DEER PARK, Texas -- The neighbor who accompanied condemned killer Ronald Clark O'Bryan on a deadly Halloween outing 10 years ago said there is no doubt O'Bryan killed his own son with poisoned candy and should die for it.
'As much as I would like to say I feel sorry for him, I don't. The death penalty is bad. But it's not as bad as that little boy's death,' Jimmy Bates said.
Bates' son, Mark, and daughter, Kim, were among five children who Bates said O'Bryan gave cyanide-laced Giant Pixy Styx while trick-or-treating Halloween night 1974.
Prosecutors said O'Bryan did it to collect $60,000 life insurance on his children.
O'Bryan, 39, after nearly 10 years on death row, is scheduled to die by lethal drug injections at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. He maintains he was made a scapegoat by a panic-stricken working class neighborhood near Houston.
Supreme Court Justice Byron White last week rejected an appeal for a stay of execution, but the request is pending before the full court.
O'Bryan's conviction and penalty have been upheld by eight state and federal courts in nine years. He was scheduled to die last Halloween, but the execution was stayed.
Bates said he granted an interview because he feared O'Bryan's frequent interviews from death row have made the public forget what happened.
'People don't see a picture of Tim's coffin. They don't think about that little boy with foam coming out of his mouth, dying on that bathroom floor,' Bates said.
'They turn on their TV ... and they say, 'That poor guy. The way he talks, they must have framed him,'' Bates said.
'They've got the right guy. I think he deserves to die because he gave Tim the death penalty,' he said.
Only Timothy O'Bryan, 12, ate the granulated cyanide and candy mixed in an 18-inch paper straw container.
O'Bryan testified he was at Tim's bedside when the boy ate the candy, which a doctor said contained enough cyanide to kill two grown men. Tim went into convulsions and died.
'You tell me -- what in your life have you heard of that is any colder than that?' Bates said.
'Here is a man who killed a trusting, defenseless, innocent 8-year-old kid for one reason -- dollars and cents. He was willing at random to pick some other kids that other people loved and kill them, too,' he said.
Bates, a shift worker for Houston Lighting & Power Co., lives in the same house where O'Bryan doled out the Giant Pixy Styx.
He remembers going to work after trick-or-treating and when his wife called to tell him of Tim's death and of his daughter's sickness, he drove home at '115 miles an hour.'
Kim only had a headache. She and her brother had been forbidden to eat the candy because it might mess up the house.
'I thought maybe it was a psycho or a dopehead,' Bates said of his initial reaction upon learning the candy was poisoned.
But it was not until Tim's funeral two days later that he became supicious of O'Bryan.
'He was not upset and he said something to the girl who was going to sing a song. He was not despondent at all,' Bates said.
'When the girl started playing on the organ, he walked right beside that open casket with his kid in it. He didn't pause. He didn't look. He didn't stop. He walked by. Right then, my brain clicked. I could feel it. I felt incredibly suspicious,' he said.
Police were baffled until they learned O'Bryan owed more than $20,000 and that he had bought another $60,000 in insurance on his children.
O'Bryan's wife at the time, Daynene, testified against her husband and believes he should die, Bates said.
Neither she nor her daughter, Elizabeth, has seen O'Bryan since the trial, Bates said.
'Daynene wants the execution to take place ... she is totally convinced of his guilt,' Bates said.
'Once he is executed, there will be a big blowup in the paper, but there will be no more Ronnie O'Bryan. It will die down and she can go on. There will be no new trial and no letters in the mail box and no TV coverage of the interviews and no chance of him contacting his daughter. She wants justice to be done,' he said.
'I don't know anybody who has had the pain that woman has had. She lost in one whack a husband and a baby.'
He said she took no insurance money, and remembered her say she would 'get by without it rather than have to spend money with blood all over it.'
