400: What if you suspected your father was the infamous Tylenol Murderer?

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening, add free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners, today we reach an incredible milestone on the show, celebrating our 400th episode. When I first started this work, I thought I'd be lucky if I made it to 50 or maybe 100 episodes. And here we are 14 years after the show was launched, with still many, many more stories to come. With each episode, each season, and each year, my gratitude for being able to do this work and for all of you only continues to grow. We have a very special episode today to mark this occasion, but it requires a little context as it involves the infamous Tylenol murders of 1982. In September and October of that year, seven people died after ingesting over-the-counter pills of Tylenol that had been laced with potassium cyanide. This led to a nationwide panic, and immediately after, the introduction of sweeping regulations mandating tamper-proof safety seals on all pharmaceutical packaging, which are still required today. Despite extensive investigation, the case of who poisoned the pills remains unsolved. And it's considered to be one of the most consequential, unsolved crimes in American history. But today's storyteller, Joseph Cibeli, believes his father was the killer. He's written a book about it called The Tylenol Murders, a father's confession to his son, and you'll hear him piece together some of the key details on the episode today. While it's very convincing, we make no claims here on the show about the veracity of his evidence, as there hasn't been any official conviction. But the story of his relationship to his father and the possibility of how dangerous he truly was is haunting and powerful. And I hope in the end it may lead to some resolution and justice for the victims' families. You can find more details about the history of the murders themselves, as well as some deeper reflections on Joe's story by going to my recently launched substack at witmissildine.substack.com. But now onto our 400th episode. What if you suspected your father was the infamous Tylenol murderer? You get up to the top of the stairs and he looks at me. He kind of crouched down to me and he's holding my brother. And he looks me in the eyes and he says, if you ever talk about what went down today, I will kill you, I will kill your mother, and I will kill your brother and sister. And then it was two days later when everybody started dying. From Audible Originals, I'm witmissildine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 400. What if you suspected your father was the infamous Tylenol murderer? Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Ottawa has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic series. Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts, plans now start at £5.99. Audible, be fascinated, be fascinating. My father was a thug by all accounts. He was a little gangster, a little thug, a little punk, living in Cicero, Illinois, the home of Al Capone. And my granny, that's what I call his mother, was my granny. Granny said, you know what, you're out, you gotta go. So my dad ran off and he was living under a bridge in Willow Springs, Illinois. That would have been about in like 1963, if you were to take. So in comes my grandma, my mother's mother. She was a good Christian woman and somebody had told her, her name was Arlene and they said, you know, Arlene, there's somebody, there's a kid living under the bridge over there. I don't know what to do about this. This isn't right. So my grandma went down, got my dad from out from underneath the bridge, brought him home. He's the same age approximately as my mom. And so they were 13 when they met. So he is all that my mom knew. They were dating seriously. And then my father went off to Vietnam and at that point they had broken up. My mom had started dating somebody else. My dad came back into the picture and my dad beat him up and basically said, you know what, you're mine, we're getting married. So 1970, they got married, had an apartment and then they moved to Lyons, which is where I grew up. He was working for a company called Electromotive and they became an EMT and his time went by. Then he joined the police force in Lyons as well. And then in 1976, we bought the house on Gage Avenue. Life was actually in 1976 was really kind of normal and it was what I would call just like a regular childhood. But 1978, something happened with my father. The first big thing was my cousin Karen was killed in a car accident in Missouri. I had a deep and profound effect on everybody in the family and it was mostly because after Karen was killed, we were not allowed to really talk about Karen. It's like she didn't exist. She's gone now and we need to move on and don't mention her name ever again. So that happened on September 30th of 1978. October 15th of 1978, my brother was born. So I went from being a seven year old only child to having a sibling and I was excited about that. It was at that time when my father really started to change. I think my father did not want to be a dad and have kids and a mortgage and a family. I think he wanted to live that military life and he liked anything that was a high adrenaline rush. That was his thing. Not long after my brother was born in November of 1978, the People's Temple Murder happened in Jonestown with Jim Jones and he killed over 900 people. I was seven and I could watch my father watching the news stories about that. And I thought he is really interested in this story. This story is really speaking to him on a level that I don't think it should. Even at seven years old, I thought he should not be that interested in this case. So I just watched my father and I saw my father devolve from this point. He was just a different person. His personality had changed. The loss of Karen, the birth of my brother, and then Jonestown happening, it mentally changed who he was as a person. He became dark. He retreated. He went into himself more and it was after that point when he built his lair. It was in our basement and our basement in that house was his little workshop space because it had always been referred to just as his workshop. A wall went up, a door went up, a deadbolt went on the door and from that point forward, my father was in that lair more than he was out. And from the age of say 70 years old, I started watching him and I saw him devolving through the lair. We went from this light filled life to this dark secret with a deadbolt on it. I would sit there and look at that door that was locked and know something is going on in there. So as I'm watching my father, he became extremely volatile, which he was not always like that. My father could be nice and he could be kind and now he was volatile. If you just looked the wrong way, if you breathed the wrong way, you would get a hand across the face or a punch or something thrown at you. And I had seven years without that kind of circumstances in my life and then all of a sudden it went from