Communications Question

Instructions Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol Murders has been said to be one of the best responses to a crisis of all time by a business. After reading Chapter Three, the supplemental articles,  listening to the podcasts, and watching the videos, respond to the following in a three – four page paper.  The paper should be double spaced, one inch margins, and should include a title page and reference page (not included in the three to four pages).  Please use MLA format. Things to cover in the paper: Discuss the six components of business communication.

(1) Discuss the purpose for communication.

(2) Who was the audience that received the communication?

(3) What was the message sent?

(4) Who ultimately communicated the message to the audience?

(5) What feedback did the company receive? and

(6) What was the response to the feedback? What communication barriers did the company face when attempting to send the message?  How would this be different today? Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol Murders has been hailed as one of the best of all time. Critique how you think J&J used the components of business communication (good and bad) to survive the crisis.  Would they still be able to do so today? Include a summary of your overall thoughts of the case.-

podcasts :

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-unsealed-the-ty…

https://casefilepodcast.com/case-118-the-chicago-t…

https://www.stitcher.com/show/stranger-than-podcas…

youtube:

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+mysterious+poi…

REAL CRIME
SEPTEMBER 27, 2018
The Tylenol Murders: Is It Too
Late to Solve the Famous
Cold Case?
JAMIE BARTOSCH
Tainted Tylenol capsules, laced with cyanide, lay at right beside the pure
capsules, in the medical examiner’s office in Cook County, Illinois.
Before she takes any type of medication, Monica Janus makes the sign of the cross. And she never takes
Tylenol.
That’s because 36 years ago, three members of Janus’s family died suddenly after taking Tylenol capsules,
which unbeknownst to them and the rest of the world at the time, had been filled with poison.
“I remember running to my mom saying, ‘Please don’t die!’ and we kneeled by the bed and were praying and
asking God to help our family. It was so scary,” Janus, who was 10 years old at the time, tells A&E Real Crime.
“I’m still scared.”
Someone had put cyanide inside Tylenol capsules, put them back in the bottles and randomly placed them on
store shelves across the Chicago area. Seven people, including a 12-year-old girl, unsuspectingly took the pills
and died.
The crime would forever change America. It gripped the nation in fear and led to changes that are part of life
today. It’s why there are tamper-proof seals on every medicine bottle and food product, sometimes in multiple
layers. It made easy-to-open medicine capsules obsolete, replaced by unbreakable caplets.
How the Tylenol Poisonings Affected Halloween
The crime even impacted Halloween. Ever since the Tylenol poisonings, parents have been urged to
examine their children’s trick-or-treat candy for anything suspicious.
It all began on September 29, 1982, when suburban Chicago seventh-grader Mary Kellerman took Tylenol for a
sore throat and collapsed to the floor. She died immediately and inexplicably. Hours later, in a neighboring suburb,
three healthy young members of the same family—Adam, Stanley and Theresa Janus —died the same way. So
did Chicago flight attendant Paula Prince; suburban mom Mary Reiner, who had just come home from the hospital
after giving birth to her fourth child; and Illinois Bell Phone Center employee Mary McFarland.
Officials quickly found the common denominator to these strange, sudden deaths: They had all just taken Tylenol.
Once the pills were identified as the culprit and it was discovered that they were all laced with cyanide, extreme
measures were taken to prevent people from taking Tylenol.
Because it was the pre-Internet era, suburban Chicago police drove along residential streets using bullhorns to
warn people, “Don’t take Tylenol!” In some places, they went door-to-door with bags, collecting bottles.
Announcements were made on school intercoms and on the evening TV news.
The Tylenol Recall of 1982
As more than 140 police and FBI investigators hunted for the killer, Tylenol’s parent company Johnson & Johnson
did something unprecedented at the time: It helped issue warnings and immediately recalled all 31 million bottles
of its product off store shelves nationwide. It cost the company an estimated $100 million. The massive product
recall, referred to as “the recall that started them all,” continues to be hailed as an example of good corporate
citizenship—and public relations. The Tylenol brand, initially considered doomed, returned to being the top-selling
pain reliever within two months.
Yet, the killer was never found. The Tylenol poisonings remain one of the nation’s most notorious unsolved
murder mysteries.
The Latest Developments in the Tylenol Poisonings
There hasn’t been much new with the investigation, at least publicly, in more than a decade. Many witnesses and
suspects are in their 70s now, or have passed away. Detectives who worked on the case have retired.
Is time running out to solve this crime? Did someone get away with a mass murder?
Police remain tight-lipped about the case, as they’ve been all along. A small task force of police from around the
Chicago area still works on the complex, cold case, but refuses to discuss their meeting frequency or latest work.
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Police Sgt. Scott Winkelman, a longtime task-force member, would only say that the
investigation remains active and that he believes the case is still solvable. After all, his department just cracked a
