Was Halloween Candy Ever Actually Poisoned?

On Halloween night in 1974, an eight-year-old boy in the Houston suburbs got Pixy Stix laced with cyanide. He wasn’t the only one. So did four other kids who were trick-or-treating that night.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean, whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. As someone who has been lucky enough to go to Napa Valley, I can tell you, it's everything people say it is. Beautiful scenery, quaint, beautiful towns, and phenomenal food and

• 0:44Dan Pashman?

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• 1:17Dan Pashman?

  Quick heads up that this episode discusses harm done to kids.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  The point of Halloween is that Halloween's supposed to be scary.

• 1:30Dan Pashman?

  This is Joel Best. He's a retired professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. For decades, Dr. Best studied why certain public fears enter the zeitgeist at certain times. Things like road rage, identity theft, and Halloween candy.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  You know, it used to be that what scared us was witches and goblins and things like that. And by and large, we don't believe in witches and goblins anymore. And so they aren't scary. In fact, they're kind of fun and funny. But what we do believe in is we believe in criminals.

• 2:08Dan Pashman?

  This is the Spork Fall. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Now, when I was in elementary school, I have a very vivid memory that every year around Halloween, Officer Ernie from our local police department, Ernie Kazner, he would come in and he would talk to us about the dangers of razor blades in Halloween candy. He would tell us, you can't just open up the candy and start shoving it in your mouth. You gotta unwrap it, look at it, break it open, make sure there's nothing inside that shouldn't be there. Multiple years in a row, Officer Ernie came in to give us this speech. But like, where did the idea that there might be razor blades in the candy come from? Today, we're bringing you a special Halloween episode from our friends at Outlaws Digest, a new independent

• 2:52Dan Pashman?

  podcast telling true crime stories from food history. Today, a look at Halloween sadism in the case of Timmy O'Brien in 1974 that sent a shock through parents nationwide. Here's host and food scholar Casey Highsmith.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  It's Halloween night, 1974. We're in a Houston suburb, Pasadena, Texas, about 100 miles from where I grew up. Two dads are out with their kids trick or treating. There's Houston-area optician Ronald O'Brien and his kids, eight-year-old Timmy and his younger sister Elizabeth. They had dinner with the Bates family, friends from the church where Ronald is a deacon. Then, armed with their candy buckets, they went out into the Bates neighborhood. It had been a wet day. Fall thunderstorms had rolled in and dropped almost three inches of rain on the area. And it was still raining that evening, but that was never gonna stop Timmy and his friends. I picture the dads, Ronald and Jim, in their

• 3:51Speaker 02

  rain jackets, chatting on the sidewalk as the kids run back and forth to the doors. A typical Halloween, if a little short. The dads decided they would only go for two blocks in the rain. The kids are making a good haul, having a good time. Then, toward the end of the night, the kids went to one house where no one answered the door. No problem. They ran on to the next house. A minute later, Timmy's dad Ronald came trailing behind the group, carrying some candy. He told the kids that someone had come to the door after they had run on, and they'd passed out some great stuff. Giant pixie sticks,

• 4:30Speaker 02

  a 21-inch tube of pure sugar. As Ronald handed out the candy, he turned to Jim and said, "Wow, you must have some rich neighbors."

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Later that night, when Timmy and Elizabeth were home, Ronald told them they could each pick one piece of candy to eat before bed. History doesn't record what Elizabeth chose. Timmy ate his pixie stick. He said it was bitter. Ronald gave him some Kool-Aid to wash it down and sent him to bed. A few minutes later, Timmy came out and said his stomach hurt. He threw up, and then he lost consciousness. Ronald rushed Timmy to the hospital, but it was too late. Timmy died on the way. His pixie stick had been poisoned with cyanide.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Candy was already suspect, and pixie sticks more than most, but after Timmy was killed, those fears went into overdrive. We'll start on the lighter side of the story with the history of pixie sticks and how kids themselves were the ones to inspire the candy as we now know it. Then we return to Timmy's story and talk more with Dr. Best about how what happened to Timmy tapped into some of our most primal fears. This is Outlaws Digest, episode three, A Spoonful of Sugar.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  So pixie sticks. This is the fun part of the episode. I ate the heck out of these as a kid. I went to a weird little private school and they had a snack stand we could buy things from in the afternoon. We always bought giant pixie sticks and dared each other to eat them super fast. Daily sugar rush. To this day, I will steal my children's Fun Dip if given the opportunity.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So what's the story behind all that? Let's go back to the beginning.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  We land in the year 1930. That's when John Fish Smith, a school principal who lost his job at the start of the Great Depression, joined a friend's business in Salt Lake City, Utah, selling, quote, "household products." It was one of those scrappy outfits operating during the country's lean years that tried to do a little bit of everything. They went door-to-door selling cleaning supplies, home remedies, cosmetics, stuff like that. Also in their lineup was a powdered drink mix called, and I'm not joking here, Cool Aid. Now, they were a few years late. Cool Aid had been developed in 1927, which had John Fish Smith and his business partners swimming in their grape-flavored wake. It was tough

