Bill Murray, whose unwillingness to utter prayers as a child in school brought about his mother’s fame in the first place, eventually became an evangelical Christian–surely the most literal born-again conversion of the century. “I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times,” Murray later announced. “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess.” Bill would return the favor by saying, upon the occasion of her death, that “I used to ask people to pray for my mother’s salvation. I don’t do that anymore. . . . My mother was an evil person.” This family romance offers a clue about how Murray led her life. When the teenaged Bill impregnated the daughter of a prominent Orthodox Jewish anesthesiologist in Baltimore, who then filed criminal charges against him, Madalyn encouraged her son and his girlfriend to flee, thereby turning them into real lawbreakers. Eventually the family escaped to Hawaii, evidently under the impression that the island was an atheist’s paradise since so many Buddhists made it their home. After the Roman Catholic governor of the state approved her extradition back to Maryland, Murray, disguised as a nun, took off for Mexico, where she promptly destroyed a fledgling experimental college that had decided, much to its eventual regret, to take her in. All charges were dropped in 1965 because the grand jury that had indicted her had been asked to swear to their belief in God, a practice that had been ruled unconstitutional.