Chicago Tribune investigative reporters Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair uncover new and critical clues in law enforcement’s latest — and possibly last — attempt at closing one of the nation’s most infamous unsolved cases.

Listen to episode 1: Steak, Flowers, Tylenol.

Christy Gutowski: We are driving up and down Cambridge, there’s a library back here that um…

Gutowski: It’s a hot August day. We’re in a tiny rental car in suburban Boston, driving between the mall, the library, and the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Trying to interview a man the FBI has spent the last forty years investigating.

Gutowksi: I’m approaching four and a half, five hours of stake out number two. Just hanging out on public walkways, hoping he’ll come out and talk to us…

Gutowski: It’s the second time this summer that we’ve flown all the way from Chicago to try and get an interview. But our subject hasn’t spoken to the media in over a decade. He used to love to talk. He did local TV interviews. He sent letters to our newsroom, the Chicago Tribune. He talked for hours with the FBI, offering to help them in an investigation where he was the target.

Gutowski: There’s the famous staircase where the FBI came down, the 2009 raid with the banker’s boxes filled with…

Gutowski: The FBI searched his condo in 2009, right here, about 20 feet from our car. It was the first public indication that authorities were still investigating him for a 1982 crime. Since then, we’ve learned so much more about the events leading up to this raid. And what happened after. We wanted to talk to him. So we spent hours waiting. And then…

Wescott: We’re not gonna hurt you.

Gutowski: We’re with the Chicago Tribune. Everyone else is talking. Fahner…

Gutowski: He wasn’t what I pictured. He was wearing knee-high running socks, shorts, and a t-shirt that said I heart my awesome wife. He had white hair and a full beard. He was older now, and unsteady when he walked.

Gutowski: You used to like to talk to the Chicago Tribune. Why are you so quiet now?

James Lewis: I did, that was a long time ago, 40 years ago.

Gutowski: I know, 40 years. Do you have any theories on who is the Tylenol killer?

Lewis: I think that’s fairly obvious.

Lewis: Ladies, have you been harassed over something for 40 years that you didn’t have anything to do with?

Stacy St. Clair: In September 1982, people started dying mysteriously in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. They were all young. And they were all healthy until each of them took a Tylenol.

Laurie Edling: It rocked the city. It was huge.

Archival Recording: People around here have become even more frightened of what police call a random killer.

Helen Jensen: Everybody was scared to take pills.

Archival Recording: The manufacturer recalled more than a quarter of a million bottles.

Jean Leavengood: It was just off the shelves so fast.

St. Clair: It caused an international panic. And a forty year search for the killer.

Archival Recording: One of the most intense manhunts in Chicago history.

Archival Recording: The manufacturer offered a $100,000 award to anyone with information on who may have poisoned the pills.

St. Clair: From the beginning there was no clear motive. And no clear suspect.

Joseph Janus: Well, there’ve been suspects, but nobody got caught.

Gutowski: I’m Christy Gutowski.

St. Clair: And I’m Stacy St. Clair. This is Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders. A Podcast from AT WILL MEDIA and The Chicago Tribune.

Gutowski: Episode 1: Steak, Flowers, Tylenol.

St. Clair: Our story starts in Arlington Heights. The Chicago suburb where Christy and I began our reporting careers. It’s a community about 35 miles from downtown Chicago. There are homes with neatly manicured lawns and the train station is filled with commuters at rush hour. It’s a nice place to settle down, and raise a family. In 1982, a young couple named Adam and Teresa Janus were doing just that.

St. Clair: Adam had moved from Poland to Chicago about two decades before, when he was just a kid. He met Teresa on one of his trips back to Poland. They fell in love, and Teresa came to the United States. They got married, had two kids, and bought a house on Mitchell Avenue. It was a quintessential starter home, made out of tan brick. Three bedrooms, and picture-windows. It wasn’t anything fancy. But to Adam and Teresa, it was the American dream.

St. Clair: Wednesday, September 29th started as just another day. It was Adam’s day off from the post office. He wasn’t feeling great, but he ran some errands and picked up his 4-year-old daughter from pre-school. On the way home, he stopped at the grocery store. Adam’s brother, Joe Janus, remembers that day.

Joseph Janus: He went to get some flowers to Teresa because they had some kind of celebration.

