Preview
DEE: Hello everyone, before we begin with today’s episode, we wanted to ask you, have you given us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening right now?
DEE: If not, please do.
JEFF: If you already did give us a rating, please tell your friends about our podcast.
JEFF: We really appreciate it, and thank you for listening.
DEE: Your spouse has a bit of a headache, or maybe your back hurts, or your daughter’s running a small fever.
JEFF: You go grab some Tylenol, like you’ve done countless times before.
JEFF: But this time, this time, the Tylenol is laced with cyanide.
DEE: It’s time to preview one of America’s most famous unsolved cases, and So Much Crime, So Little Time.
JEFF: Welcome to So Much Crime, So Little Time.
JEFF: I’m Jeff.
DEE: I’m Dee.
DEE: And today, we’re gonna introduce you to the podcast from the Chicago Tribune, Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders.
JEFF: Plus a little later on, we’re gonna talk about a true crime question of the week.
JEFF: If you don’t know this podcast, that’s great.
JEFF: This is one of our preview episodes.
JEFF: All we’re gonna do is introduce you to the podcast and talk about stuff that happens in the first episode.
JEFF: So there’ll be no spoilers for anything that happens after that first episode.
JEFF: We’ll also link to the podcast in the show notes.
DEE: On our next episode, we’re gonna discuss the whole series.
DEE: We’re gonna go through our opinions of the format, the structure, as well as the story as a whole.
DEE: But for now, let’s decide if this is a crime that’s worth your time.
JEFF: All right, before we begin, let’s just talk about what this podcast is.
JEFF: So this is a podcast that was released in 2022.
JEFF: There are eight parts in total.
JEFF: Each one is about 25 to 40 minutes long or so.
DEE: Okay, so what is the story with this podcast?
DEE: There’s a group of people who are mostly not connected, who mysteriously die in September 1982 in the Chicago land area in Illinois.
DEE: It quickly came out that Tylenol was the cause.
DEE: It was laced with cyanide.
DEE: So for 40 years, the FBI have been investigating this case, trying to find the culprit.
DEE: Thoughts, I want to throw a curve ball at you.
DEE: I don’t want to start with the host.
DEE: I want to start with the name of the podcast.
JEFF: The name of the podcast, or the name of the episode, the podcast overall.
DEE: Podcast first, episode next.
JEFF: Okay, let’s do it.
JEFF: What about it?
JEFF: My initial thoughts about it?
DEE: Yeah, did you have thoughts about it?
DEE: Has this crossed your mind?
JEFF: What was, I feel like I just keep calling this The Tylenol Murders, Unsealed.
DEE: Unsealed.
JEFF: The Tylenol Murders.
JEFF: Yeah, unsealed feels odd to me.
JEFF: I guess that kind of stands out.
JEFF: Like, the Tylenol Murders would be a great name for a podcast.
JEFF: Why do we have unsealed?
JEFF: I guess that’s about the bottles of Tylenol being unsealed?
JEFF: Or is it also a metaphor for unsealing this case because we’re investigating a cold case?
JEFF: Works both ways.
DEE: Maybe both.
DEE: I just, I thought it was really clever.
DEE: For now, in fairness, I totally agree.
DEE: I call it the Tylenol Murders.
DEE: I don’t call it Unsealed The Tylenol Murders, but I still think it’s a very clever title.
DEE: I think Unsealed was kind of good.
DEE: Anyway, that was just my little tidbit.
DEE: I was like, let’s discuss the name of the podcast first.
DEE: The name of this episode, episode one is called Steak, Flowers and Tylenol.
DEE: I kind of want to cry even just reading it because I think even before you jump in, when you’ve read what this podcast is about and you see Steak, Flowers and Tylenol, initially what’s going to go into your head, obviously, I would assume, is a shopping list.
JEFF: Sure.
DEE: And steak, flowers, Tylenol, just, it’s so like normal.
DEE: It is so, well, if someone buys you flowers in your life.
DEE: And steak, I mean.
DEE: And steak.
DEE: It’s such a great name.
DEE: It’s very telling, like really tugged at the heartstrings.
DEE: Like if you just look at it and that’s all you do, it’s like there’s a lot kind of being said in the name of the podcast and in the name of that first episode.
JEFF: Yeah, I would agree.
JEFF: I think steak, flowers, Tylenol.
JEFF: So steak, flowers, Tylenol as an episode title.
JEFF: We’ve talked about episode titling in the past.
JEFF: I think that’s a really great one.
JEFF: I just think it’s evocative.
JEFF: It’s powerful.
JEFF: It’s simple.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: And I’m not a big into them, usually.
DEE: It’s not something that I’m the one bringing up being like, did you look at the name of the episode?
DEE: But this one really stood out to me.
DEE: So I thought that was great.
DEE: We usually start with the host.
DEE: I’m, I don’t really have, like the host isn’t really present that much in this one.
DEE: I don’t feel like, I didn’t feel like she was inserting herself into the narrative that much, apart from the very start, which we can talk about now in a second.
DEE: But like, I don’t necessarily have any feelings towards the host.
JEFF: Well, there’s-
DEE: Are you similar?
JEFF: There’s two, right?
JEFF: There’s Christy, Christy Gutowski and Stacey St.
JEFF: Clair.
JEFF: I’d be lying if I said that I could tell which one was which.
DEE: I don’t know if I noticed there was two.
JEFF: There were two, Christy and Stacey.
JEFF: Yeah, no, I think this is actually, the first thing that jumped out at me was that this episode was like the first episode of The Retrievals where most of what we’re hearing are the people who were involved.
JEFF: And I mean, obviously not the victims, the people who were around the victims in various ways and the hosts are sort of in the background, with the exception of the sort of prologue at the beginning, which I think we should talk about.
JEFF: But yeah, that stood out.
JEFF: The hosts were very kind of in the background, at least in this first episode.
JEFF: I’m curious if that’s gonna continue.
DEE: Yeah, it will be interesting.
DEE: It’s definitely something I kind of enjoy.
DEE: I think the first episode, and I suppose this is why we’re doing these kind of preview episodes for our reviews.
DEE: The first episode is so important.
DEE: It’s integral to the rest of the podcast and setting the scene.
DEE: I kind of like when they take a back seat, when the hosts take a back seat and let the story tell it to the audience itself.
DEE: But yeah, so I thought that was interesting.
DEE: Okay, so the start.
DEE: I have a real love hate relationship with the start of this podcast.
DEE: I’m gonna go in heavy on the hate for a minute.
DEE: The very start was somewhat interesting.
DEE: The FBI are investigating this guy and they’re like, so the two hosts are tracking him down.
DEE: Are they stalking him?
DEE: It sounds really stalkery-ish.
DEE: Maybe that’s just what reporters do.
DEE: I don’t know, didn’t love it.
DEE: They’re like, don’t run, don’t run.
DEE: And then a minute later, they’re like, oh, he’s pretty unsteady when he’s walking.
DEE: I’m like, but then don’t be shouting, don’t run.
DEE: I don’t know, it just all felt a little bit too harassy to me and like he even said, like I’ve been someone, I couldn’t quite figure what he said.
DEE: Someone has been harassing me for 40 years about something I had nothing to do with.
DEE: And then it’s like a snippet, the reporters or the hosts are saying like, oh, the FBI raided his house and blah, blah, and this is the stairs where this happened.
DEE: But I was just like, what is happening here?
DEE: Like it just, it felt a bit wrong.
DEE: I didn’t love us.
JEFF: I, well, I was kind of hoping you’d say you’d liked it so I could disagree with you, but.
JEFF: Sorry.
JEFF: No, I also thought like, I really enjoyed this first episode as a whole.
JEFF: I thought once we got past this prologue, it was really well made, really engrossing story, really well put together.
JEFF: But this prologue really bothered me.
JEFF: And I thought a couple of things.
JEFF: So in addition to what you said, so I think, yeah, I actually wrote down the don’t run, we’re with the Chicago Tribune bit, which I thought just like, you’re hounding an old man who maybe is a murderer, I don’t know.
JEFF: We also, we don’t know his name.
JEFF: They don’t even say his name.
JEFF: So they give no real context.
JEFF: We just sort of are dropped in to the middle of this stakeout in Boston.
JEFF: Also, we know this is a story from Chicago, and yet we’re in Boston.
JEFF: We don’t really find out any details around that.
JEFF: It’s just sort of like, here is a little snippet of something that happened, like present day-ish.
JEFF: And so yeah, I didn’t really care for that.
JEFF: I also didn’t really like the kind of tone that set.
JEFF: And so I was glad that it quickly pivoted away from that.
JEFF: We’re talking about a couple minutes at the start of the whole thing.
DEE: Yeah, I totally agree.
DEE: I’m like, skip ahead of that.
DEE: You used to love talking to the Chicago Tribune.
DEE: All right, I don’t know.
DEE: They just sounded a bit mean.
DEE: And as you said, like, maybe he’s a murderer.
DEE: Like, we don’t know.
DEE: We don’t know who this guy is.
DEE: We just know the FBI have been investigating him for a long time.
DEE: But that’s all we really know.
DEE: I didn’t love that.
DEE: I will get to the love part of the intro, though.
DEE: The second intro is what I’m going to call it.
DEE: It was so strong.
DEE: They were all young.
DEE: They were all healthy.
DEE: The news clips, like the kind of text coming over.
DEE: It got me.
DEE: It gripped me.
DEE: Like the first part could have been an ad.
DEE: It could have been something I just wasn’t even listening to.
DEE: But that second one, it got me.
DEE: And I was like, yes, I am here for this.
DEE: This sounds like I was already like my heart was invested.
DEE: My head was invested.
DEE: I wanted to know what happened here.
DEE: Which I feel like should be what the intro does.
DEE: And yeah, I’m glad they had that second part in.
DEE: But the prologue was just, yeah, it was awful.
JEFF: Yeah, and I was curious if this resonated with you in the same way it did with me.
JEFF: So yeah, so we transitioned from this little stakeout bit, which is short.
JEFF: And I think if you listen to that and you think, oh, I don’t like the tone of this and you turn it off, like that’s a mistake, right?
JEFF: Like I think you should stick with it.
JEFF: And then we get this montage of like news reporters, including what I, they don’t say who those news reporters are, but one of them clearly sounds like, I think like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw are like some of like the big news anchors from the 1980s who, if you were in America in the 1980s and 90s, like you know those voices, they’re very distinct, high profile reporters and like NBC, CBS News kind of people.
JEFF: I’m saying these words that I think mean nothing to you, but.
DEE: I mean, I know NBC and CBS News, but yeah.
DEE: I was just about born in the 80s.
DEE: I was not in America.
JEFF: Okay, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather are like still famous and alive well into the 2000s.
JEFF: As of the recording of this podcast, I think they’re both still going.
JEFF: Not on the evening news, but anyway.
JEFF: Anyway, the point was, I think it’s a great pivot into a strong montage of like the gravity of the case, the tragedy of the case, right?
JEFF: And then we get in kind of the episode proper, right?
JEFF: Which is the bulk of the time of this episode.
JEFF: So, but I want to ask, before we move off of that prologue, how do you feel about like, I feel like we’ve heard this in other shows where they start with this sort of like, it’s not the end of the story, but it’s like this sort of undefined, like snippet that happens clearly later, rather than just kind of starting with like, setting the scene of what’s happening, happens before the crime.
JEFF: Like, what do you think of that as a conceit, maybe not necessarily how they executed it here, but just that as an idea of a way to start a show like this?
