Hello, I'm Daven Hiskey, you're watching the TodayIFoundOut YouTube channel.
In the video today, we're looking at whether anyone has actually ever poisoned or put razor
blades or needles into Halloween candy.
Remember your mom sorting through your Halloween candy as a kid, looking for signs of ‘tainted’
candy laced with poison, needles or razor blades?
It turns out, unless she was just using it as an excuse to steal the good candy before
you got it, she was wasting her time.
You are more likely to get attacked by a samurai sword wielding bear while trick or treating
than be poisoned by a stranger.
Further, it's more likely that your Halloween candy will be poisoned or otherwise tampered
with by one of your parents or family members than a stranger.
Think about that while your mom is "checking out" your candy before letting you eat it.
So why all the worry?
Because the news media needs something to talk about and there's nothing better for
ratings than saying something like "Is your child's Halloween candy poisoned?
Find out the deadly truth at 11!"
Further, while many children die directly after Halloween from non-candy related things
(after all, people die every day), if there isn't an apparent cause the week following
Halloween, many-a-sensationalized story gets widely publicized with poisoned Halloween
candy generally being blamed.
(There are numerous instances of this happening.)
This isn't all bad in theory.
I mean, if there is even a chance that some child's death was poisoned-candy related,
the police (rightly) encourage the news media to tell parents in the area to get rid of
their children's Halloween candy because it might be poisoned.
But when it turns out the death had nothing to do with Halloween candy, most media outlets
tend to have moved on from Halloween stories, so either don't report a retraction or don't
make it the headline like when they claimed the death was from candy.
Thus, the perception that poisoned Halloween candy is a rampant problem embeds itself in
the popular psyche, going all the way back to at least 1970 when the New York Times reported
"Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend...
may bring them more horror than happiness," which proceeded to tell parents all about
how the candy could potentially be tampered with, even though there had never been an
instance of this actually happening at the time.
So what about more recently?
According to the author of Halloween Sadism: The Evidence, professor of sociology Joel
Best from the University of Delaware who's been studying this since 1985, he hasn't yet
been able to find one single instance of a child dying as a result of candy given them
by a stranger on Halloween.
Certainly, such reports pop up every now and again (since 1958, he's found about 78 such
instances, including being connected to 5 deaths), but they were all debunked once the
matter was investigated by police in each case, and most of them were simple hoaxes.
For instance, one child, Best says, "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.
Of course, the youngster had applied the poison himself."
If you were paying close attention, you perhaps notice I said "dying as a result of candy
given them by a stranger".
It has happened once before that someone poisoned candy and gave it out to children with one
child dying.
In 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan of Texas died after eating a Pixy Stix laced
with cyanide after trick-or-treating.
Clearly trick or treating is unsafe now, right?
I mean, he trick or treated, then died from candy someone gave him.
Case closed.
Except, it wasn't candy a stranger gave him.
O'Bryan's dad, Ronald, was trying to kill his kids, so put the cyanide laced candy in
their bags.
The senior O’Bryan was about $100K in debt and close to having his car repossessed.
His solution?
Suddenly take out about $60,000 worth of life insurance policies on his two children, then
given them both the poison candy to try to collect on the policies.
What could go wrong?
I mean, there's nothing at all suspicious there...
Needless to say, the police had him as prime suspect number one as soon as they learned
these details.
After the investigation and trial, the dad was convicted of murdering his son.
His daughter survived the ordeal thanks to the fact that she simply didn't eat hers.
Timothy wasn't so lucky as Ronald had made sure he ate the tainted candy just before
tucking him into bed.
But this wasn't quite the end of it.
In order to divert suspicion from himself, O'Bryan had also slipped the poisoned candy
in a few other children's Halloween bags without them knowing.
(It's thought four others received the poisoned Pixie Stix), presumably hoping that if several
children died, it wouldn't look nearly as fishy.
Like his daughter, the other children also didn't eat their Pixy Stix.
