halloween poisoning

Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 21:00:08 -0500
From: ag028@freenet.carleton.ca (Barbara Hamel)
To: jrh@cathouse.org
Subject: Cathouse update

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			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

January 25, 1995