The drizzle began tumbling onto the suburbs of Houston during the evening rush hour.
And because it was Halloween, the weather meant plans had to be adjusted for thousands of wee ghosts and goblins intent on trick-or-treating that night in 1974.
Ronald Clark O’Bryan, 30, a local optician, decided to take his two young children out that year in their neighbourhood. But as the rain intensified, they packed it in after trolling just a few streets.
O’Bryan told the kids they could each have a treat from their loot before tucking in. His 8-year-old son Timmy selected a Pixy Stix but complained the powder tasted bitter.
His father offered the boy a glass of Kool-Aid to eliminate the raunchy taste.
O’Bryan later told detectives: “Thirty seconds after I left Tim’s room, I heard him cry to me, ‘Daddy, daddy, my stomach hurts.’ He was in the bathroom convulsing, vomiting and gasping and then he suddenly went limp.”
Within an hour, Timmy was dead. He did not make it to the hospital.
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O’Bryan lived in the quiet suburb of Deer Park with his wife Daynene and his two kids, Timmy and Elizabeth. In addition to his job as an optician, he was a deacon in his local Baptist church where he sang in the choir.
To the outside world, O’Bryan was the apex of middle-class, early 1970s propriety. Friends and neighbours called him a model citizen. His pastor gushed he was “a good, Christian man and an above-average father.”
His admiring friends were oblivious that O’Bryan’s private life was a train wreck.
Over a decade he was employed by 21 different companies and each time fired for negligence, fraudulent behaviour and a mish-mash of other misdemeanours. He was also $100,000 large in the red and was about to have his vehicle repossessed.
He was desperate to get out from under his wall of woe.
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At the morgue, the medical examiner noticed the smell of almonds emitting from Timmy’s mouth. It was determined that the boy had consumed enough cyanide to kill three adult men.
Homicide detectives were called in. They knew four of the kids in the candy-seeking quest had received the full-length Pixy Stix, so they made O’Bryan and another adult who accompanied them retrace their steps.
All four Stix were recovered uneaten. Cops figured out that someone replaced the top two inches with cyanide.
The adults told police they knocked on the door of one house but did not receive a response. O’Bryan remained behind and then brandished the Pixy Stix and gave one to each of the kids.
An extra was given to a passing trick-or-treater.
Cops checked out O’Bryan’s story and it didn’t add up.
There was a problem with the exact house where he had gotten the candy. His narrative dangled in the wind.
Detectives had seen and heard enough. They arrested O’Bryan and charged him with the cruel-hearted murder of his son.
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O’Bryan concocted the sick scheme sometime in the autumn of 1974. He was sick of being broke and wanted a more “comfortable” lifestyle.
It didn’t take cops long to uncover the deacon of death’s financial woes. In addition, there was something else: He had taken out numerous life insurance policies on his two children.
On a piece of paper with his adding machine, O’Bryan wrote down how much he owed on each of his bills. It added up to the amount he would collect from the insurance on his children.
The tally read murder.
And there were his suspicious queries at local chemical companies on the wonders of cyanide. How much it took to kill etc. Just a joke! There was also a pocket knife in his home that had traces of cyanide on it.
“I am not able to imagine a crime more reprehensible than someone killing his own child for money,” former Houston DA Clyde DeWitt told A&E.
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It didn’t take a Houston jury long to decide O’Bryan’s fate. After just an hour of deliberating, he was convicted of murder.
Next stop: Death row.
He appealed multiple times and each time it was torpedoed. O’Bryan was said to be the most hated condemned man ever to reside on the den of the doomed.
Dewitt added: “The facts were extensive and horrible. As I recall, the last sentence of my oral argument to the Court of Criminal Appeals was something like, ‘If these facts do not support the jury’s death sentence, there never will be facts that will.’”
Ronald Clark O’Bryan had a reservation on the night train to Nowheresville. On March 31, 1984, in the death house at Huntsville, he was executed via lethal injection.
He said he forgave those who had condemned him and then it was lights out. O’Bryan never came clean even, though nagging doubts about his guilt were absent.
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After the horrors of autumn 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan earned two macabre nicknames: The Man Who Killed Halloween and The Candy Man.
Exactly why O’Bryan chose Halloween to commit his vile crimes remains a mystery. One theory is that the killer used the lore-packed holiday as a ruse.
“It’s thought that he was aware of the urban legends about Halloween poisoners, and cynically assumed that his use of cyanide-laced candy would deflect suspicion from him to some anonymous boogeyman,” cultural expert David Skal said.
However, Dracula, the Werewolf and other myth-making monsters had nothing on evil Ronald Clark O’Bryan.