45-year-old cold case that led to the July 2018 first-degree murder conviction of Donnie Rudd, 76, in the death of
his teenage wife Noreen in 1973. On September 13, 2018, Rudd was sentenced to 75 to 150 years in prison.
“The Tylenol case is still open, and we continue to hold out hope that we will make an arrest and bring justice for
the victims and their families,” Winkelman says.
Victims’ Family Wait for Answers
Surviving family members hope that day comes as well.
Monica Janus, niece of victims Adam, Stanley and Theresa Janus, says her family still struggles with the fact that
the person who committed this crime was never caught. Her grandparents, who have since passed away, never
got over their loss.
“Literally, throughout their whole life, all they did was cry every day—because they never knew who did it,” she
says. “Grandma always wanted answers, and there were no answers.”
Monica grew up fearing her family members could die suddenly. She still has vivid memories of relatives
hysterically weeping over the caskets at the funeral, which was crawling with FBI agents and media. But she’s
now ready to forgive the culprit who did this, saying “it’s time.” Sometimes, she even thinks it might have all
happened for a reason. “Maybe their deaths saved people all over the planet by putting safety seals on
everything,” she says.
Joseph Janus, Monica’s father, who lost two of his brothers to the poisonings, says he is still traumatized from
seeing his brother, Stanley, grab his chest and fall to the floor. Foam oozed from his mouth and his eyes rolled to
the back of his head. “That will never go away,” Joseph Janus says. “I still see that all the time in my mind.”
His brothers’ murders challenged his faith in God and sent him into a deep depression. Joseph says he tried to
move on, but still misses his brothers and dreams about them often. In one recent dream, everyone involved in
the Tylenol case was in a room, and two men in black suits and glasses were laughing about how they got away
with murder. “I don’t think they’re ever going to find out who did it—unless somebody slips,” Joseph says. “It’s
never too late.”
Possible Suspects
Joseph believes the killer was someone who wanted to bring down America with some type of terrorist act, not
unlike the anthrax scare that happened years later, following 9/11. Police examined that possibility, plus dozens of
other possible motives—from the philosophical (Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s rage against technology), to the
financial (companies that manufacture safety seals).
Lewis, who now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was convicted of trying to extort money from Johnson &
Johnson a few days after the poisonings, demanding $1 million “to stop the killings.” Lewis’s past is filled with
arrests and strange behavior, but he steadfastly maintains his innocence.
However, many investigators who have worked on the case have had their eyes on one man all along:
James W. Lewis. On his website, Lewis writes: “The Lewis’s were in New York and were NOT in Chicago
during murders! END OF DISCUSSION! It was therefore impossible for Lewis to have committed the
Tylenol Murders! All discussions beyond this point are irresponsible, idle speculation.”
Michelle Rosen, daughter of victim Mary Reiner, doubts Lewis is responsible. Rosen has dedicated years of
her life to her own in-depth investigation of the crime. She disagrees with the police’s “lone madman”
theory, concluding from her research that the tampering occurred sometime after manufacturing, but before
the product was stocked on store shelves.
Rosen has attempted, unsuccessfully, to get police to unseal and make public some of the investigation’s
documents. She believes it isn’t too late to solve the crime.
“I will never stop investigating until there are actually answers,” she says. “Time will never run out, so long
as there are willing bodies to explore beyond this dead end.” She believes if the case is looked at from a
different angle, there’s potential to solve it. “This old, dusty avenue has returned no evidence or answers,”
she says.
As of 2009, Johnson & Johnson was offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and
conviction. Company officials did not respond to requests about whether that reward money is still being
Get Updates
How the Tylenol murders of 1982 changed the way we consume
medication
Sep 29, 2014 11:39 AM EST
Early on the morning of Sept. 29, 1982, a tragic, medical mystery began with a sore throat and a runny nose. It was then that Mary
Kellerman, a 12-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, told her mother and father about her symptoms. They gave
her one extra-strength Tylenol capsule that, unbeknownst to them, was laced with the highly poisonous potassium cyanide. Mary was
dead by 7 a.m. Within a week, her death would panic the entire nation. And only months later, it changed the way we purchase and
consume over-the-counter medications.
That same day, a 27-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, died of what was initially thought to be a
massive heart attack but turned out to be cyanide poisoning as well. His brother and sister-in-law, Stanley, 25, and Theresa, 19, of
Lisle, Illinois, rushed to his home to console their loved ones. Both experienced throbbing headaches, a not uncommon response to a
death in the family and each took a Tylenol extra-strength capsule or two from the same bottle Adam had used earlier in the day.
Stanley died that very day and Theresa died two days later.
Over the next few days, three more strange deaths occurred: 35-year-old Mary McFarland of
Elmhurst, Illinois, 35-year-old Paula Prince of Chicago, and 27-year-old Mary Weiner of Winfield,
Illinois. All of them, it turned out, took Tylenol shortly before they died.
It was at this point, early October of 1982, that investigators made the connection between the
poisoning deaths and Tylenol, the best-selling, non-prescription pain reliever sold in the United
States at that time. The gelatin-based capsules were especially popular because they were slick
and easy to swallow. Unfortunately, each victim swallowed a Tylenol capsule laced with A lethal
dose of cyanide.
McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of the health care giant, Johnson & Johnson,
manufactured Tylenol. To its credit, the company took an active role with the media in issuing
mass warning communications and immediately called for a massive recall of the more than 31
million bottles of Tylenol in circulation. Tainted capsules were discovered in early October in a
As a result of the crime, makers of Tylenol
developed new product protection methods.
Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty
Images
few other grocery stores and drug stores in the Chicago area, but, fortunately, they had not yet
been sold or consumed. McNeill and Johnson & Johnson offered replacement capsules to those
who turned in pills already purchased and a reward for anyone with information leading to the
apprehension of the individual or people involved in these random murders.
One man, James Lewis, claiming to be the Tylenol killer wrote a “ransom” letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million in
exchange for stopping the poisonings. After a lengthy cat and mouse game, police and federal investigators determined that Lewis
lived in New York and had no demonstrable links to the Chicago events. That said, he was charged with extortion and sentenced to 20
years in prison. He was released in 1995 after serving only 13 years.
Other “copy-cat” poisonings, involving Tylenol and other over-the-counter medications, cropped up again in the 1980s and early 1990s
but these events were never as dramatic or as deadly as the 1982 Chicago-area deaths. Conspiracy theories about motives and
suspects for all these heinous acts continue to be bandied about on the Internet to this day.
Before the 1982 crisis, Tylenol controlled more than 35 percent of the over-the-counter pain reliever market; only a few weeks after
the murders, that number plummeted to less than 8 percent. The dire situation, both in terms of human life and business, made it
imperative that the Johnson & Johnson executives respond swiftly and authoritatively.
For example, Johnson & Johnson developed new product protection methods and ironclad pledges to do better in protecting their
consumers in the future. Working with FDA officials, they introduced a new tamper-proof packaging, which included foil seals and
other features that made it obvious to a consumer if foul play had transpired. These packaging protections soon became the industry
standard for all over-the-counter medications. The company also introduced price reductions and a new version of their pills — called
the “caplet” — a tablet coated with slick, easy-to-swallow gelatin but far harder to tamper with than the older capsules which could
be easily opened, laced with a contaminant, and then placed back in the older non-tamper-proof bottle.
Within a year, and after an investment of more than $100 million, Tylenol’s sales rebounded to its healthy past and it became, once
again, the nation’s favorite over-the-counter pain reliever. Critics who had prematurely announced the death of the brand Tylenol were
now praising the company’s handling of the matter. Indeed, the Johnson & Johnson recall became a classic case study in business
schools across the nation.
In 1983, the U.S. Congress passed what was called “the Tylenol bill,” making it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products. In
1989, the FDA established federal guidelines for manufacturers to make all such products tamper-proof.
Sadly, the tragedies that resulted from the Tylenol poisonings can never be undone. But their deaths did inspire a series of important
moves to make over-the-counter medications safer (albeit never 100 percent safe) f or the hundreds of millions of people who buy
them every year.
Editor’s note: This report has been updated to remove the reported amount of cyanide used.
By — Dr. Howard Markel
Dr. Howard Markel writes a monthly column for the PBS NewsHour, highlighting the anniversary of a momentous event that continues to shape modern medicine.
He is the director of the Center for the History of Medicine and the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of
Michigan.
NEWS
How The Tylenol Murders Fundamentally Changed
The Way We All Take Medicine
The Tylenol murders fundamentally changed the way we consume medication
KERA NEWS | JANUARY 5, 2018, 1:53 PM
PHOTOS PROVIDED / GRAPHIC BY MOLLY EVANS
Theresa Tarasewicz (the bride) and her husband, Stanely Janus (the groom) both died from Tylenol laced with cyanide in 1982.
In September of 1982, a 12-year-old girl and six adults in and around Chicago died suddenly and mysteriously.
Hundreds of investigators looked into the cases and discovered that all the victims had taken Tylenol laced
with cyanide. The Tylenol murders fundamentally changed the way we consume medication – among other
things, leading to tamper-proof pill and designs. And 35 years later, this murder mystery is still unsolved.
Sniffing cyanide
During the frantic search for clues in the fall of 1982, a public health nurse named Helen Jensen wonders out
loud if something was with the Tylenol pills everyone had taken. Some people think she’s crazy. But the
medical examiner Dr. Edmund Donoghue wonders possible — if there might be a poison-like cyanide inside
the Tylenol. So he calls a forensic investigator who is on the scene and ove phone asks him to smell the
bottles.
“The thing is we just happened to have somebody out there who was capable of smelling cyanide,” Donoghue
