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Episode 47: The Candy Man · Deadly Divas True Crime Podcast

0:11
SPEAKER_00: Hello, all you true crime divas and dudes.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm Tina, and welcome back to your favorite true crime podcast, Deadly Divas.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: And I'm Sarah, and if you're new here, welcome.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: We break down a new true crime case for you every Friday.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: With Halloween tomorrow, we have got our final spectacular episode of the year.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And I know that's bitter sweet for you, Tina, but Christmas is right around the corner.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: I know I love Christmas too.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: I actually can't decide which one I love more.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, Halloween is probably, probably my favorite.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: And if you celebrated as a kid, think back to what Halloween felt like when you were eight years old.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: It was magic.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: You'd been thinking about your costume for weeks.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: You were watching the clock, waiting for it to get dark.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Porch lights were glowing, your candy bag was getting heavier, and for one night a year, your parents were literally encouraging you to knock on strangers' doors and ask for candy.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Halloween night in 1974 should have been exactly that for eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Timothy lived in Deer Park, Texas with his parents and his five-year-old sister, Elizabeth.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: That Halloween, Timothy dressed in a Planet of the Apes costume while Elizabeth was a princess.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: It was raining, but their father Ronald still took the kid's trick-or-treating with family friends in nearby Pasadena.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: For Timothy, it should have been one of the best nights of the year.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Instead, before Halloween was over, he would tragically be dead, and his death would permanently change the way millions of families thought about Halloween candy.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: This is the story of eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien and the man who became known as the Candyman.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: And really quick before we get started, this episode discusses the poisoning and death of a child, so please take care while listening.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: So let's start by introducing the O'Brien family.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Ronald Clark O'Brien was 30 years old.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: He was married to Danine O'Brien, and they had two children.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: Timothy was eight, Elizabeth was five.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Ronald seemed to be a devoted husband and father.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: He worked as an optician at Texas State Optical, and he was heavily involved in the church.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Ronald served as a deacon, sang in the choir, and even drove the church bus frequently.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: On the surface, he looked like a wholesome church-going suburban dad, the kind of father who took his children trick-or-treating.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: And on Halloween night in 1974, that's exactly what he was doing.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: On October 31st, the O'Brien's headed to nearby Pasadena to spend Halloween with their friends, Jim and Jean Bates.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Because it was raining, the trick-or-treating route was short, and one of the Bates children stayed home.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: Jim Bates went out with Ronald, Timothy, Elizabeth, and another Bates child, but he generally stayed near the sidewalk while Ronald accompanied the kids to the doors.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, the group reached a dark house on Dunrail Street.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: The children knocked, but nobody answered, so they moved on.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: But Ronald stayed behind, and about 30 seconds later, he caught back up with the group carrying something the kids had not gotten at any of the previous houses, giant pixie sticks.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: These were not the tiny little paper straws.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: They were huge, like 21 inches long.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: So for a kid in 1974, this was a serious Halloween score.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: Ronald explained that someone in the dark house had finally opened the door just a crack and handed him the pixie sticks.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: He made a joke that the rich neighbors were giving out expensive candy, and nobody had any reason to question that.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: They were trick-or-treating.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: People gave you candy.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: That was the whole point.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: Ronald ended up with five of those giant pixie sticks.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Two went to his children, one for Timothy and one for Elizabeth.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Two went to children in the Bates family, including the child who'd stayed home, and the fifth eventually went to another boy named Whitney Parker.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Whitney wasn't part of the trick-or-treating group, but he knew Ronald from church.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: When Whitney stopped by the Bates house, Ronald gave him one too.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, Ronald took Timothy and Elizabeth home.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: Before bed, Timothy was allowed to have one piece of his Halloween candy.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: He ate one of the giant pixie sticks.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: You can only have one.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: I'll have that giant.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, like as a kid, that's exactly what you're gonna choose.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: But he had some trouble getting the powder out.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: So Ronald took the tube and rolled it between his hands to loosen the candy before handing it back.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: Timothy took another mouthful and he immediately complained that it tasted bitter.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Ronald gave him Kool-Aid to wash it down.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: But almost immediately after, Timothy began feeling sick.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: His stomach hurt.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: He ran to the bathroom and started vomiting.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: And this wasn't a kid who had eaten too much Halloween candy and gotten an upset stomach.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Whatever was happening to Timothy was getting worse and fast.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: As he continued vomiting, Ronald held him around the waist to keep him upright.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: And then Timothy began convulsing.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: At one point, his little body went limp.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Something was very wrong.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Ronald called for an ambulance, and Timothy was rushed to a local hospital.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: But whatever Timothy had eaten was already overwhelming his body, and doctors tragically could not save him.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Less than an hour after arriving at the hospital, Timothy O'Brien was dead.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: He was just eight years old.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: And for Ronald and Danine, what had started as a completely normal Halloween had suddenly become every parent's worst nightmare.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Their little boy had been running from house to house in his Planet of the Apes costume just hours earlier, and now he was gone.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: At this point, nobody even remotely knew why.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: At the hospital, there was an immediate clue that this was not just a normal medical emergency.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: People around Timothy noticed an odor resembling bitter almonds.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: And if you're like me, you're like, what?
