Madalyn Murray O'Hair The New York Times

Table Of Content

• Police officer hiring in U.S. increased in 2023 after years of decline, survey shows
• Even in Death, O’Hair Is in Middle of Battle as Atheists Seek Her Ashes
• Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s Legacy
• John Fetterman's White House Correspondents' Dinner Look Splits Opinion
• Dig in Texas Fails to Find Atheist Figure Or Her Family

Waters and Karr bought the best suits money could buy, ordered champagne, and flashed around their newly acquired Rolex watches. Most of the money was stashed in a storage locker rented by Waters's girlfriend, but they made a serious dent in the $80,000 they had on hand. Fry's fiancée confirmed that her man was susceptible to get-rich-quick schemes. "Danny was not the type of person to make $300 or $500 a week. He wanted to make a lot of money, and he kept telling me there was a big, big backer, a big construction thing, (in Texas)." Reporter MacCormack hitched up with a private investigator named Tim Young, who had decided that the search for one of America's most famous women and her family looked intriguing. Young obtained Jon Garth's cell phone records for that last, mysterious month in San Antonio.

Police officer hiring in U.S. increased in 2023 after years of decline, survey shows

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.

Even in Death, O’Hair Is in Middle of Battle as Atheists Seek Her Ashes

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.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s Legacy

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.

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.

John Fetterman's White House Correspondents' Dinner Look Splits Opinion

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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.

Dig in Texas Fails to Find Atheist Figure Or Her Family

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.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair interviewed by KVUE at American Atheist Headquarters (7215 Cameron Rd.) - 1987

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.

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The Supreme Court had prohibited officially sponsored prayer in schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) on similar grounds. Supreme Court had long recognized that the First Amendment to the Constitution was open to widely varying interpretations. Previous cases had confirmed this separation of church and state. For example, religious instruction was not allowed in public schools and religious tests could not be given to candidates for public office.

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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 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.

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.

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.