S4 Ep25: 50 Years Ago Today: The Murder of Timothy O'Bryan and the Ensuing Halloween Candy Panic
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Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan.

I dressed up like a head on a platter for Halloween when I was 11, complete with papier-mâché veggies. It was pretty epic. I grew up trick-or-treating in Brooklyn, New York in the '80s, and I don't recall my parents ever once going through my hall to make sure nothing had been tampered with. Similarly, I've never scoured my son's Halloween booty for signs of malintent.

I know there are parents out there on high alert every Halloween, insisting on inspecting every last morsel in their kid's plastic pumpkin full of candy. But statistically speaking, we parents are our kid's greatest threat. On Halloween 1974, 8-year-old Timothy O'Brien was pumped about the evening's plans. He was planning on trick-or-treating with his little sister Elizabeth and his friend Mark Bates from church.

The two families had dinner together at the O'Briens, and then Timothy in his Planet of the Apes costume, Elizabeth dressed as a princess, and little Mark Bates, probably not dressed as Norman Bates even though that would have been a home run, undeterred by the rain, set out with Ron and the Bates' dad Jimmy. Ron had volunteered to take them earlier in the day, even though he'd never taken on trick-or-treating duty before.

The group headed to the Bates neighborhood where the houses were nicer, and so presumably would the candy be. Ronald talked Jimmy Bates into a game plan that night. He'd be the one to escort Tim, Elizabeth, and Mark Bates up to the door of the houses they'd visit, and Jimmy would hang back on the sidewalk near the street. Seems like a completely unnecessary plan, but maybe Ron was a Virgo and just needed everything mapped out.

The rain wasn't letting up, so the little parade of two adults and three children kind of hopscotched through the neighborhood, hitting only two streets and making sure to stop at some houses while ignoring others. When the group came upon the house at 4-1-1-2 Donnerail, the porch light was out, which usually indicated that the candy had either run out or the occupants weren't interested in participating. The house didn't look all that inviting.

When the kids, accompanied by Ronald, yelled out "Trick or Treat," no one answered. The trio of tykes, probably saying "I told you so," sprinted on to the next house.

O'Brien, for some reason, lingered on the porch for a little less than a minute. When he came back to the group, he proudly produced five 18-inch-long pixie sticks. After the kids had run off, he said the porch light came on and someone with a hairy hand opened the door just enough to pass the giant sugar sticks over. Weird detail, but hey, sugar.

Later, Jimmy Bates would say he didn't recall the porch light coming on or the door opening, but who knows? Maybe he'd already moved on with the kids to the next house. Anyway, Ron told the kids that the "rich neighbors" had delivered, even throwing in some for the Bates' little sister, who'd opted to stay home. The kids stashed their fresh booty in their bags and kept trucking down the street in search of more. A few doors down, O'Brien asked the kids to give him back the pixie sticks, and they did.

He then took the sticks to the car for a few minutes before catching back up with the group and giving the straws back to the kids for good. When the kids were done with their sugary mission, they retreated to the Bates house where the moms had been visiting with each other. As O'Brien was trying to usher his family out the door and back home, the doorbell rang. He answered it to find a straggler trick-or-treater holding out his bag.

The kid recognized O'Brien from the church choir, and, amused by that, O'Brien handed him a giant pixie sticks from the stash of those he'd received at the rich people's house. On the way home, Ron's wife, Dainene O'Brien, decided to stop over at another friend's house. No worries, Ron would bathe the kids and put them to bed. At home, O'Brien let his kids pick out a piece of candy each before getting ready for bed.

Tim, whether of his own volition or because he was encouraged by his father to do so, chose the giant plastic straw filled with more than 13 grams of sickly sweet pastel-colored sugar. For the record, giant pixie sticks are now 15 inches long. I believe at the time they were 18 inches long, though one blog post I read put them at 21 inches. That's a lot of sugar. My teeth hurt just thinking about it.

Little Elizabeth opted for something else, then she went to bed. O'Brien watched as his firstborn struggled with the packaging. He couldn't get the staple, holding the top of the straw closed, off. When he finally got the thing open, he tried to take a big gulp of the sugar. No good. That stuff was stuck in the straw and wouldn't budge.

