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Posted: 2023-10-31T12:00:39Z | Updated: 2023-10-31T12:00:39Z

This is an excerpt from our true crime newsletter, Suspicious Circumstances, which sends the biggest unsolved mysteries, white-collar scandals and captivating cases straight to your inbox every week. Sign up here .

For those who celebrate, Halloween is all about creative costumes, trick-or-treating, and debating whether candy corn is good or evil. Braver souls seek out scares by visiting haunted attractions or watching horror movies. But in some cases, spooky fun became overshadowed by tragedy.

Here are five terrifying true stories of murder on Halloween:

Eight-year-old Timothy OBryans father murdered him in Houston on Oct. 31, 1974, by poisoning his candy. While they were trick-or-treating, Ronald OBryan gave Timothy, his 5-year-old sister, and a neighbors son Pixy Stix paper straws containing tangy flavored sugar that hed doctored, filling the top 2 inches with cyanide. Before going to bed that night, Timothy was allowed to eat one of the candies in his goody bag, and he selected the Pixy Stix. His father watched while he poured the poison in his mouth, even giving him Kool-Aid to wash out its bitter taste . The motive? Life insurance policies hed purchased for each of his children. Timothy was the only one who ate the poisoned candy and in fact, the only child known to have been harmed by poisoned candy in spite of annual rumors and panic.

William B.J. Liske brutally murdered his father, William Liske, stepmother Susan Liske, and 23-year-old stepbrother Derek Griffin on Halloween night in 2010. When Dereks 16-year-old brother, who had been staying the night at their biological fathers, discovered the bodies the next morning, he at first thought it was a Halloween prank . (One day later in an unrelated tragedy, B.J.s aunt, Sue Dunmyer, died in a garage fire .) B.J., who had a documented history of mental illness, pleaded guilty to bludgeoning Derek with a claw hammer and then fatally shooting William and Susan. Evidence showed that Susan had been sexually assaulted prior to or after her death. B.J. killed himself in prison in 2015, more than four years after pleading guilty to the crimes he committed on Halloween.