Apparently his motive for the whole thing was to get back at a travel agency his wife had worked at. The extortion letter listed the bank account number of the closed travel agency.
the case is still open...interesting how so little is known. you would think that somewhere in the supply chain that something would be amiss or someone would come forward
What exactly in the supply chain would someone notice? For those who were either too young or didn't exist at the time, 1982 was a completely different world. You know the cellophane seal around the bottle tops on everything from food to medicine bottles? Those didn't exist. The metalized vacuum safety seal on the inside of the bottle that's a pain to pull off? Those didn't exist. Holographic or numbered tamper seals? Yeah, no one had even heard of those yet. Real-time tracking of a lot ID to trace a product all the way from primary ingredient supplier to manufacture to the retail shelf? Ha! The only way to verify where your products were in the world is if you were standing in front of it. I'm not saying it was the wild west, but I'm also not saying it wasn't. Tamper seals and smart supply chain management didn't exist. Those Tylenol bottles could have been tampered with anywhere - the manufacturing facility, in a shipping warehouse, in transit, in a retail store's stock room or even right on the shelf. Those bottles could have been tampered with literally anywhere along the journey and no one would have known because unless you caught the culprit red-handed, there would have been no indication that anything was amiss. We take food and medicine tampering very seriously today because of this incident in 1982, which is the only silver lining in that tragedy.
https://archive.li/M0M3D