Murders Archives | John Tedesco

Meet the real reporter in the new Netflix movie ‘The Most Hated Woman in America’

John Tedesco — Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:15:16 +0000

“The Most Hated Woman in America” is a new Netflix movie about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an outspoken atheist who mysteriously went missing in Austin in 1995 — along with $600,000.

No one knew what happened to her. And it’s likely no one ever would if it hadn’t been for a series of investigative articles written by San Antonio Express-News reporter John MacCormack, who realized it was a murder case before the police.

Director Tommy O’Haver said the reporter in the movie is a fictional composite of MacCormack named Jack Ferguson, played by Adam Scott.

“We had to compress so much of that story, and obviously the real investigation was far more complicated,” O’Haver told Express-News entertainment columnist Jeanne Jakle. “So we had to create a composite character for John. A lot of the stuff the reporter does in the movie, he didn’t actually do during the investigation. We also had to fit everything into an hour and a half.”

Without seeing the movie, I think it’s safe to say the truth about the reporting is going to be more interesting than fiction. Here’s a video and transcript of my Q&A interview with MacCormack as he looked back on the O’Hair story.

Who was Madalyn Murray O’Hair?

John MacCormack

MacCormack: Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a formerly famous atheist who had achieved prominence in the early 60s when she filed a lawsuit alleging that school prayer and school bible reading was unconstitutional. It was one of three suits filed in a short time frame in the early ’60s. Hers was the third. They all three made the same legal claims. And the Supreme Court decided in favor of each one of them. However, O’Hair came out of all this identified as being the one who had filed the most important suit and she took advantage of it and basically became a professional atheist. And she appeared on talk shows, she established various atheist organizations, eventually settling in Austin. And she was quite prominent in the ’60s and ’70s.

In 1995, O’Hair, her son and her granddaughter disappeared. How did you get involved in the story?

MacCormack: The assignment was a casual mention by my then-boss, Fred Bonavita, the state editor, that it had been a year since Madalyn Murray O’Hair had disappeared and why didn’t I check into things and see how the case was going? I, frankly, wasn’t even aware that she had disappeared because there was no commotion made, no police complaints filed, nothing when she disappeared. The organization just kept it very, very mum. So I didn’t know she was gone and I knew very little about her at that time.

How many stories did you write?

MacCormack: Well, there were about 80 to 100 stories over three years and about five of them really mattered. The first one was just laying out that she was gone. And I met a few critical sources who would help me later. But it didn’t go very far. And no one had any idea whether she had fled to the South Seas with atheist money or whether she had been captured by the Christists or the CIA or the Vatican as various theories were floating around.

In November of 1996, I looked at the 990 (tax) forms filed by several of her atheist organizations. And they revealed that some $600,000 had disappeared at about the same time as the O’Hairs had disappeared. So when you add a lot of money into the plot of disappeared persons it gets more interesting.

What were the major breakthroughs?

MacCormack: The next big development was that I was approached by a private investigator named Tim Young who proposed that we collaborate because his specialty was finding people who didn’t want to be found. And he frankly thought it would be rather easy to find them. …

The most critical breakthrough for us came in June of 1998 when I got an anonymous call from someone who basically told me that the O’Hairs had been killed and that another party named Danny Fry had disappeared with them. By this time we were pretty much working the theory that they were dead because Tim Young hadn’t been able to find no sign of life anywhere on the globe. So with the introduction of Danny Fry — who was kind of an alcoholic low-life con man from Florida — into the plot, and the fact that he had disappeared, this really made things more interesting.

It was in this phone call that we were told to pay attention to a guy named David Waters, who was an ex-con who had worked for the O’Hairs a few years earlier, had stolen about $50,000 from them, and O’Hair had pressed the case against Waters, and he had been convicted. And she had also devoted an entire issue of the American Atheist newsletter to David Waters and his horrific, shameful past. Because he had done some very, very bad things in his past. Including being convicted of murder.

So now we had a murderer, we had four disappeared people, we had $600,000 gone somewhere. So it was beginning to get much more serious for Tim Young and I.

