Has Madalyn Murray O’Hair Met Her Maker?
God only knows. In the meantime, FBI agents dig up a ranch in South Texas, an ex-con with a violent past sits in jail, and atheists everywhere happily adjust to life without the “most hated woman in America.”
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INTO THIS HOUSE OF PAIN AND PARANOIA walked David Waters, who had served time in Illinois for murder, battery, and forgery. In the early nineties he saw a commercial on TV with the tag line “Texas. It’s Like a Whole Other Country.” He needed a change, so he ordered the brochure, liked what he saw of the Austin area, and moved there.
In February 1993 Waters, then 45, answered an ad for a typesetter at American Atheists. He later wrote how he had “visions of an environment rife with intellectual debate and youthful philosophizing . . . ” Instead he got fear and rumors—of foreign accounts, hidden assets, and U.S. Marshals coming any day now. Things got tenser when a computer containing the library’s catalog was stolen. Then, in January 1994, more than $60,000 worth of bearer bonds were taken from the safe. Waters, who says that he was trying to cover himself in case the authorities did come, began to poke around the files in Madalyn’s office. “There was a lot of information that validated certain suspicions,” he says. “There was a whole lot more going on than any of us realized.”
Madalyn and Jon had run afoul of so many AA members that they finally had to get outside help. They found it in Don Sanders, a gay activist and phone-sex peddler in Houston who was dying of AIDS. “I came across this one file labeled ‘Confidential,’” Waters says, “and I see all these fax transmissions between Jon and Don Sanders.” The faxes concerned fake IDs, sailing dates for ships bound for the South Pacific, the possibility of Robin teaching overseas, and Sanders’ efforts to help the O’Hairs move the library to Houston. Leslie Perez, a longtime friend of Sanders’, says he was privy to even deeper secrets: “Don told me they transferred somewhere in the millions of dollars abroad.”
According to Waters, in the spring of 1994, as the Truth Seeker’s racketeering trial was just getting under way, Jon approached him about helping to hide $100,000 by cashing checks and sending the money to him in San Diego, where he and Madalyn and Robin would be at trial (Jon couldn’t do it himself because he was under surveillance by a Truth Seeker private eye). Waters, who had been appointed AA’s office manager in the trio’s absence, agreed to do it for a fee of $15,000. At Jon’s behest, he says, he laid off the staff and got to work—but after he’d cashed a few checks, Jon stopped calling him. Waters panicked, thinking he was involved in something he could no longer control, and resigned. The O’Hairs called the police, claiming Waters had stolen $54,415. Waters turned himself in, took a lie-detector test (passing, according to Vanity Fair), and eventually pleaded guilty to theft to avoid the life sentence he could have received as a habitual offender. He was given deferred adjudication, ten years’ probation, and ordered to pay restitution to AA of the $54,415, a figure cut to $15,000 after the DA’s office saw the faxes Waters had taken.
In March 1995 David Travis came across a letter to Jon from a New Zealand bank, along with an account statement listing a balance of more than $900,000. A loyal soldier, Travis felt betrayed. He and the handful of remaining AA employees had been working so hard, and Madalyn had been lying all along about her finances.
The old lady was in trouble. When former AA member Keith Berka saw her that spring, “she was poring over her books, and she told me, ‘I have a lot of big problems, and I can’t get out of them.’ She was very preoccupied with something.” She was very sick too. “I didn’t think she had six months,” Berka says. Travis says that in the last few weeks he was there, Madalyn’s feet had swelled up so painfully as a result of her diabetes that she couldn’t wear shoes, and she had to use a wheelchair or a walker to get around.
More than ever before, Madalyn, Jon, and Robin were alone together. In early August 1995, they went on a vacation to Virginia. They returned to Austin and bought plane tickets for a September picket of the pope in New York. On August 28 AA employees came to work and found a note: “The Murray-O’Hair family has been called out of town on an emergency basis. We do not know how long we will be gone at the time of the writing of this memo.” When it became clear that this was no overnight expedition, AA employee Spike Tyson went to their home. He says he found Madalyn’s blood pressure medicine on the kitchen counter and a half-eaten breakfast on the table. On August 29, the Griffith Small Animal Hospital, which had boarded the family’s dogs many times, got a call from Robin, who was crying. She told the receptionist that the O’Hairs had to leave town on a family emergency, but she didn’t have time to drop off the dogs. The hospital agreed to come pick them up. Robin never returned for them.
For the next month, all communication with the O’Hairs—who claimed to be “on business” in San Antonio—was conducted via Jon’s cell phone. “They were being very cagey,” AA member Ellen Johnson told Time. “You couldn’t get a straight answer. They were lying about a lot of things, that was obvious. I was screaming, ‘What the hell is going on. Are you OK?’ And they’re saying, ‘Just calm down. Everything’s OK.’ Everything was not OK. Robin was totally disturbed. You could hear it in the way she talked.” Johnson was especially spooked after her one conversation with Madalyn during that month. “I’ve talked to her for years,” she said. “If you were to talk to your mother, you would know when something was wrong. Something terrible had happened.”
Several times, callers said, the phone was answered by an unidentified male who handed the phone to Jon. Murray’s last call to AA headquarters came just after noon on September 29, 1995. Then the phone was turned off. The O’Hairs were never heard from again.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. —2 Timothy 4:7
SHE HAD VANISHED, AND NOBODY seemed to care. The most hated woman in America had become just another celebrity has-been.
Some people close to the atheist movement figured the O’Hairs had fled their financial and legal troubles. They were living it up somewhere, most likely New Zealand, with all that money sitting in foreign accounts—“Tens of millions,” Bill Murray speculated. Others thought Madalyn had simply gone off to die, leaving Jon and Robin free to start over somewhere else. Madalyn was fond of saying, “I don’t want no gawddamn Christers ramming a cross up my ass and burying me somewhere.” She once wrote in AA’s newsletter that she had told Jon and Robin that when the time came, “put me on a pyre in the backyard.” Still others floated theories of foul play that were whimsical (UFOs) or amusingly paranoid. (“Off the wall, I think the Vatican did it,” said Arnold Via. “The Vatican or the CIA. Someone with enough clout to cover it up.”) For their part, officials of American Atheists insisted that no money was missing and that the trio was on an extended business trip. “Madalyn is just fine,” newly installed president Ellen Johnson insisted in October 1995.
The Austin Police Department seemed to agree with Johnson and showed no sense of urgency when David Travis contacted them in the spring of 1996. He was told by a detective, “You can’t report my lawn mower missing”—in other words, only a family member can file a missing persons report (the APD insists anyone can file such a report). Bill finally did so in late September 1996. The APD passed it on to Detective Stephen Baker of its Missing Persons—Juvenile Unit. A few days later Robin’s Porsche was found at Austin’s Robert Mueller airport. The APD found nothing suspicious about it or anything else connected with Madalyn’s disappearance. In early 1997 the department released a statement that read, “We’ve already given it more attention than a case of its type because of her notoriety.”
If the police weren’t interested, reporters and private investigators were. In early December 1996, when John MacCormack of the San Antonio Express-News got hold of American Atheists’ 1995 tax returns, he found forms that alleged $625,000 was missing and “believed to be in the possession of Jon Murray.” The account had been a “trust fund,” Ellen Johnson explained, the bulk of which was “generated through wills”; the interest was eventually going to be used to run AA headquarters. The forms also reported holdings of $259,013 in “New Zealand Government Stock.”
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