Murder by Remote Control

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The Tylenol case brings calls for tamperproof packaging of drugs

It was more than a tantalizing mystery, more even than random terror. The Tylenol murders had the true Kafkaesque quality of a nightmare become real, of vague dreads taking on form and solidity in cold daylight. Such thoughts gripped Americans last week as poison scares spread around the nation, seemingly promising leads dissolved, and the hunt for the person who had put the cyanide into capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol that killed seven people in the Chicago area two weeks ago made little progress.

As in a nightmare, the most routine, innocent action--reaching for a painkiller to relieve a headache, cold or upset stomach, something that Americans do millions of times every day--had become fraught with menace. Suddenly one of the small bonds of unconscious trust that hold society together had snapped: people could not look at the ubiquitous bottles of pills on their medicine shelves in quite the same way again (see ESSAY).

By week's end Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, stopped all production in capsule form of what had been the nation's top-selling painkiller, and urged druggists across the country to remove all Tylenol capsules from their shelves. That left Tylenol available only in tablet and liquid varieties. Even as Tylenol capsules piled up in warehouses, Johnson & Johnson and other drug companies were grappling with an even more difficult, expensive and far-reaching problem: how to package over-the-counter medications to minimize the chances of tampering. Said Arthur Hull Hayes, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, which is hastily drafting new packaging regulations: "Within a week, we'll know what options are available to us." However, he added in a statement that was very far from reassuring, "it is important to make clear that a tamperproof package is not possible."

The victims could have been anybody.

They had been murdered by remote control, by a poisoner who had no way of guessing in even the most general sense who his victims might be--men or women, young or old--and could not have cared. Six bottles of cyanide-poisoned Tylenol were found in five drugstores and one supermarket; one store was in north Chicago, but the others were in communities in the western suburbs, strung out along a rough north-south line near Illinois State Route 53. The investigators' chilling theory: the murderer had driven along 53, turned off at randomly selected points and placed one bottle of poisoned capsules in each store, to be bought by the next or third or 15th man, woman or child who walked in seeking relief from minor distress.

Worse, at week's end the killer was still at large. He or she might or might not be insane, but either way was a coldly calculating planner. Said one investigator: "He is probably sitting back to admire his awful handiwork, savoring our frustration. The obvious fear is that if we don't catch him quickly, he will do this again, maybe with another product." Maybe some place other than the Chicago area too. In addition, authorities feared there might be "copycat" poisonings by deranged people looking for a perverted sort of glory. Said Arthur Schueneman, senior clinical psychologist at Northwestern University's Rehabilitation Institute: "We can expect to see a number of recurrences of this type of thing, just as we saw airliner hijackings come in clusters."

Not surprisingly, sales of painkillers of every sort slumped. Poison-control centers around the country were flooded by calls from jittery citizens. Police all over the U.S. looked with extra care into every case, new or old, that might conceivably be related to the Chicago-area poisonings. Results: a number of false alarms that for a time looked like either similar cases or promising leads.

> In Oroville, Calif., Greg Blagg, 27, a butcher in a meat market owned by his father, told a strange story. He said that on Sept. 30, the same day that the first Chicago-area poisonings became public knowledge, he had taken three capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol from a bottle that his wife Terry had bought two weeks earlier. "Everything became very blurry," he related. "I'm told I passed out and became real rigid." Terry got him to a hospital, where he was treated for four hours and then released at his own request. Back home, Blagg related, he switched on the TV and caught reports of the Tylenol deaths near Chicago. He took apart some capsules from his own bottle, found pink flecks in the powder, and the next morning turned the bottle over to his physician, John Clay, for analysis. That evening, Greg and Terry returned to the drugstore where the first purchase had been made, found Tylenol still on sale and bought two more bottles; they discovered more pink flecks in the capsules. Last week word came back from laboratories in Rockville, Md., and San Francisco: strychnine, commonly sold as a rat poison, was found in the capsules, though in quantities too small to kill a human.

By week's end strychnine had been found in one more Tylenol bottle still in stock in the Oroville drugstore but nowhere else in the country. Investigators were wondering about the wild coincidences involved in Blagg's story. If it is true, he and his wife had bought the only bottles of strychnine-poisoned Tylenol purchased by anyone. Investigators doubted there had been either an attempt at a copycat murder or any link to the Chicago poisonings.