• 7:21Speaker 02

  going. The business didn't do well, and eventually, John and his friend decided to part ways. The only part of the business John took was the drink mix. It was one of the things they had been making themselves in a big commercial mixer. I guess John figured that no matter what else was happening, he could keep adding flavor and color to sugar. That choice would really pay off for him, but only after he slipped past a few legal hurdles. See, there was enough demand for the new drink that the business grew. It grew big enough that the Kool-Aid Company in Chicago took notice. A lawsuit was brewing. John decided to ditch

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Cool Aid. Probably a good choice. His first stab at a rebrand landed him with the new label, Frutola. Nice, right? The clever new name started to bring in even more customers. Except the newly empowered Food and Drug Administration decided to take a look. Their verdict? There is no fruit in Frutola. Change the name again, or be hit with a federal penalty. John didn't want to lose his growing list of customers, so this time, it was just a one-letter tweak. Salt Lake City was about to meet Frizzola. There are hilarious advertisements from the Utah papers in the 1930s and 40s that

• 8:43Speaker 02

  read, "Drink Frizzola, the better aid. More drinks per package, stronger powder, more for your money. Delicious flavors, refreshing, cool. Serve with meals and picnics. The perfect drink, Frizzola." Huh, the better aid. That kind of sounds like sour grapes to me. Well, with the Great Depression in full swing, John started selling Frizzola in smaller and smaller packets. The smallest was a tiny bag John called Frizzola Jr. that was enough powder to mix up one quart of Frizzola. At first, he didn't sell many of those. Then, World War II hit. For

• 9:25Speaker 02

  some reason, orders for Frizzola Jr. started to flood in. John set out to investigate. He found that the wartime sugar rationing meant candy manufacturers had stopped making penny candy. Salt Lake City candy counters were running low. So in some stores, Frizzola Jr. was the only sugar hit kids could get for just one cent. But the kids didn't have the patience for pouring and mixing. One day, he heard from a salesman that instead of stirring Frizzola into water to make a drink, kids bought the packets of his flavored sugar, licked their fingers, and dipped them in the powder. Repeat until the little packet is empty. A creative thinker, John decided it wasn't the kids who were wrong,

• 10:09Speaker 02

  it was him. He started selling the sugar with a spoon. He realized he had just been making candy all along. At first, he called it Liquamade, which would eventually become the candy we know as Fun Dip. Yep, it's still around, helped in no small part by the post-war candy boom. When rationing was lifted, candy was the rage. In his memoir, Johnson Menlo writes that in 1948, candy sales in the US passed $1 billion for the first time.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  But John, and now Minlo, were only getting a small taste of that sweet explosion. Shop owners who still saw licum aid as a drink mix were only willing to stock it in the summer. That was a problem Minlo set out to solve. He ditched the Kool-Aid knockoff title of licum aid, and he ditched the spoon, too. The envelope of sugar was replaced by a rip it and tip it paper straw, a new streamlined, unmistakably candy-colored package that was ready to sell year-round, starting in 1959. The Pixie Stick was born. By then, Minlo had moved the Frizzola Company to St. Louis, renamed it Sunline, and was crushing the candy game like no one else. What did they make beyond Pixie Sticks and Fun Dip?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Spree's, Sweet Tarts, eventually Nerds, all my favorites. In fact, Sweet Tarts started out as Pixie Stick sugar pressed into pills at an antacid factory in downtown St. Louis. Yeah, John and Minlo Smith went ham on candy, so much so that they were hired by Quaker to develop the Willy Wonka candy line. Like I said, Nerds, gobstoppers, Laffy Taffy. Eventually, Quaker didn't care to hold on to the candy line, so Minlo took it. It's almost too on the nose, but it's true. John and Minlo were kind of their own Willy Wonka dynasty, only the handoff was a little simpler, going father to son. No child-endangering sweepstakes required.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  So obviously, kids were loving Pixie Sticks from the beginning, but alongside them were adults tut-tutting about all that sugar. A couple of years after they were released, one paper in Virginia described Pixie Sticks as the newest menace threatening the schoolchildren. The paper straws were littering the halls. Kids were selling them at crazy prices to other students. It was, if the Newport Daily News can be believed, causing real mayhem. Now, there's a much longer history of adults being worried about kids eating candy. As Dr. Best says...

