Speaker 1: Hey, friends, before we get going, we are super excited
Speaker 1: to announce our true thousand nineteen live tour. Yes, we're
Speaker 1: still alive, and we're gonna come prop ourselves up on
Speaker 1: stage in front of you and cities around the country
Speaker 1: and Canada. That's right, everyone. Tickets go on sale this
Speaker 1: Friday at ten a m. Your local time wherever these
Speaker 1: cities are, and we're gonna kick things off in the
Speaker 1: great City of Chicago in July at the Harris Theater,
Speaker 1: followed the next night at the Danforth Theater in Toronto,
Speaker 1: Canada on July. Yea. Then we're gonna take a month
Speaker 1: long nap and wake up, and on Thursday, August twenty nine,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take ourselves to Boston, Massa our beloved Wilbur Theater.
Speaker 1: The next night, we're going to a new city, first
Speaker 1: time ever, in Portland, Maine at the State Theater. I'm
Speaker 1: so excited about that one. Me too. And then Chuck,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a nap for another full month, wake
Speaker 1: up again, dust our selves off, and go to Orlando,
Speaker 1: Florida for the first time ever. We're gonna be at
Speaker 1: Plaza Live. Yeah, man, first Florida show, and then we
Speaker 1: are finishing up that mini leg in New Orleans, yep, Thursday,
Speaker 1: October tenth, at the Civic Theater. We're returning, So prepare
Speaker 1: the city for partying, everybody. That's right, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: wrap it up at least for now at our beloved
Speaker 1: Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, for three shows October again, folks.
Speaker 1: Tickets for all these shows go on sale this Friday
Speaker 1: today am your local time, and just go to all
Speaker 1: of these venue websites for ticketing. Yep. Thank you for
Speaker 1: coming to see us in advance, everybody. We're excited. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radios How Stuff Works. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh, not me, Chuck. Guest
Speaker 1: producer Josh is back in the house. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: little Chuck in your pockets, remember a little I was
Speaker 1: just about to say that you got that right, Tony.
Speaker 1: Oh man, what a great sketch it really was. That
Speaker 1: was Nicholas Cage, wasn't it. Yeah? Man, did you ever
Speaker 1: see Mandy? Yes? It was terrible. I don't care what
Speaker 1: anybody else says. It terrible, terrible, movie. Yeah, Nolan, I
Speaker 1: talked about it on movie Crush. He's seen it like
Speaker 1: four times, thinks it's the best thing ever. Come on.
Speaker 1: He was like, people love it or hate it, and
Speaker 1: now it's like, actually, I was kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1: Were you really? Yeah? I mean I told him young Chuck,
Speaker 1: like twenty two year old college Chuck would have probably
Speaker 1: liked it a lot more. But today Chuck was kind
Speaker 1: of like, I get it. Like, sure, sure, parts of it,
Speaker 1: we're fine. Sure to me. Spending an hour doing character development, huh,
Speaker 1: but not successfully making you care about the characters just
Speaker 1: really irked me. Wow, you had structural issues. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was really the big thing. I also thought Lenis Roach
Speaker 1: was very very odd for casting, but that was the
Speaker 1: main bad guy that that was weird, very weird. I
Speaker 1: don't even know him, but he's from Law and Order
Speaker 1: and like some other stuff, you gotta get into law.
Speaker 1: See how much you're missing out on that's becoming a bit.
Speaker 1: So did we start recording yet? I think so. I
Speaker 1: already welcomed everybody the podcast. Um so, Chuck, we are
Speaker 1: this is some true crime stuff. For getting into here,
Speaker 1: that's right, But I feel like we need to set
Speaker 1: the tone right, because this isn't This didn't happened just yesterday.
Speaker 1: This happened way back in two in Chicago, Illinois. And
Speaker 1: I remember this and I was like six at the time.
Speaker 1: It was one of my favorite years because of this,
Speaker 1: the opposite of that, right, mainly because of movies that
Speaker 1: was so great about two. Look at up man? Well,
Speaker 1: I was kind of hoping, Oh yeah, okay, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was Do you know I didn't see Blade Runner until
Speaker 1: I was forty. That's not true. Yes, the original, the
Speaker 1: original Blade Runner. Did you like it? That was good.
Speaker 1: I like the second one too, You're like, but they
Speaker 1: spent way too much time on character. Um. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I just did a little poking around about two and
Speaker 1: it was it was a good year for an eleven
Speaker 1: year old, but it was an uneasy time in America.
Speaker 1: Uh well for a bunch of awful things happened that year.
Speaker 1: Uh And I don't know if it was any more
Speaker 1: or less than other years, but uh, air Flight ninety
Speaker 1: crashed into into the Potomac River, remember that in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. The plane crash in the river. Didn't hit
Speaker 1: a bridge maybe, but there was there was like a daring,
Speaker 1: icy river rescue. Yeah, seventy eight people died. Though that
Speaker 1: same day a metro train in d C de Rail
Speaker 1: killed three people. Uh. February was when Wayne Williams was convicted,
Speaker 1: and that was just the end of a lot of
Speaker 1: uneas you know for years. Uh, Klaus Vambu Law was
Speaker 1: found guilty of attempted murder of his wife in March.
Speaker 1: I didn't make it to the end of reversal of fortune,
Speaker 1: so I honestly didn't know what happened to class guilty. Uh.
Speaker 1: In June was the murder of Vincent Chen, who was
Speaker 1: a Chinese American who was beaten to death by two
Speaker 1: men in Michigan thinking he was a Japanese and they
Speaker 1: were like stealing his their auto work. I know, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: And then July nine, pan Am flight seven nine goes
Speaker 1: down in Louisiana, Louisiana kills all one forty six people
Speaker 1: on board, plus eight more on the ground. And then
Speaker 1: in September, early September was when I know, man, remember
Speaker 1: planes used to just crash a lot. Yeah, that never
Speaker 1: happens now, Uh, not as much. But yeah, weird that
Speaker 1: we're recording this in the midst of more plane gradges
Speaker 1: and then early September was when that paper boy and Iowa,
Speaker 1: Iowa was kidnapped and never seen again. Johnny ghosh M.
