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Madalyn Murray O'Hair (April 13 1919 –
September 29 1995) was an American who founded American Atheists and campaigned for the
separation of church and state. She was murdered at age 76 by David
Roland Waters.
Biography
Madalyn Mays was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1919 to Lena
Christina Scholle and John Irwin Mays.[1] As an infant, she
was baptized into the Presbyterian church. She graduated from Rossford High School in Rossford, Ohio.[2]
She married John Henry Roths in 1941. They separated when they both enlisted for World War
II service, he in the United States Marine Corps, she in the
Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. In 1945, while posted to a cryptography position in Italy, she began an affair with an officer, William
J. Murray, Jr., and subsequently gave birth to a boy (William). Murray was a married
Roman Catholic, and he refused to divorce his wife. Nevertheless, Madalyn Mays divorced Roths and began calling herself Madalyn Murray. She
completed a BA from Ashland College. In
1952 she completed a law degree from South Texas College of Law, but she
never practiced law. On November 16 1954, she gave birth to
another son (Jon Garth Murray) by a different father.
Murray attended meetings of the Socialist Workers Party in
1957 while living in a Baltimore townhouse with her sons, parents and brother. Her
abrasive personality prevented her from holding long-term employment. In 1959 she applied for Soviet citizenship. The following year, having gotten no response, she and her two children traveled by
ship to Europe with the intention of defecting to the Soviet embassy in Paris and residing in the Soviet Union. The Soviets refused them entry. Madalyn and her sons
returned to Baltimore in 1960.[3]
In 1960, Murray filed a lawsuit (Murray
v. Curlett) against the Baltimore School District in
which she asserted that it was unconstitutional for her son William to be required to
participate in Bible readings at Baltimore public schools. In this litigation, she claimed that
her son's refusal to partake in the Bible readings had resulted in violence being directed against him by classmates, and that
administrators overlooked it (after his conversion to Christianity, William publicly stated that these were fraudulent
assertions; see below). In 1963, this suit (amalgamated with the similar Abington School District v. Schempp) reached the United States Supreme Court, which voted 8-1 in her favor, effectively banning
coercive public prayer and Bible-reading at public schools in the United States. Madalyn Murray became so controversial that, in
1964, Life magazine referred to her as "the most hated woman in America." Before
Life, Robert Anton Wilson had written an article with the same title for
Fact Magazine.
The founding of American Atheists and later
Following the Supreme Court decision, she founded American Atheists, "a nationwide
movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of
church and state, and addresses issues of First
Amendment public policy." She acted as its first CEO before later handing
that office on to her son Jon Garth.
In 1965, Madalyn married Richard O'Hair, a former Marine. Throughout the 1970s she publicly debated religious leaders on a
variety of issues, and also produced an atheist radio program in which she criticized
religion and theism. She filed lawsuits on many issues over
which she felt there was a collusion of church and state in violation of the Constitution. At this point, Richard O'Hair disappeared from her life. [citation needed]
In 1980, her son William converted to Christianity and was born again at a Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, where he took up work as a
preacher. This led to a permanent estrangement between mother and son. As she put it, "One
could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all
times...He is beyond human forgiveness."[4]
Disappearance and death
On August 27 1995, Madalyn, Jon Garth and Robin Murray O'Hair
(William's daughter, whom she had adopted) disappeared from the headquarters of American
Atheists, leaving a note implying an absence for some time and a visit to San Antonio,
Texas. In September, Jon ordered US$600,000 worth of gold coins from a San
Antonio jeweler but took delivery of only $500,000. No further communication came from any of the O'Hairs, and a year later,
William Murray filed a missing persons report.
Some speculated that the O'Hairs had abandoned American Atheists and fled with the money. One investigator working for
Vanity Fair, after looking at evidence presented to him by former employee
David Roland Waters, concluded they had gone to New Zealand. Other theories suggested
fundamentalist Christians had kidnapped the trio. Another rumor was that O'Hair had died
of natural causes, and that her remains had been secretly disposed of to prevent the possibility of a "Christian burial" by her
son. The O'Hairs were declared legally dead, and many of their assets were sold to clear up their debts.