• 12:45Speaker 01

  There's food that is morally suspect, and candy is certainly morally suspect. People think it makes you fat, and it rots your teeth, and you shouldn't eat too much, and so on and so forth. These are things that we worry about eating. We say, well, we really shouldn't eat this, and they're a little guilty pleasures.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  As Pixie Sticks caught on nationwide, riding waves of parental suspicion about candy, the US was about to hit the 1970s, and an all-new, all-different level of fear from adults about what their kids were getting up to.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  It really takes off in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is the time when there are a lot of anxieties about children. There's something in the culture about them.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Remember, this was the age when teens and 20s were blowing raspberries at the world their parents had built coming out of the Great Depression. Candy counters were gone, counterculture was on, and plus, it was the Cold War. The end of the world could come at any time. It was the age of nuclear paranoia and civilizational conflict. Soviet infiltrators were, no doubt, deluding children in all kinds of ways. The world was a scary place, and children had to be protected.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  This is when the student protests start. This is when people are worrying about hippies, okay? And hippies are enormously threatening to people.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  They are.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  They're very frightening.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Very scary.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  So worrying about children who are in danger, you know, is always there, but it really begins to have a moment in the 1970s.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Which brings us back to candy's peak holiday, Halloween. By the 1970s, it really was a holiday for kids. Kids and candy, trick-or-treating. That had grown up alongside the rise of licum aid and Pixie Sticks as an American cultural institution.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Trick-or-treating is not really as old as you think it is. It's something that really took off after the Second World War, and it was an anti-delinquency program, because Halloween had traditionally been celebrated by teenage boys who ran around tearing the front porches off their neighbors' houses and knocking over outhouses and things like that.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, for a long time, it was more tricks than treats. The origins of Halloween as we know it were an effort by adults to curb the damage and keep kids literally in line.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  The idea was, we're going to, we're going to regulate this, we're going to have it on a particular night, kids are going to be in costume, they can go around and say trick-or-treat, and so on and so forth.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  But right from those early days, trick-or-treating itself became a whole new source of fear. This time, not fear of the kids, but fear for them.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  I had a folklorist friend who was a little older than I was, so she was probably trick-or-treating at the very start of the 1950s. And she grew up having heard that people would heat pennies on a skillet and then pour the hot pennies into the outstretched hands of trick-or-treaters.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  By 1970, the fear that trick-or-treating was a real threat to kids had taken hold. That year, the New York State Health Commissioner put out a Halloween Safety Bulletin. He said razor blades and shards of broken glass had been handed out to kids in Halloween treats the previous year. So the bulletin advised parents that their kids shouldn't eat anything they collected trick-or-treating until their parents had carefully examined their haul. And just to connect candy dots here, it's pretty clear that parental suspicion of homemade and homegrown treats like apples and cookies stood to benefit one industry: the candy companies. Don't want your kid to bite into a razor blade?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Homemade goodies and communal treats begone. Turn to the hermetically sealed, individually-wrapped Nuggets of Sugar. Available today at grocery stores nationwide. But that brings us back to 1974 and the story of Timmy O'Brien, because his poison was in a Pixie Stick. If that was true, then nothing was safe. The candy had killed him.

