson recalled all of the tail in 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
(03:31):
almost overnight. It was not enough. Yeah, And so Johnson
and Johnson, within a week of the deaths recalled every
bottle of extra strength TIL and all in the United States,
which is worth about one hundred million dollars at the time,
took it back to their factories and destroyed it.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
So they say, right, yeah, both Johnson and Johnson, right.
I wonder if one of them was like, know about this.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
One of them said, Okay, I'll take all the states
west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Somewayoming
and then you can take all the other states. That's
a part one, Joe.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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 Anvil Award for how they
handle the.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Crisis the tailan All poisoning, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
And high grade foods. Remember we talked about the bad
Wieners in the first episode. The ballpark Frank Zip 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 they won the Golden Anvil,
(04:47):
which is one higher than.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Silver, because of how they handled the pr crisis brought
about by the copycats of the actual tailan All.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Crisis, which was in fact really brought about by two
jerk kids in Detroit, right, really, not even.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Copycats, not the tile in all crisis. I wonder where
those kids are today, probably in the Senate.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I bet one of them was the guy who did
our our lighting at our Detroit show.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It was a smoke I'll go some more smoke.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah, guys, we did a show in Detroit a few
years ago and 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 Uriah
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
(05:38):
like dude, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, well, the lighting was so bad that your highlighter
had turned like brown and you could no longer see
the words. And you asked him, we had to stop
the show, and you had to ask him to use
a different colored light.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And his response, because you and me he was hanging
out and our friend Chris Bowman was hanging out in
the sound with the guy. His response, according to them,
they want smoke, I'll give them some more smoke and
we got some more smoke.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Like a smoke machine.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Man, And people ask us why we haven't been back
to Detroit.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's a big reason. It's a big reason, not the
only reason.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Okay. So they won the Golden Anvil for the Wiener
pr moves McNeil Consumer Products, which is a subsidiary of
Johnson and Johnson.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
They actually make Til it All.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, they make the pills again. The way this all
this supply chain works is really convoluted, and 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, well, sure, because they'd found out the drugs
are actually fine, right thanks to Pinky McFarland.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
This is one hundred million dollars worth of stock that
they were kind of feeling the pressure to recall. That'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.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They had no choice, no, that was the only way
to do it was to lose a lot of money
in favor of future gains.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah. But even at the time, a lot of people
were like, this is it for tail and All. Sure,
the public has lost faith in Thailand All. So when
Thailandol recalled thirty one million, fifty count bottles of Extra
Strength tilent All and destroyed it all, there was a
chance that not only were they losing one hundred million dollars,
but that they were losing one hundred million dollars of
a brand that had already lost the public trust and
(07:29):
would never regain it. So which wasn't true. But yeah, no,
they didn't necessarily know that at the time. It was
still up in the air. So they it was basically
thirty one million sacrificial lambs that were killed to show
the public this taint of talent All has gone forever.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Your chances of dying from taking Extra Strength tilent All
are now gone. You can go back to taking Thailand All. Now.
That was one thing that was a big gesture, which
is what it amounted to. It was a gesture half
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
(08:08):
with this to save face and to win back public trust,
they started to do things right, like including like setting
up a hotline sure putting out one hundred thousand dollars
reward for information.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Jump change, considering how much they had lost already.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It's nineteen eighty two dollars.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well still jump change it is, yeah, and that remains unclaimed.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It does they But because of all of 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 these which they were, I mean seven murder victims. Yeah,
and Johnson and Johnson. I don't think I ever tried to
push them out of the spotlight. But they also managed
(08:49):
to portray themselves as the victim of a mad poisoner
who may or may not had something out for them.
