On Wednesday, September 29, 1982, average citizens in and around the Chicago area were subjected to an act of domestic terrorism. Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide ended up on the shelves of their local supermarkets and drug stores. And by the end of the week, seven people had been pronounced dead.
The subsequent homicide investigation, called “The Tylenol Murders” by the national media, and “Tymurs” by the FBI, was the most extensively covered news story since the JFK assassination nearly twenty years earlier.
Even with countless man hours and spilled ink, there still remains a gaping chasm at the center of our understanding of the crisis. Four decades later, federal, state, and local authorities are unable to name a solid single suspect nor provide the smoking gun explanation for the tragic deaths.
However, the fundamental opaqueness of the crimes didn’t stop three vastly different men from delving into the maelstrom in hope of finding an answer. They were:
James Burke, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson, a national icon of trust and safety, and an appointed member of President Reagan’s Committee on Economic Affairs. But also a vulnerable man torn between the dark and light of his personality and obsessed the poisoner may have come from within his own house to harm him and his marketing creation – Extra-Strength Tylenol.
Roy Lane, a young, tight-lipped, red-blooded, hungry FBI agent looking to make his name by solving the Tylenol Murders, to take a quantum leap to the top of the bureau’s food chain, but grimly unaware and unprepared that Chicago was practically another planet, especially politically.
Homicide Detective “Irish” Charlie Ford, Chicago’s “top cop”, known for his brash manner, penetrating insights into human motive, loud ties, a local accent so thick it was ready for a Michael Mann movie, and vulnerable to the hype that only he could solve “The Tylenol Murders”.
All three men were at inflection points in their careers; all three men wanted the case solved on their own terms; all three men would sacrifice a decade or more to the cause; and all three would lose themselves at the bottom of a mystery as much existential as it was criminal.
For when you peer into “The Tylenol Murders” you see what you want to, reflected back.