The Tylenol murders and the trust recovery

This episode delves into the infamous Tylenol murders of 1982, exploring how the crisis unfolded and how Johnson & Johnson managed to regain public trust through effective crisis management.

1. The Tylenol murders significantly changed how consumer products are packaged, leading to industry-wide safety improvements.
2. Johnson & Johnson's response to the crisis is a prime example of effective crisis management, demonstrating the importance of swift and transparent action.
3. Public safety measures and communication are crucial in managing a crisis impacting consumer trust and product safety.
4. The introduction of tamper-proof packaging by Johnson & Johnson set a new standard for product safety that persists in various industries today.
5. Trust in a brand can be rebuilt even after severe setbacks if the response is handled appropriately.

1. The Unfolding Crisis

Initial details of the murders and the immediate response by local authorities. Key moments include the realization of a common link among the victims—cyanide-laced Tylenol.

• Shaleen Gupta: "It was absolutely a terrifying time."
• Phil Rogers: "These people were poisoned."

2. The Response

Discussion on Johnson & Johnson's decision-making and actions taken to mitigate the crisis, including the recall of Tylenol products and the halt of their advertising.

• Shaleen Gupta: "Johnson and Johnson had to invent crisis management on the fly."

3. Recovery and Prevention

Exploration of the aftermath and preventive measures taken by Johnson & Johnson and the industry, including the legislative impacts and the introduction of tamper-proof packaging.

• Phil Rogers: "Tamper proof packaging was exactly the innovation that an anxious public wanted."

1. Always communicate transparently with the public during a crisis.
2. Implement immediate safety measures to prevent further damage.
3. Collaborate closely with authorities to facilitate an effective response.
4. Prioritize consumer safety over financial concerns during emergencies.
5. Maintain an open dialogue with consumers post-crisis to rebuild trust.
6. Innovate continuously to improve product safety and reassure consumers.
7. Use crisis as an opportunity to strengthen trust through decisive action.

Over three days in the fall of 1982, seven healthy people in the Chicago area died suddenly. At first, medical examiners were baffled but soon realized all the victims had taken Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. Public trust in the medication vanished overnight. Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, had to act fast if they wanted to save lives and their product.

This season we’ve been sharing stories about companies and organizations that made mistakes and lost public trust. In this episode, we’re looking at a company that did nothing wrong but had to find a way through a crisis to rebuild trust.

Veteran Chicago news reporter Phil Rogers recalls how the Tylenol Murders terrified the nation and how Johnson & Johnson managed the crisis. OneTrust’s Chief Trust Architect, Andrew Clearwater, examines how Johnson & Johnson defied the odds and actually strengthened trust in their brand.

People

Phil Rogers, Shaleen Gupta, Andrew Clearwater

Companies

Johnson & Johnson

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Shaleen Gupta

It's September 29, 1982, an ordinary Wednesday morning in a family friendly Chicago suburb. A twelve year old girl named Mary Kellerman wakes up with a common problem. She has a cold. She didn't feel well, and she had a headache. She stayed home from school and she retrieved some extra strength Tylenol from the medicine cabinet.

Mary's mom bought Tylenol the day before. Almost immediately, Mary started coughing and she. Fell to the floor downstairs. Mary's dad hears the crash. When he finds her on the floor.

Mary's eyes are dilated. Her breathing is shallow and labored as though she's suffocating. They got her to a hospital. She got progressively sicker and sicker and was pronounced dead a short time later. Mary Kellerman's death marked the start of a nationwide crisis because her death was just the beginning of what's come to be known as the Tylenol murders.

I'm Shaleen Gupta and this is trustonomy, an original podcast from one trust. All season, we've been exploring the ways companies lose the trust of the public and the devastating consequences that follow. But now for our season finale, we're telling a different kind of story. This is a story about how a crisis helped a company rebuild trust by proving that they had their customers back.

Andrew Clearwater

It's important if you're building trust in a company that you don't stagnate at just meeting people's expectations. It's actually going to be around exceeding them. Thats Andrew Clearwater. Hes going to tell us how Johnson and Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, helped rebuild trust in one of the nations biggest brands. But first, we need to hear from veteran journalist Phil Rogers.

Phil Rogers

I dont remember a time when the public was more frightened than during the Tylenol murders in Chicago. Last year, Phil retired after 31 years reporting for NBC Five News. But in the fall of 1982, Phil was just starting his career working at WBBM radio, a local Chicago station, when the murders hit the news. At first, nobody knew why Mary Kellerman had died. At this point, her death wasn't tied to the Tylenol she took that fall morning.