But either way, their brand was taking a huge hit
because of this, and they were a victim and were
able to generate public sympathy. Is part of the road
to regaining the public trust.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Right, which is why it's taught in PR classes. So
we'll take you back to nineteen eighty two if you're
if you weren't around then or old enough to be
taking OTC pills and pain relievers.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
OTC is over the counter by the way. That's right, Okay,
you down with OTC. Yeah, you know me so dumb.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I love that you played along, though, I appreciate that
you could have made me feel stupid.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
We've been partners for eleven years almost now.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah, that'd be when next month or this month? Yeah right, yeah, unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So uh I'm believable, Not not in that way. Okay.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
So here's how it used to happen. If you wanted
to take a pill, like a tile and all, you
would get your bottle, you would pop it open with
your thumb.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Well first, first it came in a little box.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Sure, but the box wasn't even glued shut. No, 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. No,
there was no The cotton was completely superfluous at this time.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah. Cotton originally was introduced to keep bare aspirin like
the hard tablets, yeah, from getting crushed in transport.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Still today you'll find cotton in your in your pills.
There's no reason for it to be there except because
the companies know that you want it to be there.
You would be weirded out if there wasn't cotton in
your pills.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Imagine the cotton lobby had something to do with that too.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, I'll bet they're not. They're not complaining, you know,
so big cotton.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
They.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
New, fancy otc pill should have Micromo doll in there, right.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
It just comes with a pair of Meuni stuffed into
your pill bottle like these have been warm.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And so 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.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yes, that's what you could do, and then.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Closing it back and putting it back on the shelf.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Mate.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, oh there's a little mold in this one. Yeah,
and I'll just leave it for the next person.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Forget poisoning like these they could be spitting in this stuff.
It was allowed.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
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 in All Poisoning. It
really shows how much of a jarring experience it was
from America, because all of a sudden, like it's finally
(11:51):
sunk in in a couple of days, there's something wrong
with the tile in 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
to do this is because it's easy to get into
the tile in all, tamper with it, put it back,
and no one will be any any more. The wiser
(12:12):
and wait, it's not just tile and all. Milk doesn't
have anything that keeps it tamper resistant. Nei, there's orange juice, NEI,
there's cereal. Neither does cottage cheese. Nothing does. And America
forreaked out. And this is the reason why this Tile
in All Poisoning is considered widely the first incident of
(12:32):
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, the flight attendant
who was the last one to die in Chicago, she
had a coworker who said, like, everything looked tainted. Now,
(12:54):
I was afraid to give my kid's milk. I was
afraid to give my kids cereal. If they could get
to the tail and all, they can poison anything. And
that was really emblematic of the attitude, the shock that
everybody went through. And as a result, within six weeks,
Tyland all said we got this covered.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, And I have a feeling they did this so
fast there had to have been this idea in place already.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, it was. I saw a reference that it was.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
And I imagine it was not done because they're like, well,
it's a lot of money, and why would we bother.
It's like, it's not like someone's going to poison the medicine, right,
And then that happened. So within six weeks they had
a box that was actually glued shut, so if your
little box had been opened, you would be able to tell.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, that was That was part one of three of
this tamper resistant packaging.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
That little plastic seal over the top of the bottle
after you open it or no, no, no, the plastic is
over the cap on the outside of the bottle.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, like the plastic foil.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
And then the actual foil was over the mouth of
the bottle that you we all have to poke through
now to pull out the cotton and whatever still uses cotton.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
None of that existed until the beginning of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
So all three of these are put in place within
six weeks. 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 capsule that you could literally pull apart, and
you could snort the tile in all if you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Sure, I'm quite sure some people did.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
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 I imagine you could tamper with it.
And even I even saw with all these things in place,
they said, nothing is tamper proof. But these measures really
went a long way to restore the public, you know, well,
(14:43):
like the good feelings about what was going on.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, within about a year, Thailand all or Johnson and
Johnson managed to win the public's trust back in Thailand.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
All that's hard to believe. Yeah, that was really fast, but.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
It also goes to show like just how perfectly they
did everything from that from the time they ca admitted
to it on.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, and I feel like I remember like commercials with
CEOs and stuff addressing the public. He became sake.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
I can't remember his name. I want to say, Jeoffrey Beam.