DEE: I mean, I don’t know if I can say like definitively, I like that or dislike it.
DEE: I just think it really depends on like, how it’s done.
DEE: And we’ve already said, like I didn’t think it was strong here.
DEE: I feel like we’ve seen it done quite well in other episodes or in other podcasts.
DEE: It’s not my favorite.
DEE: It’s like when you’re reading a book and they tell you the end at the start.
DEE: And I’m like, okay, so now I just have to think about like how we get there.
DEE: But like, I don’t know, I don’t want to do that.
DEE: I just want like a linear story.
DEE: I really do feel like if they had just cut that first bit, it would have been good.
DEE: And yeah, I think if I have to go definitive on this, if you’re forcing me into an answer, I’m going to say I don’t like it.
JEFF: You have to answer this question.
DEE: Yes, I don’t like it.
DEE: What about you?
JEFF: I don’t like it either.
JEFF: I actually actively try to immediately block out what I just learned in the beginning so that I can be immersed in the story, which honestly is like, I feel like I’ve honed over the years of reading or watching movies or TV shows.
JEFF: Like it’s a common trope, right?
JEFF: Like you start with the end and then you loop back.
JEFF: And I feel like I have a great ability to sort of like willfully disengage from that part of the story.
JEFF: So I can be, I can just forget about it.
DEE: I wonder like how many people listen to something like that and then think like, oh, this is what I loved about it is we knew what happened at the end.
DEE: Like we knew the outcome, but we just didn’t know that like journey there.
DEE: Like I wonder how many people it works for or how many people threw out it throughout the podcast or the book or the movie, whatever it is, are thinking about the start and being like, but how do they get there?
DEE: Like, how do they get there?
JEFF: I mean, if this podcast is a representative sample of the world at large, then 0%.
JEFF: I don’t know if it works.
JEFF: Is that how statistics work?
JEFF: I think that’s how statistics work.
DEE: All right.
DEE: Tell me, I will say before we jump in further, I want to pause and talk about, we have at least three professionals in this episode, who get shit done.
DEE: They are quick.
DEE: They have urgency.
DEE: It’s so impressive.
DEE: So we’ve got Helen Jensen, who’s a nurse.
DEE: We’ll talk about her a bit more later.
DEE: We’ve got Chuck, can’t remember his second name.
DEE: He’s the fire guy.
DEE: Chuck Cramer, yeah.
DEE: And we’ve got Dr.
DEE: Kim and he’s the doctor who pronounces Adam’s, Adam dead and then sees his brother and his brother’s wife coming in just as he’s about to clock off.
DEE: They get stuff done.
DEE: Like it was really impressive how quickly they got stuff done.
DEE: And I know we’ll get to that, like the whole like story behind it in a second, but I just feel like, you know, we’re on, we’ve gone through a fair amount of podcasts so far and generally speaking, nobody’s doing anything that they’re supposed to do.
DEE: But these three are like the reason that this got moving as quick as possible.
DEE: And like likely saved a lot of lives by figuring out the issue.
DEE: We obviously don’t know that.
DEE: We’ll find out more in episode two, but I just need to pause for the professionals who have urgency and get their passing gear.
JEFF: Yeah, we’re often shitting on the police.
JEFF: And this is a nice moment to recognize some real good detective work from a doctor, from a nurse, and from a fire lieutenant.
JEFF: I guess none of them are actually police officers.
DEE: For a second when you were saying that, I was like, did I forget a police officer in this?
DEE: No, yeah.
JEFF: No, I don’t think we actually have any police officers.
DEE: No, not yet, not yet.
JEFF: Yeah, well, all right, so let’s jump back.
JEFF: So once we get into the story proper, we talk about this day, which is, so we’re in, what, September, 1982, and we center on the Janis family.
JEFF: So there’s Adam, who, that’s where the steak flowers Tylenol comes in, right?
DEE: Picks up his four-year-old daughter.
JEFF: His four-year-old daughter goes to the store, gets the steak, the flowers, the Tylenol, goes home, and, what, takes the Tylenol, takes a couple of Tylenol.
JEFF: Seems to have a heart attack.
JEFF: They think it’s a heart attack.
DEE: The symptoms were funny.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: I thought some of the quotes that I’ve pulled, like even the description of Adam and his wife, Theresa, had come over from Poland, and they were here to like, they were living, is what they’re saying in the podcast, The American Dream.
DEE: Then he just drops dead, which is just a lot.
DEE: And the firefighters are like, you know, he was built like a baby bull.
DEE: That was one of the quotes from it.
DEE: And the symptoms were funny.
DEE: They couldn’t figure it out.
DEE: They were like, it didn’t look like a heart attack.
DEE: So anyway, he’s brought to the hospital and pronounced dead.
DEE: And then his family all go back to the house to like basically organize his funeral.
DEE: He’s like in his 20s, 27, I think.
DEE: And there’s a big crowd outside.
DEE: Obviously people are hearing that someone has passed away or whatever.
DEE: And then Adam’s brother, Stanley, takes two Tylenol because he’s not feeling well.
DEE: Drops, paramedics are called.
DEE: More or less like a lot of the same people here, like firefighters and stuff here.
DEE: And they come down.
DEE: Just after he took two Tylenol, his wife had taken two Tylenol.
DEE: They’re just back from honeymoon.
DEE: And then as the paramedics are there trying to revive Stanley, the wife drops dead.
DEE: It is unbelievable.
DEE: It actually, it sounds like a movie.
DEE: And in fact, if I saw this in a movie, I’d be like, wow, that’s a bit traumatic.
DEE: Like, it’s incredible, the whole scene.
DEE: And it’s said so quickly.
DEE: Like they don’t, they’re not drawing any of this out and there’s no like pause for dramatic effect.