one way to a complete opposite way. So I learned at a very young age that I needed to keep my eye on him moment to moment to know, okay, is it safe to go in that room? Do I need to grab my siblings because my sister was born in 1981? Do I need to grab them and run out of the house? What is going on? So I had to learn to gauge that from an early, early age and it progressively got worse and worse and worse. And the worse that it got, the more time he spent in that lair. We lived in a constant fear of not knowing what was coming at us. There came a time when I think my mom knew that I could possibly help. I was 10 years old and she looked me in the eyes and said, if he starts beating on me tonight, I need you to call the police. So apparently, I mean, my mom must have known some damn was about to break because, you know, that night it happened. I was in my room in the basement and I heard yells and screams and glass breaking and then there was this thump and I knew that was my mother hitting the floor. I'm thinking like she wants me to call the police. If I call the police and they show up, he's going to kill me and I'm thinking, you know what, I don't care at this point. This has got to stop. So I did. I called the police and I said, I need help. And I said, well, actually my mom needs help and she's like, what's going on? I said, my dad is beating her up bad and she asked my mom's name and she said, I'm are you Danny's son? I said, yeah. And she's like, somebody's already on the way. Like they didn't need the address. They knew where they were going. The officer showed up and was like looking in the door and he's like, Danny, whatever's going on, they're just knock it off. Just knock it off, cut it out. And every time I had to call the police to intervene, that was it. I mean, people are like bruised and bloody. They're like, just, just cut it out. You know, they didn't want to be bothered with it. Because he was an officer. He was a police officer and they protected him. He could get away with whatever he wanted and that only emboldened him. And in fact, it was kind of put to me by my father, you know, you keep calling the police like this, they're going to end up taking you and your brother and sister away and you're going to be in an orphanage and you'll probably never see them again. There's a seven year gap between myself and my brother. And then there was a 10 year gap between me and my sister. And, you know, I tried as much as I could to protect her. My father would come after her and I would get between them and be like, you know what, I don't think you're going to do this. You know, I would stop him and I did not flinch. And my mom would come down and she'd be like, it's okay, you know how he gets, you just have to stay out of his way. And I was like, I want to kill him. You know, in my mind, I had honestly thought like, how can I take him out? So back when I was probably about eight years old, my father started taking me on, I would call them a mission. It was some kind of a hiking expedition. And it started out pretty simply. We would be walking in the woods and he would teach me how to walk through the underbrush and not make any noise. I would walk out of very quietly walk so nobody would hear you. But these excursions started getting darker. We would take our excursions through the woods and he would show me plants in the woods and what was edible, what was not edible. And that I think is a great life skill to have to understand this. But my father took it to another level to where he would show me plants that were poisoned and say, if you're ever going to have to use this to poison somebody, you know, you take these leaves and you dry them and you put them in tea and that will knock somebody out and they'll be gone. You know, he taught me about killing people with antifreeze. He taught me how to kill somebody with a pen. He taught me how to follow people in the woods and that's where it really gets, it takes a turn there. There was an incident that my father took me to the woods. I'm eight years old. We parked the car. We're in the car and we see a young couple as a male and a female walking towards the trailhead. And he had this, like a stair. When he would go into something like this, there was a look that you got and it was dark. It was soulless and it was very purposeful. This look, it was very intentional. My father taught me how to read and break ciphers and codes and he had also taught me basic sign language. So my father made the symbol for a T and he pointed at the people and I thought, okay, T must mean target. That's the target. So he's, he's stalking these people and I'm, I'm with him. So it looks like I'm stalking them too. He had packed a bag and we got out of the car. I've never seen anything like this because he was completely silent. It was almost like he was hovering along. He did not make one noise as he was walking. We let the people get about a hundred feet away from us. And we started creeping up in the woods. We were walked very, very quietly. And there was a tree that had fallen and it was off the side of the trail. We went behind that tree and out of his bag, he took an army green wool blanket. My father had named the blanket, which is odd. He named the blanket itchy brother. So he takes itchy brother out of the bag, lays itchy brother on the ground behind this tree, pulls me back there, we're crouched down, we're hands and knees now. And you could just barely see over this log. And I'm like, what is he doing? He pulled out camouflage netting that you could put over yourself. You can see through it, but it's completely camouflage. He puts that over us and we sat there and he kept telling me he put his finger, you know, over his mouth like quiet. My guesstimate was we were there about 20 minutes and we just sat there in quiet and stillness. And then I heard the couple walking back down the trail back to the parking lot right past this log. Well, we were hiding behind it with the netting on. He leapt over that log with the netting on. The netting pulled off of me and he was on the trail behind these people with the netting on right up behind them. He did not make a noise the whole time where he leapt over the log in the time that he was running down the trail behind them. Absolute silence. He got up behind them. He had the netting on him, which it's a terrifying sight. Your heart's going to skip a beat. He puts his arms up and he makes this noise. And it is the only way I can describe it is it sounds like a wild boar, like a and it was 10 times as loud as that, probably not even four feet behind them. They both turn around, they look and they scream bloody murder and they go charging out of the woods. They took off, they ran out into the parking lot and I could just hear them screaming and my dad was running behind them. 100 percent silent, not a word. They got in the car. I could hear the car engine start and I heard that the car pop into reverse and I heard the tires squeal out. So I'm thinking to myself, we got to get out of here. These people are going to be out waiting for us or the police are going to be there. I mean, I'm I'm going into a panic. My father comes back just slow and casual, takes the netting off, kind of shakes it out, shakes itchy brother out, fold them up, puts it all back in his bag, not rushing, nothing like there was no fear in him. And he looked at me right in the eyes and he said, that is how you stalk your prey. I'm Leon Nefok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. 