Madalyn Murray O'Hair The New York Times

Table Of Content

• The Far Right Has Proposed a Twelve-Point Plan to Make the Texas House More Extreme
• O’Hair, Madalyn Murray
• Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood
• O’Hair filed suit over mandatory prayer, Bible reading in Baltimore schools
• Texas Ranch Searched for Body of Missing Atheist
• "The most hated woman in America"

Murray, through her various court appearances and public speeches, had become a savant at shaping her public image. She was the first guest on the Phil Donahue Show, and was combative from the start. In an audience made up primarily of middle-class women, she provoked angry rebukes with her antitheist barbs. She publicized her victory as a triumph against the oppressive hegemony of the church in Christian society. Unsurprisingly, she achieved celebrity status, though much of the attention was violently antagonistic.

The Far Right Has Proposed a Twelve-Point Plan to Make the Texas House More Extreme

O'Hair concluded that Waters was a dangerous person and that the courts were indifferent to prosecuting him as he deserved to be -- because he had stolen from atheists. Waters, in his 40s, was a slick-looking man with the piercing eyes of a fox. O'Hair knew he had a criminal record but she later claimed she didn't know just how bad it was. At first the O'Hairs only knew that their new office manager was obviously intelligent and well spoken and capable of more than working as a $7 dollar-an-hour typesetter. Later, some valuable bonds were stolen from the office safe. The O'Hairs suspected that the thefts were an inside job, but still, they entrusted Waters with the bank accounts and the keys while they went to California for a long-running legal dispute with another atheist organization.

O’Hair, Madalyn Murray

Others thought Madalyn had simply gone off to die, leaving Jon and Robin free to start over somewhere else. “Madalyn is just fine,” newly installed president Ellen Johnson insisted in October 1995. The party line, however, was that American Atheists was cash poor.

Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood

Still, she took his name, both for herself and for Bill III, who was born in 1946 and baptized a Presbyterian. Three years later, Madalyn led her son, her brother, Irv, and her parents, John and Lena Mays, to Houston, where she worked as a probation officer and attended South Texas College of Law. In 1952 they went to Baltimore, and two years after that she had another child out of wedlock, with a man named Michael Fiorillo. (b. 13 April 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; disappeared and presumed dead 1995?), atheist who successfully sued to prohibit prayer in public schools, and who gained notoriety for her spirited attacks against religion before mysteriously disappearing. In 1986, at the age of sixty-seven, O'Hair resigned as the president of the American Atheists. In an interesting twist of irony, O'Hair's first son William, the subject of the Supreme Court case that ended school-sanctioned prayer, had become a devout evangelical Christian.

He broke from his mother's non-religious beliefs at the age of thirty-four and had become the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition. This coalition's ultimate goal was to restore prayer in schools. O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray and her granddaughter Robin Murray O'Hair all went missing in 1995, along with $600,000 in gold coins. They were held at a San Antonio hotel by their kidnappers for a month after being abducted, erroneously believing that paying the $600,000 ransom would spare them their lives. Authorities found their mutilated remains on a ranch that Waters led them to more than five years later. Madalyn O'Hair fires an ex-con for stealing money from the American Atheists.

Her last words were, "I know you will do the right thing." The Supreme Court decision banning prayer in school enabled Madalyn to throw off the bondage of poverty and anonymity and gave her life a direction and a purpose. First though, she had to settle that bit of legal trouble with the Baltimore police -- she was accused of assaulting five officers when they came to her home to retrieve a runway teenager. (The teen was a girlfriend of Madalyn's oldest son, Bill). After successfully resisting an extradition order to Maryland, she settled in Texas, where she preached the gospel of the separation of church and state. The Austin Police Department, which in January was still claiming there was no evidence of foul play, watches as the feds grab the headlines in the city’s biggest missing persons case ever.

Texas Ranch Searched for Body of Missing Atheist

On June 17, 1963, the Supreme Court issued its ruling which upheld Murray’s appeal against Maryland’s educational system, with huge consequences. Despite public sympathy with the sentiment, “The Bible Better in School than in Court,” the Justices ruled that mandatory religious practices in public schools were unconstitutional. More than forty percent of school districts in the United States were now required to make significant alterations to their long-standing daily routines.

O'Hair, Madalyn Murray (1919–

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For one thing, his mother would be unable to resist the publicity her disappearance had generated. The most dangerous place to be was in between Madalyn O'Hair and a camera, he pointed out. Ex-con David Waters, the former office manager, was as willing as anyone to speculate on their disappearance.

"The most hated woman in America"

It was not the six-foot-two, dark-haired Jon, though his signature was on the title transfer (which was signed later, after the transaction had been made). The car was parked at the Warren Inn, a motel-apartment complex in northwest San Antonio; the man told Sparrow he could contact him by asking for “Jon” at Bonnie Jean’s Cocktails, a bar in the strip center across the street. When the seller delivered the Mercedes to Sparrow’s office, he was followed by a man and a woman in a pickup truck.

School authorities would not excuse him from saying it, so she sued the school board for violating the First Amendment prohibition of state establishment of religion. Murray v. Curlett went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where it was absorbed by a similar suit, Abington School District v. Schempp. On June 17, 1963, in a decisive 8—1 vote, the court kicked prayer out of the schools. "Even though she wasn't liked, she got people talking, and for that she deserves a place in history," said Dunavan. He said she remains an inspiration for atheists today, many of whom still feel alienated in a dominant religious culture. O’Hair, fired from her state job for alleged incompetence, spent much of the next decade filing lawsuits to remove Christianity from public life.

Just as the atheists’ remains were being consumed by the fires of cremation, William Murray’s plane nosed onto Texas soil. After six years of speculation, O’Hair’s former office manager admitted kidnapping and killing the three in a plot to steal $600,000 worth of gold. In January, 53-year-old David Roland Waters led investigators to a shallow grave in the ranchland outside San Antonio.

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By this time she was also using Murray as her own last name. The family disappeared from San Antonio in 1995 along with $500,000 in gold coins. Investigators believe they were kidnapped, robbed and killed, and their bodies were cut up and dumped on a ranch near Camp Wood, about 125 miles from San Antonio. One of the law enforcement officials was close to tears on several occasions. The details of the last days and hours of my mother, brother and daughter were so brutal that even men accustomed to violence were emotionally shaken. Baptists believe that upon death the fate of the soul is sealed.

Madalyn began an affair with William Murray during the war, and they had a child, William. She and Murray were never married, however, due to the fact that he refused to divorce his wife because of his strict Roman Catholic beliefs. Nevertheless, Madalyn began calling herself "Madalyn Murray." She studied at Western Reserve University and Ohio Northern University before attaining a law degree from South Texas College of Law around 1952.

In 1960, Murray filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Public School System (Murray v. Curlett), naming her son William as plaintiff. She challenged the city school system's practice of requiring students to participate in Bible readings at the city's public schools. The Court voted 8–1 in Schempp's favor, saying that mandatory public Bible readings by students were unconstitutional. Prayer in schools other than Bible-readings had been ruled as unconstitutional the year before by the Court in Engel v. Vitale (1962). In 2000, Karr had been sentenced to two life sentences for his part in the extortion and murder plot. He had previously served decades in prison for crimes including rape, kidnapping and armed robbery.