In August of 1998, Tim Young and I had a split. He felt it was his duty as a private investigator to go to the police with the information we had. Because we had a pretty coherent theory now. And I had no confidence in the police. I’m speaking of the Austin police, who had pretty much ignored the case. They treated it as a voluntary disappearance by a person, which isn’t a crime. So Tim and I had a — not acrimonious — but it was an unfriendly split. I decided I was going to keep reporting. He went to the Austin police. They ignored him. And from then on I worked alone.

How did you find out Danny Fry had been killed?

MacCormack: In October of ’98, I happened across a small story that was generated by AP in Dallas, based on a (Dallas) Morning News story about the third anniversary of the discovery of a nude, headless, handless body beside the Trinity River. It had been found in October of ’95. And I just, somehow, fortunately thought to myself, ‘That’s the same weekend that Danny Fry disappeared, and you know, why not?’

To make a long story short, I tried to exclude Danny Fry from being that person. … Nothing could exclude him. So I called the sheriff’s office in Dallas County and I said, ‘Look, I might know who your missing guy is.’ And they’d invested hundreds of hours and hundreds of missing person’s reports trying to find out who this was. So they were kind of cautious about talking to me but they wanted to do it. So I flew up there. We all sat in a little room. And I walked them through the O’Hair disappearance. And to them it was like science fiction. But eventually they came to see that there was a possibility that this headless, handless guy might be my Danny Fry who had disappeared in Texas after coming from Florida. So that was a big, big development. They didn’t laugh me off or anything, they took me seriously.

Danny Fry’s relatives weren’t the type who were comfortable with police. So I got three of his relatives to contribute blood samples, and the lab tested it all, and voila, in January of ’99, it turns out that the headless, handless body was Danny Fry. And that pretty much closed the door on the O’Hairs being alive anywhere.

So I wrote another story basically laying out the picture of them being taken to San Antonio, Danny Fry’s with the O’Hairs, he’s making calls from the same places that they’re known to be. And he’s dead. So, ergo, they’re likely dead. And this really inspired the FBI to get involved. So they threw a lot of manpower at it. And within a couple of months, they’d arrested David Waters, and they’d arrested a second ex-con named Gary Karr, who was a real cold-blooded snake. So the FBI got involved hardcore and then the story proceeded from there.

At this point, the only thing that was really missing, the critical component, was proof of their deaths. It’s hard to prosecute someone for murder when you don’t have a body. So that hung over the case for a long time. No one knew where the bodies were.

How did authorities find out where the bodies were?

MacCormack: David Waters decided, basically, it was over. He was in state custody on a state offense. And he made a deal with the feds that if they put him in federal prison, which apparently is a lot nicer place than state prison, that he would cooperate. And that was the deal they cut. So Waters gave a very long statement describing everything, and eventually also walked them out there and said, ‘There’s the spot.’ And they dug and they found the bodies. … They kind of knew they found Madalyn Murray O’Hair when the turned up a titanium, artificial hip. And the DNA tests proved that these were the bodies of the three O’Hairs plus Danny Fry’s head and hands all buried in the same hole. And that kind of brought things to an end.

What’s it like as a reporter solving a murder mystery?

MacCormack: Well, as a newspaper reporter, most stories are short-lived and you never really figure everything out. And it ends up, you know, you’re just further into the murk. With this story, it went on for three years. I wrote 80 to 100 stories. And it kept getting better and better and better the longer we pushed and searched. Not every day. There were long periods of no progress. But at the end of the day we managed to take a complete mystery, everything was confused, and we pulled it all the way into the sunlight where you had a clear idea, a clear story of what happened. And it solved a very complex murder case, which doesn’t happen every day. So it was very satisfying.

But I don’t confuse it with more important reporting about social issues. This was just a whodunit that was just a hell of a lot of fun to report, a lot of work and at the end of the day, very satisfying.

