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Missing atheist case goes to Texas jury

O'Hair, her son and granddaughter disappeared in late August 1995

May 30, 2000
Web posted at: 6:41 p.m. EDT (2241 GMT)

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) -- A Texas jury Tuesday began deliberating the fate of a man charged in the 1995 disappearance of atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

Gary Karr, 52, is on trial in federal court for allegedly kidnapping O'Hair and her two adult children in a plot with two other men to rob her of $500,000 in gold coins.

Prosecutors charged in closing arguments of the two-week trial that the plot turned deadly when O'Hair, son Jon Garth Murray and daughter Robin Murray O'Hair were killed and dismembered in September 1995.

Their bodies were not found, so no murder charges have been filed, they said.

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Defense attorneys countered that O'Hair, who led the successful 1960s legal battle to ban prayer from public schools, fled the country with the gold coins to escape Internal Revenue Service scrutiny and may still be alive. She was 77 at the time and suffering from diabetes.

A defense witness testified earlier that he had seen O'Hair in Romania in 1997.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gerald Carruth accused the defense of creating "rabbit trails" to confuse the jury.

"If you follow the money in this case, you can figure out what happened," he said in closing arguments.

Prosecutors charged that Karr, David Waters and Danny Fry kidnapped the O'Hair family, who had lived in Austin for many years, and forced them to hand over the coins, their cars and other valuable items before killing them.

They said evidence indicated their dismembered bodies were stuffed in barrels and dumped on a remote ranch in southwest Texas where it was likely that floods or animals had carried them away.

They said the plotters stashed the gold coins in a storage shed in Austin, but lost them to burglars who went on a wild spending spree with the money.

Lawyers for Karr said the government had no physical evidence to support their case.

"Not one time did science support the government's case. There was no blood on the knife, no blood on the sheets, no blood on the bow saw (supposedly used to carve up the bodies)," said defense attorney Christie Williams.

Karr, 52, who has a long criminal history and is currently jailed on weapons charges, could get a life sentence if convicted on charges that include kidnapping and extortion.

Waters, a former office manager for O'Hair and the alleged mastermind of the plot, has not been charged directly in the case, but was sentenced to 60 years in jail on a weapons charge. He, like Karr, was a convicted felon forbidden by law to have arms.

Fry, the other alleged accomplice, was found dead near Dallas in October 1995, his head and hands chopped off.

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American Athiests

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