In her diary for 1972 Madalyn O’Hair wrote of her intention to run for governor of Texas, and then President of the United States. Her chances were slim. During the 1950s the population of America grew by 19 per cent whereas church attendance grew by 30 per cent. In the 1960s most opinion polls indicated that ‘all but a small percentage of Americans classified themselves as religious’. A survey at the end of 1972 showed that the most popular personality in America after President Nixon was Billy Graham. During that same year, Loretta Lee Frye’s petition in support of religious readings in space reached 10 million signatures. Even in 1973, NASA administrator James C. Fields said that the Manned Space Center was ‘sorely taxed’ because of the volume of letters still flooding into NASA in support of religious observance in space. It has been estimated that by 1975 NASA received more than 8 million letters and petition signatures in support of the readings. In To Touch the Face of God, an account of religion and the space race, Kendrick Oliver writes that ‘the magnitude, the duration, and even the existence of the correspondence campaign in defense of free religious expression in space has generally evaded the attention of historians’. The letters were warehoused, and then destroyed.
The day before the first moon landing, NASA scientist and evangelist Rodney W. Johnson told Christians Today that ‘if the space program can be faulted for anything, it is that it has ignored man’s spiritual yearnings’. Rusty Schweickart said of the Genesis reading that its intention had been ‘to sacramentalize the experience and to transmit what they were experiencing to everyone back on Earth’, as had Buzz Aldrin’s attempt to celebrate Communion publicly. But by choosing a Biblical text and a Christian rite, the attempts had been bound to fail. Kendrick Oliver said that ‘without realizing it, O’Hair had executed her most perfect provocation’; and yet, by being against any kind of spiritual observance, O’Hair had also ensured that the opportunity that Apollo had offered to find a new paradigm that included both science and religion also failed.
By opposing religion and mocking it, O’Hair ended up creating a poisoned version of what she was so against; her version of atheism was just another kind of fundamentalism. Two years earlier she had founded her own atheist church: Poor Richard’s Universal Life Church of Austin, Texas. She went to court to establish the church’s tax status. In order to comply with the legal requirements, she named herself bishop, and her husband, Richard, pastor and prophet. She said she was the Virgin Mary in her fourteenth reincarnation. At a court hearing she wore black and a clerical collar. She won her action. Like all churches in America, Poor Richard’s was now exempt from tax, and its members could deduct tax from their donations. She had made her point, but by always being in opposition to religion she had nothing to say that was positive and outward-looking. When the Supreme Court ruled that businesses should accommodate those who wished to observe a day other than Sunday as the Sabbath, O’Hair encouraged atheists to take Thursday off: ‘the day I led the children of atheism out of the wilderness of religion’. It was an amusing stunt that the newspapers covered but it did little to advance her vision of a secular America.
Madalyn O’Hair
The legal actions continued, some of them important, some trivial. If a judgment went against her, she just issued a few more writs. It was as if they streamed from her head like snakes. She sued the President in an attempt to end religious services at the White House: Murray v. Nixon, 1970. Her action against NASA had been filed in 1971: O’Hair v. Paine. She filed an action against Austin city council for beginning their council meetings with an opening prayer: O’Hair v. Cooke, 1977. She challenged the inclusion of the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ on US currency: O’Hair v. Blumenthal, 1978. After seven years, often putting in 16-hour days, she won an action against the state of Texas overturning the requirement that persons holding offices of public trust swear to a belief in God: O’Hair v. Hill, 1978. The ruling was a disappointment to her; she had wanted the action to go all the way to the Supreme Court. She had succeeded in making a belief in God no longer a requirement of state office in Texas, but if it had gone to the Supreme Court the requirement might have become a national one. She was unsuccessful in her attempt to prevent John Paul II from celebrating Mass on the Washington Mall: O’Hair v. Andrus, 1979. She was again unsuccessful when she tried to have the nativity scene removed from the rotunda of the capitol building in Austin: O’Hair v. Clements, 1980.