Speaker 1: I don't know that one. That was a big deal too,
Speaker 1: because it was you know, the paper boy, and there
Speaker 1: was this false story about a pedophile ring from politicians
Speaker 1: and that turned out not to be true, but he
Speaker 1: was never found again. So basically everything that's going on
Speaker 1: today is just a rehash of two It sounds like
Speaker 1: I just remember being about that age and they're just
Speaker 1: the nightly news sort of just being a horror show
Speaker 1: and not politically speaking, you know, like real bad incidences occurring.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, plane crash, like just about it at any age,
Speaker 1: like that'll that'll bring you down if you see that
Speaker 1: on the news for sure, Yeah, um, because you know,
Speaker 1: when you get on a plane, you think maybe this
Speaker 1: plane will go down while I'm on it, and that
Speaker 1: would be terrible. Although I wasn't flying at eleven. So
Speaker 1: all of those things you just mentioned sweep them totally
Speaker 1: off the table, because come the end of September of
Speaker 1: that year, nothing else mattered but what we're about to
Speaker 1: talk about now, that's right, Nothing nothing came close to
Speaker 1: taking the over the national psyche like the deaths of
Speaker 1: seven people beginning on September two in Chicago, Illinois. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one of the articles I read about this, I mean,
Speaker 1: are we trying to keep it a secret? It's a
Speaker 1: show title, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to figure it out. So yeah, go ahead, the
Speaker 1: thailantal murders. Okay, you're like, oh no, no, but that's
Speaker 1: that comes up in part two. Oh yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a two parter. Yeah, as well so Buckling and everybody.
Speaker 1: Uh So. I was doing some research though, and I
Speaker 1: saw one article that said something about, you know, the
Speaker 1: first domestic terror incident United States that nobody has ever
Speaker 1: heard of? Like what? Who hasn't heard of this? A
Speaker 1: millennial wrote that headline. Well, I have to say it.
Speaker 1: Josh on the way in here. Yeah, I told him
Speaker 1: thailandle murders and huh he goes, what's tail and all?
Speaker 1: You old Kadr, we should probably say what Thailand all is?
Speaker 1: Huh Okay, yeah, I guess just in case you are
Speaker 1: a MILLENNI only you've never heard of Thailand all but
Speaker 1: tail and all was and still is and over the
Speaker 1: counter pain reliever. It's like you have eggs and pains
Speaker 1: and apparently what's crazy people would take thaile and all
Speaker 1: whatever was wrong with them because now you can go
Speaker 1: get like you know, aspirin and um adville and and
Speaker 1: a lead. There was no leave back then. That was
Speaker 1: a nineties drug. There's way more over the counter pain
Speaker 1: relievers now than they we're back then. Back then, Thailand
Speaker 1: All was basically it. Yeah, it's a sea of menafin,
Speaker 1: which is different than aspirin, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people just think those are interchangeable. Right. The reason
Speaker 1: I believe thailand All became so big is because aspirin
Speaker 1: upsets a lot of people's stomachs tail and all does not,
Speaker 1: or it's not supposed to, And that's why it came
Speaker 1: out of nowhere and just took over the aspera market.
Speaker 1: I think by two Thailand All had thirty seven percent
Speaker 1: of the market. It's pretty good cornered. Yeah, yeah, almost half,
Speaker 1: especially since like some of the other like aspirants have
Speaker 1: been around since you know, nineteenth century, right, So it
Speaker 1: makes sense then that when a little girl named Mary
Speaker 1: Anne kellerman Uh complained that she had a sore throat
Speaker 1: and wasn't feeling too good at like seven am on Wednesday,
Speaker 1: September two. Her parents said, just take an extra strength
Speaker 1: to tail and all and go back to bed man
Speaker 1: first sore throat. Imagine the guilt. Oh no, these parents
Speaker 1: feel well, don't blow it. We haven't said what happens
Speaker 1: to Marianne Kellerman yet. I think everybody knows. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she got up, said I'm sick. He said, take this.
Speaker 1: The father said he heard her go into the bathroom
Speaker 1: and close the door, then heard something drop and went
Speaker 1: to the door, saying, are you okay, you're okay? Uh
Speaker 1: no answer, opened the door and there she is on
Speaker 1: the floor. Um. Taken to the hospital, but died very quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably was dead when she went to the hospital, was
Speaker 1: pronounced there Um and she they suspected this is just
Speaker 1: a little twelve year old girl of middle school. Girl
Speaker 1: into Jane Adams Middle School. Um. She they think she
Speaker 1: died of a stroke. That's what they thought happened to her.
Speaker 1: They were just so baffled that they're like, it had
Speaker 1: to have been a stroke. That's the only thing that
Speaker 1: can come on like this. Yeah. So that's seven am.
Speaker 1: Just the day is just beginning, and one atrocity has
Speaker 1: already happened. Yeah, this is a this is a very
Speaker 1: bad day in the history of Chicago September. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and it started early Adam Janice, who uh will detail
Speaker 1: his story, but put a pin in this one too,
Speaker 1: because he figures in even more prominently in a minute.
Speaker 1: But a little bit later that same morning, Uh, this gentleman,
Speaker 1: Adam Janese's twenty seven years old and lived in Arlington,
Speaker 1: it's another Chicago suburb, and he died. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: think that this is a heart attack. Uh. He complained
Speaker 1: of chess pains after he had driven his daughter's neighbor
Speaker 1: home from school. Uh said, I'm gonna take the day off,
Speaker 1: comes home, eats a little lunch, takes two extra strength
Speaker 1: tile and all that he bought from a local drug store.