> In Philadelphia, police reopened the case of William Pascual, a 26-year-old graduate student at the Wharton School of Business, who had been found dead of cyanide poisoning in his apartment last April 3. His death had been ruled a suicide, largely on the strength of a note Pascual had mailed to his mother in Arlington, Va. ("Dear Mom: It wasn't your fault. It was mine, all mine"). At the time, analysis of three Tylenol capsules from a bottle found in a shoe in the closet uncovered no poison, but analysis last week of the remaining capsules, which were still in police storage, did turn up cyanide. For a day or so hope grew that the case might become an important lead to the Chicago-area deaths almost six months later. But investigators soon concluded there was no link. Philadelphia police saw no reason to change the ruling of suicide.

> In Elgin, Ill., police returned to the parking lot of a Howard Johnson's restaurant and motel where two officers had discovered discarded bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol a day before the poisonings. The policemen in the Interval had become mildly ill with symptoms that were similar to those of cyanide poisoning. Elgin officers found that the bottles had been broken by the wheels of cars, and powder was scattered on the ground.

It was analyzed. No cyanide, no strychnine and, investigators reluctantly concluded, no leads either.

> In Fort Washington, Pa., a letter turned up at the offices of McNeil Consumer Products Co., the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that makes Tylenol; it had been forwarded from the Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Brunswick, N.J., because the word Tylenol had been written on the envelope. The letter demanded that the manufacturer pay $1 million into a postal box at Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. in Chicago, and according to Chicago newspapers it implied that there would be more poisonings if this were not done. Investigators identified the sender as a Chicago stockbroker, name undisclosed, who had been a customer of Continental Illinois and had suffered heavy losses in the market. On Friday, Illinois Attorney General Tyrone Fahner, who is directing a task force of more than 100 federal, state and local investigators, stated flatly that the letter "was not sent by the killer or killers." It apparently pointed to no more than an attempt to capitalize on the Tylenol poisonings.

> In Wyoming, investigators thought they just might have found the poisoner's first victim. Jay Mitchell, 19, of the town of Big Horn, failed to turn off the alarm clock that he had set to buzz at 6:30 a.m. on July 26; his father tried to awaken him, but young Mitchell was dead. Tissues from his body were sent for analysis to a busy laboratory in Utah, which concluded a month later that Mitchell had died of cyanide poisoning. Reviewing records last week and checking with authorities in Chicago, Pathologist William Doughty, of Sheridan County Memorial Hospital, who had been consulted in the baffling case, found that the level of cyanide had been about the same as in the bodies of the seven Illinois victims.

Doughty also determined that Mitchell's mother had bought Tylenol, possibly (her memory is hazy) from a local outlet of the Jewel chain, which also owns one of the Chicago-area stores where poisoned capsules were found two weeks ago.

Investigators flew from Chicago to Wyoming over the weekend to probe further, but the trail is very cold. His older brother thinks Mitchell took Tylenol from a bottle in the kitchen four hours before the unanswered alarm buzzed, but the Utah lab last week found no Tylenol in blood and urine samples that it had retained from Mitchell's body, which had earlier been cremated. The family long ago discarded the Tylenol bottle and the two or three capsules it contained.

All last week, Fahner held twice-daily news conferences before TV cameras that made him the nation's latest instant celebrity. Those conferences became steadily less hopeful as the week passed. At first Fahner announced that the task force was progressively narrowing its list of suspect from an initial 20 or so to eight or nine by midweek. After that he stopped giving numbers, apparently because any further narrowing of the list would have brought the total embarrassingly close to zero. Late in the week, Fahner conceded that the task force, despite conducting more than 1,000 interviews and testing 2 million Tylenol capsules, was "not close to an arrest." Said another investigator: "We are not hot. We are not even warm."

Small wonder. The sleuths had only the haziest idea of what kind of person they were looking for. The Tylenol poisonings were so different from the patterns of other mass murders that experts in criminal psychology could offer little about the killer's personality and motive. Investigators were reduced to such expedients as asking pharmacists whether they had noticed anyone "acting strangely" in their stores.

Whenever the poisoner is caught, the problem will remain: how to protect the public against deranged people who might follow his ghastly example. The FDA was not the only agency determined to tighten up packaging rules. The board of commissioners of Cook County, which comprises Chicago and some of its suburbs, last week passed a local law that will require seals on all nonprescription drugs sold in the county 90 days from now. In Chicago proper, Mayor Jane Byrne proposed a tougher ordinance that would also apply to some cosmetics, and said, "I think we're going to have to go further and deal with food products too." Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard Schweiker, the FDA's boss, was openly worried that such local laws would create "a nightmare" of overlapping and conflicting regulations if the Federal Government does not quickly set rules covering the whole U.S.