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Why is that relevant?
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, apparently that can be associated with an extremely dangerous chemical, cyanide.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: And when Timothy was tested, the horrifying truth became clear.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: He had actually ingested potassium cyanide.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: And this was no tiny amount that would indicate something like accidental contamination.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: This was enough cyanide to kill two grown adults.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Poor Timothy never had a chance.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: It seemed that this eight-year-old boy had been deliberately poisoned, so investigators needed to figure out what Timothy had eaten immediately before he became sick.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: And there was an obvious place to start, the giant pixie sticks.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Timothy had eaten some of it shortly before he began vomiting and convulsing.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: The rest of the tube was still there, and investigators took it as evidence.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Now think about how horrifying this would have been in 1974.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: Stories about dangerous Halloween candy already existed and had been circulating for years.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Parents had heard rumors about razor blades hidden in apples, needles stuck in various treats, and all kinds of other disturbing tampering.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: But those stories were mostly just rumors and urban legends.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: Now there was really an eight-year-old boy dead from cyanide after eating Halloween candy.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: And investigators had reason to believe the poison had been inside that giant pixie sticks.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, the urban legend looked very real.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: But then came an even more terrifying realization.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Ronald told investigators that Timothy wasn't the only child who had received one of the pixie sticks that night.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: There had been five of them, which meant four other children might be holding or even eating poison Halloween candy right this second.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: So police immediately began trying to recover the other candy.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth still had hers, so did the Bates children.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: Those were thankfully recovered without incident.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: But when police reached Whitney Parker's family, his parents could not find his pixie sticks.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: Imagine the panic.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Another child had just died from cyanide.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Whitney had received the exact same candy, and now nobody knew where it was.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: Eventually they found Whitney safe asleep in bed.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: And get this, y'all.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: He was still clutching that giant pixie stick.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: He had apparently tried to open it before falling asleep, but he couldn't.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: The end had been stapled shut and he hadn't been able to pull it open.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: And thank God for that.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: Stapled shut sounds a bit fishy anyway.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: Very fishy.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: So police took all the recovered candy for testing.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: And when the results came back on those remaining pixie sticks, the situation became even more horrifying.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: They contained cyanide too.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: All five pixie sticks had been poisoned.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Timothy had simply been the only child who managed to eat one.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Whitney's inability to get those staples out literally saved his life.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: So investigators examined the pixie sticks closely.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: One end had the normal factory seal.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: The other had been opened and crudely stapled back together.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: The manufacturer definitely did not seal pixie sticks that way.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Someone had opened them, put cyanide inside, and then closed them again.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: And whoever did this hadn't been stingy with the poison.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: The surviving pixie sticks contained lethal amounts concentrated near the opening.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Police were now looking for someone who had intentionally prepared enough poison candy to kill five children, and they already had a lead.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Ronald had told them where the pixie sticks came from.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: That dark house on Dunrail Street.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: Ronald told investigators that when the children knocked, nobody answered.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: So while everybody else took the hint and moved on, Ronald stayed behind.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: Then the door of the dark house finally opened, ever so slightly.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't see the face of the person inside, or really much at all.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: In fact, he said all he could see was an arm mysteriously reach out, hand him the pixie sticks, and then close the door without a word.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Ronald did say he noticed the arm was hairy and appeared to be a man's arm, but that was all he could gather.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: Now this truly sounded like the Halloween nightmare parents had always feared.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: A stranger hiding inside a dark house, a hand reaching through the door, candy filled with poison, and somewhere in Pasadena there might be a person who had just tried to murder five children.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Police needed to find him and fast.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: But there was a problem.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: Ronald couldn't seem to remember which house had given him the pixie sticks.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And at first, investigators could understand that.