- In life, Danny Fry, a Florida con man
who came to Texas in 1995 looking for a big score, may have played a role
in one of the century's most baffling celebrity disappearances.
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- In death, he may lead authorities to
missing atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who vanished from San Antonio in
late September 1995 with her two adult children and $500,000 in gold coins.
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- Fry spent that month in San Antonio and
disappeared the same weekend as the O'Hair family.
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- As an enduring mystery, the O'Hair case
ranks with those of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa and aviator Amelia Earhart,
neither of whom was found despite decades of sleuthing.
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- Although the O'Hairs' fate remains an
enigma, Fry's has become chillingly clear.
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- Genetic testing completed last week has
determined a nude and mutilated body that was dumped Oct. 2, 1995, in southeastern
Dallas County was the missing Florida man.
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- "It certainly was a cocky bastard
who did this. The way they laid him out was like, 'Come and find us,' "
said Robert Bjorklund, a Dallas County sheriff's detective who has worked
the case since the body was found.
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- The corpse, minus crudely amputated head
and hands, was found that 1995 fall afternoon by a man collecting aluminum
cans on a trash-strewn riverbank near Seagoville.
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- The body was placed chest-up, legs neatly
together and arms splayed.
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- "Why didn't they dump him in the
water? It would have been a whole lot harder to find," mused Bjorklund,
who reviewed more than 200 missing-person cases in an effort to identify
the headless man.
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- But without tattoos, scars, dental records
or fingerprints, police were stumped.
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- The search ended when DNA tests, using
blood obtained from Fry's brother, ex-wife and son at the suggestion of
the San Antonio Express-News, matched a genetic sample taken before the
headless corpse went to a pauper's grave.
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- "It is confirmed that our homicide
victim is Danny Fry. The probability . . . is 99.99 percent," Bjorklund
said after receiving test results from the Dallas County medical examiner's
office.
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- Detectives think Fry, 42, was murdered
earlier than Oct. 2, 1995, somewhere else and by unknown means. The body
held few clues, and Fry's clothing, head and hands have not been found.
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- For Dallas investigators, the hunt for
his killers now begins.
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- The evidence they have divulged is sparse:
some blue fiber on the body, witness accounts of a white luxury car leaving
the scene and a footprint on the riverbank.
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- The trail, however, is likely to heat
up quickly as it leads south to Austin and San Antonio, where Fry spent
the final months of his life.
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- Success in the Fry investigation also
could break loose the logjammed O'Hair case, which, despite the dogged
efforts of private investigators and reporters, remains unsolved.
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- While tantalizing clues abound, proof
remains elusive. A three-year global search for America's most famous nonbeliever
has yielded little more than rumors and speculation.
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- Murdered for gold?
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- Some believe O'Hair, her son Jon Garth
Murray and daughter, Robin, were murdered for the gold they bought in late
September 1995, using $600,000 wired from an account maintained in New
Zealand by an atheist organization.
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- "I think my mother was kidnapped,
Robin was taken along to take care of her, and my brother was run like
a wet mule in order to get the kidnap money together. I absolutely believe
that is what happened," said Bill Murray, O'Hair's other son.
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- "Jon saw himself as the absolute
worshipper and protector of his mother. I think he had his back up against
the wall. I think he really thought that, if he played ball with these
guys and got them the money, he'd save his mother," he said.
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- Others think the three atheists activated
a long-planned getaway scheme and now are living in foreign exile, sustained
by funds skimmed over the years from their organizations.
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- At the time of her sudden disappearance,
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 76, was a sick woman, suffering from diabetes and
heart trouble, whose role in national atheist affairs had become marginal.
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- It was a long slide from her prominence
decades ago during the legal battles over Bible reading and prayer in public
schools, and the Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that banned
them.
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- O'Hair, who once proclaimed herself "the
most hated woman in America," relished conflict with the believers
of any rank or stripe, from the local Baptist preacher to the pope.
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- "Religion is the most monstrous
idea in the world. It must be killed without quarter along with fascism,
racism, sexism, war and slavery. All those ideas are nuts, and mankind
must get over them," she wrote in 1979, capturing her own combative,
irreverent personality.
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- By 1995, however, after decades of fighting
what she called "the Christers" and raising money to keep her
atheist organizations afloat, O'Hair was pondering a way out.
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- Overseas retirement
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- It was an open secret within inner circles
that the three O'Hairs, who ran the nonprofit organizations like family
businesses, were considering a joint retirement, perhaps overseas.