Any other parent in their right mind would have been like, oh no, you can't get the pure sugar out? How about something else that won't instantly put you into a diabetic coma? But O'Brien offered to help by rubbing the stick between his hands to get everything loosened up. Tim lifted the straw and poured some candy into his mouth, but didn't empty it because, he told his dad, it didn't taste right.

O'Brien, once again not taking the opportunity to steer his kid away from a horrendous sugar crash, offered to mix what was left with some Kool-Aid. His eight-year-old couldn't get pure sugar easily enough, so he mixed it with liquid sugar for him. In what would later become a terrible euphemism for easy compliance, when four years later Jim Jones made news in Guyana, Tim drank the Kool-Aid.

And while Jim Jones didn't actually kill his flock with Kool-Aid, it had the same effect as the glass of actual Kool-Aid mixed with more than half a giant pixie stick's worth of sugar that O'Brien handed his son. Almost instantly, Tim began to vomit before violently convulsing. Dutifully, Ronald Clark O'Brien called an ambulance, but to no avail. Slumping in his father's arms, Timothy died a horrible death, as his father watched.

When he got to the hospital with his dead son, an agony-stricken O'Brien told hospital attendants through his sorrow and misery that he, too, had vomited. Deeply alarmed that they were about to lose another patient, they prepared to pump his stomach when O'Brien recovered himself and was like, oh, wait, actually, you know what? I'm OK. False alarm. Thanks, though. So miraculous was the recovery that people would later recall it.

It had been the longest of long dark nights. A child had died. A city was about to be put on high alert. Rewards would be offered for information leading to anything anyone knew about this heartbreaking turn of events. An eight-year-old who sang in the church choir and who loved his sister and who had engaged in the most American of childhood traditions had suffered at the hands of the most villainous of strangers.

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Get 30% off any subscription or one-time purchase of Create 90 Count Bags at trycreate.co.strange. That's trycreate.co.strange for 30% off your order. After Timothy O'Brien's death, the coroner set about trying to figure out what had killed him. His little body was subjected to some serious scrutiny.

In the boy's stomach, the coroner found 16 milligrams of cyanide. In his blood, the coroner found 0.4 milligrams of cyanide. A fatal reading for cyanide in the blood is somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 milligrams. Tim O'Brien had enough cyanide in his blood to kill two adults, not to mention the amount left in his stomach, which could have killed a small handful more.

The news of Tim O'Brien's death traveled fast after hospital personnel called to explain his tragic demise. The police moved swiftly to talk to the adults involved and then to try to nail down the kid's root that night, trying to find out who could have given a child cyanide-laced candy.

Their first stop was the O'Brien home. There, they found some residual cyanide in Tim's sugar straw and four full inches of cyanide in the opening of little Elizabeth's pixie stick.

They quickly discovered the same thing in both Pixie Stix still waiting to be consumed at the Bates house. In fact, little Mark Bates had tried to open his Pixie Stix that night, but couldn't quite get the thing opened. It was stapled shut and just wouldn't budge. He fell asleep trying. Later, Mark Bates told a TV crew that it was the biggest piece of candy he'd ever seen. But his mom told him she'd just cleaned the house and he'd have to wait until tomorrow and have it outside.

By then, his friend Tim was dead and his much-admired Pixie Stix was in the hands of police, likely already in a forensic lab being tested for poison. The fifth Pixie Stix showed up after the town was enveloped in the ensuing panic. In the Pixie Stix that had been used to enhance the Kool-Aid, which was intended to cover the taste of the cyanide, half of the poison remained lodged, mingled with the sugar crystals.

In each of the four remaining tainted pixie sticks, the amount of cyanide was enough to kill three adults. But how could anyone know if there were more poisoned pixie sticks making their way into tiny hands? What about other candy? Parents across the nation were wracked with panic. Not a single child within a 50-mile radius of Deer Park, Texas, got to keep their Halloween stash as parents destroyed the bags or turned them over to police.

And while the news media and parents panicked about some sinister monster out there poisoning all the children, police were finding out some troubling facts about Ronald O'Brien. Going back, you could say the theory that something was not exactly right with O'Brien began with his spotty work record in the 1960s and early 70s.