That's like a shoe brand.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Gabby Johnson, No, um, Bill Johnson, No, Jimmy Howard Johnson.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yes, this, I can't remember his name, but he Jimmy
Johnson is way far away from that. But he became
a public face. He would, you know, go on to
sixty minutes and he talked to Dan Reather and take
Copple and all those cats like he he was out
there like showing how much the company cared. Yeah, and
(15:39):
it had had a huge effect.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And then in nineteen eighty three, Congress got involved. They
passed what they dubbed the Tail and All Bill, which
basically says, if you do something like this is now
a federal offense. A few years later, in nineteen eighty nine,
the FDA actually established guidelines for all manufacturers of any
product really to make it Tampa proof.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, because it wasn't just the OTC manufacturers that started
doing this. They followed suit very quickly once Tail and
all came out with it, because they kind of had
to if they wanted to keep up with TIL and all.
But also the uh, the manufacturers of everything, like every product,
every consumer product, started putting their products in like tamper
(16:20):
proof packaging. Dial soap started coming wrapped in cellophane inside
the box.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
To trap the chemicals in.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I guess, but also to show like nobody's injected this
with lie or something like that, although lie is used
in the making the soap, isn't it. I remember my
fight Club.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
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 about the profile of the supposed
mad poisoner. Right after this.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Stop you know, stop stop, should know no stop?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
All right. So this was a very big case at
the time. Obviously, like we've been saying, it was a
landmark case. So of course you're going to get psychological profiles,
which you know we should do one in profiling. Actually,
have we done that.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I don't think so, it'd be a good one.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, because it always like seems like the trope in
movies and TV. But it is kind of like that.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
No, it is a thing for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
It's not like they 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 Jekyll and Hide type During the day, he's
very ordinary. He could be in the desk cubicle next
to you and you wouldn't even know it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Every once in a while uses here him go more.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Yeah, exactly. But deep in his in the recesses of
his brain, everyone, he's plagued with self doubt and has
an illusion that a random killing can boost a sense
of self worth, which is just sounds like a straight
out of a movie.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It sounds like a psychiatrist saying I want to be
on TV. Yeah, listen to me.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
They also speculated, and this is just completely like conjecture
was that he had probably already taken his own life
after the killings.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
That was one specific person who was it that. Yeah, Yeah,
it was I think like the medical examiner for Cook County.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, he probably already jumped off the bridge, so don't
worry about it.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Don't worry everybody. Yeah, yeah, he just threw that out there.
I don't know if it was to calm people or not,
but or maybe he's just throwing his two cents in.
But 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 no one has ever been charged with the Thailand
(19:05):
All murders.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah that's the ending.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
But there has been There were a lot of suspects
that remember Thailand All set up a hotline and this
Thailand All Task Force, one 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. Yeah,
(19:28):
they were trying to whittle those down into actual tips
that were worth pursuing, and out of all of them,
they deemed twelve hundred tips or twelve hundred leads worth
checking out. There's a lot of leads for a case,
even considering yet one hundred and forty people working them.
And I read somewhere that they started out with like
(19:50):
twenty thousand suspects or something like that and whittled it
down to four hundred.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, And sort of the sad part is as quickly
as they sort of figured a lot of this out
and had that one 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.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, it became clear very quickly.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Yeah, they whittled that down. 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 nineteen eighty two where
you didn't have security cameras everywhere, you didn't have credit
cards and debit cards creating paper trails. It was a
lot easier back then to get away with something like this,
(20:34):
to be completely unknown, to walk into a store, maybe
slip some tilin all into your pocket, go out to
the parking lot and come back in and slip them
back on the shelf. Yeah, if you're really easy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You won't even go to the trouble of buying it.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, I guess that's a good point, steal it and
then put it. But you know people were using cash.
If there were cameras in a place, they were probably
trained on employees. I worked at a golden pantry in College.
