Well, in addition to being an atheist, she was also a communist who had two children out of wedlock with two different fathers. Imagine the hate directed at her, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court with her children in tow in that era? She was known as "the most hated woman in America". She was provocative and iconoclastic, to say the least, but I don't think that was a bad thing in her day. Someone really needed to blow out the windows to bring in the winds of change, and she was, almost singlehandedly, the human being who did that for the nation, and I believe, the entire planet.

She seemed utterly incomprehensible to conventional, mainstream people. But I've actually known a lot of radical leftist women like her in my day. I would have been proud to be able to say I knew her, I think.

The prejudice against atheists, and her in particular, was so bad that the Austin Texas police department wouldn't even investigate their disappearances, despite the IRS, FBI, and a number of journalists piecing together the crimes.

Waters and Karr, with the assistance of Danny Fry, had kidnapped the O'Hairs and held them for nearly a month in a motel in San Antonio, while forcing them to cash out as much of their assets as Waters had been able to find out about while working for (and embezzling) the American Atheists, before killing them.

Waters, Karr and Fry then took their bodies to a rented storage locker, dismembered them, put their body parts in barrels and took them to this remote part of a huge ranch outside San Antonio, and burned the remains. To keep the other American Atheist board members wondering and off guard, the O'Hairs were forced to communicate with the board members up until the time of their murder. The American Atheist board members were anxious to keep the whole thing quiet, because they didn't want to draw suspicion to themselves. I guess one or two of them had moved into the O'Hair's home after their disappearance.   The O'Hair's had meticulously not paid taxes to the IRS as a form of political protest, and eventually the IRS seized the family property and the offices.

A couple days after the O'Hairs were murdered, Waters and Karr killed and dismembered the third accomplice, Fry (who remained unidentified in a pauper's grave for several years until a journalist received an anonymous tip about his disappearance), and dumped his body sans hands and head, in Dallas.

Karr and Waters partied it up with their girlfriends and quickly blew through about $80,000 of the $500,000 in gold coins they'd gotten out of the O'Hairs, but within a few weeks? of the murders, the gold coins, which they had stashed in one of their girlfriend's storage lockers, was stolen when another couple thieves hit the jackpot when they broke into the storage locker and found the money.

There was so much negativity surrounding the disappeared family, and accusations that they had embezzled the American Atheist funds, that they had surreptiously left the country with the assets, etc. that no one really seemed to give a rip about a murder investigation, except O'Hair's estranged son, who had years before become an evangelical convert and been disowned by his mother.

But despite his own religious beliefs, he did the right thing, and at least stood up for his family's right to see justice served, and he didn't allow anyone to pray over their bodies, just as they had wished. So apparently, she raised at least one pretty decent kid.

The whole sad, sordid story is something of a morality tale I think, as it does show just how reviled atheists are in our society, and how little protection of their civil and human rights the Austin PD powers whose responsibility it was to investigate all this, felt compelled to provide for a reviled atheist family.

I think history will treat her much better than her contemporaries did.