CRIME HUNTER: Evil Candy Man was the monster Who Killed Halloween
· Toronto Sun
Oil, filthy oil, made the Houston bedroom community of Deer Park, Texas a rollicking success.
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In the early 1970s, suburbia bloomed there. It was safe, quiet and not unlike thousands of other small towns in the U.S. If murder shattered this idyll, it was usually just one per year – if that.
But that’s not to say they don’t happen in the upper middle-class neighbourhood.
On Oct. 29, 2019, newly-divorced mom Ashley Auzenne , 39, of New Orleans St., shot to death her three young children before parking a bullet in her own brain.
Ronald O’Bryan was an optician and church deacon
Yet Deer Park is the kind of community where professionals like doctors, lawyers and opticians choose to raise their families.
One such optician was a man named Ronald Clark O’Bryan, who was also a deacon at his church. He lived in a comfortable home with his wife and two children. There was nothing outwardly unusual about them.
But behind the toothy facade, O’Bryan was drowning in debt. These sorts of things happen when you cycle through 21 jobs in 10 years.
By the summer of 1974, O’Bryan’s debt was close to $100,000 and he faced imminent bankruptcy. He had already managed to lose the family home.
But O’Bryan was a problem solver and he devised a twisted magic bullet strategy that would lead him to financial Nirvana.
He would murder his children for the life insurance policies he had taken out on them totaling around $60,000 US – equal to around $425,000 in 2026. O’Bryan hid his evil machinations from his wife.
Purchased potassium cyanide
The would-be killer had calculated the big payout and by Halloween night in 1974, he believed he had figured out how to get his hands on that insurance cash. That morning, he purchased potassium cyanide from a local gardening store.
On Halloween Eve, the dutiful O’Bryan took his two children along with two neighbourhood kids trick-or-treating through their suburban streets. One of the homes on the street was dark, hinting that the owner was not home.
The kids said skip it but the adult lagged behind and then told the kids the owner of the house gave him four Pixy Stix for the kids. They didn’t realize the ends the sickly sweet powdery treat had been opened and stapled together.
When the O’Bryans returned home, Ronald urged his son Timothy to try the delicious candy and he loosened up the powder. Timothy tested the Pixy Stix contents and declared it bitter, so his father grabbed him a glass of Kool-Aid to wash away the taste.
“Thirty seconds after I left Tim’s room, I heard him cry to me, ‘Daddy, Daddy, my stomach hurts,'” O’Bryan said, the United Press International reported (via The New York Times ). “He was in the bathroom, convulsing, vomiting and gasping, and then suddenly he went limp.”
‘I did not see any tears’
O’Bryan later said he held his son as he died.
His wife, Daynene O’Bryan, later testified that Ronald reacted to the tragedy by beating the wall and questioning why an eight-year-old boy had to die. Cops believed he was trying to deflect suspicion and blame from himself.
“I did not see any tears,” his wife later said.
She was mostly in the dark about his insurance machinations.
“I tried to discourage him,” she later testified. “But he said it was the thing to do. We didn’t have that much money.”
News swept the quiet area with paranoid parents scouring their kids loot bags looking for poisoned candy. According to cops, four Pixy Stix were found in the O’Bryan home with one unopened treat tucked in bed with his daughter.
Contacted insurance company the next day
The staples O’Bryan used to close the bogus treats likely saved one boy’s life. The neighbourhood children were poised to become collateral damage.
“That’s what saved another boy’s life that night,” Harris County prosecutor Mike Hinton told Vice . “They found him in bed with the sweet in his hand, but he wasn’t strong enough to undo the staples.”
The morning after the poisoning, O’Bryan contacted the insurance company asking about the payout on his son’s policy. The insurance company tipped off cops.
Homicide detectives began scouring every nook and cranny in Ronald O’Bryan’s life. They learned about his imploding finances and they also zeroed in on his purchase of the cyanide and life insurance policies.
Ronald Clark O’Bryan, then 30, was arrested and charged in Harris County, Texas with capital murder. A conviction meant a date with the electric chair. Even legendary Houston lawyer Marvin Teague did not budge the needle for the despised O’Bryan.
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Sentenced to death in 46 minutes
In 46 minutes, the jury returned a guilty verdict along with an order that the deadly daddy was to be executed in the electric chair at the Huntsville death house.
For seven years, O’Bryan launched appeal after appeal but nothing changed for him. Fittingly, his execution was slated for Halloween night in 1982 – but it was delayed for another 18 months by more appeals.
O’Bryan finally got the big adios via lethal injection on March 31, 1984. By the time of his execution, O’Bryan had earned the moniker the “Candy Man Killer” and “The Man Who Killed Halloween.”
“His whole life has been a lie,” prosecutor Vic Driscoll said, per UPI . “He has used his church. He has used his friends. He has used his community and his family. And, worst of all, he has used his son – not as Abraham did – he sacrificed his son on the altar of greed.”
And that’s damned scary.