197. Terrifying True Urban Legends: The Clown Panic of 2016 and Poison Candy

In the summer of 2016, children at a South Carolina apartment complex ran out of the woods screaming. They said there were clowns in the trees. No one believed them. Within weeks, the sightings had spread across the country, school lockdowns, armed mobs, arrests, and a panic so intense that McDonald’s benched Ronald McDonald. But where did it actually start? The answer is stranger than the legend. Then: Halloween night, 1974. An eight-year-old boy in Pasadena, Texas eats a piece of candy from his trick-or-treat bag. He’s dead within the hour. For fifty years, parents have checked their children’s candy because of what happened that night but the real story is darker than the urban legend it created. TW: Child death Love true crime, horror, folklore, and the unexplained? Join us in the Rogue Detecting Society on Patreon. Start for free to stay up to date on all things HSP with our newsletter, bonus content, and more. If you want to dive deeper into a community of fellow darkly curious listeners, upgrade for ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes with topics voted on by members, merch perks, and Patreon-only group chats. High Council members also get Footnotes, our weekly after-show where Kaelyn dives deeper into the episode, recent true crime news, theories, and other scary stories from around the internet. Join free or go paid: https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding

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

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by Bigelow Tea. By now, you should all know that I'm obviously a very curious person and I'm also a big tea drinker. So I've always heard about this tea called Bigelow Constant Comment. It's been around forever and people absolutely love it. I realized I had no idea what it actually tasted like. Obviously, I had to investigate and now I'm obsessed. Constant Comment is this incredible black tea with real orange rind, cold-pressed orange oil, and sweet spices. The best way I can describe it is it's like Christmas in a cup, except you get to drink it all year long. Then I learned the story behind it, which made me love it even more. Constant Comment was created by Ruth Campbell Bigelow and her New York City kitchen in 1945. She shared it with her friends and everyone kept

• 0:45Kaelyn Moore?

  talking about it. And all of those "constant comments" actually gave it its name. The recipe is still a Bigelow family secret over 80 years later. So this one is a mystery worth investigating for yourself. Bigelow Constant Comment. Curiously different, impossible to forget. This episode is brought to you by Rula. World Mental Health Day takes place in October, and I think the best way to honor it is to be honest. Actually getting help can be really hard. Not because people don't want to get help, but because the process can be absolutely exhausting. Figuring out insurance, waiting for openings, wondering if someone is even the right fit for you. I know how hard the process can be. You go on your insurance's website, try to find someone who even has openings, making sure they actually take your insurance, making sure they're actually in person versus virtual, or whatever works

• 1:30Kaelyn Moore?

  best for you. The whole process can exhaust you to the point of not even getting started with therapy. So on World Mental Health Day, maybe it's time to actually do something for yourself. Rula is a healthcare company that partners with over 120 insurance plans, bringing the average copay to just $15 a session. They help you find a therapist based on your needs and goals with appointments available as soon as tomorrow. With World Mental Health Day this October, it's a good reminder that taking care of your mental health can start with one step. Visit rula.com/hspod to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash HSP pod. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. So today, I want to dive into two terrifying Halloween urban

• 2:14Kaelyn Moore?

  legends and the true stories behind them. Yes, we are getting into the clown epidemic of 2016. We're going to find out what those damn clowns were really doing. And we're going to look into why parents check their children's Halloween candy for razor blades every year. It's going to get really spooky, so grab some candy and get cozy. Now, I was actually going to write a whole intro for this episode, but as I sat down to write, I got caught up in reading about some updates on older Heart Starts Pounding episodes. Turns out, Paul McKenzie, the Kenyan cult leader from our episode about the Shakahola starvation cult, he was just convicted on 191 murder charges. It sounds like a lot,

• 2:55Kaelyn Moore?

  but he's still charged with 230 more deaths. I cannot believe that there was a Jonestown style cult operating for years and it is hardly making headlines. Also, an update from the Amelia Earhart mystery. Purdue University finally made their way out to the Teriyah object to see if it's actually Amelia Earhart's plane. They were going to go out over the summer, which is why I timed the episode for then, but they got delayed. However, they did go and they found out it is tragically not Amelia Earhart's plane. It's so devastating. I'm very sad about this. They actually said that the object was a tree. A tree, you guys.

• 3:39Kaelyn Moore?

