Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Halloween Poisoner

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Candy laced with cyanide and needles in marshmallows, we've long been warned to be suspicious of the sweet treats handed out by strangers at Halloween. But it seems that most stories of "Halloween sadism" are just that, stories. No child seems to have been  killed by adulterated Halloween candy... well... there is one terrible exception. The poisoned Pixy Stix of Pasadena, TX. For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Pushkin Pasadena, Texas, 1974. Someone is getting ready for Halloween. He lays out five pixie sticks on the kitchen counter. The large plastic tubes nearly two feet long, filled to the brim with fizzing candy, quite a prize for the local trickle treaters. Then it takes a sharp pair of scissors and one by one, he snips off the top of each pixie sticks. And from each one he pours an inch or two of candy into the sink. He turns the faucet and the water rinses the candy powder away, fizzing as it vanishes down the drain. Next, he unscrews the cap from a large bottle filled with a white powder.

The bottle has an official looking label on it. Is that kind of chemical? He grabs a spoon and digs into the powder, keeping it into one pixie sticks tube after another, replacing the missing candy. He's hurrying a little now. He puts down the spoon and screws the cap back on the bottle. He reaches for a stapler.

A couple of staples per tube does the job, sealing their new contents away. Stapler away. Scissors away. On the forted again, he winters the spoon and dries it. He picks up some soap and thoroughly washes his hands. Then he dries them. Five pixie sticks tubes still lie on the counter.

Is anyone ready for some trick or treating? on the counter. Is anyone ready for some trick or treating? I'm Tim Haafard, and you're listening to cautionary tales. 15 years earlier, Fremont, California. Trick or treat! Squeal the children as they rang the doorbell, the door swung open. On the threshold stood an ordinary looking couple. On the doorstep gathered a gang of tiny little vampires and ghosts and monsters holding out their treat bags and waiting for candy. Treat or trick. Smiling the grown-ups dropped a handful

of candy into each bag and the spooky little sprites scampered off to the next house. But when they tasted the candy, something wasn't right. Some of the treats were little white, heart-shaped pills. They were sugary on the outside, but the inside was yucky. Some of the kids complained to their parents about the substandard treats on offer. The parents of Fremont were seriously worried. Looking for evidence, they sent some older children back to the house with treat bags. The children returned with lollipops, and more of those unpleasant little pills. The police were summoned and paid a visit to the house of Dr. William Shine, a dentist with an impeccable

reputation. It was 1959, a simpler time, a more innocent time. Nobody could quite get their heads around what Dr. Shine seemed to have done, but it was hard to deny. The pills were analysed and found to be a professionally manufactured, laxative, suggesting that Dr. Shine had a rather twisted sense of humour, given that an adult dose was two pills, and some children had 30 pills in their treat bags, the risk of tragedy was clear enough.

Eventually, the police recovered nearly 500 pills. Eventually, the police recovered nearly 500 pills. Fortunately, none of the children were sick enough to go to hospital. A few suffered cramps or vomited, most of them spat the unpleasant pills out immediately. The main damage was to the peace of mind of the community, along with a self-inflicted damage to Dr. Shine's reputation. For a while, it seemed as though he'd faced prison time and lose his license to practice, but in the end, he escaped with probation at a fine of $525. And that was that.

A strange, cruel joke in which sheer luck prevented tragedy. Something unique, the kind of thing that would surely never happen again. My daughter says that Halloween is her favorite holiday. She says it's even better than Christmas. How so, I ask? Because it's about community, she says. Christmas is inward looking. The immediate family huddled together having fun at home. Halloween is outward looking. You don't spend it at home.

You spend it wandering around your neighborhood. Gifts aren't wrapped and handed to a select few. They're doled out liberally to all visitors. Children experience kindness not just from friends and family, but kindness from strangers too. But not all strangers are kind. William Shine's Laxative Prank is the first example I can find of what is sometimes called Halloween sadism, where a stranger puts something dangerous into the treats collected by children on Halloween, rat poison in the chocolate bar, needles in marshmallows. That sort of thing.

My daughter's vision of Halloween is a way to meet your community and realize that strangers can be nice people too. That vision dissolves on contact with Halloween sadism. And that's what makes Halloween sadism such a grotesque act of betrayal. It's toxic, figuratively and literally, poisoning the relationship children have with their community. Eating away at the very idea that someone you don't know, I never the less, give you something of value. No wonder we're warned. The idea that someone you don't know, I nevertheless give you something of value. No wonder we're warned.

That plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block, cautioned the New York Times in 1970, may have a razor blade hidden inside. Well, it may. But does that happen often? Indeed it does noted Newsweek shortly before Halloween 1975. If this year's Halloween follows form, a few children will return home with something more than an upset tummy. In recent years, several children have died, and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury

from razor blades, sowing needles and shards of glass purposefully put into their goodies by adults. That's just awful. It implies that serious incidents occur every single year. And in 1983, the dear Abbey column syndicated in over a thousand newspapers, agreed. It's Halloween time again, and time to remind you that somebody's child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade. But after reading such alarming warnings, The young sociologist named Joel Best became curious. Best had a wide

variety of interests. He was interested in crime and in social problems, but he was puzzled by these stories. Best had found that criminals and drug addicts always had a reason for what they did, even if we might object to those reasons. I could not for the life of me figure out what the reason for poisoning Halloween treats might be, he told me. And some of these stories sounded a bit more like Grimm's fairy tales than reality, a razor blade in the plump red apple from the kindly old woman, seriously. But when Joel Best told his friends, he thought the stories might not be real. His friends were outraged. Of course they were real. So, best

started to look for data on these appalling crimes. How often were children poisoned or maimed by evil strangers peddling treats? Not easy to say. There is no crime of Halloween sadism, so crime statistics wouldn't cover it. The dentist, William Shine, was convicted of outraging public decency for handing out laxatives to neighbourhood children. That's the kind of crime they charge you with when everyone agrees you've been a complete bastard, but nobody can quite nail you with anything more specific. But Joel best figured that whenever a child died or was hospitalized by a Halloween treat, the newspapers would cover the story in the first few days of November, and so he got hold of the major newspapers dating back to 1958. The year before William Shine's laxative stunt,

and carefully studied the days immediately following Halloween, to find out just how often this had happened. The newspapers reported some worrying incidents. In 1964, two teenage girls, LC and Irene Drucker, knocked on the door of Helen Files, a neighbour in Greenland, Long Island. Mrs Files gave them a foil-wrapped pack of treats, but when they opened it, it was disgusted to find steel wool, dog biscuits, and a bottle cap sized container full of ant poison. They showed the parcel to their father, he called the police, and Mrs. Files was duly arrested and charged with endangering the health and life of a child. The judge committed her to a hospital for psychiatric examination. It's hard for me to understand how any woman

with sense or reason could give this to a child. Well, fair enough, Mrs. Files did not display good judgment. Her husband told the New York Times that she'd given out the trick packages only to teenagers. She'd told them explicitly it was a Halloween joke, and she'd been giving out real candy to younger children all day. I've no reason to doubt that explanation, and in fact it would actually be quite a good joke if it wasn't so self-evidently flirting with disaster. That said, the experts tell me that even if a young child did get hold of and poison, it would be unlikely to do them serious harm.

Okay, so now Joel Best had two cases. William V. Shine, who in 1959 gave laxative pills to neighbourhood children and made some of them sick for an evening, and Helen Files, who in 1964 gave teenagers in edible household supplies from the cupboard under the kitchen sink and told them to their faces that it was a Halloween joke, two stupid thoughtless people, and thankfully no lasting harm done. But by the 1970s, newspapers were warning before each Halloween that severe injuries and death were frequent occurrences. It's true that after each Halloween, accounts of trouble had become more common in the media. In the early 1960s, the newspapers would rarely have any incident to report.

Yet, in the three years from 1969 to 1971, there were 31 incidents in the press. The strange thing was noted Joel Best. While there were a lot of reports of Halloween sadism, most of them seemed fairly minor. Most of the time, nobody was hurt. A child just pointed to something worrying in a candy bar. Indeed on closer inspection, many of the cases seemed to be, well, somewhat implausible. A few were proven hoaxes, others just seemed rather unlikely. Joel Best noted one case where a boy had eaten half a candy bar,

then complained to his parents, I think there's an poison on this mum. And indeed there was, on the unbitten end, the child had, of course, applied the poison himself, was perfectly unharmed and presumably thought it would be a hilarious Halloween prank. In 1973, the Trade Magazine of the newspaper industry, Editor and publisher, reviewed newspaper's efforts to track down actual cases of Halloween sadism. Editor and publisher magazine concluded that almost every report was a hoax. There was warm, strange, and awful exception. Corsion retails will return in a moment.

