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View documents and written acounts of Dr. McIntire’s historic battle with the FCC over the first-ever use of the “Fairness Doctrine” against his radio broadcasts.

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MURDER OF ATHEIST O’HAIR

Hated, Missing
by Joshua Benton
Toledo Blade, 10-10-99

 

Police Believe Atheist O’Hair was Killed For Money By Men With A Grudge

 
Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s most famous atheist, was ready to retire. Back in 1964, Life magazine had called her the “most hated woman In America” after she won a Supreme Court case stopping prayer in public schools.
 
For two decades, her abrasive personality made her a favorite of the talk-show circuit, debating ministers over the existence of God and assembling a multimillion-dollar empire dedicated to fighting religion in any arena.

 
But people lost interest in her during the Reagan years and the 1990s brought little hope of an atheist revival.


In her 7Os and suffering from diabetes, Mrs. O’Hair was in no shape to leap back into the religious war she helped create. “I have little or no hope about the country; she wrote in a May 1995, letter to Naomi Twining, an old high school classmate. “I think that it is going to be taken back to Medievalism. The American people are not politically sophisticated enough to manage an (alleged) democracy. Oh well, it’s been a good fight, even though a losing one.”
 
Madalyn Murray O’Hair was ready to give up the fight and prepare for the pleasures and pains of old age. Four months later, she vanished. Some surmised that an angry God had taken her; others said she had gone into hiding because she was near death and didn’t want Christians praying for her.
 
More cynical types suggested she had stolen millions and had run away to a retirement overseas. But federal authorities believe none of those scenarios are true. They say Mrs. O’Hair was kidnapped, murdered, dismembered, stuffed in a plastic barrel, and buried somewhere on a West Texas ranch.
 
A few weeks ago, more than four years after her disappearance, the man they think did the killing was sentenced to time behind bars, but on unrelated charges.
 
Mrs. O’Hair had long ago faded from the spotlight. It is one of her life’s bizarre ironies that it took her disappearance to make the world notice her one last time.
 
“Next year, it will be 40 years since my mother came into public view; said her surviving son, Bill Murray. And in that time, she’s gotten more attention from this than from anything else she did.”
 
Madalyn Mays was born on April 13, 1919, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Beechview to a Presbyterian family that was not particularly religious.


It’s not clear when young Madalyn started thinking about God and religion. After she achieved fame, she told several different stories about how she came to her beliefs. Sometimes she said she had been an atheist since age 6. In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1965, she said her eureka moment came when the family was living in Ohio. “I was about 12 or 13 years old’ she said.

In high school, Madalyn “was very assertive, very bright;’ said Stanley Schultz, who was then the student body president and now sells real estate in California. “But she was not a particularly attractive girl. She was sometimes the victim of classmates’ jokes: ‘Who are you going to take to prom? Madalyn Mays?’ “

 
After graduating from high school in 1936, Madalyn attended the University of Toledo, but only for a year. “My father moved a lot, and I went to whatever college was handy; she told an interviewer in 1964. She ended up attending the University of Pittsburgh, Howard University, and the South Texas College of Law, along with a total of four Ohio schools: University of Toledo, Ashland College, where she received her bachelor’s degree;
Western Reserve University; and Ohio Northern University, where she attended law school for one year.


Later in life, in her Playboy interview, she talked about her time at Ashland, a Brethren institution that required two years of Bible study for graduation. “It was a good, sound, thorough, but completely biased evaluation of the Bible, and I was delighted with it, because it helped to document my doubts; it gave me a framework
within which I could be critical;’ she said.


In 1941, Mrs. O’Hair eloped with a steelworker named John Roths, but World War II separated them two months after marriage. He joined the Marines and was sent to the Pacific; she went to Europe in the Women’s Army Corps. While in Europe, she had an affair with a married air corps officer named William Murray Jr., and in 1945 conceived her first child.
 
When she returned to Roths, she demanded a divorce and hoped Murray would leave his wife for her. He never did, but she took his name anyway. She became Madalyn Murray, and named her son William Murray III.

 
Over the next few years, Madalyn moved back to Ohio, then to Texas, and finally, in 1952, to Baltimore.
She met another man, who  fathered her second child, whom she named Jon Garth Murray despite the fact that her wartime lover was not the father.
 
It was in Baltimore, in 1960, that she found her true calling. Her eldest son, Bill, was enrolled at Woodbourne Junior High, where students were required to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the start of each school day.

 
Mrs. O’Hair, by that time an avowed and open atheist, decided to file suit against the Baltimore schools, saying that her son’s rights were being violated when he was forced to be around prayers in a public school.

 
Few noticed, until a Baltimore Sun reporter decided to do a story on her and her son. Within days, every major television and radio network was on the story. Mrs. O’Hair was a celebrity.
 
In 1961, a local court dismissed her suit, but she appealed to the Maryland Court of Appeals. She lost there too, leaving only one court to hear her case. When the suit reached the US. Supreme Court, the attorneys general of 18 states filed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing Mrs. O’Hair. On her side were an array of liberal and humanist groups, along with the National Council of Churches and several Jewish groups. On June 17,
1963, the court ruled 8-1, with Justice Potter Stewart dissenting, that school-sponsored prayer was unconstitutional. She had won.
 