Speaker 1: Collapses in front of his wife, and by you know,
Speaker 1: a few minutes later, when the paramedics arrived, he was dead. Right.
Speaker 1: And again, like you said, they said heart attack because
Speaker 1: he's been complaining of chess pains, which had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with it. But just like Marianne Kellerman took an
Speaker 1: extra strength tile and all for a sore throat, he
Speaker 1: took some extra strength tile and all for some chest pains.
Speaker 1: This is just what people did back then. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's what complicated it a little bit at first. Um
Speaker 1: was that you know, if you take the tile and all,
Speaker 1: it means you felt bad already. So obviously you know
Speaker 1: they're gonna be saying like, wait a minute, chess pains
Speaker 1: or some throat like, how does that figure in? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it didn't. Plus, also, what made this even more
Speaker 1: baffling is that Marianne Kellerman's twelve even healthy. Adam Janis
Speaker 1: was twenty seven and healthy, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: they just dropped up. People don't just drop dead, no
Speaker 1: matter what you see on TV or in the movies
Speaker 1: or whatever. Dropping dead inexplicably is a really bizarre thing.
Speaker 1: When you're a healthy person. That doesn't happen. Uh. Next
Speaker 1: we have Mary Reiner, same day, same day. This is
Speaker 1: still all on the same day. Um, she's twenty seven
Speaker 1: years old. She's feeling a little dizzy. She had just
Speaker 1: come home from the hospital. Uh, after having given birth
Speaker 1: to her fourth kid a couple of days before. Super
Speaker 1: super sad. All of these are, obviously, but being a
Speaker 1: just a brand new mom for the fourth time, it's
Speaker 1: just so tragic. Uh. And then by three forty five.
Speaker 1: She was so ill she was rushed back to the
Speaker 1: hospital and again died very very quickly. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: Adam Janis collapsed in front of his wife, she collapsed
Speaker 1: in front of her young eight year old daughter. One
Speaker 1: of her children sare um and Yeah, when she was
Speaker 1: taking the hospit it all, they pronounced her dead as well.
Speaker 1: This is mid afternoon. Mary McFarland was up next. She
Speaker 1: was over in um the the suburb of Lombard, and
Speaker 1: she worked at the Illinois Bell Phone Center where you remember,
Speaker 1: like you go get your phone, like the rotary phone,
Speaker 1: you know, you would actually lease your phone. I wasn't
Speaker 1: involved in that process, but we had them in our home. Okay,
Speaker 1: well your parents bought that stuff. No, there was like
Speaker 1: a store where you would go It's like the phone
Speaker 1: company's retail store, and you would go and be like
Speaker 1: that pink one. It's like smartphones today, kind of same model.
Speaker 1: Kind of Um, yeah, I guess so, but this was
Speaker 1: with a big, clunky rotary phone and you had to
Speaker 1: pay extra for the extra long court. Well. Mary McFarland
Speaker 1: worked in one of these stores, and at about four
Speaker 1: o'clock UM at the Illinois Bell Phone center. She was
Speaker 1: She had a massive headache that just came on out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, and she went back and got some extra
Speaker 1: strength tile and all out of her purse, took a
Speaker 1: couple of them, and within minutes collapsed in the store. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she was young as well. She was thirty one years old,
Speaker 1: mother of two. And then remember I was talking about
Speaker 1: Adam Janice a few minutes ago. Um, his family goes
Speaker 1: to the hospital. Obviously, everyone converges there, he passes away,
Speaker 1: and so the family makes their way home UM to
Speaker 1: begin morning and just sort of trying to reconcile what
Speaker 1: had just happened. His brother, Stanley, he was only five,
Speaker 1: and then his wife Teresa, who was only nineteen, are
Speaker 1: both just overcome and worn out and have headaches. So
Speaker 1: they're at Adam's house. They got to his medicine cabinet,
Speaker 1: get out the tail and all that he took completely
Speaker 1: unknowingly obviously, and uh, Stanley hits the ground, Foam comes
Speaker 1: from his mouth, his eyes rolled back in his head.
Speaker 1: Everyone's freaking out, and a few minutes later his wife
Speaker 1: collapses and they called the ambulance. By the time and
Speaker 1: the ambulances get there, I think Stanley died that day,
Speaker 1: and Teresa somehow managed to live a couple of days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she hung on. And I don't know if like her
Speaker 1: dose is lesser or what, but but she she survived
Speaker 1: for a couple of days after that. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: my guess is that, uh, there just wasn't as much
Speaker 1: cyanide and the capsule she took. Did I just give
Speaker 1: something else away? But the so Stanley took his tail
Speaker 1: in all first, and then Teresa's oo curs and one
Speaker 1: of the paramedics noted, like Teresa was the one that
Speaker 1: called the ambulance out to come out for Stanley. And
Speaker 1: when they get there, they're they're both like on the
Speaker 1: ground and they're like, what's going on? And one of
Speaker 1: the paramedics said, everything that was happening to the guy
Speaker 1: happened to the woman like a couple of minutes later,
Speaker 1: like she was just following him through this process of
Speaker 1: like basically systemic organ failure. And this is the same
Speaker 1: day that his brother had passed away. Yep, this is
Speaker 1: about five six hours, six hours after Adam Janis had
Speaker 1: Then finally, I know this is all tough to go through. Everyone.
Speaker 1: We almost selected this as our next live show I'm
Speaker 1: really glad we did, because, I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 1: trying to liven this up with some jokes? I thought
Speaker 1: the whole time I was like, no, we can do that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the more I got into it, I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably not good live material. We should have a
Speaker 1: rule of thumb that any story that begins with the
Speaker 1: death of a twelve year old girl probably not live
Speaker 1: show material. I think you're right. So finally we have
Speaker 1: Paula Prince. Paula Jeene Prince. This is a couple of
Speaker 1: days later. This is not the same day. This is
Speaker 1: on Friday evening. She was a thirty five year old
Speaker 1: flight attendant and she was found dead in her apartment
Speaker 1: after police responded for a welfare check that her sister
Speaker 1: called in saying, hey, you know, I know she's a
Speaker 1: flight attendant and all, but no one knows where she is.
