Today, Explained - Our annual Halloween hysteria

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

This year’s fear of rainbow fentanyl in kids’ trick-or-treat bags is just the latest unfounded Halloween candy freakout. But the yearly panic has its roots in a very real crisis: the 1982 Tylenol murders. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Jillian Weinberger, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trick or treat! Ooh, happy Halloween! And what are you, Maverick from Top Gun? I'm Dark Brandon! Ooh, and you're a balloon! I'm inflation dummy. Scary. What do we have here?

I've got full-size Skittles. I've got some Tootsie Rolls. Ooh, and what else is in here? Rainbow Fentanyl? The DEA warning that deadly Rainbow Fentanyl could end up inside of a candy bag of your kid. They've found Rainbow Fentanyl in 21 states. It looks like candy.

And in fact, some of the drug traffickers have nicknamed it Sweet Tarts, Skittles. Uh, we'll just take the Tootsie Rolls, mister. Suit yourself. Happy Halloween! The annual Halloween Hysteria. On Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever.

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Young children now going out to trick-or-treat. I mean, basically parents have a decision to make. You don't let your kids get that candy. It doesn't mean the person giving it out is intending to harm. You throw away all the nerds and the sweet-talks. Today explained, but we're going to talk about three days from today. Monday's Halloween. On Monday, kids across the continent will take to the streets to trick or treat, and some of their parents will be worried about rainbow fentanyl. It's the latest in a long line of Halloween panics. Candy apples with razor blades, poison candy bars, marijuana gummies. The latest freak out over rainbow fentanyl made us want to ask someone in the know whether any of these Halloween panics has ever been based in,

you know, reality. Here's, to me, the absolutely fascinating part of the story. According to sociologist Joel Best, who began a study of this going back to 1958, and he's actually carried it forward to today. He updates it every year. He has not found a single incident. Oh, my goodness. A single confirmed incident of either a child's death or injury related to tainted candy. Our someone in the know is W. Scott Poole. He teaches about the history of horror at the College of Charleston. Now, one can never say, you know, with 100% accuracy, it never happened one single

time. Sure. But we can say that despite the huge amount of press attention that's been given to it, that law enforcement has given to it, that politicians have given to it, and religious leaders, not a single incident from 1958 until 2022 has occurred. But there was one case that happened a month before Halloween that terrified the nation. The 1982 Tylenol murders right at the beginning of the 80s, at a moment when probably the panic over Halloween candy in local communities was at its height, added to the idea that there were dangerous strangers out there seeking to harm your children. Even though it was an unrelated issue, it wasn't specifically directed toward children. It didn't take place at Halloween. Even if you've never heard of these murders,

you see the effects of these murders every time you go into a store, because these led to the safety seals that we see in the tamper-proof packaging that we see on everything from salad dressing to Tylenol today. My name is Stacey St. Clair, and I'm a reporter with the Chicago Tribune. And along with my colleague, Christy Gutowski, we have been digging into the Tylenol murders in advance of the 40th anniversary this year. And though this really didn't have anything to do with Halloween, it did have a serious impact on Halloweens across the country that year.

Is that right? That's right. The murders took place in late September of 1982, and they sent the country into a panic. I think it's terrible. Somebody's crazy. It has to be. I think what bothers me more than just this incident is if it can happen with this, what else can it happen with?

That's the part that really gives you the creeps. project. And I would say 50% of them talked about Halloween and how Halloween loomed so heavily over this sort of national crisis because people didn't know where the killer intended to strike next. And so you saw it in communities canceling Halloween. If you're concerned about safety this Halloween, instead of trick-or-treating, consider having a party at home. If you do decide to send your kids out, keep these tips in mind. Well, I want to ask you more about that later, but walk us through what happened 40 years ago in Chicago. So on September 29th of 1982,

seven people in the Chicago area took Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. The acetaminophen that was in the capsules was poured out and potassium cyanide was put in its place and then put on the store shelves. And there was nothing about the way the capsules looked or the bottles looked that could have warned people about what was inside. And each capsule contained at least three times the minimum dosage to kill somebody. So once the people swallowed it, they didn't have a chance of survival. Even if the doctors knew what they had ingested, there was no chance of saving them. It is a violent, horrific death. Give us a sense of the seven people who died.

So the seven people include a 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman, two young mothers, Mary Sue McFarlane and Mary Reiner. Mary Reiner had just given birth to her fourth baby less than a week earlier and was taking Tylenol per her doctor's orders during her recovery. There was a flight attendant named Paula Prince, who was the last person found. And then there was three members of the same family. And they were the key for medical investigators to figuring out what was killing young, healthy people so randomly. And what happened was a man named Adam Janis, a young father, was home from work. He took some Tylenol.