Only camera we had was directly above us, pointing down
at the catch register.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
It was the one at Alps in Atlanta Highway.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Alps. No, ok, the one on the east side College
Station Road. I think, okay, yeah, 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.
(21:32):
And I got the Golden pantry job later that day.
Here you go, which, hey man, sure, it's like sign
me up.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
From Golden arches to golden pantry. That's like a rags
of riches story.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
I was selling beer and cigarettes.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Nice.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
It was pretty great.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
You're like one for you, one for me.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Oh, I would never do that, all right? Where was I?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, I was at Golden pantry. So the cameras trained
on the register. They're not. You know, you could come
and go in a store and no one even knows.
In nineteen eighty two, right, it ops of nothing to
go on. Most importantly, no motive.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
That was a big one, because remember, this is just
a Jekylin Hyde type who you'd never suspect.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Who's probably at the bottom of the Chicago.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
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, 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
(22:33):
it's not to say that they didn't have some suspects.
Some people definitely did kind of come to come to
the fore, but not many of them.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, but these two are really interesting sub stories in
and of themselves.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
For sure.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
The first guy's name was last name Arnold.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
First name Roger. That's right, I call him Richard, That's
all right, but for good reason.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Oh sure, because you said he was like the Richard
Jewel of his day. Yeah, the Olympic bomber who was
not the bomber.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Right, but whose life was ruined because he basically was
implicated as the Olympic bomber.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Right, the same thing happened to this guy. Yeah, he
was one of the first named suspects. Forty nine year
old guy.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
So put yourself in the position. Okay, the media is
going berserk on the 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 named. Oh yeah,
it's like people going crazy, like trying to get to
this guy to interview him.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
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. Sure, and then how
it all ended up. Yeah, as you're about to see.
So he was a diy chemist.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It's a big one.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
There's a big thing right there, because into chemistry.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
He said, he's a jekylin Hyde type who's probably into chemistry.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
That's right. He was a dockhand at Jewel food just
at a warehouse west of Chicago.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And Dual Foods. There are a couple of different jewel
foods are where the tyran was bought. It's like a
grocery store of food market.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
It's all checking out so far. So the cops look
into him and go to his house. He has a book,
a handbook rather on methods of killing people.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
How to kill people A to Z. I don't know
if that's a title, but okay, that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
He had five unregistered guns.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
That's a big one.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He admitted to having cyanide once. Yeah, but he said
I threw it out like at least six months before
these murders.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
He's like, when were the murders again? Oh, yeah, six
months before that. That's fine, it was.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
And then his wife said, uh, you know they're investigating
her and interviewing her. She was like, you know what,
Actually I did take some tyl and all and felt
really sick and threw up one time. But again I
was it was probably due to overeating and it was
just that once.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
As the fact of the podcast, So like, you.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Can't blame cops for saying this guy's a pretty good lead.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
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 tailand 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 if she would notice? Who knows. But
the cops thoroughly investigated this guy and cleared him. There's
(25:30):
a there's not a person associated with the story that
I came across who thought, he said, I actually think
this guy did it. I didn't find one person who
thought Roger Arnold 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,
(25:52):
a guy named John Stenishaw Stanisha. I would say, yeah,
I'm going with that too, some Slovak or something.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, he was forty six. He was a Chicago computer consultant.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And that's saying something in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah, probably. So, So here's what happened Arnold. There was
his bartender 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 shot point blank.
(26:31):
And so he in fact did kill somebody. He did
because of what had happened to his life.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
It was premeditated murder, even though it was the wrong person.
He was definitely he created an intentional homicide. He killed
somebody on.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Purpose mistaken identity killing though.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Right, and because of this, because it was directly related
to the Titlan All poisonings, John Stanisha is frequently considered
an eighth victim of the Titlan All killings. Yeah, kind
of like an honorary victim, right in this case. But
it is kind of appropriate that he just happened to
(27:07):
be in the wrong place at 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 that poor dude just happened to be in
the wrong bar and it happened to look like the owner,
that's just it just is perfect for this saga.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Yeah, I wonder what Marty Sinclair thought about all that.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I'll bet he was not very happy.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Probably not, but probably also very relieved and probably also guilt.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, I would guess there's a touch of that.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Yep, So, chuck, 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.