St. Clair: He picked out a bouquet of lilies. He also bought some steaks and a bottle of pain reliever. At home, he put away the groceries and then went to the bathroom. He took two pills from the new bottle. And then Adam came walking out of the bathroom, clutching his chest.

Janus: He says he’s not feeling good. So he went down, laid down on the bed.

St. Clair: Teresa followed Adam into the bedroom. Looking at her husband, she instantly knew something was wrong. She ran to the neighbors for help. Teresa called Joe Janus, Adam’s oldest brother.

Janus: I got a phone call. She says Adam got a heart attack. He’s in Arlington Heights Hospital.

St. Clair: Joe rushed from his job to the hospital. But he was too late. At 3:15 p.m Adam was pronounced dead.

Janus: They said that he died of heart attack.

St. Clair: That must have been unbelievable for you, that he died of a heart attack.

Janus: Yeah. Yeah. He was a young person. How could he die of heart attack when, you know, he never complained? You know?

St. Clair: That’s the same question that paramedics had too. Chuck Kramer was the Fire Lieutenant in Arlington Heights. His crew had tried to save Adam earlier that day.

Chuck Kramer: And they said, ‘Guys, we had what the weirdest call l you’ve ever seen. We had a guy 27 years old, built like a baby bull, gone. They suspect a heart attack, but symptoms were funny.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean by symptoms were funny?’ He said, ‘He was still alive, and his eyes were fixed and dilated and nonresponsive. Just like if he was dead. And his breathing was rapid and shallow.’

Gutowski: After they got the news, the Janus family went back to Adam’s house. The same house where he had fallen ill just a little while before. Now he was dead. The family decided to start planning his funeral. At the house were Adam’s two brothers. Stanley and Joe. Stanley wasn’t feeling well. So he went into the bathroom. His older brother, Joe, was in the living room. Joe remembers that out of nowhere…

Janus: Stanley came to us and all of a sudden he’s falling down. And then when he, he drop on the floor, white stuff was coming from his mouth. And then, uh, I look at him and I says, his eyes was turning white. I said, oh my God...

Gutowski: Stanley had just taken some pain reliever. He had a headache and a bad back. His wife, Terri Janus, had taken two as well. The family called for an ambulance. And Chuck Kramer’s squad responded to the call.

Kramer: Dejavu. It’s exactly the same dispatch, 1262 South Mitchell for the man down. I told the guys, ‘Get on the engine. We’re gonna follow ‘em.’

Gutowski: It was chaos on Mitchell Avenue.

Kramer: There were crowds of people. And as we pulled up in front, I started to go up to the house and I can hear screaming come outta the house. I walked in and one of my paramedics looked up and you could just see it in his face. He said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, Lieutenant.’ But he said, ‘This is the same thing as the guy this morning.’

Gutowski: The paramedics started working on Stanley. And his wife, Terri, was right there watching. She and Stanley had just gotten married and returned from their honeymoon. They hadn’t even gotten the proofs back from the wedding photographer. Terri was screaming and crying, calling out Stanley! Stanley!

Kramer: She was holding onto my arm. And all of a sudden she let go and I heard her groan and I turned around and she collapsed right there.

Gutowski: Chuck shined a flashlight into Terri’s eyes. But they were fixed. And dilated.

Kramer: I’m looking at what’s going on. I said, guys, ‘This isn’t heart attacks. There’s something wrong.’

Gutowski: Stanley was just 25 years old. Terri, only 20. The medics put the couple into ambulances. Adam Janus had died just a few hours before. Now, two more people from the Janus family were being rushed to the hospital. A similar pattern was happening across the Chicago area. And the Janus story would be the key to figuring out the mystery.

St. Clair: As the ambulances raced toward the hospital, one of the doctors was on his way out.

Dr. Thomas Kim: I was going home.

St. Clair: Dr. Thomas Kim was the chief of critical care. Confident and well-respected. Just a few hours earlier, he pronounced Adam Janus dead. And broke the news to Adam’s family. Now, two more people from the same family were right back at the hospital. But this time, on stretchers.

Kramer: Dr. Kim met us outside. He could not believe what was happening because he said they just left and they were fine.

Kim: I came back and told the ICU nurses that I’m still here. I didn’t go home.