Speaker 1: Can you go check on her welfare check up? And
Speaker 1: they finally found her and she was gone. Yes, very
Speaker 1: very sad. She was found in her bathroom with a
Speaker 1: bottle of Strength of Title and all still open on
Speaker 1: the counter, and she uh. They looked into um her
Speaker 1: receipts and found that she had purchased it on Wednesday September.
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh So, at the end of this very
Speaker 1: short span of time in the Chicago area, we have
Speaker 1: seven people dead, and I feel like that's a good
Speaker 1: time to take a message break. Yeah, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: stop stop, okay, Chuck, So you said cyanide. How did
Speaker 1: you know that? Because I was eleven years old and
Speaker 1: I watch the nightly news like all eleven year old
Speaker 1: state you just called it just me and broke off
Speaker 1: Dan Rather, Yeah, Copley? Who else? That was it? Peter
Speaker 1: Jennings He came a little later, but sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he came after somebody. Well, I mean Cronkite wasn't still around,
Speaker 1: was he? Or was he? I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: think so. I was. I was going to be into
Speaker 1: the news as a kid a little bit. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that was that was where you got your
Speaker 1: news back then. Yeah, you would watch the evening news.
Speaker 1: It's very strange to think about now with the with
Speaker 1: the up to the minute news cycle. So oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I know how much more innocent things were back then. Um,
Speaker 1: So remove yourself from the benefit of hindsight or the
Speaker 1: benefit of Dan Rather's insight, and put yourself in the
Speaker 1: shoes of the people in Chicago. Right, these are five
Speaker 1: These are seven different deaths. Um, I think from five
Speaker 1: different townships in the greater Chicago area, including Chicago. Paula Prince,
Speaker 1: the last person to die, lived in Chicago. These people
Speaker 1: aren't talking. These people have no idea what's going on.
Speaker 1: It's just that there were five, seven separate, baffling deaths.
Speaker 1: If you want to if you were people to be dead,
Speaker 1: yeah I do. That's good. My voices aren't working though. Um.
Speaker 1: It just so happens that the ambulance, the paramedics that
Speaker 1: showed up to attend to marry Mary Anne Kellerman, the
Speaker 1: first girl to die. Um, they were just logging everything
Speaker 1: because it was such a baffling thing, and they logged
Speaker 1: her tile and all, yeah logged isn't collected, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: took it as evidence to maybe look into who knows,
Speaker 1: But they took the extra shrink tile and all that
Speaker 1: she had taken, not thinking anything of it, but just
Speaker 1: basically throwing anything at the wall to see what stopped. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure the dad was like, you know, she went in,
Speaker 1: took some tile and on and dropped dead. So it
Speaker 1: probably made sense even though it's just tail and all
Speaker 1: to say like, well, hey, let's at least take this
Speaker 1: in yes, and that title and all that, right, you know,
Speaker 1: because that bottle of tile and all made its way
Speaker 1: into the hands uh of a medical examiner um whose
Speaker 1: name was Safer and Michael Schaefer tested the tile in
Speaker 1: all and it was rather surprised to find that some
Speaker 1: of the capsules had not tile in all in it,
Speaker 1: but sixty five milligrams of potassium cyanide. And it takes
Speaker 1: about fifty milligrams to kill a healthy adult. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean some of them. I don't think they were all
Speaker 1: exactly the same, but some of them had been completely
Speaker 1: emptied of any staminafin and completely filled with cyanide. With cyanide, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was someone intent on for
Speaker 1: sure killing people. Yes, because cyanide is no joke. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a really really small molecule um and it
Speaker 1: normally attaches to metals outside of the body, which is
Speaker 1: why you have or minerals, I guess, which is why
Speaker 1: you have potassium cyanide um when it goes into the
Speaker 1: body when you ingest it, however you ingested, whether it's
Speaker 1: from a tile in all capsule or breathing cyanide gas
Speaker 1: like they used to use to execute people with, Like
Speaker 1: they stopped using it for executions because it was such
Speaker 1: a brutal death. Yeah, it's a very cruel, painful way
Speaker 1: to die. Um in the body. It detaches from its
Speaker 1: its mineral or metal, and it attaches to a protein
Speaker 1: in the body called um cytochrome c oxidase, which doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like could be a big problem, but it turns
Speaker 1: out that that's about the worst protein that cyanide could
Speaker 1: attach itself too, because we really need cytochrome c oxidase
Speaker 1: to breathe. Yeah, basically it I mean, this sounds like
Speaker 1: such a cruel thing because it's just rapid cell death
Speaker 1: and it's not like your throat closes up and you
Speaker 1: can't breathe, like you're inhaling oxygen and you you are
Speaker 1: technically taking breaths, but the oxygen is not getting in
Speaker 1: the cells. No, it's not because that c or that
Speaker 1: cytochrome c oxidase is what helps transport the oxygen and
Speaker 1: get and allows the oxygen to be used for energy.
Speaker 1: So if the potassium is clinging to it, the oxygen,
Speaker 1: can't it just stays in the bloodstream and it doesn't
Speaker 1: get used by the cells. And since your central nervous
Speaker 1: system is the most oxygen hungry system in your entire body,
Speaker 1: it starts to shut down first. And when your brain
Speaker 1: and your spinal cords starts shutting down, all sorts of
Speaker 1: things happen. Your long start shutting down. Your heart, God
Speaker 1: bless it keeps beating for minutes after the rest of
Speaker 1: your body is shut down, so you're not technically dead.