Several simple and time-tested methods exist that could make drug bottles more resistant to tampering. Perhaps the most common device is an aluminum or waxed-paper seal covering a bottle's opening, like those that have long been used to protect the freshness of vitamins and instant coffee. If the seal is broken, a buyer is alerted that the product could have been contaminated. Drug capsules also could be put into so-called blister packs, that is, encased in sheets of plastic, with each capsule in its own bubble. Another safeguard might be to enclose medicines in one-piece capsules that are difficult to pull apart.

None of these safety features is prohibitively expensive. Aluminum seals cost 2-c- apiece at most, and the machine used to attach them to bottles sells for only $9,000. But it could be three or four months before the drug industry can gear up to produce new containers. Even then, as FDA Commissioner Hayes notes, none of the methods is foolproof. Packaging experts admit, for example, that a careful criminal with a razor blade and a bit of glue could remove and replace an aluminum seal seemingly intact.

Whatever might be done, how long will it take before public confidence is fully restored in nonprescription drugs generally, and Tylenol specifically? Though the Tylenol capsules apparently were poisoned after they left its control, Johnson & Johnson is stuck with a product that has become seared into the public mind as a cause, however innocent, of death. The company is offering to take back all 22 million bottles of Tylenol capsules now in stores and homes and exchange them for pills or liquid.

The company as a whole doubtless will survive and even prosper. Johnson & Johnson makes all manner of sanitary products that have become consumer bywords. Among them: Band-Aids, Stayfree maxi-pads, Ortho-Novum oral contraceptives, many baby products. Tylenol accounted for only $400 million of the company's 1981 sales of nearly $5.4 billion, which ranked J&J No. 68 on the FORTUNE 500 list of the largest U.S. industrial companies. Some Wall Street analysts now guess that the expense of recalling all Tylenol capsules will cause the company to report a loss for the current quarter, but add that even so; company-wide profits for all 1982 should be only a bit below last year's $467.6 million (about 17% of that came from Tylenol). Still, J&J stock fell from $46.125 a share just before the poisonings to as low as $39 last week and closed at $42.125, though the market as a whole was soaring.

Immediately Johnson & Johnson will have the problem of fighting off lawsuits. At least four were filed last week. Three, brought by members of the families of people who died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol, ask for damages totaling $35 million. The fourth is a class-action suit brought by Merle Kirsner of Highland Park, Ill., demanding refunds for everyone who bought Tylenol products in the entire country this year -- maybe $600 million, including retail markups, estimates Kirsner's lawyer.

Generally, the suits accuse Johnson & Johnson of failing to package Tylenol in a tamperproof manner. Attorneys who are expert in product-liability law think that Johnson & Johnson will be able to convince the courts that it could not have been expected to anticipate and guard against the acts of a putative madman. But they add that the company is likely to incur expenses running into the millions in defending itself.

Longerrange, there is the awesome problem of re-establishing a product that had enabled Johnson & Johnson to win 37% of the entire $1 billion-plus market in nonprescription painkillers last year, vs. a mere 4% in 1976. Company officials would say nothing last week about their future marketing plans for Tylenol.

On Wall Street, Hal Chefitz, an analyst with the brokerage firm of Gintel & Co., voiced a widespread view. Said he: "Use of the name Tylenol is dead." Advertising executives, who have more than a passing interest in the subject--it was aggressive advertising and promotion by Johnson & Johnson that catapulted Tylenol into its lead position--were not so sure.

Several thought that J&J, which advertised Tylenol only to physicians as recently as 1975, could capitalize on the solid reputation that Tylenol has built among many doctors. Says Louis T. Hagopian, chief executive of N W Ayer, one of the nation's largest ad agencies: "I would be thinking about relaunching Tylenol with new packaging that would be very fail-safe.

[But] I would also have a group working on the side on a similar product with a totally new name."

The future of Tylenol, however, is hardly the nation's most pressing concern.

A nameless killer is at large, and he has not only the cunning to leave few clues but the twisted ingenuity to invent a new form of murder. Even after he is caught and convicted, if he ever is, the terror that he inspired is likely to live on, and with altogether too good reason. There have been mass murders that were more brutal and claimed more victims. But there have been few if any so exquisitely attuned to the anonymity and impersonality of modern urban and suburban life. Paranoia is supposed to be an irrational fear, but who can now say that it is silly to dread that innocent bottle of capsules? --By George J. Church. Reported by Lee Griggs/Chicago and Adam Zagorin/ New York

With reporting by Lee Griggs, Adam Zagorin

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