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it had been dark, it was raining, they'd been going from house to house, and Ronald had just watched his eight-year-old son die.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, he was a grieving father who'd gone through something unimaginably traumatic, so nobody expected his memory of that night to be perfect.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: But investigators still needed to find whoever handed out that candy.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: So they took Ronald back through the neighborhood and asked him to show them where he'd gotten the pixie sticks.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't find it.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: They tried again, still nothing.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: And eventually what had initially seemed understandable started becoming suspicious, because this wasn't like the families had spent hours covering miles of Pasadena.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: The rain had also cut their trigger treating short, and they had only visited houses on two streets.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: These were not ordinary little pieces of candy that just blended in with everything else.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: They were five giant ass pixie sticks.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: So it seems like that would be a detail extraordinary enough to remember.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: Investigators even went door to door themselves, asking residents what they'd handed out that Halloween, and not a single person said they had giant pixie sticks.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: That's what I was wondering, like how many houses on this street that they can't investigate them all.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: So over the next few days, Ronald gave conflicting accounts about where the candy had come from.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: Police walked the neighborhood with him twice, trying to get him to identify the mystery house, but he still couldn't.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: Then on November 3rd, three days after Halloween, they took him back for a third time.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: By now, investigators were frustrated, and this time they pressed Ronald much harder, letting him know this wasn't making him look all too great.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, he remembered.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: He pointed them toward the dark house they'd visited just a few days earlier, 4112 Dunrail Street.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: It belonged to Courtney and Carolyn Melvin.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Ronald said this was the house.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: Investigators immediately began checking Ronald's story.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: The Melvin family had been giving out candy in the early evening of Halloween, but they ran out pretty quickly.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: After that, they turned off all the lights and stopped answering the door.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: That explained why the house had been dark when the group arrived for trick-or-treating.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: But what about the mysterious man who opened the door and handed Ronald the pixie sticks?
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Police had already been going door to door along the family's short trick-or-treating route, asking residents what kind of candy they'd handed out.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And they kept running into the same problem.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Nobody said they'd given out giant pixie sticks, not the Melvins and not anybody else investigators could find along the route.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: But Ronald wasn't just saying the candy came from somewhere in that neighborhood anymore.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: He had now identified this specific house.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: And he went even further.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: The homeowner, Courtney Melvin, was an air traffic controller at William P.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Hobby Airport.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: After seeing Courtney, Ronald told police he was almost positive Courtney was the man who handed him the poison pixie sticks.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: So police took that accusation seriously.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Investigators went directly to Hobby Airport where Courtney was working and arrested him in front of his coworkers on suspicion of murdering a child.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just imagine that for a second.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: You're at work minding your own business when police suddenly show up and arrest you in front of everyone you work with because an eight-year-old boy has been poisoned to death, and his father, a total stranger to you, has essentially said you did it.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: But after a brief investigation, police found Courtney had an extremely solid alibi.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: He had been at work on Halloween night, and his co-workers could verify it.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Courtney couldn't have handed Ronald those pixie sticks because he wasn't even home.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: His family hadn't been handing them out either.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: So not only was Courtney innocent, Ronald had just sent police after an innocent man, and investigators wanted to know why.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Turns out, behind Ronald's respectable public image, his life was a mess.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: Ronald had a lot of trouble holding down jobs.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Over about 10 years, he had 21 different jobs.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: By 1974, his finances were disastrous.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: He was behind on multiple loans, his car was close to being repossessed.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: The family had actually sold their previous home and used thousands of dollars from the sale to pay debts before moving into a rented townhouse.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Even after that, the financial pressures mounted and they were facing eviction there.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: All in all, Ronald was in about$100,000 worth of debt.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: And remember, this was 1974.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: That would be well over$600,000 today.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: And at Texas State Optical, where he worked, he was also reportedly under suspicion of stealing money from them.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh Ronald.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Right?