By the time he was 30, he had had 21 different jobs in five different Texas cities in just 10 years. Now, many people in their 20s have checkered work histories, but most don't leave those jobs because their boss thinks they might be stealing from them. In the case of Ronald O'Brien, most employers had invited him to quietly leave after he was suspected of some kind of fraud or embezzlement that was easier to sweep under the rug than prosecute.

But it wasn't just stealing. Something about Ronald O'Brien was just creepy. A short time before his son's death, O'Brien became an optician at Texas State Optical, a recognized chain of eyeglass providers and stores found in strip malls all over the state. The job paid okay and was steady. Plus, he got to wear a white coat. Fancy.

How his wife viewed this continual pattern of work instability is anyone's guess, but she remained steadfastly by his side, bringing two children into the world with him over that decade. In any case, the O'Briens were in perpetual debt. Again, how much the wife knew is unknowable, but they had things most everyone else had. A house, a car, stuff.

They had a small amount of debt for unpaid taxes, but it doesn't seem like there were any red flags around finances as far as Dainene knew. If she was unaware of their money problems, she was clued in when sometime in 1974, the house where the family of four lived was foreclosed upon.

The O'Briens then moved to a rented townhouse in Deer Park, a small town of working-class folks who mostly made their living in the oil refining business that was the mainstay of their suburban Houston town. They found a nice Baptist church to go nearby and they made friends. As an optician, O'Brien made about $150 a week or $7,800 a year.

On one hand, that's $52,000 in today money, which is the median family income in this country in 2024. But $7,800 in 1974 was actually about $4,000 less than the median income then. So, sure, things might have been tight, but not nightmarishly so. Some reasonable budgeting should have done the trick. O'Brien, however, was clearly no fan of budgeting.

He consistently failed to meet his base financial obligations. There was that past house foreclosure, which meant he hadn't paid his mortgage in a pretty long while. And it turned out he was also eight months behind on his $150 a month car payment. It would not be long before somebody with a tow truck was going to repossess that car without so much as knocking on his door. If only that were the only outstanding debt he carried.

Later, when his financial troubles were made public, it'd be determined that he was about $100,000 in the hole, more than half a million today. One wonders where all that money had gone, because clearly it was not going into savings or college funds or car payments or the mortgage payment or back taxes. No wonder he couldn't get new loans to cover his old ones. He tried, of course, but had been repeatedly turned down.

But wait, don't say he wasn't looking out for his family. In early 1974, O'Brien decided he'd buy some life insurance on his children. Two policies for $10,000 apiece on children who do not work or contribute in any way to the family's financial well-being.

In fact, as macabre as this may be, the death of a child usually lowers the family's financial burden. Why one would need to insure children is beyond me. When his wife found out about the policies, she questioned the wisdom of spending money on premiums for children who would surely outlive their parents, because, duh.

O'Brien must have been some kind of charmer because despite her protests, the life insurance premiums got paid before most anything else.

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In August 1974, O'Brien asked the manager of his optical office to order some cyanide, a chemical compound that had been used in the past to polish gold frames. But use of the compound for that purpose was eased out in the 1950s in favor of other, less deadly chemical brighteners. So the manager saw no need. Request denied.

Not one to be easily deterred, O'Brien asked the manager to see if maybe those above him in the company would see fit to okay the request. Whether or not the manager did, I don't know. O'Brien even tried to talk up the professional use of cyanide with his colleagues, as if to get their support for the request. Hard to know how that went over, but sometime during those discussions, the talk turned to how cyanide was more associated with death than shiny frames.

Later, his co-workers would remember that conversation. Getting nowhere, O'Brien then contacted someone he used to work with at a chemical company in Houston. He told the guy that he was taking some junior college classes and thought his professor was lacking in his cyanide knowledge, and O'Brien wanted to school him. Which led to a rather illuminating conversation about how cyanide works to kill a human being and how much is necessary to get the job done.

Short answer to the first part. Cyanide, when mixed with the moisture in your mouth, becomes hydrocyanic acid, which enters the bloodstream and quickly renders your body unable to use oxygen. It's an ugly death. It takes 10 to 15 minutes to die, most of that consumed by convulsions, organ failure, and brain death. And on question two, how much do you need to cause death?