Just as the flow of letters to NASA in support of religious observance in space was drying up, O’Hair provoked another protest; this time unwittingly. A rumour began to circulate among the Christian Right that the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC, a body that oversees radio and TV coverage in all 50 states) was about to ban religious broadcasting across the board. Christian Crusade Weekly ran the headline: ‘Yes, she’s at it again.’ The FCC received 700,000 letters of protest in 1975. Though it was not in fact true – the FCC had no such plans – the rumour persisted. By early 1976 the FCC had received 3 million letters, and 25 million by the mid-1980s. Without uttering a word O’Hair had mobilized the new Christian Right. What O’Hair represented had been enough in itself.
By the end of the 1970s O’Hair had her own TV show, American Atheist Forum. It was carried on more than 140 cable TV channels. She was as famous as she had ever been.
Madalyn’s relationship with her son Bill had been difficult for years. In 1980, on Mothers’ Day, Bill converted to Christianity. When she heard the news, Madalyn disowned him. She said, as if casting a curse on him: ‘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.’ Bill’s daughter, Robin, also disowned him, and continued to live, as she had done since she was a child, with Madalyn and Madalyn’s other son, Garth. Richard had died of cancer in 1978. Her brother Irv, who never entirely escaped her gravitational pull, had died a virgin at the age of 71.
During the early 1980s Madalyn formed a bizarre partnership, bizarre even for her, with the self-proclaimed Reverend Bob Harrington, Chaplain of Bourbon Street, an ex-alcoholic, now evangelist pastor. Together they toured Texas in a bus provided by the pornographer Larry Flynt. Harrington and O’Hair were friends off stage, pretend enemies on stage. Harrington – handsome and charming – would warm up the audience, and then Madalyn, his stooge, appeared. They would engage in verbal battles. He would call her a bad smell that needed to be eradicated. The crowd would shout out ‘Satan’s Whore!’, or sometimes, worse, ‘Communist!’ The show regularly attracted crowds of thousands. Back-stage she was given 45 per cent of the collection: bags stuffed with dollar bills, typically taking home several thousand dollars a night. On occasion she was dragged off stage by armed police officers hired for the night. One time, the crowd got so riled up she had to flee, fearing for her life. The events got O’Hair and Harrington national attention and a spot together on the Phil Donahue Show. Donahue said it was one of his all-time favourites. They were in Newsweek. O’Hair was profiled on 60 Minutes. They appeared together on Good Morning America.
O’Hair got to know the Hustler publisher Larry Flynt personally. By that time he was paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair, having been shot by a sniper outside a courthouse in Georgia while on trial for publishing pornography. For a time he had converted to Christianity, encouraged by the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, Jimmy Carter’s sister. Under O’Hair’s influence he was persuaded to embrace atheism. She told him that he had turned to Christianity because of an iodine deficiency. Flynt described O’Hair as the most brilliant person he had ever met. When he decided to stand against Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election, he employed her as one of his speechwriters. She wrote polemics in support of his anti-war stance, his campaign against cigarettes and his belief in free speech.
When Flynt turned up in court during the trial of the sportscar manufacturer John DeLorean wearing diapers and swathed in the Stars and Stripes, he was given a six-month prison sentence for desecration of the flag. During his time in jail he gave O’Hair power of attorney over his $300 million publishing empire. Her attempt to transfer the corporation’s assets to American Atheists was blocked by Flynt’s brother. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1980s, O’Hair was wealthy. She bought a Mercedes for Garth and one for herself, for Robin a Porsche and a diamond necklace. They all went on holiday together to China for a month. In her diary she wrote, ‘Jesus Christ it is wonderful to be rich.’ But the chaos that had served her well was beginning to rebound on its author. Her life was out of control. She had developed diabetes and it was getting worse. Her mood swings were greater than they’d ever been. She and Garth fought all the time. He would call her a fat stupid bitch, she would call him a retard, and then pick up the phone to some potential donor and put on her sweetest voice. She described her supporters as ‘longhair freaks, filthy bodies, alcoholics, Jesus freaks’. She was lonely and depressed. At one point she had launched a dating service called Lonely Atheists. She confided to her diary: ‘I hope I have lived my life in such a manner that when I die, someone cares . . . I want some human being, somewhere, to weep for me.’ In 1991, at an American Atheists conference in Arizona, she turned her attention to the environment, proving that she was still in tune with the Zeitgeist. But by now her speeches were becoming wilder. The passion remained but she was often incoherent and inconsistent. ‘We simply have to change the system,’ she told a journalist. ‘It’s crying out to be changed . . . I love my country. I love the world. I love the people . . . We are taking our whole ecosystem down with us . . . the human community needs to be wiped out. What a pity we can’t have a nuclear war.’ In the same year, a set of commemorative stamps had been issued to celebrate the achievements of American Atheists, a first for an atheist organization. It was too little, too late.