Speaker 1: And they're not sure exactly how long the pain and
Speaker 1: excruciation of dying from cyanide lasts, but they think you're
Speaker 1: probably conscious in a way and freaked out for about
Speaker 1: a minute at least, and your heart may continue beating
Speaker 1: for three or four minutes after that. So it's not
Speaker 1: a pleasant death at all. No. I mean, you're you're
Speaker 1: gasping for air, You're breathing in air, and nothing's happening.
Speaker 1: Like I said, um Stanley Janice, he was foaming at
Speaker 1: the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head
Speaker 1: in front of his family. It's just like it's awful,
Speaker 1: like writhing on the floor gasping for air. You're breathing,
Speaker 1: but it's not doing anything. It's just I can't imagine
Speaker 1: anything more horrifying, right, Because your central nervous system has
Speaker 1: kind of fallen out of its um out of controller rhythm.
Speaker 1: Convulsions are usually a hallmark of cyanide poisoning. And then
Speaker 1: you turn bright red at the end of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a skin a chair, you read, they said, Because when
Speaker 1: your body has gotten rid of oxygen to your cells
Speaker 1: and the oxygen becomes depleted, um, your your skin kind
Speaker 1: of turns like a rusty brownish red. But because it
Speaker 1: can unload that oxygen when you're dead, it stays a
Speaker 1: bright red and your skin turns bright red. And then
Speaker 1: the other real telltale sign is your breath will smell
Speaker 1: a bit like almonds. Yeah, I mean not a bit.
Speaker 1: I mean these bottles supposedly were really pungent with bitter almond,
Speaker 1: And unless you know what that means, then you're probably
Speaker 1: not clued in, you know, Like I wouldn't. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have known. So I opened a bottle of Thailand on
Speaker 1: it smelled like better almen. I'd probably be like, huh, right,
Speaker 1: it's a nice smell. Actually, yeah, I like this tail
Speaker 1: and all. Yeah, I guess they have a new almond flavor. So,
Speaker 1: Michael Schaefer, that medical examiner has just realized that this
Speaker 1: this little girl has been poisoned, but he he knows
Speaker 1: nothing about these other deaths. There's nothing like that. Um
Speaker 1: it's not entirely clear how everything became connected or who
Speaker 1: connected it. But what I find just particularly astonishing is
Speaker 1: that within just a few hours, by that evening, by
Speaker 1: the evening of September twenty nine, people were saying, there's
Speaker 1: something up with the Thailand all in these mysterious deaths
Speaker 1: that have been going on all around Chicago. Yeah and not.
Speaker 1: I mean, we'll get into the dragnet they cast. But
Speaker 1: within a few days they had kind of solved everything.
Speaker 1: But who did it and how it may have happened?
Speaker 1: Who done it? Who done it? Um? So, yeah, very
Speaker 1: quickly they figured out the tailand on. There are a
Speaker 1: couple of different stories, um on, Like you said, on
Speaker 1: who who was the first person to point this out? Um?
Speaker 1: One story is that a reporter for the City News
Speaker 1: Bureau in Chicago was doing the reporter thing and doing
Speaker 1: some deep diving and investigating and called up a deputy
Speaker 1: corner and said, hey, I think this is what's happening.
Speaker 1: They told the police. Another story is that too, people
Speaker 1: who didn't know each other kind of came together independently
Speaker 1: to um let people know. One was a fire captain
Speaker 1: name uh, Philip Capitelli. I knew it. I knew you
Speaker 1: were going to do that. There was like a chance,
Speaker 1: you know why, because we got a lot of support
Speaker 1: from people that wrote in saying I'm Italian and I
Speaker 1: love it. Keep doing it. And only one guy who
Speaker 1: hated it. But ironically it was fire captain Philip Capitelli
Speaker 1: and said no, so he uh here here was his deal.
Speaker 1: His um. His mother in law was friends with Mary Kellerman,
Speaker 1: the victim's mother. Yeah, the first of the little girl,
Speaker 1: and she said, hey, would you mind looking into this
Speaker 1: because I'm friends with this little girl's mom and it's
Speaker 1: weird that she dropped at it. And he's a fire
Speaker 1: captain and they're all connected to you know, the police,
Speaker 1: into the medical community. Everybody knows you want something done,
Speaker 1: ask a fire captain, um, because they'll bust into the
Speaker 1: room with an ax get everybody's attention. UM. So he's
Speaker 1: he's investigating. And then there's this, uh there's a nurse
Speaker 1: named Helen Jensen and she i don't. Do you know
Speaker 1: why she was so into this case was just no, no, no.
Speaker 1: She was the public health nurse for Cook County, I believe. Okay,
Speaker 1: so she had an official designation to investigate. Yes, but
Speaker 1: unfortunately no one would listen to her because this is
Speaker 1: nine two and she was a nurse. Even though she
Speaker 1: was like a public health director, she was still a
Speaker 1: nurse and people wouldn't listen to her. And she recalled
Speaker 1: in an oral history I read about this that she
Speaker 1: was stomping her feet out of frustration, saying like, there's
Speaker 1: something wrong with the tail and all, like the tail
Speaker 1: and all is behind all this, and people wouldn't listen
Speaker 1: to her. Supposedly, she and Philip got together and um
Speaker 1: joined forces and I guess we're able to convince everybody
Speaker 1: that no, there's something wrong with the with the taile
Speaker 1: and all. And by this time people started talking and
Speaker 1: you know, the the idea that Michael Shaffer had identified
Speaker 1: tail and all. I don't know if it was the
Speaker 1: same day or the day after something like that, but
Speaker 1: all this is within a span of thirty six forty
Speaker 1: eight hours. Top said, all of this is going on,
Speaker 1: that the dots are being connected, right, so uh, then
Speaker 1: what follows is um, Cook County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, Dr.