  It was apparently covered in coral sand, which made it look shiny on Google Maps and Apple Maps, but I cannot believe that they didn't know it was a tree. They did say that they found a steel tube about 30 inches long that was discovered in the lagoon near the Teriyah Peninsula. They said they're going to investigate that. Maybe we'll come up with some answer based on that. However, I'm very devastated over this update. Also, before we dive in, if you want more Heart Starts Pounding, you can sign up for our Patreon for monthly exclusive bonus episodes and more. And also now, you can sign up for free. Our free tier gets you access to our book club, monthly newsletter, and old bonus episodes that get released to everyone. And if you sign up for three months on the premium tier, you get a free sticker. Three months on the High Council tier, you get a free

• 4:23Kaelyn Moore?

  exclusive Rogue Detecting Society mug shipped right to you. Members can also vote on our bonus episodes, get merch, discounts, and more. That's all over at the Heart Starts Pounding Patreon. You can sign up today. All right. And with that, let's get into it. I want to take you back in time to the woods of Greenville, South Carolina, on August 21st, 2016. It's a Sunday night at the Fleetwood Manor Apartments and a bunch of kids are still playing outside, when all of a sudden, there's a scream. Behind the apartments is a big patch of woods that eventually turn into Reedy River. And from the tree line, two little boys come running out of the woods, tears streaming down their faces. Their

• 5:04Kaelyn Moore?

  parents rush over to them and ask what happened. The boys catch their breaths and then tell them, "There are clowns in the woods." Now, back in those dark woods, there's a pond with an old house that sits beside it. And according to the boys, they were out exploring by the pond when all of a sudden they heard whispers. One of the boys stopped in his tracks, his face frozen in terror. And one of the other followed the direction he was looking. He saw that in the distance, there were two clowns standing in the trees in full circus costumes with white face paint. And they were whispering to each other, making these strange noises. The boys stared at

• 5:48Kaelyn Moore?

  them, totally confused. Then one of the clowns looked right at them and held out some money, like they were trying to get the children to follow them deeper into the woods. Now, the boys were totally breathless as they recounted this story, and they told the adults, "There are clowns that live in that old house by the pond." Now, one of the moms decided that she was going to go take a look. There is no way that there are clowns in the woods, but maybe she could find what they were talking about and just make the kids feel a little bit better. So she walks to the edge of the woods behind the complex, and she looks out where her son said that he saw those clowns. She's scanning the woods. There's nothing but trees and brush. But wait, what was that?

• 6:32Kaelyn Moore?

  There, in the distance, through the trees, she sees it. What the boys saw. Two figures crouching, staring directly towards her in full clown costume. One of them pulls something out of its pocket and points it at her. And then she goes blind. She can't see anything. So she puts her hands out in front of her face to protect herself, and she starts heading in the direction of the clowns. But the two figures turn and they run deeper into the woods, laughing maniacally. By the time she gets to where she saw them, they're gone. The Greenville County Sheriff's Office eventually gets called, and there's a few problems.

• 7:15Kaelyn Moore?

  One, there is another neighbor who also saw a clown that night. A big one, described as standing under the light by the dumpster with a nose that was blinking on and off. It didn't approach anyone, though. It just waved and then walked away. And two, someone else in the area called in saying they heard gunshots in the direction the clowns headed. So deputies did the only thing that they could do. They found the trail that the boys had taken behind the basketball court, and they started walking into the woods, towards that pond, towards the old house where the children said that the clowns lived. But

• 7:55Kaelyn Moore?

  the police couldn't find anything. No clowns, no sign that anyone had been living in that cabin, no sign that a clown had gotten shot or had shot someone. And since no one had gotten hurt, the police wrote it off as kids being dramatic. And then, on August 24th, management at the apartment complex where the kids lived posted a letter to the residents. It warned that there had been reports of, quote, "A clown or a person dressed in clown clothing trying to lure children into the woods." And it told parents to keep their kids inside after dark. Somebody photographed that sign that was posted and they put it

• 8:37Kaelyn Moore?

  on Facebook. And that photo went viral. And thus, the clown panic of 2016 had fully commenced, spreading like an urban legend throughout the entire country and then eventually the rest of the world. "There are clowns in the woods trying to lure children," is what the legend said. But as the story started spreading, so did more sightings. And it seemed like the clowns were just getting started. Within a week, there were more reports in Greenville. A child at another apartment complex said a man in a clown mask was watching them from the woods. A 12-year-old at a third complex said two clowns had been in the yard behind

• 9:17Kaelyn Moore?

  her building. Six reports in total were called in. But the police felt like this was just all part of the legend, because none of them had any physical evidence of the clowns being there. There was no footage. There was no corroborating witness sightings. The police would do quick searches of the area, but they never found anything that proved a clown had been there. And once again, there were no injuries. So these sightings were all written off. But then more calls started coming in from more states. And these sightings really started escalating. So on September 4th, there was a sighting in Winston-Salem,

• 9:59Kaelyn Moore?

