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Though none of the copycats has yet been caught, the phenomenon is chillingly common enough—in the rash of airplane hijackings, for instance—to give psychologists ideas about what kind of personalities are involved. Says Arthur Schueneman, senior clinical psychologist at the Northwestern University Rehabilitation Institute: "These people are often stirred to excitement by news reports. They may have longstanding impulses, barely contained, that are triggered by these events: anger, thrill seeking, retribution against injustice, real or imagined." Helen Morrison, an authority on mass murder, sums up their motives: "Better to be wanted by the police than not to be wanted at all." Morrison and other psychologists are virtually sure that no copycat is the Tylenol killer.
That killer remained elusive last week. There were no new leads and no real suspects. The major development was a brief flurry about a "mystery woman" who had turned in a bottle of cyanide-poisoned Tylenol to Chicago police on Oct. 14. The mystery, police later confessed, was actually a "clerical error" that had caused them to misidentify which judge of the Du Page County, Ill., circuit court was her husband. The woman turned out to be Linda Morgan, 35, wife of Judge Lewis Morgan.
Mrs. Morgan said she had bought the Tylenol on Sept. 29, the day before the first deaths were reported, and that very day wanted to take some at a family gathering. Her sister offered Bufferin, she said, and she decided to take that instead. She escaped death, she says, by "blind luck."
For three weeks, the police have been searching for Chicago Con Man James Lewis, also known as Robert Richardson, who is accused of trying to extort $ 1 million from the makers of Tylenol in the wake of the killings. The Chicago Tribune received a letter, postmarked from New York City last Wednesday, that apparently came from the fugitive. "My wife and I have not committed the Chicago area Tylenol murders," the author wrote. "We do not go around killing people."
Efforts to protect the public from the Tylenol killer and his imitators are lumbering along. The FDA last week submitted a proposed regulation on tamper-resistant packaging of over-the-counter drugs to the Office of Management and Budget for approval. The regulation would not specify which of many types of packaging the industry should adopt; it would set a standard for the industry to meet in any way that companies might choose. Estimates are that new packaging will cost the industry between $20 million and $30-million a year and will add anything from a penny to a dime to the price of nonprescription drugs.
Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, wrote off $50 million (net after taxes) as the expense of recalling all Tylenol capsules. J & J nonetheless resumed advertising of Tylenol, which is currently available only in tablet and liquid forms, and promised to have repackaged capsules back on the market soon.