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

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Key Phrases: atheist organizations, Jon Garth, David Waters, San Antonio (more...)

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 (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: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #608,796 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 8 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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" 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 this book to be very well researched and I learned an awful lot. Recommended.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Giving the Devil Her Due, August 6, 2004

By	D. SMITH - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

One has only to read the reviews on the book jacket to know that they are in for a biased account of O'Hair's life and death.
One compares O'hair with her killer, "Her killer was as bright viscious and devious as she was." As if to say that opposition to Christianity and a little conning are as bad as murder. The other reviewer calls O'hair's death "poetic justice". Very Christian like, indeed.

In these times when religion and state are all too intertwined we could use another O'Hair, even with all her faults. We may not be able to stop Bush's mixing state and religion at the poles but Madalyn may have stopped him through the courts.

Unfortunately, for those of us who are curious rather than vengefull, this book doesn't sufficiently recount the tactics O'Hair used to get prayer out of schools.

What it does point out, perhaps inadvertantly, is the bias that officials showed whenever it came to performing their civic duties as they related to O'Hair's predicaments.