• 17:08Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, the real story of what happened to Timmy O'Brien. Stick around.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.

• 17:22Dan Pashman?

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• 18:50Dan Pashman?

  Plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. I grew up on Lando Lake's cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lake's American cheese. And now, Lando Lake's cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lake's cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad thai, Lando Lake's has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 19:35Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. In last week's show, I'm joined by my friends Gail Simmons from Top Chef and chef Aisha Nargia to take your calls. Gail's just written a new book called Guesting, all about how to be a great guest at a dinner party. But that doesn't mean she and Aisha are advocating for traditional rules of etiquette.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Charles is probably one of those people that will pick up a bone in a restaurant and eat it. Yeah. And I think that everyone should feel free to do that. You know what I'm saying?

• 19:59Dan Pashman?

  Aisha gives you permission.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  No, I think you should.

• 20:01Dan Pashman?

  We also take a live call from a couple fighting over wedge salad. You could say it's become a wedge issue. Get it? The Sporkful team was up all night thinking of that one. Anyway, check it out.

• 20:12Dan Pashman?

  Okay, back to Outlaws Digest and the story of the child poisoned by pixie sticks in 1974. Here again is host Casey Highsmith.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  In 1974, my dad was in the sixth grade. And that Halloween, he was trick or treating outside of Houston. So I called him up to see what he remembered about that year. Hi, Dad.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Hang on just a second, sorry.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Power and battery, energy saver is on.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Of course, I had to ask him what he was for Halloween.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  I know, I was a pirate. I love pirates. And I actually made a hook with a hanger one time.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Creepy.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Took a coat hanger, clothes hanger, a wire one, and made a hook, which turned out pretty cool. And of course, you know, you can always make your own swords and that sort of thing.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Trick or treating for him sounds a little different than what I do with my kids today.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  As a kid, we pretty much had free rein anyway. This was back in the early 70s. And we had new bikes and with banana seats and weird handlebars. We were given the entire neighborhood. Of course, we couldn't go any further than the river. We could not cross the highway and we had to stay together.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  When the family heard about Timmy's death on the news, it shook my grandparents.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  We heard about it on the news because we did get one or two channels down there. It was close. It was in Pasadena and that was just southeast of Houston and closer to us than Houston. It was pretty scary. And of course, you know, my mom sat us down and talked to us and told us all about it.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  My dad remembers that it kind of shook him, too.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  She had to tell us all about it and scare the bejesus out of us. And of course, you know, it did everybody because it was a pretty scary situation. It never even entered my mind that somebody would do something like that. And it really made us mad because there was always lots of good homemade treats like caramel popcorn balls and candy apples and sometimes cupcakes and cookies and things like that that, you know, these old ladies in the neighborhood, you know, made and handed out and they were just fine and whatnot. But we weren't allowed to have them. And so it ruined a lot of that kind of down home thing.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  So the news of Timmy's death scared the bejesus out of the Houston area within a day. By day two, it was national news.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And the police assume, oh yeah, we've heard about this.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  That's Dr. Joel Best again.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  They put out an announcement to everybody, hey, there's poison candy out there. Don't let your kids eat their candy. Check their candy.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  In the Bates neighborhood, the fear was overwhelming. Reporters went door to door and heard from neighbors that they just couldn't believe someone would have handed out poisoned candy to kids. It had all the neighbors looking suspiciously at each other. One woman said the only thing she could guess had happened was some outsider had broken into a deserted home on the block and handed out poison candy there. She had kept her own kids home because of the rain and she was thanking her lucky stars. Another neighbor remembered that after the ambulance had torn through the streets to get Timmy to the hospital, they had been up late into the night going door to door to warn every family that the Halloween candy might be poisoned.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  The police also went to work. When they were told that Timmy had been poisoned by a pixie stick, they joined neighbors in canvassing the neighborhood.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  The county prosecutor told reporters that at one house, the parents had remembered their son getting a giant pixie stick. They wanted to turn it over to the cops, but when they searched his candy hall, they couldn't find it. They scoured the house. The longer they went without it turning up, the more worried they got. Then they went into the room where their son was sleeping. They found it in his hand. He had taken it with him to bed, but he hadn't opened it. The end had been snipped and then stapled back together. Their son hadn't been able to get the staple open and that had saved him.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  By Saturday, November 2nd, the police had collected four more pixie sticks that were poisoned with cyanide, one from Timmy's younger sister, one from each of the Bates kids, and the one from the neighborhood boy who had taken it to bed. A flood of candy of all kinds poured into the police from local parents. The detectives remember it piling high in a room at the station to be examined. But in the end, it was only the pixie sticks that were poisoned.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  To the eye, the cyanide inside perfectly resembled the actual ingredients of pixie sticks, a white powdered mix of the sugar dextrose, maltodextrin, citric acid, and flavoring.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  The county medical examiner ran lab tests on them. He said the top two inches of each pixie stick were packed with cyanide, an incredibly lethal dose.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  To catch the poisoner, the police took Timmy's dad Ronald back along the route. They narrowed down the possible houses. Ronald told them it was in the last block they had walked. But the detective said Ronald couldn't remember exactly which house it was. He told them that he hadn't even seen the face of the person who had handed him the pixie stick. All he had seen, Ronald said, was an arm holding the candy out from a dark doorway.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  That didn't give the cops much to go on, but they did learn some other things from Ronald, things that started to raise a different set of questions.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  They had some interesting revelations. They discovered that Ronald O'Brien had taken out a $20,000 life insurance policy on his son a few weeks before.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  And somehow they had some record of him buying cyanide.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  On November 4th, the Pasadena police called Ronald O'Brien and his wife, Danine, to come down to the police station. There, they took the two grieving parents to separate rooms. When detectives told Danine they had discovered that Ronald had taken out insurance policies on both their children, she froze. The prosecutor later told reporters he remembered her crying. He said that was the moment when she recognized her husband could have killed Timmy.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  The family was deeply in debt. Their car was about to be repossessed. Ronald had just lost another job after losing so many in the past few years, from a contact lens plant in Baltimore to an optical office in Big Spring, Texas. Twice in the past, he had collected insurance payouts for strange fires.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  The prosecutor said that by the end of the interview, Danine begged the police not to let Ronald walk out of the station. She knew he was dangerous.

