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In the span of four days in September 1982, seven people across the Chicago suburbs — a twelve-year-old with a sore throat, a postal worker, and the two family members who gathered at his house to grieve him, among others — took an ordinary Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule from a bottle that looked exactly like the one in anyone's medicine cabinet, and never woke up again. It took a public health nurse counting missing capsules out loud in a grieving family's kitchen, and a medical examiner's investigator willing to lean over a pill bottle and smell it, to even figure out what had happened: someone had opened bottles on store shelves across the city, laced the capsules with cyanide at nearly triple the lethal dose, and put them back — with no connection to a single victim. The case named one man, James Lewis, who mailed Johnson & Johnson a million-dollar extortion letter days later containing operational detail about the tampering that had never been made public — and was convicted only of that extortion, never of the murders. He died in 2023, mid-documentary, still saying he didn't do it. This week, Eli and Simone dig into a case that reshaped how an entire country buys medicine and still has no answer to the one question it was actually about.

Want to see for yourself? The case file has the full story in writing, and the source list shows which claims are confirmed, which are disputed, and which rest on a single account.

Case file: https://precisionandinstinct.com/cases/chicago-tylenol-murders/

Source list: https://notes.precisionandinstinct.com/episodes/15-the-chicago-tylenol-murders.html

CONTENT NOTE: This episode covers a real, unsolved 1982 mass-poisoning case with seven named victims; several of their relatives appeared on-camera in the 2025 Netflix documentary covering this case and are treated with the same care this show gives other cases with living family participants. LeAnn Lewis, James Lewis's wife, is named only as a factual anchor (a traced bank account, assumed names, her own documented aliases) and is never characterized or implicated beyond what's sourced — she was investigated and cleared. Roger Arnold, a second person investigators looked at hard and never charged in this case, is named consistent with this show's established pattern on uncharged-suspect naming; he died in 2008 and two rounds of DNA testing never connected him to the poisonings. James Lewis, the case's central suspect, was convicted only of extortion, never murder, and died in 2023 still maintaining his innocence — this episode does not resolve whether he was responsible, and the murders remain an officially open investigation to this day.

The hosts are fictional characters created by Verb Editorial, with AI-generated voices designed specifically for each one. Each episode is researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and produced by a human team.

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On a September night in 1922, a small-town minister and a choir singer he'd been having an affair with were shot dead and laid out side by side under a crab apple tree in a New Jersey lovers' lane — his hat over his face, her scarf around her throat, torn love letters scattered between them, and his own calling card propped at his feet like a signature. The crime scene was never secured: within days it was pulling an estimated thousand cars a day, with vendors selling balloons and twenty-five-cent bags of dirt scooped from under the tree until souvenir hunters had stripped the bark off it. Four years, a missing grand jury file, and a witness testifying from a hospital bed later, the reverend's widow and her two brothers stood trial in the biggest media circus American journalism had seen before Lindbergh — and walked out acquitted. This week, Eli makes the case that the acquittal was the only honest verdict a badly-compromised, circumstantial case could produce. Simone isn't ready to let a filed-down pistol, a changed story, and a family with the money to buy the best defense in the state off the hook that easily.

Want to see for yourself? The case file has the full story in writing, and the source list shows which claims are confirmed, which are disputed, and which rest on a single account.

Case file: https://precisionandinstinct.com/cases/hall-mills-murders/

Source list: https://notes.precisionandinstinct.com/episodes/14-the-hall-mills-murders.html

CONTENT NOTE: This episode covers a real, unsolved 1922 double homicide and the 1926 trial of four named historical defendants — Frances Hall, Henry Stevens, Willie Stevens, and Henry Carpender — all of whom were acquitted or never brought to trial and were never legally found guilty of anything. All named principals in this case, including both victims and the prosecution's central witness, died between 1930 and 1992; there are no living subjects and no sensitivity sign-off gate on this case. Standard care applies throughout to any language implying guilt, since the jury's verdict stands and has never been overturned — the episode itself argues both sides without resolving which one is right.

The hosts are characters created by Verb Editorial. Their voices are AI-generated. All research, writing and production are done by a human team.

Hey! We would love to hear your thoughts, send us a voice note.

EPISODE 13: The Mad Gasser of Mattoon (Mattoon, Illinois, September 1944)

EPISODE NOTES:

In September 1944, in the small Illinois railroad town of Mattoon, a woman named Beulah Cordes picked up a cloth left on her own front porch — and within seconds her lips were swelling and her mouth and throat were burning, with a skeleton key and a lipstick tube, neither hers, sitting beside it. Over the next two weeks, dozens of residents reported a mysterious "gas maniac" breaking into homes at night to leave people gassed and paralyzed, drawing in the Illinois State Police and the FBI, before the panic collapsed within days of the police chief publicly doubting it — and no suspect was ever arrested or charged. This week, Eli and Simone dig into a case the town's own public health commissioner couldn't fully settle in real time: whether this is one of history's clearest documented cases of mass hysteria, or whether one badly-explained porch means something in Mattoon actually happened.

CONTENT NOTE: This episode discusses a wartime panic involving documented chemical injury to a real, named private individual (Beulah Cordes) and references to wartime loss (a household member killed at Normandy) as historical context, not as a focus of grief or tragedy narration. One contested historical candidate (Farley Llewellyn) is named once, sourced to a single self-published book flagged as unreliable by Wikipedia's own editors; no motive, personal life, or biographical detail about him is discussed. No suspect was ever arrested or charged in this case, and it remains officially unresolved.

You'll find the source list here: https://verbeditorial.github.io/precision-and-instinct-notes/episodes/13-the-mad-gasser-of-mattoon.html

The hosts' voices in this episode are AI-generated. All research, writing, and production are done by a human team.