I’ve watched more documentaries than I can count, some routine, some riveting, but The Tylenol Murders on Netflix stands alone. It is a haunting, brilliantly constructed deep dive into one of the most terrifying unsolved mass murders in American history. And for me, it’s not just a story. It’s personal.
This horror story unfolded in a neighborhood I knew intimately. Years earlier, I lived near 1500 N. LaSalle Street in Chicago, the same building where Paula Prince, one of the victims once lived. Even after I moved downtown to Marina City, I remained closely tied to that area as the Democratic precinct captain for the neighborhood. It was my beat. I knew the streets, the shops, the people.
Paula Prince was a striking, graceful flight attendant for United Airlines. I remember her clearly. She bought a bottle of Tylenol from the Walgreens at North and Wells—a store I’d frequented many times. That bottle had been tampered with and laced with cyanide. Paula was found dead in her apartment.
Her friend and fellow flight attendant, Jean Regula-another striking young woman I also knew-was the one who found her. Watching Jean speak in this documentary, her voice heavy with the weight of what she witnessed, stopped me cold.
I also knew Richard Brzeczek, the Chicago Police Superintendent at the time. I had known him long before this nightmare began, from our mutual work in law enforcement and legal circles.
I also met former CNN reporter, Jeff Flock while I was doing Freelance investigative TV news producing.
This three-part Netflix series doesn’t just rehash the facts, it rips open an old, still-bleeding wound. It exposes the chaos, the confusion, and the catastrophic missteps that allowed a mass murderer to disappear into the night.
One of the greatest failures? Johnson & Johnson-the pharmaceutical giant whose product was weaponized-was allowed to conduct its own investigation. They cleared themselves of any wrongdoing, and the government let them. No charges. No consequences. Only public reassurances and empty condolences.
Then came the extortion letter-demanding $1 million or more people would die. But this wasn’t about greed. It was about revenge. The suspect, a dangerous and manipulative figure, used the threat of mass murder to frame a man he loathed. The cruelty of it is staggering.
The evidence against him-though circumstantial-was enough to keep him in the FBI’s crosshairs for decades. But never enough to prosecute. Justice, in this case, remains a ghost.
One element that chilled me most was what the documentary didn’t outright say: there were likely more victims. Elderly individuals who died suddenly and were never tested for cyanide. In 1982, a sudden cardiac death in an older adult didn’t trigger alarms. But we now know better. And we will never know how many souls were quietly taken.
If this crime were committed today, it would be solved within days. Cameras, digital receipts, GPS data, phone metadata-technolog- would have tracked this killer down fast. But in 1982, it was a different world. A world where someone could buy poison, slip it into a bottle, and walk away unseen.
The Tylenol Murders is now streaming on Netflix. Watch it. Let it disturb you. Let it remind you how fragile our sense of safety really is-and how sometimes the most horrifying crimes don’t come from shadows. They come from places we know, people we trust, and products we never question.
