Tylenol murders: daughter tells of toll of unsolved killings, 40 years on
Forty years after the infamous Tylenol murders killed her father and two other close relatives, a Wisconsin woman refuses to take the popular pain pills.
Kasia Janus also always verifies products are properly sealed before she buys anything at stores, she said in a recently published series of interviews with CNN that described the gutwrenching legacy left behind for her by the unsolved Tylenol killings, which made tampering with medications as well as other consumer goods a federal crime but remain unsolved.
“It is something that altered the life of every person in the world,” Janus, who had never before spoken publicly about her ordeal, told CNN. “And I want people to know that, yeah, this was my family, and it has changed all of us.”
At the time just four, Janus recalls being with her father, Adam, in their Chicago suburb when he bought an Extra-Strength Tylenol bottle that someone had slipped cyanide pills into. Adam Janus, a 27-year-old postal worker, wasn’t feeling well – and without having any way to know the mortal peril that the bottle posed for him, he took a pill from it before going to sleep that day.
Kasia said she still remembers hearing her mother scream when she couldn’t wake her father up the next day, 29 September 1982. Paramedics came and took Adam Janus to a nearby hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead from what they suspected may have been a heart attack.
But something more sinister was afoot when Kasia’s paternal uncle Stanley Janus and his wife, Theresa Tarasewicz Janus, each took pills from the same Tylenol bottle that Adam had bought in an attempt to fight headaches.
Stanley Janus soon collapsed on his late brother’s kitchen floor. His wife – whom he had just married – fell limp in the living room a short while after that. The couple were later pronounced dead, too.
Meanwhile, a 12-year-old child named Mary Kellerman had also died suddenly in another Chicago suburb after taking an Extra-Strength Tylenol. Investigators soon confirmed there was lethally poisonous cyanide inside the Tylenol capsules in question. But ultimately, three more people – Mary Reiner, Mary McFarland and Paula Prince – died within days after taking what they thought was an ExtraStrength Tylenol.
Manufacturer Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million Tylenol bottles as panic spread nationwide. Congress eventually criminalized tampering with medications and other consumer products, classifying that as a federal crime that could carry up to life imprisonment in cases involving a death.
And soon, many medications and foods sold over store counters began being sold in tamper-proof, sealed packaging.
But no one has ever been arrested in connection with the spate of poisonings that shattered the families of Janus and the others. Authorities won’t discuss the potential theories or suspects they have amid an investigation that they insist remains open and unforgotten.
But the police chief of the Chicago suburb where Adam Janus lived, Joe Murphy, told CNN he hopes forensic technology used to analyze DNA could eventually produce the break they need to conclusively identify whoever was responsible for the Tylenol killings.
In the meantime, Kasia Janus has said she’s dealt with occasionally overwhelming sadness because of the graduations her father couldn’t attend. She also laments that her dad never got to meet her and her husband, her son, her stepson and her step-grandson.
Kasia said she long blamed herself for her father’s death, even though she was just in preschool when it happened. But she said years of therapy and yoga have helped her overcome her anger and guilt, and she’s hopeful there will be justice in the killings of her father as well as her aunt and uncle.
She also told CNN she had invited many people to a memorial service and celebration of life luncheon honoring her father in hopes that she’d learn things she never got the chance to because of the murder.
“What was my dad’s favorite color? What was he like in school? What was he liked as a boss?”
She added: “Good and bad, I want to hear those stories, because it’s a reflection of who I am.”