His wife found him unresponsive. And his family gathered at the hospital to hear what happened and try to figure out what to do next. So they get the tragic news about Adam. They go back to Adam's house and start planning a funeral. And Adam's brother and his new sister-in-law had headaches from just the day's grieving. So they went into the bathroom and they took some Tylenol and both died. How much of a panic did this stir up in the country? I mean, this was a thing that was happening in Chicago, but when you say someone's put cyanide in Tylenol pills, I imagine people were probably freaking out all over the world if the story made it that far. Yeah, people did freak out all over the world. When it first

happened, Johnson & Johnson on the first day recalled about 170,000 bottles of Tylenol. Here in Chicago, what started as a series of mysterious unrelated deaths 48 hours ago has resulted in the biggest drug warning in U.S. history. A few days later, under pressure from law enforcement, they recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol. Oh my goodness, what? Yeah. Is that all the Tylenol? It's all the Tylenol capsules, yeah.

Wow. It was the first time that a product had ever been recalled on a widespread national level like that. It was news all over the world. It's widely regarded as an early act of domestic terrorism. That wasn't even a word people used or knew at the time. But it so pierced the veil of security that people felt around their families that shockwaves were felt everywhere, including Halloween.

Yeah. Tell me more about how this affected Halloween in 1982. One of the people we talked to was Chuck Kramer, and he was the fire lieutenant who first identified that, hey, these aren't heart attacks at the Janus house. Like, this is something bigger. He talked about all the different ways these deaths changed the way we live. And he told us, you're going to hear a lot about how this impacted Halloween. Halloween's changed forever. Prior to 1982, I don't think the parents went through the candy. They just let the kids take it.

But today, parents are going through, that's not wrapped, that's not wrapped, that's not good. I'm sure they do. Communities were canceling Halloween, encouraging their children not to go out. And another person we spoke with, his name is Sam Adam Jr., and he's a prominent defense attorney here in Chicago who's studied the case. I had just turned 10, and there were rumors at the time,

and it had just come out that people were putting razor blades, I remember this so vividly, in apples. And so parents were really, really on this idea of people doing crazy things at Halloween time. His parents didn't want him to go out because they were so scared. I have vivid memories of not going trick-or-treating that year. We were not allowed to go because we didn't know what was going to happen. People stopped giving apples out. You know, you used to go trick-or-treating and you could get apples and home-baked cookies and popcorn balls and people would

just wrap them in their own saran wrap and and that sort of put an end to that. On the surface trick-or-treating in Virginia Beach tonight seemed normal but underneath the outfits and masquerades and even more within the parents there was an underlying tension. Now I really didn't want to take the children out and my daughter told me that she'd rather just go trick or treating and throw everything away. That's really what she wanted to do, just to go out. I think it also was the birth of coupons being given out. People talked about the McDonald's coupons

that were given out that year because that seems so much safer than the typical candy bar. Wally Sale and his wife were giving away coupons for ice cream at a local Baskin-Robbins. We've been relying mainly on these because this way, the children and the parents know that what they're going to get is a good deal. And they're not worried about having to check it and deal with it and so forth and so on. It made you second guess everything. We're going to talk more about the sort of annual Halloween panic later in the show,

but do you think the Tylenol murders had a lasting impact on people's, you know, paranoia, hysteria every October 31st? I think it absolutely did. You know, the Chicago Tribune articles from the time talk about this novel idea of set trick-or-treating hours and this novel idea of like going trick-or-treating at the mall. Thanks to the scare created by Tylenol poisonings and the barrage of copycat criminals, alternatives to trick-or-treating cropped up instantly. Malls in Virginia Beach offered trick-or-treating at their stores with all the candy pre-checked. And those are commonplace today.

Those are sort of standard things we do to ensure safety or make us feel safer. And here we are still doing it, you know, 40 years later. All of that was introduced as part of the Tylenol scare. Did they ever catch whoever perpetrated these murders, whoever put cyanide in Tylenol scare. Did they ever catch whoever perpetrated these murders, whoever put cyanide in Tylenol pills? Nobody's ever been arrested or charged with the Tylenol murders. And as part of our investigation, we did find that police investigators have brought a case to prosecutors saying they have a circumstantial chargeable case against a longtime suspect. And now it's in prosecutors' hands as to whether they're going to charge the case or not.