Ultimately, a murder investigation focused on David Roland Waters [5], who had worked as an office manager and typesetter for American Atheists and who had previous
convictions for violent crimes and also one for stealing $54,000 from the organization. There were also several suspicious
burglaries during his employment there. Shortly after his theft of the $54,000 was discovered, Madalyn O'Hair had written a
scathing article about Waters exposing this and his previous crimes. The article was contained in the 'Members Only' section of
the American Atheists newsletter; the fact that Waters knew of it shows that a disgruntled member turned it over to him. Waters'
girlfriend later testified that he was enraged by O'Hair's article and that he fantasized about torturing her in gruesome ways.
Police concluded that he and his accomplices had kidnapped the O'Hairs, forced them to withdraw the missing funds, and then
murdered them, along with Danny Fry (an accomplice who was murdered a few days after the O'Hairs; his body was found with its
head and hands severed on a riverbed but remained unidentified for three and a half years). Waters eventually pled guilty to
reduced charges. Subsequently, in January 2001, Waters informed the police that the O'Hairs were
buried on a ranch in Texas, and gave them the exact location of the ranch and the bodies. When the
police excavated there, they discovered that the O'Hairs' bodies had been cut into dozens of pieces with a saw. The remains
exhibited such extensive mutilation and successive decomposition that identification had
to be made through dental records, by DNA testing, and
in Madalyn O'Hair's case, by her prosthetic hip.
The gold coins extorted from the O'Hairs were put in a storage locker rented by Waters' girlfriend. Waters had taken out
$80,000 and partied with his girlfriend for a few days, but upon coming back discovered that the remaining $420,000 had been
stolen. A group of thieves from San Antonio operating in that area at the time were in possession of a master key to the type of
lock which Waters used to secure the locker. In the course of their activities, they came across the locker, used the master key
to open it, and found a suitcase full of gold coins. They eventually spent all but one, which the police were able to
recover.[4]
There was some criticism of the Austin Police Department's apparent apathy
about the case. Austin reporter Robert Bryce wrote: "Despite pleas from O'Hair's son, William J. Murray, several briefings from
federal agents, and solid leads developed by members of the press, the Austin Police Department (APD) sat on the sidelines of the
O'Hair investigation...Meanwhile, investigators from the Internal Revenue
Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Dallas County Sheriff's Office are working together on the case....a federal agent was asked to
discuss APD's actions in the O'Hair case. His only response was to roll his eyes in amazement."[6]
Approximately 60 days after the disappearance of the Murray-O'Hairs, David Travis, Robin Murray-O'Hair's editorial assistant,
called the FBI but was bluntly told, "We're not interested." Travis then contacted the Austin Police Department only to be told
that he had no standing to file a complaint. The investigator with whom he spoke told him, "You cannot report my lawn mower
missing." [citation needed]David Roland Waters died in prison of lung cancer on
January 27 2003. [citation needed]
As an interesting side note, from the day he was sentenced to the day he died, David
Roland Waters spent 666 days being incarcerated (the 666th day being the day he died in prison)[citation needed]. He spent slightly more than 1.8
years in prison, out of a sentence of 20 years (only 9% of the imposed sentence for this crime) in federal prison imposed by US
District Judge Sam Sparks, which also included a 60 year sentence (only 3% of the imposed sentence for this crime) imposed by
Texas for probation violation, and a 8 year federal sentence (only 22.5% of the imposed sentence for this crime) for a weapons
charge (at the time, Roland was in-eligible for parole). Also, had he filed a federal appeal to his conviction, and he died
before having the appeals hearing, it is likely that his murder conviction of O'Hair would have been vacated, as it was done for
Ken Lay of the Enron scandal, as he would have not had the
ability to aid in his own defense during the appeals process.
In addition, he was also ordered to pay back a total of $543,665 to the United Secularists of America, the estate of Madalyn
Murray O'Hair, the estate of Jon Murray, and the estate of Robin Murray (O'Hair's adopted daughter). It is unlikely that any of
these debts were paid, as Roland had no ability to earn money while in prison, and died in prison as a result of being convicted
for O'Hair's murder.
