EP. 37 TEXAS - The Poisoned Pixy Stix: The Halloween Murder of 8-Year-Old Timothy O’Bryan
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murder, and offenses against children. This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned. Halloween is undoubtedly one of the best days of the year, especially when you're a little kid. You and your friends are dressing up as princesses, witches, ghosts. You've been planning out your costume for weeks.

And on the 31st of October, every year, the big day is finally here. Once night falls, you and your friends spend hours running around the neighborhood, knocking on strangers' doors, asking for candy. By the end of the night, you and your friends compare Halloween baskets, seeing who got the most candy. But the fun doesn't end there.

After trick-or-treating is over, you get to come home, empty your candy out on the floor, and eat as much as you can before bedtime. This is exactly what happened in our case for today with a little boy named Timothy O'Brien. But instead of eating his candy and peacefully falling asleep after a night of fun, Timothy starts to vomit. He starts to convulse.

His dad knew that something was wrong and he called the police, but unfortunately, Timothy would never make it to the hospital alive. He died that Halloween night because there, inside of his Halloween basket, was a treat that had been laced with cyanide. This is the story of the poisoned pixie stick, the Halloween murder of eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien. I'm Courtney Shannon. And I'm Colin Brown. And you're listening to Murder in America.

It's October 31st, 1974 in a suburb of Houston, Texas called Deer Park. Within this town is the Bowling Green subdivision where nearly every house is decorated for Halloween. There are carved pumpkins on the porches, skeletons hanging from doors, and images of creepy witches in the windows. It's the best time of the year. Everyone remembers how exciting Halloween was as a little kid.

This particular Halloween was on a Thursday, and as the school bus drives into the subdivision to drop off the neighborhood kids from school, everyone is eager to run home and get into their Halloween costumes. Dozens of children change into their outfits for the night. Princesses, superheroes, cowboys, they're putting their tiaras on and painting their faces, ready to take on the scary night. But in one house in this neighborhood, there's a real monster. One that doesn't wear a mask or hide under children's beds.

He looks like everyone else, hiding in plain sight. And as night falls upon the suburban neighborhood and children flood the streets, the monster cuts open a pixie stick. He empties a little bit of the powdered sugar out of the long tube and puts a dose of cyanide inside.

Among one of the houses in the neighborhood lives the O'Brien family. There's eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien, who is dressed up in his Planet of the Apes costume, and his five-year-old sister Elizabeth, who is dressed as a princess. The two siblings are very excited for the night because their dad, Ronald, arranged for them to go trick-or-treating with the Bates family, who live in a nice neighborhood in Houston.

Once Timothy and Elizabeth are all dressed, they grab their Halloween baskets and make their way over to Jim Bates' house. Once they arrive, the families eat dinner together, chat for a while, and then the dads, Ronald and Jim, take the kids through the neighborhood for some trick-or-treating. The group goes by several houses that evening.

The dads follow close behind as the kids run door to door filling their bags with the candy of strangers. Along their route they see a house that doesn't have any lights on, which typically means that the family isn't home or they just don't want anyone to come to the door. But wanting to get as much candy as possible, the group decides to try the house anyways. Jim Bates waits back near the street while Ronald and the kids approach the house.

The group waits for a second, but no answer. So the kids call it a loss and move on to the next house. Jim and the children run to the house next door, but Ronald stays back for a few minutes to see if just maybe the family would answer their door. And to everyone's surprise, Ronald comes from around the corner with five huge pixie sticks in hand, saying, quote, you've got rich neighbors. Look what they're handing out, end quote.

The kids were ecstatic. These weren't just normal pixie sticks. They were the 22 inch ones, which is way too much sugar, but I know that I used to love those as a little kid.

When the kids ask Ronald where he got them, he tells them that it was from the house with their lights off. Someone had ended up answering the door after all. The children wanted the pixie sticks right then and there, but Ronald told them that he would give it to them when they got back because they were so large. The group would go on to a few more houses that night, but they ended up going in a little early because it started to rain.