DEE: It’s like this story is so dramatic in itself that there is no need for that.
DEE: We can just tell you what happened.
JEFF: Yeah, very succinctly.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Well, a lot of it, so again, so yeah, so you’re talking about Adam first, so he’s 27.
JEFF: There’s Stanley, who is his younger brother, he’s 25.
JEFF: And then Stanley’s wife, Terry, who is 20.
JEFF: So they’re young, real young, right?
JEFF: And young families and yeah, these Polish immigrants outside of Chicago.
JEFF: And yeah, you’re right.
JEFF: Like it’s so tragic and so quick and so just, I don’t know, it’s amazing to think about like what it’s like to be the, it’s like it’s the fire lieutenant.
JEFF: This is where Chuck Kramer comes in.
JEFF: And you’re also hearing a lot of this through the perspective of Joe Janis, who is the brother of Adam and Stanley, their older brother, the oldest brother in the family.
JEFF: Because he was there, right?
JEFF: Like he’s at the hospital, he comes home with Stanley and Terry, and he’s there when they collapse and he goes to the hospital and then he gets quarantined because they’re like, we don’t know, like, is this something that affected all of them?
JEFF: Like they quarantine the family, they quarantine Chuck Kramer, the fire lieutenant.
JEFF: Like they have no idea.
JEFF: They know it’s not a heart attack, right?
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: But they don’t know what could have happened.
JEFF: So it’s over a dozen people.
DEE: Which must be just so terrifying for everyone involved.
DEE: So we also have to note that Adam’s wife, Teresa, is said to have very little English.
DEE: So like as scary as this would be, if you can really understand what’s going on, like she’s constantly needing translation by Joe or by Adam’s sister.
DEE: I don’t think they mentioned Adam’s sister’s name.
DEE: So yeah, it was just really unbelievable.
DEE: And then Dr.
DEE: Kim comes into it.
DEE: So again, with the drama, apparently he was leaving the hospital, signing off his shift as Stanley and Terry are being brought in, like, I don’t know.
JEFF: Well, and let’s, so you were talking earlier about the great detective work here.
JEFF: And so, yeah, so Chuck Grammer gets quarantined.
JEFF: And then we-
DEE: Feeling so helpless.
JEFF: Right, right.
JEFF: This is a guy who wants to go on and help people and fix problems, right?
DEE: And he wants to do it now.
DEE: He’s like, I want to get this, this isn’t talked about, this urgency.
JEFF: And he-
JEFF: So he responded to the first call with Adam and the second call with Stanley and Terry.
JEFF: So he knows that something, something is seriously wrong.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: And so he calls Helen Jensen.
JEFF: So she is a nurse.
DEE: I need to pause.
DEE: What the hell’s a village nurse?
JEFF: I have no idea.
DEE: She’s described as a village nurse.
DEE: I’m like a village, like we’re not in the mountains.
JEFF: Maybe it’s the village of Arlington Heights, Illinois.
JEFF: I don’t know.
DEE: I was just like.
JEFF: I presume she’s just like a local nurse who’s affiliated somehow with the fire department.
DEE: She also like doesn’t seem to just be a nurse.
DEE: Like she’s a cop on the side.
DEE: So she was on it immediately.
JEFF: I wrote down a question that simply says, how great is Helen Jensen?
DEE: Oh yeah.
DEE: Add her to the list of people we want to sit down and have a drink with.
DEE: So she goes to the house, the Janice’s house, and basically finds the bin.
DEE: Like goes through store, finds the Tylenol, empties it, sees there’s six missing.
DEE: I was like, oh, this is interesting, bags it and brings it in.
JEFF: Wait, let me pause you for a second.
JEFF: I wrote down a couple of quotes of her.
JEFF: So she finds the receipt for the Tylenol, realizes the same day, she counts the Tylenol, realizes there are six missing, which lines up with three people getting sick.
JEFF: And then she says, after she counted the pills and puts them back in the bottle, I probably didn’t wash my hands, but I should have.
JEFF: Like, she’s so great.
JEFF: I love her so much.
DEE: She is, yeah, she is great.
DEE: The next like love for Helen Jensen is when she goes into the medical examiner’s officer.
JEFF: Yeah, at the hospital.
DEE: Of the hospital.
DEE: And she says, it’s the Tylenol.
DEE: And he’s just like, no, it’s not.
DEE: So she’s not believed.
DEE: What she does is she stamps her foot and says it louder.
DEE: And she’s like, I’m just sitting standing there in my shorts and t-shirt.
DEE: Because she was not working at this stage.
DEE: She just got the call from Chuck and like got on into it.
DEE: But it really pissed me off the way like this dismissive examiner and look like, I don’t know, I’ve ever been a medical examiner.
DEE: I don’t know how many people come up with these ideas of what might be happening or whatever.
DEE: But like, why was she ignored?
DEE: Was it fear?
DEE: Was it a lack of respect?
DEE: Was it like a sexist thing?
JEFF: It’s probably all of those in some form, right?
JEFF: Like we don’t know, it’s 1982 as well.
JEFF: But yeah, I wrote that down.
JEFF: So I stamped my foot and said it louder.
JEFF: Again, she’s amazing.
DEE: And then she goes home to settle her nerves.
DEE: Was it a bourbon?
JEFF: A skull puddle.
JEFF: Some type of, yeah, whiskey or something.
JEFF: Yeah, she had a stiff drink and complained to her husband about it.
DEE: So funny.
DEE: She’s just so quick, quick off the mark.
JEFF: And she was right.
JEFF: She was right.
JEFF: She knew exactly.
DEE: But you know who was paying attention to her, Jeff?
JEFF: It’s Dr.
JEFF: Kim.
JEFF: Oh, Chuck.
JEFF: Well, it ended up being Dr.
JEFF: Kim.
DEE: Chuck and Dr.