  North Carolina. It happened on East 29th Street off of Highway 52 at around 8:30 PM. The sun had set. It was getting late, but two children were still playing outside of an apartment complex before they were called in for bed. One of the children was running out by the tree lines towards the woods when something caught their eye. It was dark, but they could make out the shape of a figure. An adult man, it looked like. There was just enough light to illuminate the white overalls the person was wearing as they slowly walked towards the children. And as the figure emerged from the woods, the kids could see

• 10:38Kaelyn Moore?

  the person was also wearing white gloves, red shoes, had red bushy hair and a red nose, and their face was painted bright white as well. The figure stood there, smiled at the children, and then reached into their pocket and pulled out some wrapped candy. The children turned to run, and the clown let out this loud laugh. And it was loud enough for another adult in the apartment complex to hear it and later tell the police about it. The police came, they investigated, but once again, they never found any physical evidence of the clown. Here's the woman who calls the police talking about it.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  These kids were so terrified that this man actually tried to lure them in the woods. I was scared and I was scared and mad at the same time. You know, I wanted to get them myself.

• 11:30Kaelyn Moore?

  And here's another woman in the neighborhood explaining just how scary it was.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  There's woods right over here. You don't, we don't even want our kids to come outside anymore. It started in South Carolina and now it's up here. That's, that's nerve wracking.

• 11:44Kaelyn Moore?

  And even though the police didn't find anything, that was not the only sighting of the clown that night. About four hours later, a caller who refused to give their name, reported seeing a clown about two miles away. Police, once again, said they found no evidence. And then, two days later, another child in the area saw the clown in the woods. And this sighting was also confirmed by another adult man who also saw this clown, ran into his home and grabbed a machete. And then he ran out after the clown, but the clown was able to escape. And that person was never found. But because the police were never finding the actual people, they started to wonder if these sightings were even real.

• 12:29Kaelyn Moore?

  After all, five days later, on September 9th, a man named David Wayne Armstrong was arrested and charged with filing a false police report relating to a clown sighting. Armstrong claims that a clown knocked on his window before he chased it into the woods. Police say that he later admitted to making it all up. They released a statement saying, "The Winston-Salem Police Department has not been able to substantiate any sightings." And so, there was kind of this theory that the people were all lying, that maybe this was some sort of mass hysteria that everyone was facing. However, less than a week later, there would be a sighting that no one could deny.

• 13:11Kaelyn Moore?

  So on September 15th, 2016, the sightings changed from just sightings in the woods to anonymous online school threats. So that night, a senior named Alex at Flomaton High School in Alabama, gets a Facebook friend request from someone that he doesn't recognize. The name on the account is @FlomoClown. The profile picture is a deranged looking clown with sharp teeth and an evil looking smile. He accepts this friend request. I don't know that I would. And then he messages the account. "Who is this? How do you know me?" There's a beat. And then, the clown answers him. "Coming for you. Gonna kill you. See you at school."

• 13:57Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, Alex starts freaking out about these messages and he ends up sending them to some of his friends. And then, they start spreading all of these messages around Facebook. Other kids see it, they start getting super scared, parents start seeing it. And eventually, the police are called. And they look into this @FlomoClown account. And it's more disturbing than they thought. So this account posted this horrifying video of themselves dressed in a clown costume with sharp teeth, holding the severed head of Ronald McDonald. And also, written somewhere on their Facebook page was, "I kill people for a living."

• 14:37Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, this account had also posted, "It's going down tonight," with a bunch of gun emojis next to it. So the next day, about 700 students at Flomaton High School and the nearby Flomaton Elementary School, they were told to shelter in place and the schools were put on lockdown while police tried to figure out who was behind the account and if they were going to show up and do something at the schools. Thirty officers descended on the campus, searching room by room by room, looking for this clown. But there wasn't one. Nobody had seen a clown anywhere near the school. So, police started taking a closer look at that Facebook page that was making the threats, seeing if they could just figure out who was behind it and really what was going on

• 15:22Kaelyn Moore?

  with it. The sheriff's office, the district attorney, and the FBI, the FBI got called over this. They worked throughout the night, tracking the accounts, tracing who was using it, what emails were associated. And by Thursday evening, police were at a house on Pecan Leaf Lane, making arrests. It turns out, there were four people behind the @FlomoClown account. It was a 22-year-old woman, a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old, and a 12-year-old from Pensacola. None of them went to the school. And according to their own statements, this whole thing was just supposed to be a prank on that one kid, Alex. The 22-year-old woman was held on a $200,000 bond and she was charged with making a terroristic

