WHERE'S MADALYN?

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One day in March 1989, long after Madalyn Murray O'Hair dropped from fame but before she dropped from sight, she enjoyed one of the sweet contradictions of life as America's foremost atheist: she played the preacher at Scott Kerns' wedding. Kerns was something of a favorite of O'Hair's; for a while he led the Texas chapter of her American Atheists group. And so Madalyn invited the couple up to her handsome tan shingle house on Greystone Drive in Austin. The event took place in the library, and was attended by friends, a photographer and Madalyn's son Jon Murray and granddaughter Robin Murray-O'Hair, from whom Madalyn was inseparable. "She took the ceremony very seriously," says Kerns. In Texas justices of the peace are likely to slip a "God" or even a "Jesus" into an otherwise civil service; to avoid such sabotage, O'Hair had obtained certification to perform marriages. She now pronounced the couple man and wife. It was a lovely moment, Kerns recalls, though, inevitably, he was nipped by one of O'Hair's several ill-tempered little dogs. Afterward, he says, "there was music and champagne, and we went out to dinner. And Madalyn. Madalyn is funny. She's the funniest person on earth." He pauses. "If she's still on earth."

"If Dean Koontz and Stephen King sat down with a bottle of Scotch and tried to figure out the most bizarre ending to this family they could," says William Murray, Madalyn O'Hair's estranged older son, the one who converted to Christianity, "whatever really happened was probably more bizarre than that." Hyperbole is a Murray-O'Hair family trait, but the assessment is not totally astray. One day in August 1995, Madalyn, then 76, along with Jon, 40, and Robin, 30, vanished from the house on Greystone Drive, reportedly with breakfast still cooking, and were never seen again. Tax returns filed by groups affiliated with American Atheists suggest that Jon took $629,500 of organization money with him. Although Austin police say they have thus far found no evidence of foul play in the family's disappearance, both O'Hair friends and foes have offered scenarios including kidnapping, murder and flight to New Zealand with the funds. After a decade of infamy and two more in a slide toward obscurity, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, by her absence, has managed to grab the spotlight again.

The public saga of Madalyn Murray O'Hair began in June 1963, when the U.S. Supreme Court removed prayer from the public schools. The suit on which the decision was primarily based had been brought by a Philadelphia Unitarian named Ed Schempp. But it soon became apparent that a secondary litigant, whose case had merely been attached to Schempp's, was the one who most desperately wanted the mantle of the era's foremost separator of church and state. Madalyn O'Hair was a heavy woman with a strong voice and jaw who even in repose resembled, as author Lawrence Wright once observed, "a bowling ball looking for new pins to scatter." She was an Army veteran and a law-school graduate and a big talker. Most important, she was an atheist.