False Claims of Stranger Poisoning
In 1970, a 5-year-old boy from the Detroit area found and ate heroin his uncle had stashed. The boy died following a four-day coma. The family attempted to protect the uncle by claiming the drug had been sprinkled in the child's Halloween candy.
In a 1974 case, Timothy O'Bryan, an 8-year-old boy from Deer Park, Texas, died after eating a cyanide-laced package of Pixy Stix. A subsequent police investigation eventually determined that the poisoned candy had been planted in his trick-or-treat pile by the boy's father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who also gave out poisoned candy to other children in an attempt to cover up the murder. The murderer, who had wanted to claim life insurance money, was executed in 1984.
Read more about this topic: Poisoned Candy Myths
Famous quotes containing the words false, claims, stranger and/or poisoning:
“A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight.”
—Bible: Hebrew Proverbs 11:1.
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)