• 16:07Kaelyn Moore?

  threat. Yes, that is the first case of clown terrorism that I've ever read about personally, and I hope it's the last. Three years later, she pleaded guilty and a judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison for the Facebook account, but then they suspended it and they put her on five years probation with one big condition. No more social media for you. Now, by this point, the clown sightings were picking up around the country and they were getting more and more terrifying and more and more people were seeing them. It was getting to a point where the police could not deny that clowns were being seen in places. And there was a rumor started around this time that on Halloween of that year, there

• 16:49Kaelyn Moore?

  would be a clown purge and masked clowns would terrorize cities and start killing people. But still, up until this point, these were just sightings. No one had gotten physically hurt. That is, until two weeks after the school lockdown.

• 17:08Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by Cash App. Cash App does more than you think when it comes to having your back and making sure your money stays your money. Cash App just released a new status program for the way people actually spend called Cash App Green. Now, when you spend at least $500 a month with a Cash App card, you earn green status, which unlocks benefits like up to $200 of free overdraft coverage. If you overdraft unexpectedly, there are no hidden fees. You also unlock higher borrow limits and custom personalized cash back offers every Friday at places you love to shop. Turn everyday spending into status with Cash App Green. Download Cash App today or visit cash.app to learn more about this and other financial benefits. Download Cash App today and make your money work for you. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners.

• 17:53Kaelyn Moore?

  Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. And the Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton Prepaid Card, Sutton Debit Flex Card, and Bancorp Debit Flex Card. Cash App Green features savings, direct deposit, roundups, overdraft coverage, and discounts provided by Cash App, a Block Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. This episode is brought to you by Sijoo. A new season always makes me want to reset things, my space, my routine, how my mornings feel. And honestly, upgrading my bedding has made a big difference and that's why I have been loving Sijoo Home. I have the Aerie Weight Eucalyptus Sheets from Sijoo. They have a lightweight feel, cool to the touch texture, and now my bed feels like a real reset at the end of a long day.

• 18:36Kaelyn Moore?

  I know that every little bit of improvement I can do with my sleep routine makes a huge difference, and so I'm so happy I was able to get Sijoo Sheets. The Aerie Weight Sheets are made with Tencel Liocell, they're doctor recommended, Ecotec certified, and even HSA and FSA eligible, which I genuinely did not know was a thing for bedding. And if you're someone who prefers a more lived-in texture, their Luxe Weave French Linen Sheets are stone washed and get softer with every wash. Really beautiful for a bedroom refresh. Go to SijooHome.com and use code HSP to get 20% off your first order. That's S-I-J-O-H-O-M-E.com and use code HSP for 20% off at checkout. So on September 30th, in Redding, Ohio, a woman called 911 in a fit.

• 19:20Kaelyn Moore?

  Breathless, she told the dispatcher that someone had just tried to kill her. And so, when the dispatcher asked for a description of what the assailant looked like, she told them that it was a clown. So according to the woman, early that morning, around 4:00 a.m. before the sun was even up, she was smoking a cigarette out on her porch when she saw someone strolling down the street. Now, it wasn't really normal to see people out for walks that early, but it wasn't unheard of, so she didn't really think much of it. Until she realized what this person was wearing. The passerby had on a striped outfit, a red wig, and a white clown mask with this eerie grin.

• 20:03Kaelyn Moore?

  They were walking by her porch when suddenly they turned and climbed up towards her. And before she knew what to do, the person grabbed her by the throat and whispered in her ear, "I should just kill you now." And some students and teachers would wish they were never born at the junior and senior high school today. The clown then released this woman and took off. She called 911 immediately afterwards. The district closed every school in Redding that day, but they didn't find anything credible about that threat. They weren't necessarily denying that this woman had that experience, but they were saying there wasn't a threat to the schools necessarily. Though, they did find an elementary student who told officials that someone dressed as

• 20:45Kaelyn Moore?

  a clown, holding a knife, chased her on her way to school that morning. But they were never able to find that person, and once again, they claimed that it wasn't a credible threat. Then, the very next morning, in the same town, Alexandra Conley, who was 18 years old, lived in Hamilton, she called police around 6:00 AM on Saturday, saying that a clown jumped over a fence, waved a knife at her, and ended up cutting her left thumb. That's how close it got. But later, she admitted to making up that story, police said, because she was running late to work and she didn't want to lose her job. Now, the idea that you could plausibly tell people you were late for work because a killer clown attacked you should tell you just how wild things were getting around this time.