Are you allowed to say who the suspect is? Yeah, the longtime suspect is James Lewis. He was arrested and convicted of sending an attempted extortion letter to Johnson & Johnson. He said he had spent about $50 so far in poisoning the capsules. And he said he would stop the killing

if they wired a million dollars to a bank account in Chicago that belonged to his wife's ex-boss. And he claims he sent the letter because he was upset with his wife's boss for her last paycheck bouncing, and he wanted to call law enforcement's attention to what he thought was that man's bad business dealings. It seems pretty suspicious. How was that not enough to prosecute this guy 40 years ago? They've never been able to put him in Chicago or in one of the stores. He had left Chicago about three weeks before the killings occurred. Do you have any sense from your reporting on why this person may have wanted to

kill innocent people, families, children? The working motive, according to documents we reviewed, is that the suspect's daughter had died in 1974 after a heart surgery in which sutures used to repair a heart defect tore. And those sutures were trademarked by Johnson & Johnson. And investigators have told prosecutors they believe that was the motive behind, and records we reviewed said that was the motive behind the killings.

I should say we have tried several times to speak to James Lewis about this motive and about this allegation from police, and he has not responded. Stacey St. Clair reported on the Tylenol murders with Christy Gutowski for the Chicago Tribune. And there's a podcast. It's called Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders. You can find it right now wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're back with more Today Explained in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC.

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It's today explained, before we get to all the hysteria, why do we even do Halloween? It seems to have come to the United States in the middle of the 19th century, and that was largely from both Irish and Scottish immigrants. Back to W. Scott Poole, our historian of horror. One of the kind of partial truths about Halloween is that it is based on a ancient Celtic festival called Samhain, spelled to look like Samhain, but pronounced Samhain, that was kind of a harvest in the summer festival. It's kind of hard to make those exact links. One thing that I think is important in the history of the holiday, particularly given the way it's come to be seen as a little bit dangerous and a little bit scary and maybe

even for some people a little demonic, is that it's really a Christian holiday. It's All Hallows Eve. It's the beginning of the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Day. Where does the candy show up? As far as I remember from going to church as a kid, there was no candy involved. Yeah, so that really begins as early as the 1920s. And the reason for that is in part because part of the history of Halloween is the trick coming before the treats. In the 1920s, Halloween was, particularly in urban America, was all about pranking. And particularly interesting is that there was a little bit of a class struggle element to it. This was a time that working class kids kind of unleashed on middle class and upper middleclass neighborhoods. The treats part, in a way, was an attempt to, an eventually successful attempt, to really kind of normalize Halloween in a way to sort of sanitize it a little bit.

And by the 1950s, the distribution of candy is especially popular. So the treats were introduced to quell the tricks, and the treats have become this source of hysteria. When exactly does that happen? There seems to be something of a patient zero article that is the cause of this. There's an op-ed that many people did not seemingly distinguish from a news story, an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times, October 28th, 1970, that talked about the possibility that strangers could use Halloween to perform what came to be known as acts of Halloween sadism. Huh.

Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of trick-or-treating may bring them more horror than happiness. You can go read the article today. It's really interesting. Take, for example, that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade inside. The chocolate candy bar may be a laxative. The bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye. The popcorn balls may be coated with camphor.

The candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills. Were there legitimate reasons to be fearful? Well, there were a couple of incidents in the early 70s, both of which are very, very complicated in the sense that they don't fit the story of Halloween sadism that subsequently different people in American society have told. They're not stories of stranger danger. They're actually stories of tragedies and violence within families. One is a particularly tragic thing. There's a young five-year-old boy in Detroit. This is an important one because it comes just a few days after the Times op-ed. And he died from ingesting heroin that his family claimed they had found in his basket of Halloween

treats. What it turned out to be is that it had nothing to do with Halloween candy at all. The child had gotten into a uncle's stash of heroin, had ingested it, and so the family, in kind of an effort to cover this up, had actually sprinkled heroin themselves on the Halloween candy. Oh my goodness! Yeah, right. Okay, so that's one incident. Were there any others? There was another that was even more famous. In 1974 in Texas, in Houston, Texas, Ronald Clark O'Brien took out in September of that year, he took out an insurance policy on his two children. Huh. And in a really horrific incident on Halloween night, and we assume he was aware of these fears of poison candy. On Halloween night, he placed cyanide in their pixie sticks.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it's awful. His son Timothy ate it, died. Ronald Clark O'Brien became known as the Candyman Killer. And he was convicted of this crime and actually executed in 1984. But this was, again, an incident of domestic violence, not stranger danger. The very real violence that children and young people face in American society is much more likely to occur at home than it is from the scary, spooky stranger. So where does this hysteria come from every year, Scott? Is it purely the Candyman killer and

Uncle Heroin in Detroit? You know, I am completely empathetic to some of the fear. You know, people understandably worry about their children. Now, that concern has been weaponized really in three different ways. First, it absolutely fires a very powerful media cycle crystal police are asking parents to carefully check their children's halloween candy now the warning comes after several sharp objects were found in trick-or-treat bags including at least two cases in crystal and one of the things I've noticed in my years of following this is that particularly on local news outlets, there's significant coverage of the, and let me underscore, the possibility that this could happen. This is every parent's worst nightmare as Halloween fast approaches. I think secondly, though, that comes in part from a willingness on the part of local law enforcement

to give some credence to these claims. You know, third and finally, I think that the timing of these fears was interesting in the 70s and the 80s. You've probably heard of kids being hurt, kidnapped, or even killed. You've seen it on the news or read about it in the papers. It doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. Like our own time, this is a very anxious period in American history. This is post-Watergate. This is post-Watergate. This is post-Vietnam War.