DEE: Kim.
DEE: Three superheroes.
JEFF: Those are, that’s our trio.
JEFF: Well, and don’t forget Phil Capitelli.
JEFF: So, yeah.
DEE: No, you introduce Phil.
DEE: So I can’t say his name.
DEE: You introduce him.
JEFF: So Phil Capitelli is another fire lieutenant, like Chuck Cramer.
JEFF: And when Chuck Cramer gets out of quarantine, right, they realize that, okay, we don’t have to keep these folks in quarantine.
JEFF: And he sends out this radio message to the other, I guess the other emergency responders about the vehicles.
JEFF: I guess the vehicles were held back or held out.
DEE: Washing down or something.
JEFF: Yeah, and Phil Capitelli hears that, and he’s like, wait a minute.
JEFF: He connects the dots.
JEFF: He’s like, wait, we had another call that sounds suspiciously like this.
DEE: No, it wasn’t another call.
DEE: It was Phil rang, so not over the dispatch.
DEE: He rang on his phone and said, my mother-in-law, like a person my mother-in-law worked with, her daughter died today from taking Tylenol.
JEFF: This is one of the Marys.
DEE: This is the 12 year old.
JEFF: Mary Kellerman, yeah.
DEE: So before we get into Mary Kellerman, Phil rings and says, well, guess what?
DEE: I have a connection to this other person who seems to have died because of Tylenol.
DEE: And I’m listening to this being like, is this fuck in Ireland?
DEE: Everyone is connected.
DEE: Like that feels like the most Irish thing ever.
DEE: It doesn’t really feel like a Chicago or a big city thing.
DEE: Maybe Chicagoland, everyone knows each other.
DEE: I don’t know.
DEE: Do you know?
JEFF: I mean, okay, I will say this.
JEFF: Chicago, the greater Chicagoland area, it’s a very big area.
JEFF: Lots of people live there.
JEFF: But also I feel like there is a tight knit element to it within the communities, right?
JEFF: Like there are certain communities that are very closely woven together.
JEFF: It is very Midwestern in some ways.
JEFF: You know, there’s large segments of Polish immigrants and things like that who are very interconnected.
JEFF: I think the same thing is probably true for my limited knowledge of the fire departments, the police departments.
JEFF: There’s a lot of interconnectedness there, both in terms of the profession, but also in terms of families in the same business.
DEE: Okay.
DEE: It just seemed like, whoa, again, this drama.
DEE: If you were watching this, you’d be like, ah.
DEE: The chances that his mates, mother-in-law, no.
JEFF: The improbability to have in 1982, right?
JEFF: The lack of ability to reach people.
DEE: Yeah, that’s a good point, actually.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Okay, so anyway.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: Mary Kellerman, 12 years old.
DEE: Do you know what really got me?
DEE: And this goes back to me thinking this episode was just fantastic.
DEE: The quote, Mary died as her seventh grade classmates were starting school that day.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah, so Mary.
DEE: She took a Tylenol for a sore throat.
JEFF: She had a sore throat.
JEFF: Her parents held her home from school, gave her some Tylenol, and then she very quickly died.
DEE: 12.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah, I wrote down that line as well.
JEFF: That was, that hit me pretty hard.
DEE: Like, it’s.
JEFF: Just a sore throat.
JEFF: She just had a sore throat.
JEFF: She took some Tylenol.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah, I mean, the same thing with the Janis family, right?
JEFF: Like a headache here, just like feeling.
JEFF: Feeling a little bad.
JEFF: You take some Tylenol, you don’t think about it, right?
JEFF: Like it’s such like an innocuous thing.
JEFF: Yeah.
DEE: And then we go back to Chuck and he like calls the hospital and he’s explaining what he’s heard and he’s fighting for this.
DEE: Like he’s like notifying there’s more victims.
DEE: Like he’s pushing things together between him and Helen.
DEE: They’re pushing things together.
DEE: And then aren’t they very lucky that Dr.
DEE: Kim is there?
DEE: Cause like he’s in on it.
DEE: Like he’s trying to figure out like what is going on with this?
JEFF: So yeah, so Dr.
JEFF: Kim, who just sounds like one of those doctors who won’t let something rest until he figures it out.
JEFF: He realizes it’s not acetaminophen poisoning.
JEFF: So acetaminophen is what Tylenol is, right?
JEFF: Like that’s the non-brand name for Tylenol.
JEFF: And he’s just like, it sounds like he’s just like pacing in his office or whatever, trying to figure out like, what could this possibly be?
JEFF: What do these symptoms suggest?
JEFF: What are the clues?
JEFF: And he has the idea that it might be poison, and he gets the blood samples from the victims, sends it in a cab for testing, which is a great visual of like, taking these blood samples, putting them in a cab, and sending them off to be tested.
JEFF: And then we get this-
JEFF: We get this Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for Cook County, Dr.
JEFF: Edmund Donahue, who was like, well, it could be cyanide, it could be, I think he said nicotine?
DEE: Is that what he said?
DEE: Yeah, but do you know how they’re gonna figure it out?
DEE: The sniff test.
JEFF: Yeah, the sniff, the old sniff test.
JEFF: So did you know that cyanide has this distinct odor of bitter almonds?
DEE: No, but like, how annoying that it has to be almonds, because it’s almonds.
JEFF: Wait, what did you say it was?
DEE: Almonds.
JEFF: Almonds.
JEFF: All, almonds.
DEE: Almond.
JEFF: There’s an L in there.
DEE: It’s a silent L.
DEE: Almond.
DEE: I have A-M-O-N-D-S in capital some might know that.
DEE: Remember to say the word should be pronounced almond.
DEE: No, it’s apparently correct if you pronounce it almond or almond.
JEFF: Okay, I’ll take your word for that.
JEFF: I feel like that’s maybe an Irish thing, but okay.