3 days after Halloween in 1970, Kevin Toaston, a five-year-old boy from Detroit, collapsed and fell into a coma. Four days later, he died. The cause of death was a drug overdose, and the police had said Kevin's Halloween candy had been sprinkled with heroin. This tragedy was widely reported as an appalling case of Halloween sadism, and you can see why, after a growing drip, drip of newspaper warnings, the first fatal case of Halloween sadism had finally happened. Except the truth that gradually emerged was rather different. A few days later, the Detroit police announced that Kevin had not, in fact, consumed poisoned candy. It swallowed a capsule of heroin while visiting his uncle's home, and that was the state of play in the early 1970s. Every year there

would be ten or twelve reports of tampering with candy, hardly anyone was injured, and careful reporters had concluded that most of the incidents were fabricated. The tragic death of Kevin Toaston had nothing to do with Halloween at all. And then, on Halloween night in 1974, something happened. Something so terrible that even by the standards of cautionary tales, it's shocking. The evening started well enough for eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien and his 5-year-old sister, Elizabeth. They were strolling around the neighborhood in Pasadena near Houston, Texas, with their father Ronald, Ronald's friend Jim Bates and Jim's children.

It was something of a reunion. The O'Brien's had once been neighbours of the Bates family, but when he was tight, the O'Brien's had moved to an apartment in a less desirable neighborhood. Still, they were all together again now, tapping on doors, collecting treats. Timothy and Elizabeth had the planet of the Apes costumes, issuing traditional garb for something a little more modern. It was raining, but if you want the candy, you can't be scared off by that. They knocked on the door of one spooky looking house. Dark and perhaps deserted?

There was no answer. They ran off to the next house, leaving their father, Ronald, trailing behind. But Halloween treats come to those who wait. Ronald had lingered a little and emerged smiling with a hall of candy. The door had cracked open a few inches and an unseen stranger had thrust out a hand

with the treats. What treats? Why? Five large plastic tubes of fizzing candy powder, five giant pixie sticks. As the rain got heavier, everyone decided to head home. Ronald handed out the pixie sticks to the four children, then gave the last one to a child who knocked the door, sticks to the four children, then gave the last one to a child who knocked at the door, a fellow congregant that Ronald's church. The O'Brien family then waved goodbye to the Batesys and headed for home, little Timothy begging for a treat before bed. Ronald gave him the pixie sticks, but Timothy complained that the candy tasted bitter, so Ronald fetched some sweet cool

aid to wash it down. Then he turned out the light. Within minutes, Timothy had run to the bathroom, violently throwing up. Daddy, daddy, my stomach hurts. Timothy went limp. It was obvious that he was seriously ill. Timothy's mother, Danine, called 911. The ambulance was on its way, but it wasn't clear whether anything could save Timothy

O'Brien. The pixie sticks that Timothy had gulped down hadn't been spiked with ant bait or elaxative or even heroin. The top inch or so of the pixie sticks tube had been emptied of candy powder and filled up with powdered potassium cyanide, one of the most infamous poisons in existence. Cyanide blocks the body's ability to use oxygen. Gulp all the air you like,

the cyanide poisoned body can't absorb it as the victim's blood carrying oxygen that can't be used terms cherry red Timothy O'Brien an eight-year-old boy had swallowed enough cyanide to kill three grown men He died long before reaching the hospital long before reaching the hospital. But while Daniel Nobriam tried to absorb what had just happened to her boy, the police had an urgent question, where were the other four pixie sticks? Five-year-old Elizabeth had one, but had gone to bed without touching it. Two more were in the possession of the Bates children, and the child from church who had

knocked at the Bates' door had the last one. Those other tubes of candy powder might be just as deadly, they had to be found. The Bates children had gone to bed by the time the police arrived at Jim Bates' house. Fortunately, their mother had objected to the mess making pixie sticks and had told her children that have to wait until morning when they could eat the candy outside. The suspect treats were safely removed by the police and soon enough, they too were confirmed to contain cyanide. At two o'clock in the morning, when the police finally arrived at the house of the last child, Whitney Parker, the news of the cyanide triggered understandable panic at a frantic search. Where was that tube? Surely Whitney hadn't eaten it? Whitney's parents found him in bed, eyes closed, quite still, clutching the pixie sticks tube

to his chest. He was safely asleep, and the tube was unopened. Perhaps because Whitney had failed to prize open the treats crudely stapled end. It was, of course, poisoned too. One eight-year-old child was dead and that number could easily have been five. Who could have done such a thing? The police retraced the trick or treating route with Ronald the next day, but he couldn't remember any details. Ronald spoke to the press, telling them, I have my peace, knowing Tim is in heaven now. And then, the day after that, was Timothy O'Brien's funeral service.