• 27:37Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, the fallout from this strange and sad case. Stick around.

• 27:43Speaker 03

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• 28:32Dan Pashman?

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• 29:50Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back. Let's return now to Casey Highsmith from Outlaws Digest. When we left off, Ronald O'Brien's wife had just turned on him at the Pasadena Police Station.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  The Pasadena Police placed Ronald under arrest. He was charged with murder and jailed on $100,000 bond. When his case went before a grand jury on November 11th, they handed down new indictments. For the poisoned pixie sticks that had been given to other children, Ronald was charged with attempted murder. With those charges and Timmy's death, Ronald faced the death penalty. He was held without bond. Ronald's trial started in May 1975. The key witness against him was the church friend, Jim Bates, who had gone trick or treating with Ronald and his kids that night.

• 30:37Speaker 06

  Most of today's testimony came from Jimmy Bates, a close friend of the O'Brien family. Bates said that before Halloween, O'Brien asked if he could bring his children over to trick or treat with the Bates children on Halloween night. Both families ate dinner together and then the fathers took the children trick or treating.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Jim Bates' testimony at the trial offered some new details of the night, including what might have been the moment when Ronald had laced the pixie sticks with poison.

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Bates said O'Brien went to one house where no one appeared to be home.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Remember, that's the point that Ronald had stayed behind. Then...

