Madalyn Murray O'Hair
From Philosopedia
O’Hair, Madalyn Murray (13 April 1919 - 29 September 1995?)
O'Hair, the daughter of homemaker Lena Christina Scholle Mays and carpenter John Irwin Mays, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Beechview neighborhood and her parents had her baptized as a Presbyterian. She graduated from Rossford High School in Rossford, Ohio.
In 1941 after marrying John Henry Roths, the two separated because he enlisted into the Marine Corps and she into the Women's Army Corp. While in Italy and assigned to a cryptography section, she had an affair with a married Roman Catholic – William J. Murray Jr. – who refused to divorce his wife after she gave birth to a son she named William J. Murray, called "Bill."
She attended the University of Toledo in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and Howard University, then received her B.A. from Ashland University in 1949. In 1952 she completed a law degree at Texas College of Law, failed the bar exam, and never practiced.
On 16 November 1954, she gave birth to her second son, John Garth Murray, fathered by a boyfriend, Michael Fiorillo.
With her two children she intended to defect, trying to stay in the Soviet Union's Paris embassy and living in the USSR. When the Soviets declined, she returned to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1960 and, she told Playboy (October, 1965), worked as a psychiatric social worker for seventeen years.
The 1963 Supreme Court Decision
O’Hair in 1960 filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Public School System, complaining that her son William was being required to participate in Bible studies, that he had been bullied by students whose administrators condoned such. In 1963 the Court voted 8 to 1 in her favor, and this led to making coercive prayer and Bible verse recitation illegal in public schools throughout the United States.
Her efforts later blocked Buzz Aldrin from taking communion during the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, and she was instrumental in the striking down of a part of the Texas Constitution requiring officeholders to believe in a supreme being. Time once described her as the most hated woman in America.
When she refused to take an oath upon being called for jury duty in Austin, Texas, she was jailed. But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans in a two-to-one ruling found she had been jailed illegally, that jurors who are atheists are not required to swear an oath or any other religion-based premise that might violate their beliefs. She said,
- I want to be able to walk down any street in America and not see a cross or a sign of religion. I won’t stop ’til the Pope—or whoever the highest religious authority is—says that Atheists have a right to breathe in this world.
An Atheist Epic
Details of her life vary. In her 1970 autobiography, An Atheist Epic, O’Hair revealed that, when twenty-two, she married John Roths. During World War II, he joined the Marines, and she joined the Women’s Army Corps (claiming, in fact, to have been on Eisenhower’s staff). She had a son by an Eighth Army officer, William J. Murray Jr., a wealthy Roman Catholic who denied paternity of the son. She called the son Bill and raised him. Divorcing Roths, she attended South Texas College of Law, dabbled in Communism and socialism, then had another son, Jon Garth. She married an ex-FBI informer, a hard drinker by the name of Richard O’Hair. They lived in Texas with Bill and Bill’s daughter Robin, who had been born in Hawaii in 1965.
Bill Murray's Memory
“Basically,” her son Bill told Mimi Swartz in a 1997 interview, “this family was so dysfunctional anything could have happened. . . . She was a Marxist, I was a laissez-faireist.” In his 1982 My Life Without God, he detailed his differences with his mother and told of her hatred for her father. Madalyn, he revealed, once asked him to murder the old man. Murray, now a “born-again” Christian, runs a Texas ministry called the William Murray Faith Foundation, one which favors “pro-life, pro-family, anti-violence, anti-pornography, and creation science.”
Atheism's Trinity
With Bill gone from her family, the trinity of Atheism became Madalyn, Jon, and Robin. They set up as many as twelve organizations, including the American Atheists and the Society of Separationists. Also, there were the American Atheist General Headquarters, the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library and Archives, Inc., and United World Atheists. Her organizations received funds from around the nation, and numerous atheist chapters formed. In the late 1970s she claimed 70,000 families were on the mailing list of American Atheists.
In her childhood, O’Hair said she picked up the Bible “and read it from cover to cover one weekend—just as if it were a novel—very rapidly and I’ve never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism. . . . I looked in the kitchen at my mother and father and I thought, Can they really believe in all that?”
