Michigan man convicted of extortion in O'Hair case

AUSTIN, Texas - In the first trial stemming from the 1995 disappearance of atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her two closest relatives, a Michigan man was convicted of extortion and other crimes yesterday in what prosecutors said was an elaborate and murderous scheme to loot the bank accounts of O'Hair's anti-religion group.

Gary Paul Karr, 52, one of three men publicly identified by authorities as culprits in the alleged plot, was found guilty in federal court after two weeks of often stranger-than-fiction testimony concerning the fate of O'Hair and her kin.

In a case based largely on circumstantial evidence, prosecutors said the family was held captive for a month, then slain and buried after Karr and his alleged cohorts stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from O'Hair's organization, American Atheists.

The panel earlier in the day had told U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in a note that it was deadlocked on some of the charges after four days of deliberations.

Karr, whose record of convictions for violent felonies dates to the 1960s, was found guilty of extortion, crossing state lines to commit a felony, committing a crime for profit and interstate transportation of stolen property. He was acquitted of conspiring to kidnap O'Hair and her relatives, who remain missing. No murder charges have been filed.

Sparks scheduled Karr's sentencing for Aug. 4. He faces life in prison.

O'Hair gained fame as a plaintiff in the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case that banned public-school prayer. Caustic and combative, she went on to form American Atheists, which in the 1970s had chapters across the country.

Eventually, she faded into obscurity.

She was 76 when she vanished from her Austin home in late August 1995, along with her two most loyal American Atheists aides: son Jon Garth Murray, 40, and granddaughter Robin Murray-O'Hair, 30. For years, most people suspected they had stolen a fortune in the organization's money and escaped to some tropical climate, fleeing the heat of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation.

The mystery surrounding their disappearance evaporated last year when an IRS agent filed a long court affidavit alleging that the three atheists had been kidnapped and held throughout September 1995 in a cut-rate San Antonio motel.

The affidavit, used to obtain a search warrant, alleged that Karr and two accomplices forced Jon Murray to remove hundreds of thousands of dollars from a New Zealand bank and convert the money into untraceable gold coins.

One of the men named with Karr, Danny Raymond Fry, 41, was found slain and dismembered shortly after the alleged month-long caper. The other suspect, David Roland Waters, 53, serving a 60-year prison term in another case, has not been charged with a crime in the atheists' disappearance.