Upon investigation, none of the kids could remember any place they went giving out Pixie
Stix, but did have contact with O'Bryan, so the evidence further pointed to him being
the poisoner.
Needless to say, being a resident of Texas, where the state policy for any extreme crime
is essentially, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out", despite the fact that all the
evidence against him was circumstantial- though very compelling- O'Bryan was executed a decade
later via lethal injection: the poisoner was poisoned.
While not the outcome he’d originally hoped for, I guess he did at least get out of having
to pay off his debts…
Before O’Bryan’s tragic Halloween exploits, in 1970, there was a case of a family that
tampered with candy after a child died, to cover for a family member.
The 5-year-old in question was a Detroit boy who ate a large amount of heroin his uncle
had hidden.
The boy died four days later.
The media at the time, of course, reported it was a case of Halloween candy poisoning.
In the media's defense, in an attempt to divert attention away from the uncle, the family
had sprinkled some heroin on some of the child's
Halloween candy and claimed that's how the boy wound up ingesting the drug.
Upon investigation, the truth came out.
As far as other illegal substances go, in 2000, kids in a San Francisco neighborhood
got a trick mixed in with their treats when they found Snickers candy bar wrappers stuffed
with marijuana.
Needless to say, depending on their age, I'm guessing some of the kids weren't too upset
about this.
;-)
But was this intentional?
Police traced the pot to a homeowner who was confounded by the accusations.
It turns out the man worked in the “dead letter office” at a local postal facility,
and when he found a bag of Snickers in a lost package, he brought them home to give out
as treats.
He hadn’t realized that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to put pot in the packages
and reseal them in an attempt at smuggling pot through the mail.
So as far as the actual non-hoax instances of poisoned candy given out on Halloween,
that mostly sums it up.
We have one instance of someone actually doing this, though mostly just trying to kill his
own kids and the other kids not actually getting the poison from trick or treating, but via
the man slipping it into their bags without them noticing; one accidental giveaway of
some pot; and one kid who simply ate a stash of his uncle's heroin.
So that's poisoning.
What about razors and needles?
There are verified reports of sharp objects being placed in random trick-or-treaters’
candy, although these incidents are exceptionally rare (under 100, even including the hoaxes
and pranks).
In nearly all of these cases, the sharp objects were found to have been placed in the food
item by a relative or friend, usually as a prank.
From the poisoning and this, it would appear kids should be fearing what their families
and friends are doing to their candy more than strangers on Halloween.
;-)
In fact, despite the fact that this has been reported as a widespread problem since the
late 1960s, the first known confirmed case of a person intentionally giving out candy
with sharp objects embedded to random children didn't happen until the year 2000.
49 year old James Joseph Smith did stick needles into Snickers candy bars as a prank and give
them out to kids.
While several children bit into the candy, the only injury was to a teenager who was
pricked by one of the needles, but did not require any medical attention.
Smith was charged with "adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness".
In another non-family related poking- in 2008, candy from a Florida dollar store was found
to have metal shavings and metal blades embedded in it.
An investigation revealed that the candy (Pokémon Valentine's Day lollipops) was manufactured
in China and the foreign objects are believed to have gotten into the candy at the factory
accidentally.
So while the instances of both the poisoning and embedded needles are not zero, they are
virtually zero when you consider the many millions of kids that have trick or treated
since the early 20th century.
So- faith in humanity restored.
In the end, there has only been one death as a result of either of these things and
a stranger wasn't involved.
On the flip-side, statistically- and not surprisingly- children are four times more likely to be
struck by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year.
Yet another instance where we humans tend to obsessively worry about extremely unlikely
things, while conveniently ignoring the fact that for most of us the most dangerous thing
we do in our lives, we do just about every day without worrying about it at all- ride
in automobiles or on bikes and cross or walk along streets on foot.
Bonus Fact:
While your children's Halloween candy probably doesn't contain poison, the apples you likely
have in your kitchen do.
You see, apple seeds contain cyanide.