This Texas Murder Is Why We Always Check Halloween Candy

I'd be willing to bet your parents either used to check your Halloween candy or really nagged you to use your head before you enjoyed it. I know my parents did.

Don't eat anything that looks opened. Don't eat anything homemade. Check the wrappers. Make sure nobody put anything weird in your candy.

It was one of those things adults told kids without explaining why. I always thought it was some urban legend... Like, come on, who is putting razor blades in the caramel apples? And then I ran across a true story of Halloween murder.

As it turns out, the whole poisoned candy thing isn't some wild urban legend.

There really was a guy in Texas who poisoned Halloween candy, and the story is considerably worse than you're picturing.

The Halloween Murder That Happened in Texas

Halloween night in 1974, Ronald O'Bryan was taking his two kids trick-or-treating in the Houston area.

At some point in the night, O'Bryan let the kids be kids and independently go it alone for a few moments... But when he caught back up, he had five giant Pixy Stix a neighbor had given him for his group of trick-or-treaters.

You remember the big Pixy Stix? About three feet long, thick plastic you couldn't bite through, a literal yard of sugar.

He gave one to both of his kids and three of their friends. And when his 8-year-old son Timmy ate his that night before bed, he died.

The investigation discovered there was cyanide mixed into that giant Pixy Stix.

It was a tragedy, and the whole neighborhood mourned.

During the police investigation, O'Bryan told them the poisoned candy had come from a house in the neighborhood... Except nobody in the neighborhood had given out any giant Pixy Stix.

Weirdly enough, O'Bryan called his insurance company the day after Timmy died, wanting to collect the life insurance check.

Red flag.

The police didn't actually find out about that. The insurance company contacted them. They also thought it was really weird timing.

That's when investigators started looking into O'Bryan's finances.

He was deeply in debt and had also taken out life insurance policies on his children.

By the time the police put the case together, O'Bryan had given poisoned Pixy Stix to four other children too, including his own daughter. Thankfully, none of them ate theirs.

He was arrested five days later, convicted of murdering his son, and executed in 1984.

The case became known as the "Candy Man" murder, and it left a very lasting mark on Halloween.

Why We Started Checking Halloween Candy

The idea that somebody might poison your kid's Halloween candy wasn't actually created by this case. Stories about tampered Halloween candy had already been floating around, but this made the parent inspections mandatory.

A Texas father really did poison his son's Halloween candy for insurance money, planning to hide the crime by killing his daughter too, and three other kids.

So the next time you see somebody dumping their kid's Halloween haul onto the kitchen table and inspecting every piece before it gets eaten, there's a pretty good chance they're carrying on a tradition that has a very ugly piece of Texas history attached to it.