Latest / Outlaw's Digest / A Spoonful of Sugar - Halloween Candy Poisoning

Transcript

A Spoonful of Sugar - Halloween Candy Poisoning · Outlaw's Digest

• Just a heads up: today’s episode discusses harm done to kids. It was hard to research, and hard to write. For some people I know it will also be hard to hear. Please take care in deciding when and where to listen. COLD OPEN: KILLER PIXIE STIX Best:  the point of Halloween is that Halloween's supposed to be scary. That’s Joel Best. He’s retired now, but most recently he was a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. For decades, Dr. Best focused his research on what scares us about Halloween. In particular, what scares us about Halloween candy. Best: 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. Most people don't. And so they aren't scary. In fact, they're kind of fun and funny, Best:  if I tell you that you really wanna check your treat for goblins it's not gonna get much of a reaction. KC: Yeah, I'm gonna let the kid eat the candy or I'll eat it myself after they've gone to bed. When I was a kid, sure, the witches and skeletons and spooky stuff were definitely scary. But you grow out of that at some point. Once you live through enough Halloweens, the glowing eyes and fog machines and green colored witches are less killer and more kitsch, right? It’s like… blah blah blah this is just the aesthetics of consumerism. Pumpkins with sharp teeth are filling up the grocery story in August. Here we go again. But… then I hit another point in my life when Halloween became scary again. I outgrew my phase of not being afraid. Only this time, it was for a whole different reason. It was basically… when I had kids. You know, as Dr. Best says: Best:  we don't believe in witches and goblins anymore… but what we do believe in is we believe in criminals. It’s Halloween night, 1974. We’re in a Houston suburb: Pasadena, Texas. About a hundred miles from where I grew up. Two dads are out with their kids trick or treating. There’s Houston area optician Ronald O’Bryan, 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 thunder storms 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 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 Pixy Stix. A twenty-one inch tube of pure sugar. As Ronald handed out the candy, he turned to Jim and said, “wow, you must have some rich neighbors!” 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 Pixy 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 Pixy stick… had been poisoned with cyanide. INTRO Welcome to Outlaw's Digest, the podcast telling stories from criminally delicious food history. I’m KC Hysmith. Today, a look at “Halloween sadism,” and the death of Timmy O’Bryan in 1974 that sent a shock through parents nationwide. Candy was already suspect, and Pixy Stix 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 Pixy Stix 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 Outlaw’s Digest episode 3: A Spoonful of Sugar ACT I: RIP IT AND TIP IT So Pixy Stix. 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 for K through Two, and they had a snack stand we could buy things from in the afternoon. We always bought giant Pixy Stix 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. So what’s the story behind all that? Let’s go back to the beginning. 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 Maid. Now… they were a few years late. Kool Aid had been developed in 1927, which had John Fish Smith and his business partner swimming in their grape-flavored wake. It was tough 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 Cool Maid. Probably a good choice. His first stab at a rebrand landed him with the new label Frutola. Nice, right? That 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 Fruzola. There are hilarious advertisements from the Utah papers in the 1930s and 40s that read: Drink FRUZOLA! THE BETTER ADE. More drinks per package! Stronger powder! More for your money! DELICIOUS FLAVORS. Refreshing, cool. Serve with meals and picnics! The perfect drink: FRUZOLA. Huh, the better ade. That kinda sounds like sour grapes, to me. Well, with the Great Depression in full swing, John started selling Fruzola in smaller and smaller packets. The smallest was a tiny bag John called Fruzola Junior that was enough powder to mix up one quart of Fruzola. At first, he didn’t sell many of those. Then, World War Two hit. For some reason, orders for Fruzola Junior started to flood in. John set out to investigate. He found that the wartime sugar rationing meant other candy manufacturers had stopped making penny candy. Salt Lake City candy counters were running low. So in some stores, Fruzola Junior 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 Fruzola 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. 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 Lik-M-Aid, 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, John’s son Menlo writes that in 1948, candy sales in the US passed one billion dollars for the first time. But John, and now Menlo, were only getting a small taste of that sweet explosion. Shop owners who still saw Lik-M-Aid as a drink mix were only willing to stock it in the summer. That was a problem Menlo set out to solve. He ditched the Kool Aid knockoff title of Lik-M-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 Pixy Stick was born. By then, Menlo had moved the Fruzola company to St. Louis, renamed it Sunline, and was crushing the candy game like no one else. What did they make beyond Pixy Stix and Fun Dip? Sprees. SweeTarts. Eventually: NERDS. All my favorites! In fact, SweeTarts started out as Pixy Stix sugar pressed into pills at an antacid factory in downtown St. Louis. Yeah, John and Menlo 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, etcetera! Eventually, Quaker didn’t care to hold onto the candy line, so Menlo took it. It’s almost too on the nose, but it’s true: John and Menlo were kinda their own Willy Wonka dynasty. Only the handoff was a little simpler, going father to son. No child-endangering sweepstakes required. So, obviously, kids were loving Pixy Stix from the beginning. But alongside them, were adults tut tutting about all that sugar. A couple years after they were released, one paper in Virginia described Pixy Stix as the newest menace threatening the school children. The paper straws were littering the halls. Kids were selling them at crazy prices to other students. It’s one of those half silly half serious articles where it reads like the humor is a thin veil over real adult