Very little. It takes about a third of a gram to kill someone in a few days, and about a half a gram to kill someone instantly. By the way, I googled that, and the first handful of results were for suicide prevention hotlines. Undeterred by the gory details, O'Brien got around to asking his buddy just where cyanide could be procured in town. A short list of suppliers was provided, and O'Brien made some calls.

Of course, he had never been enrolled in junior college or in any chemistry classes, and he had no questionable professor who didn't know the ins and outs of cyanide. Meanwhile, back at his job, O'Brien's co-workers' antenna may have been tingling a little bit from the cyanide talk, but when the money started going missing from the till, they had their eye on their likely culprit.

What to do? O'Brien was known to be a family man who ran the church school bus program in his spare time and sang in the church choir and impressed his pastor, he would later say, as, quote, an above-average father, end quote. Very weird flex. But was he really also a small-time cashier thief?

Turns out, in the month preceding Halloween, the above-average dad's expenses had gone up when he bought more life insurance for his little darlings, upping the amount to $30,000 per kiddo, payable upon their untimely deaths. God forbid.

When O'Brien bought the new increased amount of coverage, he asked the insurance agent not to mention it to Dainene. No need to worry her. And the agent said sure, because women were barely even citizens at that point. Oh, and one more thing, O'Brien informed the insurance officer. You can lower the insurance I have on myself and the wife. Also, don't tell her about that.

As late summer became fall, O'Brien had a new money-making plan that he was cooking up with his church friend Jimmy Bates. They'd buy a house together. They had already figured out what town and in what neighborhood they'd like to purchase. Might be a nice rental income for the two men. Another thing he didn't feel the need to tell his wife. Just keep it between the boys.

Then, as Halloween approached, O'Brien sought out a cyanide supplier who helpfully counseled him that he didn't need a lot for whatever he said he was planning to do with it. That guy suggested another guy who could sell him just a small amount. It was a five-pound sack, and for not much money. Let's just pause on that for a moment. A five-pound sack of cyanide. Five pounds.

pounds, which is more than 2,200 grams, and it takes a third of a milligram to kill a person. What on earth would anyone need with five pounds of cyanide? Anyway, O'Brien, it seems, was talking to everybody in town about cyanide, and some were clearly ready to help him out.

A week before Halloween, with his loan company breathing down his neck, O'Brien negotiated a bit of temporary reprieve. He told the loan officer he'd be coming into some money before the end of the year. Wow. The loan officer rescheduled his payment to reflect this glowing new financial reality on the horizon. On Halloween Day, Ron O'Brien told his coworkers in passing about this cool pocket stapler he'd recently acquired.

He then headed out to the parking lot to his car with the cool little stapler and a five-pound bag of something and opened his trunk and spent a little time with whatever his craft project was. He also told a co-worker that day that he was planning on quitting his job soon. What? Why? How? Here a hint, there a hint, everywhere a hint, hint.

But who knew all of it? Only Ron. Who knew bits and pieces? A lot of people sprinkled all over the greater Houston area. Nobody was putting two and two together. It's horrifying to think about how many friends or acquaintances or salesmen could have raised a red flag somewhere, telling someone else of the strange conversations, the inexplicable interest, the insurance irregularities. Nobody said anything.

And why would they? Why would the insurance agent ever have cause to talk to the cyanide salesman? Why would a cyanide salesman ever have cause to talk to Ron's boss? They were just dots on a map that were seemingly unconnected. Until they weren't. At 9 a.m. on November 1st, just hours after Timothy had breathed his last, the overcome and deeply affected Ronald O'Brien called his insurance company asking how to collect on his son's death.

A half hour after that, he called on his bank to ask them how to collect on an insurance policy that he'd taken out on his children there, too.

Over the next week, as police zeroed in on their suspect, they found a stapler, a knife, and scissors in the O'Briens' home. Those on their own wouldn't mean much — what house doesn't have a stapler, knife, and scissors? But this particular trio of common household items each had purple plastic residue similar to the Pixie Stix packaging on it. And there was evidence of crystalline sugar adhering to the tools.