Speaker 4 (28:01):
Stop you know, stop stop stop, should know no, stop?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
All right, Chuck. 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 was it, it
turns out it was. But James Lewis came under the
(28:44):
attention of the Chicago p D and 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 so far, and the whole thing has
taken me about ten minutes per bottle, and I've already
(29:06):
killed seven people. I basically see no reason to stop.
Pay me one million dollars and then I will stop
the killings. And it hired.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
He gave a bank account number, right, he said, wire
me this money.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Very very presiently. No, that's not the right word. Stupidly maybe,
but is it. No, it's not. So this letter has
a New York postmark, but the bank account is associated
with a travel agency in Chicago. And so the cops go, Okay,
this seems like it was dropped in our lap, but
(29:39):
let's go check it out. And they find the owner
of this travel agency that had closed up, had gone under,
and this guy is like, oh my god, you're kidding me.
He's like, no, I didn't write this letter, but I
can guarantee I can tell you who did is a
guy named Robert Richardson. Robert Richardson, it turned out, was
the husband of a woman named Nancy Richardson, who had
(30:02):
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, right, and was even
more so the type of guy who would write a
letter to frame the owner of the travel agency for
the tailan all murderers in retaliation for that last paycheck.
(30:23):
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 didn't actually exist,
that he was actually somebody else, a man named James Lewis.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Right. So when we joked earlier about is that his
real name, and you said it was, it was?
Speaker 1 (30:42):
It was.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
His name was not Robert Richardson though, that was an alias.
So what they found out was that Robert Richardson was
a tax consultant. He and this is just a strange,
ironic twist, when he was twenty years old, he tried
to take his own life by swallowing aspirin.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Thirty six of them.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Yeah, so that's just neither here nor there. But an
interesting little side note.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, the fact that, like most people don't have that
as part of their past. Yeah, it is interesting that
it came.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Up, so he had a pretty long rap sheet. He
was wanted by postal inspectors for a credit card fraud
in Kansas City. He was indicted in nineteen seventy eight.
And this one is just mind blowing. Yeah, he's indicted
for murder after police found remains of one of his
former clients in bags in his attic, and he got
(31:32):
let loose because it was an illegal search.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
But he was caught with the body of one of
his clients. He was dismembered in his attic with no
good explanation as far as I've ever heard.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah, well, what explanation would be good?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Well, we were playing poker and one thing I.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Do another juggling swords and yeah. So his wife's real
name was lee Anne, the one who worked at the
travel agency and went unpaid. They fled Kansas City in
December of eighty one, and this was as US Postal
inspectors were converging on them about this credit card scheme.
(32:11):
So they're like, just bad people.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Not the postal inspectors, No, no, no, the Lewises.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Sure great. Yeah, so they moved to Chicago. They changed
their names to Robert 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,
and then she lost her job, went unpaid. They left Chicago,
and this turns out this is what got them exonerated
(32:39):
from the title. All thing is, they left Chicago and
moved to New York before this.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Happened, right before those same month, right.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
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 ate through the gelatin capsules eventually, so I had
a very very short shelf life before the whole bottle
just turned into a mush of cyanid powder and melted gelatin. So,
(33:16):
like you said, it had to have been done basically
the day before the twenty ninth. On the twenty eighth,
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, James
Lewis said, yeah, I wrote this letter. I wrote the
letter of Johnson and Johnson framing that travel agency guy.
(33:38):
But I did not I did not poison the title.
In 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 tile in all. Although the Talent All Task
Force tried to trip him up once, I guess to
just get this on the record that he done this,
(34:00):
but they asked him, like, in an interview, Okay, let's
say you had done it, how would you have done it?
