Trick-or-Treating Nightmare: The Candy Man Killer

[Music] hello guys and welcome to freak week 2019 if you are new to this channel this is something I've done the past three years for Halloween where I do seven videos in a row the week of Halloween and you guys seem to really love it it's super fun it always helps me get in the mood for Halloween and I hope it helps you guys get in the spirit as well so let's just get right into it today I am going to tell you about a crazy true crime case I actually covered it on my podcast last Halloween very briefly and some of you may remember it from there today we are talking about the case of the Candyman so obviously the best part of Halloween is a trick-or-treating it's what you wait for as a kid October 31st walking around your neighborhood or something collecting candy it's such a great memory for me I love looking back at my childhood going around and trick-or-treating it's one of my favorite memories of my childhood picking out a costume the whole experience is super fun and now when it comes to Halloween candy most parents nowadays check their kids Halloween candy make sure there's no you know splinters or staples or something inside of it most people make sure it's all sealed up and you know doesn't look sketchy doesn't look homemade but there was a time where parents were definitely not as aware or even thought that that could be an issue back in the 70s there was you know a trust among people and no one was thinking to check their kids Halloween candy but that all changed in Houston Texas in 1974 so first let me tell you about Ronald Clark O'Bryan he was a guy that lived in Deer Park Texas right outside of Houston Texas he lived with his wife today and they had two children together they had a son named Timothy in 1966 and a daughter named Elizabeth in 1969 and Ronald was known as a decent average guy he actually was an optician for a well-known optical chain in Texas he was also really involved with his Baptist Church and he even sang in the choir so fast forward to Halloween of 1974 Ronald and his two kids and a few of their neighbors and their parents were all out trick-or-treating as a group Timothy his son was dressed as a character from Planet of the Apes that movie had just come out it was super popular at this time so a bunch of kids were dressed up that way for Halloween and in the group was another family from church there was Jim and his two kids Mark and Kimberly Ronald actually went over to Jim's house to trick-or-treat because they lived in a better neighborhood and he thought the trick-or-treating would go better so they were having a fun normal night trick-or-treating going door to door together picking up candy but then they came to a house where the lights were off and typically this means hey no candy don't come here but they decided we're gonna try anyway so they went up to the house knocked on the door and nobody answered so the kids were like whatever okay on to the next house and so Jim and the kids went to the next house but Ronald stayed behind at this house a little while later he caught up with them and he told them that he decided to stay at that house and continue trying to get them to answer the door and get some candy which is so weird I don't know what he was thinking trying to make that story make any sense what adult goes to a house that's clearly not giving out candy and stays there until they do without kids there but he said that eventually they did finally answer the door and gave him six Pixy sticks to give to the kids and if you don't know what a Pixy stick is it's like a little paper tube with sugar in it it's like a sugary powder so he gave Pixy sticks to all the kids including another ten-year-old boy from church so they continued about two blocks down the street trick-or-treating as normal until they decided to just call it a night and go back home and once the kids got home of course the first thing you do is dump out your bag of candy sort what you have and start you know down on it so of course Timothy wanted to eat his Pixy stick right away according to Ronald Timothy was having trouble getting the Pixy stick open because it was stapled shut so Ronald decided to help him with it and gave it to him and as Timothy was eating the Pixy stick he said that it tasted really bitter and just gross not right so Ronald ended up giving him some kool-aid to wash down the taste and hopefully help and he said he thought that it was just rotten or old although only a few minutes later Timothy started complaining of a stomachache a really bad stomachache he ran to the bathroom and started vomiting and convulsing just terrible Ronald said he ran to the bathroom and stood there with his son and held him until he basically just went limp in his arms he called 9-1-1 and they you know tried rushing him to the hospital but it was too late he had died within an hour of eating the Pixy stick so a word got out really quick that this happened to Timothy and everyone in the neighborhood was scared people in the area started thinking there's got to be a house that's giving out poisonous candy and this caused extreme panic all over this area a lot of parents were just making their kids completely throw out all of their Halloween candy they weren't taking any chances or they would literally have people bring their Halloween candy down to the police department to be inspected and cleared so they did an autopsy on