UnGodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair [Hardcover]

Ted Dracos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2003

Obscene, belligerent, obsessive, and brilliant, the infamous and outrageous Madalyn Murray O'Hair succeeded in becoming "America's Most Hated Woman." Now award-winning journalist Ted Dracos reveals the incredible true story of the life and murder of the woman who changed the religious habits of an entire nation.

As the woman who won a longshot, landmark Supreme Court case to ban prayer in public schools -- and also the millionaire murdered for her ill-gained money -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair was one of the most powerful personalities of the twentieth century. Investigative reporter Ted Dracos presents an amazing account of O'Hair's life -- a story that is rare in the annals of crime and is truly stranger than fiction.

With impeccable research based on thousands of pages of court records, nearly one hundred interviews in fourteen states, and never-before-released documents UnGodly traces the self-anointed atheist high priestess from her public skirmishes with the law through her remarkable legal maneuverings and her schemes to siphon off enormous sums of money from the foundations she created. O'Hair's private life proves as bizarre as her public life. UnGodly also explains for the first time the full story of the kidnapping and murder of O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter -- a grisly multiple murder masterminded by a genius ex-con who hoped to pocket nearly a million dollars worth of loot in a pitiless and cunning plot.

Fearless, combative, and domineering, O'Hair led one of the most unforgettable -- and almost unbelievable -- lives in American history. UnGodly -- a seamless blend of biography and murder mystery -- is a chilling portrait of a fascinating, complex woman whose life finally became a living hell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the notorious atheist who launched the Supreme Court case taking prayer out of America's public schools, was also the victim (along with her son and granddaughter) in a brutal Texas murder that went unsolved for years. Dracos, a print and TV journalist who has consulted for America's Most Wanted, reviews the case in full true-crime mode, the prose purpler with every page. But in a departure from genre conventions, the book heaps more abuse on the victims than the killer. It's one thing to deflate the "godless Joan of Arc" legend built up around O'Hair by discussing the shortcomings in her legal arguments or speaking candidly about her pervasive bigotry, but those revelations are just a warmup for gratuitously cruel swipes at her physical appearance and lurid intimations of lesbian incest. (There's even a brazen assertion that her husband was paid to marry her by the FBI so they could keep tabs on her.) For all its excesses, though, the narrative handles the family's disappearance and the subsequent investigations well, describing how an ex-convict finagled his way into O'Hair's inner circle and manipulated her and her finances, making it look as if O'Hair had fled the country. The ruse was good enough to fool the local police (portrayed here as bumbling incompetents) for years, until an investigative reporter and a private eye began to uncover the details. The book's pulp sensibility, complete with fevered imaginings of O'Hair's thoughts, may obscure the subtleties of her life, succeeding only in its main priority of unraveling the mystery behind her death.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair has a long and complicated backstory. In 1960, O'Hair sued the Baltimore school board for requiring her son to say prayers in class. The case wound up in the Supreme Court, and in 1963, O'Hair won a bigger victory than she initially had sought: prayer was banned in public schools across the country. That same year, O'Hair founded the American Atheists, the country's first organization devoted to atheism. Thirty years later, she hired a man named David Waters, who would later plead guilty to stealing money from American Atheists and the O'Hair family. Soon after that, Madalyn, her daughter, and her granddaughter were kidnapped and murdered. In January 2001, David Waters pleaded guilty to the crimes. It's an intellectually stimulating, convoluted, and emotionally draining story. O'Hair was a complex person, committed to her beliefs and unbending to criticism, and Dracos, a veteran investigative journalist, deftly walks the fine line between biography and true crime, telling the story vividly and dramatically but without stinting on detail. Given its subject matter--the battle between church and state--the book could have wandered off on numerous tangents, but the author keeps to the spine of the story, giving us as much of the sociopolitical context as we need, but not enough to distract us. One of the best true-crime sagas of recent years. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Edition edition (October 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743228332
• ISBN-13: 978-0743228336
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #970,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ted Dracos (1945-2011) was a journalist in the areas of science and social policy, and was the author of UnGodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More "True Crime" than "Biography", October 13, 2004

By 

Kelley Hunt (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: UnGodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Hardcover)

Although this book does give the chronological story of MMO's life, it is written in the sensationalistic style typical of true crime books; that is why I say it is more "true crime" than "biography". For 30 years MMO was the reigning goddess of atheism in America. Her fatal flaw was her contempt for humanity in general, not just Christians. Using MMO's diaries & atheist newsletter, the author lets us know her opinions of the people in her life. Her mother was a "dumb broad". Her office workers at her atheist headquarters in Austin were "scum, derelicts, lumpen proletariat" (the rest of the words she used -including racial slurs- might possibly be deleted by amazon.com if I included them here). Her oldest son, who converted to Christianity was a "post natal abortion". Her financial supporters were "gutless bastards". As noted in her diaries, she had a special dislike for Jewish people. It seems the only people she had kind words for were those who acquiesced to her domineering personality.