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The most terrifying part of this whole thing, this whole episode with him, was yes, the fact he was hiding under camouflage netting and yes, he was chasing people through the woods and stalking them. But the most terrifying thing to me was his calm. So after that excursion with my father, it was not even 10 days until my father and I and my brother, who was not even four yet, my father took us to a baseball game. And on the way back from the baseball game, we drove past Lincoln Park Zoo. And I had said to him, I've never been to the zoo. And he's like, oh, you know, a couple of weeks we'll go with your brother. Well, I have a day. My father went to this gas station and he pumped gas, nothing under the ordinary. When he was done pumping gas, he stood there at the edge of the gas station, staring across the street. I can see the sun kind of setting in the background. And I'm watching my father just this dead blank stare across the street. Like, what is he looking at? He finishes with the gas, comes, gets me, grabs me by the hand. We walked down to Wells and almost on the corner of Wells and LaSalle is Walgreens. My father took me into the Walgreens on Wells Avenue. He bought us each a can of Coke. And then we left. We crossed the street, we went back to the car. And at that point, I said to myself, I'm thinking, why didn't he just buy us a can of Coke at the gas station? A few weeks go by, my father takes me and my brother, like I said, who was not even four at this time, to Lincoln Park Zoo. So kind of me entered through the zoo for a while. And my brother at this point, he wanted a balloon. And my dad's like, oh, yeah, look at him a balloon. And I will always remember this. My father was wearing a red jacket. And it was his lion's fire department jacket. He reaches into his pocket and he pulls out his jacket. He pulls out his wallet and he goes, oh, shit, I didn't bring any cash today. He's like, Joey, stay here with your brother. He said, right down the street, there's a Dominix. I can run into Dominix and cash a check and I'll be right back. So my dad ran off. He was gone about 45 minutes. And, you know, four decades from this point go past. And I realized then that that Dominix is next door to the Walgreens. On Wells Avenue in Chicago. The next week, I had a day off of school and my father took my brother and myself to Bussy Woods. And Bussy Woods is a big forest preserve outside of Chicago. We had a itchy brother with us and he had packed some other things and we're walking down a trail. And he kind of set my brother and myself in the spot. And he put out the blanket and he said, you know what, you're going to have to stay here with your brother. And I'm like, what is going on? We're in the woods. I'm 11 years old. He's not even four and you're going to leave me here again. Right after you left us at the zoo. I would say probably 50 feet away, there was a pavilion there and there were bikers at the pavilion. They're out there. They're having a good time and my father's like, you got to be quiet. Those people over there, those are dangerous people. You cannot say a word. You've got to keep your brother calm because I've got to go do something. Do you remember how I've been teaching you how to use a watch as a compass? Yeah. He said, here's my watch. I want you to stay here with your brother and you watch that watch. You do not leave these woods for one hour. And then you use my watch as a compass to find your way back to the parking lot. I'm 11. I got not even a four year old here. I'm watching with the bikers. I got dangerous bikers right here. And I kept an eye on the watch and I was like, oh my God, it's only been five minutes. It's only been 20 minutes. It's only been a half hour. And this is the second time within just a few days that we were left alone. And I'm sitting there thinking like, what is my father doing? We start heading back to the car. And when I got to back to the parking lot, it was over an hour and 20 minutes that we had been left there. So my father gets back and I was pissed. And it was really the first time I ever stood up to my father. I was like, you know what? There is nothing right about what you did. Why did you leave us in the woods? And he said, you know what? You were fine. I was testing you to see if you could get back to the parking lot. You did. You made it back. Okay. So what's the problem? And I was like, the problem is you left us in the woods alone with these bikers. And he's like, okay, you know what? I think everybody's hungry. We got to eat. So we pull into the Howard Johnson's. We go in. We have pancakes. It's a completely uneventful afternoon. We finally got home. Everything in my life changed. We got back from Bussey Woods. My brother was sleeping. My dad's carrying him up the stairs. We get up to the top of the stairs and he looks at me. He kind of crouched down to me and he's holding my brother and he looks me in the eyes. And he says, if you ever talk about what went down today, I will kill you. I will kill your mother and I will kill your brother and sister. And then it was two days later when everybody started dying. Now you have to remember, 1982, we did not have 24-7 news. We did not have a social media feed. We did not have any kind of news popping up on our cell phones. It was a different era. So all around us at this point, you're hearing about people dying. And then it came out when people were dying from taking Tylenol. And I just remember, I was realizing at this moment that my father was capable of killing people. Like I had no doubt about that. And not only was he capable of killing people, I had an epiphany, I guess you could say, up an 11-year-old canyp on epiphany. I think he's doing this. That day, like something in my whole life kind of changed. I was out riding my bike. I'm like, I got to get home. I have to dump Tylenol because I think, what if we have poisoned Tylenol in the house? So I got back home, go in the medicine cabinet, there's two bottles of Tylenol in there. And at the time, you know, those boxes were not sealed, the tops were not sealed, there was no nothing. So I popped the top off, pulled out the cotton and I dumped the Tylenol. 11 years old, I dumped it. It was not long after the murders. I believe it was October 5th. I was in the living room with my father and any time that he was around, I would try to figure out how I get out of this room. That was after he had threatened me and said, you know, he'll kill me, my mother, my brother and sister. I ended up, I was in the living room with him. We're watching ABC7 News Chicago. On the TV, there was a clip from the funeral for the three members of the Janus family who died from the Tylenol. They're showing Joseph Bernardine, he was, I think, the Archbishop at that time. And he's sprinkling holy water onto their caskets and saying a prayer. And I felt this reverence for these people, the suffering that was going on in that church. It was palpable to me through the airwaves. I could feel it. And my father's behind me and he wanted to watch this. My father was not a news watcher. He insisted this night to watch the news. He's sitting behind me and I can hear his breathing change. And I know when I hear that, I know something's brewing. They were getting their caskets sprinkled with holy water. And my father says, great, three fucking holy Catholic martyrs. To me, that was like somebody hit me in the head with an axe. I mean, I've been always been a very sensitive person. I am very in tune to what people think and what people feel. And I'm feeling this through the airwaves, this sense of sadness and sorrow and dread. So at that, I just turned around and I mean, I was, I was so pissed. I mean, I could feel like the veins in my neck popping out. And I was like, what does that even mean? What are you saying? And he's like, none of your business. And I said, no, honestly, like, what does that even mean? What kind of a person I'm 11. What kind of a person says this? And he just looked at me and he said, if you're so fucking smart, you'll figure it out one day what it means. I was taking the side of these people who were murdered. And in his mind, I was betraying him. That was such a profound moment in my life that my whole life after that, it's been burned into my being. My brother's birthday was October 15th. So we were planning to have a quote unquote birthday party at the house, which was just like something in the theater of dread is what I would say. My mom asked me to clean my room. So my room is in the basement right across from the lair. I go down there in the lair door is wide open. All the lights were on. The shades were up. There was sunshine in the lair and I was watching my father and I was watching my father in what I would now say a hypomanic mode. He was throwing things into a barrel and he had stolen these barrels from where he worked and they're a shell oil drum. That's what I can picture yellow with red writing and it had shell oil on there. I'm watching him like I'm standing there watching him. He's got like no idea I'm even watching him. I mean, he's in this mode throwing papers and throwing stuff. And so I creep up on there and I look in the barrel in there was a pink cup and there was a watch in there that I had found on a hike with him. He was making me look for something and I found this watch. The watch was in there and I'm just watching him throwing all this stuff into the barrel. And for the first time ever, the lair is like spotless clean. It's like it was like he bleached it down. So I'm upstairs and I'm in the kitchen looking out the window at him and then I hear him dragging the barrel out through the basement door. We had an outdoor fireplace and he doused this thing with gasoline and lit it on fire. He destroyed everything. So after 1982, life in our house was always pretty hellish. There were periods where it just escalated and got worse. And then there was also times where it faded. There were times, I mean, in our family that we did laugh and we did have fun, but it was always overshadowed by the darkness. So in about 1988, I was 16 going on 17 and I was figuring out my own life. Like how do I, you know, I can, I can have a life outside of this house now. So, you know, I had my little group of friends and I was getting ready. I was waiting for my friend Tina and Tina was always late and I'm stuck downstairs with my dad. He just had decided to plop down and have a conversation with me. My whole life after the Bussy Woods incident where he said, I'll kill you and your mother and your brother and sister. I just stayed out of his way. I didn't want to be anywhere near him. And I think my father had been drinking and he was not a big drinker, but I feel like he was drunk this day. And he basically sat me down and he said, you know, it's good. I think it's good for you that you're going out with your friends and you're meeting people and he's like, I've never been real social. So in my mind, I'm like, oh yeah, you know, most psychopaths aren't, you know. And he's like, you know, I've never been right in the head. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to sit back down now because I got to hear this. So we had this conversation and he says that he had adjusted poison medication when he was a kid. It wasn't technically poison medication, but he was allergic to it. And he told me that he had died that day. He's like, I don't know if it happened, you know, when I drank that medication, I don't know if it's from my time in the military. I don't know if I'm just not wired right. But, you know, he said, you know, I've never really been right in the head. And it was at that point like Prozac was starting to come out. You know, it was one of the first really heavily used antidepressants. And I said, you know, there's medication for that. Now you can, you know, you go see a therapist and talk about this and get some medications. He's like, no, no, no, I can't do that because my work found out they'll fire me. We go into this conversation and he says, yeah, you know what, you don't want to end up like me. He's like, you know, I've killed people. Time to sit in there. I'm 16. I'm like, oh my God, what are you going to tell me when you say you've killed people? I felt like I was doing an interview on TV. So when you say you've killed people, do you mean while you were in Vietnam? No, no, no, no, not there. He's like, you know, I was really more saving lives there with what I had to do there. And, you know, I learned a lot of stuff, but no, not there. And I was like, so when did you kill people and who did you kill? He's like, you know what, it's not important. And so he would kind of change his subject and go on to something else. And I'd be like, no, I want to go back to what you said. You just sat here and you told me you killed people. I want to know who and I want to know when. And again, he admonished me with what he had said before. He said, you know what, if you're so smart, you're going to figure it out some day. And I have that with me the rest of my life. So at this point then, you know, I'm in high school, I got my friends, you know, I'm living my life and I just learned to have a life outside of that house. I started working. I was involved in student government. I was involved in plays at school. I was, you know, anything I could possibly do to just not be in that house on Gage Avenue, I would do. And then as soon as I was done with high school, I was like, you know, I got to do something because I want to get out of here. So I went to beauty school. So at this point, I'm working, doing hair, making friends. And honestly, I took