The Candy Man

Criminology

Emash Digital

True Crime

4.7 • 7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On October 31st, 1974, the O’Bryan family set out for Halloween in Deer Park, just outside of Houston, Texas. Despite the rain, Ronald Clark O’Bryan and neighbor Jim Bates took their kids, four in total, out to trick or treating. But this Halloween turned out to be fatal for one of the O'Bryan children.

Join Mike and Morf as they discuss The Candy Man. Timothy O'Bryan ate a Pixy Stix that night, became extremely ill, and died. This caused a massive panic throughout the area. The police weren't sure who was giving out laced candy and how much was out there. People were shocked when the police figured out who perpetrated this heinous act.

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Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics.
0:05.9	Listener discretion is advised. Hello, everyone, and welcome. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 382 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson.
0:45.8	And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford. How you doing this week, buddy? I'm doing pretty good. How you
0:50.7	doing? I'm having a great week. I really am. My whole family has plans this
0:56.4	weekend to go to, you know, kind of one of those Halloween or October type pumpkin farms,
1:05.8	get some apple cider, looking forward to that. Yeah, that's always fun. The good part about fall. And, you know, obviously we down in Florida here, we still celebrate Halloween, but it's not quite the same because, you know, that cold fall air that you get up in the northeast, we just don't have that. So it's a little bit different, but we do have a lot of awesome, you know, trunk or treats and there's some really good
1:27.7	neighborhoods for trick or treat.
1:28.7	And so my kids are excited about it.
1:30.9	Well, let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts.
1:33.5	We had Sierra Mitchell and Carla Borgasen.
1:37.0	So great new support.
1:38.6	We really appreciate it.
1:40.1	Yeah.
1:40.3	Thank you so much for that support.
1:41.6	It really helps us out.
1:42.6	And for anyone else that would like to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash criminology to get started.
1:48.2	Well, let's go ahead and dive into this week's episode. And if you were listening at the very beginning, you no doubt heard that creepy organ music and long time listeners of the show know that that really only means one thing.
2:01.7	It's time for our annual Halloween episode, in which we cover a really creepy case
2:06.9	or a case that is connected to Halloween in some way.
2:10.9	And this year we have a good one for you.
2:13.3	We're talking about a sinister character called The Candyman.
2:16.9	Now, a lot of true crime listeners may immediately think of the serial killer Dean Coral.
	...

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