And he actually pulled an OJ. He showed them how
he would have done it.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah. He just didn't write a book about it. He
just showed him in an interview.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
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, right.
I think the answer for me would have been I
don't know, man, Yeah, I'm innocent. I can't figure this out.
But he's like, here's how I do it.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I've been waiting for you to ask me.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Though he's eventually found in New York City. He's at
the public library with a reference book, copying names and
addresses of newspapers. I would imagine to send them letters
like zodiac style.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yeah, because so we got to say this. So the
cops figured out who James Lewis was before they found
James Lewis, and it became part of the national media circus.
While they were looking for James Lewis, this guy was
writing letters to newspapers. He called in a radio talk show. Yeah,
he was really relishing the fact that there was a
(35:10):
national manhunt out for him. Who Like, that's what I'm saying.
On the one hand, you got to kind of feel
a little bit bad that this guy was kind of
being railroaded into, you know, the rap for these murders.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
After his extortion attempt, that's where the.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Feeling bad forms is. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right.
He totally brought this on himself.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
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 lives in the Greater Boston
area today.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
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 detectives maintain
that the Tailanhall murder could have flown into O'Hare, rented
a car, done that circuit, flown or driven back to
here and flown out all in the same day the
day before, but they could never put James Lewis in
(36:07):
Chicago at all that day. So he was cleared finally,
although he did serve two consecutive ten year sentences. He
served thirteen of the twenty years for that credit card
fraud that the Postal Inspectors wanted him for and for
the extortion letter. And like you said, he lives in Cambridge,
mass now. But then in two thousand and nine, the case,
(36:29):
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 raided James
Lewis's house demanded a fingerprint and DNA sample. James and
Leanne Lewis fought it in court. The judges like, no,
you have to do this before leaving the courthouse. They
(36:52):
gave him the samples and nothing has come of it.
So I guess that means tacitly that the Lewises were
cleared once and four all of the tailent all murders.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, and you know, the DNA thing is an interesting
piece because they still have some samples of the cyanide.
I guess that the capsules have worn away by now
if it had the cyanide in there. But there was
and still his hope that DNA could could crack this case,
(37:22):
just like eight or nine years ago. The unibomber ted Kazinski.
Is that a two parter? No, No, just one part
good podcast, So I.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Don't think so. That was a good episode.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
He grew up in Chicago and his parents were living
in the Greater Chicago area in eighty two, and he
is the unibomber. So they said we might as well
get a DNA sample and talk to him, right, and
he was cleared. I don't think he was ever a
super strong suspect, no, and he probably would have admitted it.
So he was like, no, this is not me.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Right, So the unibomber has been cleared. That's right from
the talent on. 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 is they're just sitting
around with that. There's there are no suspects there. Every
suspect has been cleared and there's nobody on the horizon.
(38:19):
It's just an unsolved random series of killings that happened.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah, they're still working on it though. There's a police
sergeant named Scott Winkelmann who has been on this task
force for a long time and he says he thinks
is solvable and his department did just save a forty
five year old murder case cold case.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Man, if they solved this one, that would be, I know,
the biggest cold case ever solved.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I think. I mean, who knows, But I could see
maybe finding like a deathbed letter or something one day,
maybe like I don't know if they're going to catch someone.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
At the bottom of the Chicago River and hull them.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Off to jail. But I could see the truth coming
out when day. I hope so for the families because
Monica Janis 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, said that they
have still not gotten over it. She said her grandparents
have passed now, but she said, literally every day for
(39:19):
the rest of their lives, they just cried about me,
the fact that they didn't know who did it. She
grew up and has been a therapy therapy her whole
life because there were all victims. You know that this
post traumatic stress disorder kicks in sure where she grew
up fearing that any of her family members could die
at any time. Joseph Manus, her dad, says that he
(39:44):
still has dreams like you know on the rag about
these murders. He said he had one recently where everyone
involved was in a room in the case and then
two black men in suits and glasses were laughing about
how they got away with murder. Michelle Rosen, she's the
daughter of Mary Reiner. She has dedicated her life to
(40:06):
investigating this on her own and she doesn't agree with
the Loane the mad poisoner theory at all.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
No, this is interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, she thinks it had something to do with the
supply chain.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
And that Johnson and Johnson knew this and covered it.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Up.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
One of the things, one of the things that people
who believe this point to is that Johnson and Johnson
recalled all of that tail and 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
(40:41):
or just locals in Chicago. Seems like it took long
enough that other people would have died in that week
before the national recall was undertaken. But there was something very,
very interesting that was a PostScript to all this that
does undermine that mad poisoner theory.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, it was just a few years later, in nineteen
eighty five, a woman in New York named Diane Ellsroth
took two extra strength Tilon all capsules and died from
cyanide poisoning. But they found I mean, it's just completely unrelated.
