It's Halloween Halloween 1974, Deer Park, Texas.

30 year old Ronald Clark O'Brien and friend Jimmy Bates

will take their kids trick or treating.

Later that night, little 8 year old Timmy O'Brien would be rushed to hospital and die.

This is true. Grab a pumpkin and pull up a broomstick. This is True Crime Island Halloween edition. I'd like to thank Lisa and Shevon for suggesting this story both of them selected

the same one funny enough. Now when I was a kid we didn't have Halloween in fact it's a fairly

recent thing in Australia I don't even know if we really do the trick or treating thing now or if we just use the

night to get dressed up and drink.

We used to have a firecracker night.

But I do know that the trick or treating thing is big in the US of A. But it goes

even further back to the 16th century where in Ireland and Britain people would get dressed up

and go door to door asking for food. I mean they go,

I top of the day to you, mom, and could you spare a treat for a poor common man and my tree children?

And the reply would be, oh take these turnip treats and be gone with you or something like that. Anyway, for our Scottish listeners and there are a few along with the Irish you call

trick-or-treating guising and in some Scottish places it's called Galishans or I don't know I can't do a Scottish

action I'll try Galishans but tonight I want to tell you the story of the candy man or as others would call him the man who killed Halloween.

This guy, his name was Ronald Clark O'Brien.

He was born on October 19, 1944.

He was married to Danine with two children, Timothy born in 1966 and Elizabeth born two years later.

He worked as an optician at Texas State Optical Company.

And funny enough, he was also a deacon at the local Baptist church where he sang in the choir. In 1974 the O'Brien family were in quite a difficult

financial situation. They were behind in several loans and had been forced to sell their home just to get by.

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