DEE: No, they haven’t pinned it down to a geographic location.
DEE: I was actually reading up on this to try and figure out, is it me?
DEE: Is it just me that’s the problem?
JEFF: You know, when I was, can I, quick aside, when I was a kid, my mother, oh, I think still to this day, pronounces the word golf, golf, as though there’s no L in it.
JEFF: And for the longest time, I thought that was just like a regional dialect thing, but I don’t think it is.
JEFF: I think that’s a regional, it’s like a region of one.
DEE: I mean, everyone’s an island, isn’t that what they say?
DEE: I don’t know, did they say that?
JEFF: I don’t think that’s a thing.
DEE: Anyway, they send it off for testing, and there’s a lethal amount, enough to kill at least three people.
JEFF: In each pill, each Tylenol pill, each single pill has enough to kill three people.
JEFF: And then furthermore, they say if you inhale cyanide, it can kill you in a few seconds.
JEFF: If you ingest it, it takes a few minutes, which explains what was happening when we hear about the Janus.
JEFF: It didn’t take long, it was very sudden, very quick.
DEE: But if you inhale it, it only takes a few minutes, but they’re off sniffing it.
JEFF: Well, I think it’s diffused in the way that there’s the bitter almonds smell.
JEFF: I don’t know the logistics of that.
DEE: Anyway, sorry, that was a real side note.
DEE: Yeah, wild.
JEFF: And that’s pretty much where this episode wraps up, right?
JEFF: Like that’s…
DEE: Well, there’s the other two Marys that are brought into it.
JEFF: Oh, right, yeah.
DEE: So many Marys.
DEE: So we’ve got Mary Lynn, who is 27, who just had her fourth baby.
DEE: She was at home after a few days of having her fourth baby, and she just took a Tylenol as she’s recovering.
DEE: And she died.
DEE: And then there’s Mary Sue, who is a single mother, who again, I think had a headache.
JEFF: At work, yeah, she was at work, had a headache.
DEE: And she died.
DEE: There are so many kids impacted by these events, just the ones that we’ve discussed now.
DEE: Like obviously, Mary Kellerman, she was only 12.
DEE: She was a child.
DEE: But the kids of both Mary Lynn and Mary Sue, Adam’s four-year-old daughter, it’s heartbreaking.
DEE: It’s heartbreaking.
DEE: The whole thing was just, yeah.
DEE: They do not put filler in here.
DEE: There is no filler in this episode.
DEE: It is boom, boom, boom.
DEE: Don’t listen to the first two minutes.
DEE: And then you are on, you just can’t stop listening to every detail.
DEE: I’ve gone back and listened to it a couple of times, just being like, whoa, this is huge.
DEE: This is wild.
JEFF: Yeah, I would agree with that.
JEFF: I think that’s one of the things I really liked about it.
JEFF: It moved so fast.
JEFF: I mean, it moved so fast that I went back and listened to the whole thing a second time.
JEFF: Like it felt even though once I knew the bits and pieces of the story, it still felt like it moved right along.
JEFF: So, I mean, we mentioned this before, but I think part of the effectiveness of it is that we go from kind of interview to interview with the people involved, right?
JEFF: Like these people that we’re talking about, Chuck Kramer, we’re talking about Dr.
JEFF: Kim, Helen Jensen, like we hear from all these people.
JEFF: We hear directly from all these people.
JEFF: Even Edmund Donahue, Dr.
JEFF: Donahue, the one who did the test on the cyanide.
JEFF: We hear from him too.
JEFF: So, and then back to the Janis family, we hear from Joe Janis.
JEFF: So getting those voices of these people.
DEE: Yeah, you’re so right.
DEE: Like it’s so nice to not have just like one voice.
DEE: Like they have an array of people who were there, like primary sources able to talk to them.
DEE: Like that has really strengthens the episode.
DEE: We’ve dealt with podcasts previously where, like Filthy Rituals, where really there’s a one main narrator of the story.
DEE: And so if you don’t warm to that narrator, there’s a lot of him in it.
DEE: Like it can be kind of hard.
DEE: So for this to have like so many different people, so many different perspectives, like it really layers up things and it just, it’s so strong.
DEE: So I thought this episode was amazing.
DEE: I think it might be one of my favorite first episodes of something I’ve listened to, so it was so, so strong.
JEFF: I also like, I’m a fan of a story that just doesn’t drag it out, right?
JEFF: Like doesn’t try to make like an hour of content when, I mean, there is an hour of content here.
JEFF: They could have made an hour.
JEFF: They could have split this, but they didn’t.
JEFF: They could have sort of dragged out the different stories of the different victims.
JEFF: And maybe they’ll get it more into their stories later.
JEFF: I don’t know.
JEFF: But I think the fact that we just, it kind of hits you like again and again and again, as you go through this.
JEFF: And then you realize like, before you even know it, we’re at the end of the episode.
JEFF: So like, I am like very hooked on this, very eager to keep listening.
DEE: Me too.
JEFF: Yeah, I also think, we know from the start that this is an unsolved case, but.
DEE: Why do we do this to ourselves?
JEFF: Again, I like, I suspend a disbelief.
JEFF: Like I get into the story and I think, oh, they’re gonna solve this by the end of this.
JEFF: And I’m gonna listen to the second episode.
JEFF: I’m gonna listen to the third and the fourth and the fifth.
JEFF: And I’m gonna be thinking all along like, yeah, we’re gonna get there.
JEFF: Like we’re gonna get resolution.
JEFF: And yeah, we’re not.
JEFF: Can I, a couple of things.
JEFF: One question I wanted to ask for you.
JEFF: So we talked about how these like innocuous, like I’m just gonna have a headache.
JEFF: I have whatever, I’m gonna take some Tylenol.
JEFF: Did this make you think twice about that?