Jane Kathryn Conrad's Criticism
Of her many critics, Jane Kathryn Conrad was one of the most outspoken. She published a highly critical pamphlet, “Mad Madalyn,” divulging that Madalyn’s father had keeled over the night after the morning she told him to drop dead. Conrad provided other details, alleging that Madalyn received her Ph. D. from a mail order school called the Minnesota Institute of Philosophy, one that was operated by an atheist. Conrad described how Madalyn allegedly mistreated her second husband, O’Hair. And Madalyn’s atheism, Conrad claimed, actually was entirely a business-oriented entity, adding that Madalyn skimmed cash from contributions, fought with absolutely everyone and trusted no one, liked homosexuals only if they contributed money (and accused one of trying “to make a gay Atheist a day”), arranged for about fifty or sixty wills with a value of about $3 million to develop a Center, did not comply with the terms of gifts made to the Center enjoyed expensive travels, and enjoyed telling tasteless stories about Jews, Christians, and humanists. (Angry that James Hervey Johnson was not going to bequeath over $15 million to her, she wrote him, “You are a dying, defunct, discredited old man who will grow moldy in an unmarked grave.” He never gave in to her.) To one of her homosexual associates who complained to her, she said,
- I would expect this kind of literature to issue from a misogomist [sic]. I am a female head of an American atheist group. You are a cock-sucker.
Quips
Certainly she achieved journalists’ attention. In a 1965 Playboy interview she said, concerning sex, “I need somebody who can . . . slug it out, toe to toe, and I don’t mean a physical battle. I mean a man who would lay me, and when he was done I’d say ‘Oh brother, I’ve been laid.’ . . . . You think I’ve got wild ideas about sex? Think of those poor old dried up women lying there on their solitary pallets yearning for Christ to come to them in a vision.” When a believer challenged her to explain how she could possibly have been born without God’s help, Madalyn retorted, “My mother and father were fucking in bed one night.”
In her Why I Am An Atheist, O’Hair wrote, “Is mankind advanced or retarded by faith in god? Well, if history, with the crimes of the Inquisition, with the crusades, with all the religious wars, if this does not answer the question, we could demolish it by asking if a belief in Santa Claus would not do just as well. . . . Religion has caused more misery to all men in every stage of human history than any other single idea.”
In a 1990 speech, she declared,
- Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason, and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education, and science to take over.
The 1962 School Prayer Decision
Barbara Bernstein, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Nassau Chapter, has pointed out that O’Hair had no role in the school prayer decision of 1962, despite journalistic accounts to the contrary. “That 8-to-1 ruling in Engel v. Vitale,” Bernstein declared, “was a result of a suit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of five families in New Hyde Park, N.Y., who objected to a prayer composed by state officials for daily recitation. The Court ruled that even a nondenominational prayer was religious and that ‘it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite.”
Being on the American Humanist Association Board
Another critic, Lawrence Wright, wrote in Saints and Sinners (1993) that O’Hair is a liar and a highly frightened person. She resembles, he said, “a bowling ball looking for new pins to scatter.” Her critics as well as her supporters, in short, are numerous and include many whom she “excommunicated.” From 1962 to 1964, O’Hair edited Free Humanist and was briefly on the board of the American Humanist Association. According to Bette Chambers, O'Hair attended only a few meetings, then quit.
Talk Shows
Phil Donahue invited her to be on the first episode of his pioneering talk show, and she was on many other talk-shows, saying such things as
- I love a good fight. I guess fighting God and God’s spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn’t it?
and
- We have to live now. No one gets a second chance. There is no heaven and no hell. . . . You either make the best or the worst of what you have now, or there is nothing. Laugh at it. Hug it to you. Drain it. Build it. Have it.
Orin “Spike” Tyson said of her, “She went out in public and made it acceptable to at least say the A word. She put it on the map.
Succeeded as American Atheist Editor by Robin Murray-O'Hair
One of O’Hair’s provocative works was All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists, With All the Answers (1986). Long the editor of American Atheist, she was succeeded by Robin Murray-O’Hair, but the financial problems continued, the Internal Revenue Service investigated the various associations, and Madalyn eventually cut all ties with the atheist chapters she had worked to form. At a 1993 Atheist Convention in Sacramento, O’Hair was televised on C-Span for national coverage. She spoke on behalf of atheism’s being taught in schools and lamented the hold on education which organized religion has had over the years.
Son William Becomes a Baptist, Accuses His Mother of Evil
In 1980, her son William was baptized in Dallas and became a minister. Ted Dracos, in Ungodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (2004), wrote that she said,
- 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."
When she disappeared later and no one knew why, he told the Religious Freedom Coalition,
- 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....Regardless of how evil and lawless my mother was she did not deserve to die in the manner she did.
Time (10 February 1997) reported that Murray claimed his mother had illegally stashed "tens of millions" away. He attempted to gain "guardianship" over his missing mother and brother's assets, declaring they had stolen money, and said, "My brother had a tendency to fall for con games and con artists".