St. Clair: Dr. Kim treated Stanley and Terri right away. He quarantined everyone else in a meeting room. Dr. Kim wasn’t sure what was causing three young, healthy people all from the same family to suddenly pass out. Maybe it was carbon monoxide, or botulism. Possible suicide. But none of those seemed right.

St. Clair: Joe Janus looked around at his family. He was afraid they’d all be dead soon.

Janus: I was in shock so bad that I didn’t know what was going on.

St. Clair: More than a dozen people were in the quarantine, including Fire Lieutenant Chuck Kramer. Chuck sat there feeling useless. There was all this commotion outside but he was trapped in that room. Then he called his friend Helen Jensen, a public health official for Arlington Heights. She was the village nurse. And handled everything, from home visits to flu shots. If Chuck had to be stuck in quarantine, waiting to see if the Januses and his crew would live or die, at least Helen could continue investigating.

Gutowski: It was around 7 p.m. when Helen got the call. She was cooking dinner.

Helen Jensen: We were just sitting down to eat when the phone rang.

Kramer: I says, ‘Helen, I don’t know what’s going on here.’ I said ‘We’ve lost one young person in his twenties. We got two more that are not good. And I brought everybody to the hospital. There’s something wrong here.’ And she says, ‘I’ll be right there.’

Gutowski: Helen went right to the hospital. She started by interviewing Teresa Janus, who lost her husband Adam earlier that day.

Jensen: Teresa was standing all by herself on the other side of the room. And she did not speak very much English and her brother-in-law came up and started to interpret it.

Gutowski: They huddled together, translating from English to Polish and back. She walked Helen through the day. Her husband, Adam, went to run errands. Then he came home, clutched his chest in pain, and died. The family went back to the house. And Stanley collapsed. Then Terri right after.

Jensen: I went to the cops and said, ‘I wanna go out to the house. I wanna take a look for myself.’ It was, um, a nice house. Clean as could be. And I went through the refrigerator and I went through the shelves. I, you know, to see if anything was spoiled in the refrigerator, nothing was. And then I went into the bathroom and I found the bottle of Tylenol. In the garbage, I found the receipt with the day’s date on it. And I emptied the bottle, and I counted them and put them back in. Now I probably didn’t wash my hands, but I should have…

Jensen: I counted and there were six capsules missing. And I said, it has to be something to do with this bottle. That was the only thing in common for all three of them.

Gutowski: Helen took the pills back to the hospital. And found an investigator with the medical examiner’s office.

Jensen: I told him that there were six capsules missing. It has to be the Tylenol. There’s something in the Tylenol. And he went, ‘Oh no, no.’ I was not believed. So I stamped my foot and said it louder. This woman that you don’t know, standing there with her shorts and a t-shirt. I’m nobody of any kind of authority. I was so upset. I went home and had a stiff drink and complained to my husband.

Gutowski: Helen tried to wind down with a glass of scotch. And she cried.

Jensen: I said, ‘I know it’s the Tylenol and they’re not paying any attention to me.’

Gutowksi: But Chuck Kramer was paying attention to Helen. He thought she could be right. Maybe it was the Tylenol. He waited with his crew at the hospital, to see if they’d been exposed to something more deadly.

Kramer: So finally Dr. Kim comes in and he says, ‘Okay, I don’t think we’re dealing with some sort of a virus.’

Gutowski: Dr. Kim wanted to run some tests to confirm.

Kramer: ‘I’ll let you know if we find anything out afterwards.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’

Gutowski: Chuck and his crew were let out of quarantine. They were free to go. On the way back to the firehouse, Chuck picked up his radio.

Kramer: I said, ‘Engine three to central. Engine three, ambulance three, squad one, ambulance two are all out of service going to station three for decontamination.’ So that went out over the radio.

Gutowski: One of Chuck’s friend’s - Phil Cappitelli - heard the radio call. He was another Fire Lieutenant in Arlington Heights.

Kramer: And when he heard that, he thought, ‘What the hell has Chuck got there?’ Phone rings, it’s Phil Capatelli. He says, ‘Chuck, what’s going on?’ I said, ‘Phil we’ve had a day like you wouldn’t believe.’ I said, ‘The only thing that these people got in common at all is they all took Tylenol.’ Phil says ‘Tylenol?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’

Kramer: He said, ‘This morning, my mother-in-law works with a woman. And her daughter died this morning in Elk Grove.’