JEFF: Like how much did this affect your kind of psyche around just like absentmindedly taking some Tylenol?
DEE: I mean, I definitely think you’d pause for a second.
DEE: You’d definitely be checking the seal.
DEE: It definitely stays in your head.
DEE: Like I think, why has it impacted?
DEE: I presume it’s impacted you if you’re asking the question.
DEE: Did you just withstand some toothache or headache?
JEFF: No, the day I listened to this, I went to go take some Tylenol and then I didn’t.
JEFF: And it was a bottle of Tylenol I had been using for a while.
JEFF: I’m like, no, I’m not gonna do this.
JEFF: It also made me think, and maybe this is, so I had never heard of this story before.
JEFF: I know this is described as a famous unsolved American mystery.
JEFF: I was unfamiliar with this, but I think it was in the ether, like that idea of the cyanide-laced whatever, kind of like the Halloween candy with the razor blades in it or whatever, like these things you just sort of hear about, but you don’t know about that.
JEFF: That’s not a thing.
JEFF: Oh, that’s like a-
DEE: Sounds like a Bokinon type thing.
JEFF: It is.
JEFF: That one I think is not real.
JEFF: But one of the things this made me think of, did you ever see the 1989 Batman movie, the one with Jack Nicholson as the Joker?
DEE: Oh, yeah.
JEFF: Okay, so there’s a plot point in that where the Joker is poisoning every day, like shampoo or deodorant or things like that.
JEFF: And it’s not like one or the other that causes it.
JEFF: Like that’s the spoiler for a movie from 1989.
JEFF: It’s the combination of the chemicals, right?
JEFF: Like he’s into chemistry.
JEFF: But there’s this period in the movie where everyone is like paranoid about just regular, you know, drug store products that can be poisoned them.
JEFF: So that movie came out, what, six or seven years after this case, not long.
JEFF: So I was too young to appreciate that.
JEFF: Like in 1982, I was not watching the news.
JEFF: But like I’m wondering like, was that an influence for this story?
DEE: Maybe, they do say a lot of like movies, a lot of books, a lot of films are like, based slightly on, could be.
DEE: I mean, I wonder how many times this has happened though.
DEE: Like not this in particular, like this exact thing, but like how many times has someone gone in and done that?
DEE: I think you’d be surprised if we looked into it, which I don’t want to do, because it sounds scary.
JEFF: I want to keep being able to take Tylenol.
JEFF: One other thing I want to ask you is did you go, so this is a podcast by the Chicago Tribune, and they do mention here how you can go to their website and find out more information.
JEFF: Did you do that?
DEE: I tried to, and I kept, I don’t think I tried very hard.
DEE: I kept landing on pages that were just like where to play the podcast from.
JEFF: This is a pet peeve of mine.
JEFF: This, as I understand the state of journalism today, and how hard it is to make money, but this Chicago Tribune website is so dense with ads, like pop-up ads, and then it paywalls you very quickly.
JEFF: I was not able to get hardly anywhere without like paying for a subscription.
DEE: So why isn’t it in the episode notes?
DEE: Cause I was looking for it there.
JEFF: Well, there’s some limited information there, but there are other things that I could see the headlines of things that are on their website, where they have like a timeline of the events of the whole story, and they have transcripts, and they have like, there’s a bunch of information related to both their original investigative journalism that was, I presume, in the paper around the time this came out, and then just kind of like related content.
JEFF: But, you know, like when we did Inside the Crime, the Unalinsky Murder, like News Talk has a website where you can go and see like a map and like a family tree and like some good additional resources if you want to dig deeper.
JEFF: And I think the Chicago Tribune has the same thing, but you just can’t get to it.
JEFF: Like it’s like-
DEE: That’s a pity.
JEFF: Pay for it.
DEE: So that was frustrating.
DEE: I feel like we’re both like 100%.
DEE: I want to continue listening.
DEE: This is for me.
JEFF: Yeah, 100%.
DEE: I will say the ending was so strong as well.
DEE: They were talking about how the investigators, basically the nurse, the doctor and the fireman.
DEE: It’s like at the start of a bad joke, isn’t it?
DEE: And investigators, they figured it out so quickly, like what killed them.
DEE: But now they had to figure out who killed them.
DEE: And there’s this whole snippet of saying like, we’re going to catch this person, like, and we’re going to do it soon.
DEE: They’re like, no, you didn’t, basically.
DEE: Dettol wouldn’t stay at six for long.
DEE: Nothing about this investigation would be quick or easy.
DEE: And so it’s wild that we really got so far so quickly.
DEE: And they’re telling us that it’s going to be a 40 year road, at least.
DEE: Yeah, which is, it’s an intriguing little bit frustrating, obviously, from a.
DEE: I want it to tie up in a little bow, and I know it’s not going to point of view, but I just thought it was a strong ending to a really, really strong first episode.
JEFF: Yeah, I totally agree.
JEFF: I’m very eager to keep going.
JEFF: And I feel like this, based on this first episode, I would definitely recommend this.
DEE: Would recommend to a friend.
JEFF: Absolutely.
DEE: So friends, get out there, get listening.
DEE: Our next episode, remember, will be out.
DEE: Our full recap will be out on Friday.
DEE: But don’t go yet, because we have our true crime question of the episode.
DEE: So Jeff, a true crime question of the episode.
DEE: Do you crave resolution in a true crime podcast?
DEE: Unlike here, obviously, where we know it won’t resolve.
JEFF: Yeah, it’s funny, as much as we talked about liking how this starts and knowing that it’s gonna end unresolved, like that is somewhere in the back of my brain, it’s gonna be lingering that like, I’m not gonna feel good about this at the end.
JEFF: This is the way I feel when there’s like, I don’t know, 50 pages left in a book that I’m reading.
JEFF: We’re like, I really enjoyed this, but are they gonna like stick the landing?