Speaker 1: Edmund Donohue holds a pressor. I've either watched this one
Speaker 1: or one of the other ones. Like I remember specifically
Speaker 1: seeing this press conference on the news. Probably saw Jane Burns.
Speaker 1: That would have been the nationwide one, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I was like, how would that have been nationwide?
Speaker 1: And then I looked it up. W g N was
Speaker 1: a superstation starting in night. Oh you know it, man,
Speaker 1: So everybody saw it because wg N could broadcast nationwide.
Speaker 1: By I watched Cubs games a kid just because it
Speaker 1: was on. That was it like that embraced games were
Speaker 1: all you can So Dr Donohue UM has a pressor,
Speaker 1: a local pressor. Um, of course there is panic initially, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he scares the s out of everybody because he comes
Speaker 1: out of nowhere and says stop taking the taile and all,
Speaker 1: oh yeah sure, and so anyone. I mean, imagine how
Speaker 1: many people in Chicago had taken time and all within
Speaker 1: two hours of that press conference and are thinking like
Speaker 1: should I go to the hospital? Right, And as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, Um, the poison control lines for basically
Speaker 1: every in every city where somebody saw this started to
Speaker 1: light up right after that, and people are like, I
Speaker 1: just took tile in all, Am I okay? Or gave
Speaker 1: my kid? Can you imagine? And the the what came
Speaker 1: to be the pat response was if you are still
Speaker 1: standing and talking to us, you're probably okay, which is
Speaker 1: sort of a double edged sword, right, It's like, don't worry,
Speaker 1: you die super fast kind of so just relax. So
Speaker 1: just hold the line for five minutes and then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna come back and check on you. And if you're
Speaker 1: still talking, you're fine. Oh man, um alright. So then
Speaker 1: the Chicago Mayor's office gets involved, Like you said, Mayor
Speaker 1: Jane Byrne, she gets says, you know, print a bunch
Speaker 1: of flyers, print them in a bunch of languages, maybe
Speaker 1: on Golden Rod and corn flower blue. Sure, why not
Speaker 1: really catch people's attention? Uh that she had police drive
Speaker 1: through um with loud speakers on their car, literally saying like,
Speaker 1: don't take tile in all, re enacting that scene from
Speaker 1: The Blues Brothers. Whether I was thinking slacker and that's funny,
Speaker 1: two different movies. But do you remember they're driving through
Speaker 1: in the police car with the loudspeaker talking about their
Speaker 1: their show. Yeah, same as Slacker. I don't remember. I
Speaker 1: don't I guess I didn't make it to the end
Speaker 1: of Slacker either. It was in the middle ish. There
Speaker 1: was no Dazed in confused huh oh, just different movies. Um,
Speaker 1: so they're they're posting flyers, cops are driving around blaring
Speaker 1: it through neighborhoods uh. And then she has a press conference,
Speaker 1: she has all Thailand all removed from the Chicago area.
Speaker 1: She calls for it. Well, sure she didn't go around
Speaker 1: with her her basket, right, No, I'm not a hundred
Speaker 1: percent clear if she was actually able to demand that
Speaker 1: the Thailand all be removed. I think she was more warning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I doubt if there was any law she
Speaker 1: could invoke. I wonder though, it seems I would imagine
Speaker 1: that's you know, we'll talk about that later. So, um,
Speaker 1: the TV and the radio. You know, obviously everyone picks
Speaker 1: us up, not just in Chicago or the United States.
Speaker 1: It goes worldwide, and so you know there's people in
Speaker 1: Europe and Asia pulling Thailand all off the shelves. So
Speaker 1: this is a big deal, And there was a lot
Speaker 1: of attention lavished on this. There was a poll that
Speaker 1: was taken the next month in October that found that
Speaker 1: this was in cities all over the country, that found
Speaker 1: that respondents were aware of this thail and all poisoning story.
Speaker 1: Some some press agency like a news clipping service said
Speaker 1: that it's the number of the number of stories dedicated
Speaker 1: to it were second only to the number of stories
Speaker 1: dedicated to the assassination of JFK. That's how big this
Speaker 1: story became overnight. And again one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: is because everybody took Thailand all for everything, all the time.
Speaker 1: That's just what you did. It was just something everyone took,
Speaker 1: and that same product was now killing people. So the
Speaker 1: most chilling part of all this to me, and this
Speaker 1: is all chilling, uh, maybe the copycat stuff because almost immediately,
Speaker 1: UM copycat incidences started popping up all over the country.
Speaker 1: Um there were two d seventy reports of product tampering
Speaker 1: in the month after thirty six were quote hardcore true tamperings.
Speaker 1: And that's what's the most chilling to me, is like
Speaker 1: there were that many people, at least thirty six, let's
Speaker 1: go on the low end, thirty six people across the
Speaker 1: country that wanted to kill people and just saw an
Speaker 1: idea and I'm like, oh, that's what I'll do now.
Speaker 1: I should have thought of that myself. I mean that's scary, man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's what's scary but also infuriating is that there's such
Speaker 1: terrible self starters that they had to be a copycat
Speaker 1: murderer in that, you know what I'm saying, Like, it's
Speaker 1: bad enough that they're trying to kill somebody, randomly kill somebody,
Speaker 1: anonymously kill somebody. They didn't even think of it themselves
Speaker 1: as a pathetic murderer right there, it's pretty pathetic. Put
Speaker 1: my foot down. Exceedrian extra strength Excedrian capsules UM were
Speaker 1: found poison with mercuric chloride uh, and that almost killed
Speaker 1: a man in Colorado. His name was William Sinkovich and
Speaker 1: he got he had liberal and kidney failure, but he
Speaker 1: did survive. Uh. This one gets me so more than
Speaker 1: one person thought, Oh, well, you know people spray and
Speaker 1: like drop things in their eyes and nose, I'll put
Speaker 1: acid in there. So tampered sin X and tampered vizine
Speaker 1: both turned up after they had burned people with acid.
