Deep in debt and facing the loss of his home and car, Ronald Clark O’Bryan took his eight-year-old son Timothy trick-or-treating through a Pasadena, Texas neighbourhood on this day in 1974 and slipped him a Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide. To make the poisoning look like the work of a stranger, he handed identically tainted candy to four other children, including his own daughter; none of them ate it. Timothy did, and died within the hour.
Investigators soon discovered O’Bryan had taken out roughly $100,000 in new life insurance on his two children in the months before the murder, and had tried to buy cyanide from a chemical supplier weeks earlier. A jury took under an hour to convict him of capital murder in 1975, and he was sentenced to death.
After years of delayed execution dates, O’Bryan was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville on 31 March 1984, while a crowd outside shouted “Trick or treat!”
O’Bryan never confessed to the killing. In his final statement he called his own execution “wrong”, while insisting it did not mean the justice system that convicted him was at fault.