15:54
SPEAKER_00: And working there, he was only bringing home about$150 a week.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, this man was in deep trouble with money.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: And then investigators learned something even more damning.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: Despite being buried in debt, Ronald had recently started talking like his financial problems were about to disappear.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: He told a credit union that he expected to come into a large amount of money before the end of the year to hold them off from collecting.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: He was expecting to inulter it?
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe so.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: He told a coworker he planned to quit his job in November.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: He talked to Jim Bates about buying another house, and he specifically asked Jimmy not to mention that conversation to his wife, Danine.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this man was broke as fuck.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: His car was about to be repossessed, he was drowning in debt, and yet somehow he seemed absolutely convinced that a large sum of money was headed his way.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, he's like broke as fuck, he can't pay anything and he's gonna quit his job.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Right?
16:54
SPEAKER_00: And police soon found a possible explanation for that.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: Earlier in 1974, Ronald had joined a bank club that provided life insurance coverage for members of his family.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: The coverage included Timothy and Elizabeth.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Danine hadn't even wanted to spend the money on life insurance for the children because they were already struggling financially and she didn't understand why their young children even needed it.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: Then, shortly before Halloween, Ronald obtained additional life insurance on both children.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Danine did not know about all of that additional coverage.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: By the time Timothy died, he had roughly$31,000 in life insurance coverage across multiple policies.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: That was an enormous amount compared with Ronald's income.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: And remember what Ronald had told the credit union?
17:45
SPEAKER_00: He expected to come into a large amount of money before the end of the year.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: He made that statement on October 23rd.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Eight days later, Timothy was dead.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: So was he hoping to kill both of them and get both life insurance policies?
18:00
SPEAKER_00: Possibly.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: And what about the other children?
18:02
SPEAKER_00: He didn't give a fuck.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: We'll get to that.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: And then investigators learned what Ronald had done the following morning.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: Less than 24 hours after his son died, a horrific death, Ronald started asking about collecting the insurance money.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: He contacted people involved with the policies and learned that he would need certified copies of Timothy's death certificate.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: So he immediately ordered multiple copies.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: And around the time his family was burying Timothy, relatives remembered Ronald already talking about what he could do with the money.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: He talked about taking an extended vacation and making other large purchases.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: You're burying your kid and you're gonna go on vacation?
18:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not looking too good for Ronald.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Oh Ronald.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And while there were people who saw Ronald grieving publicly, people close to him testified that privately his behavior was very different.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Jim Bates remembered Ronald making an especially strange comment.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Ronald said he didn't see how authorities could ever pin Timothy's death on anybody.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Like who the hell talks about their eight-year-old son's murder that way?
19:11
SPEAKER_01: A psychopath.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, usually it's the opposite.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: You're like, I'm gonna find this motherfucker and kill him.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: So at this point, that dark house on Dunrail Street was starting to look like a red herring.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And Ronald was starting to look very suspicious.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: Then detectives discovered his recent obsession with something critical we mentioned earlier.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: Cyanide.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: So we already knew Timothy had died from cyanide poisoning.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: And months before that, guess what?
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Ronald had been trying to obtain cyanide.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: At Texas State Optical, Ronald asked his manager where he could find some.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: He claimed he wanted it to clean gold eyeglass frames.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: The problem was that cyanide hadn't really been used for that purpose in the optical industry for years.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: And Ronald didn't just ask once, he brought it up again, but his manager refused.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Then he contacted an acquaintance who worked in the chemical industry.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Ronald claimed he was taking a chemistry course, and the questions he asked were disturbing.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Where could someone buy cyanide?
20:19
SPEAKER_00: What amount would be fatal to a human being?
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And how would an unknown chemical be detected in a person's body after death?