Once back at Jim Bates' house, the kids were dying to get their jumbo pixie sticks, so Ronald handed one to his daughter, Elizabeth, one to his son, Timothy, one to each of Jim's kids, and he had one left over. Before leaving, another neighborhood kid stopped by the Bates' house, and Ronald gave him the last pixie stick.

It was a successful Halloween night, the kids had fun, everyone had plenty of candy, and now it was time to go home and call it a night." When Timothy and Elizabeth got back to their house, they begged their father to let them eat some of their Halloween candy. But Ronald knew that the kids had school the next day and I'm sure he didn't want them up all night, so he made a deal with them.

They could each pick one piece of candy to have before bed. Elizabeth went through her bag and carefully picked out her piece, but for Timothy, that decision was easy. He wanted the jumbo pixie stick. So, he opens it up, puts it to his mouth, tilts his head back expecting a mouthful of sugar, but nothing comes out. The sugar was apparently jammed inside of the tube.

So he brings it to his dad and asks him to help. Ronald grabs the tube, rolls it between his hands, loosening the sugar inside, and hands it back to Timothy. But when Timothy starts to pour the sugar in his mouth, he gets a look on his face. Something about the candy tasted off. Bitter, almost. Timothy tells his dad about the terrible taste, and Ronald runs to the kitchen to grab some Kool-Aid for his son.

Timothy drinks it, washing the bitter taste out of his mouth and goes on with his night. But instead of the sugar high that he expected to feel, Timothy starts getting sick. Almost immediately after consuming the candy, he starts complaining about a stomach ache.

Moments later, he runs to the bathroom and starts to vomit. According to Wikipedia, symptoms of cyanide poisoning include headache, dizziness, fast heart rate, shortness of breath, and vomiting.

Timothy was currently at this stage of poisoning, but just minutes later he would enter into the second stage, which includes seizures, slow heart rate, low blood pressure, loss of consciousness, and cardiac arrest. Timothy's father, Ronald, ran into the bathroom with his son and quickly called 911. But shortly after, Timothy would start convulsing and eventually go limp in his father's arms.

The ambulance would arrive at the O'Brien household shortly after, but there wasn't much they could do. Timothy died on that fateful Halloween night in 1974 at the hands of someone evil. - According to Michael Segolov in his article titled "The True Story of the Notorious Trick-or-Treat Murder," the prosecutor at the time was named Mike Hinton, and he quickly got word about the death of eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien. And something was off about this incident.

Little kids don't randomly die like this. So he placed a call to the medical examiner named Joseph A. Yahymchik. According to Segolov's article, Hinton said, "I told him the situation and he asked what the young man's breath smelled like." When Hinton called the morgue and asked them to smell Timothy's breath, they reported that it smelled like almonds. After hearing this information, the medical examiner was positive that Timothy had been poisoned with cyanide.

and the medical examiner was right. An autopsy would later prove that Timothy had enough cyanide in his system to kill two full-grown adults. This information was troubling to investigators because it meant that someone out there in their own community had set out to kill children on Halloween.

After talking to Ronald O'Brien, investigators discovered that four other children currently possess the same pixie sticks as Timothy. And it was now a race against time to confiscate them so that no other children would be harmed. The authorities called the parents of one child who had a pixie stick and told them to quickly find it because it may have been poisoned.

The parents frantically look through their son's basket and to their horror, it's nowhere to be seen. They run up to their son's bedroom as fast as they can, praying that he's still alive.

And when they open his door, they find him fast asleep with the pixie stick unopened in his hands. Apparently, whoever tampered with the candy poured the cyanide in and then stapled it back shut. The little boy had tried to open it, but he couldn't because of the staple. Luckily, none of the other children had eaten their pixie sticks that night, only Timothy.

News spread quickly about the poisoned Halloween candy and many parents turned their kids' Halloween baskets over to police. If Timothy O'Brien's candy was poisoned, how many other kids had poison in their candy? Investigators inspected many bags checking for cyanide, but the five Pixie Stix seemed to be the only candy that had been tampered with. It later came out that the top two inches of Timothy's Pixie Stix were filled with cyanide.

