Ronald Clark O’Bryan was born on October 19, 1994. He lived in Deer Park, Texas with his wife Daynene, son Timothy, and daughter Elizabeth. O’Bryan worked as an optician. He was also a deacon at the Second Baptist Church where he sang in choir and ran a local bus program. O’Bryan was convicted of killing his 8-year-old son, Timothy O’Bryan on Halloween 1974.
On October 31, 1974, O’Bryan took his two kids out to trick-or-treat in a neighborhood in Pasadena, Texas where his neighbor and his neighbor’s two children accompanied them. They visited a house in which the owner didn’t answer, which made the kids impatient, so they ran off to the other house as the neighbor went with them. O’Bryan stayed back but eventually caught up with them and came back with five 21-inch Pixy Stix, which he handed to both the neighbor’s kids, his children, and a 10-year-old boy whom he recognized from church. Before bedtime, he told his kids that they could each have a candy before they headed to bed. He encouraged both of his kids to eat the Pixy Stix, (since both of his children were his primary targets) in which Elizabeth refused to take but Timothy did. O’Bryan helped Timothy open the candy as Timothy said it was stuck, and once he tasted it, he complained that it tasted really bitter and gross, not like a normal Pixy Stix at all. He eventually went to sleep where he soon woke up complaining of stomach pain and ran straight to the bathroom, where he vomited and began convulsing and foaming at the mouth. The Pixy Stix Timothy had consumed was laced with potassium cyanide, and he ingested enough cyanide to kill two grown men. Timothy died on the ride to the hospital less than an hour after consuming the candy.
The police had already been suspicious that O’Bryan was the one who did it. He had told the police that he didn’t remember the house where he got the Pixy Stix. They became more suspicious because the O’Bryans had only gone to two houses on Halloween night and they found out that none of the houses they went to were giving out Pixy Stix. He then took the police to the house that he ‘allegedly’ got the Pixy Stix from, which was the house that didn’t answer the door. They brought the owner of the house in for investigation where they then ruled him out as a suspect because he had over 200 co-workers confirm that he had been at work that night. The police then investigated more on O’Bryan, where they found the life insurance policies he had been taking out on both of his kids. The police also learned that he called the insurance company the morning after Timothy’s death to ask about the money that he would be collecting. They also learned that he had gone to a chemical supply store to buy cyanide not too long before Halloween. They suspected that he gave the other children the poisoned candy to cover up his crime. They arrested him for his son’s murder on November 5, 1974.
O’Bryan’s reasoning behind plotting the death of his kids was that he needed insurance money. At the time, he was in more than $100,000 in debt. In January 1994, he took out $10,000 of life insurance policies on both of his children. He took out another $20,000 not long after, and before the death of his son, he took out another $20,000 on policies for both of the kids. He was doing this in hopes that both of his children would die from consuming the Pixy Stix, from which he would receive all the money from the insurance policies.
Timothy’s death was very unfortunate and sad and was something most parents would never wish upon their kids. On March 31, 1984, O’Bryan received the lethal injection, where he took his last breath at 12:48 a.m.