St. Clair: Less than 10 miles from where the Januses lived, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman had a sore throat. On the morning of September 29th, she went into the bathroom and took a Tylenol. Mary died while her 7th grade classmates were starting school that day.

Gutowski: Chuck called the hospital. And told a nurse what he’d heard from Phil. There was now more evidence backing Helen’s theory. That it must have been Tylenol that connected all three of the Januses. And now they know about a fourth victim, too. Mary Kellerman.

St. Clair: And then there were more victims. Two other people collapsed in the Chicago area. Both had taken Tylenol. Both were also named Mary. Mary “Lynn” Reiner was 27-years-old. She’d just given birth to her fourth baby a few days earlier. During her recovery at home, she took some Tylenol capsules.

St. Clair: A few hours later, a 31-year-old single mother named Mary Sue McFarland had a headache at work. She also took some Tylenol. Her friend and coworker Diana Hilderbrand was there.

Diana Hilderbrand: And then she walked down on the floor and she came back. I don’t even know if it was 10 minutes and said, ‘I don’t feel good’ and just collapsed. We’re all trying to do CPR and call 9-1-1. And the paramedics got there. And he said, ‘Do you know if she took anything?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, she took some Tylenol I think.’

Gutowski: By the end of the day - September 29, 1982 - Mary Reiner, Mary Sue McFarland, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman and Adam and Stanley Janus were all dead. Terri Janus was still on life support.

St. Clair: Joe Janus and his sister spent the night at the hospital. The doctor kept the entire family there. Just to be sure.

St. Clair: Were you afraid that you were gonna die?

Janus: Of course. So then we stayed there the whole night in, you know, in quarantine. Me and my sister. I was in one bed and she was in the other bed. Then they were watching us, when we going to die.

St. Clair: Did you guys get to sleep at all that night or what are you talking about all night long?

Janus: I was, like, frozen in that hospital. I didn’t even speak with my sister at that time. I was just looking at her and she was looking at me, if we still alive. I was afraid to go to sleep, yeah.

St. Clair: By the end of the night, Dr. Kim had heard about the possible Tylenol connection. But Tylenol was acetaminophen. He knew what acetomenphine poisoning looked like. This wasn’t it. If the Tylenol was the connection, it must have been something else. He just needed to figure out what. And fast. With every passing moment, there were lives on the line. He consulted poisoning experts. Scoured his old medical school books, paced back and forth in his office. And then, Dr. Kim had a wild thought.

St. Clair: In Dr. Kim’s office late that Wednesday night, he landed on something. Maybe the Tylenol was contaminated with a deadly chemical. One that was easy to get. And easy to hide. He took blood samples from Stanley and Terri. The young couple who had just died. He put the vials in a taxi cab. And sent them to a lab for testing overnight.

Gutowski: At the Arlington Heights hospital, an investigator for the medical examiner’s office heard about the Tylenol connection. How maybe that was the link between the Janus family and Mary Kellerman. The investigator called his boss, Dr. Edmund Donoghue.

Dr. Edmund Donoghue: In 1982, I was the deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County.

Gutowski: Dr. Donoghue had the same theory as Dr. Kim.

Donoghue: And there are only two poisons that kill people so rapidly. The first is cyanide. And the second is nicotine.

Gutowski: The investigator had both bottles in front of him. Donoghue gave him very specific instructions:

Donoghue: ‘I want you to open the containers and smell ‘em and see if you can smell cyanide.’ Cyanide has a very distinctive odor. It’s traditionally described as the odor of bitter almonds…

Gutowski: Not always, but when it does, it’s a pretty good clue. Sure enough, when the investigator opened the bottles at the hospital, there it was. The bitter almond smell.

Donoghue: There was cyanide in the capsules.

Gutowski: The medical investigator gave the capsules to a toxicologist to run some tests. While he worked, Dr. Kim’s lab results arrived. The Janus’s blood had a lethal amount of cyanide. Donoghue’s toxicologist found the same thing with the two bottles of Tylenol. Each poisoned pill had enough cyanide to kill at least three people. Helen’s hunch had been right. And authorities now had scientific proof to back it.

St. Clair: The next morning, Joe Janus got the news. He was in his hospital room.

