Today’s Halloween-y Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
We all remember childhood Halloweens, and we all remember being warned by our teachers and parents that we shouldn’t eat any of our candy till it had been inspected by an adult. We were told there were a lot of bad people who liked to poison Halloween candy, hide nails in chocolate bars or put razor blades in apples. (Most of us probably thought that people who handed out apples on Halloween were odd enough to do almost anything.) But nobody actually had first- or even second-hand experience with tainted Halloween goodies. The whole thing seemed, as we grew older, to be an urban legend. While truly random, genuine (as opposed to hoaxes created for publicity or financial gain) incidences of candy-tampering are extremely few and far between, the “urban legend” sprang from a very real crime that took place in the Houston suburb of Deer Park, Texas, in October of 1974.
Ronald O’Bryan was well-regarded by family and friends alike, known as a devout churchgoer and loving father. But he was also greedy, and his greed led him to plan and commit murder. As early as October 2, O’Bryan had taken out insurance policies on his two young children, in addition to the policies he and his wife had on them through their bank. These additional policies were paid for in cash so that his wife, who had expressed the belief that it was stupid to have even the basic insurance policy on the children, would not know about them.
O’Bryan worked as an optician and knew that cyanide had until the last decade or so been used to polish gold eyeglass frames. He talked with at least a dozen people around his workplace about how to obtain cyanide, saying that he wanted to learn the old polishing technique. He even asked a chemist how much cyanide it would take to kill a person. Nobody knows where and how he eventually obtained the cyanide, but it is clear that he was able to acquire some.
On Halloween night, a cool and rainy evening, the O’Bryans and their close friends, the Bates, enjoyed dinner together and then Ron O’Bryan and Jim Bates took the kids out trick-or-treating. Jim Bates testified later he saw the two O’Bryan children and his own two going up to a house, ringing the doorbell and nobody answered. The kids then ran to a neighboring house with its lights off, and Ron O’Bryan left the porch to meet them, carrying five giant Pixy Stix, purple-and-white striped tubes filled with colored, tangy sugar. “You must have some rich neighbors! Look what they gave out!” O’Bryan laughed, displaying the oversize treats.
There were five Stix so each child was given one and when they got home, O’Bryan gave the extra to a trick-or-treater who rang their bell. This trick-or-treater went home and was just about to open the big tube when his mother told him “I don’t want that all over the house. That’s an outside candy.” Jim Bates’s son was likewise about to eat his Stix when his mother reminded him that it was a school night and sent him to bed.
Eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan was not so fortunate. His father helped him open his Stix, which was closed with staples, and watched his son take a mouthful of the powder. Tim then said that the sugar had turned hard in the tube and he couldn’t get any more out, so his father rolled the tube between his palms to loosen the sugar and gave it back. Tim poured the rest of the sugar into his mouth and complained of a bitter taste. He was given some Kool-Aid to wash away the taste, whereupon he vomited and went into convulsions. An ambulance was called but Timothy O’Bryan died shortly afterward. The cause of death, cyanide poisoning, was readily discovered.
The news that a child had ingested cyanide-laced Halloween candy spread all over the nation. Houston police were desperate to find the killer, and they leaned hard on Ron O’Bryan to provide them with a suspect. He was able to pinpoint the house where he said the giant Pixy Stix were given out, and identified Courtney Melvin as the man who’d given them. Melvin luckily was able to prove that he had been at work at the airport until well after trick-or-treat, and that the women in the house at the time had forgotten to buy any candy and so were not answering their door. After that, O’Bryan’s fate was sealed. The insurance policies were uncovered, his talk of cyanide was disclosed, and witnesses recalled seeing him with a bag of Pixy Stix and a stapler; the candy’s manufacturer confirmed that their product was never stapled, they used a heat-sealing method to prevent leakage and contamination.
Ronald O’Bryan was sentenced to death and the sentence was carried out on March 31, 1984. He was the second Texas inmate to die by lethal injection.
And from that day to this, parents have been inspecting their children’s Halloween candy.
Culled from The Malefactors’ Register
Submitted by: Aimee
Greed indeed leaves a bitter taste. – Aimee