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How a journalist solved the murder case of the ‘most hated woman in America’

John Tedesco — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:50:52 +0000

John MacCormack

This speech is a decade old but it never grows stale. It still offers a fresh, compelling look at what makes a good reporter tick.

John MacCormack is a veteran journalist at the San Antonio Express-News. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a controversial atheist who had been reported missing in Austin.

Most people believed O’Hair was alive and well and had skipped town. The Austin Police Department didn’t think any foul play was involved. Vanity Fair even sent a writer to New Zealand to track down O’Hair — and the story suggested she was there.

MacCormack figured out O’Hair had been killed.

How did he do it?

Check out this speech that MacCormack gave in 1999 at an atheism convention held in San Antonio. At the time of the speech, MacCormack had written story after story laying out how O’Hair and others were most likely the victim of David Waters, a former convict. MacCormack was invited to speak about how he untangled the mystery.

Here’s what I like about MacCormack’s speech:

It gave the audience an accurate sense of what it’s like to be a reporter. A lot of times, we get assigned what we initially think are lame stories. But as we dig into them, our curiosity gets the best of us. In this case, MacCormack was assigned to write a story about the one year anniversary of O’Hair’s disappearance. “I’m thinking: Right, a loser story,” MacCormack said. But that initial story put O’Hair on MacCormack’s radar. And he ended up staying with the story for years.

For complex stories, it takes time and grunt work to learn the truth:

I’ve been a reporter about 25 years. I’m very much a generalist: I do whatever comes my way. But of course, every reporter dreams of a story where, when you get hold of it, it slips away, then you get a greater chunk of it, and then you keep pushing, working your way through the murkiness and the fog, and every time you push, you see a little more. That doesn’t happen very often in reporting. Usually the fog just stays put, and you end up writing what little you find out.

Reporters have to cultivate good human sources and dig up pertinent documents. A tipster told MacCormack to check out the most recent, publicly available tax forms of O’Hair’s nonprofit organization. The records disclosed, for the first time, that $612,000 had gone missing around the time O’Hair disappeared. That tidbit was an important piece of the puzzle.

MacCormack later teamed up with a private investigator, and they worked together for 19 months tracking down leads generated from cell phone records.

MacCormack talks about the importance of “the serendipity breakthrough, probably where luck plays as big a role as hard work and all those other elements that go into a successful story.” One lazy day, he happened to be scanning the Associated Press wires:

I was sitting there surfing the waves, as we call it, and you pretend to be working but you’re really sitting there reading all the wire stories. I hit this story. It was just an AP summary of the Dallas Morning News story. It was 6-8 graphs and it said police were still baffled by this horrendous crime, this white guy ended up without his head, his clothes or his hands on this riverbank.

MacCormack wondered if it was the body of Danny Fry, one of Waters’ associates who, like O’Hair, was also missing. Through much effort and the cooperation of the sheriff’s department and Fry’s family, a DNA test proved the body was Fry:

We published a story that said this headless guy is Danny Fry. That gets the attention of the FBI. In the next three or four months, there’s furious action. The FBI raids these guys’ apartments, they find guns, they put them in jail, they release an affidavit describing this whole plot where Waters and his buddies kidnapped them. They put the pieces in the puzzle that kind of confirmed our suspicions.

Like all good stories, there were unexpected twists:

This is a rare case where the accused killer wrote a book about the alleged victim! That would be Mr. Waters. Mr. Waters wrote a 200-page book describing how the O’Hairs were in New Zealand. Of course, if he were right, he’s going to sell a lot of books, and he’s also going to live. But no one found her there. Here’s the beginning of Mr. Waters’ book. It’s called “Good God, Madalyn”:

“To simply label Madalyn an atheist, racist, homophobe, anti-Semite, etc., would be a tremendous misnomer. To her dubious credit, Madalyn Mays Murray O’Hair is an equal opportunity bigot, whose loathing of humanity is evenly dispensed without partiality.”

The speech is long but it’s just as clear and compelling as MacCormack’s writing. If you’re interested in journalism and looking for a spark of inspiration, it’s worth a read.

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