> At one point a psychic called in saying he’d had a crystal clear vision of a 46-year-old Japanese woman who was angry at J&J for refusing to hire her. She’d bought a jar of olives at the store before dropping off the poisoned Tylenol, he said. The specificity of his details made his story seem plausible until police asked how he came upon his visions and he told them his magic pen wrote the details out for him whenever he picked it up.<p>These days they could be asking an LLM instead and get a similarly convincing response.
> When Pishos smelled an almond-like scent, Donoghue asked the county's chief toxicologist, Michael Schaffer, to test the capsules, and Schaffer's team determined that four of the 44 remaining capsules from the Janus' bottle contained nearly three times the fatal amount of cyanide<p>(From the wiki page)<p>This is super interesting, because there was a NileRed video testing this and finding that cyanide doesn't really smell like almonds at all (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYagO-nup6c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYagO-nup6c</a>).
A few pieces of additional context: It's undated but I believe that this article/essay is from 2022. There apparently is a recently released Netflix documentary about this case. James Lewis died in 2023.
Ruined Halloween for kids in the 80's. After this happened the streets were empty for the rest of my childhood. He should get the witch treatment if he's ever caught.
I looked, but could find no link to a much greater death toll involving vitamins made from a
poisionous pre cursor, 90's?, factory that made the vitamins was in Austrailia, but by the time investigators moved in it has been striped and the paper work was faked, no "leads", deaths in the US....made the news, but totaly swept under the rug
I can no longer find the source but someone could with enough research. A person on Reddit knew that their uncle committed and confessed to these crimes. They have since died, if I recall correctly. Like decades ago.
> While in custody, she took a lie detector test, which revealed deception in two key responses[...]<p>It did not. It revealed that the police failed to trick a confession out of her using pseudo-science.<p>> James Lewis refused a polygraph.<p>Sensible move - Especially when journalists interpret LDTs as per above.<p>> They tried enlarging the pharmacy surveillance photo, but the bigger it got, the grainier it got.<p>What did Fahner and Zagel actually tell Michael here? Surely not that, verbatim.<p>Interesting piece otherwise.
Our global supply chain is just so fragile and insecure. We may need to rethink everything. For a start, is it not ridiculous that we have unsealed/re-sealable products? I do not want Ibuprofen etc. to be moved to behind-counter, but perhaps a better 'discard if tampered with' seal should be implemented. Will we get to a point where we have to sell fruit in tear-open cardboard mailers? Sounds ridiculous, but depends on what happens in the next decade re: terrorism in general.
Recently watched the Netflix docu series on this, J&J claimed that cyanide was not present in the factory, so there is no way the pills could have been contaminated at the factory.<p>Then later on one of the doctors asked J&J if a test for cyanide is done for each batch in QA at the factory. J&J said yes, each batch was tested for the presence of cyanide.<p>The doctor then asked, "Why were they testing for it(cyanide)?", kinda blew my mind. Implying that J&J knew cyanide contamination was a possibility at the factory itself.