Famous crimes that happened on Halloween
Since the mid-1980s, sociologist Joel Best has tracked reports of poisoned Halloween candy, looking for the stranger who hurts a child. He has found no evidence of a single culprit.
That doesn’t mean October 31 has a clean record. A helicopter landed in a Dublin prison yard. Detroit logged 810 fires in three days. A bank robber showed up in a witch costume and left the hat behind.
Four documented cases follow, in order, from the 1970s to the 2000s. Each comes with a date, names, and a court or newspaper record.
A helicopter landed in the exercise yard during a football match
At about 3:35 p.m. on October 31, 1973, three Provisional IRA prisoners in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, Seamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon, and J.B. O’Hagan, were watching a football match in the yard when a helicopter dropped in. A man posing as an American film producer had hired it, and the pilot, Captain Thompson Boyes, was ordered at gunpoint to fly to Dublin. Mallon guided it down using semaphore.
Stunned guards reportedly thought it was a surprise ministerial visit. The Wolfe Tones recorded The Helicopter Song, which topped the Irish charts for 12 weeks.
Where did the poisoned-candy panic come from?
From a father, not a stranger. On October 31, 1974, Ronald O’Bryan of Deer Park, Texas, handed his children Pixy Stix he said came from a neighbor, and his 8-year-old son Timothy died. Investigators traced the cause to poison in the candy, and O’Bryan had recently taken out $40,000 in life insurance on his children. He was convicted and executed in 1984. The case made the stranger-with-the-poisoned-candy story feel real, but Best’s decades-long tracking hasn’t turned one up.
810 fires in three days
In 1984, Detroit firefighters responded to 810 fires over the three days around Halloween, a record, in a city that normally saw 50 or 60 in a 24-hour period. The night before Halloween had become a ritual called Devil’s Night, with abandoned buildings and houses set alight. A curfew for kids under 17 and more than 11,000 volunteers cut the count roughly in half the next year; by 1997, 35,000 volunteers answered the mayor’s call, and the three-day total fell to 142.
More recently, Deputy Commissioner Dave Fornell told The Detroit News the city logged just three fires on Oct. 30 and three on Halloween. “Parents used to have to keep their kids locked up the night before Halloween,” he said.
A witch costume, a dye pack, and 13 years
Vanessa Molina, 23, walked into a bank in the Olympia, Washington, area on Halloween dressed as a witch. A dye pack hidden in the cash exploded, and she ran off in a puff of smoke, leaving behind the witch hat and about $2,000. She’d already gotten away with about $11,500 from other holdups in the area, and she was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The bottom line
The Halloween crimes on record are smaller and stranger than the ones people fear: a helicopter, a family betrayal, a burning city, a witch hat left behind. The stranger with the poisoned candy still hasn’t turned up.
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