Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders (2025) review

Dir. Ari Prines and Yotam Guendelman

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

The Chicago Tylenol murders left a deep, permanent scar in the city and surrounding suburbs. It’s one that can still be felt today. Ask a baby boomer in the Chicagoland area if they remember the events of early fall 1982, and they’ll likely be able to tell you where they were or what they were doing when news starting breaking that cyanide-laced Tylenol was linked to the sudden deaths of everyone from a 12-year-old girl to several members of the same family.

My mother was 19-years-old, and once told me she remembered eating breakfast and seeing police circle her neighborhood, imploring residents via loudspeaker to discard any Tylenol that may be in their medicine cabinet for fear of cyanide contamination. Years later, it dawned on me that my mother never kept any Tylenol in the house. If any of us had a headache, it was ibuprofen and a bottle of water. When you live with a nurse, there are few things that can’t be cured with such a remedy.

Finally, in Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders, we get a comprehensive documentary on the issue that examines everything from the victims involved, the panic that rocked the Chicagoland region, the iffy suspect at the center of the investigation, and yet another corporation that got off scot-free and ducked any/all culpability.

The three-episode docuseries chronicles the Tylenol murders by way of sit-down interviews with investigators, reporters, county health officials, and those who knew the victims themselves. Marrying all of this together is a plethora of b-roll, newspaper clippings, and archival footage. Netflix is reliable in the documentary space, and this production is no different.

Where The Tylenol Murders really succeeds is in humanizing those affected by the tragedies and showing how unfortunate fate led to the deaths. For example, following the death of a man named Adam Janus, who took a cyanide-laced Tylenol pill, several members of the Janus family gathered to mourn his passing. Two of them, Stanley and Teresa, happened to take Tylenol at the house and dropped dead before an already grieving family. The same investigators who responded to the sudden death of a 12-year-old girl the previous day recognized the common link of Tylenol in all of their deaths and alerted the Cook County Health Department. Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne called a live televised press conference at midnight to announce a complete ban on the sale of all Tylenol products in Chicago. Cops took to the streets to warn the public; newscasts and football games featured a chyron alerting viewers of the dangers brought forth by Tylenol. This was the 1980s. These were the primary channels of getting information to the public in a timely fashion.

Making The Tylenol Murders perhaps the best account of this strange piece of Chicago history is its inclusion of James Lewis, who penned an extortion letter to Johnson & Johnson claiming responsibility for the poisonings. Filmmakers Ari Prines and Yotam Guendelman have no easy task in making his involvement in the story clear and concise, for Lewis harbored multiple different aliases awhile running a crooked accounting racket in which he tried to extort multiple companies. Lewis was eventually convicted of extortion, but not the Tylenol murders themselves.

An element of this case I always found suspect, personally, was the fact that while police could find surveillance camera video of victims purchasing the contaminated bottles of Tylenol, they mysteriously could never find video of “the bogeyman” who was allegedly going around to different Jewel grocery stores in the Chicagoland area and lacing these pill bottles while they sat on store shelves. In episodes two and three, Prines and Guendelman turn the doc over to Johnson & Johnson whistleblowers of sorts, who suspect the company had involvement in the poisonings. There was proven to be cyanide at J&J factories (for what purpose other than vague “clinical trials” remains unclear), for one. It also digs into the sad case of Roger Arnold, a one-time suspect, who was exonerated, but blamed a local bar owner for turning him into the police. Arnold went to the bar intending to kill the man he deemed responsible for his wrongful incarceration, but instead shot a father of six who resembled the owner.

Furthermore, a woman in New York died after ingesting a Tylenol capsule laced with cyanide in 1986, four years after the Chicago murders, and during the timeline in which Lewis was in prison. In the 1980s, it was much easier to convince a worried, panicked public that an unknown individual was going around to stores lacing bottles of Tylenol with cyanide than it was to fathom a corporation maybe wasn’t looking out for their best interests. J&J has been absolved of any wrongdoing for too long, and though I doubt any new litigation will transpire from this, it’s important the conversation shifts, for the lack of any truly credible suspects leaves plenty of room to suspect factory temperament, inadvertent or not.

As this docuseries shows, there are still former/present high-ranking members of Chicago institutions who think Lewis was responsible for the murders, even though no tangible evidence of him being in the Windy City during the time the contaminated bottles were shipped to stores exists. Former Chicago Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek helps conclude the third and final episode by saying, “James Lewis is an asshole, but he is not the Tylenol killer.”

It’s a minor miracle J&J was able to rebound and save their biggest brand after this PR catastrophe (thanks to the advent of a glued seal on the box; a triple-seal on the pill bottles; and a foil protectant on the inside of the bottle itself). All that being said, I still use and trust ibuprofen to this day.

NOTE: Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders is available to stream on Netflix, with a subscription.

Directed by: Ari Prines and Yotam Guendelman.