O'Brien, meanwhile, was telling police he'd gotten the pixie sticks at those rich people's house and that it was a man with a hairy arm that handed him the candy that had been doctored.

Well, the man of the house was an air traffic controller on a shift that started in the afternoon and continued on until past 10.30 p.m. So, no, he wasn't home that night. His wife and children had handed out candy until they ran out and then turned off the porch light to indicate that they were no longer in the treating mood. And besides, neither of them had hairy arms.

If that weren't proof enough that O'Brien's shaky story was holding no water, no one else who trick-or-treated on that street got the 18-inch long candy straws that had so dazzled and tempted Tim O'Brien. As far as anyone knew, the only other kid who got a giant pixie stick that night that wasn't in Ron O'Brien's little group was the kid from church who got his from none other than Ron O'Brien himself.

And, like a house of cards, the whole thing unraveled as each co-worker and church pal, present and former colleagues, the guy who knew chemistry and the guy who sold chemicals, and all those whom O'Brien had talked to, recalled chapter and verse of their conversations with the optician.

Dainene had told the police what she knew about the insurance policies, but she did not know that her husband had increased the payouts. She did not know that he had stopped paying on the insurance he had on her or himself. She told the police about the family finances as she understood them. They did not include all the debts her husband had been hiding from her. That house he was going to buy with his buddy Jimmy Bates? O'Brien had seemed to assure him that the money for the down payment was in the bag.

All those plans with all that imaginary cash. And so it went, every thread unraveling like a cheap sweater. It took less than a week after the boy had died for his father to be arrested for killing his child and for attempting to kill four other children.

When finally told what the police had discovered, the distraught mother of the murdered child told the district attorney who had charged her husband with that crime that she had hoped it had not been true, but she could see that it was. Strangers, we have a brand new sponsor that I am so excited about.

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O'Brien's trial began on May 5th, 1975, seven months after Tim was buried. The prosecution had plenty of evidence to show the jury. O'Brien had a handful of people attest to his character and say they didn't think he was much of a danger to the rest of us.

But then there was a venerable parade of people to whom he'd said incredibly incriminating things in the weeks and months leading up to the murders. Pixie Stick's stock dipped for a bit, but recovered after they explained to police, and later at trial, that they didn't use staples to secure their candy. They used heat to fuse the straw shut.

Staples. Egads. That's so dangerous, they said. They were in the business of cavities and diabetes, not murder. Listen, it's weird to call a guy who murders his child an idiot, but this guy was a grade-A, top-shelf idiot. It was almost as if he was hoping someone along the way would catch on to his plan and stop him before he did it.

On June 3rd, it took a jury only 46 minutes to find Ron O'Brien guilty of murder. They also sentenced him to die. Texas is like that. They do not mess around. In fact, I believe it's their official state motto, if I'm not mistaken. O'Brien was executed, per the law, by lethal injection at midnight on March 31st, 1984.

Demonstrators outside the Huntsville, Texas prison where the death house is yelled loud enough that inmates inside the prison could hear. They were yelling trick-or-treat. They were mostly college kids from the local university in Huntsville. It must have been a nice night for drinking and tailgating outside an execution. I'm not sure I find that all that amusing, but grief and rage are funny things.

Despite the fact that this awful murder took place 50 years ago, exactly, it has had a lasting impact on Halloween. From rumors of razor blades and apples, pins and candy bars, and of course, poison treats of any kind, there is a pervasive worry that evil strangers are looking to kill innocent little kitties on Halloween. Every few years, it seems, local news stations issue warnings about checking your child's candy.

Most recently, it's nefarious drug lords in Mexico putting fentanyl in candy. Spoiler alert: they are not.

According to an article on Patch.com from 2015, quote,

The grand total of incidents in which a child was killed or seriously injured by contaminated candy handed out by a stranger during trick-or-treating? A big fat zero. End quote. In fact, homicide is a leading cause of death in children in the United States. We have the highest rate of child murder among developed nations, according to a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine study.

