Episode 10: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Halloween is always such a fun time for kids, but not so fun for everybody, so I decided that during the month of October, I’m doing a series on murders that occur on Halloween. Listen in today as I share the stories about father killing son, and son killing father.

Ready? Let’s go…

SHOWNOTES:

•   I can remember waiting out by the road and my sister walking up this long sidewalk, of course, they had the outside decorated, didn’t look too scary, so we weren’t really initially too terrified. But they pulled her into the house and then made her screen before they gave her candy. I was completely freaked out, I’m like, Oh no, forget it, I’m not going in there. I took off running home, I don’t care if they’re giving me a whole snickers bar, I’m not going in, so I ran home. That’s one way to save money on candy because all the kids are going to run away, and you might get one or two that aren’t afraid, that are going to actually go inside and scream. I mean, now I’ll look at it and laugh, but that would never fly these days, because if someone pulled your kid into their house… The SWAT team would be there. (02:12)

•   So dad reached in, pulled out a Pixie stick and actually loosened the powder by rubbing it around in his hands and poured it into Timothy’s mouth, and then gave him a drink of Kool-Aide. So Timothy immediately started vomiting and actually died on the way to the hospital, at this time he was eight years old. So the story was that Ronald, the dad, was actually about $100,000 in debt, so prior to this, he had taken out life insurance policies on both of the kids, $20,000 life insurance policies. Literally, like Timothy dies on October 31st and on November 1, the very next morning 9am, Ronald’s on the phone with a life insurance company trying to collect on the policy. Come to find out he had also gone to a friend who worked at a chemical plant and asked a lot of questions about potassium cyanide and how much of it is needed to actually kill a human and different things like that. But the story of what happened is, the kids had all knocked on the door at a house and no one answered, they weren’t home. So the kids ran next door to another house while Ronald had four giant pixies in his pocket that he had laced with potassium cyanide, and he actually folded the end over and stapled them shut. He caught up with the kids and he’s like, Hey, you all have some rich neighbors, and he put a giant Pixie stick in each of the four kids bags. (04:59)

•   So William Jr, who went by BJ, was the son of William Liske, and William married a lady named Sue who had two sons, Devin and Derek. Susan and William got married back in 01, and it’s always hard when you try to merge two families, especially when there are young children, it’s just very, very challenging. And so this case is no different, the father kind of found himself torn and struggling between his relationship with his wife and his relationship with his son. So Susan’s son Devin was older, and he came home one day after church and he had spent the night with his dad. He went to play some video games when he got home, and then he started realizing the house was really quiet, it was Halloween, and he thought that everybody would be up and getting ready to go trick or treating or just getting ready for the excitement of Halloween. But it was really quiet. So he made his way to his parents room, they were both covered in a quilt, and he started speaking to them and they didn’t speak. So he went over to his mother’s side of the bed and shook her, she didn’t respond. When he pulled the blanket off of her and William, he saw blood. (08:26)

•   So that’s another murder that happened on Halloween. I found those two very interesting, one where dad killed his son and one where the son killed the dad, as well as the rest of the family. Of course, not to say that only bad things like this happened on Halloween, because we all know that that’s not true. But I thought just concentrating on these murders that occurred in October, specifically on Halloween Day, would be very interesting for this series. I know that a lot of these are cases that we don’t hear of every day, or cases that haven’t been on the news, and so I like to touch on stories that you don’t hear so much about, and stories that are new news, instead of going over stories that we all know, and things that we’ve all heard before. Again, two very interesting cases, I’m looking forward to doing research on more Halloween deaths. I know that we’ve all seen the movie Halloween and all of the sequels, I think there’s 11 now and then there’s a new one coming out on… I think October 14th of this year, 2022. But we all love the story of Michael Myers, who was committed to a sanitarium as a child because he murdered his sister Judith, and then 15 years later, he escapes and stalks and kills people in this fictional town in Illinois. And of course, all of his killings occur on Halloween, which is when all the films take place, but I am one of those people who’s still going to go to the movie theater and watch every single sequel, because even though it may be like the one before, I can’t miss it. (13:34)

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