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One day, my seven-year-old son, Seth, came home from school and started crying. I thought maybe he'd been in a dispute with a kid or something, but that wasn't it. He was terrified because he heard that school back in the 1980s that a little girl died after her mother gave her a Tylenol.

I tried to tell him, don't worry about it. Mommy would never give you anything to hurt you, and he looked me right in the eyes and said, but her mommy gave her the pills.

How was I supposed to reassure him that if I gave him medicine, it was okay, but her mother unknowingly did.

This is what I was dealing with in my own home, but outside my house, the entire city of Chicago was just as terrified about what was possibly in their medicine cabinets.

Someone had tainted Tylenol with potassium cyanide and put poison bottles on shelves and stores all over Chicago. The nation was terrified.

They were throwing away their medication or taking it into the police, stores, drug stores, grocery stores were taking Tylenol and other things off their shelves.

Why the hysteria? Because it could happen so easily and seven people unknowingly took poison and died.

Adding to the hysteria was wall-to-wall radio coverage. CNN was in its first year of cable news, and there were three competing newspapers in Chicago, every headline, in large bull print, was about the Tylenol murders.

It became a national story in a matter of a day.

By the end of September 1982, which is when this tragedy occurred, I had only been an agent just under two years.

The first few years of my career, I was doing anything and everything I could get involved in, arresting bank robbers, a murderer here and there, working on a case of a corrupt public official, anything.

In a big city like Chicago, in a big division like Chicago, or 400 agents. If you were a rookie, as I was, you had no reason to believe you'd be chosen to investigate a case like this.

But this was an all-hands-on-deck situation and any available agent was assigned to work this case.

By the time I had that conversation with my son, I had been working on this case, 12, 13, sometimes 16-hour days.

My partner would pick me up at 6 in the morning, I'd get home at 10 or 11 at night, and I'd turn on the news and watch what was going on.

The urgency of this case was profound. We needed to identify and capture whoever was doing this.

Every hour working on this case felt critically important to me. It was hard to sleep. I just wanted to keep going.

I remember when my alarm went off, I would fly out of bed.

How quickly could we track the killer down before more innocent people died?

What was the killer's motivation? Why would anyone? Randomly and anonymously murder innocent people this way?

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