The case begins with a 12-year-old Elk Grove Village girl who wakes up with a cold. The pattern of horror only grew worse from there.
Ed Marshall was working the CBS 2 News assignment desk. He remembers:"There was some sort of bulletin from one of the authorities that there was going to be a press conference about a series of poisoning deaths. That was an instant trigger to tell us something big was going on."
It's now been a little more than 24 hours since the first poisoning and five people are now dead. A sixth person is on life support. Cyanide has been discovered in victims' blood samples and in Tylenol capsules. "I mean you were working at hyper-speed. Your job was to try to find out, what was the source of this mystery? Why were these people dying?" Marshall continued."I just remember that there was a sense of shock in the community because these people were dying unexpectedly."Now, that the public was getting word that they should toss out Tylenol or drop bottles off for testing, Fahner's focus shifted to following leads and finding the killer or killers.
Ty Fahner, Illinois Attorney General in 1982, revisits the Des Plaines location where he held numerous press conferences during the early days of the Tylenol Murders investigationIn 1982, he said,"We were drawing like literally 300 or 400 tips a day into there as to who might have been crazy and done stuff like this."1:15 p.mLater that evening came the discovery of a seventh victim – this time in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood.
He recalled how emotional it was seeing her body being carried out of the condo building on a stretcher.