People are complicated. While in our hearts we know that it’s true, it can be a lot of fun to find people who really ride the line when it comes to defining a legacy. One of the more interesting legacies I’ve seen recently is that of Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

In the early days, Madalyn was a relatively unremarkable woman living in Ohio. She was born in 1919. She got married in 1941 but separated from her husband when they both enlisted in the military during WWII. During her deployment she met and married a man named William Murray, Jr, who seems like a real catch because he was not only married, but also refused to divorce his wife. Madalyn took his last name anyway and became Madalyn Murray, ultimately having a son named William Murray III.

She went to college, then law school, ultimately never passing the bar exam. She and her son moved to Baltimore around 1950 and she had a second son, Jon Garth Murray, of a different father, in 1954.

It’s around this time that her story gets interesting. Madalyn was a socialist, but not at a time when socialism had a leg to stand on in the USA. This was the 1950s, and Madalyn reportedly considered defecting to the Soviet Union through Soviet embassies in both DC and Paris. She was denied both times (not a great sign).

Back in Baltimore, she took her older son to school one day and saw that the kids were engaging in prayer. She was not a fan. Madalyn requested that her son could leave the classroom during prayer times and was denied, so she went ahead and filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming that prayer in school was unconstitutional. She won.

She was on the right side of progressive history throughout the 1950s and ’60s; she described herself as a “militant feminist,” she fought against Bible readings in schools, she was adamantly in favor of sex-ed in school (though, it should be noted, her teenage son impregnated a girl who then ran away to their house, and Madalyn reportedly assaulted five police officers who tried to take the girlfriend from her; Madalyn later adopted the baby), and we’re just at the tip of the iceberg on her story.

The Creation of the American Atheists

You see, Madalyn started the American Atheists. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and she was very prominent as a result. She is regarded as the “public voice and face of atheism in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s.” She was regularly interviewed on talk shows and in magazines, and she filed many more lawsuits on the matters of separating church and state. She was even Larry Flynt’s speechwriter for his unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign.

And then, eventually, Madalyn Murray O’Hair (she remarried in 1965) was murdered. On August 27, 1995, Madalyn, her son Jon, and her granddaughter Robin disappeared. They were alleged to have taken about $400,000 from the company’s funds and left for “business.” They periodically called the American Atheists offices over the ensuing month, but the last call came on September 28.

The search landed on David Roland Waters, who used to work for the Atheists, and who Madalyn had written an article about. She pointed out that he’d stolen $54,000 from the organization (he was caught and pled guilty), and had killed a guy when he was 17, spending eight years in prison. After a series of trials related to the family’s kidnapping, Waters ultimately was convicted and led federal agents to the site where the bodies had been buried… six years earlier. They didn’t find the bodies until 2001, and that was only because Waters literally took them to the bodies. What’s more, they’d been pretty extensively dismembered, so confirming the identities was not as easy as you might hope.

That’s the gist of her story, with one more wrinkle coming soon. To this point, she is largely a sympathetic figure: she championed women’s rights, she fought for freedom of religion, she believed in upholding the values of the First Amendment, and she was brutally murdered by a disgruntled former employee. She even had a poorly reviewed movie based loosely on her life and murder (The Most Hated Woman in America). The worst thing you might be able to say about her is that she chose to fight some uphill battles that may not have been worth her time. She was strong-willed, which can be a double-edged sword.

But there is one more facet to her story, just one more very unfortunate piece – one area that completely drives home the “humans are complicated” theme.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s Wikipedia page includes a heading titled “Comments on the Holocaust.”

There has never been a time when detailing someone’s thoughts on the Holocaust has been a good thing. Nobody ever says, “Wait until you hear what person X said about the Holocaust” and then it turns out that they said, “It’s one of the worst things in human history. Reprehensible in every conceivable way. Something that we, as a species, should never forget and work tirelessly to prevent from ever happening again.”

Madalyn was no exception. She thought the numbers were inflated and that the Germans couldn’t have possibly moved 6,000,000 people on trains, let alone killed them. She also said that Europe was “…cleared of Jews, but that was primarily through emigration.”

Oh boy.

Keep your heroes at a distance, folks.

The post Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s Most Famous Atheist Murder Victim appeared first on America Is Weird.