anxieties. If the Newport News Daily Press can be believed, Pixy Stix were causing real mayhem. Now, there’s a much longer history of adults being worried about kids eating candy. Which is why we had to talk to the ultimate expert on fears about candy. As Dr. Best says… Best:  there's food that is morally suspect, all right? And, 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, 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 little guilty pleasures. As Pixy Stix 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. Best: 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 then. Remember, this was the age when teens and twenties 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. Best: this is when the student protests start. This is when people are worrying about hippies, okay? And hippies are enormously threatening to people. KC: They Best: they're, they are, they're very frightening. KC: scary Best: So worrying about children who are in danger, uh, you know, is always there, but it really begins to have a moment, uh, in the 1970s. 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 Lik-M-Aid and Pixy Stix, as an American cultural institution. Best: Trick-or-treating is really not 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, their neighbors' houses and and knocking over outhouses and things like that. 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. Best: the idea was we're going to, we're going to regulate this. We're gonna have it on a particular night. Kids are gonna be in costume. They can go around and say trick-or-treat and, and so on and so forth. 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. Best: 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. 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? Homemade goodies and communal treats be gone! 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’Bryan. Because his poison… was in a Pixy Stick. If that was true, then nothing was safe. The candy had killed him. ACT II: An Arm in the Doorway In 1974, my dad was in the sixth grade. And that Halloween, he was trick-or-treating right outside of Houston. So… I called him up to see what he remembered about that year. KC: Right. Hi, Dad. Larry: hang on just a second. KC: What's going on? Larry: Power and battery. Energy saver is on. Jiminy! KC: Oh, no. [Giggles] Of course I had to ask him what we was for Halloween. Larry: um, gosh, I know I was a pirate. I love pirates. And, I actually made a hook with a, with a, uh, hanger one time. KC: Creepy! Larry: You know, took, took a, uh, coat hanger, clothes hanger, a wire one, and made a hook, which turned out pretty cool. And, uh, of course, you know, you can always make your own swords and that sort of thing. Trick or treating for him sounds a little different than what I do with my kids today. Larry:  as a kid, we pretty much had free rein anyway. This was back in the early '70s. And, um, we had new bikes and with banana seats and, and, and, uh, s- uh, 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. When the family heard about Timmy’s death on the news, it shook my grandparents. Larry:   we heard about it on the news 'cause we did get one or two channels down there. It was close. It was in Pasadena, and, um, that was, 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.   My dad remembers that it kinda shook him, too. Larry: she, uh, had to tell us all about it and, and scare the bejesus out of us. And, and of course, you know, it did everybody because it was, it was a pretty scary situation it never even entered my mind that somebody would do something like that. And, um, it really made us mad because there was always lots of good homemade treats like, um, like caramel, uh, popcorn balls and candy apples and, uh, sometimes cupcakes and cookies and things like that, that, you know, these, these old ladies in the neighborhood, you know, made and handed out and they were just fine and whatnot, but, but we weren't allowed to have them. And so it, it ruined a lot of that kinda down home thing. So, the news of Timmy’s death scared the bejesus out of the Houston area within a day. By day 2, it was national news. Best: And the police assume, "Oh, yeah, we've heard about this.” That’s Dr. Joel Best again. Best: “They put out an announcement to everybody, "Hey, uh, there's poison candy out there. Don't let your kids eat their candy. Check their candy." 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 the poisoned 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. The police also went to work. When they were told that Timmy had been poisoned by a Pixy stick, they joined neighbors in canvassing the neighborhood. The county prosecutor told reporters that at one house, the parents had remembered their son getting a giant Pixy stick. They wanted to turn it over to the cops but when they searched his candy haul, 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. By Saturday, November 2, the police had collected four more Pixy Stix 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 Pixy Stix that were poisoned. To the eye, the cyanide inside perfectly resembled the actual ingredients of Pixy Stix: a white powdered mix of the sugar dextrose, maltodextrin, citric acid, and flavoring. The county medical examiner ran lab tests. He said the top two inches of each Pixy stick were packed with cyanide. An incredibly lethal dose. 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 handed him the Pixy Stix. All he had seen, Ronald said, was an arm—holding the candy out from a dark doorway. 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. Best: And then, they had some interesting revelations. Um, they discovered that that Ronald O'Bryan had taken out a $20,000 life insurance policy on his son a few weeks before, and somehow they had some record of him buying cyanide. ACT III: Daytime Candy On November 4, the Pasadena police called Ronald O’Bryan and his wife Daynene to come down to the police station. There, they took the two grieving parents to separate rooms. When detectives told Daynene 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. 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. The prosecutor said that by the end of the interview, Daynene begged the police not to let Ronald walk out of the station. She knew he was dangerous. 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 Pixy Stix 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. Reporter:  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. 