Friday, Sep 5, 2008
If you lived in Philadelphia in the '60s, you know who Einhorn was. Harbinger of the new age, ambassador of acid, Earth Day organizer, environmental activist, Free University founder and professor, Einhorn was "indisputably Philadelphia's head hippie," as the Village Voice put it, "its number one freak." He was at home in the hot springs at California's proto-New Age Esalen Institute and in radical chic circles on the East Coast. It's hard fully to appreciate his influence from today's perspective. Newspaper photographs show him in constant motion: addressing a sea of people on Earth Day, arguing passionately with police, clowning with Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, his peace-loving long beard and gap-toothed smile the picture of the age. That doesn't quite do him justice. Having been a stellar, nearly legendary student at the University of Pennsylvania, he also had currency in the intellectual circles of the day, and in the corporate world, where he was much prized as a "far watcher" of technological trends. In 1977 he held a fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
The event that would transform Ira Einhorn went nearly unnoticed. When Holly Maddux, his delicately beautiful girlfriend of five years, disappeared in the fall of 1977, the transient college-based community around her and Einhorn paid little attention. He had been the important member of that couple, in any case, and his beautiful girlfriends were virtually interchangeable. When she failed to reappear, however, a closer scrutiny came Einhorn's way. Slowly, during 1978, a private investigator hired by the Maddux family looked at Einhorn's life, and as he looked, evidence came together like a charm. A downstairs neighbor told of liquid leaking from Einhorn's apartment into their kitchen, a dark liquid with a terrible smell of putrefaction, and of hearing a "blood-curdling" scream and "several sharp thuds" around about the time of Holly's disappearance. Presented, finally, to the police, this and other evidence won a search warrant on Ira Einhorn's apartment. It was served on March 29, 1978, and police found Holly Maddux's battered and partially mummified body in a trunk in the bedroom closet, packed in Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.
Here now was an alternate narrative about Ira Einhorn, and it very quickly took hold, a narrative finally canonized by Stephen Levy, whose 1988 study "The Unicorn's Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius," drew on access to Einhorn's diaries to conclude that Holly's death was the final act in his established pattern of violent abuse of girlfriends. Einhorn's status as a countercultural hero faded quickly: His publications were few; his activism grandstanding; his expertise followed a path steadily away from even the countercultural mainstream toward the far out -- the paranormal, Uri Geller, Andre Puharich and the community of CIA mind-control conspiracy theorists, still very active today. Einhorn's claim that Holly's death stemmed from this activism -- he insists to this day that Holly Maddux was killed by an intelligence agency, and her body planted in his bedroom, to silence his growing knowledge of the CIA's use of the paranormal in military research -- received little credence. And his generous humanism -- Einhorn was consistently described by the many character witnesses at his bail hearing as a "man of love" -- is mentioned much less than his priapism, his enormous sexual practice.
And any doubt as to Einhorn's guilt was resolved for most Philadelphians by another event. With his trial scheduled for the early spring of 1981, Einhorn nearly effortlessly skipped the bail provided by his friend and supporter Barbara Bronfman and disappeared into Europe.
In 1993, 12 years after Einhorn's flight, Philadelphia D.A. Lynne Abraham decided to bring him to trial in his absence, a rare legal procedure and the only in-absentia murder trial ever conducted in Philadelphia. Einhorn was represented by Norris Gelman, his lawyer at the time of his flight, who was obliged by the court to conduct the defense at his own expense. During a week in court, the leaking liquid, the smell of putrefaction, the scream, and other strong circumstantial evidence was put on trial. Gelman was able to demonstrate that the forensic evidence on which the prosecution hung its case was inconclusive; the prosecution was unable to prove that the putrefying liquid contained human protein, and therefore it was possible, at least in theory, that Holly's body was planted in Einhorn's closet. The jury nevertheless took only two hours to convict him of first degree murder and sentence him to life imprisonment. His flight from justice made their decision that much easier.
On the morning of June 13, 1997, acting on information compiled by dogged Philadelphia Police investigator Rich Debenedetto, French police stormed a converted millhouse outside Champagne Mouton, a tiny village in a rolling portion of the French countryside next to Cognac. Naked in his bed was Mr. Eugene Mallon, a resident American writer who lived quietly with his beautiful Swedish wife. It is not hard to imagine the scene: the kind summer air through the window, the early morning still, and Mr. Mallon's rude awakening to arrest as Ira Einhorn.
At 4 o'clock in the morning, in Philadelphia, Norris Gelman was awakened by the telephone. "I got a call from Annika," he recalls. "I remember it well. She said, 'They stormed the house like stormtroopers!' And I said, 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of her and I had no idea who she was. I said, 'Who was taken away?' She says, 'Ira Einhorn.'"
Gelman is a rotund man with a youthful face and a full head of curly hair. Educated at University of Pennsylvania and versed in left-wing intellectual terms, he runs a practice that includes mobsters and murderers, the appealing mix of high principles and low crimes that defines criminal lawyers. It's a mixture that everywhere informs Gelman's persona, such as his frequent conversational reference to his mother and his taste for the races. Pictures of the horses he owns, as well as a wealth of other track memorabilia, some verging on kitsch, fill his office. When he remembers Einhorn back in the day, it is with admiration, as for a free-thinking, brilliant professor. Many in the Einhorn camp share this admiration, in apparent disregard of the enormous evidence that this charismatic, compelling man may have committed a horrific murder.
In a day or two, Gelman called Annika Flodin -- who prefers to be addressed as Annika Einhorn -- back, and the news he had for her was surprising. "I told her, 'You tell Ira we're going to fight like hell. We got a case here and Ira's not coming back so fast."
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