The Man Who Killed Halloween.
On the evening of October 31, 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan took his two children trick-or-treating in a neighbourhood outside Houston, Texas. They had spent the evening at the home of his friend, Jimmy Bates, whose family joined them for dinner. By the time they finished eating, it had begun to rain, and the children were growing impatient to collect their Halloween candy.
The two fathers took three of the children out, leaving the others at home. They had not gone very far when they reached a house with its lights turned off. O’Bryan accompanied the children to the front door while Bates waited on the pavement. Nobody answered, so the children ran ahead to the next house. O’Bryan, however, remained on the porch for another thirty seconds before following them.
When he returned, he was carrying at least two large Pixy Stix, long plastic tubes containing powdered candy. He told Bates that the wealthy neighbours had been giving out expensive treats, which must have been welcome news to the children. Bates had not seen anyone answer the door, although there seemed little reason to question his friend’s account.
After returning to Bates’s house, O’Bryan distributed five Pixy Stix among the children. His eight-year-old son, Timothy, received one, as did his daughter Elizabeth. The remaining sweets went to the other children, including a boy who came trick-or-treating at the house.
Later that night, O’Bryan took his children home and allowed them to eat one piece of candy before bed. Timothy chose his Pixy Stix, but struggled to get the powder out of its plastic tube. His father took it from him and rolled it between his hands to loosen the contents. When Timothy finally tasted the candy, he complained that it was bitter, so O’Bryan gave him Kool-Aid to wash it down.
Within minutes, the boy became violently ill. He ran to the bathroom and began vomiting before suffering convulsions. An ambulance was called, but Timothy died shortly after reaching the hospital.
An autopsy established that he had been poisoned with cyanide.
Investigators recovered the other four Pixy Stix and discovered that each contained a fatal quantity of the same substance. Fortunately, none of the other children had eaten theirs. The sweets had also been tampered with, as one end of each plastic tube had been closed using a staple rather than the heat seal applied by the manufacturer.
At first, the case appeared to confirm a fear that had troubled American parents for years. Stories of strangers hiding poison inside Halloween candy had existed long before Timothy’s death, and now a child had apparently become their first fatal victim.
The trouble was that investigators could find no stranger responsible for distributing the sweets.
O’Bryan eventually identified the house where he claimed to have received them, but the man who lived there had been at work that evening. Further enquiries produced no evidence that anyone along the trick-or-treating route had distributed giant Pixy Stix.
Meanwhile, the police were learning rather more about Timothy’s father.
O’Bryan worked as an optician and had accumulated substantial debts. He had fallen behind on his car payments, struggled to obtain credit and sold the family home to meet his financial obligations. Despite these difficulties, he had recently increased the life insurance coverage on both his children to approximately $30,000 each, partly without his wife’s knowledge.
Witnesses also recalled his enquiries about obtaining cyanide in the months preceding the murder. On Halloween itself, a customer had seen him carrying a stapler and a bag outside his workplace.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable discovery concerned a conversation O’Bryan had with a funeral director on November 1, the morning after his son’s death. Having learned that he would need a separate death certificate for each insurance claim, he ordered six copies.
In June 1975, a jury convicted Ronald Clark O’Bryan of capital murder. He continued to deny responsibility, but his appeals were unsuccessful, and on March 31, 1984, he was executed by lethal injection.
The press called him the Candy Man, although another name would become associated with his crime: the Man Who Killed Halloween.
His murder did not put an end to the holiday, nor had he invented the stories of poisoned candy. What he had done was give those stories an actual victim, making an old childhood fear seem frighteningly reasonable.
For years afterward, parents would remember Timothy’s death as a warning about accepting sweets from strangers. Yet the most disturbing part of the case was that no stranger had ever offered Timothy the poisoned candy.
The man who handed it to him had been walking beside him all evening.
Comments