I’ll never let you
leave me. If I can’t have you, no one will.
The jilted lover turned murderer is a classic
character in crime fiction and in the true annals of crime.
"To kill what you love when you can’t
have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right,"
Ira Einhorn wrote in his journal in 1962 when their love affair ended.
Fortunately, she survived the attack, but a later girlfriend would not be so
lucky.
Einhorn, often called Philadelphia’s
"Hippie Guru," in the 1960s and 70s, was recently convicted in
Philadelphia of the murder of his former girlfriend, Holly Maddux.
The long road to his conviction and life
sentence in a Pennsylvania prison began in 1977 when Maddux, a young woman who
left Texas to attend Bryn Mawr College, was reported missing after she broke it
off with Einhorn. When the police could not find her, the Maddux family hired a
private detective to search for her.
When neighbors complained about a horrible smell
coming from Einhorn’s apartment in 1979, the police searched and found Maddux’s
body in a locked steamer trunk in his closet.
Arrested and charged with her
murder, Einhorn’s attorney, former Philadelphia District Attorney and current
U.S. Senator, Arlen Specter, arranged for several prominent business, social
and civic leaders to testify to Einhorn’s good character. Despite the obvious
fact that Einhorn kept his mummified girlfriend in a closet for 18 months, bail
was set at $40,000. He skipped his pretrial hearing and fled the country.
Einhorn, a local media darling, often appeared
on TV and in the newspapers during the 1960s as a counterculture hippie
spokesman and in the 1970s as a "New Age activist." He was a friend
of 60’s radicals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as well as the pet radical of
some of Philadelphia’s bluest bloods and wealthiest corporate leaders (to get a
better understanding of this type of odd social pairing, read Tom Wolfe’s great
piece, Radical Chic).
As the name Einhorn translates to "one
horn," he began to call himself "the Unicorn." He lived off of
the kindness and money of gullible supporters. He was largely a media creation,
it seemed to me. He was, both then and now, a sociopath and con artist.
Having been a teenager during the 1960s, I
recall the decade’s counterculture vividly. The true believers, called hippies
by the media, were a small, though highly visible minority group. They rejected
conventional morality and personal hygiene (Einhorn was known to not bathe and
smelled horribly) and claimed to believe in peace, love and understanding. Also
active during that time and confused with the hippies were the radicals who
participated in violent protests against the Vietnam War and other issues.
On college campuses and in urban centers like
Philadelphia, most of the young people were enamored with the music, clothes,
movies, drugs and other stylistic trappings of the age, but the great majority
never truly subscribed to the extreme radical politics of the day or the dreamy
hippie philosophy. Reporters looking for good copy and sound bites flocked like
groupies to charlatans like Einhorn.
Throughout the 1980s Einhorn was a fugitive from
justice. He was spotted in Ireland and Sweden, but no arrests were made. In
1993 the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office tried Einhorn in absentia. He
was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
In 1997, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries told
the story of Maddux’s murder and Einhorn’s fugitive flight. The tips rolled in
after the show was broadcast and Einhorn was reported to be living in France
under the name of Eugene Mallon. The French police arrested him, but then the
French court refused to extradite him back to the U.S.
The French are much taken with our murderers –
and Jerry Lewis. I suppose it’s a French thing.
Finally, after much public debate and political
maneuvering, as well as Einhorn’s pathetic and phony attempt to slash his own
throat, the French turned Einhorn over to the American authorities in France in
2001.
He was flown back to Philadelphia and granted a
new trial. The trial, which received both national and international news
coverage, was a strange one.
Einhorn’s defense was that he was framed.
Although that is not a particularly original defense - "The DA framed me
not knowing that I was really guilty. Ain’t that a coincidence?" a small-time
hood said to Dashiell Hammet’s fictional detective Nick Charles in The
Thin Man – Einhorn said the CIA framed him because of his extensive
knowledge of secret, mind-control weapons. Some called this the
"X-Files" defense.
Einhorn took the stand and told the court that
his research into psychotronic mind-control weaponry, and the use of telepathic
power and radio waves to control people was the reason Maddux was murdered and
her body placed in his apartment. His egomania clearly came through in the
court and the jury only took two hours to return a verdict of guilty.
Before sentencing Einhorn to life in prison,
Judge William Mazzola called him an "intellectual dilettante who prayed on
uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting, inexperienced people."
The judge quoted one witness who said Einhorn
was a gadfly who ingratiated himself into organizations, as when he received a
fellowship at Harvard and then passed himself off as a professor.
"He’s the type of person who I would
describe as someone who would buy a book and read the first and last chapters
of the book and feign a special understanding. I think the criticism we heard
during testimony of other witnesses was not unfounded and the sentence is
justified," Judge Mazzola said from the bench.
Now, after all these years, the Maddux family
finally has justice. Einhorn has gone from sipping fine wine on his French farm
to being prisoner ES6859. They don’t serve wine, fine or otherwise, at the
State Correctional Institution at Houtzdale.
Note: The column originally appeared in
the Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2002.
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