everything that had ever happened to me in my life and in that house and just stuck it away. I never dealt with it. I'm really great with people and people would be attracted to me and want to be involved in my life. And I would only let people get in so far. I mean, I can't tell you how many people in my life that I've kind of pushed away because they were starting to get into close. You know, they were getting too close to the fire. And I would go into therapy in the second we started getting into deep. I'd be like, oops, gotta go. I would never let anybody in past the veneer. We were taught in that house, like when you walk out that door, everything's perfect. I don't care if you have a black eye. You know what I mean? You left that house and everything was just fine and funny and right. And I was just fine and funny and rosy and happy and, you know, happiest place on earth. And I lived my life that way. I lived my life behind a facade. So I always refer to my father like he was a black hole in a black hole. We'll suck anything into it. And it will just literally suck the light and the life out of that. And I was stuck in that orbit. Like I was still in the orbit of this madman. And I found myself in friendships and relationships, defending this man who abused the shit out of me and his whole family and murdered people. I mean, I never would even broach that subject. I was like, nope, that is hands off, you know, one out of fear. Cause if I was to ever say anything, he would have offed me. And two, I just didn't want people to know that part of me. I mean, there was no way I was going to go diving into this. I just, I wasn't ready to, I was not able to, because I was still in the orbit. And while I was in that orbit, I mean, like I enjoyed my life. I had, you know, like the best times I met the best people and I started traveling, you know, I was working really hard, but I also would play hard. I would take these amazing trips and go off to Europe for a month or I went to Australia for a month and I was trying anything I could possibly do to be out of that orbit and to put this out of my life. But it was never possible. That was always there. I did hair for three and a half decades. And then, you know, as I was doing hair for a long time, I bought salons. I had sold salons. I had a really great life doing that. And then I bought my first condo. I'm like, okay, I'm away from it. No, no, I wasn't. That black hole was still the center of my life, no matter how much I didn't want it to be. I could never tell anybody about any of the abuse we went through. You know, I didn't want to look at the, the ugly. I didn't want to look inside of that black hole. I just wanted to get away from it. It played out in my life in so many ways. I never really got into drugs and I was never really even a drinker. I was more of the control freak type because we had to be constantly aware. So for me, if I'm out in a club or something and I'm drinking and I'm getting drunk, that can't happen because I have to be in control. You know, I was always the one in my friend groups who would drive places because I didn't want to be left anyway. You know, I had to be in control. So, you know, I didn't drink and I'd be a total dick to people because I didn't want them getting too close to me because I was worried they were going to discover what I was hiding, which was, you know, nothing that I had done. But in my own way, I always felt culpable because I knew what he was capable of and I didn't do anything. And I didn't want anybody to get too close to me because I didn't want them uncovering what I knew. I know that my father's a criminal. Like I was angry. And then I started kind of turning that anger towards myself because I thought, you know what, you're smart. You know what was going on and you did nothing. You know, and I give myself that grace because I was 11, but I still, I've carried that my whole life. You know, I've gotten through my 20s and in my mind, I just always thought like, well, you know what, when I'm 30, that seems like a good age to, you know, find somebody. So I was exactly 30 when I met my husband. We kind of hit it off right away. But from the very beginning of our relationship, I would take out stuff from my father on him, even though he had nothing to do with it. And what kept us together was he's kind. My husband is a kind and he is a gentle man. And I did not know how to deal with that. It was very difficult for me because that is not what I was used to. I'm like, there's got to be a motive behind this. What are you really looking for? What are you after? What are you really up to? And it's like, no, my husband didn't have a layer in the basement. My husband wasn't, you know, leaving people in places so he could go murder people. You know, it was, it was just a whole different experience having this kind and gentle person now at the center of my life where the other man that was the center of my life was my father, who was a black hole. My husband's name is Craig. And we were sitting on a couch one night and he just looked at me and he said, I don't know what you're carrying, but you're carrying something. And I was like, everything's fine. You know, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm probably just tired, you know, and we kind of kept going down that path. So we were in our kitchen one day and Craig is telling me about his father and his father by all accounts was such an amazing, decent, great man. And he's telling me, you know, oh, my dad worked for this company and every year for a bonus, they'd get new snowmobiles. And, you know, he's like, oh, yeah, we go out, the whole family is out on the snowmobiles and we'd be out having a good time. And then we'd get home and we'd sit in front of the fireplace and drink hot chocolate. He's like, oh, my dad was such a great guy. And I'm like, I think my father was a serial killer. He's like, wait, do you think your dad's a serial killer? Like, where did that come from? And so from that point forward, I slowly started to let him in. I slowly started to talk about what had happened behind the closed doors. I slowly started to talk about what I saw, what I heard, what I knew. And I mean, he would just ball. He would just be like, I had no idea it was like this. I had no idea it was this bad. At this point, my sister had gotten engaged and I loved my sister. My sister, I mean, for a 10-year gap, like we were so close. And she got married. They bought a house four doors away from my mom and dad. And my sister just refused to move into the house. And I sat my sister down and I said, you know, what is wrong? What is going on? Why aren't you moving into your house? And she just told me, she's like, I can't leave mom alone with him. And she told me, she said, there's things that you don't know about. She says nobody knows about. She never even told her husband some of the things. You know, I had noticed with my sister a little bit of a darkness emerging. You know, she had gotten some surgery and then she was hooked on painkillers. And you know, I mean, it