Madalyn Murray O'Hair

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Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1983.
Born	April 13, 1919 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	September 29, 1995 (age 76) Austin, Texas, United States

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.

1 Biography
2 The founding of American Atheists and later
3 Disappearance and death
4 Criticism
5 Urban legend
6 Play
7 Bibliography
8 See also
9 Footnotes
10 External links

[edit] 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, 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 she 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 (now Ashland University). 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, her 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 dubious intention of defecting to the Soviet embassy in Paris and living 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, Maryland School District in which she claimed it was unconstitutional for her son William to participate in Bible readings at Baltimore public schools. She further went on to claim that her son's refusal to partake in the Bible readings had made him the victim of violence from other classmates, violence that she claimed was overlooked by administrators. (Her son William later publicly averred that her claims of him being a victim of violence were fraudulent; 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 in her opinions 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. It was the article in Fact Magazine that had prompted Life to run their article.

[edit] 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, another ex-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 troubled 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." [2]

[edit] 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 $600,000 (USD) worth of gold coins from a San Antonio jeweler but took delivery of only $500,000 (USD). No further communication came from any of the O'Hairs, and one year later, William Murray filed a missing persons report.

There was speculation 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. (Or, as she put it, she was afraid that religious relatives might "stick a crucifix up my ass."^[4]) 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[3], 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 David 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 Waters 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 which were 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 $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.^[5]

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 can't report my lawn mower missing."

David Waters died in prison of lung cancer on January 27, 2003.

[edit] 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 enumerates other charges against her, including the disappearance of $8 million.) (Who Speaks For Atheism? The Problem of American Atheists, Inc.[4] )

Significant amounts of criticism of O'Hair can be traced to her son William, who eventually became a born-again Christian and preacher and whose extreme antipathy towards his mother is made explicit in his writings [5]. 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." [6]

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 organisation's money was rife. An example of this is an article in Time Magazine, 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 a relatively paltry $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." [7]

[edit] 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.[8] 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 2006 similar e-mails were still being reported, eleven years after O'Hair's disappearance and long after her confirmed death.

[edit] Play

Between the time of O'Hair's dissappearance 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. [9]

[edit] 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.