20:28
SPEAKER_00: Other people remembered Ronald casually bringing up cyanide in conversation, and he didn't stop at asking questions.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Ronald went to a chemical supply company in Houston and tried to buy some, but the smallest container available was five pounds.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: But Ronald said that was too much, so he left without purchasing it.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: And then there was what happened on Halloween Day itself.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: One of Ronald's customers at Texas State Optical saw him outside in the parking lot carrying two things: a bag with unknown contents and a stapler.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh Ronald.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: Oh Ronald.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: For me, I thought you were gonna say a bag of giant pixie sticks on a stapler.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: And that's what could have been in there.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: Later that same day, Ronald serviced that customer's glasses.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: And while they were talking, Ronald brought up cyanide.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: We just can't stop talking about it, can he?
21:20
SPEAKER_00: He can't.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Specifically, they discussed lethal amounts of cyanide.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: So let's just make sure we're all putting this timeline together.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: On the exact day Timothy would be poisoned with cyanide, Ronald was seen carrying a stapler and a mysterious bag while also having a conversation about how much cyanide could kill a person.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And just five hours later, five giant pixie sticks would appear with one end crudely stapled shut.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Remember, investigators had already learned pixie sticks did not come from the manufacturer that way.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Becomes stapled.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: No.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: Someone had opened those tubes, put cyanide inside, and stapled them back together.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: And Ronald had been seen carrying a stapler that very day.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: Investigators could never conclusively establish exactly where he eventually got the cyanide.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Every source he approached appears to have turned him down.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: But investigators now knew something incredibly damning.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Long before Timothy died from cyanide, Ronald had been actively trying to obtain that very substance.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: It's starting to sound like Ronald's goose is cooked, jaw.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: So once police became suspicious of Ronald, they went back over Halloween night.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly details that hadn't seemed important before became incredibly so.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Remember how excited Ronald had been about Halloween?
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Witnesses said that was very unusual.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: He had never been particularly interested in Halloween before.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: But in 1974, he suddenly bought the kids costumes, seemed excited about the holiday, and eagerly volunteered to take them trick-or-treating even in the rain.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: Red Flaggler.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: Then there was what happened with the other poison pixie sticks.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: One of the Bates children had tried to open his while they were out trick-or-treating, and Ronald stopped him.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: At the time, nobody had any reason to think that meant anything, but now they did.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: And then there was Timothy's final piece of candy.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Ronald said Timothy chose the pixie sticks himself, but Danine remembered it very differently.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: She testified that Timothy initially wanted a sucker, and Ronald was the one who steered him toward the pixie sticks.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: No, have more sugar right beforehand.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Then when Timothy couldn't get the powder out, Ronald took it from him.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: He rolled it between his hands to loosen the powder inside and gave it back.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Timothy then swallowed more, and when he complained that it tasted bitter, Ronald gave him Kool-Aid to wash it down.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Here's some Kool-Aid to wash down that cyanide song.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Right, I mean, Ronald could have stopped at any point.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: He did not have to steer Timothy towards the pixie sticks.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: He didn't have to take it from him and loosen the powder.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: And when he complained that it tasted bitter, he most certainly did not have to give him that Kool-Aid to make sure that it was fully ingested.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Like, these were not accidents.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: They were deliberate choices.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And the goal seems very clear to me, his own eight-year-old son's death.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: So police searched the O'Brien home.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: They found scissors with lavender-colored plastic residue on the blades, as well as a knife with waxy and plastic material and tiny clear crystals containing sugar.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: Ronald was drowning in debt.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: He had recently insured his children.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: He was telling people that money was coming.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: And then his son died.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Before he was even buried, Ronald called about the insurance money the next morning.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: He had been trying to obtain cyanide.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: He had asked about fatal doses and detecting it in the human body.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: His story about the Dark House did not hold up.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: And he had personally handed out every poisoned pixie sticks.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: This is painting a very clear picture for me, y'all.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Investigators now believed Ronald had taken one of America's existing Halloween fears and turned it into a real life murder plot.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Timothy was the target, but his death needed to look random.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: So Ronald poisoned five pixie sticks and distributed them among children from three different families.