After the Supreme Court decision, Mrs. O’Hair became a star. In truth, her role was not essential to the court’s ruling. The Supreme Court actually made its groundbreaking decision on another case, Abington Township vs. Schempp, and merely attached Mrs. O’Hair’s suit to that one.

 
Had Mrs. O’Hair’s suit never been filed, school-sponsored prayer would be just as unconstitutional as it is today. And it didn’t take an atheist to oppose school prayer: many believers of many faiths believed the court had made the correct decision in keeping religion and education separate.
 
But, to millions of Americans, Mrs. O’Hair had become the villain. Mrs. O’Hair didn’t mind. She took to calling herself “the most hated woman in America;’ and reveled in the seeming importance it brought her.

 
“My mother was constantly talking about how brilliant she was: ‘I’m Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a very important person!'” said her son Bill, who converted to Christianity in 1980.
 
She immediately set to filing more lawsuits. She tried to remove the tax exemption of churches; when she couldn’t win that battle in court, she succeeded in getting her atheist organizations declared tax-exempt.

  
By 1965, Mrs. O’Hair had moved to Austin, Texas, and made it the center of the many atheist organizations
she founded. She claimed that her main group, American Atheists, had more than 50,000 members, although more objective estimates put the total at 2,000 or 3,000.

 
But somehow,· with a small membership, her atheist groups managed to pull in substantial amounts of money, and some of it reached the O’Hair family. In 1986, she bragged about paying for the new 16,000-square-foot American Atheist headquarters with more than $1 million in cash.

 
At the same time, her abrasive manner alienated more than a few members of her organization. In 1980, even her own son Bill revolted, declaring he had found Jesus Christ and becoming a fundamentalist minister. She put her other son, Jon Garth, and granddaughter Robin into positions of power within the organization.
 
The mystery began on Aug. 28, 1995, when employees of American Atheists showed up for work at the Austin headquarters. “The Murray-O’Hair family has been called out of town on an emergency basis,” read a note left at the headquarters. Mrs. O’Hair, son Jon, and granddaughter Robin were nowhere to be found. An
atheist friend of the family stopped by their home, and found a half eaten breakfast on the table, and
Mrs. O’Hair’s blood-pressure medication left on the kitchen counter.

 
Concerned associates of the O’Hairs tried reaching them on Jon’s cell phone, and succeeded. Mrs. O’Hair told her callers that she was on unspecified business in San Antonio and that she shouldn’t  be contacted. She told them that everything was fine, but her friends told authorities they weren’t so sure.

 
“You could tell everything was not OK:’ said Ellen Johnson, now president of American Atheists. The last contact with the O’Hairs took place on Sept. 29. After that the phone was turned off. No one has heard from the three of them since.

 
Few noticed when Mrs. O’Hair vanished, because her star had long ago dimmed on the national scene. No one even filed a missing persons report until September 1996, when son Bill finally did.
 
Op March 24 this year, FBI, agents raided the Austin apartment of David Waters, a former office manager at American Atheists. They simultaneously entered the Novi, Mich., home of a man  named Gary Karr. Waters, 52, and Karr, SO, both have extensive criminal records.

 
Agents in Waters’ apartment were looking for, among other things, pieces of O’Hair’s jewelry, missing gold coins, and a 9 mm handgun. They didn’t find those, but they did find 119 rounds of ammunition.
As a convicted felon, Waters is banned from having weapons or ammunition, and he was arrested on weapons charges. At the same time, agents in Michigan found two handguns in Karr’s home, and arrested him on similar charges.

 
Neither man has been charged with anything related to the family’s disappearance, and no bodies have been found. But an affidavit  filed in federal court and unsealed on May 26 lays out a substantial circumstantial case against Waters and Karr. “


Here, according to the affidavit, is what agents believe happened to Mrs. O’Hair and her family: In April, 1994, more than $54,000 disappeared from the bank account of one of Mrs. O’Hair’s groups. A subsequent investigation showed that the money vanished when Waters wrote checks to himself from the account. 

 
In May, 1995, Waters pleased guilty to theft, and despite his lengthy, violent criminal record, received a light sentence: 10 years of probation, and an order to repay the money over a 10-year period. Mrs. O’Hair was flabbergasted at the sentence. She took out her anger in writing, penning a long article for the July 1995 issue of the American Atheist newsletter about Waters.

 
According to Waters’ girlfriend at the time, the essay enraged Waters. He began talking about wanting to kill the O’Hairs, to torture Mrs. O’Hair by pulling off each of her toes with pliers.
 
According to the affidavit, he recruited Karr, an old buddy from a prison stint in Illinois, along with a man from Florida named Danny Fry. Their plan: Kidnap the O’Hairs, force them to withdraw money from one of their bank accounts, convert it into untraceable gold coins, then kill them. According to the affidavit, they carried
out the plan.

 
Three days after the O’Hairs were last heard from, Fry disappeared as well. His body, with its head and hands chopped off, was dumped by a river east of Dallas. It went unidentified for more than three years.

 
In the month after the killings, Waters and Karr went on a spending spree, buying expensive clothes, jewelry and cars. Most elements of the government’s case are well documented through phone and purchase records
accumulated throughout investigations. by the IRS, the FBI, and local agencies. The major holes: no bodies and no weapon.
 
If Mrs. O’Hair is dead, it’s possible her body will never be found. If authorities are correct, it’s likely that only Waters knows where it is, and he has little incentive to talk.
 
• Distributed by Scripps Howard