was manifesting in ways that I was not expecting. So I watched my sister kind of devolving. And my sister had attempted a few times to take her own life. There was a time where she was in a lockdown facility and she had joined a therapy group. And in that group, you know, she made new friends. And with those new friends, she was able to express what had happened to her and her life. And then she was kind of starting to get on the right track. She was very smart. She graduated college. She was a teacher. And, you know, everything seemed like it was going in the right direction. Then the morning of June 6, 2013, and I'm in the kitchen, I'm making coffee, the phone rings. It's Craig's phone. He's like, oh, it's your mom. And when he picked up the phone, I could hear her and I just knew something wasn't right. I just heard Craig saying, oh my God, Mary, no, not Liz. She had a pulmonary embolism and died that morning just out of the blue. Like no warning. One minute she's standing, one minute she's down. I was very close with my sister. I had described her as my ride or die. You know, she was just an incredible person. So when she died, my life changed completely. I went off the rails. I wanted to get out of Illinois. So Craig and I ended up moving to California. And Craig kind of sat with me one day and he's like, do you remember the time we saw your sister when she was in lockdown? And there was something she wanted to say, but she wasn't ready yet. And I said, yeah. He's like, do you think that your father could have molested her? Your condition to protect the abuser. I'm like, there's no way. I mean, he's a horrible person. But no, that just ate at me. And I knew who to call. She had a friend named Sandy. I called Sandy and I was like, okay, what's the deal? And she goes, I have been waiting for this call. And I said, what do you know? She said, imagine my surprise when I walked into your sister's memorial service and there he was, meaning my father, pontificating in front of the room. And she said, I'm sorry. And she said, I have journals with her writing in it about the abuse she suffered at the hands of your father. She was not ready for anybody to know this. And it was unfortunate we found out about this after she died. I had asked Sandy, I said, can you send me those books? And so I got the proof. I have it in my sister's handwriting. My father raped my sister from the time she was six until the time she was 13. So when you look back at that, I'm 10 years older than she was. So the time I was 16, as soon as I had a driver's license, I was out of that house. And she was stuck there with him. And you know, my mom always worked like a three to 11. She was a nurse at that point. And you know, so my sister was there with him and it just like it kills me because I'm like, I left for there. You know, I knew this man's a monster, but I left my sister there with him. So I went off the rails. I mean, like I laid on the floor in our house and I was shaking and I'm like, I swear to God, I'm getting on a plane. I'm going there. And I was like, no, you can't do that. So I called him and I told him, I said, I know what you did. He's like, fuck you. And I was like, no, why don't you tell me what you did to my sister? Fuck you. Fuck you. You don't know anything yet. Really? I have it right here in her own handwriting. And I said, and I'm going to expose you. My father had gotten very involved in their church. He was a deacon and he was the treasurer and then they made him an elder in the church. When I found out 100% certainty, my father raped my sister. I reached out to that church and I had said, you know what? You have got a monster in there leading your congregation. And they did nothing. This guy raped his daughter. I have it in his dead daughter's handwriting and you're making him an elder. He has never once been held accountable for anything he's done. All of this happened and nobody would listen. He turned my brother against me. He was trying to make my mom choose because I was in California and my mom was like, I'm not choosing. And I think at that point people were like, okay, this guy's crazy. You know, I was the one who looked like I was nuts. And that's a horrible position to be in is when you're telling somebody a story about something that's happened and you look like you're the crazy one. So that was 2015. You know, I had to kind of work on this and put myself together. 2019 comes around. I cut him out of my life and I changed my last name. He found out and he's like, oh yeah, you're going to script my name from you. Guess what? I know what you're thinking. You're putting this together and I'm not going down for this. About 1986, I started keeping track of this man. I started writing down places we were at, things I saw, things I heard, anything I could think of. I wrote it down in this journal. Hey, we went to the woods today and stalked somebody. You know what I mean? It was it was along those lines and he found it and he must have thought that was a threat. And that journal went and disappeared. He had stolen it out of my room in 1988 and he held on to it. And I think by 2019, I had already figured out what he had done to my sister. And he was worried I was figuring out about the Tylenol murders because all those dates where we went to Bussy Woods and we went to the zoo. I had all of that in this journal. And I think the biggest detail is if you go on Google Maps and you look at Bussy Woods from the air and you plug in the addresses of where those bottles were in that area, one was in Elk Grove Village, literally right on the border with Bussy Woods. Woodfield Mall, there were two tainted bottles found at Osco Drug there. You can stand at Bussy Woods and look across the highway and there's Woodfield Mall. And also from Bussy Woods, north is Arlington Heights. The jewel in Arlington Heights where the bottle was found that killed three people is also right on the perimeter with Bussy Woods. If you look at Bussy Woods from the air and plug these three addresses in, it's literally like they are all along the perimeter of where he left us. So, in August of 23, Craig told me your mom messaged me and told me your father's dying. I called my mom on the phone and I said, okay, Craig told me she didn't want to tell me until she knew for sure like this was the stage four pancreatic cancer. So, I had to kind of figure out like, how do I deal? I'm not going to fly out there and sit with him. So, I said, you know what, I'm going to write him a letter. So, I send it as a text because I had no other way to send it to him because he wouldn't have opened mail for me. So, I send him, this is a text and I go into, you know, I have had a good life. I've become a good man. I had great accomplishments and I want you to know that I did this not because of you but in spite of you and I want you to know that the poison that you put out into the world did not kill me and that was about 10 days prior to him making his confession on his deathbed. When I found out my father was dying and even though I, you know, we had no