Shaleen Gupta

And it's the mystery at the core of the story that made the fear spread so quickly. There is no minimizing how scared everybody was. It was absolutely a terrifying time. That level of horror and outrage going on for weeks and weeks, and a lot of people wondering if another shoe was still gonna drop. That worry was, sadly, completely justified.

In fact, even as Mary's family was trying to process her sudden death, tragedy was stalking other folks in the Chicago. Area, a postal worker by the name of Adam Janus, who was 27 years old, is getting up and starting his day. He doesn't feel very well. He calls in sick. He goes to the grocery store, and while he's there, he picks up a bottle of extra strength tylenol.

Then he heads home and takes a couple capsules from the bottle and comes. Out of the bathroom clutching his chest, and obviously is in real distress. His wife is alarmed by this, and they call 911 and get an ambulance there to try to give him some help. Take him to the hospital, and he dies a short time later.

Like Mary, Adam Janus death is a total mystery. Authorities thought maybe it was a heart attack, but all they really know is that they have a seemingly healthy young man who has suddenly died. Later that day. Recovering from the shock of his death, Adams brother Stanley, and the rest of the Janus family leave the hospital and go back to Adams house to make funeral arrangements. Stanley was himself now feeling well and was overcome with grief.

Phil Rogers

He asked if they had any pain medication. Was told, yeah, it's in the bathroom, medicine cabinet. There should be some tylenol in there. He went in and retrieved the bottle and came out with it, and his wife Theresa, said, you know what? Why don't you let me have two of those, too?

I'm not feeling so well either. They both ingested the capsules. Almost immediately, they fell to the floor, suffering the exact same kind of symptoms as Adam had been displaying. They are quickly taking into the same hospital, where they would eventually be pronounced dead as well. Three members of the same family all collapsed in the same house, all on the same day.

Shaleen Gupta

They were all taken to the same hospital by the same paramedics. First responders and medical staff were baffled, but that would soon change with a random bit of luck. There were two different, completely unrelated sets of paramedics and firefighters from different communities. Who happened to know one set knew about young Mary's death, and the other set knew about the Janus family. They happened to talk to each other and mention, boy, I had this crazy run in my department.

Phil Rogers

These people were poisoned. And the other party's saying, you know what? We had the very same thing happen here. And start to put two and two together. Four people in the Chicago area had now died in the same way, all on the same day.

Shaleen Gupta

Then within hours, three more people perished. Extra strength tylenol remained the common link in every case. Armed with this information, the deputy medical examiner at the Cook county office, doctor Edmund Donahue, decided to dig deeper. He does have the foresight to ask a colleague to open one of the bottles and smell it. That person reports back that he did so.

Phil Rogers

And there was a strong almond smell, which is a very telltale sign of cyanide. They send that out to be tested, and it comes back positive for cyanide. A dose of cyanide prevents the body cells from processing oxygen. It attacks the respiratory system, the heart, and the central nervous system. So Donohue's discovery perfectly explained the symptoms suffered by the victims.

Shaleen Gupta

On September 30, a day after the deaths began, the Cook county medical examiner's office called an emergency press conference announcing the situation to the public. They still didn't have many answers, and neither did Johnson and Johnson. A reporter who was present at that news conference calls Johnson and Johnson to see if they have any comment about the fact that their product seems to be associated with so many deaths in Chicago. The official who took the call at Johnson and Johnson said, this is the first we've heard of it. While Johnson and Johnson tried to quickly figure out their response, the authorities, of course, began to take action themselves.

Phil Rogers

Authorities were really, really worried about getting the word out. And so you would see public health officials going door to door, handing out flyers in multiple languages, warning, people, don't take extra strength Tylenol. The police cars would drive down the street using the speakers on the tops of the their cars, warning the public, if you have bottles of Tylenol, turn it in.

Shaleen Gupta

Thousands of bottles of Tylenol were turned in for testing. But there were still lots of questions. Why were the deaths spread all over Chicago? Were there more victims still to be discovered? And how did Tylenol become tainted in the first place?

Was it perhaps the manufacturers fault? Cyanide, after all, was used to test lead levels in the factories where Tylenol was made. The theory was soon dismissed. The cyanide in the poison capsules had a different chemical makeup. And even more troubling, the poison capsules were coming from more than one factory.