• 21:30Kaelyn Moore?

  And by the first week of October, sightings had exploded everywhere. There was a 14-year-old in Houston who was charged with a terroristic threat for saying he would shoot up his school with his clown friends. There were teenagers in Baytown, Texas that were arrested for chasing people with sticks and clown masks. And there was a man in Pennsylvania arrested for prowling his neighbor's yard in a mask with an airsoft pistol. There were also two people in Georgia charged for calling 911 about clowns that just didn't exist. And a Massachusetts college locked down and evacuated one of the dorms over a hoax. And it was really, really getting dire for the clown community. Stores started pulling clown masks off of shelves, retailers in New Zealand completely

• 22:14Kaelyn Moore?

  nixed costumes altogether, some school districts even banned clown costumes outright heading into Halloween. On October 3rd, Stephen King, the man behind Pennywise, he posted a tweet that read, "Hey guys, time to cool the clown hysteria. Most of them are good. Cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh." Which is a lot coming from him. And a week later, McDonald's even issued a statement saying that it was "mindful of the current climate around clown sightings and would be thoughtful about Ronald McDonald's public appearances for the time being." So yeah, they benched Ronald McDonald over this. Now, the same night that Stephen King posted that tweet on October 3rd, something happened

• 22:56Kaelyn Moore?

  at Penn State that really illustrates what this panic had turned into at that point. So it started on yick yak. Some of you millennials might remember that anonymous messaging app. It was really popular on college campuses in like 2015, 2016, around this time. So somebody posted that a clown had been seen near campus. Then, someone else posted that their friend had seen it too. By 11:30 that night, at least 500 students were gathered on the quad, and they were armed. They had grabbed whatever they could from their dorm rooms. Some of them had baseball bats, there were kids with hockey sticks, golf clubs, tennis rackets, they had flashlights, girls had pepper spray.

• 23:39Kaelyn Moore?

  The students had basically decided that they had had enough of this clown epidemic, and they were going to solve it one way or another. Now, this mob moved across campus and into downtown State College, and it grew as it went. They were chanting about the clown, people from the community were joining in, one student got up and gave a speech on the lawn, and someone even projected a giant clown face onto the side of an apartment building, and the crowd roared and booed at it. For an hour and a half, a small army of college students ran through the streets of a Pennsylvania town, looking for someone in a wig with a red nose to murder, basically. After months of the police not finding anything, of fake accounts and all of the harassment,

• 24:24Kaelyn Moore?

  this was going to be the moment where one of these clowns was actually caught. And maybe, just maybe, it would send a warning to the other bad actors out there that, hey, knock it off, we're not messing around anymore. But that group of college students never found a single clown. The police sergeant on duty told a local reporter that if there had been a clown out there with that many students and that many officers, somebody would have run into it. But nobody did. After this, the clown sightings started dwindling, Halloween came and went, maybe the bad actors dressed up as clowns got scared and stopped, or maybe the mania had just run its course. When it was all over, The New York Times tallied up the clown panic of 2016.

• 25:09Kaelyn Moore?

  At least 12 people were arrested across multiple states, there were schools that had locked down, there were death threats against professional clowns made. I mean, some people argue that the biggest victims of the clown panic were actual working clowns. I tend to agree with that. There were a lot of working performers who said that they lost their bookings for the entire season. And the number of children who were actually taken into the woods by a clown was zero. And as the police were doing their investigation, they were able to trace back the origins of the clown panic. And it turns out, it might have been started for a really surprising reason. So the farthest back that we can go in the clown epidemic is a photo that was taken on August 1st in 2016 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

• 25:53Kaelyn Moore?

  So three weeks before our first story, where the kids at the Fleetwood Manor apartment complex ran out of the woods. So, that night, August 1st, a photo appeared on Facebook at around 2:00 in the morning. It was of a clown standing under a downtown bridge, and it had this really raggedy, filthy costume on, a white face, and a fistful of black balloons. And it was just standing there in the dark, like he was waiting for someone. Once that photo was posted, it went viral in hours. People nicknamed the clown Gags, and local news picked it up, then Fox News picked it up and was trying to get everyone worried about it. The police got multiple calls, but they never figured out who was behind it.

• 26:38Kaelyn Moore?

