It's almost Halloween, and you've probably heard the fentanyl-candy scare stories. It's ridiculous, of course, that someone would be handing out drugs that cost money to kids, and there's no evidence of it. The colorful photos shown are always traced back to stock photos, or maybe sometimes they're of drugs that have been interdicted at the border that were made to look like candy. They weren't found anywhere that kids would have access to them.
As local and national news has been hyping the child-fear story, I saw a Twitter thread about the history of Halloween candy scares from an account called @Zooophagous:
Not so fun fact. The big incident that sparked fear of poisoned Halloween candy was actually from a guy who murdered his own son with a cyanide-laced pixie stick and he used Halloween candy to make it look like a random act.
He also handed out poisoned candy to the other kids in his son's friend group so that a single death wouldn't look as suspicious because he was that big of a bastard. Miraculously none of the other kids ate the candy, one lived because he couldn't get it open.
Violent crime is statistically rare as is, and random violent crime even more rare. If you're going to be poisoned, it's almost definitely going to be someone you know who has an axe to grind.
I'm not sure I've ever heard those aspects of the story before. Here are some more.
The man's name was Ronald O'Bryan, and he lived with his wife, son, and daughter in the Houston area. In 1974 he was $100,000 in debt (close to $600,000 today), and somehow, despite being an optician and a deacon in his Baptist church, he took out multiple life insurance policies on his kids and put cyanide in their Pixie Stix. It was only luck that he didn't also kill his daughter and another child who went trick-or-treating with them. And he tried to frame someone else for his crime, but that man had an air-tight alibi.
He was someone who was desperate and incredibly selfish, who exploited fear to try to get away with something. (This probably sounds familiar these days.)
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