This led investigators to a frightening conclusion. That was the point where they knew they had somebody out there that was tampering with the capsules, some kind of madman that is intentionally poisoning the Tylenol and putting them in the stores. Then on October 1, just two days. After people started dying, a man mails an extortion letter. It was written anonymously to Johnson and Johnson, demanding a million dollars be deposited in a Chicago bank.

Phil Rogers

In his words, if you want to stop the killing. Using the bank account number, authorities tracked the threat back to a man named James Lewis. And while he didn't admit to the. Crime, he was given paper and writing materials, and he drew a picture of how he thought the killer probably put the Tylenol into the capsules. A lot of the investigators thought that indicated more than just a little creativity on Mister Lewis part, that it showed that he was possibly even using his own recollection.

Shaleen Gupta

Heres what was an enormous number of lives were now at risk. They could be looking at a horrifying case of mass murder. The scale of the tragedy was expanding by the hour. Johnson and Johnson was understandably subject to a lot of serious scrutiny. At this point, all eyes were on them.

They had to react. Johnson and Johnson mounted a big blitz of information. They go on television, tell the public, don't buy our product. They also, for a while, killed all their advertising completely. They offered a reward for information that might lead to the killer.

Phil Rogers

They worked incredibly closely with law enforcement and with the Food and Drug Administration, and they start pulling it off the shelves by the tens of millions of bottles, which they admit are now going to be tested for the potential presence of cyanide. That nationwide recall took place on October 5, less than a week into the crisis. It was the first mass recall in american history. This was an extraordinary and full fledged reaction. In 1982, the term crisis management wasn't even a thing.

Shaleen Gupta

So Johnson and Johnson had to invent it on the fly. Johnson and Johnson ends up recalling 31 million bottles of extra strength Tylenol worth an estimated hundred million dollars. That's in 1980, $2. And they were taking quite a hit on this because at that point, Tylenol was the number one over the counter pain medication. Suddenly everyone's afraid of this product.

The change to Johnson and Johnson's bottom line was enormous and immediate. In just a few weeks, Tylenol's market share plummeted from 35% to 8%. It doesn't come much worse than that for an american business to have to go to the public and say, don't use our product. It might kill you. If you had asked any of us in the news business or anybody in the public at that point, in the days after the murders began to unfold, we would have told you that there was one fact that was indisputable and that that was Tylenol was dead as a product.

When a company is faced with such a terrible crisis, a common reaction is to retreat and make themselves invisible. But Johnson and Johnson did the opposite. They decided to reach out. They set up toll free numbers for the public and for the news media to call with updates on information from the company itself. The chairman of the company was not shy.

Phil Rogers

He went on big shows. He was on 60 Minutes, he was on Donahue. He appeared in the television commercials himself, going on as the face of the company to talk about why people shouldn't take the product. And let me show you what we're doing to safeguard the public.

Shaleen Gupta

Of course, any solution was never just going to be about optics. They needed a concrete change. By November, Johnson and Johnson announced an innovation that they'd been experimenting with before the murders. They go back on television and they announce, for the very first time in history, tamper proof packaging. And they demonstrate in the commercial, I remember this really, really well.

Phil Rogers

They show the box that the end flap is glued shut, that when you open the box, you're going to take out a bottle that has a safety seal around the neck of the bottle, a plastic shrink wrap seal, and then you're going to open the bottle and it has a foil cap across the top of the bottle. Tamper proof packaging was exactly the innovation that an anxious public wanted, even if they didn't know it yet. In 1983, Congress passed a bill making it a federal crime to tamper with medications. It was called the Tylenol bill. I remember that a disaster official who was responsible for federal legislation told me once that all safety regulations are written in blood.

And what she meant by that is that any good law that deals with the safety of the public probably stemmed from a tragedy. The daily life of american consumers was changed forever. A new layer of protection and of trust was now baked into the consumer experience. So did it work out for Johnson and Johnson? Did they regain the trust of the public?

Shaleen Gupta

And just a year after the murders, Tylenol regained its entire market share and was once again the top pain reliever in the country. Johnson and Johnson did the best job I can remember of trying to take control of a tragic situation that was affecting their company, and they managed to turn it around. And proof of that is possibly sitting in your home right now.

Andrew Clearwater

My experience with it is that it's something you definitely have in your cupboard, and Tylenol is not something to worry about. Like most people, Andrew Clearwater, the chief trust architect at Onetrust, has always thought of Tylenol as a brand that everybody can trust. But as we've just heard, there was a brief time when trust in Tylenol was shaken to its core. The tragedy here is you would trust, you know, that if you go to a store that is selling medication to make you healthier, it's such an unexpected thing. And there really was no way that either the company or the families could have known the circumstances that were going to unfold.