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 Pixy Stix with poison. Reporter:   Bates said O'Brien went to one house where no one appeared to be home, Remember, that’s the point that Ronald had stayed behind. Then… Reporter: After the children had scampered ahead to the next house. O'Bryan came off the front porch carrying the Pixy Stix. He gave the Pixy Stix 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 Pixy Stix to the children. Jim’s wife Liliian Bates remembered that after they had all filed inside, Ronald gathered the kids at the couch and handed out the Pixy Stix, one to each child. The fifth he handed to a boy who rang the doorbell just as Ronald was leading his kids 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 swept the floor, when her eight-year-old asked if he could eat his Giant Pixy Stick. She told him no. She had just finished cleaning. That Pixy Stick was going to be a mess. It was a daytime candy, she said. 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 Pixy Stick itself—the twenty one inch tube of sugar and the mess it would make—is the thing that actually saved her son’s life. 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 Daynene testified. She said she hadn’t known about the life insurance policies he took out on both of their kids. But 9 AM the day after Halloween, with Timmy only a few hours dead, Ronald had called the insurance company to try to collect. 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. The defense tried to convince the jury: the Pixy Stix 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. 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. Best: He must have thought that this was going to commit the 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. 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, After ten years of appealing his case, Ronald O’Bryan was executed in 1984. Best:  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. 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. Best: When people ask me " Is it dangerous to-- 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?" They're saying, "Do I have to worry about the maniac down the street?" And my attitude is, "No, you don't." Being suspicious of the candy kids accept 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: Larry:  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. 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. 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 candyman” 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.” The truth is: despite how horrifying Timmy O’Bryan’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 Pixy Stix 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… Best:  Halloween is absolutely dangerous.  it leads all the other holidays in emergency, uh, room admissions, okay? It’s just not because of the candy. Best:  why is it dangerous? It's dangerous because it's the one night of the year, 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. 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 spirits 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. INTERVIEW: Joel Best on Halloween Sadism Thanks for joining us on a look into the candy panics that rise every Halloween, and the real death that drove them forward, even if it shouldn’t have. 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. I thought his answer was really insightful, so I’m glad to share it here. Here’s more from Dr. Best… Best: The key, uh, issue here is whether bad things have happened in September, okay? And you know, the, uh, God, what is it? 1982, I think is the year of the Tylenol poisonings. People who were, uh, killed with poison Tylenol, that occurred in September. And, uh, as Halloween approached, there was a kind of drumbeat of, uh, concern that, uh, y- you really need to check the kids' treats this year because there'd been product tampering and,Tylenol. And, interestingly, uh, that's the only time I made a buck on this. The, uh, 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 'cause I, I do that anyway, you know. And, but they, they gave me 500 bucks and, and nobody called me. But they, 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, if it was, it was candy that they tampered with. And they, they went through and tried to track down, uh, all of the cases, and there were like 100 of them, close to 100. And whenever people try and do this, they discover that, uh, these are almost all hoaxes. The kids do it. Um, 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 every... You get the concerned attention of adults and, and so on and so forth. Um, other examples of this, in 2001. Uh, KC: I was about to ask Best: 9/11, you get stories about, uh, kids getting t- uh, terrorist messages in their cupcakes, you know, 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, uh, that was going around, uh, right after, uh, 9/11, that there was a woman who had an Afghani boyfriend, which of course is very common, and, and, um, 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 h- have to leave you like this. Uh, just make me two promises don't go outside on September 11th, and don't go to the mall on Halloween. Ooh. You know? KC: Yeah, as someone born in September I take great offense to, to that being the, the precursor to the, the Halloween scaries. Join us on the Outlaw’s Digest patreon to hear the full interview with Dr. Joel Best on what makes legends of Halloween sadism a little like a vampire, why he finds the memoirs of criminals boring, and why we get so scared of strangers when, as they say, the call is coming from inside the house. You’ll also get the aftershow where I go behind the scenes with the production team for a second helping of the history around Halloween candy panic, Timmy O’Bryan’s story, and Dr. Best’s ongoing research: this episode’s digestif. That’s all at outlaws digest dot com. And of course, as always, you can follow Outlaw’s Digest on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CREDITS Outlaw’s Digest is a production of Good Egg Audio, an independent worker cooperative, and me, KC Hysmith. 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 Nicki Stein, Gemma Castelli-Foley, and me. Carl Nellis is managing producer of Outlaw’s Digest. Mixing, mastering, and sound design by Nick Dooley. Original music by Rebecca Ryskalczyk. Show art by Andreea Dumuta. My personal thanks to my kids for not making midnight mocktail margaritas while I recorded this. and to Maggie Cooper from Aevitas Creative. And thanks to all of you for listening.