Michelle Rosen, daughter of one of the seven Tylenol murder victims of 1982, has launched a Tylenol Murders website, vowing to take down what she calls “the empire of lies and corruption” surrounding the incident.
The website links to a video Rosen has created that has coverage by ABC-TV News, Wall Street Journal and other media that have carried her claims.
Most coverage, as tracked by this website, has positioned J&J’s handling of the murders as the “gold standard in crisis control,” a phrase used by the May 28, 2007 Fortune magazine.
Rosen, then the eight-year-old daughter of 27-year-old Lynn Reiner who had just given birth, said she has booked 15 interviews at radio shows in the Chicago area in the next two weeks as part of her campaign.
She says she accepted for many years the J&J/police and FBI scenario that a “madman” had gone from store to store, stocking poisoned Tylenols.
However, a “eureka moment” occurred to her in 2009 when the FBI announced it was reopening the case and obtained a search warrant for the apartment of James W. Lewis in Boston.
Lewis had written a letter to J&J following the murders demanding $1 million. He served more than 12 years in prison for sending the extortion note.
Lewis Served to “Reopen” the Case
Lewis was in New York at the time of the murders and was virtually eliminated as a suspect early in the investigations. Rosen and others concluded that the case had been “reopened” merely to block release of documents.
“Right then, the whole lie of this story became obvious,” she says. “I started reading everything I could to get more reports from news articles. But because the case was reactivated, all of the documents that the government held would stay sealed from the public. How convenient. Well, that explains this reactivated case. Raiding someone’s house—innocent or not—and announcing the breakthrough was all the case needed to get an ‘active’ status and stay sealed.” Her website seeks $75,000 in donations to continue the campaign to unseal documents.
Bartz Book Helped
Rosen compared notes with seven-year J&J employee Scott Bartz who was writing The Tylenol Mafia. The 499-page book contended that the poisonings took place somewhere in the distribution chain of the drug which could involve up to five separate operations.
Both Rosen and Bartz charge that J&J, FBI, TV networks and other media, judges, J&J employees, state authorities and the Food & Drug Administration all combined to save J&J from massive lawsuits.
The death of 23-year-old Diane Elsroth in 1986 from a poisoned Tylenol taken from a bottle that had not been tampered with “proved beyond a doubt that the Tylenol poisonings were happening before the product made to the store shelves,” she said.
Rosen and Bartz have noted that Lynn Reiner got her Tylenols from a secure hospital dispensary that could not have been invaded by the mythical “madman.”
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