October 31, 1974, 50 years ago: It's Halloween in America. All over the country, kids are dressing up as their favorite monsters, TV characters, superheroes, and sports stars, trick-or-treating in the hopes of getting all that great candy they saw in TV commercials.
In East Brunswick, on the New York side of New Jersey, your humble author, then only 4 years old, dressed like a cowboy (it was my mother's idea, not mine), and was trick-or-treating for UNICEF, with the little orange box with the coin slot on top (also my mother's idea).
And, in Deer Park, Texas, a suburb of Houston, then home to a toddler named Andy Pettitte, who went on to become a great pitcher, Timothy O'Bryan, 8 years old, dies. He was murdered, by his father, Ronald O'Bryan, who had poisoned the boy's candy, specifically Pixy Stix.
He did it in order to claim the insurance money. He also distributed poisoned candy to his daughter and 3 other children, in an attempt to cover up his crime, but none of them ate it.
He was convicted on June 3, 1975. It would take until March 31, 1984 for him to be executed.
O'Bryan, known as "The Candy Man" and "The Man Who Killed Halloween," is the source of all those awful myths about tainted Halloween candy: Poisoned Hershey bars, razor blades hidden in apples, things like that.
His death was by lethal injection -- a far less painful death than his son had. For putting fear into the heads of trick-or-treaters and their parents ever since, I wish he'd been left in the prison yard for his fellow inmates to beat him to death. (From what I've heard, they would have been happy to try: No one, not even a hardened criminal, likes a man who killed a child, especially his own.)
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