His father, Ronald, sang the old hymn, blessed assurance, but changed the words. Instead of, this is my story, this is my song. He sang, this is Tim's story, this is Tim's song. The boy's little coffin sat there in the centre of the chapel. The congregation were weeping uncontrollably. Soon after, Ronald O'Brien and the police retraced the route again. Finally, Ronald remembered where he'd got the pixie sticks. Someone had opened the door of that house, just a crap.

Stuck out an arm, a man's arm, it was hairy, and offered the deadly tubes of candy. But when the police investigated, the occupants of the house had a solid alibi. He worked at nearby Houston Airport and had been on shift that Halloween. His colleagues backed up that story. His employer had the time

sheets to prove it. So, Ronald O'Brien's account just didn't make sense. Corsionary tales will be back in a moment. We're never going to stop worrying about our children, of course. But what exactly we worry about seems to change from decade to decade. Here's the latest fresh from Facebook warning about an epidemic of child abduction with that inevitable invitation to smash the share button 22,000 kids go missing a day 916 per hour never keep quiet about it keep sharing hashtag save our children And people do indeed keep sharing when I last checked just that one post had been shared about 40,000

times. In the 1970s, we worried about Halloween candy. In the 1980s, we worried that Satanists were running daycare centres. Today, it seems we worry about industrial-scale child abduction, 22,000 missinging Children a Day. My book, The Data Detective, argues that one of the most important steps to take when confronted with a statistic is simply to notice your emotional response and try to find a moment of calm. It's not easy to become when you're picturing gangs in vans with blacked out windows, cruising the streets of every neighborhood, looking for the next child to grab.

But if we can slow down, calm down, and think, we might not rush to hit that share button. We might notice that if 22,000 children really were going missing each day in the United States, that would mean children were going missing, at more than twice the rate at which children are being born. That seems unlikely. Our brains feed on stories, not statistics. Some stories are completely fictional, but they seize our imaginations anyway. The kindly old woman offering the plump, red apple, juicy yet full of danger, that's an image from Snow White, it's more than two centuries old, we'll never forget it. Other stories are based in reality. The abuser whose money and status and

connections shield them from scrutiny. They do exist. Jeffrey Epstein, Larry NASA, Harvey Weinstein. But on these foundations of truth, some people spin much grand offantices. Deep state gangs, kidnapping and enslaving hundreds of thousands of children all commanded by the pedophile masterminds who control the most powerful institutions in the world, our gut reactions can easily overwhelm all rational thought. But if we can stop and think, perhaps we can find more reliable statistics and take a moment to understand what they mean. According to the FBI, there were 425,000 reports of missing children in the US in 2018. It's a huge number.

But as the investigative journalist Michael Hobbs has explained, about half these cases were a custody dispute. One parent took the children away for the weekend and didn't bring them back on time, and the other parent complained to the police. Most of the rest were runaways, children unhappy with their families or foster families who left to sleep on a friend's couch. Often this would happen again and again, so the same child might be reported missing a dozen times a year. It's all very sad, but none of this matches the social media myth of the van with dark and windows cruising neighborhoods to look for children to snatch. The number of actual kidnappings in the United States by strangers or near strangers, it's

between 100 and 150 children a year. Even one would be too many, but thankfully it's very far from 425,000. It's also much less than the number of American children who die in car accidents more than 2,000 a year, or who are fatally shot, again more than 2,000 a year, or who die from abuse or neglect at the hands of their parents or primary caregivers, just under 2,000 a year. Children are much less at risk from predatory strangers than they are from cars, or guns, or their own families. Back in 1974 in Pasadena, Texas, the police received an intriguing call from a life insurance agent.

Whether you're aware, he asked that Ronald O'Brien had taken out insurance on his own son's life, eight days before Halloween, that he had insisted on a policy that would pay in full even if only the first quarterly premium had been paid, and that on the 1st of November, the day after Timothy's death, he'd called the agent to collect his money? No, said the police, they had not been aware of that. Joel Best had troubled publishing his findings at first. Academic journals were so convinced that Halloween sadism was real that when he published evidence suggesting that it was dramatically exaggerated, the journal editors just rejected it out of hand.