The author has a lot of unkind words for people too, at one point remarking that Bill Murray's "homely" wife Susan wore thick, black-rimmed glasses "of a sort that a mean-spirited librarian might wear". (I'm not sure why the author singled out librarians for this insult.) There is a photo of Susan in the book and as far as I am concerned she has very pleasant features and I believe the glasses she is wearing were considered fashionable at the time. I think the catty remarks are unnecessary and take away from the quality of the book.

At the time of MMO's disappearance I was living in Austin. I remember reading in the paper a speculative article that she had died and her son and grand-daughter had spirited her body away to someplace where Christians could not pray for her soul at her gravesite. Apparently nobody, not even the athiests cared enough about the abrasive and arrogant MMO to bother trying to find out what happened to her. The police seemed to have little interest in the case, and it took Bill Murray a year to file a missing persons report on his mother, half brother and daughter. It took a newspaper reporter, John MacCormack, and a private investigator, Tim Young, to initiate the investigation that would lead to the arrest and conviction of Waters and Karr for murder.

One issue that I would have liked for the author to explore more fully was why Bill and Susan turned their daughter Robin over for MMO to raise. Neither Bill nor Susan seemed to like MMO, so why would they allow MMO to raise their daughter? If they had not done so, she would probably still be alive today.

This is a very uneven work, still it is interesting and hard to put down due to the "true crime!" style prose that has a tendency to "hook" readers and hold their attention throughout the book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sordid tale of the life and murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, September 2, 2004

By 

Paul Tognetti "The real world is so much more... (Cranston, RI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: UnGodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Hardcover)

She was frequently described as "America's Most Hated Woman". The mere mention of her name would repulse a large segment of the population. Any number of adjectives (or expletives for that matter) might describe this woman. She was arrogant, smart, vulgar, domineering, outrageous and crooked to mention just a few. In "Ungodly: The Passions, Torments and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair" author Ted Dracos traces the career of this most unikely American icon.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair came out of nowhere in 1960 to challenge the tradition of daily prayer in the public schools. It was perhaps the first shot in the cultural war still being waged across this country even as we speak. O'Hair succeeded in taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where she won a startling victory that essentially banned prayer in the public schools. Ever the opportunist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair decided to cash in on her triumph and founded American Atheists to promote her cause. Over the years American Atheists would become a mostly family affair with leadership positions being filled by Madalyn herself, her son Jon and her granddaughter Robin. And Madalyn would see to it that they were all handsomely compensated for their services.

Fast forward now to the mid 1990's. It seemed that after all these years the jig just might be up for American Atheists. The Feds had gotten wise to several of Madalyn's schemes and were ready to pounce. It was about this same time Madalyn's granddaughter Robin would hire an office manager named David Waters. No one ever bothered to check references because if they had they would have discovered that not only was Waters a bad actor, he was also a convicted murderer!! In his fast moving and highly entertaining book, Ted Dracos recounts the circumstances of the relationship between Waters and the O'Hairs and the events that led up to the disappearance of the trio. We also meet those individuals who pooled their efforts to solve the mystery of just what happened to Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her family. At first, no one could be sure if they just flew the coop, had been kidnapped or possibly were the victims of murder. I found "Ungodly" to be very well researched and I learned an awful lot. Highly recommended.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the most unprofessional biography I've ever read, May 25, 2009

By 

Don Incognito - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ungodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Athiest Madalyn Murray O'Hair (Berkley True Crime) (Paperback)

What the author set out to prove in this book proved difficult to identify, for reasons that may become clear. But the identifiable thesis seems to be that O'Hair--the plaintiff in the lawsuit that ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down school prayer in 1963--was a certifiable sociopath who, while possessing genuine convictions against religion, pursued her lawsuit (and many subsequent commitments) based on personal spite. The beginning of this lifetime of spiteful attitudes and behaviors began with a vendetta, displayed in the presence of family members, against God.

The glimpses of Madalyn O'Hair's behavior are fairly effective in establishing her lifelong pattern of antisocial behavior and in establishing her atheist career as being probably an extended campaign of revenge against God. However, if the examples of her behavior quickly begin to resemble either the tawdry shenanigans of a corrupt family or (to a lesser extent) the manipulative behavior of a quasi-political, quasi-religious figure (several times, I thought her career vaguely resembled that of of L. Ron Hubbard), it is because of something that that the reader concludes by the end of the book: that author Dracos has no real thesis.

More accurately, he does introduce the thesis of O'Hair's being a textbook sociopath, but offers only a scattershot variety of behavioral examples, with no explicit tie-ins to that thesis. That probably owes to two observations that I can objectively make about this book. One is that, because of the author's style and because of the inevitable focus on Madalyn's and her family's murders, ends up being a true-crime book posing as a literate biography. The second is that, objectively, the book is very poorly written. The problem is not so much bad grammar or sloppy editing is that the author, an investigative journalist, is excessively informal and sardonic in style. He regularly insults not only Madalyn and her family, but other figures in the book as well; he also uses inappropriate paraphrases of what should be direct quotations--inappropriate because, in keeping with his style, he gratuitously inserts profane profane and obscene language into the paraphrases.

Oh, and this obviously is a pop biography, not an academic one