Shaleen Gupta

Andrew's job is about discovering new ways to secure customer trust. In today's digital world, that title, trust architect, carries a lot of weight. I'm one of very few, I believe really be the second, if I can believe, what's on LinkedIn. But it's a unique job, for sure. There's a combination of research work where we're looking at privacy and security ethics in ESG, and there's a kind of facilitating the development that goes with building a program that works for a lot of companies.

The issues that companies deal with today may look radically different from the pre cloud, offline world of the 1980s. But Andrew says the way Johnson and Johnson dealt with their crisis still has a lot to teach us. What's interesting about this story is that we wouldn't have known so much about what Johnson and Johnson values if they hadn't been tested. People can say whatever they want, but it's their actions that we measure. So what were Johnson and Johnson's actions?

They took their commercials off the air and recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol. They also worked with law enforcement and offered a reward for information about the case. They set up a hotline. They responded to a real risk in a transparent, meaningful way. Finally, they responded by reinventing their packaging.

Andrew Clearwater

It's the fact that they made such a bold move so quickly. They said it with authority. This is what we're doing. This is our response. That's them owning it.

They are able to show that even in this situation that seems wildly out of control, that they are calling the shots about how they're going to respond to it. And it's worth remembering they responded efficiently, even as the crisis was still unfolding. They didn't know at the moment whether they were solving a nationwide problem or a regional problem. But the choice that they made shows how they valued people and how they chose to think about the risk. They put themselves in the place of the individual who's buying the medication.

This is customer centric values, for sure. By acting so decisively, Johnson and Johnson made their values plain for all to see. They were a company that believed in what Andrew calls an outside in approach. That means the needs of the public inform the company's actions. Other companies may have gone with an inside out approach which puts their own.

Concerns first, the inside out view. I mean, they're first going to think about what's the loss to the company from a financial point of view, maybe. What are the perceptions of our company that are going to be harmed, the reputational damage, the implications, I guess, to the long term outcome of the company. And from that point of view, you're not going to get the same result as this story. Johnson and Johnson's customer first approach wasn't just lip service.

Shaleen Gupta

They let that value dictate their response. In other words, they weren't inventing some new moral compass on the fly. Their plan emerged from values they already had. So if your values were created by your marketing department, then you won't see them carried out later on if they weren't actually internalized, taught and part of how the company behaves. One of the things that you can see here with Tylenol is that they lived their values.

Andrew Clearwater

And I think it's in times of crisis that values are tested. It shouldn't surprise anyone that putting people first also happens to be good for a brand. In the long run, people respect companies like that, and companies like that earn their trust. Tylenol becomes this value filled underdog, almost even though they're a giant corporation. Right?

Like they are trying to figure something out. I think it really brought the public along with them. Tylenol ends up looking like a victim of something that happened to them.

Shaleen Gupta

Johnson and Johnson did not simply take action. They also communicated that action to the public. Just weeks after the Tylenol murders, their chairman went on 60 minutes and the Donahue show. The Tylenol murders were dominating the american imagination. So Johnson and Johnson made sure their voice was at the forefront of the national conversation.

Andrew Clearwater

Communicating a strategy is what gives people confidence in your actions. If you're doing it in a vacuum and people are scared, they will not have confidence. And what's interesting about Johnson and Johnson is not only were they able to communicate it, they did it with such immediacy. All that communication wasn't about claiming innocence, either. Instead, they spent that airtime explaining what they were doing to fix the situation.

Shaleen Gupta

Again, Johnson and Johnson was putting the needs of their customer first. In doing so, they received a massive lift themselves. It would have been easy for Tylenol to spend a lot of their communications time on how this was not them. But by really bringing it back to look, this is what we're going to do about it. It puts you in the space of showing, basically, capability and value, when normally you could be focusing on the crisis itself.

Andrew Clearwater

And so by making it clear through your communications, the story about what Johnson and Johnson was doing, doing became the story.

Shaleen Gupta

It can feel like a leap of faith to really let a customer first open and transparent culture guide your company. But it's more pragmatic than it may seem.

The extraordinary actions Johnson and Johnson took, for example, may seem altruistic, but here's the thing. It was also a kind of enlightened self interest. A company that earns the public's trust has earned the public's business. Every time a shopper looked at a bottle of Tylenol, the visual of that new tamper proof packaging reminded them that this was a company they could trust. And these protections became industry standard.