This is the age of rising concern. Actually, another panic that was a bit misplaced over the fear of serial killers everywhere. And both politicians and religious leaders really played these fears up. Our laws represent the collective moral voice of a free society. And right now that voice is crying out to protect our children and keep them safe. One notable thing about the 1980s is that it's the time of the emergence of the religious right, specifically in the form of the organization, the Moral Majority. This group had particular concerns about Halloween itself because many evangelicals who belonged to that movement deemed it as demonic, as challenging their religious values. Halloween, that's the day when millions of children and adults will be dressing up as devils, witches, and goblins to celebrate Satan.

And so I think that the warning that your child could be physically harmed on Halloween becomes weaponized by these groups. But here we are in 2022, and the threat du jour is rainbow fentanyl. Moms and dads everywhere are really worried that their kids are going to end up with one of these bags of nerd candies, and they'll find their child dead. One of the issues is that fentanyl itself is quite dangerous. Doctors say fentanyl is 50 times more dangerous than heroin and 100 times more lethal than morphine. And rainbow fentanyl, which is a real thing, is quite dangerous as well.

However, what has happened really over the last several weeks, starting at the end of September, is there have been a number of authority figures, particularly on the right in relation to Halloween, but also it's become something of a bipartisan panic as well. Ronna McDaniel, national chair of the Republican Party, Kelly Loeffler, former Republican senator from Georgia, have all made a link between Rainbow Fentanyl, the possibility that kids are going to be poisoned on Halloween, and the empirically false, completely falsifiable idea that illegal immigrants are bringing rainbow fentanyl into the country. I mean, just last month, 2,000 pounds of fentanyl came across our border.

That could kill 500 million people. We're coming into Halloween. Every mom in the country right now is worried, what if this gets into my kid's Halloween basket? You're talking about the rainbow fentanyl? The rainbow fentanyl. What if my teenager gets this? And it's really stoking fears right before the midterms. And I think this has become so significant that even Senate Majority Leader

Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, came out and said, this is a real concern. This is a picture of real fentanyl. These are sweet tarts. And if you opened up this little container of sweet tarts, it would look about the same. I think that many on the right have found a particularly powerful narrative that combines some very old fears with religious concerns, with a very real concern over rainbow fentanyl. But there is no real fear here that some maniacal drug dealer or some undocumented immigrant is going to be giving your kids free fentanyl this Halloween.

Well, we know from a study done by the Cato Institute that over about a four-year period, fentanyl that has been seized by American customs has overwhelmingly been American citizens or people in the country legally, not this fear of illegal immigrants. There's also just kind of a logical, practical side of this. The notion that cartels have come up with the idea of sneaking fentanyl into the country and then they're going to give it away obviously makes no sense at all, right? I mean, say what you will about cartels, they generally have a pretty good business plan. And that's a terrible one, right?

Yeah. And there's, of course, all sorts of risk. I mean, this goes back to, you know, for example, the panic a couple of years ago about marijuana and gummy bears. Marijuana edibles can easily be mistaken for regular candy. The bright and colorful packaging appealing to kids. There's all kinds of risks associated with attempting to market drugs specifically to children. Why attempt to do that, right? There's no gain in it for the criminals that are actually, you know, bringing illegal drugs into the country. We are, as a culture, and particularly in 2022, just like we were in 1975, we are nervous and understandably nervous about a lot of things. And so, panics like this give

some of us this really, really simple narrative about good versus evil that something can be done about. What I would hope is that people would take a step back and say, you know, do we really need these kinds of stories? I mean, don't they hurt our culture? Don't they ratchet up the anxiety? Don't they cause us to be afraid of our neighbor and our neighbor, just in our next door neighbor, but in the biggest sense of just other human beings and other cultures and other subcultures? W. Scott Poole teaches history at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and he writes books. His latest is called Dark Carnivals, Modern Horror, and the Origins of American Empire.

Our program today was produced by Avishai Artsy. He had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Efim the Scream, Sean Ramosverum, and Jillian Weinberger, who's off to do scary things in a scary new place. Goodbye, Jillian. We miss you. Happy Halloween from Today Explained.