Janus: And then in the morning they call us in the one room and told us, you know, what happened. That they were poisoned.

St. Clair: Cyanide acts fast. If someone ingests it, it can take just a few minutes to start destroying the body. Inhale it, and it only takes a few seconds. Now, Dr. Kim had the answer to what killed Adam and Stanley Janus. So they released Joe and the rest of the family from the hospital Terri was taken off life support the next day. Three people, all from the same family, were dead. It was an unthinkable tragedy. The work of an unknown killer. Investigators figured out quickly what killed them. Now, they had to figure out who killed them. Before it was too late.

Archival Recording: We’re going to get to the bottom of this and we’re gonna do it very quickly.

Gutowski: But nothing about the investigation would turn out to be quick or easy. And the death toll wouldn’t stay at 6 for long.

St. Clair: For exclusive details about the first 24 hours and more visit chicago tribune dot com forward slash Tylenol murders. And keep checking back. We’re posting new stories each week through October 27.

Gutowski: Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders is Executive Produced by Will Malnati from AT

WILL MEDIA. And Mitch Pugh from the Chicago Tribune, in association with audiochuck. Produced by Claire Tighe, Jessica Glazer, and Anmargaret Warner. Edited by Morgan Springer. Fact-checked by Wudan Yan. Production support from Clementine Ford, Molly Getman, Zach Grappone, Matt Hickey, Andrew Holzberger, Seth Richardson, and Mark Van Hare. Mixed by Daniel Tureck. Original music by Hannis Brown. Reported by us, Christy Gutowski and Stacy St. Clair. Coming up, on this season of Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders.

Archival Recording: We don’t know the extent of the contaminations. So I think at this time, uh, it would be wise not to take Extra Strength Tylenol at all.

Archival Recording: How they had been contaminated, by whom, and how many other bottles there might be, nobody could say.

Roy Lane Jr.: We had no subjects. Nobody of interest that we had identified.

Archival Recording: A task force of more than 100 local, state, and federal investigators is looking into seven deaths linked to poisoned Extra Strength Tylenol capsules.

Lane Jr.: He says, ‘It is easy to place cyanide. It is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. I can fly to any city quickly and plant more cyanide in stores all over the country.

Jeremy Margolis: Was this person just a crank who was playing games and tweaking law enforcement?

Charlie Ford: You have mass murderers all the time, just prove to themselves that they’re a criminal mastermind.

Lane Jr.: The person who committed this is enjoying the attention right now and the fact that he or she had outsmarted the law enforcement.

David Barton: It was sort of like a game, I think.

Dan Webb: The person made it clear that he could arrange for the killings to stop.

John West: We kind of had a feeling, I think deep down that something wasn’t right and it wasn’t going to be good.

Archival Recording: They’re our prime suspects at this point in time by anyone’s definition of what a suspect is.

Lane Jr.: The entire time that this person is talking to you he is fantasizing about the crime.

Margolis: We had hours and hours and hours of conversations as to how the Tylenol killer might have done it.

Lane Jr.: If you can find the right trigger mechanism he can have a psychotic leak.

Barton: So something was very, very strange about that whole thing.

Jimmy Gildea: And he just broke down and started crying and was inconsolable, really, because he realized he killed the wrong guy.

Barton: Quite frankly, it was a very disorganized murder.

Laurie Edling: So it’s like a crime within a crime.

Barton: Once you smell a decomposed body, you never forget it.

Gildea: The State’s Attorney supervisor said, ‘It’s a non-starter, they won’t do it.’

Webb: I wanted the jury to know this was an awful thing that he did.

Bell: Game’s over. Case, case just went down the river.

Lane Jr.: A person walks into the Arlington Heights Police Department. And says, ‘I think I know who did the Tylenol poisonings.’

Archival Recording: The FBI says there are new leads tonight in the fatal poisoning case from 1982 in which Tylenol capsules were laced with cyanide.

St. Clair: I don’t think we’ve spoken to a single detective in this case, who isn’t still frustrated 40 years later by the politics.

Ford: It was all politics at the time, especially election year.

Gildea: Once you start deviating from whatever your normal procedure is, you’re making a mistake.

Barton: Just none of it jived. It just didn’t fit together.

St. Clair: Is he making that story up?

Lane Jr.: I can’t, I just can’t get into it. I wish I could.