• 31:11Speaker 06

  After the children had scampered ahead to the next house, O'Brien came off the front porch carrying the pixie sticks. He gave the pixie sticks to the children and then later took them back and said he wanted to stop at his car for a moment. Bates said when O'Brien came back into the Bates' house, he returned the pixie sticks to the children.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Jim's wife, Lily and Bates, remembered that after they had all filed inside, Ronald gathered the kids at the couch and handed out the pixie sticks, one to each child. The fifth, he handed to a boy who rang the doorbell just as Ronald was leading his children out the door. She also remembered how close things had come for her own son. Her kids had eaten a lot of candy and she had just swept the floor when her eight-year-old asked if he could eat his giant pixie stick. She told him, "No, she had just finished cleaning." That pixie stick was going to be a mess. "It was a daytime candy," she said.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  It's such a close call. It's a moment in the story that really chills me. I also note that it's a moment when a mom's frustration with a giant pixie stick itself, the 21-inch tube of sugar and the mess it would make, is the thing that actually saved her son's life.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Other witnesses testified that Ronald had been on the hunt for cyanide since the summer, asking coworkers if they knew how to get it, asking sales clerks how he could get small, cheap amounts. Ronald's wife, Deneen, testified. She said she hadn't known about the life insurance policies he took out on both of their kids. But 9:00 AM the day after Halloween, with Timmy only a few hours dead, Ronald had called the insurance company to try to collect.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  In the face of those testimonies, Ronald's defense team had a story of their own. They tried to prove that Ronald wasn't the kind of guy who would hurt a child. The defense called one coworker from an optical shop where Ronald had worked. He testified that when Ronald was examining a child's eyes, he would always have a little treat for them, bubble gum, some kind of candy. He knew what kids liked. He took care of them.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  The defense tried to convince the jury, the pixie stick poisoner must be someone else, a wild sadist who was out to hurt kids he didn't know. The real killer, somewhere else, was still on the loose.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  The jury convicted Ronald in under an hour. He was sentenced to death. Not only were the judge and jury convinced that he had murdered his own son and tried to kill his daughter too, but he had also attempted to kill the Bates kids to cover his trail as he collected the insurance payouts.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  He must have thought that this was going to be a perfect crime. You know, everybody knew that kids were being poisoned left and right on Halloween. You could see how he would think this because he'd heard this story so many times and he might have believed that it was perfectly plausible.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  And he could poison his kid and collect the insurance money and no one would ever suspect him because there'd be all of these other dead bodies stacked up everywhere.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  After 10 years of appealing his case, Ronald O'Brien was executed in 1984.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  He never came clean. There's no way of proving that that's what happened, but that's, that seems to make sense to me.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  As Dr. Best sees it, the deeply bitter irony is that believing in the tall tale of widespread Halloween poisoning didn't help a parent to protect their child. It inspired them to plot their own child's death.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  When people ask me, is it dangerous? Should I let my kid go trick or treating? Should I inspect the treats? They are not saying, is it likely that I'm going to murder my child?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  They're saying, do I have to worry about the maniac down the street? And my attitude is, no, you don't.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Being suspicious of the candy kids except from strangers would not have saved Timmy. The real threat to him was in his own home. So Dr. Best argues that Timmy's death is not an example that trick or treating is dangerous. That made sense to kids like my dad.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  When we found out that the, the man that you're referring to actually poisoned his own son, you know, that was very sad and we couldn't believe it, but it was also relieving.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  But not everyone was able to shake off the shock of the story so easily. In fact, when Timmy's story went public, it fed the same tall tales that had inspired Ronald in the first place. And now with a real child having really been killed by poisoned candy, it spread that fear to new horizons.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  In 2016, the Austin American Statesman interviewed the county prosecutor who had worked the case. He remembered that reporters had come in from as far away as London and even Germany. They were following Ronald's Halloween poisoning from around the world. In the reporting, Ronald was given the nickname, "The Candy Man." And because of the new current of fear running through parents who even thought about their kids trick or treating, he was also called "The Man Who Killed Halloween."

