Candyman

You know how you were always told to check your Halloween food as a kid? Make sure no one laced it with anything, that the apples don’t have razor blades in them?

So, it is 1974 in Texas on Halloween. Timothy O’Bryan, who at the time was 8 years old went trick or treating in Pasadena with his little sister Elizabeth, who was 5 his father, a neighbor and the neighbor’s two children.

Later that night Timothy chose to eat a Pixy Stix which he called bitter and had a glass of Kool-Aid to get rid of the taste. He then immediately had stomach pains and began to vomit and convulse. He died one hour later on the way to the hospital.

Now I’m leaving out an entire chunk of what happened during the actual trick or treating.

It was discovered that the pixy Stix was laced with potassium cyanide. Thankfully none of the other children had consumed there’s which also tested positive for poison. So, who poisoned Timothy O’Bryan?

It was raining and they only trick or treated on two streets. Police became suspicious when they discovered the pixie Stix were acquired at a house where the occupant appeared to not be home. This home was owned by a man named Courtney Melvin. The kids got impatient and ran off to the next place. Then the door cracked open and the guy inside handed 5 candy sticks to Timothy’s father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan who gave them to the four children and the extra one to a child from their church. According to Ronald he only saw the hairy arm of the man.

It took several tours around the neighborhood for Ronald to remember what house he got them at, especially when it was confirmed that no other house gave out pixie Stix, and like I said before it was raining so they didn’t do it for very long.

His story fell apart when it was confirmed by over 200 witnesses that Melvin was indeed not home on Halloween and was in fact working his job at the William P. Hobby Airport as an air traffic controller.

Pretty hard to be in two places at once. They then discovered that Ronald was over 100,000 dollars in debt, which for the 1970’s was A TON of money. And both Timothy and his sister had significant life insurance on them with policies of 10.000 on each of them. Which was increased by 20,000 a piece just before Halloween.

I think for them it was a very clear case of yeah, that dirtbag definitely was responsible for the death of his child. And what’s worse is he basically didn’t care if he killed 3 other kids either. One of the families even allegedly found their child asleep with the pixie Stix after finding out they were poisoned, because he couldn’t open it by himself. Which makes sense because I guess Timothy’s dad had to help him open his. The candies had enough poison in them to kill 2-4 adults.

Ronald was arrested on November 5th, so again very quick investigation. Didn’t do a very good job of hiding his tracks. He was also talking about cyanide with a lot of people so…. yeah. Just a terrible human being and parent.

He was called the Candyman in the media and found guilty on June 3rd, 1975 was executed on May 31st 1984, ten years after the ordeal. By that time his wife had divorced him and happily remarried. He claimed his innocence by using the old urban legend that we just discussed of a stranger handing out dangerous candy.

Which I would like to say this is the ONLY known instance of poisoned Halloween candy being given and consumed by a child, and again not a stranger but his own father.