A crime that changed America
In 1982, a series of events that started in Elk Grove Village and Arlington Heights would leave the Chicago suburbs - and the nation - gripped by fear.
Someone had gone into random grocery and drugstores in Cook and DuPage counties and put deadly doses of cyanide into Extra Strength Tylenol capsules.
The fast-acting poison killed seven people in the Chicago area in three days. No one knew what was causing these deaths, but three local firefighters and a nurse came up with a theory. Arlington Heights fire Lt. Charles Kramer, Arlington Heights nurse Helen Jensen, the now deceased Arlington Heights firefighter Phillip Capitelli, and Elk Grove Village firefighter Richard Keyworth connected the dots and realized that all of the victims had taken Tylenol. Could the Tylenol contain poison? Laboratory tests proved his theory correct.
Suburban police officers and firefighters responded immediately by driving through neighborhoods using loudspeakers to warn people: "Don't take Tylenol!" In some places, they went door to door with bags, collecting bottle after bottle of the pain reliever.
"It was in the early hours, before it got out in the media," said Elk Grove Village Deputy Police Chief Larry Hammer, who was just a young patrolman at the time, in a 2002 interview with the Daily Herald. "People didn't know what was going on."
When the news got out, though, people flooded doctor's offices and hospitals with phone calls, asking questions about cyanide poisoning.
The murders led to national hysteria and intense media attention. A 140-member police task force was put on the case. No one knew how much, or what kind, of tainted products were out there, and it was unclear whether the Tylenol poisonings were random or targeted at certain people. The panic mirrored that which followed the anthrax cases in 2001.
Suddenly, every food or medical product seemed vulnerable to tampering. Even trusted products, like aspirin or Halloween candy, were being viewed as potentially deadly.
"No one trusted anything," recalled Arlington Heights police Capt. John Fellmann, who helped investigate the crime, in a 2002 interview with the Daily Herald. "Halloween has forever changed because of this. The case actually changed a national holiday."
The crime revolutionized the way nonprescription medicine is packaged. Over-the-counter medicine used to be covered by nothing more than a piece of cotton and a plastic lid. Now, federal law requires three layers of protective, tamper-proof sealing.
The incident also set a new standard for corporate accountability. The makers of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, reacted to the crisis by immediately pulling all 22 million bottles of the product off the shelves nationwide, which cost the company more than $100 million. It was one of several decisions the company made that put customers' interests above corporate profits.
As a result, Tylenol - initially considered doomed to extinction - quickly regained its title as the country's top-selling pain reliever. To this day, Johnson & Johnson's handling of the crisis is hailed as the textbook example of good public relations.