A young Rayful Edmond, draped in expensive jewelry

An entrepreneurial prodigy, Edmond controlled most of the drug trade within the city by his early twenties, importing millions of dollars in Columbian cocaine every week. His arrest at the age of 24 in 1989 and his subsequent trial created a media circus to rival Casey Anthony’s. Jurors were kept anonymous before, during, and after the trial, and the jury box was kept behind bulletproof glass. Edmond was transported to the court everyday from the Quantico maximum-security facility (also the location of the FBI Training Academy) via helicopter. Although these measures may seem extreme, authorities fears were far from unfound.

Edmond’s gang was notoriously violent. In one year, Edmond’s “employees” committed 30 murders. At his peak, Edmond moved 2,000 keys of cocaine a week, and brought in $70 million a month. Overall, the gang is believed to have committed over 400 murders over the course of their run, not including the attempted murder of a local pastor during an anti-drug march.

Edmond was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Several members of his family also received sentences, including his mother, several of his sisters, and some of his cousins. Being incarcerated did not stop Edmond at first, however, and, along with his new contacts in prison, Edmond conducted his drug business via phone privileges. He received another 30 years sentence after his misconduct was found out. Since his second conviction, Edmond has become a government informant, and is now a part of the Federal Witness Protection Program. His current location is confidential.

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1. Antisocial Behavior
Psychopaths have a strong tendency towards antisocial behavior, so watch for extremely antisocial children. That being said, some children develop more slowly, and this is not a definitive sign. Pay attention if a child regresses from being extremely social to extremely anti-social.
Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates and Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill, had no social connections besides his extremely religious and abusive mother, who punished him whenever he tried to make friends. After she died in 1945, Gein began to murder and dig up graves, collecting body parts of women who looked like his mother and trying to make a “woman suit.”

2. Arson
Many serial killers start as arsonists. Arson is psychologically attractive because it involves manipulating power and control, something that serial killing also offers.
David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer, was infatuated with pyromania as a child, to the point that other children called him “Pyro.” After being arrested, he took responsibility for dozens of New York arsons. Some sources indicate that he might have been responsible for up to 1,400 fires.

3. Torturing Small Animals
This is one of the strongest warning signs. Children who torture or kill small animals like squirrels, birds, cats, and dogs without showing remorse are highly likely to be sociopaths. Many serial killers kill to control others’ lives, and as children, small animals are the only lives they have the power to control.
Cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would bike around the woods as a child, collecting dead animals to dissect. Dahmer even killed and dismembered his own puppy, mounting its head on a stake when he was done.

4. Poor Family Life
Many serial killers come from unstable families with criminal, psychiatric, or alcoholic histories. These killers often have terrible relationships with their families, and often use them as their first victims.
When he was only fifteen, Ed Kemper, “the Co-ed Killer,” killed his grandparents. After being released at age twenty-one, Kemper killed six female college students. The police finally caught him when Kemper killed his violent, alcoholic mother. He treated his mother’s corpse particularly brutally, decapitating her, using her head as a dart board, and throwing her vocal cords down the garbage disposal.

5. Childhood Abuse
Many serial killers are abused – physically, psychologically, sexually – as children by a close family member. This behavior instills in the child feelings of humiliation and helpless, feelings which they will later seek to instill in their victims.
Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute serial killer portrayed by Charlize Theron in Monster, was abandoned by her mother when she was four and never met her father, who was serving time in prison for raping a seven-year-old girl when Aileen was born. Aileen’s grandfather, who took over care of Aileen when her mother left, physically and sexually abused her until she ran away at age fifteen.

6. Substance abuse
Many serial killers struggle with drug and alcohol abuse.
Jeffrey Dahmer began drinking in his teens and was an alcoholic by his high school graduation. His alcoholism resulted in both his expulsion from college and his discharge from the military.

7. Voyeurism
From a young age, many serial killers are interested in voyeurism, sado-masochistic pornography, and fetishism.
Ted Bundy claimed that, as an adolescent, he would get drunk and stalk around his community at night, looking for undressing women or other titillating sights.

8. Intelligence
Many serial killers have IQs in the “bright normal” range. Organized serial killers who kill methodically, like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, have an average I.Q. of 113, while disorganized serial killers have an average I.Q. of 93.
Ed Kemper had an I.Q. of 136 (140 is often used as the genius mark in I.Q. tests). He used his intelligence to convince psychiatrists to release him after serving only five years for his grandparents’ murders, claiming to have reformed. He hadn’t, and he killed eight more women before being caught again.

9. Shiftlessness
Despite higher than normal intelligence, many serial killers have trouble keeping jobs or work in unskilled labor.
After leaving the military, David Berkowitz, who reportedly was of “above-average intelligence,” held several blue-collar jobs before he was captured, including his last one as a postman.

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Testing of the recovered Tylenol bottles found that the capsules had been laced with approximately 65mg of the highly toxic compound potassium cyanide, nearly 10,000 times the amount to kill an average person. An investigation carried out by the FBI and local Chicago police department found that the tampered bottles came from different factories. Tampering in the initial production of the Tylenol capsules was ruled out since all of the deaths occurred in the Chicago area.

The original theory behind the crimes was a culprit who took the Tylenol bottles from drug and grocery stores in the Chicago area over a period of weeks, opened the capsules and added potassium cyanide, after which the culprit would return the bottles to the stores to be purchased. Due to the capsule form of the Tylenol, one could not tell the pills had been tampered with. To this date, the crimes remain unsolved.

Recently, Scott Bartz wrote an expose titled The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson which explores a very different story of the murders and why the case was never closed. Bartz, a former Johnson & Johnson employee, had another theory in which the tampered Tylenol capsules were introduced at the manufacturer warehouses rather than being tampered and replaced in stores. He goes on to state that Johnson & Johnson later learned about this information and intentionally hid the evidence.

The expose compiles numerous sources of information, including the interviews of the victim’s families, FBI, local law enforcement, and prime suspects as well as undisclosed documentation that give rise to why the murders were never solved. Some problems that Bartz encounters include lack of evidence to support a culprit tampering with bottles in stores, the closely guarded distribution system by the makers of Tylenol, and the manipulation of facts by investigators. The inconsistencies that occurred with the production & distribution of the Tylenol capsules are believed to be due to the relationships of the company executives and their political motivations.

Update

In the years following the Tylenol murders, a number of copycat attacks occurred (ie. The 1986 Excedrin Tampering Murders). This led to tamper-resistant packaging and improved quality control of drug manufacturing through packaging reforms and the development of federal anti-tampering laws.

With new advances in forensic technology, the case is being re-investigated. A prime suspect at the time of the crimes was James W. Lewis, but police could not link him to the actual crimes.  In January 2009, Lewis’s home was searched for evidence and in 2010, he submitted DNA and fingerprints. The connection between Lewis and the murders is still being investigated.

On May 19, 2011, DNA samples were requested from Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) by the FBI. At the time of the crimes, Kaczynski’s parents lived in a Chicago suburb where he occasionally stayed. Kaczynski denies any connection to the murders.

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Read about another crime involving Marijuana

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