Latest / Dead Serious / The Candyman: Ronald Clark O'Bryan

Transcript

The Candyman: Ronald Clark O'Bryan · Dead Serious

0:04
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dead Serious, a true crime podcast.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ames Murray.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: This podcast contains mature themes.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Your discretion is advised.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, and welcome back to Dead Serious.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Ames Murray.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Here we are in mid-October already.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: It's spooky month.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Halloween is this weekend, which means every grocery store is selling bags of fun-size candy.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And every parent you know is about to inspect those bags like they worked for the bomb squad.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Check the wrappers, toss anything homemade.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Some hospitals will even x-ray it for you.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: Today we are talking about the man who made that ritual feel necessary, Ronald Clark O'Brien, known in the papers as the candyman, and sometimes as the man who killed Halloween.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: This is a story about a church deacon, a stack of life insurance policies, five poisoned pixie sticks, and a lie so convenient that America is still telling it 50 years later.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: Ronald Clark O'Brien was born on October 19, 1944.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: By 1974, he was 30 years old and living in Deer Park, Texas, a suburb east of Houston with his wife Denine and their two children, Timothy, born April 5th, 1966, and Elizabeth, born in 1969.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: On paper, Ronald looked like the dad every neighborhood wants.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: He was a deacon at Second Baptist Church.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: He sang in the choir, he ran a local bus program for the church.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: The man was quite literally driving the youth group around.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: He worked as an optician at Texas State Optical in the Sharpstown area of Houston, which, you know, stownstable.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: It was not.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: In the 10 years before Halloween 1974, Ronald O'Brien held 21 different jobs.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: 21, that is a new job roughly every six months.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: And at the time of his arrest, he was suspected of stealing from Texas State Optical and was reportedly close to being fired.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: His finances were worse.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: He was more than$100,000 in debt, which is roughly$650,000 today.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: He had defaulted on several bank loans.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: His car was about to be repossessed.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: The family home had been foreclosed on.
2:33
SPEAKER_01: So here is a man drowning in debt, about to lose his job, his car, and his house.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: Most people in that situation call a bankruptcy lawyer.
2:42
SPEAKER_01: Ronald O'Brien called an insurance agent.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: On Thursday, October 31st, 1974, Ronald took Timothy and Elizabeth trick-or-treating in a neighborhood in nearby Pasadena, Texas.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: A neighbor came along with his own two children.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: It was raining slightly and getting late, so the group kept it short and stuck to two streets.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: At one house, nobody answered the door.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: The kids got impatient and ran ahead to the next house.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Ronald stayed behind.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: When he caught up, he had a surprise.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: Five giant pixie sticks, each about 21 inches long.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: He said the people at the dark house had answered after all.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: At the end of the night, he handed them out.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: One each to his neighbor's two children, one to Timothy, and one to Elizabeth.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: Back home, he gave the fifth to a ten-year-old boy he recognized from church.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: Remember that.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: He did not just poison his son.
3:41
SPEAKER_01: He poisoned four other children so that it would look random.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: Before bed, Timothy asked for one piece of candy.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: According to his father, Timothy picked the pixie sticks himself.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: The powder would not come out, so Ronald helped loosen it.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: Timothy said it tasted bitter.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: Ronald gave him Kool-Aid.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: Drink the Kool-Aid.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: Ronald told reporters a few days later that seconds after he left the room, he heard Timothy cry out that his stomach hurt.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: He found him in the bathroom, convulsing and gasping.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: Ronald later claimed Timothy went limp in his arms.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Timothy died on the way to the hospital less than an hour after eating the candy.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: He was just eight years old.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Now, about those other four pixie sticks.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: Police tracked all of them down.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: None had been eaten.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: But the parents of the boy from church could not find his.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: They ran upstairs and found him asleep in bed, still holding it.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: He had not been able to get the staples open.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: That is how close this came to being five dead children instead of one.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: The news spread fast.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: And so did the panic.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: Parents across Deer Park and Pasadena brought their children's candy to the police, convinced a poisoner was loose in the neighborhood.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: At first, police had no reason to suspect a grieving father.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: Then the autopsy came back.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: Timothy's pixie sticks had been laced with potassium cyanide.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: When investigators examined all five, each had been open, the top two inches refilled with cyanide powder, and the end resealed with a staple.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: A pathologist later testified that Timothy's straw held enough poison to kill two adults.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: The other four held enough to kill three or four adults each.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: So the question became which house gave out the candy?