Timothy and when they did that they realized that the Pixy stick that he had eaten had a cyanide in it so an alert was sent out through the neighborhood immediately saying that if you have a Pixy stick if your kids have any Pixy sticks throw them out immediately Ron told the police that he had handed out a total of five so they were able to track those five down and luckily none of the other kids how to eat it however there was one last kid that they were not able to track down because Ronald didn't even remember who it was he said it was a kid from church but he didn't remember exactly who but they ended up finding the kid tracking down his parents contacting them and they started looking for the Pixy stick but they couldn't find it they looked all through his candy but it was not there and their son was already asleep in bed so they ran up to check on him and make sure he wasn't sick and how to eaten it and they found him laying in bed holding the pixie stick uneaten basically he had ended up trying to open it but because it was stapled he wasn't able to get it open and he just gave up and fell asleep so once they ended up collecting these five Pixy sticks they emptied them all out and realized they had all been replaced with pure cyanide the five sticks had enough powder to kill two to four adults so I mean this was super intense for poor Timothy Timothy was buried on November 2nd at Forest Park Lawndale cemetery in Houston Texas and Ronald sang at the funeral and talked about how his son was now in a better place with God so obviously police want to figure out which house gave out these Pixy sticks but when they asked Ronald which house he got them from he didn't remember now like I mentioned they only went two blocks because it had actually started raining so they ended up wrapping up their night a little early so it wasn't that many houses that they had been to for him to have gotten the Pixy sticks from so they instantly thought that this was kind of weird for him to say so police decided they'll just go to all the houses that they went to and start questioning people however none of the neighbors seemed to be giving out Pixy sticks or at least they claimed they never gave any out and there wasn't any evidence of pixie sticks in their houses so they ended up walking with Ronald around the neighborhood hoping that he would remember you know something would jog his memory and he would remember where he thought the Pixy sticks for him and finally he did remember which house it was and once he saw the house he remembered a bit more Ronald claimed that this house was dark and Ronald claimed that he continuously was knocking in the door because they weren't answering right away he said they didn't have any lights on and when they opened the door the lights were still off and they only opened the door enough to a stick a hand out and hand him the five Pixy sticks like really man that's your story conveniently Ronald claimed that he could not see this man and he literally just handed them the five Pixy sticks and shut the door and then he thought it was a good idea to go give these stapled Pixy sticks to five kids so police went to the house that Ronald claims he definitely remembers getting them from and it was owned by a man named Courtney Melvin now Courtney told them that he actually worked at a nearby airport he had an alibi showing that was working that night until 11 p.m. and that's why the lights were off and he wasn't giving out candy at his house so he was like there's no way you got Pixy Stix from my house so they are definitely starting to look more at Ronald now it's not looking so good for him so after looking into Ronald a little more the police realized that he was actually in over $100,000 of debt which is quite a bit for 1974 in addition to that he had 21 jobs in the last ten years because he wasn't ever able to keep a job and during this time he was in a bit of hot water at his optical store because he was accused of stealing from them not only that but there was a lot of other things going wrong in his life his car was about to be repossessed he had defaulted on several bank loans and their family home was about to be foreclosed on so Ronald is already looking pretty guilty at this point but things got taken up a whole nother level when the police ended up finding out that he had taken out life insurance policies on his kids very shortly before this all happened January of that year 1974 he took out two $10,000 life insurance policies on his kids and one month before this all happened he took out an additional 20,000 per kid then just a few days before Halloween Ronald ended up taking out another twenty thousand dollar policy on each kid all of this wrapped up to $60,000 per child so obviously when police found this out they were like okay what know kids have life-insurance policies this young especially for that much so the life insurance company ended up contacting the police and telling them that on November 1st the day after Halloween when Timothy died he immediately called them up asking how he would go about getting that money for his dead child and his wife today had no idea that either of the kids had life insurance policies so as if Ronald couldn't look any more guilty a local chemical supply stores contacted police as well and claimed that Ronald had come in a few days before Halloween looking to buy cyanide however this supply store like most had major