  A week later, though, on August 8th, a local filmmaker named Adam Kraus stepped forward and explained that Gags was actually his. He had written a short horror film about a clown called Gags, and he planned a 10-day viral marketing campaign to promote it. Somebody in a costume, a couple of staged photos under that bridge, and then he was going to slow drip the whole thing on social media. He later said that he hoped maybe a couple hundred people would see the photos, and that those photos had actually been taken back in May. The only reason that the secret came out when it did was that there were actors who auditioned for the film, and they didn't get cast in it, but they knew the whole plan and they started talking. Gags the Clown was a movie ad.

• 27:21Kaelyn Moore?

  So now, it's believed that a marketing stunt was what really set off the 2016 clown panic, where the fear of something manifested into an actual panic, where people really did get arrested and children really were seeing clowns, even if no one believed them. But this whole thing, the fear epidemic, the way that things spread, it's not a new pattern. It's the same one that every Halloween legend runs on. And for 50 years, leading up to the clown epidemic, the scariest legend in America surrounding Halloween, it wasn't about a clown, it was about a stranger handing out Halloween candy. This legend, though, that I want to tell you about, is different, because in this one,

• 28:03Kaelyn Moore?

  a child really did die. This episode is brought to you by Merit Beauty. Fall has always felt like more of a reset to me than New Year's. It's also a lot darker in the mornings, and that's why I love Merit and their five-minute makeup routine. Using Merit is great. Usually, I'll do their Great Skin Serum, which just makes my skin look so glowy and refreshed. Then they have the Minimalist Foundation. You can top it off with some Flush Balm and some Clean Volume Mascara for a really clean look that makes it look like you're wearing a little bit of makeup, your skin definitely looks refreshed, but it also doesn't take very long, which is my favorite. Everything blends together seamlessly, there's no peeling, no caking, and they have a five-minute

• 28:48Kaelyn Moore?

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• 29:32Kaelyn Moore?

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• 30:12Speaker 03

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• 31:14Kaelyn Moore?

  So trick or treating has an official rule. Check your candy before you eat it. Some parents take it even further. They say, throw away anything that's homemade. Only factory wrapped candy. If the wrapper looks loose, toss it. And whatever you do, definitely don't eat the apples because somebody, somewhere out there, has pushed a razor blade into them. Now, this is the oldest Halloween urban legend in America that somewhere out there, a stranger who hates children has loaded candy bars with needles and poison and is handing them out with a smile. Hospitals actually used to offer free x-rays for trick or treat halls. Some of them even still do. There is a sociologist named Joel Best,

• 31:58Kaelyn Moore?

  who spent a lot of his career on this exact legend. And in 1985, he and a colleague went through every newspaper report they could find of tampered Halloween candy going back to 1958. And here is what he found. In all of that time, the whole time he was doing the study, he never located one substantiated case of a stranger killing or seriously injuring a child with candy that was collected while trick or treating. Not a one. But this legend must have come from somewhere, right? Well, it does. But the story is a little different than you would think. So let's go back to Halloween 1974 in Pasadena, Texas, a suburb southeast of Houston.

• 32:42Kaelyn Moore?

  It's refinery country, where the sky glows orange at night from the petrochemical plants along the Ship Channel. That night, it was raining. 30-year-old Ronald O'Brien and his wife, Janine, had taken their children to have dinner at a family friend's, the Bates's, before heading out to trick or treat. Ronald O'Brien was an optician at a Texas state optical shop, and he was also a deacon at his Baptist church. His son, Timothy, was eight. His daughter, Elizabeth, was five. And the Bates's, the house they were going to, they had two children of their own. After dinner, all of the kids got into their costumes and they got ready to go out. Now, because of the rain, one of the Bates children decided that they just wanted to stay home. So the group that went out that night

• 33:27Kaelyn Moore?

  was the two dads, Ronald O'Brien and Jim Bates, Timothy, Elizabeth, and then one of the Bates children. Now, it was going to be a short night, even without the rain. There were only two streets to go trick or treating on in this neighborhood, and that was Citation Street and Donarail Street. And to speed up the night, the group had a system in place. Jim Bates would stay on the sidewalk with the candy bags, and Ronald O'Brien would walk the kids up to the doors. Now, partway down Donarail Street, the group came to a house where the lights were off. The kids ran up and they knocked on the door anyways, but nobody answered. So they gave up and they ran ahead to the next porch, the way that kids do. But Ronald O'Brien stayed behind,

• 34:10Kaelyn Moore?

  standing in the dark at the door that nobody had opened for about 30 seconds. And then he came back down the walkway, waving five giant pixie sticks, swishing them through the air like batons. And he called out to the kids, "Hey, somebody in that house had finally come to the door, and look at what they were handing out." If you haven't seen one, a pixie stick is this paper straw that's filled with flavored sugar. The regular ones are about the size of a drinking straw. But Ronald was holding giant ones. They were 21 inches long, nearly two feet of sugar in a tube. Now, when you're eight years old, that is the best thing that anyone is going to hand you all night. He told them that he was going to hang on to them and he would hand them out properly later,