On 31 January 1993 O’Hair took on a new employee, a typesetter named David Waters. She knew he had a criminal record but not how extensive it was. By then the O’Hairs – Madalyn, Robin and Garth – planned to flee to New Zealand, along with American Atheists’ millions. Garth had already begun transferring funds into a New Zealand account. Like O’Hair, Waters was self-taught. He was a keen reader of history and biography. He listened to NPR, was eager to learn about anything. He was also good-looking; just the sort of man O’Hair always complained was lacking in her life. For almost a year all went well, but by Christmas Waters had come to loathe his employers. While the O’Hairs were on holiday, Waters fired all the staff and absconded with $54,000 worth of cheques. At the subsequent trial, details of his past emerged.
As a young boy he had been sent to reform school. By the time they were teenagers, he and his brother had become hustlers. Aged 17 Waters murdered a boy of 16, driving over his legs then beating him to death. He had dug out the boy’s eyeballs with a can opener while he was still alive. He narrowly avoided being sent to the electric chair, and instead served 12 years. A year after his release he had been arrested again, for beating up his mother and urinating on her face. He got another year in jail. In 1982, the bullet-riddled body of a 36-year-old ex-con named Billy King was discovered. The last person to have seen him alive was David Waters, but the case against him was never proved. A year or so later, Waters was back in jail for beating up two friends, in an apparent road rage attack. Waters got bored easily and violence was his outlet. His girlfriend Carolyn said that he hated women and that all men feared him. O’Hair wrote up what had come out about Waters in an issue of the American Atheists newsletter. It was to be a fatal mistake.
Garth, Madalyn and Robin
On Monday 28 August 1995 the staff of American Atheists arrived to find a note pinned to the door. It said that the O’Hairs had been called out of town on an emergency. Inside were half-eaten dinners abandoned on the table. They seemed to have left in a great hurry. Over the next month the office was able to reach Garth on his cell phone. He sounded cool, but when Robin came on the line she sounded anxious. And then after a month there was silence. The missing funds suggested that the O’Hairs had fled the country, as indeed they had planned to do. The press reported their disappearance. The Austin Police Department did almost nothing about it. A spokesman was reported as saying, ‘It’s not against the law in Texas to be missing.’
A year later, the case was taken up by the San Antonio Express-News. The editor suggested to one of his longtime reporters, John MacCormack, that the story might be worth further investigation. MacCormack soon discovered that $612,000 was missing from American Atheists’ bank account. No one at American Atheists had reported the loss. One of the staff told MacCormack that during the month of phone contact with the O’Hairs Garth had asked for $600,000. She said that she had seen no reason why Garth shouldn’t have the money. MacCormack also discovered that Garth had subsequently commissioned a jeweller, for a fee of $25,000, to use the money to buy gold coins: a mixture of Canadian Maple Leafs, Krugerrands and American Eagles, each worth around $300. CNN, Time and NBC began to cover the story. The most likely explanation seemed to be that the O’Hairs had fled to New Zealand. The jeweller recognized Garth from photographs. He had turned up to collect the coins in person and had not appeared to be particularly anxious. By now the CIA and IRS were involved. Attention soon turned to Waters, who was arrested. But it was hard to bring a case against him. Where were the O’Hairs ? And if they had been kidnapped, why had Garth apparently been so calm? One of Waters’ defence witnesses, a preacher, said he had seen Madalyn eating pasta in Romania in 1997. In a later plea bargain, one of Waters’ accomplices, Paul Karr, revealed what had actually happened. Waters and Karr, along with another accomplice, Danny Fry, had indeed kidnapped the O’Hairs. And then, in a curious case of Stockholm Syndrome, Garth had bonded with Waters. They even went shopping together to buy clothes for Madalyn and Robin. Sometimes they went out drinking or to play video games. One night, returning to the apartment where the O’Hairs were being kept captive, Waters knew immediately that something was wrong. It turned out that Karr had lured Robin away from Madalyn and had raped her. She had suffocated while he was holding a pillow over her face to prevent her crying out. Madalyn and Garth were unaware that Robin had been killed. Now Waters knew that he had to get Garth to collect the gold immediately even though not all the coins had been delivered. The following day, once the gold was in the kidnappers’ possession, Waters and Karr killed Garth and Madalyn, most likely by strangling them. Fry panicked. Waters and Karr drove him to a riverbank near Dallas where he, too, was murdered. Karr cut off his head and hands and left the rest of the body. The O’Hairs’ bodies were cut up and put – along with Fry’s head and hands – into 50-gallon drums.