restrictions on how much you could get they would only give you a tiny amount less you had some type of license according to them though he came in looking for way more cyanide than was even in those five Pixy Stix and when they denied him he just left so imagine he may have been trying to make way more than he even did so finding this out was the last straw for the police and November 5th five days after Timothy had passed away they ended up arresting Ronald Clark O'Bryan he was indicted on four counts of attempted murder and one count of capital murder for his son Timothy his own child what a savage and he immediately pleaded not guilty to all five charges the case ended up attracting tons of national coverage and the media dubbed him the Candyman so his trial began on May 5th 1975 and during the trial there was actually a chemist who was friends with Ronald and he said that in summer of 1973 the year before that Ronald had asked him about cyanide and how much could kill someone friends and co-workers of Ronald also claimed that he had an unusual cyanide interest and he would randomly talk about how much it would take to kill somebody and then Ronald's sister and brother-in-law ended up claiming that during the funeral Ronald was going around talking to everyone about how he was going to go on this big long vacation to kind of deal with grief after his son died you know with the insurance money and he was talking about buying a bunch of other [ __ ] so even they were like okay this is not adding up but despite all of these things ronald still was saying i am not guilty of this he was still trying to push the theory that there was some nut job in the neighborhood passing out poison candy to kids and that had nothing to do with the death of his son but his case was weak as [ __ ] to say the least the trial lasted about a month and then on June 3rd 1975 the jury found Ronald guilty on all charges they only ended up deliberating for 46 minutes which is really no time at all in the jury world so they were pretty certain that he did this next it was time for them to figure out a sentence for him and again that was a quick process it only took the jury 71 minutes and they decided to give him the death penalty I mean this is Texas shortly after he was convicted his wife ended up filing for divorce Ronald was held in the Huntsville unit in Huntsville Texas until it was time for his death and according to people that worked in the prison he was literally shunned by even all the death row mates because who the hell tries to poison children with Halloween candy I mean you're just sick so he lived a pretty miserable rest of his existence and then he was scheduled to be executed on August 8th of 1980 that day ended up getting pushed to May 25th 1982 and then finally it was pushed once again to October 31st 1980 - that was the eighth anniversary of Timothy's death which I felt was pretty fitting the judge wanted justice for this case so bad that he said he would literally drive him there himself to be executed on the 31st if there was any type of idea of pushing it once again however the Supreme Court got involved and they ended up delaying it once again they wanted to give Ronald the chance to try to appeal and get a new trial so finally a fourth date was scheduled for March 31st 1984 Ronald's attorneys spot to let in for him trying get this cancelled they said that death by lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment and I would say so is giving your child a Pixy stick full of cyanide for money but eventually on March 31st 1984 he was finally put to death he was 39 years old at the time and in his final moments he maintained his innocence he said the death penalty was wrong and his final words were I forgive all and I do mean all those who have been involved in my death god bless you and may God's best blessings always be yours during his execution a crowd of 300 people gathered and cheered while he was being put down and while this was happening someone yelled trick-or-treat and this was the first time the Texas had actually executed a inmate by lethal injection ron was buried in the Forest Park East Cemetery in Webster Texas his wife ended up getting remarried and his daughter was legally adopted by her new husband so they went on and lived their lives it's a very scary story and definitely a good reminder to check your kids Halloween candy this is coming up most parents do this like I said but again it never hurts to give it a double-check but that's it for the first day of freak week you guys be sure to subscribe and turn on your notifications so you don't miss tomorrow night's video it's definitely just as interesting as this one but that's it for me today guys stay it's spooky and I will talk to you next time [Music]

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 1,007,116

Rating: 4.9684434 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, candy man, the candy man, freak week, halloween, spooky, mystery, true crime, crime, mile higher podcast, mile higher, mysteries, unsolved mysteries, buzzfeed unsolved, creepypasta, paranormal, unexplained, unsolved, crime watch daily, cold case, unsolved mystery, buzzfeed, investigative, investigate, haunted, strange, creepy, investigation, criminal, dateline, eerie, supernatural, scary, id discovery, ronald o'bryan, the candyman, ronald clark o'bryan, news

Id: cDQ4GST4pac

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019