And there will be no time to take counter measures.”Ī shaken Kopich brought the letter to his supervisor, who took it to the company’s security office, federal records show. “Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. “And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill,” he wrote. James Lewis was convicted of attempted extortion for sending this letter to Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, demanding $1 million to 'stop the killing.' (The National Archives) It would be easy enough to kill again, the writer said, given he had spent less than $50 so far on the poisonings. Penned in neat capital letters on a single sheet of lined legal paper, the message promised to “stop the killing” if Johnson & Johnson wired $1 million to a Chicago-based bank account. No one knew what the future held.Īs Kopich sifted through the mail, most of it customer complaints or requests for free samples, he picked up an envelope addressed to “Johnson & Johnson.” He opened it and read the letter inside. The McNeil campus was crawling with police, FBI and Food and Drug Administration agents questioning employees about the poisonings.

The public no longer trusted the country’s top-selling pain reliever, the company had recalled all Tylenol capsules and the manufacturing plant had been shut down indefinitely. Things were already tense in the office because of the murders. It was his job to sort through the mail addressed generically to McNeil and figure out where to forward it. John Kopich, then a 27-year-old clerk looking to work his way up the corporate ladder, sat down at his desk that morning and dug into a pile of letters. 6, 1982, after a brief stop at the headquarters of Johnson & Johnson, its parent company in New Brunswick, N.J. It arrived at the McNeil Pharmaceuticals mailroom on Oct. With seven people dead and the country panicking over the possibility of additional poisonings, a letter began making its way from Manhattan to Tylenol’s manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

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