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: If more than one child received the same poison candy, it looked like a madman was targeting random trick-or-treaters, not a father targeting his own son.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Ronald didn't look like the kind of man parents would warn their children about.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: He looked like exactly the kind of adult they would trust.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: And now police believed Ronald had used that to his advantage.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: He handed poison candy to five unsuspecting children, including both of his own.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: And Ronald apparently considered the lives of those other children an acceptable risk.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he stopped one of the Bates children from opening his while he was standing there, but those children were eventually going home.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Ronald couldn't possibly know what would happen after that.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: Well he obviously just stopped that kid so that that kid didn't die first and then his kid not eat the candy.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: Right.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't have controlled what happened after they went home with that candy.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: And every single one of those pixie sticks contained enough cyanide to kill.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: So whatever his intentions were beyond Timothy, he knowingly put four other children's lives in danger simply to make his son's murder look random.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: That is unfathomable evil, y'all.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: The Dark House story supplied the imaginary killer.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: The additional poison pixie sticks made it look like Timothy was only one of several potential victims, and for a little while it worked.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Police went looking for the monster behind the darkened doorway.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: They even arrested an innocent man.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, Ronald's plan backfired because the other four children survived, and instead of creating a convincing trail away from himself, Ronald had created four additional pieces of evidence pointing straight back at him.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: On November 5th, 1974, just five days after Timothy died, Ronald Clark O'Brien was arrested for his son's murder.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: The story that had terrified the community had completely changed.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: There was no evidence of a mysterious stranger in Pasadena handing out poison candy to children.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: The mysterious man behind the darkened doorway never existed.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: Police believe the poison candy had been carried through the neighborhood by Timothy's own father.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: Ronald, of course, denied everything, and he would continue denying it for the rest of his life.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: Ronald went on trial for capital murder in May 1975.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: The prosecution's case was largely circumstantial.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had watched Ronald put cyanide into the pixie sticks.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: Investigators never determined exactly where he obtained the poison, and the material found on the scissors and knife couldn't be conclusively matched to the candy.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: But taken together, the evidence was incredibly difficult to explain away.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: The jury heard the entire chain of evidence investigators had uncovered.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: Ronald's desperate financial situation and the life insurance policies, his multiple attempts to obtain cyanide, the false story about the Dark House, the four other poisoned pixie sticks, and Danine's testimony that Ronald, not Timothy, had pushed the pixie sticks as his bedtime treat.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: Still, Ronald took the stand and denied killing his son, but the jury did not believe him for a second.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: They deliberated for only 46 minutes.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: Wow, I thought an hour was the minimum.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: Apparently not in 1975 in Texas.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Ronald Clark O'Brien was found guilty of capital murder, and the punishment phase didn't take much longer.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: After a little over an hour of deliberation, the jury returned the findings that resulted in a death sentence.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Ronald O'Brien was going to death row.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: By then, Ronald had done more than destroy his own family.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: Timothy's murder terrified the Houston area.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: Then that fear spread across the country, because for a brief period, the story seemed to confirm something parents had been afraid of for years, that a stranger might poison their child's Halloween candy.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Parents became even more cautious after this.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Wrappers were inspected, suspicious or homemade treats were thrown away, and some hospitals even offered to x-ray candy for foreign objects.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: The effect was especially intense around Houston.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: People who lived through it remembered Halloween changing, with a lot of neighborhoods noticeably quieter the following year.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: And Ronald eventually gained another nickname, the man who killed Halloween.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: Ronald spent nearly nine years on death row.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Through his appeals, he continued insisting that he was innocent.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Danine had no such doubts.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: She spoke about Timothy as a sweet, sensitive little boy who, and this is so heartbreaking, loved his dad more than anything in the world.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Ronald's execution was eventually scheduled for March 31, 1984.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: Crowds gathered outside the Huntsville prison where he was housed.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: Shortly after midnight, Ronald was strapped to a gurney.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: In his final written statement, he continued to maintain his innocence.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: He said his execution was wrong.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: He asked forgiveness from anyone he had offended and said he forgave the people involved in putting him to death, but he never confessed to killing Timothy.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: At 12 48 a.m., Ronald Clark O'Brien was pronounced dead.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: He was 39 years old.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: When word reached the crowd outside the prison, people cheered, and some even yelled, trick or treat.