The common painkiller acetaminophen has been in the news lately, and perhaps unfairly so. But it’s far from the first time that Tylenol (the most commonly used brand name for the drug) has been in the news. A previous round of dramatic Tylenol news changed the way we get over-the-counter medications in the U.S. It also changed the probate law in Arizona and many other states.
How did Tylenol affect probates? By changing the “simultaneous death” rules in many jurisdictions. And how did Tylenol manage to make that change?
How simultaneous death is treated
First we have to sketch out the problem of simultaneous death. Let’s assume, for instance, that a married couple each has a will leaving their entire estate to the other spouse. But if they are killed in a common accident, and it’s difficult to figure out the sequence of death, whose will controls the final disposition?
So let’s make the problem clearer. Stanley and Theresa are married, and they have no children. Stanley’s will leaves everything to Theresa; if she does not survive him, his estate goes to his favorite charity. Theresa’s will leaves everything to Stanley; if he does not survive, she leaves everything to her mother.
When Stanley and Theresa are involved in a tragic and deadly automobile accident, the paramedics rush to treat each of them. Both are pronounced dead before they can reach a hospital, but the exact times of death are in dispute; Stanley might have died minutes before Theresa. Or perhaps Theresa was actually dead before the paramedics arrived.
If Stanley died first and his estate all goes to Theresa, then her mother inherits from both of them. On the other hand, if Theresa died first everything goes to Stanley and then to his charity. Theresa’s mother and Stanley’s charity may have to go to court to have an unpleasant — even gory — dispute over the sequence of death.
What does this have to do with Tylenol?
Well, Stanley and Theresa did not die in an accident. And neither of them had a will, anyway.
In 1982, an unknown killer (or killers) substituted cyanide in multiple Tylenol capsules and put them back on drugstore shelves. A number of deaths ensued — through no fault of Tylenol or its corporate owners, it should be said.
Stanley and Theresa Janus were two of the victims. They had both rushed to Stanley’s brother’s home after the brother’s unexplained death. Because they both had headaches, they each swallowed Tylenol from his medicine chest. It turned out that the bottle had been the cause of the brother’s death and both Stanley and Theresa also died.
Stanley had a $100,000 life insurance policy naming Theresa as beneficiary and his mother as alternate beneficiary. But if Theresa survived Stanley, the insurance proceeds would flow through her estate and to her mother. So the two grieving mothers were set up to have a fight over the details of their respective children’s nearly simultaneous deaths.
Janus v. Tarasewicz
The upshot: an Illinois Court of Appeals decision holding that there was sufficient evidence that Theresa survived Stanley. Theresa’s mother received the insurance proceeds and the rest of the couple’s estate. That decision was handed down on August 12, 1985, almost three years after the couple’s tragic death.
That lead to the creation of uniform law, the Uniform Simultaneous Death Act, in 1991. Actually, the 1991 uniform law was a rewrite of a 1940 proposal. That earlier law had been in effect in Illinois (Arizona, too) at the time of the Janus’s death. The new law tried to cut out the gory and unproductive litigation, and Arizona adopted it almost immediately.
Under the “new” Arizona simultaneous death act in 1991, very few cases would require any litigation at all. If two people die within 120 hours of one another, that amounts to a “simultaneous” death. Each decedent is treated as having both died before and survived the other.
In other words, if Theresa and Stanley had died in Arizona in 2025, the results would have been switched. Each would have been deemed to have predeceased the other, and Stanley’s alternate life insurance beneficiary (his mother) would have received the policy proceeds. Their other property, though, would likely be divided among each of their heirs. His heirs would receive his half-interest in joint property and all of his separate property. Her heirs would receive the same as to her property.
The current state of the simultaneous death law
In subsequent years, Arizona further clarified that its version of the simultaneous death act applied to all “governing instruments.” That means even Stanley Janus’s life insurance policy would have been affected. Though that might not have been completely clear at first, since there was a separate statute expressly covering insurance beneficiaries that the legislature apparently overlooked when it changed the law. In UNUM Life Insurance Co. of America v. Craig, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled (in 2001) that the 120-hour survivorship requirement prevailed.
In the Craig case, a husband and wife, and the husband’s son from a prior marriage, were all killed in a horrible auto accident. Testimony indicated that the husband and son were clearly dead when the paramedics arrived, but the wife might have made some gurgling sounds just before being declared dead. Exactly the kind of testimony that the law was intended to avoid.
For at least some purposes, 120 hours (five days) isn’t really long enough. Imagine, for example, a probate proceeding that takes 4-6 months (or more) to complete. If a beneficiary dies during the probate process but before receiving any proceeds, will we have to probate his or her estate later? And will his or her creditors have access to the inheritance? Maybe we want to make the survivorship requirement not five days but thirty — or sixty, or ninety. We can do that in wills and trusts, at least. And, in fact, we often do.
Please remember that we practice law in Arizona, and that’s what we know. Sometimes we look at other states’ laws, but we don’t want you to think that we really know the law in your state. We express no opinion, for instance, on whether Stanley’s life insurance would be treated differently under Illinois law today.
