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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Later that month came the first hints of something darker. Evan Moore of the Houston Chronicle reported that on September 5, 1995, someone claiming to be Jon Murray sold Murray’s Mercedes to a San Antonio couple for $15,000 cash—$6,000 under blue book value. “He was in a hurry to sell it,” said the buyer, Mark Sparrow, who had responded to a classified ad listing Jon’s cell-phone number. The seller was about fifty, five foot nine, and stocky, with light, curly hair. 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. Sparrow later said that the couple could have been Jon and Robin.
In February 1998 MacCormack—who was working with a private investigator named Tim Young—reported that Jon had wired $600,000 from a New Zealand United Secularists of America account to a San Antonio bank via a New Jersey bank. The money was then used to buy gold coins—Krugerrands, American Eagles, and Canadian Maple Leafs—from Cory Ticknor, a San Antonio coin dealer. Ticknor had delivered $500,000 worth of coins to Jon on September 29, 1995; the rest, the dealer said, would come in a few days. Jon loaded the 100 pounds of gold into his car and said he would return for the balance. He never did. That afternoon he would make his last call to American Atheists. It was also revealed that Jon had flown to New Jersey eight days earlier, apparently to clear up a complication in the wire transfer. He had gone with another man, whose name, “Conrad Johnson,” was a wedding of the names of longtime AA members Conrad Goeringer and Ellen Johnson.
Nightline took the story national with a June 1998 show that relied heavily on the findings of Young and MacCormack. The family, it appeared, had stayed at the Warren Inn. Madalyn had even been in Bonnie Jean’s, the bar across the street. Bonnie Jean Davis told how she had helped Madalyn—who was using a walker—into the restroom one afternoon. The show also reported that Jon had bought a diamond for $6,665 on September 16 and that he had rented a car at the San Antonio airport on September 14 and returned it on September 30. Producers brought in a sketch artist to work with the Sparrows on a portrait of the shady Mercedes seller. The result looked like David Hasselhoff with a skin condition.
After the show aired, MacCormack, the bespectacled, bulldog-faced 23-year newspaper veteran who was rapidly becoming the star of the story, got a huge break. “You get a lot of goofy tips,” he says. “When the caller started talking about this guy who vanished, I didn’t take it that seriously. Until he mentioned Mr. Waters’ name. Of course, I knew who he was. That made it viable.” The vanished man’s name was Danny Fry. And he should have stayed in Florida.
DANNY FRY WAS A 42-YEAR-OLD SALESMAN, handyman, and con man, an outgoing sort whose biggest problem was that he drank too much and talked too much when he did. According to his family, he had left for Texas in July 1995 at the behest of his friend, David Waters, whom he had known when Waters lived in Florida in the late eighties. Fry’s daughter, Lisa, says her father was enticed by a job that Waters described as a “big deal.” Still, he was reluctant to go, and she says she had a “disgusting feeling” when she took him to the airport. Once Fry got to Texas he called often—from Waters’ apartment in Austin, where he lived for several weeks, and from a pay phone at the Warren Inn in San Antonio, where he said he was staying. But the calls got fewer, shorter, and tenser. “It was like he was sneaking calls to me,” Lisa says. His final call was on September 30, 1995, from Waters’ apartment, to Lisa on her sixteenth birthday.
Two days later, the headless, handless body of a man showed up on the banks of the Trinity River near Seagoville. He was on his back, legs together, arms outstretched. “It certainly was a cocky bastard who did this,” said Detective Robert Bjorklund of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. They don’t get a lot of murders in rural Dallas County, and they almost never get a headless, handless corpse. Sheriff’s deputies found a hint of blue fiber on the body, an African-American hair, and a footprint; a white luxury car was seen leaving the scene. There were no other clues. For three years the body lay in a pauper’s grave, its identity unknown. Soon after the anniversary of the O’Hairs’ disappearance, though, MacCormack saw a wire story about the corpse. He picked up the phone and called the sheriff. A DNA test proved his hunch: The body was Danny Fry’s.
It was getting harder and harder to be David Waters. MacCormack had already reported that, on September 16, 1995, eleven days after Jon’s Mercedes had been sold, Waters bought a white Cadillac Eldorado for $13,000 cash. When Jon’s credit and charge card receipts were found, they showed several cash advances, including $3,000 on September 14 and $7,400 on September 15. It also turned out that Waters had stayed at the Warren Inn right before moving to Austin. And MacCormack wrote that the Sparrows had made the closest thing yet to an ID on the seller of the Mercedes. For two years they had perused photos and mug shots (including those of Waters and Fry) but had never found a match—until shown a new photo. “He is a very likely candidate,” said Sparrow, “the best yet, but I’d have to see him in person to be positive.” The picture was of an ex-con who had been at an Illinois minimum-security prison when Waters was incarcerated there for seven months in 1986 and 1987. The man was doing time for aggravated kidnapping and armed robbery and served more than twenty years of a thirty- to fifty-year sentence. After getting paroled on March 31, 1995, he lived in Florida for a short period and then came to South Texas that summer. If the mystery wasn’t confusing enough, now it had a third man.
It also had a witness, sort of. Fry’s brother Bob said that Danny had written him from Texas in the summer of 1995: “The letter said that if he wasn’t back by a certain date, that meant something serious had happened,” he told MacCormack. “I should contact the authorities and bring in Dave Waters’ name, that Dave Waters planned what we did.” Bob claimed that he called Waters asking about Danny’s whereabouts and told him that his brother had sent a letter that he had not opened yet. He said that Waters flew to Florida the next day with another man and demanded the letter, but he told them he had destroyed it. When he finally convinced them he was telling the truth, they left. “One thing Waters said keeps haunting me,” Fry recalled. “He said, ‘Your brother drinks a lot. He’s got a big mouth.’”
SITTING NEAR THE POOL AT HIS APARTMENT complex on a balmy February day, David Waters looked like the kind of guy who had comfortably worn a leather jacket his whole life. He had a hard face and a scar on his right lip, yet he was polite and seemed to get along well with his neighbors. He wasn’t exactly religious, but he wasn’t godless either. “I think atheism is arrogance,” he said. “I consider myself an agnostic. I don’t know that there’s not a deity. If there is no God, if it’s an invention of man, I still see a good reason for the concept of God. God and religion give a lot of people hope.” He was smart and charming, like a hustler—an imperfect poster boy for second chances.
“One reason I really liked Texas,” he said, “is that it truly is a whole new country.” Waters had a lot to leave behind. In 1964, when he was seventeen, he and four teenage friends got into an argument in a car. He and the other three passengers beat the driver to death. Waters got thirty to sixty years and served twelve. Fifteen months after getting out, in 1977, he beat his mother with a broom handle and urinated in her face. At one point during the attack, according to the state’s attorney, he “began talking very crazily and said that she was a piece of garbage and kept repeating about people being stiffs and he was going to kill them all.”
Waters speculated that he was the focus of the O’Hair investigation because of his criminal record. He said he was frustrated and embarrassed about the suggestions of guilt. Yes, he had invited his friend Danny Fry to Austin, but there was no “big deal.” “Danny essentially disappeared as soon as he left Florida,” Waters said. “Apparently he had some felony things he was looking at over in Florida. He defrauded some old people in a condo scheme. He was talking about the economic situation in Austin, Texas. I told him this is the place to be. I said the unemployment rate is nil. I said if you want to work, make a buck, I said this is the place to be.” Fry stayed at his apartment, Waters said, and spent most of his time running around on Sixth Street.
About Lisa Fry’s claims, he said, “This is the same daughter who told me that this is not the first time Danny has done this and that if I talk to Danny to tell Danny to turn himself in and do his time.”
He said the sales of the two luxury cars were coincidental: “If I had been in a situation where one had anything to do with the other, I don’t think I would run out and buy a car.” He said he used cash because his credit was bad.
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