Speaker 1: Chemical burn up your nose. Unbelievable. Yeah, that's a bad one.
Speaker 1: So food was also on the list of things being
Speaker 1: tampered with um orange juice, chocolate milk. Very high profile
Speaker 1: incident with ballpark hot dogs. They pulled a million pounds
Speaker 1: of wieners off the shelves and ran them through a
Speaker 1: metal detector. Yeah, because this was a scare all of
Speaker 1: you know, the old urban legend of razor blades and
Speaker 1: Halloween candy. I don't Did they actually find pins and
Speaker 1: needles and things for sure? Yes? Okay, because I thought
Speaker 1: that had literally never happened. It hadn't. It was an
Speaker 1: urban legend that became true. But nothing in in the wieners. No,
Speaker 1: some boys I think in Detroit claimed to have found
Speaker 1: razor blades in their ballpark wieners, and like you said,
Speaker 1: a million pounds were recalled and then the boys were like, wow,
Speaker 1: we were just kidding. Yeah. And ballpark, well we'll talk
Speaker 1: about how ballpark was treated after that. But they were
Speaker 1: put on shoulders and carried around for how great they
Speaker 1: handled everything. Uh, And you know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of hoaxes. There were a lot of UM tips called
Speaker 1: in about other tampering and it had to really like
Speaker 1: it if the purpose of this was to induce panic
Speaker 1: and fear and terror. Then it absolutely worked, absolutely should
Speaker 1: be taken another break, I think. So, man, we're gonna
Speaker 1: come back and talk about the investigation. Stop stop, okay,
Speaker 1: chuck um. I also want to point this out Time magazine.
Speaker 1: You know how I'm like super into uh like going
Speaker 1: back and reading contemporary news articles about an event this one.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all over the place. But Time wrote
Speaker 1: about the copycat incidents back in two and they said
Speaker 1: that the copycats were trying to quote emulate their demonic hero.
Speaker 1: There's still unknown poisoner their demonic hero. That's what the
Speaker 1: journalists from Time decided to go with. That's funny, I guess.
Speaker 1: I mean that seems like a very two thousand nineteen
Speaker 1: thing to write. That's what I'm saying. I feel like
Speaker 1: we're reverting back too right now, I guess. So after
Speaker 1: that intro of yours, I'm now convinced. So everybody's freaked
Speaker 1: out there. There are whole towns that canceled Halloween because
Speaker 1: remember this happened like a month before Halloween, and everyone
Speaker 1: was very scared about candy tampering because of the urban legend.
Speaker 1: In some places that turned out to be true, a
Speaker 1: self fulfilling prophecy. There are all these hoaxes, there are
Speaker 1: all these actual true product tamperings, copycats. People were freaked
Speaker 1: out and the cops needed to do something. And initially
Speaker 1: these seven different deaths in five different towns in the
Speaker 1: Chicago area, we're being treated as five different investigations. Um,
Speaker 1: that didn't last for very long. Within two days, by Friday,
Speaker 1: by the time Mayor Burne holds her press conference on
Speaker 1: w g n UM, what came to be called the
Speaker 1: Thailand All Task Force was formed. All five those investigations
Speaker 1: got folded into not just local investigations, the FBI, the
Speaker 1: Illinois State Police, UM, FDA of course, Yeah, the FDA
Speaker 1: was involved that, and then the whole thing was led
Speaker 1: by the Illinois District Attorney's office, who was the nominal
Speaker 1: head of the investigation. Yeah. So they figured out pretty
Speaker 1: quickly that um, you know, like I said earlier, they
Speaker 1: cast their drag net. They come up with about a
Speaker 1: fifty mile radius of where all this stuff was bought
Speaker 1: and sold, and go investigate drug store after drug store,
Speaker 1: and they did find more more bad thaile in all that,
Speaker 1: I'm still sitting on the shelves thankfully. Yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't want to skim past that. They found more Thilent,
Speaker 1: all waiting to be bought, that's right, like just sitting
Speaker 1: there like, hey, come by me. Within two days of
Speaker 1: of these first deaths, these first murders that we keep
Speaker 1: calling them deaths, these were murders, that's right. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they name their their case there's they're always code names
Speaker 1: for all these cases. This one ranks pretty low in
Speaker 1: my opinion. Timers T Y m U R S short
Speaker 1: obviously for Tilent all murders. At the very least, the
Speaker 1: s should have been a Z timers. Yeah, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: give it a little flavor. Agreed. Uh. So the cops
Speaker 1: are um there. There was some confusion about how this
Speaker 1: went down because they're trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: did it happened at the factory, did it happen after
Speaker 1: the factory? What's the supply chain? Like, well, that's that's huge,
Speaker 1: it's like the crux of the investigent. Yeah, absolutely, Where
Speaker 1: did the tainting occur? Yeah, So they found out that
Speaker 1: all of the containers were from Lot number MC, which
Speaker 1: was pushed out in August. Again, this is the end
Speaker 1: of September. Uh, in states east, all states east of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi, plus the Dakotas, Nebraska, in a bit of Wyoming.
Speaker 1: Just just to touch a Wyoming for flavor. That's right,
Speaker 1: that mesquite flavor. Uh. However, they were from different production
Speaker 1: plants and they were sold in different drug stores, which
Speaker 1: is weird. It's tough to wrap your head around that
Speaker 1: because it's the same lot, but they came from different plants.
Speaker 1: And it turns out Thailand all has also a really
Speaker 1: weird convoluted distribution network. I think that's every company. I
Speaker 1: have a friend that works in supply chain management and
Speaker 1: I was like, huh, so supposedly they'll they'll take boxes
Speaker 1: and open them up and repackage them in smaller boxes.