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: Danine's reaction was much shorter.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: She simply said, It's over.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: And this poor woman, I cannot even imagine losing a child in any way, let alone like this, and then having to come to terms with the fact that that monster was the man you married and trusted.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: And made that child with.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: And years later, she also revealed something that makes her story even more chilling.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Before Timothy's murder, Ronald had actually arranged for Danine to meet with an insurance agent about taking out a life insurance policy on her.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: The policy never happened because they couldn't afford the premiums.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: But after everything that happened to Timothy, it's horrifying to think that Danine may have narrowly escaped becoming another victim herself.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: And in the years after Timothy's murder, Danine did her best to rebuild a life for herself and her daughter Elizabeth.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: She filed for divorce and she did eventually remarry.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Her new husband adopted Elizabeth, and by the time she was 15, she reportedly considered her adoptive father her dad, and Ronald was just her biological father.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: That takes some guts there for that lady to remarry.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: No doubt.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of trust issues.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: I would never trust anybody again.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: Hell no.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: So Danine had largely stayed out of the public eye during those years, trying to protect her daughter and move forward with their lives.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: But she said there would always be a void left by Timothy.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And there was one thing she wanted absolutely nothing to do with Timothy's life insurance money.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Danine never collected it.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: She called it blood money.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: The money Ronald had murdered their son to get was still there, and Timothy's mother never touched it.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: And I have one final bizarre and creepy detail before we close this one out.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: It gets worse?
32:51
SPEAKER_00: It gets worse.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: Ronald had wheeled his eyes to medical research.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: After his execution, both eyes were removed and studied to determine whether the lethal injection drugs had damaged them.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: If the corneas were still viable, they were supposed to be donated for transplant.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't find if they'd ever actually been transplanted onto another person or not.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: But just the thought of that gives me the chills.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, imagine not just having the eyes of a murderer, but the eyes that had seen and planned the murder of their own eight-year-old son.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: I'll stay blind, thank you.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like someone could theoretically be walking around with those eyes today, chilling.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: So today, more than 50 years later, there's still a little piece of Ronald O'Brien's unthinkable crime woven into Halloween.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Every year, parents still tell their kids not to eat any candy until they get home.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: It's a Halloween ritual.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: Candy buckets and bags get dumped onto the kitchen table, and anything that looks even a little suspicious is immediately thrown away.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: Most people doing that today probably have no idea who Timothy O'Brien was.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: They don't know that behind one of Halloween's oldest fears was a real eight-year-old boy.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: He was excited to spend Halloween with his father and his sister dressed as a character from Planet of the Apes.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: And he should have gotten to wake up the next morning and start working his way through that giant bag of candy.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: He should have gotten another Halloween the next year and another one after that.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: He should have gotten to grow up.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: Instead, Ronald O'Brien, his own father, took all of that away from him.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: Rest in peace, Timothy.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: And that is the real life story of the candy man.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: Final thoughts?
34:41
SPEAKER_01: So what gets me is parents are dumping out the Halloween candy on the kid's table to protect their children from strangers possibly contaminating the stash.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: Because the parents are supposed to be the ones protecting them.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: When it's the parent who's contaminating the Halloween candy, the kid has no vote.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Right.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: It's just it's a sick, sick irony that this happened.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: And there has never been a documented case, aside from this one, of a child dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: There's one documented case of a dentist putting laxatives in candy.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: So a bunch of kids got sick, which is horrible.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, don't ever do that.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, this is the only documented case, and it wasn't a stranger, it was his own father.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: Just horrific.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: And y'all, I don't want to ruin the holiday.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: So before we end today's episode, I want to leave you with this.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: Despite decades of stories about strangers deliberately poisoning Halloween candy and handing it out to random children, again, this is the only documented case.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: His poison Halloween candy did not come from a stranger, it came from his own father.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: So obviously, do the normal safety checks tomorrow and only get candy from trusted sources, but don't let an urban legend take the magic out of Halloween.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: Alright, y'all.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: Hope you enjoyed this uh episode.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: Have a happy and safe Halloween, and until next time, be David.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Not deadly