How a decades-old unsolved murder case changed the way we consume medicine
Editor’s Note: Learn more about the decades-old cold case of the Tylenol murders in the latest episode of “How It Really Happened,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.
It’s almost unimaginable today. A police car slowly moving down your street, its loudspeaker blaring: “Do not take Tylenol until further notice.” But that was indeed the scene in Chicago’s suburbs in the fall of 1982.
The events that led to those warnings sent chills down the spines of millions of Americans. A string of unsolved murders is the subject of a CNN Original Series documentary, ‘How It Really Happened: Tylenol Murders’ airing Sunday, November 17 at 9 p.m. ET.
The scare began when Mary Kellerman, a 12-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, Illinois, told her parents she was feeling sick on the morning of September 29, 1982. She wanted to stay home from school. After taking one Tylenol capsule, Mary collapsed on the bathroom floor. She died shortly after.
The same day Kellerman took that Tylenol, less than 10 miles away in Arlington Heights, Illinois, 27-year-old postal worker Adam Janus took two capsules of Tylenol. He later died at a nearby hospital. Adam’s family was in shock. When they gathered that afternoon, Adam’s brother Stanley Janus and Stanley’s wife, Theresa, also took Tylenol capsules from the same bottle. Both dropped to the floor and were later pronounced dead. Over the next few days, three more people in the Chicago suburbs would die after taking Tylenol: 31-year-old Mary McFarland; 35-year-old Paula Prince; and 27-year-old Mary “Lynn” Reiner, who had just delivered her fourth child. Seven people, all from the same general suburban area of Chicago, had died.
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