Two important question remained. Where was the money? And where were the bodies? In 1999, six years after the O’Hairs had first disappeared, a tip-off led MacCormack to one Joey Cortez and two accomplices. In exchange for immunity they admitted that they had stolen the coins. They claimed that they had found the gold in a storage unit. They had managed to get hold of the storage company’s master key, which opened lockers at a number of different locations. Inside the first locker they opened they found a TV, but when they couldn’t pawn it, they went to a different location and tried again. On just their second attempt they had come across the hoard of gold coins.
At the trial they said they had nothing left to show for it except for a three-year-old child, one of them said, which drew laughter from the courtroom. The money had gone on girls, big-screen TVs, black-leather couches, trips to Vegas, cars, guns, and on giving parties about which they had no memories. No connection was ever found between the gold thieves and the O’Hairs, nor between them and the O’Hairs’ murderers. The FBI investigation concluded that the coins had been found by accident as Cortez and his accomplices claimed. But there were some puzzling features. They had driven 100 miles to get to the second storage unit even though there were plenty of others nearby. And why had they only opened one unit in each location? Off the record, one of the accomplices told MacCormack that there were ‘just some parts of this we cannot reveal’.
The police retrieved a single gold coin, a Canadian Maple Leaf that had been made into a pendant for the aunt of one of the robbers.
Waters agreed to say where the bodies were buried in exchange for incarceration in a state jail rather than a federal one. What was left of Madalyn O’Hair was identified by the serial number on her hip-replacement joint.
Bill had to fight American Atheists to get possession of the bodies. A court ruling granted him custody of the bodies, but the ruling was being contested by the secretary of American Atheists, Ellen Johnson. She was flying in with a lawyer to try to put a stop to Bill’s planned Christian burial. Bill got the bodies of his mother, daughter and brother into the ground before she touched down. They were buried in Austin, Texas on 23 March 2001.
In 2002, George W. Bush tried to bring back prayer in public schools. He enlisted Bill’s support. His attempt failed.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair could be affectionate and funny, but she could also be withering, sarcastic and obscene. Like many charismatics, when she turned her gaze on you it was all-consuming. Phil Donahue, despite being a Catholic himself, greatly admired her. ‘She was difficult to love,’ he said. ‘She was loud. She interrupted you. She would show you no deference. She was a zealot, but she was right. If you listened to her she’d make you stronger . . . Madalyn was fighting against public servants who believed they had a pipeline to God, and once you’ve got somebody who talks to God and God talks back, you’re in trouble. Madalyn was victimized by the piety of America. She wouldn’t have received this abuse in Europe. They understand hypocrisy. In America, the piety rises to a messianic level. Those who would pray for Madalyn are condescending. They’re saying, “I’m better than you. I’ll take Jesus with me and I will win.” There is an anger in them that is the beginning of war.’
Madalyn had been a powerful voice speaking out against the destructive forces of religious fundamentalism in America, but by defining herself entirely in opposition to what she had sought to destroy, in the end she represented only nihilism.
It was no surprise that NASA had been institutionally incapable of rising to the opportunity of acknowledging the metaphysics of space travel, but Madalyn almost single-handedly ensured that the conversation never took place.