Speaker 1: And it happens at like different different companies at different
Speaker 1: points around the country. It's pretty complicated from from a
Speaker 1: product from factory to your mouth, like what happens to
Speaker 1: kind of everything. Um, I would think simplicity would be
Speaker 1: safer much, you know, probably not cheaper, though you're probably right.
Speaker 1: So what they finally figured out was, here's what we
Speaker 1: think happened is this stuff was not tainted at the factory.
Speaker 1: This stuff was not tainted in the supply chain, but
Speaker 1: this stuff was tainted, it from the store and then
Speaker 1: returned back to the store because these pills were sold
Speaker 1: in different stores, which is a big one, because not
Speaker 1: only could it have been like part of the factory,
Speaker 1: it could have been one of the local stores distribution
Speaker 1: centers where there was somebody messing with it. But since
Speaker 1: they were sold in Jewel food stores and Walgreens and
Speaker 1: other places too around the Chicago area, that didn't make
Speaker 1: any sense. It couldn't have just been like the jewel
Speaker 1: distribution center. And also because they were coming from different
Speaker 1: production plants, it really couldn't have been the production plant
Speaker 1: or the factory where it came from. It had to be,
Speaker 1: like you said, happening at the stores. Yeah, And there
Speaker 1: were a lot of initial theories, you know. Was it
Speaker 1: someone who like a former disgruntled employee of Johnson and Johnson?
Speaker 1: Was it someone uh? Was it it just a serial
Speaker 1: killer who just picked tail on all and wanted to
Speaker 1: randomly kill people? Right? And this is that's weird, that's
Speaker 1: a weird idea at the time, like now it just
Speaker 1: seems normal, like yeah, probably, but this but this was
Speaker 1: two years before the Sanya Cidro McDonald's massacre, which is
Speaker 1: one of the very one of the next random killings
Speaker 1: of people who just happened to be in the wrong
Speaker 1: place at the wrong time. This was kind of the
Speaker 1: first of that, but it was still so new and remote.
Speaker 1: An alien that that's that didn't seem like a realistic
Speaker 1: idea at the time. Yeah, some of the other ideas
Speaker 1: they thought, um, maybe this was someone that was targeting
Speaker 1: a specific person or people and then randomly poisoned other
Speaker 1: people to cover their tracks. One of the weird um
Speaker 1: one of the weird theories that came out later after
Speaker 1: an spoiler alert, we now have tamper proof medicines. Sure
Speaker 1: everyone's noticed. It was one theory that it was someone
Speaker 1: who had a financial steak and tamper proof technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw something like that too. I don't think there
Speaker 1: was ever a ton of credence put into that one,
Speaker 1: But the point is there were a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: they were flying blind basically because it was just such
Speaker 1: an unexpected, odd, random thing that we're basically coming up
Speaker 1: with kind of any idea they could think of. But
Speaker 1: the one that the cops settled on and the one
Speaker 1: that Johnson and Johnson also settled on too, because they
Speaker 1: went back and tested samples from Lot MC and found
Speaker 1: that there was no no, there's no taining of the
Speaker 1: of the lot that there's their samples were pure. So
Speaker 1: the cops and Johnson and Johnson both decided they settled
Speaker 1: on what's called the mad poisoner theory. That somebody went
Speaker 1: around this fifty mile radius in in the Chicago area
Speaker 1: UM in about seven hours is what the cops calculated.
Speaker 1: It would have taken either bought a bunch of tile
Speaker 1: in all and then took it back to their house
Speaker 1: and poisoned it, repackaged it and then drove around and
Speaker 1: redistributed it, or went from store to store, went in,
Speaker 1: bought some tile and all, took it out to the car,
Speaker 1: poisoned it, and then repackaged it and brought it back in. UM.
Speaker 1: But that it was local and it was specific to Chicago.
Speaker 1: That was the mad poisoner theory. And again why still
Speaker 1: no one has any idea why. Um. It could have
Speaker 1: been random, they could have been targeting somebody. It could
Speaker 1: have been a disgruntal Johnson and Johnson employee. But the
Speaker 1: main theory for the Thaile and all killings in Chicago
Speaker 1: is the mad poison er theory. Yeah, and do you
Speaker 1: know how they tested that the rest of that lot.
Speaker 1: They got Detective John Pinky McFarland, who had the best
Speaker 1: drug pinky and all of Illinois. And he went around
Speaker 1: and dipped that pinky in, touched it to his tongue.
Speaker 1: He said, it's good. He's like, I can't feel my
Speaker 1: face right now. The guy's a legend. Yeah, he's his
Speaker 1: pinky is his pinky ring is so significant and barely
Speaker 1: lift his finger. He only lifts to test drugs. I
Speaker 1: told you we'd find some jokes. So by mid October,
Speaker 1: this is sort of the final bit of part one here. Um,
Speaker 1: there was another bottle that people that they found another
Speaker 1: tainted bottle that was purchased on September twenty nine, so
Speaker 1: it fit the bill. And it was a woman who
Speaker 1: uh was feeling bad and went to go get that
Speaker 1: tail in all and her sister was like, no, I've
Speaker 1: got some buffering right here, just go ahead and take that.
Speaker 1: And the lady presumably said, well, I really prefer see
Speaker 1: a benefit, but I guess I'll take an aspirin. So yeah,
Speaker 1: her sister in law saved her by offering her buffering instead.
Speaker 1: She was steps away from dropping dead at a family gathering. Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: That is a good place to stop. Huh. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that's part one of the Thailand All Murders or Timer's
Speaker 1: with an S, and we're gonna come back with part
Speaker 1: two after this. If you want to get in touch
Speaker 1: with this in the meantime, you can go on to
Speaker 1: stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our
Speaker 1: social links, or you can send us a good old
Speaker 1: fashioned email version to stuff podcast at i heeart radio
Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H