Was it another copycat case well, or the original poisoner maybe?
(41:20):
So this is a different cyanide.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Right, The cyanide was definitely not the same side from
the same batch. It was chemically different. But there was
another bottle found around the block from where Mary Elswroth
bought hers and Yonkers that did match that cyanide. So
there were two bottles of extra strength til and All
two years later in another state that had been tampered with.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
The problem is this was after the three prong tamper
resistant packaging had been introduced.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Which means it was an inside job, right.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I guess because the tamper the thing had not been
obviously tampered with. Then Thailand all was never able to
play what happened?
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah, and then within five days of her death, eight
states outright banned the capsules, Thailand all capsules.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Right, and Thailand All, for its part, was like, we've
been trying to get everybody to take capl it's anyway,
but they keep taking capsules, so we're making it.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
And then a guy wrote a book, right, Scott Bart's Yeah,
a former Johnson and Johnson employee wrote in twenty eleven
a self published book on the timel in All poisonings.
And he said, you know what we were talking about earlier.
He's like, this supply chain is so convoluted, right, basically,
(42:35):
like it could definitely could have happened at any point
right along the way.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
And his idea is that that Johnson and Johnson knew
that it was in their distribution network and they covered it.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Up self published book.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah, you gotta note that for sure.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
I'm not knocking it, no, but it's noteworthy.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
It does if there's like any hint of journalistic integrity
in US, that feels like we have to note that.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
So that's the tailanol poisonings of nineteen eighty two in
Chicago changed America, changed the world, but definitely changed America.
Was the end of some form of innocence that we
still had.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Absolutely, if you.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Want to know more about the tail and Al 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.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
This is from Jin from Brunswick, Maine. Hey, guys, been
listening for several years and never thought I'd have a
never thought a perfect time would to write. End would
be related to synthetic farts. Remember the discussed episode we
talked about synthetic parts. It's a real thing. When I
was in high school, my dad came across the stuff
(43:48):
online called liquid ass.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
That's horrible.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Not a lot occurs, right, No, that occursion.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
We can spell it out, though, sure, or I guess
maybe you should have said, like ask asterisk.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah, there you go. A good name for a product, though.
She said. He found it on a joke web website
and ordered some. And I have to tell you it
is the worst thing you've ever smelled. I can't even
describe it, and 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 I was pretty funny
(44:25):
putting a couple of drops in the radiator by across
the friend across the hall friends room, 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
(44:46):
in the ten years since.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
That's probably it's called learning your lesson.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
But she still has the bottle.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
She's like, but I kept it right just in case.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
Thank you for your interesting and entertaining podcast. This is
the first podcast ever listened to, and it's still always
on the top of my download list. Thanks 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.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Signed anonymous that is Jengreen. Thanks Jengreen, very brave for
you'd put your name on that one. Especially. I wonder
if you stepped up and said that horrible smell that
was my bad.
Speaker 4 (45:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
If you have a great story about college pranks, we
want to hear about it. You can get in touch
with this via our social links by going to stuff
youshould Know dot com, or you can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of Iheartradios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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