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Timothy's family was grieving, but investigators needed to take action and find who did this. So they ask Ronald O'Brien where Timothy got the pixie sticks. He tells investigators that they got them from a house in Jim Bates' neighborhood. But when they drive Ronald around the neighborhood asking for him to point out the house, he can't seem to remember where it was.

When investigators asked him what the person looked like, he told them that he never saw their face. They just handed him the pixie sticks and shut the door. The only characteristic that Ronald could recall was that this person had hairy arms. Investigators were not able to get many leads from this and ended up bringing Ronald back home.

His son had just died and he was going through a lot, so investigators decided to give him some space. A few days later though, they would pick up Ronald again for another ride through the neighborhood, and this time he was able to find it. It was the house at 4112 Donnerail Drive. The man who lived there was Courtney Melvin.

Did Melvin have a sinister side? Did he have a motive to murder kids on Halloween? The police weren't so sure. And when they knocked on his door, they discovered that he wasn't home. He was at work as an air traffic controller at the Hobby Airport in Houston. So they headed over to pay him a visit. When they questioned Melvin, he adamantly denies poisoning any candy. In fact, he claims he wasn't even home on Halloween night.

He was there at the airport working a shift. Investigators were able to confirm this alibi and Melvin was quickly dropped from their suspect list. And now investigators can focus on the person who they really suspected all along.

Ronald O'Brien, Timothy's father. All while investigators were running around testing candy, interviewing witnesses, checking alibis, they were also looking into the O'Brien family like they do in any investigation. And what they found definitely made them suspicious. Ronald O'Brien was an optician who had a hard time holding down a job.

In fact, within the last decade, he had been fired from 21 different jobs. And he was on the verge of being fired at his current position because his employer suspected him of stealing.

According to David Scull in Death Makes a Holiday, Ronald was about to get his car repossessed, his home had just been foreclosed on, and he was behind on several bank loans. When investigators looked a little further, they discovered that Ronald was $100,000 in debt.

In today's time with inflation, that equates to around $555,000. But being in debt doesn't make you a murderer.

However, taking life insurance policies out on your children right before they are killed sure does raise some red flags. That's right, investigators found two life insurance policies taken out on both Timothy and Elizabeth on October 3rd by Ronald O'Brien himself.

The policies equaled about $60,000. When investigators looked through Ronald's things, they found a list of all of Ronald's bills added up.

and the total cost of what he owed was almost exactly $60,000. It was suspicious to investigators that Ronald never took life insurance policies out on he or his wife, only his two children. And if that isn't suspicious enough, Ronald called the insurance company the morning after his son passed away.

wanting to claim his payout. For most innocent grieving parents, the insurance money would be the last thing that they're thinking about after the death of their child.

but not for Ronald. Many family members would go on to say that Ronald acted very strange after Timothy's death. He didn't seem to be as sad as everyone thought he would be. Now, we obviously can't judge people on how they grieve, but it is strange that Ronald talked to many people about using the insurance money from Timothy's death to take a nice vacation.

Investigators also found out that in the weeks prior to Halloween, Ronald had been talking to several people around town about cyanide. One person was Ronald's professor at his community college. Witnesses claimed that Ronald had asked the professor a series of strange things like, is cyanide the most lethal of all poisons?

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A Houston Chemical Company employee would later come forward saying that just before Halloween, a man came into their store wanting to buy cyanide. The employee told the man that yes, they did have cyanide, but it was only available to purchase in large quantities. The man ended up leaving the store because he only wanted a small amount.

When investigators asked the employee to identify the man, he couldn't tell whether or not it was Ronald O'Brien. All he could remember was that the man was wearing a blue or beige smock, kind of like doctors would wear. Now, this isn't the best evidence, but it is interesting to note that Ronald was an optician who wore that exact same attire to work every day. Investigators would later bring Ronald's wife, Dainene, in for questioning to see if she knew anything.

or worse, to see if she could have possibly been involved herself. The authorities asked her if she was aware of the life insurance policies taken out on her children, and she told them that she only knew of the $10,000 policy that had been taken out earlier that year. Dainene didn't want the policies taken out on her children, but Ronald insisted.

