Word: madalyn
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Weeks passed, and then months. After a year, Robin's 1985 Porsche 944 was found in a parking lot at Austin's Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, apparently abandoned at the time of the disappearance. In May 1996, when Phil Donahue wanted Madalyn to attend his final broadcast, his executive producer hired a private detective to find her, to no avail. But what really fired the imagination of both the local and national press were the observations and surmises of David Travis. Travis, a Vietnam "foxhole atheist" who had lost his God while under enemy attack, had initially regarded the American...
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...
...team at its center, however, was growing tighter than ever. Despite Madalyn's retirement, she came in to work seven days a week. Jon was very much a presence, "this screaming madman running around the office, shouting obscenities about everyone and everything," recalls former employee Travis. Robin, who had run the magazine and maintained a valuable library of atheist books, was much quieter and reputedly much brighter, but capable of answering back in kind. During working hours, says American Atheists officer and longtime Murray-O'Hair friend Arnold Via, "they didn't bother one another unless they wanted...
...then they vanished together. In mid-August 1995, just before they disappeared, the trio picnicked with Via at his home in Grottoes, Virginia. Despite chronic medical problems, Madalyn seemed healthy. Says Via: "They were in wonderful spirits; Madalyn is a wonderful humorist." The Murray-O'Hairs talked about searching the area for records of Madalyn's ancestors, and about possibly moving American Atheists to Richmond. Via snapped some Polaroids, and the trio returned to Austin. Then, on Aug. 28, says Travis, "I went to work and there was a letter taped to the door and it said, 'We've been...
...things, that was obvious. I was screaming, 'What the hell is going on, are you O.K.?' And they're saying, 'Just calm down. Everything's O.K.' Everything was not O.K. Robin was totally disturbed, you could hear it in the way she talked." Johnson talked to Madalyn herself only once: "I've talked to her for years. If you were to talk to your mother, you would know when something was wrong. Something terrible had happened." The last communication with the O'Hairs occurred at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 28. After that, says Johnson, "they just turned the phone...