• 34:54Kaelyn Moore?

  once everyone was back home. Now, back at the Bates's house, he did exactly that. There was one for Timothy, one for Elizabeth, one for each of the two Bates kids, including the one that stayed home. And then there was a fifth. A boy came to the Bates's door trick or treating. He went to church with the O'Briens, and so Ronald gave him one too. Five giant pixie sticks for five kids. That night, as Ronald was getting the kids ready at their townhouse in Deer Park, they asked if they could have one piece of their candy from the stash. Ronald agreed, and he let them choose. Timothy picked the pixie stick. He tore it open and he tipped it up, but the powder wouldn't come out. It was really packed in there, stuck like it had maybe gotten wet at some point.

• 35:38Kaelyn Moore?

  So his father took the candy and he rolled it back and forth between his hands to loosen the sugar inside, and then he handed it back to his son. Timothy swallowed a mouthful and he made a face. And then he swallowed another, and he told his dad that the candy tasted bad. Ronald went into the kitchen to grab him some Kool-Aid to wash it down with, but within moments, Timothy was vomiting. Ronald ran in and tried to help him, but the boy went into convulsions. So he called for an ambulance. And when the paramedics finally arrived, Ronald tried to explain what had happened, and twice while he was talking. He told them that he felt sick himself and he went into the bathroom. Now, both times, the paramedics offered to treat him, but both times he said no.

• 36:22Kaelyn Moore?

  They rushed Timothy to the hospital, but tragically, it was too late. Eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien died less than an hour after he opened the candy. When the medical examiner tested the contents of his stomach, they found something that they had never seen before. Timothy had eaten 16 milligrams of potassium cyanide. The concentration in his blood was 0.4 milligrams. He had swallowed nearly twice what it takes to kill a child. Somehow, an eight-year-old's Halloween candy had been poisoned with cyanide. Now, within hours, Pasadena police were trying to find out where those pixie sticks came from. And while they were doing that,

• 37:07Kaelyn Moore?

  word about what had happened was spreading. Parents across the Houston area all dumped their kids' candy out on the counter and they started picking through it. Then they started bringing it to the police. The station actually had an entire room full to the ceiling of candy that parents were too afraid to touch. But that wasn't the candy that police were interested in. Not right now. Their first job was finding those other four pixie sticks. Now, they went and saw that Elizabeth had not eaten hers. Neither had the Bates kids, luckily. But what about that boy from church? So police got his name and they ran to his home to tell his parents to not let him eat that candy. His parents brought officers to his room where the boy was laying in his bed

• 37:52Kaelyn Moore?

  with his eyes closed and his pixie stick in his hand. His mother screamed, bloody murder. And the boy woke up. Turns out, he didn't touch the candy. He had tried to open it that night, but it was stapled shut and he just fell asleep holding it. Wait, it was stapled shut? That's not how pixie sticks work. The straws are supposed to be heat sealed by the factory, both ends. That happens every single time. They are never, ever stapled. So that meant that somebody had opened these, poured something in, and then closed them back up by hand. And the lab confirmed it. Each of the four remaining straws

• 38:36Kaelyn Moore?

  had a fatal dose of cyanide packed into the top two inches. Timothy's straw was missing its first four inches, the part that he swallowed, and all of the powder underneath tested clean. So now they had to figure out who handed these sticks out. Detectives asked Ronald O'Brien about the house that the pixie sticks had come from, but strangely, he couldn't remember. His answer kept changing. At first, he couldn't remember which street, which was weird because there's only two streets to trick or treat on. And then he remembered the street, but he just didn't remember the house. But then later, he remembered the house, just not the person that handed him the candy. He said that he only saw an arm that reached out and handed them to him.

• 39:20Kaelyn Moore?

