Re:It's Me, the Person Putting Drugs in the Halloween Candy ...
by voxadam on Saturday October 28, 2023 @04:53AM
(#38048258)
I'd argue that the case of Ronald Clark bares little resemblance to the imaginary case of some random crazy person who decides to poison or otherwise harm a bunch of random kids for no obvious reason. Ronald Clark had a clear motive, profit, a motive absent in all the apocryphal stories this piece is satirizing.
Re:It's Me, the Person Putting Drugs in the Halloween Candy ...
by OfSanguineFire on Saturday October 28, 2023 @06:46AM
(#38048748)
As horrible as that story is, I don’t think that fears about poisoned candy go back to that alone. In the 1980s there were a number of real examples of the general American public being poisoned – for example the Chicago tylenol murders[0] and the salmonella attack by the Rajneesh (Osho) cult[1], Because the USA is such a low trust society in general, it’s only to be expected that people’s fears would settle on the candy given out by strangers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta...
He was fairly quickly identified as a suspect and then caught. Somehow over the years this story of a shithead scumbag father murdering his child morphed into the idea that a stranger would adulterate candy for the fun of it, which as far as I am aware has never happened. Unless the original poster isn’t lying which would likely be able to be substantiated fairly easily as they clearly knew which house gave out the apples so the perpetrator would be easily identified. Or maybe we’re supposed to believe they found a razor in their children’s candy and just let it go without reporting anything to the police or media, who would obviously pounce on the one time in history this urban legend finally came true aside from a sociopath father trying to pull insurance fraud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan