Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 21:00:08 -0500 From: ag028@freenet.carleton.ca (Barbara Hamel) To: jrh@cathouse.org Subject: Cathouse update -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Halloween Poisonings ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (Originally posted to alt.folklore.urban on Nov 29 1994 and amended on March 16, 1995) Tales of black-hearted madmen doling out poisoned Halloween candy to unsuspecting little tykes have been around forever -- God knows they were part of my Halloween experience thirty years ago. And every year it's the same -- radio, tv and newspapers issue dark warnings re tampered candy and suggest taking the little ones to parties instead of door-to-door. Even Ann Landers published a column warning us against the mad poisoner -- you don't get more voracious than that. It's a sadness that a holiday so thoroughly and greedily enjoyed by kids all over the place is being sanitized out of existence in the name of safety. What's sadder still is there appears to be no reason for it. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a genuine Halloween poisoning. I say this after reviewing hundreds of newspaper articles and pawing through other people's discourses on this subject that predated what I could find in the databases. I found endless articles full of dire warnings and quite a few others that stated that the problem -- if it existed at all -- was greatly overstated. Let's set the criteria for what constitutes a Halloween poisoning and then examine the famous and not-so-famous cases often pointed to as examples of this horror. To qualify as a Halloween poisoning, poisoned candy has to be handed out on a random basis to children as part of the trick-or-treating ritual inherent to Halloween. The act cannot be targeted to one specific child. Though I never found evidence of a genuine Halloween poisoning, I did uncover a few isolated incidents initially reported as random poisonings that, upon further investigation, turned out to be something else. The most famous case is the murder of eight-year-old Timothy Mark O'Bryan at the hands of his father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan in Houston, Texas. The child died at 10 pm on October 31, 1974 as a result of eating cyanide-laced Pixie Stix which he had acquired while trick-or-treating. The prosecution proved that the father had purchased the cyanide and had (along with a neighbour) accompanied the group of children on their door-to-door mission. None of the houses visited that night were giving out Pixie Stix. Young Mark's life was insured for a large sum of money and collecting on this policy has always been pointed to as the motive for this murder. Though the case was circumstantial (no one saw the father poison the candy or slip the Pixie Stix into the boy's bag), Ronald O'Bryan was convicted of the murder in May, 1975. He received the death sentence and was executed by lethal injection on Mar 31, 1984 (not on the poeticly-just Oct 31 as is often recounted in off-the-cuff verbal summaries of the case). The O'Bryan murder was an attempt to use a well-known urban legend to cover up the premeditated murder of one particular child. Though cold-blooded and horrible to contemplate, it still does not qualify as a genuine Halloween poisoning because there was nothing random about this child's death. There was another attempt to cover up the circumstances surrounding a child's death by invoking this legend and it happened in Detroit in 1970. On November 2, 1970, 5-year-old Kevin Toston lapsed into a coma and died four days later of a heroin overdose. Analysis of some of his Halloween candy showed that it had been sprinkled with heroin. This case was widely reported as a real-life example of Halloween sadism. What was not so widely circulated was the results of the police investigation that concluded the boy had accidentally got into his uncle's heroin stash and poisoned himself and that the family had sprinkled the heroin on the kid's candy after the fact to protect the uncle. Pre-dating both of these stories is the odd case of Helen Pfeil, a Greenlawn, NY housewife who in 1964 was arrested for giving out arsenic- laced ant poison buttons as part of a self-evident Halloween joke. Annoyed that too many of the trick-or-treaters were too old to be asking for free candy, she made up packages of inedible "treats" to give to the teenagers. The packages contained dog biscuits, steel wool pads and the ant buttons (which were clearly marked "Poison" with a skull and crossbones.) She also took the precaution of telling the teenagers that the packages were a joke when she handed them out and there is no record of anyone being harmed by her actions. Even so, the potential for harm was there so she was charged. She pled guilty to