Then, the investigators told her that just weeks before Timothy's death, Ronald had raised the policy another $40,000. When Dainene heard this news, an absolutely horrified look came across her face and she immediately broke down crying. Investigators were eventually able to determine that Dainene did not have any involvement in the murder. I can't imagine the grief of losing a child.

But to then find out that your spouse was responsible for the murder is something that I can't even begin to wrap my head around. And investigators were thinking the same thing. How could a man who on the outside looked like a good father poison his own child?

So they decide to bring him in for questioning. Investigators interrogated Ronald for hours, catching him in many lies throughout the process. They pointed out the fact that Courtney Melvin could not have been the man to give him the poison candy. He had a solid alibi, but Ronald had no other explanation. They also pointed out the suspicious life insurance policy.

But again, Ronald said it was all a coincidence. No matter how many times they poked holes in his story and laid out all of the evidence that was against him, he still proclaimed his innocence. But it didn't matter. Law enforcement didn't need a confession.

With all of the evidence piled against him, an arrest warrant was issued and on November 5th, 1974, Ronald O'Brien was arrested for the murder of his son, Timothy. One of the worst parts of this story is that Ronald didn't just try to kill Timothy. He also tried to kill his daughter, Elizabeth.

and he knew that if it was just his children that died, it would look suspicious. So, in an attempt to cover up his involvement, he slipped cyanide into five pixie sticks and handed them out to the children of the neighborhood, knowing good and well that five children were going to die that night at his hands, just so he could get $60,000.

Ronald would end up being indicted for one count of capital murder and four counts of attempted murder, and he would plead not guilty. Ronald's defense team relied on the urban legend of the Mad Candy Poisoner, who was allegedly a man that would lace Halloween candy with poison or put sharp objects inside of candy bars to hurt the trick-or-treaters. They claimed that that night, the urban legend had come to life and that the man responsible was still walking the streets.

But in the end, the jury saw right through his lies. There was indeed a Mad Candy Poisoner in Houston that night, but it wasn't some random guy. It was Ronald O'Brien himself.

Law enforcement was never able to prove where Ronald had bought the cyanide, but it didn't matter. They had plenty of evidence, and after 45 minutes, the jury convicted Ronald O'Brien guilty and sentenced him to death. - There was a ton of news coverage on this case.

I mean, a father of two that tried to kill his children and three others by poisoning their Halloween candy is obviously big news. And the press named him "The Candyman."

a name that seemed to stick with him throughout the years. Ronald O'Brien would spend his last days on death row at the correctional facility in Huntsville, Texas. His execution date would be postponed many times until finally the date was secured for March 31st, 1984. On the day of his execution, a crowd of hundreds gathered.

Some screamed trick-or-treat, and others threw candy at death penalty protesters. Everyone wanted to be in attendance when the Candyman took his last breath. According to Murderpedia, Ronald's last words were, What is about to transpire in a few moments is wrong. However, we as human beings do make mistakes and errors. This execution is one of those wrongs, yet doesn't mean our whole system of justice is wrong.

Therefore, I would forgive all who have taken part in any way in my death. Also, to anyone I have offended in any way during my 39 years, I pray and ask your forgiveness, just as I forgive anyone who offended me in any way. And I pray and ask God's forgiveness for all of us respectively as human beings. To my loved ones, I extend my undying love. To those close to me, know in your hearts I love you one and all.

God bless you all, and may God's best blessings be always yours.

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And with that, Ronald O'Brien received his lethal injection and took his last breath. With the Candyman dead, the people of Texas could finally feel a sense of relief, knowing that their children were safe. But Ronald O'Brien's decisions that Halloween night left a mark on society, a mark that is still seen and felt today. My parents were actually living around Houston at the time that this all took place.

And I reached out to them because I was curious if they remembered this story. My mom and dad were both born in 1969, so they would have been around 5 years old when this story unfolded. My dad told me that he definitely remembered it. He even said that in the years following the murder of Timothy, my grandma would go through his Halloween basket, making sure nothing was tampered with.

and he said that she would always throw away his pixie sticks just to be safe. It's crazy to think about how this crime had such an impact on society.

