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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The '60s-era icon claimed shadowy intelligence agents were behind the 1977 murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux. The jury disagreed.
Oct 18, 2002 | Ira Einhorn, the smart, smooth-talking icon of Philadelphia's counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, finally got the murder trial he wanted: one with no death penalty. On Thursday, he got the sentence that relatives of his victim, former girlfriend Helen Holly Maddux, have sought for over 20 years: life in prison without the possibility of parole.
For four weeks, a racially mixed jury of six women and six men (and a packed courtroom filled with curious spectators) heard both sides of a case that began with the 1977 slaying of Maddux, a pretty young hippie who was found a year later mummified in a crate in Einhorn's closet. They heard the prosecution's evidence that it was all Einhorn's doing, and they heard Einhorn's claim that he had been framed by unidentified "enemies," possibly the CIA or KGB.
The jury went with the prosecutor.
The 62-year-old Einhorn, who spent 20 years on the lam after skipping out on his 1981 trial while free on bail, stood stoically as the jury foreman read out the verdict: guilty of first-degree murder. But he shook his head slowly in a sign of disagreement as the judge, William Mazzola, read out the sentence -- life in prison without parole -- and told Einhorn he was "an intellectual dilettante" who "preyed upon the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced."
It was a hard fall for a man who a few decades earlier had been the toast of the town, courted by the trendy elite of Philadelphia. It was also the end of a long manhunt by Maddux's family, who hired a private investigator to track the elusive suspect down; when finally located, Einhorn was living the life of an expat gentleman, complete with Swedish wife, in rural France under the name Eugene Mallon. But France came to see his case as a human rights cause célèbre, with prominent attorneys and others arguing that he'd been unfairly tried in absentia and so should not be extradited. It took several years, a special law passed by the Pennsylvania Legislature and a promise by the Philadelphia district attorney not to seek the death penalty to win his extradition -- and if the law is found unconstitutional, it could be his ticket to a successful appeal.
Einhorn, who took the stand himself, came across as a profoundly egocentric and libidinous character with a history of battering girlfriends who wanted to leave him. In the end, the University of Pennsylvania English grad was hoist on his own literary petard. A diligent diarist, he was led during cross-examination by Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Joel Rosen to read from extensive portions of those diaries.
One entry, written after an evening with a girlfriend, Rita Resnick, who was in the process of dumping him, read as follows: "To kill what you love seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seems so right." Resnick had testified about the strangling incident, which occurred in 1965, earlier in the trial.
Einhorn, who rarely appeared agitated, read this and other damaging diary entries in a mellifluous voice, addressing the jurors directly, with the air of a patient university professor. He tried to explain the brutal statements away as "metaphorical" or "literary" musings.
Conceding that he had had problems with uncontrolled violence in his relationships with women during the 1960s, Einhorn claimed that he had gone to the proto-New Age Esalen Institute in California for treatment and that by the time he was with Maddux, he had been cured. That claim was undermined, however, by a number of witnesses who testified to having seen her covered with bruises.
Throughout the trial, the prosecution assembled an enormous body of circumstantial evidence against Einhorn. There was the rotted and mummified corpse found inside a steamer trunk in a locked closet in his apartment. There was a report of a fight in Einhorn's apartment around the time Maddux went missing, which included a terrified scream and a series of loud bangs on the floor. Then too, there was testimony of a stinking, reddish-brown fluid that for weeks was dripping through the ceiling into a downstairs apartment closet directly below the one where Einhorn kept the steamer chest. And there was testimony that Einhorn had put multiple locks on the closet and vehemently denied requests by the landlord for access to that closet.