endangering children and eventually received a suspended sentence. What appeared to be a non-Halloween random poisoning attempt occurred in Emerson, New Jersey. On Oct 8, 1988 _The New York Times_ said traces of strychnine were found in a box of Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs purchased on Sept 23 in a New Jersey grocery. The suspicious powder the State Police lab had initially labeled strychnine was retested by the Food and Drug Administration and pronounced corn starch. _The New York Times_ printed the updated version of the story on Oct 14, 1988 but not before Thomas J. Lipton Inc. (the manufacturer of Fun Fruits) destroyed 9400 cases of the product. The company maintained the negative publicity surrounding this story had an adverse effect on their image. Though it's impossible to accurately measure such things, I believe their claim has merit. After all, it is human nature to recall the destruction of the candy but forget it was a false alarm. It is only reasonable to assume their image was damaged somewhat. Another suspected Halloween poisoning occurred in Washington, DC in 1991. 31-year-old Kevin Michael Cherry of Montgomery County died of heart failure after eating some of his child's Halloween goodies. As reported in the November 2, 1991 edition of _The Washington Times_, anxious parents dumped pounds of their kids' candy before the true cause of death was determined by autopsy. Yet another case was the death of Ariel Katz, a 7-year-old Santa Monica girl who died on Oct 31, 1990 while trick-or-treating. The little girl died of congenital heart failure, not from poisoning, as police initially feared. The police acted immediately on what they suspected, as reported in the Nov 2, 1990 edition of _The Los Angeles Times_: Santa Monica police had conducted an intense door-to-door search on the street where the youngster collapsed. They feared that other children might have picked up tainted Halloween candy, and they blocked off the 700 block of 12th Street for several hours while they confiscated candy and interviewed residents and revelers. Putting the crazed Halloween poisoner story to rest can be quite the task as was confirmed by a Nov 9, 1989 article in _The Los Angeles Times_ by Mike Spencer. Here's part of his interview with Joel Best, a professor of sociology at Cal State Fresno, who has been trying to debunk this urban legend for more than thirty years: "We checked major newspapers from throughout the country from 1958 through 1988," he said, "assuming that any story this horrible would certainly be well reported." Well, they found a total of 78 cases and two deaths*. Further checking proved that almost all of the 78 cases were pranks. The deaths were tragically real, but they, too, were misrepresented in the beginning. The pranks, he said, were all of kids -- after years of hearing similar stories -- inserting needles or razor blades into fruit, not realizing (or maybe realizing) how much they frightened their whole town. "My favorite," Best says, "was the kid who brought a half-eaten candy bar to his parents and said, 'I think there's ant poison on this.' They had it checked and, sure enough, there was ant poison on it -- significantly, on the end he had not bitten." Of course, the youngster had applied the poison himself. Best has tried mightily over the years to destroy this particular myth, but obviously to no avail. "It's the old problem of trying to prove a negative," he says. Sad to say, foreign objects hidden in Halloween loot is part of the trick-or-treat experience, but these incidents are few and far between and our fear of them is greatly out of proportion with the likelihood of occurrence. From a Oct 31, 1993 article in _The Washington Post_: Of several contacted, only Southern Maryland Hospital Center reported discovering what seemed to be a real threat -- a needle detected by X-ray in a candy bar in 1988. But there was never an arrest or resolution in the case. Also from that same article: In the 10 years the National Confectioners Association has run its Halloween Hot Line, the group has yet to verify an instance of tampering, said spokesman Bill Sheehan. "These myths become truisms." Searching through all these newspaper reports and reading back through the work done by others on this subject, only one reasonable conclusion can be drawn: All our fears aside, there has yet to be a random Halloween poisoning. Yes, there are sick people out there and yes, this could happen. Until one such verifiable case is reported, I stand firm in my belief it never did. God willing, it never will. Barbara "soaping the windows of your mind" Hamel * The two deaths Best referred to in that 1989 interview were the O'Bryne murder and the accidental poisoning of Kevin Toston. Barbara "soaping the windows of your mind" Hamel