Ira Einhorn's long, strange trip

After two decades on the run from charges in a horrific murder, the counterculture icon is home and headed for trial. But in France, he's still a human rights hero.

By Neil Gordon

Aug 14, 2002 | The man whom Philadelphia loves to hate greets me with a bear hug each time I make the trip to State Correctional Facility in Houtzdale, Pa., his home since his extradition from France last year to face a 25-year-old murder charge. After the months I've spent digesting the enormous literature devoted to him, it's something of a surprise to find that the baby-boom Hannibal Lecter is a nervous person of 61, some 6 feet tall with a full head of white hair, trim in his orange prison-issue jumpsuit, attentive and anxious to please. But any doubt that this is Ira Einhorn, the famous '60s icon and infamous international fugitive, is put to rest immediately by the pink scar still visible above his collar, a reminder of his last night in France, when he cut his throat in front of reporters. A chipped front tooth gives him his crooked smile, familiar from pictures. His eyes, which contain a nearly manic intensity in their shocking blue, are very hard to meet.

Part of their intensity is his well-known charisma: Einhorn is a famous leader of men and a seducer of women, casually laying claim to thousands of lovers, two or three a week for 20 years until meeting Annika Flodin, whom he would marry in 1987. Another part is that Einhorn, who convincingly claims to read a book a day, is amazingly intelligent, and he has few other visitors. Today he wants to talk about politics, physics, Buddhism, the economy, terrorism, ecology. He wants to tell me about Houellebecq, the French novelist du jour; about Jennifer Egans new novel; about Hardt and Negris popular left-wing history, "Empire," and Naomi Kleins notoriously dense "No Logo" -- unlike most American progressives, hes read and understood both.

The last thing he wants to discuss is the reason he's in jail today, but when he does address it, it's to deny absolutely, entirely, having killed Holly Maddux in 1977, some two years before he jumped bail and disappeared into a fugitive life that only ended last summer. "There's no doubt that I ought to be executed for what I think," he tells me, leaning across the table where we sit in the clean, well-appointed prison visiting room, his blue eyes holding mine hostage. "But not for what I did."

Well, maybe. You won't find many journalists who will agree: The coverage of Einhorn, both locally and nationally, has almost uniformly depicted him as at best as manipulative, at worst malign, and always guilty. All are plausible conclusions, given the evidence. Two separate Philadelphia juries have found him so, the first in Einhorn's 1993 murder trial, held in absentia while he was a fugitive, the second in a civil trial which in 1999 awarded the victim's family just shy of $1 billion in damages. In Philadelphia, hating Einhorn is a kind of blood sport. When in June 2000 the Philadelphia Daily News erected a billboard of Einhorn and invited readers to bring their rotten tomatoes to throw at it, the newspaper found takers. And when the Daily News printed handy fill-out-and-mail forms by which readers could send messages to Einhorn welcoming him home at the time of his extradition, some 300 took advantage of the opportunity, many offering shockingly obscene predictions of what awaited him in prison showers.

And there lies the central peculiarity of the Einhorn prosecution: Its very vigor, both in the press and in District Attorney Lynne Abraham's office, very nearly set him free. His extradition pitted two equally passionate communities against each other, each fueled by identical outrage: one a moral certainty of his guilt, the other a moral horror at legal tactics the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania employed to bring him home. The latter group unites powerful, if unexpected, members: prominent Philadelphia lawyers and a community of French lawyers, activists, and members of parliament who strenuously opposed Einhorn's extradition from France, forcing it to be ordered by then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin himself, and for whom Ira Einhorn has the status of a human rights hero on the level of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who recently was awarded honorary citizenship of Paris. And now that he is back at home, Einhorn's murder trial next month will put these passions on stage in a way that threatens to overshadow the death of Holly Maddux, and opens the possibility that the long, strange trip of Ira Einhorn is not yet over.

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