  Eventually, Ronald was able to point out the house. It was that dark one on Donarail. He said that he was almost positive the man who lived there was the one who handed him the candy. And so, police went to the house. They knocked on the door, and this man answered. He was a shift supervisor at one of the local airports, and he told them that he had left for work at 1:30 that afternoon and didn't get back home until 10:30 that night. Now, there were roughly 200 coworkers who all confirmed that he was there at the times he said he was. His wife and his kids had handed out candy until they ran out at around 6:45 PM. And then they turned off the porch light and they stopped answering the door. But they were surprised by the story that the police told them

• 40:04Kaelyn Moore?

  because not only were they not handing out candy at that point, but they definitely didn't hand out giant pixie sticks. And so detectives canvassed the entire route, every house on Citation, every house on Donarail, asking them about the candy that they had been handing out. And none of them had giant pixie sticks. So if the candy didn't come from one of these houses, then where exactly did they come from? Investigators started pulling records on the only other person they could confirm touched the candy that evening, and that was Ronald O'Brien. And what they found, when they looked into this guy, did not look good. So in January, Ronald O'Brien had joined a bank club

• 40:47Kaelyn Moore?

  that put a $10,000 life insurance policy on every member of his family. His wife objected to him doing this. But, you know, life insurance policies on your family, not all that abnormal, right? A lot of people have these. But then a few weeks before Halloween, he had taken out $20,000 policies on each of his children. And these were life insurance policies that his wife did not know about. Again, you know, maybe this is normal. It's definitely less normal, but officers decided they needed to look more into his finances to find that smoking gun. And it turns out that Ronald was behind on everything. He was eight months late on a car payment he had.

• 41:31Kaelyn Moore?

  He already had a repossession letter in hand. He owed thousands of dollars in delinquent loans and his take home pay, the pay that he was taking home on his paychecks was just $150 a week. He was deep in a hole of debt that his salary could not dig him out of. And then the story started to look even more conclusive once they started talking to his coworkers. So back in August, just a couple of months prior, he had asked his manager at the optical shop to get him some cyanide. He said that he needed it to clean gold eyeglass frames. Now, his manager thought that was strange because yeah,

• 42:13Kaelyn Moore?

  he had heard of people using cyanide that way, but not in 20 years. But Ronald was persistent. He kept asking. He asked again a few weeks later. And then when that didn't work out, Ronald called an old coworker from a chemical company, and he asked where he could buy cyanide, but not just where. He asked how much it would take to kill a person and also how poison would show up in a dead body. Now Ronald really tried to explain all these questions away. He said that it was for research, which, you know, I can't look at too judgmentally because I do say that about my own Google searches when I am looking at horrible things. But Ronald worked at an optical shop.

• 42:57Kaelyn Moore?

  He didn't host a true crime podcast. So what exactly was he researching? So then police eventually learned that the morning after Timothy died at 9:00 AM, Ronald called about collecting on the insurance. And when the funeral home told him that each policy would need its own death certificate, he went ahead and he ordered six. Now, all of this felt like enough for police, who arrested Ronald O'Brien on November 5th, 1974, for the murder of his son. The trial took place in Houston the following spring. Ronald took the stand and he denied everything, but the jury came back in just about 46 minutes. Guilty of capital murder, the sentence, death. But Ronald never confessed.

• 43:41Kaelyn Moore?

  When he heard his sentence, he slumped over and he started nodding. And the detective actually leaned in and said to him, Ronald, tell me. And Ronald just looked up at him and said, tell you what? And then the moment was gone. Ronald spent nine years on death row appealing. And then on March 31st, 1984, the state of Texas executed him. And outside of the prison where this happened in Huntsville, a crowd of a couple hundred people gathered and some of them, waiting for the announcement that the execution had happened, started chanting trick or treat.

• 44:20Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, when I hear this story, one of the most horrifying things, to me at least, is that Ronald had two children that he was going to attempt to collect life insurance policies on. But he made five poisoned pixie sticks that night, which meant that he was completely willing to kill three other innocent children in order to make it look like he wasn't guilty. He felt like he could get away by saying they were handed poisoned candy from a rich elusive neighbor and no one would ever question him or know. And Ronald didn't know it, but he was actually fundamentally changing trick or treating forever. Eight years later, after the Tylenol murders in Chicago, dozens of towns across the country canceled trick or treating altogether. Hospitals started rolling out X-ray machines.

• 45:04Kaelyn Moore?

  And by the late eighties, they were spending more than a million dollars a year scanning candy. And 50 years later, parents are still checking all of the candy that their kids bring home. And so what do you all think? Do you check your kids' Halloween candy? We are going trick or treating this year, but my little baby boy is too young to eat candy. So I'm going to have to check the candy for myself. But let me know if there were other Halloween legends that you were raised on. You can reach out to me wherever you listen, and I'm going to be here next week with more scary stories for all of us to listen to together. I'll meet you here and until then, stay curious.

• 45:44Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grace and Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartsarts pounding.com.

• 46:05Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet, turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom mugs made from Vistaprint and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality.

• 46:47Kaelyn Moore?

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