Criticism
Howard Thompson (editor of the newsletter The Texas Atheist), in the course of an article claiming that O'Hair was the biggest
problem facing atheists in the United States and that she was not fit to be called any sort of "atheist-heroine," writes: - "The
stories told to me in Austin by those who had personal contact with Madalyn make one wonder how anyone could ever look to her for
leadership. She was vulgar, rude and abusive to those around her. The O'Hairs engaged in frequent screaming matches at AA
headquarters. The most frequently mentioned aspect of Madalyn was her dishonesty." The article also enumerates other charges
against her, including the disappearance of $8 million. [7]
Her own son disliked her intensely.
One critic was her son William, who eventually became a born-again Christian and preacher. His dislike of his mother is made
explicit in his writings [8]. He writes: "My mother
was an evil person ... Not for removing prayer from America's schools ...
No ... She was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of
their parents' inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock
certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company." [8]
Further criticism can be traced to the period between her disappearance and the discovery that she had been kidnapped and
robbed by Waters, when speculation in the press that she had absconded with her organization's money was rife. An example of this
is an article in Time magazine on February
10 1997 entitled "Where's Madalyn?" which states: "Rumors have long circulated that Madalyn
had stowed away millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. Elder son William Murray guesses "tens of millions." He says that
as long ago as 1978, Madalyn kept multiple secret accounts around the world, at least one of which contained hundreds of
thousands of dollars (declared funds from estates in 1995 came to about $340,000). Withers, the Murray-O'Hairs' legal inquisitor,
supports the hidden-money theory, volunteering that a Murray-O'Hair phone log that he had access to featured numbers of
Swiss banks."[9]
Urban legend
Madalyn Murray O'Hair achieved posthumous notoriety among users of the Internet through an
urban legend. An e-mail claimed "Madeline Murray O'Hare [sic] is attempting to get TV
programs such as Touched by an Angel and all TV programs that mention
God taken off the air" (the e-mail invariably misspelled O'Hair's name). It cited
a petition RM-2493 to the FCC which
had nothing to do with O'Hair, and which was denied in 1975, concerning the prevention of
educational radio channels being used for religious broadcasting [10]. A variant acknowledging her death was circulating in 2003, still
warning about a threat to Touched by An Angel months after the program's last episode had been aired. In 2007, similar e-mails were still being reported, twelve years after O'Hair's disappearance and long after her
confirmed death.[11]
Play
Between the time of O'Hair's disappearance and the discovery of the bodies, a comedic play called The Last Days of Madalyn
Murray O'Hair in Exile was written by David Foley. It was based on the premise that she, her son and her granddaughter had
stolen the money and fled to an island in the South Pacific [12].
Bibliography
- McGrath, Alister E., The Twilight of
Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, ISBN 0-385-50061-0.
Chapter 10 is headed The Bizarre Case of Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
- Ted Dracos, Ungodly: the Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Free Press, New York, 2003.
ISBN 978-0743228336.
See also
Footnotes
- ^ www.wargs.com/other/ohair.html.
- ^ NNDB. Madalyn Murray O'Hair bio. Retrieved on
2006-02-22.
- ^ Saints and Sinners, by Lawrence Wright, published by Vintage Books, 1993,
p.101. (cited in "Who
Speaks For Atheism" by Howard Thompson)
- ^ a b The Murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman.
- ^ David Roland Waters, findagrave.com
- ^ www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol18/issue40/pols.athiests.html.
- ^ Who Speaks For Atheism? The Problem of American Atheists, Inc.
- ^ a b Religious Freedom Coalition, Statement of William
J. Murray
- ^ Where's Madalyn?,
TIME, February 10, 1997
- ^ Federal Communications
Commission,Religious
Broadcasting Rumor Denied
- ^ http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_petition_2493.htm
- ^ Off Off Off Theater,Atheists in paradise
External links
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