Word: jon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...original suit, and then Hawaii, she arrived in Austin in 1965 and established the Society of Separationists, later adding Atheist Centre in America and several satellite groups. By the late '80s, there were eight. Each had a five- or six-person board, and each board was dominated by Madalyn, Jon and Robin (she was Bill's daughter, but he had given her up to his mother years before his Christian conversion...
...more important, Madalyn, like many of her clerical foes, became adept at persuading elderly members to leave American Atheists their last bequests. In 1986, when she moved the organization into its current red brick headquarters, she claimed to have paid in cash the full cost of $1 million-plus. Jon Murray, her second son and by then her titular successor, told Wright, who later profiled her in his book Saints and Sinners, "We're accustomed to good food...All of us have nice clothes. My suits cost a minimum of five, six hundred dollars...We have a nice house...
...Jon was boasting, however, Madalyn's darker traits--and his own--were taking an increasing toll. They did not restrict their belligerence to the political sphere. "The Murray-O'Hairs," says a movement observer, "were factories of rancor." Almost from its inception, American Atheists spawned splinter groups, usually led by people Madalyn had wooed, employed and finally alienated, often viciously and profanely. "She went through people like popcorn," says Anne Gaylor, who in 1978 became head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin. "People realized, 'We can do this on our own,'" says Kerns. Madalyn, without irony...
...early 1990s, the center had ceased to hold. Part of the problem was Jon. David Travis, an editorial, financial and clerical worker for the organization for three years, ending in August 1995, reports that Madalyn's son, whom she had pressed on her fellow board members as her successor, didn't "even know when to be polite." Says Kerns: "He had no special training, nor a great number of social skills, as well as a speech impediment. He was at an extreme disadvantage, and he was aware that he'd been put in a position beyond his abilities to handle...
Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service was seeking $1.5 million in back taxes and penalties from Jon and Robin. (The amount would eventually drop to $36,787, atheist lawyers have said.) And there was the payback for Madalyn's tendency to litigate. In September 1987, she sued for control of a California atheist organization called Truth Seeker. (The bid failed.) Truth Seeker's furious owner countersued American Atheists under a federal racketeering law. The dispute eventually ate up more than $500,000 in legal fees; at one point Madalyn was so sure of losing that she told an employee...