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Ronald said he could not remember, which is odd because it had been raining and the group had only visited two streets.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: Police also could not find a single house on either street that had handed out pixie sticks.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: Officers walked the neighborhood with Ronald three separate times.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: Finally, he pointed to the house where no one had answered.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: He said the lights stayed off, the door cracked open, and someone handed him five pixie sticks.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: All he saw was an arm.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: A hairy arm.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: That is the description.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: Not a face, not a voice, a hairy arm.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: The house belonged to a man named Courtney Melvin, an air traffic controller at Houston's Hobby Airport.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: On Halloween night, Melvin did not get home from work until 11 p.m.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: More than 200 people could confirm he was at work, probably the best alibi in Texas history.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: With the mystery neighbor ruled out, police looked closer at the father, and the picture changed quickly.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: They found the debt, they found the job history, and they found the life insurance.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: In January 1974, Ronald had taken out policies on both children.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: About a month before Halloween, he added more over the objections of his insurance agency.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: And in the days just before Halloween, he added still more.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: Newspapers at the time of his arrest report a policy on Timothy taken out just five days before Halloween.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: His wife, Denine, said she knew nothing about any of it.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: And the morning after Timothy died, Ronald called the insurance company to ask how to collect.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Police also learned that shortly before Halloween, Ronald had visited a chemical supply company in Houston asking about cyanide.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: He left without buying any after learning the smallest amount sold was five pounds.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: On November 5th, 1974, five days after his son's death, Ronald Clark O'Brien was charged with murder.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: According to a source close to the investigation, the charge came after he took a lie detector test and after police found that last-minute policy.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: He was held on a$100,000 bond.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: And here's what makes it worse.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: Just days earlier, before his arrest, Ronald had sat for a newspaper interview and sobbed.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: He said Timothy loved football and basketball, never had an enemy, and never met a stranger.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: He wasn't right about that last part.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: The person who killed Timothy was not a stranger at all.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: O'Brien was indicted on one count of capital murder for Timothy and four counts of attempted murder, one each for each of the children.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: He pleaded not guilty to all of it.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: The trial opened in Houston on May 5th, 1975, and the prosecution's case was mostly people saying in various ways, Ron asked me about cyanide.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: A chemist who knew O'Brien testified that in the summer of 1973, more than a year before Halloween, Ronald asked about cyanide and how much it would take to be fatal.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: A chemical supply salesman testified that O'Brien asked how to buy cyanide.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: Friends and coworkers said that in the months before Timothy's death, he showed an unusual interest in cyanide and how much it would take to kill a person.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: Then came the family.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: O'Brien's sister-in-law and brother-in-law testified that on the day of Timothy's funeral, Ronald talked about how he would spend the insurance money, a long vacation and other purchases on the day of his son's funeral.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: And then Denine took the stand.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: Remember Ronald's story that Timothy begged for a tree and picked the pixie sticks himself?
9:31
SPEAKER_01: Danine said that was not true.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: She testified that Ronald made Timothy choose the pixie sticks.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: So what was the defense?
9:40
SPEAKER_01: Basically, the hairy arm.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: The defense leaned on the old Halloween legend of the stranger who poisons candy or hides razor blades and apples.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: Somebody out there, they argue, did this, not Rod.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: The jury did not need long.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: On June 3, 1975, after 46 minutes of deliberation, they found Ronald Clark O'Brien guilty of capital murder and all four counts of attempted murder.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: It took them 71 minutes to sentence him to death.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: The press had a name for him by then, The Candyman.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: Shortly after the verdict, Denine filed for divorce.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: She later remarried and her new husband adopted Elizabeth.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: O'Brien went to death row at the Ellis Unit near Huntsville.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: And here is a fun fact about death row.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: There is a hierarchy, and a man who poisoned his own child sits at the very bottom of it.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: We all know that.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: According to the Reverend Carol Pickett, a former prison chaplain, O'Brien was shunned by the other inmates and was, in Pickett's words, absolutely friendless.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: The inmates reportedly even asked permission to hold a demonstration on his execution date to show how much they hated him.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: When the men on death row are organizing a protest against you, you have done something special.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: The AP reported that his fellow inmates called him the Candyman, the same name the press had given him at trial.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: Then came the appeals and the stays.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: His first execution date, August 8, 1980, was stayed.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: A second date, May 25th, 1982, was postponed.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: For the third date, Judge Michael McSpadden chose October 31, 1982, the eighth anniversary of Timothy's death.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: McSpadden reportedly offered to drive O'Brien to the death chamber himself.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: It would have been the first lethal injection in Texas history.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: The U.S.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Supreme Court stepped in and delayed it so O'Brien could pursue another appeal.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: The fourth date was set for March 31, 1984.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: That last week was a flurry of final attempts.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: On Monday, March 26, 1984, the U.S.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Supreme Court refused, with two justices dissenting to let O'Brien file an appeal seeking a new trial.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: His argument was about jury selection.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: Three potential jurors had been excluded from his 1975 trial after expressing only general reservations about the death penalty.