But he persisted, and eventually, in 1985, he published an article with a colleague. By then, Joel Best had found newspaper reports of 76 separate incidents of suspected Halloween sadism. There were no cases of children being poisoned by kindly looking old ladies or any other stranger. The two fatal incidents were Kevin Toaston's accidental heroin overdose, a tragedy that never had any connection to Halloween, and the death of Timothy O'Brien. Eight days after his father took out a generous insurance policy on his own son's life. As for the other 74 incidents, a mixture of minor injuries, near misses and hoaxes, mostly thought Joel best, hoaxes.

And while every year brings more reports of trouble, they either evaporate under scrutiny or turn out to involve very minor injuries or no injuries at all. I'm not making light of the dangers to children. I'm a parent, and like most parents, I worry about my children's safety. But I am trying to shed some light on which dangers should worry us. For instance, it's common for more than a dozen children every year to die in accidents connected to toys or baby equipment. Often by choking on a small part, a child is vastly more likely to be killed by their own toys than by candy poisoned by a stranger. Still unlikely mind you, still very unlikely, but looking squarely at the numbers, I know what I'd worry about more. Here's another

number. Between 4pm and 10pm on Halloween, children aged 5 to 14 years old are 4 times more likely to be hit and killed by a car than during the same hours on any other night of the year. That's according to a detailed analysis from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's four or five deaths a year in the US every year. Compare that to the number of children killed because of stranger poisoned their candy. to the number of children killed because of stranger poisons their candy. Not one, not ever. No one ever made a decision because of a number said the celebrated psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. They need a story. But the more emotional the story is, the less we're really thinking it all through.

Our misperceptions of the world matter. They matter because we end up scaring our children about things which are very unlikely to happen, such as being abducted by a stranger, while diverting our attention from problems that are bigger, but more mundane. And our misperceptions of the world matter when they provide cover for people who really do want to do harm. People like Ronald O'Brien. When the police in Pasadena, Texas began to look more deeply into the death of little Timothy O'Brien, they quickly discovered some unsettling facts.

That not only had Ronald O'Brien taken out life insurance on Timothy just days earlier, but that on the insurance documents, he'd forged the signature of Timothy's mother, Danine. Danine O'Brien didn't know anything about the life insurance. The police also discovered that Ronald O'Brien was in money trouble. That Ronald's friend friend Jim Bates had noticed him acting very strangely at the funeral. He was paying so little attention to his own son's coffin that he actually walked into it, that three people remembered

Ronald chatting quite recently about the toxicity of cyanide, and that he'd been at pains to confirm the lethal dose and to find a cheap supply. That scissors in O'Brien's house had fragments of pixie sticks plastic on the blades. Ron Aldo-Brien was arrested and charged with the murder of his son Timothy, and the attempted murder of his daughter Elizabeth, the Bates children, and Whitney Parker. He decided that he could murder his own eight-year-old son and risk the death of his own daughter and three other children, because he'd heard the stories about stranger danger at Halloween. He thought nobody would suspect him. All those urban myths about poisoned candy, they kept circulating and circulating,

until eventually they became a self-fulfilling prophecy. O'Brien's trial took place in the summer of 1975. The prosecutor, Mike Hinton, did not hold back. He ought to be damned for what he did. He declared, staring intently at the jury while pointing at O'Brien. I don't want you to forget for one minute he wanted to take those other kids with him. The jury agreed. After 46 minutes of deliberation, they pronounced Ronald O'Brien guilty.

He was sentenced to death, and in 1984, the state of Texas executed him. Joel Best is still updating his data. Approaching Halloween 2022, Professor Best still has yet to find a single example of a child killed because of stranger poisoned Halloween treats. But when you've finished listening to this podcast, what will you remember? Will you remember Joel Best's carefully compiled statistics? Or will you remember the horrific death of Little Timothy O'Brien? If your family is celebrating Halloween this year, enjoy yourself, make some new friends,

meet your neighbours, and do please make sure that your children take care when crossing the street. For a full list of the sources used in this episode, visit the show notes at TimHalford.com. Corsinary tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support for Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Halford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob

Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton, Carly McGleory, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniel Lacan and Maya Caning. Horsery Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show please remember to share, rate, and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page

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