Every year since 2013 has seen a 4% increase. But it's not strangers that are killing our kids, just like it's usually not strangers abducting kids. It's parents. About 2.5% of all homicide arrests in this country are for parents who had killed their children, according to a Brown University study.

According to the Journal of American Medical Association, a close look at the statistics gathered by accredited child advocacy centers shows that more than 90% of abuse, injury, and death of children is at the hands of people they know. And because we love them, firearms were the most likely weapon used in that scenario, not cyanide in the pixie sticks.

Children die a lot as well if they are victims of continued abuse. Or because a parent has an untreated or poorly treated mental illness and thought it in the best interest of their child to help them depart this life. Or there's a parent out to hurt an estranged spouse and can think of no greater pain than to kill the thing they love the most.

But when I tried to track down how many parents kill their children for profit, I came up with zip. Zero. Nada. Maybe it's too rare, or maybe, you know, too fucking psychotic even for the most depraved of humans? Nah, it can't be that.

And how many are killed by strangers? That's a tough statistic that even AI was lurching badly on. Seems that in 2019, 10% of homicide victims all ages in the US were killed by strangers. In that same year, stranger abductions made up only about 0.3% of missing children cases. But this seems like comparing apples to oranges.

The only real takeaway I have from all this is somehow we persist in believing that the greatest threat to children is strangers. Apparently, though, it really is usually the devil you know. It's certainly almost never strangers handing out candy on Halloween. I am not advocating laissez-faire parenting. It's just that we are a frightened bunch of otherwise reasonable adults on Halloween night.

This despite the fact that as of today, there are no confirmed cases of children having been poisoned by Halloween candy, or of any razors or pins being found inside candy meant for random child consumption. Except for this one. Except for this pasty, ineffectual loser of a man who, from all indications, expressed no remorse ever for his heinous crime.

who stood behind his claim that he didn't do it even on the day he was executed for doing so. Spoiler alert: no one in their right mind thinks he didn't do it. The evidence really is that strong. But it is a crime that has stuck with us for decades now, changing how we do Halloween in some very basic ways. It was a crime that, despite never having anything to do with strangers, single-handedly stole some of the magic out of Halloween night.

So much so that in the crime's initial wake, trick-or-treating looked damn near extinction. Close to mortally wounded, on its way out of the American experience to be replaced by well-chaperoned parties that didn't last past 8 p.m. We've rebounded a bit from that, but we are still uber-cautious now in a way we weren't before 1974, when a child died by eating something out of his trick-or-treating cache.

All because his father was a greedy, sociopathic asswipe who, despite being found out, planted a seed of fear so pervasive it lasts to this day. Fear is, after all, what Halloween is all about. And since the 70s, Halloween has only gotten bigger. According to USA Today, last year, shoppers spent $12.2 billion on Halloween.

In a random survey, LendingTree found that 27% of those who spend on Halloween went into debt while overspending on the occasion. Don't do that. Or do! What do I care? Life is short. If you want to spend all your money on inflatable pumpkins, live your life. These days, for a small investment, you can buy an inflatable Grim Reaper that is, I guess, supposed to be scary, but always misses the mark as far as I'm concerned.

My neighbors have one, but much scarier is the plastic garbage bag fitted to look like it has a body in it, hanging from their basketball hoop. That thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. Now that I have a house with a porch, we go all out in October, fashioning our house to look like a monster that just might swallow you up if you get too close.

I'll be posting pictures on our socials, of course. But we are in the habit of pretend scary, which, while it can get expensive, is a lot cheaper than real scary, which may just cost you your life. Fun scary, in the way that scary should be. Fun, something Timothy O'Brien, who would be 58 now had he lived, did not get near enough of.

He was just eight. Eight is so young, so innocent, so really the perfect age for Halloween. I don't know about you, stranger, but I'm going to double my candy output this year in his honor. Just no godforsaken pixie sticks. Fuck those things anyway. And call Timothy's death what it was. Inexplicable.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained. In May of 1921, a young man tripped on his way into an elevator and sparked one of the most violent and devastating riots in our country's history. The effects of the Tulsa Massacre are still felt today.

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written and researched by Amy Wilson and me, Daisy Egan, with sound engineering by Heather Eagle Ears Wilson. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

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