Monsters and demons are a common sight on Halloween as children take to the streets for the annual tradition known as trick-or-treat.
But in 1974, a real monster walked among them in a disarming disguise — a dad.
Ronald Clark O’Bryan is today remembered as the “Man Who Killed Halloween.” He earned the nickname — as well as another, “The Candy Man” — by murdering his own son, Timothy, 8, with a cyanide-laced treat.
Although the holiday stretches back to antiquity, children in costume going door-to-door and asking for sweets is relatively recent, only about a century old. The tradition was firmly established by the 1950s. Along with trick-or-treating rose another phenomenon — panic about people slipping poison, razor blades, pins and other instruments of destruction into the goodies.
Most of these horror stories have been relegated to urban myth. O’Bryan is the one documented case that is cited when talk turns to killer Halloween candy.
O’Bryan, then 30, his wife, Daynene, and two children, Timothy and Elizabeth, 5, started Halloween evening with a meal at the home of another family, Jim Bates and his wife and children, in Pasadena, Texas.
After dinner, the two dads left the house, escorting three children — Bates’ son and O’Bryan’s son and daughter — out into a drizzly night for the annual candy hunt.
One house along the route was dark, but the children still rang the doorbell. There was no answer, so they moved on.
O’Bryan lagged behind and then, moments later, came running to catch up. He was waving five giant Pixy Stix, 22-inch straws filled with flavored sugar.
He told the kids it was their lucky day, because “rich neighbors” were distributing “expensive treats.”
Each of the three children on the walk got one Pixy Stix. Later, O’Bryan gave the fourth to Bates’ other child, a 5-year-old daughter. The final Pixy Stix went to a trick-or-treat visitor who rang the doorbell at the Bates house.
Back at their home in Deer Park, Texas, O’Bryan told his children they could each have a treat before bedtime. Timothy chose the Pixy Stix, but he stopped after the first taste, saying it was bitter.
Timothy’s dad offered him Kool-Aid to wash it down. Moments later, O’Bryan heard the boy crying, “Daddy, Daddy.”
“It seems like it wasn’t long before he was up and complaining his stomach hurt and he didn’t feel good. He was bent over vomiting, and I was holding him when he just went limp,” O’Bryan told the Associated Press. “We thought we were so careful. We had even wondered if we should go out trick-or-treating this year. There isn’t going to be any more trick-or-treating for us.”
An autopsy found enough cyanide in the boy’s body to kill three grown men. Examination of the Pixy Stix showed that someone had opened the tube and replaced some of the candy with poison. Then the tube had been stapled shut.
One of the children who had gotten a tainted Pixy Stix had been tempted but fell asleep before he managed to pull out the staple. The other tubes were recovered before any child tried to eat the contents.
Police became suspicious of O’Bryan’s story, especially after he offered his version of how he came into possession of the deadly treats. He said that he rang the doorbell at the dark house, and a man thrust the five Pixy Stix at him.
He said he saw nothing but a “hairy arm.”
It turned out that the man who lived there was an air-traffic controller, and he had 200 people vouch for the fact that he was at work at the time this was supposed to have happened.
Then detectives delving into O’Bryan’s background came up with some startling facts. O’Bryan, an optician who worked for Texas State Optical, was about $100,000 in debt, had lost his house, and was on the verge of losing his car.
He was also about to lose his job because his bosses had discovered that he was stealing. In the decade before the crime, he had been booted from 21 other positions.
To top it all off, investigators learned that he had taken out about $60,000 in life insurance on his children. Police speculated that O’Bryan had planned to kill his kids for insurance money.
Within days, O’Bryan was under arrest for the murder of his son.
Detectives were never able to pin down the source of the cyanide, but several witnesses at O’Bryan’s trial, which started in May 1975, told of his interest in obtaining the poison and how much it would take to kill. His sister-in-law also said that at the boy’s funeral the grieving dad mused about using the insurance money to take a long vacation.
“The only inescapable conclusion is that this man killed his own flesh and blood for money,” Prosecutor Mike Hinton told the court. “Think how easy it would be for him to kill a stranger for money.”
The jury took 46 minutes to find O’Bryan guilty and worthy of the death penalty.
Appeals dragged on for nearly 10 years, and O’Bryan maintained he was innocent to the end.
On March 31, 1984, “The Candy Man” had a last supper of steak, French fries, peas and Boston cream pie before his execution by lethal injection. As the sentence was carried out, demonstrators in Halloween masks stood outside the prison, yelling “Trick or Treat!”
