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:
“Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,—I call it Dialectic,—which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For that is love’s nature that it lays claim to exclusive right and that all other claims are nil.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“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)