said. “Only about half population can smell cyanide, and it’s a genetically inherited trait. Classically, it’s
described as smelling like the odor of bitter almonds investigator said ‘Yeah, he could smell cyanide in the
Tylenol bottles.” Donoghue examined the bodies, looking to see if cyanide was in fact inside. He notices a few
things. Their skin is red. Also, they smell strange – like bitter almonds.
When Donoghue looks inside their stomachs, he sees the lining is all eroded, and it’s not acidic inside the
stomach anymore, which i strange. He puts all of these signs together: red skin, an almond smell, the eroded
and alkaline stomachs and comes up with a theory.
To him, it looks like cyanide poisoning.
Changing how we take medicine
After the deaths in Chicago, Johnson & Johnson did something that turned the drug industry on its head and
affects the way we take today: They changed the packaging and the actual pills. It sounds like a trivial change,
but the switch from capsules to caplets affected other drug companies, too. After Johnson & Johnson upgraded
the packaging and adopted caplets, the whole industry rebooted. Dr. Howard Markel, a University of Michigan
professor, specializes in the history of medicine. “I can’t think of a single scary event that affected so much
change in the physical presentation and the change and packaging of a medication other than the Tylenol
scare,” he said. This led to a change in the law. In 1983, the Federal Anti-Tampering Bill was introduced that
made it a felony to tamper with medicine Some people still call it the “Tylenol bill.”
The same bill made it an FDA requirement for medicines to be packaged with tamper-resistant technology —
things like blister packs wrap bottle covers and visible seals.
A dramatic turnaround
After the Tylenol deaths, many predicted the product would tank. Johnson & Johnson confounded the marketing experts. One
analyst called it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” Markel, the medical historian, calls it the biggest turnaround. “The Tylenol
story did change how most large corporations handle the recall issue,” Markel said. “When they found something was w was no
longer acceptable to turn your head the other way.” Johnson & Johnson ran such a skillful PR campaign that it’s become the
standard case study that business school students read for management. “I can’t think of a single scary event that affected so much
change in the physical presentation and the change and packaging of medication other than the Tylenol scare.”
Johnson & Johnson saved Tylenol in part by portraying itself as a victim — a victim of an attack from a dangerous “kook,” as some
investigators put it. The company, the police, the government and the media started spreading the message that this was done by a
madman. This is the message that was repeated every day for months — and years after. And like any message repeated over and
over, it stuck.
CHICAGO TYLENOL MURDERS
Home » Crime Library » Cold Cases » Chicago Tylenol Murders
On September 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary
Kellerman of Chicago, Illinois, suddenly passed
away after consuming an Extra-Strength Tylenol
capsule. Later that day, in a neighboring Chicago
suburb, a man named Adam Janus also
mysteriously died after taking the same
medication. Two members of his family, after also
ingesting the Tylenol, soon died as well. Three
more victims in the surrounding area suffered the
same fate, and it did not take long .
for the link between the deaths and Tylenol to be discovered by the authorities. This strange string
of deaths revealed that the Tylenol capsules had been laced with potassium cyanide.
The bottles that had been tampered with all came from different factories, yet the victims were all
within the Chicago area. This meant that the tampering had not occurred at the production level, but
rather within the stores themselves.
The manufacturer of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, immediately cut all production and
advertisements of Tylenol, and advised the public not to take any medicine with acetaminophen in
it. After the discovery that only capsules had been tampered with, the company offered to replace
all purchased capsules. Due to this incident, stricter standards to prevent pharmaceutical tampering
were soon implemented such as, tamper-resistant packaging and tampering with medications
becoming a federal crime. Another big change was going from a capsule to a solid caplet in the
shape of a capsule, as the capsules were found easier to tamper with without any noticeable signs
of tampering.
As the investigations began, Johnson & Johnson received several letters from James William Lewis
claiming that he was the one who tampered with the capsules, and demanded $1 million to stop.
Because he and his wife lived in New York at the time and had no ties to Chicago, police did not
find much credible evidence to suggest that Lewis was actually the culprit. He was, however,
arrested for extortion and served 13 years in prison (on top of additional multi-year sentences for
unrelated crimes). Other suspects arose, but police were not able to tie any of them to the Tylenol
murders.
After the 25th anniversary of the crime renewed
public interest in the case, the police received
several new tips and went back over the old
evidence. In 2009 they conducted another search
of Lewis’s home and later received a sample of
Lewis’s DNA for analysis, but found nothing to
incriminate him further. The FBI even requested
DNA samples from the “Unabomber” Ted
Kaczynski, who had terrorized the same area just
a couple of years earlier, but he denied any
involvement with the potassium cyanide case.
Unfortunately, none of the new leads have
panned out and the investigation continues.