• 36:41Speaker 02

  The truth is, despite how horrifying Timmy O'Brien's murder is, it can't really be blamed on trick or treating. Candy was the camouflage, but not the culprit. It's not the fault of the people celebrating the holiday and enjoying themselves if a predator uses their good time as cover. It's not pixie sticks' fault that white sugar looks like cyanide. But, and now I want to share the final thing that really scares me about Halloween. When I talked to Dr. Best, he emphasized that he's not saying Halloween is harmless.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Halloween is absolutely dangerous. It leads to all the other holidays and emergency room admissions. Okay?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  It's just not because of the candy.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Why is it dangerous? It's dangerous because it's the one night of the year when we send tens of millions of kids out into the dark. All right? You know, things happen to them. They get hit by cars.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  That's something that makes sense to worry about. Remember that most car crashes happen when people are close to home, when they have their guard down. And unlike the mythical sadist poisoner, it's also something you can actually look out for. So it's a reminder I'm very happy to pass along. On Halloween, dress up, trick or treat, eat candy and share it with your neighbors, get into the spirit of things, have a good time. And please, please, please, keep an eye out for the most dangerous Halloween killer. Cars. It's not a random stranger putting a razor blade in an apple, but really the everyday things close to home that are most likely to hurt you.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  In our interview with Dr. Joel Best, we asked him why the fear of poisoned candy at Halloween is more intense in some years than others.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  The key issue here is whether bad things have happened in September. Okay. And, you know, the, God, what is it? 1982, I think, is the year the Tylenol poisoning. People who were killed with poisoned Tylenol, that occurred in September. And as Halloween approached, there was a kind of drumbeat of concern that you really need to check the kids' treats this year because there'd been product tampering in Tylenol. And interestingly, that's the only time I made a buck on this.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  The American Confectioners Association hired me to be a talking head that they could refer people to, which is, you know, you don't have to hire me to do this because I do that anyway, you know? And they gave me 500 bucks and, and nobody called me. But they, they actually commissioned a report that year, which is a wonderful document looking for all of the poisoned Halloween candy. If somebody put a razor blade in an apple, they didn't care. But if it was, it was candy that they tampered with. And they, they went through and tried to track down all the cases. And there were like 100 of them, close to 100. And whenever people try and do this, they discover that these are almost all hoaxes.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  The kids do it. And, you know, it's an easy thing for a kid to do. You get your Halloween candy, you put a pin in it, you run in and say, look, Mom, I found a pin in my Halloween candy. And you get the concerned attention of adults and so on and so forth. Other examples of this in 2001.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  I was about to ask.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  9/11, you get stories about kids getting terrorist messages in their cupcakes that are being handed to them and, and stuff like this. And I don't know if you remember this, but there was a rumor that was going around right after 9/11, that there was a woman who had an Afghani boyfriend, which of course is very common. And, and this guy had disappeared and he wrote her a note and said, you know, I love you very much. It kills me to have to, have to leave you like this. Just make me two promises.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Don't go outside on September 11th and don't go to the mall on Halloween.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. As someone born in September, I take great offense to, to that being the precursor to the, the Halloween scaries.

• 41:22Dan Pashman?

  That's Casey Highsmith with an episode of her podcast, Outlaws Digest. Join them on their Patreon for the full interview with Dr. Joel Best, including why he finds memoirs by criminals boring and more behind the scenes goodies. Get all the info at outlawsdigest.com. Next week on the show, a friend comes to me with a mysterious bottle of whiskey and finding out where it came from ends up taking me more than a year and reveals family stories that even some of the siblings didn't know about. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's show with top chefs Gail Simmons and triple threats Ayesha Nargia. We'll take your calls and ask, is it okay to take home a six pack of beer that you brought to a friend's house if nobody drank it? That one's up now. Check it out. Now here's Casey Highsmith with the Outlaws Digest credits.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Outlaws Digest is a production of Good Egg Audio, an independent worker cooperative, and me, Casey Highsmith. Thanks to my dad for talking about his memories of Halloween in the 1970s. And thanks to Dr. Joel Best for talking with us about candy panic, Halloween sadism, and the eternal battle against contemporary legends. You can find his research report, which he updates every year, at the University of Delaware website. The link is in the show notes. His most recent piece, published on annual candy panics, should parents really be worried about rainbow fentanyl, was published in 2022 by The Scientific American. This episode was written by Carl Nellis. Story editing and production support from Nikki Stein, Jim Acosta-Foley, and me.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Carl Nellis is managing producer of Outlaws Digest. Mixing, mastering, and sound design by Nick Dooley. Original music by Rebecca Raskalsik. Show art by Andrea Dumutza. My personal thanks to my kids for not making midnight mocktail margaritas while I recorded this. And to Maggie Cooper from Avitas Creative. And thanks to all of you for listening.

• 43:21Dan Pashman?

  And hey, if you want to hear new episodes of The Sporkful ad free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 43:39Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer. Andres O'Hara. Our technical director is. Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Suzy in Seattle, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

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