No one ever suspected that, on Halloween, one of the best days of the year, a true monster would be walking among the streets, preying on innocent children. But after this event, everyone was overly cautious, because they learned that evil is constantly among us. Ronald O'Brien wasn't dressed like a monster. He looked like you and I.

But Ronald O'Brien wasn't the only person to have the idea that it would be pretty easy to kill with candy.

In the 1960s in New York, for example, a woman named Helen Feal decided that it would be funny to punish kids that she believed were too old to be trick-or-treating by handing out odd items to them like dog biscuits and ant poison. Even though Helen thought of this as a practical joke, the town that she lived in and the authorities that kept it safe didn't find it very funny, and she was arrested.

And in the 1980s in Japan, a crime ring known only as the Mystery Man with 21 Faces threatened candy companies that they would poison their candy if they didn't pay them a large sum of money. Authorities pulled candy from stores across the country and checked it for chemicals, but they found nothing after the first threat. But the second time that the group claimed that they would poison the candy,

They did. Authorities, after learning of this second threat against the public of Japan, once again pulled candy from stores across the country and found packages of poisoned candies and cookies laced with cyanide throughout central Japan. And after this, the group known as the Mystery Man with 21 Faces completely disappeared. And to this day, the crime remains unsolved.

Over 125,000 investigations have been performed by Japanese authorities in an attempt to hunt this crime ring down over the years, but there are still no answers. And sadly, even though no one died from poisoned candy after these threats, one chief of police from an affected region of Japan eventually took his own life because he failed to stop the crimes or bring those involved in them to justice.

But, you see, you really shouldn't be afraid of poisoned candy on Halloween. One thing you should be afraid of is cars and vehicles.

Most deaths that occur on Halloween are actually due to pedestrian accidents or DUI related crashes. It seems like, once again, the scariest monsters are human after all. But regardless, the myth of the poisoned Halloween candy, the tale of the razor blade and the Snickers bar lives on, all thanks to Ronald O'Brien. And that fear, fear from parents, fear from kids,

seems like it will never truly go away. In 2009, decades after Ronald's execution, Ronald's lawyer was interviewed by the Austin American Statesman newspaper in nearby Austin, Texas about the crime. And years on, this is what he had to say. As you know, my client was convicted of killing Halloween.

Hey, everybody, and thank you again for listening to another brand new episode of Murder in America. Sorry we had to break the canon of the podcast for this. This is a case from Texas. We already did Texas. But for the month of October, we're doing strictly Halloween stories. We aren't doing our typical state to state episodes for this month. If you like this episode, please consider giving us a five star review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram at Murder in America and you can join our Facebook group for free.

Thank you to our patrons who make all of this possible. We love you guys. Our new patrons this week are... Rachel Recco. Stacey Hazleton. Jocelyn Rodarte. Chelsea. Brittany Bunte. Ellen McCormick. Sorry, Brittany, I didn't say your name right. Stefan Helfrich. And Callie. Thank you guys for supporting us. We love you. Sorry if we butchered your names, y'all, but if you would like, you can support us on Patreon where we post these episodes every...

ad-free, and you can get a bunch of bonus content. Just download the Patreon app and type in Murder in America. We're posting bonus episodes on there as well, and it's a way that we can chat with you guys daily and directly. I wrote today's episode. Hope you guys liked it. You can follow me on Instagram at CourtShan.

And I'm the one who produced and audio edited the episode. You can follow me on Instagram at Colin Brown. And you can also check out my YouTube channel, The Paranormal Files, if you like spooky stuff. Courtney and I are on there together filming all the time. We're about to drop a New Orleans episode on Wednesday that's really good. We investigated Zach and Addie's

the place where Zach actually, you know, murdered Addie. That's going to be in Wednesday's video in New Orleans. But anyways, the story is crazy to think that a father could murder his own son on one of the happiest days of the year is just horrible. And it makes you wonder, especially on Halloween, when the veil is supposedly the thinnest, when the dead can roam the earth. The dead don't talk. Or do they? Thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll see you on the next one.