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- But no one was prepared for the dramatic
events that unfolded in 1995 when, in late August, the O'Hairs abruptly
abandoned their comfortable Austin home.
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- In their hasty departure, they left behind
their three beloved dogs, unattended, Madalyn's diabetes medication and
a note telling atheist staffers the office was closed.
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- But the three soon resurfaced in San
Antonio, where they kept in intermittent phone contact with anxious atheist
officials for about a month and then vanished for good.
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- Austin police, who are unconvinced any
crime occurred, have handled the O'Hair disappearance like a routine missing
person's case.
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- "It's still an open case. Nothing
indicates foul play. I feel they have left on their own accord, and they
have that right to come and go as they please," said Sgt. Steve Baker,
who had the case until late last year.
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- "I believe they just took off, it
was a planned departure," he said.
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- Baker said police did interview David
Waters, an Austin ex-con who knew Fry and had worked as office manager
of O'Hair's atheist organizations in Austin in 1993. But Baker said investigators
learned little.
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- Waters, 48, has convictions for murder,
forgery, battery and theft.
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- The last one came in 1995 after he admitted
stealing $54,000 from the O'Hair organizations. Now on probation, Waters
is making monthly restitution payments.
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- Like the Austin police, Waters thinks
the O'Hairs took the money and ran, and he denies any knowledge of their
fate.
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- "I am in no way connected with their
disappearance, demise, relocation to a sunny clime or anything else that
has to do with them. The last time I saw them was about a year before they
decided to make this little move," Waters said in an interview last
fall.
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- "Everyone seems to think it was
sudden," he said of their disappearance. "In fact, it was an
ongoing process, and I know that it can be verified with well-documented
evidence, this unannounced relocation to parts unknown."
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- Waters said he has internal atheist documents
that prove the family absconded. But he withdrew an offer to share them
with the press.
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- He also said he doesn't have any knowledge
of Fry's disappearance and murder and recalls only a passing encounter
with him in 1995.
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- The two men had worked together in Florida
a few years earlier, and Waters said they became reacquainted when Fry
called that summer asking about work in Austin.
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- "Dan contacted me. I did tell him
if he was interested in getting ahead, Austin was hot. I said the unemployment
rate is 3.2 percent. If you want to get something going, this is the place
to be," Waters recalled.
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- Waters said he put his old buddy up briefly
in his apartment on Austin's Lamar Boulevard sometime in 1995.
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- "He stayed here a couple of weeks,"
Waters said of Fry. "I know he was having some personal problems.
I got the impression he was trying to get away from things for a while."
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- 'Ripping and running'
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- Waters said Fry stayed in Austin a little
while, drinking and gambling, and, after no job materialized, moved on,
never to surface again.
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- "He was ripping and running. He
had his own group of friends. The last time I saw him was with a guy he
was running around with. It was in Austin," he said.
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- Fry's relatives confirm Fry was a heavy
drinker and a big talker when he had a few too many. And they say he wasn't
too particular about how he made his money, as long as the payoff was good.
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- But they say Fry never would have come
to Texas just to look for work in the Austin classified advertisements.
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- "My dad was the type where there
had to be some money to be made to go to Texas, and Waters was the only
person he knew there," said Fry's son, D.J.
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- Instead, they say, it was Waters who
induced Fry to leave Florida that summer with promises of big money. It
was a deal Fry never wanted to discuss.
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- "We took him to the (Tampa) airport.
He was going up there to work with a friend, David Waters," recalled
Fry's daughter, Lisa.
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- "He told me it was a big deal. He
would never really say if it was something bad . . . He was kind of a con
artist."
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- While in Texas, family members say, Fry
sent back several thousand dollars, phoned home frequently but never talked
about his work.
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- They dispute Waters' statement that his
association with Fry was brief. Phone records indicate a longer and deeper
relationship between the two men.
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- The 1995 phone bills, provided by Fry
family members, track an association that began in the spring and lasted
nearly to Fry's death.
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- Fry's last recorded call was made from
Waters' Austin apartment at 2:47 p.m. Sept. 30, 1995, when he called his
daughter on a Saturday afternoon during her 16th birthday party in Florida.
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- Tense and short-spoken on the phone,
Fry said his mysterious business in Texas was almost finished and he would
be home soon, his daughter recalled.
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- "He just told me he'd be home the
following Tuesday," Lisa Fry said.
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- But Fry never made it to Florida. Instead,
roughly 48 hours later, his butchered corpse was discovered among the garbage,
ants and poison ivy on the bank of the Trinity River.
