The Day Halloween Died
How a series of unsolved killings in 1982 changed the holiday
I was at my office in the opening days of October, 1982 when the news spread like a conflagration: Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide had been sold in Chicago-area stores, and people were dying.
The first victim, twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, had been rushed to the hospital and died on September 29th. Adam Janus of nearby Arlington Heights died later that same day. Adam’s brother Stanley and sister-in-law Theresa were soon dead as well. In all, seven people would die of cyanide poisoning. The connection? All had recently taken Tylenol. The bottles from which the pills had come were all found to contain sodium cyanide.
Law enforcement, the media, and Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson launched a nationwide blitz to pull Tylenol products from the shelves and warn people to stop taking the drug. In the end, five bottles of Tylenol were responsible for seven deaths, and three more tainted bottles were found lurking on store shelves.
How had the poison gotten into the bottles? It could only have been sabotage. Investigators moved quickly and determined that the bottles had come from different pharmaceutical companies, so it couldn’t have been a disgruntled employee. All the poisoned bottles appeared in the…