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: That same day, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 6 to 0 to hold a hearing on his request for a 90-day reprieve.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: His attorney, Charlotte Harris, wanted the delay so the Supreme Court could clarify the jury issue.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: State prosecutors called the appeal meritless, pointing out that he had already lost on that same argument twice before.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: His lawyers tried one more angle, that lethal ejection itself was cruel and unusual punishment.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: On March 28th, a federal judge rejected that too.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: On Friday, March 30th, the day before the execution, his ex-wife Denine spoke to the Houston Chronicle.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: She said he had made his bed and now he had to lie in it.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: She had no pity for him.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: Shortly after midnight, on Saturday, March 31, 1984, Ronald Clark O'Brien was taken into the death chamber at the Huntsville unit.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: His last meal was a team bone steak cooked medium to well, French fries with ketchup, corn, sweet peas, a lettuce and tomato salad with egg and French dressing, iced tea, salt teens, rolls, and Boston cream pie.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: A full spread for a man who had nine years to think about what he did.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: He chose his own clothes.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: Dark trousers, a khaki shirt, and running shoes.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: He had asked to wear his glasses.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: They were missing.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: The optician went to his death without his glasses.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: As twenty four witnesses filed in, O'Brien turned and looked at them, winking or nodding at the people he recognized.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: Warden Jack Pursley asked if he had any last words.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: He spoke for about two minutes.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: He said the execution was wrong, but that people make mistakes, and that one wrong did not mean the whole justice system was wrong.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: He said he forgave everyone involved in his death.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: He asked forgiveness from anyone he had offended in all his 39 years, and asked God's forgiveness for all of us.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: He closed with, God bless you all.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: So to recap, on his way out, the man who poisoned five children forgave the state of Texas.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: How generous of him.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: And to the very end, he insisted he was innocent.
14:40
SPEAKER_01: The AP reporter in the room described what happened next.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: O'Brien yawned, his chest heaved, and he gasped as the drugs took effect.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: He was pronounced dead at 12 48 a.m., about 10 minutes after the drugs began.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: He was the third person executed by lethal injection in Texas, and the second that month following James David Autry on March 14th.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: Outside the prison, a crowd of nearly 300 people had gathered, most of them young.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: When the witnesses came out, they cheered.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: Some yelled trick-or-treat, others threw candy at the anti-death penalty protesters who had also come.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: Not everyone celebrated.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: The Reverend Ron Cloudier, a Harris County jail chaplain who had met O'Brien and watched him die, told the AP that society had figured out how to recycle beer cans, but not human beings.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: Ronald O'Brien is buried at Forest Park East Cemetery in Webster, Texas.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: Timothy is buried at Forest Lake Lawndale Cemetery in Houston.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: Here is the twist that I think most matters in the whole story.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: O'Brien's entire plan depended on a myth.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: The stranger who poisons Halloween candy.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: He was counting on everyone believing in the hairy arm.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: And for a few days in November 1974, everyone did.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: So is that stranger real?
16:06
SPEAKER_01: Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, has spent decades studying reports of Halloween tampering going back to the 1950s.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: His conclusion, as reported by the St.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: Petersburg Times, poison candy from strangers is a myth.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: He could not find a single confirmed case, not one razor blade in an apple.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: Best found that these scares spiked during times of national stress.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: In 1970 and 1971, there were 10 and 14 reports, all of them false, and he tied them to fears about hippies handing out LSD to kids.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: The cases that did involve real deaths always had another explanation.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: In 1970, a five-year-old in Detroit died after eating heroin.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: It was first blamed on his Halloween candy.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: It actually came from his uncle's supply.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: And the scares kept coming.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: After seven people died from poison Tylenol in the Chicago area in September 1982, trigger treating in Florida's Tampa Bay area nearly shut down that year.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: After the anthrax attacks in 2001, parents steered clear of anything powdered.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: So think about where that leaves Ronald O'Brien.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: The best known case of Halloween candy poisoning in America history is regularly cited as proof that the danger is real.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: And it was real, just not the way people think.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: The threat was never the dark house down the street, it was the man walking the kids home in the rain.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: Every October, when parents dump the candy on the kitchen table and inspect every wrapper, they are guarding against a stranger who has never been shown to exist.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: In a way, that is O'Brien's legacy.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: He did not just kill his son.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: He hid behind a monster that never existed.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: And 50 years later, we are still checking for it.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Timothy O'Brien was just eight years old.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: He loved football and basketball.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: He went trick-or-treating in the rain with his little sister, and he asked for one piece of candy before bed.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: He deserved a father who would have taken a bankruptcy over a life insurance check.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: He did not get one.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: So this Halloween, go ahead and check the candy if it makes you feel better.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: Maybe also remember Timothy.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Not as a cautionary tale about strangers, but as a boy whose story deserves to be told accurately.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: That's it for today's episode of Dead Serious.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: You can find me on socials at dead underscore serious pod.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: Please rate and review wherever you listen.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: And thank you for the support.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: Until next time, stay safe, stay sharp, and stay serious.