Victimless crime

But if the feds' case lacked the bodies, it had plenty of facts. And as the government case gained momentum, Karr's defenders quickly became guerrilla fighters, darting from alleys to lob Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, and red herrings, hoping to plant the magic bullet known as "reasonable doubt" in the mind of at least one juror. Karr's defense was two-pronged: His first was that the O'Hairs had made their long-planned getaway ahead of the IRS and are now hiding somewhere overseas. The second defense was that if someone killed them, it wasn't Karr.

Carruth was happy to point out the inherent contradiction. "The defense can't have it both ways. They want to say the O'Hairs fled the country, but if they didn't, Mr. Karr had nothing to do with their demise," he told the jury.

It didn't help much that Karr had already conceded most of the government's case in loose talk to cops, prison buddies, his ex-wife, and his former employer in Florida. Partway through the trial, Mills said his firm in Dallas received a letter from Waters, who was apparently following the course of the events from his state prison cell. "He said my client is an idiot, that he talks too much," Mills said.

The trial's first witness was American Atheists President Ellen Johnson, a chipper blonde dressed in a cotton-candy-pink dress, who had never before spoken publicly about the case. It was quickly apparent Johnson still revered the lost leader whom she referred to as Dr. O'Hair, despite the absence of any known doctoral degree. The usage prompted the lawyers to begin referring to one another as "doctor" during trial breaks. Prosecutors used Johnson to introduce the O'Hairs to the jury, showing portions of a videotaped speech from earlier in 1995. The O'Hairs did not disappoint.

"Because prayer is insane, children should not be taught to pray. It doesn't help them with anything," declared a seated Madalyn on the tape.

"There is no God. There is no hell. There is no heaven. There is no he, she, it, or any deity to answer prayer," added Jon in his slightly lisping tone.

Johnson described the crucial month of September 1995, after the O'Hairs had left Austin for San Antonio and were keeping in touch with atheist officials by cell phone. At one point, she said, Jon Murray asked her to send him two blank corporate checks in San Antonio. "I said, 'No, I will not. I have no idea if there is a gun to your head or not,'" recalled Johnson, who later relented and mailed him the checks, both of which were cashed for large sums.

Johnson also related the last conversation she had with "an extremely distraught" Robin Murray O'Hair sometime during that month. "I was saying, 'What's going on? What's wrong?' I was so upset because something was terribly wrong," Johnson recalled. "The very last words I remember Robin saying were, 'I know you'll do the right thing,'" she said.

The next witness, the O'Hairs' tax lawyer, Craig Etter, quickly countered defense claims that the family fled ahead of zealous revenuers. He testified that a tentative settlement for all contested matters had been reached with the IRS by summer 1995. Besides, he said, O'Hair had only contempt for the IRS and would never have fled. He cited a letter she had written to an IRS agent who was requesting financial information. "The letter said, 'Fuck You,' and it was signed, 'Madalyn Murray O'Hair,'" he recalled.

Other atheist officials described how in 1993 and 1994, when the O'Hairs were engaged in civil litigation in California that could have ruined them had they lost, they began liquidating and moving assets. The precautions included hiding their main asset, the entire Charles E. Stevens Memorial Library, which held the world's largest collection of atheist historical and archival materials. The library, which was Madalyn's pride and joy, was packed up in Austin and stashed in a Houston storage facility until it was later moved to Kansas City. But, the witnesses said, by late 1995, the danger from the civil case had passed, the heat was off, and the O'Hairs were not going anywhere. And although a family retirement to New Zealand had been talked about for years, it was still somewhere over the horizon.

"My sense is that it [New Zealand] existed as a back-pocket plan, almost a fantasy, but nothing they were seriously considering," testified Conrad Goeringer, another atheist official. And, he said, the O'Hairs would never have considered recruiting Waters to help them do anything, as Karr told police. "They had no use for this man, and they were very afraid of him. They told me this many times," he said.

The preliminaries over, matters quickly got serious on the trial's third day. Steffens took the stand to testify about her strange and sometimes conflicted life with David Waters, a hardened ex-con whom she had taken up with after first dating his brother Ron, a well-behaved if nervous Peoria baker.

More particularly, Steffens told the jury about the critical months of late 1995 when Karr and Fry came to stay with them in their apartment in Austin. Steffens joins Waters and O'Hair as the story's most complex characters. A woman who majored in history and English literature in college, Steffens used words like "ebullient" and "paradigm" with facility. She could also articulate the nuances of her abusive seven-year relationship with Waters, which included occasional savage beatings. But Steffens' walk on the dark side also emerged during trial.