Andrew Clearwater

And it became a way to visually see what was different between before the crisis and after the crisis. And I think that matters a lot. It's putting it back in this new form that really changes the experience. And I think customers need to be able to perceive the brand and what's changed here. By investing in a new technology that tamper proof seal, Tylenol was suddenly a brand that stood out as safe instead of dangerous.

Shaleen Gupta

They reversed the narrative about their product, and the ultimate result is that they established a competitive advantage over their competition. If you're choosing a technology that enhances trust, you might actually bring people towards your brand in a way that causes the rest of the industry to have to catch up. And if they try to catch up, they're going to incur costs in the rush to bring that technology to market. Or they might not even get the benefit of trust because the brand that acted quickly will be able to show, hey, we acted because we were acting in your best interests. The others, they don't get that halo effect.

In fact, Tylenol came out of the crisis looking like a leader and the result. We heard earlier that their market share bounced back to its pre crisis level. Nobody thought that was possible. That is remarkable, both in how quickly it dropped and how quickly it returned. But also in an odd way, all of this talk about Tylenol, once it became clear that they were taking the right actions, it sort of built a recognition among households that probably wasn't even there prior to it.

Andrew Clearwater

And then it's sort of in the collective consciousness after that. I can't think of any company that has made such a quick recovery like that. And, boy, could it have gone another way. Andrew envisions a future where nobody has to go that other way. He believes every company can benefit from treating their customers trust like a core part of their business.

Shaleen Gupta

The goal is to exceed people's expectations, and an entire metric of trust can be established to see how you're doing. The customer's trust in a company becomes a real, measurable thing of value. Let's say we have privacy, ethics, security and ESg, sort of building the core of our trust program. Talking about trust measurement and trust scores, isn't it important to know what other people think of what you do? Right.

Andrew Clearwater

In the end, I think you want a combination internally of values that show what you're doing for the business. But you've got to bring into scope feedback from the key audiences about their experience. And I think that might be a bit of a seed that grows into trust scoring. Overall, listening is fundamental to trust. It's where customer first values and effective communication really begin.

Shaleen Gupta

You need to listen to the public's concerns and hopes, tell them what you're going to do to help, and then do it. But when it comes down to whether those actions end up being trusted or not, you don't really find that in the playbook, right? That's still something that has to happen in the culture.

So whatever happened to James Lewis, the star suspect in the Tylenol murders? He was eventually charged with extortion for the letter he sent to Johnson and Johnson and sentenced to twelve years in prison. But despite their suspicions, investigators were never able to pin him with the murders. The case was reopened several times over the years. But sadly, there was never a proper ending to this tragedy.

Phil Rogers

When Lewis died in the summer of 2023, there was still no resolution in this case. To this day, the Tylenol murders in Chicago remain unsolved. And yet, for all that uncertainty and chaos, real and positive changes were made. In 1989, new FDA guidelines required all over the counter drugs to be sold in tamper proof packaging. Tylenol's new packaging became the vanguard, leading the way to a whole new landscape for american consumer goods.

Whenever you go to the store and you buy something that has a tamper proof seal, when you buy a bottle of orange juice and you unscrew the top of it and you have that really hard to peel off foil seal across the neck of the bottle. All of that stems from the Tylenol murders in Chicago, and it was all invented by Johnson and Johnson.

Shaleen Gupta

This season, stories from the past have inspired new insights about trust and the role it plays with successful businesses. We saw a number of tragedies along the way, but a few powerful tools always made the difference when disaster struck. Tools that often go ignored, like privacy and informed consent, third party risk management, respect for whistleblowers, and proper data management. Tools like these are the fundamentals of trust. A lot can go wrong out there.

But trust isn't about some perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong. It's about knowing that someone's done right by you. It's about knowing every effort has been made to keep you safe. And I've learned this much for sure. In the world of business, trust is something we have to earn every day.

So that's a wrap for season one of Tristonomy. I hope you've loved listening to the show as much as I've enjoyed hosting it. The team behind Trustonomy is story producer and showrunner David Swanson, executive producer Tori Allen, writer Michael Harris, and sound designers Mark Angley, Christian Prohem, and Robin Edgar. From one trust, we have Katie Wharton and John Ville, with graphic design by Isabella Dubose. I'm Shaleen Gupta, and this is Trustonomy, an original podcast from one trust.

Thanks for listening.