- In an episode of City Confidential that covered O'Hair, a former employee of American Atheists stated that another former employee had told him of a foreign bank account where O'Hair had deposited $18 million of American Atheists money. He noted that he had heard the story from someone and, therefore, that it was technically hearsay. He then said that he himself had seen a New Zealand bank statement showing a balance of $1.2 million of American Atheists money in New Zealand currency, which then translated to between $800,000 and $900,000 in American currency.
Atheists in New Zealand claimed they had no information about this and that she was never seen there by anyone.
The Mysterious Disappearance and Death
Mysteriously, O’Hair simply disappeared from public view in 1995. Left unanswered was whether she was kidnapped, killed, or had hidden because of her health, fiscal, or legal problems. An ex-employee, David Travis, has claimed that he accidentally opened an envelope from New Zealand Guardian Trust that contained a bank statement showing more than $900,000 had been deposited. Meanwhile, the San Antonio Express-News in December 1996 revealed that the United Secularists of America and American Atheists Inc. listed $627,500 in missing assets, “assets believed to be in the possession of Jon Murray, former secretary.”
Mimi Swartz in Vanity Fair (March 1997) wrote that Madalyn and Robin were spotted near the end of 1996 in Auckland, close to the New Zealand Guardian Trust, and that a receptionist identified Madalyn as a client. Schwartz concluded, “If the Murray O’Hairs are not in Auckland, they are most likely close by, or certainly have been in the past.” However, The New Zealand Herald claimed the O’Hairs were not in New Zealand as of January 1997, and Ellen Johnson claimed their passports were still in the United States on her desk.
In 1998, however, son Jon believed his mother and Robin had been forcibly taken from their home—they had left an unfinished meal and pets. For some reason $500,000 was spent on gold coins at the time of their disappearance. Police were said to be looking into a possible link that Danny Fry may have had in their disappearance, for he disappeared at about the same time. Fry’s nude, headless, and handless body was found in 1995 east of Dallas, Texas.
In a 1999 breakthrough, two of the office managers—Gary P. Karr, a former convict who previously had been an accessory to four homicides in Texas including one in which a corpse was mutilated; and David Waters—were arrested. They were suspected of being part of a plot to rob and murder Ms. O’Hair. A lawyer representing Waters, however, said that although Waters had served several years in an Illinois penitentiary on a murder conviction and later had pleaded guilty in 1994 to having stolen $54,000 from American Atheists Inc., he did not have the $500,000 in gold coins that belonged to the O’Hair family, that in fact Waters was about to be evicted from his apartment because of lack of funds. Karr admitted to helping to dispose of four homicide victims in Texas, including one with its head and hands hacked off.
Karr and Waters were indicted, but the case remained unsolved at the end of 1999. Until the three bodies could be located—those of O’Hair, her son Jon Murray, and her granddaughter Robin Murray—the case as of the end of 1999 had not been closed. “I have told Jon and Robin,” Madalyn O’Hair was quoted in a 1986 atheist newspaper, “that when I die they should gather me up in a sheet, unwashed . . . and put me on a pyre in the back yard. . . . I don’t want any damn Christer praying over the body. . . . I don’t want some religious nut to shove a rosary up the ass of my body.” (Assuming Madalyn did die, some jokers in her American Atheists group, whose membership dipped to 2,400 from 50,000 or more, began making bets as to the date of her “Second Coming.”
In 2001, the dismembered bodies of O'Hair, Jon Murray, and Robin Murray were found buried on a ranch in Texas. They had been sawed into dozens of pieces and could be identified only by dental records, DNA testing, and in Madalyn's case by her prosthetic hip. One of the persons involved but not the killer, David Waters, led the authorities to the site in return for a guarantee he would serve his time in a Federal rather than in a Texas state prison. In 2003, he died in prison of a liver disease.
William Murray buried them in an unmarked grave in Austin,Texas, refusing to disclose - even to American Atheists or any other group - details as to exactly where the site is.
An urban legend has grown up about O'Hair. Even in 2006 some internet mail has repeated past information that was untrue. Some atheists continue to attack O'Hair for her abrasiveness, whereas others lament her death and wish for a successor who could continue her aggressiveness upon behalf of non-theism and non-revelationism.
Correspondence
In 1976, she wrote the pseudonymous Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism,
- The [Naturalistic] Humanists deserve one another. I know that group and know them well. I don’t want any part of the warped thinking that goes on with them.
(See entries for John Vinson, the lawyer O’Hair allegedly bankrupted, and for Ellen Johnson. Also, see entry for Jon Garth Murray. Also see comments by Herbert A. Tonne.
{CA; E; EU, Gordon Stein; FUS; PA; The New York Times, 26 March 1999; Time, 10 February 1997; TYD; Vanity Fair, March 1997; WAS, 21 January 1976}