JEFF: Or am I gonna like, is the end of it gonna really leave me disappointed?
JEFF: And I think that’s what I want in a true crime podcast.
JEFF: Like I want some type of justice.
JEFF: I want some type of like clarity.
JEFF: I want some form of resolution.
JEFF: So yeah, I think it’s, I’m worried that that’s gonna bother me here.
JEFF: It’s bothered me in ones we’ve listened to before, where it just sort of like, it’s an open-ended, unsolved case.
DEE: What do you think?
DEE: Yeah, a hundred percent.
DEE: Like I want the bow on it.
DEE: I want Jessica Fletcher to march in and like, you know, be like, it was him.
JEFF: Is that where that comes from?
JEFF: Is like the murder she wrote, the one-hour procedurals monk or whatever, where like, it always ends neatly.
DEE: It doesn’t always end neatly.
JEFF: Often.
JEFF: More often than not.
DEE: Probably.
DEE: I also just think it’s like a product of my time, like this whole happy ending, the whole just everything is instantaneous.
DEE: I just want, I want it to be an end.
DEE: It also like, it’s disconcerting to know that someone is either, we don’t know who, who has done this.
JEFF: Yeah, I think, so like, it’s funny because in comparing it to like books or movies or something, like in a serious literary fiction novel or something, I almost don’t want that.
JEFF: Like, I feel like that’s not reflective of life, which is funny because I’ve said that about books where I feel like the ending can be sort of too contained or too…
DEE: But in real life.
JEFF: But ironically, yeah, in real life, I really wish it would be.
JEFF: Like, I’m going to devote these hours to listening to this podcast.
JEFF: I, yeah, where there, like you said, like there’s a real criminal out there, someone who’s murdered people, like here, like these families that are broken up, these children that are left without their parents.
JEFF: Like, I want someone to be held accountable for that.
JEFF: Yeah, it bothers me to know that that’s not going to be the case.
DEE: I mean, I will say it makes for a really good conversation, like to to say, like, you know, who do you think?
DEE: Like, do you think they had enough, like, evidence or whatever?
DEE: They obviously the FBI have investigating this guy at the start that we don’t know his name yet.
DEE: But like, it’ll be interesting to see, like, OK, you’ve been investigating him for 40 years.
DEE: Does that just mean you’ve no evidence?
DEE: Like, it’ll just it’ll make for an interesting, I think, discussion in this case in particular.
DEE: And it has done in previous cases where.
DEE: I don’t know, I kind of want it to be a case where.
DEE: OK, it hasn’t been solved yet, but this podcast is going to be the time that it gets solved, you know what I mean?
DEE: But like, that’s almost like it doesn’t feel like it’s teeing itself up to be like that.
JEFF: But it’s like I feel like that’s a particular branch of that tree, right?
JEFF: Like where the podcast is the thing that solves it, which is that’s satisfying in its own way, right?
DEE: Imagine.
JEFF: Yeah, this and some of this gets back to something we talked about, I think in one of our very first episodes where we talked about where we first sort of started listening to True Crime, and I mentioned Serial, like season one of Serial, which is one of those stories where there’s sort of an unsatisfying end, or there’s so many questions answered that you don’t get a good resolution to, and that’s a case that has sort of dragged on over the years since that came out, and it’s still like as captivating as that story was.
JEFF: It didn’t reach the conclusion that I think it prompts.
JEFF: I feel like this is sort of a bad comparison, but to a series finale of a TV show, where it’s like, I love this show, but the last season or the last episode just wasn’t good.
JEFF: It didn’t leave me in a good place.
JEFF: And that kind of wrecks it, right?
JEFF: That’s like the Game of Thrones ending, where it’s like, I loved this show for so many years, and then the ending was so bad that now I think less of everything that came before.
DEE: What a waste of months of my life.
JEFF: Right, well, here we’re talking about a handful of hours.
JEFF: I watched Game of Thrones, I read all those books, and I watched that TV show for however many years.
JEFF: And yeah, I regret some of that time.
DEE: Those books were big.
JEFF: They were.
JEFF: It was a lot of pages.
DEE: It was a lot.
DEE: So yeah, we want resolution in real life, but not in literary fiction.
DEE: That’s where we’re landing.
DEE: I want it in fiction as well, to be honest.
DEE: It just feels more clear-cut, feels safer that just the system is working if there’s a resolution, which.
JEFF: Which we know better, right?
DEE: Like we do, but still we can dream.
DEE: We can dream.
JEFF: We can know better, but still hope for better.
JEFF: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s my conclusion.
DEE: That’s a good conclusion.
DEE: In the next episode of So Much Crime, So Little Time, we’re gonna do a full recap of Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders.
DEE: Were our initial thoughts correct?
DEE: What moments lingered?
DEE: And how does it all end?
DEE: And of course, was this crime worth your time?
JEFF: Check out our show notes for the links to…
JEFF: But I had the easier part.
DEE: Way easier.
DEE: I didn’t even have to say the name of our podcast.
JEFF: Check out our show notes for links to Unsealed, The Tylenol Mur…
JEFF: Check out our show notes for links to Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders, and then join us for our full recap next time.
JEFF: Again, preview episodes come out every Sunday, and full recaps come out every Friday.
JEFF: So Much Crime, So Little Time is a production of MindGlobe Media.
JEFF: The executive producer is Paxton Calariso.
JEFF: Our associate producer is Blythe Tai.
JEFF: Our theme music was composed by Vyacheslav Starostin.
JEFF: If you haven’t done it yet, please subscribe to this show on your podcast app.
JEFF: Don’t forget to give us a five-star rating and a review.
JEFF: Even better, tell your friends.
JEFF: To join the discussion, look for us on social media.
JEFF: Check out the show notes for all the links.
JEFF: Thanks for listening.