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- The records show this was just the last
of many calls to home Fry made from Waters' apartment that summer and fall.
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- In August alone, 51 calls from the apartment
to Fry's home appear on Fry's MCI phone bill. The records show regular
calls from Florida to the apartment, buttressing the claims of relatives
who say they contacted Fry there.
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- The records also indicate contact between
the two men had begun many months before, at least as early as May 1995,
and intensified as the summer progressed.
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- A call from Fry's Florida home to Waters'
apartment June 12, 1995, lasted 46 minutes. Another on June 22 was for
25 minutes, and on July 21, shortly before Fry flew to Texas, there was
an 87-minute call.
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- The phone records show, beginning in
late August 1995, after spending a month in Austin, Fry moved south and
began making calls from pay phones in Northwest San Antonio.
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- Included were several calls from a pay
phone by the residents' laundry room at the Warren Inn, a budget motel
on Fredericksburg Road just outside Loop 410. According to Fry's relatives,
he told them he was staying there.
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- The records show several calls during
September to Fry's home from Austin. The calls from San Antonio, however,
ended late in the month when Fry apparently returned to Austin for the
last time.
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- On Sept. 30, 1995, he made two final
calls from Waters' apartment before vanishing.
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- Waters also was familiar with that part
of Northwest San Antonio.
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- Waters said, just a couple of years earlier,
he had stayed at the Warren Inn with his longtime companion Patti Jo Steffens
before moving to Austin and going to work for the O'Hairs.
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- White Cadillac
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- Motor vehicle records show Waters also
was in San Antonio during September 1995. On Sept. 16, he bought a white
1990 Cadillac Eldorado, with tinted windows and blue interior, from a Terrell
Hills couple, paying $13,000 in cash.
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- "I remarked at what a large stack
of bills it was," said the seller, who asked not to be named.
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- Waters said he used personal savings
to buy the car.
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- At that time, according to credit card
records, Jon Murray was accumulating a lot of cash in San Antonio. In the
two days before the Cadillac purchase, Murray charged $10,400 in cash advances.
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- On Sept. 14, 1995, Murray withdrew $3,000
from a bank in Alamo Heights. The next day, using a different credit card,
he withdrew $7,400 from a bank on San Pedro Avenue.
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- The Cadillac purchase came 11 days after
a different vehicle transaction was made that loomed significantly in the
O'Hair disappearance.
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- On Sept. 5, someone impersonating Murray
sold his 1988 Mercedes-Benz for $15,000 at the Warren Inn. The identity
of the seller remains unknown.
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- Motor vehicle records show Waters had
resold the white Cadillac by mid-February 1996.
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- When Fry failed to return to Florida
in early October 1995 as he had promised, his fiancee, children and brother
say they began calling Waters in Austin for information. But they said
he was unhelpful.
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- "I spoke with him on the phone,
and he denied any association with him. He said my father and him were
just roommates, they had no work contacts. He said my dad was in his own
world, doing his own thing," said Fry's son, D.J.
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- Waters said since he had no clue where
Fry had gone, there was nothing he could do to help.
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- Trip to Florida
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- Fry's older brother Bob said Waters took
a more active interest in the matter about a week after Danny Fry vanished.
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- Bob Fry said the events were triggered
when he called Waters from Florida and mentioned a letter Danny had sent
from Texas.
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- "The letter said that if he wasn't
back by a certain date, that meant something serious had happened. I should
contact the authorities and bring in Dave Waters name, that Dave Waters
planned what we did," recalled Bob.
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- "I called Waters and told him about
the letter. I had already destroyed it, but I just told him I had an unopened
letter," Bob Fry recalled.
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- Bob Fry said things happened quickly
after that.
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- "He said, 'Hold onto it. I'm sure
he'll show up. I just talked to him the night before last from a bar in
Dallas. He was drunk,' " Fry said.
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- By the next evening, Bob Fry said, Waters
and a second man were on his doorstep in Florida, demanding the letter.
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- "They told me they were involved
with something really heavy in Texas, and the people who planned it wanted
them to get the letter back. And if they didn't, the people would come
and get it, and they wouldn't be as nice," Bob Fry recalled.
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- Fry said the two men finally left after
he convinced them the letter already was destroyed. But, he said, their
words lingered.
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- "One thing Waters said keeps haunting
me. He said, 'Your brother drinks a lot. He's got a big mouth,' "
recalled Bob Fry.
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- Informed last week of Bob Fry's account,
Waters said it did not occur.
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- "I have no idea of what you're talking
about," he said.
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