relationship, I wanted him to still have the best care. I'm like, you know what, whatever you did in your life, when you're at that point, you deserve some dignity. So, my husband's business is actually end of life care. So, we had reached out to a friend of ours in Chicago who was running a hospice and she got it set up for my dad and I mean he was treated like a VIP and there was a day when there was a nurse there and in front of the nurse he said, cyanide pills, I did it. And they had thought that my father was saying like he put the cyanide in his own pills. It was a mystery at that point and then my brother is with my father and my father sat up in bed just out of the blue and said again, cyanide pills, I did it, it was me. And then he said, my father sat there, he was just kind of staring down the hall and then my father said, my father said, the three Marys should still be here. One of them was so young. And my brother was like, what the fuck are you even talking about? And there were three Marys who were victims of this crime. There were three Marys who died. One of them was 12 years old when she died. Thus, one of them was so young. When my brother told me this, I almost dropped the phone because I was like, all along I thought he did this. When he said cyanide pills, I did it, it was me. I knew exactly what he meant, but this was such a key to the whole thing when he said the three Marys should still be here. Right after my father said that about the three Marys, he said, my dad was just kind of staring down the hall again, kind of blank. And my dad was talking to somebody that you couldn't see. He was talking to some entity that was not there, but he was seeing somebody there and he's looking down the hall and he said, if you know what I did and you didn't do anything about it, you would be the monster. I feel like all of that was my father's reply to my letter that I sent him. And I took that as a personal challenge that if you knew this and you're not going to do anything about it, you're the monster, not me. You're the problem. So I was at work at the salon, had a client in the chair. I had to run out to my car to get some clippers out of the trunk. I had put in the trunk of the car and there's Craig and he's walking a parking lot towards me. He's got a box of cookies and he's like, I wanted to tell you your dad died this morning. Your mom called me, which my mom always does whenever there's something she calls him and lets him break it to me. So he's telling me this and he brought me these cookies and I will never forget these cookies. They were a lemon cookie and they're soft and they were covered in powdered sugar. It was just something about those cookies that day. These lemon cookies brought to me to tell me my dad died. And I go inside with the cookies and I don't really know how to feel right now. Should I feel happy? Would that be horrible? Should I feel sad? Would that be just a bunch of BS? And I just kind of drifted that day just like not knowing how should I feel? I felt like I was at sea. Like I really should be happy but I'm not. You know, I'm not happy that he died. In my mind, you know, I'd always thought, you know what, he's going to come to his senses. He's going to see what a dick he is and he's going to like try to make things right. And you know, you hold on to that as a child and you take that into your adulthood with you. So up until that day that he died, I carried that with me, honestly thinking like, you know, we're going to get to sit down and have a conversation. We're going to sit down and discuss things and we're going to get to hash things out even a little bit before he died. And I didn't get that opportunity. The day after he died, I thought, this is the first day in my life ever that I've woken up on this planet without him breathing the same air. And I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I was a little sad, even though he was horrible and even though I know his crimes and I know his demons, you know, there was always that hope that we would have some kind of a father son moment. You know, I've had to move on in my life and I tell people, I'm like, you know what, I forgave him a long time ago. I had to because it wasn't hurting him that I held on to it. It was hurting me. Like it was creating chaos in my life. And I finally just had to say, you know what, I'm done with this. I forgive you. It's over. And that's kind of how I felt that day. When I found out he died, I felt a little bit lost and I thought, I'm not going to get that opportunity to ever cash any of this out with him. So I've just, I've got to let it go. And I also had put in the letter that I wrote to him, you know, I talked about my life was good. You know, I've done these things not because of him, but in spite of him. And even though he put this poison into the world, it didn't kill me. And I told him in there too, you know, that I'm going to lead this family now with love and truth. Your reign of terror is over now. And I hope to see you on the other side. My bachelor's degree was in criminal justice, which I was fascinated with. And that kind of led me into forensic psychology. And I will tell you with 100% certainty, the reason that I chose forensic psychology is because I have spent my life since the age of six or seven trying to unravel my father's brain. And I still to this day, I'm trying to figure him out. I don't think I'll ever have an answer of why he was the way he was, why he did what he did. It will always be a question to me. And it's a question that I never got to ask him. I mean, even if I would have been able to ask him, I would have not gotten an answer. If you ask him a question, you didn't get an answer. You got something to decode. And so, you know, I pursued forensic psychology so I could try to unravel him. And I just, you know, I don't think that's going to do it either. You know, it really is helped for things to make sense. But I'm never going to understand why he did what he did. And I don't think I will fully understand everything he did. I've honestly thought, you know what, I mean, I thought like I'm going to be done with my PhD. I'm going to be done with law school. You know, I'm going to go into law practice. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. When I honestly feel like I'm going to probably spend a big chunk of the rest of my life kind of decoding my father and trying to make sense of it. I went back to Chicago after he died. And I was like, you know what, I need to understand what was in that layer. And I went up into the attic and now my father was a hoarder. He would have boxes. Like if he was going to clean his car out, he would just take everything out of the car, put it in a box and put it in the attic. He didn't throw stuff out. So I start looking through cardboard boxes. I open up a box. It's sitting right in the middle of those papers and junk is a small sample size bottle of extra strength Tylenol with an expiration date the same year of the expiration dates from the poison bottles. So I'm rummaging through boxes. There was the Anarchist Cook book, which in itself is pretty awful. There was another little manual in there called How to Kill. And then these pamphlets called The Poor Man's James Bond. These are things you had to mail order for. You know, you didn't just go to the store and buy them. So I had to, as an adult, research these things. And you know, the Anarchist Cook book is definitely, it's sort of terrifying, but it's nothing like The Poor Man's James Bond. It's dark. It's dark and it's sick and it's twisted. The Tylenol murders, it's laid out in those books. The Poor Man's James Bond quite literally says, if you want to take somebody out, get into their medicine cabinet, take capsules and put cyanide in them. And he had those in his lair. So, you know, I'm reading this and I'm reading my father's material. It all makes sense. The other thing that was profound in there revolves around the people's temple. You know, my father was obsessed with that. And I explained that earlier about Jim Jones and the cyanide in the Kool-Aid. There was a conversation that my father had with me one day and he said, you know, Jim Jones was a merciful man because, you know, originally he had planned to put anaphrase in the Kool-Aid. And anaphrase is cruel. Anaphrase is a long, painful death where cyanide was fast and instant. So this story, I feel like my father is praising Jim Jones. He's praising the cyanide. And as I'm reading through the Poor Man's James Bond, there it is. There's a whole story in there. You know, if you want to be a real hit at a party, dump some anaphrase into the Kool-Aid. And it was like my father took the time to tell me that Jim Jones made a conscious decision to use cyanide as opposed to antifreeze because he was merciful. You know, you're reading that and that's some dark shit. There were days where I just had to kind of close the book and just walk away because I was, I was like, I don't know what I'm going down. Like what rabbit hole am I going down now? At this era, my mom was going to nursing school. So she was in class and she was working and she was running the house. And then when I started to put this together and I had to have this conversation with her, and I mean, she's devastated as you can imagine because she does not disbelieve what I'm saying. I mean, she's, she's right there with me, but it's devastating to her. She's like, I took the abuse from him so that my kids could have something better. And she's like, I was not aware of what was happening to my children. I have had some resentment before like, come on, you did it now. You did it now. And then when I was putting things together, I made the realization that when my father did all these horrible things to us, it was when she wasn't around. She's at school thinking that she is going to make a better life for everybody. And this monster just came out and did whatever he wanted. She's just mortified. She doesn't know which way to turn. Like I said, in the beginning, they were 13. My mom's, which will be 76 in December, you know, her whole life has been spent with him. And she's like, I feel like everything I did in my life, everything I've worked for, everything I've accomplished was part of a big lie. You know, like I feel like I'm complicit in this because I contributed to this. I felt bad for my mom. I mean, I've witnessed what she went through being married to him. When I started to put this all together, I was not planning to write a book. All I wanted to do was stand there and look at this disaster area that was my life and try to piece it together. But there's crimes that were committed and there's things that happened. And I'm not the person who can like look at these things and not do something about it. Craig, my husband had said, if you want to write this as a book, I will support it. But I'm going to insist that you be in therapy while this is going on because it's dark. So I started into therapy and as I was going through therapy and unraveling all this and putting all of this together, I mean, it really did help because there was so much darkness. So with therapy, like I'm constantly coming into these revelations about my life and myself because, you know, I feel like this curse that was on my family, which is really silence, I have carried that in me. And I carried it in my own personal inner layer. Like I had my own layer of darkness and secrets and lies locked up behind my own personal door. And by writing the book and doing therapy, I've been able to open up that layer door and put it all out for everybody to see. And, you know, there's no more secrets behind it now. And it's an exhilarating place to be in my life. And it's also terrifying. It's terrifying because this is my normal, you know, carrying this with me. And now I mean, I've decided and it was a conscious decision. I'm not carrying this anymore. I'm putting it out there for the world to see. And I feel honestly, for the first time in my life, I feel like I'm happy. I feel like I've let this darkness out. And you know what? I let the darkness out and I didn't die. You know, if I had let this darkness out while my father was still alive, chances would be he'd be trying to kill me. I know what it feels like to not be listened to. The police didn't listen to me. Adults didn't listen to me. And even now people, you know, authorities are still not completely listening to me. In a way, I feel like I've betrayed my father because I'm telling all of these secrets. But at the same time, that betrayal feels right. And it feels like it was time for me to do this. And for myself, it's the best thing I could have done. I feel completely satisfied in my life now. And every day I'm kind of looking at that and like, my God, this this layer door, my own personal layer door is now gone. Like I took the door off the hinges, it's not there. And it's like, I have this openness in me. And I'm like, what am I going to do with that? And where am I going to go with this? And, you know, that's to be determined. That's to be determined. But I want to be able to use my voice to be able to help people. I want to take my father's horrible legacy, and I want to turn it into something beautiful. Today's episode featured Joseph Cciabelli. Joe is a former salon entrepreneur, turned author, legal scholar, and forensic psychologist. He wrote The Tylenol Murders, a father's confession to his son, which investigates the 1982 Chicago Tylenol Murders. If you'd like to contact Joe, you can find his socials, email address, and website in the show notes. From Audible Originals, you are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Naven, Head of Audible Originals, North America, Marshall Looey, and Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiatzah. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velazquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at Actually Happening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com. You can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's ThisIsActuallyHappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening.