Ira Einhorn: The Unicorn Killer’s Crimes and Conviction

Ira Einhorn was a Philadelphia counterculture figure of the 1960s and 1970s who beat his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux to death in 1977, hid her body in a steamer trunk in his apartment for 18 months, fled the country before trial, and spent 16 years as an international fugitive before France extradited him to Pennsylvania, where he was convicted of first-degree murder in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.¹ He died behind bars in April 2020 at age 79.²

Who Einhorn Was Before the Murder

In 1960s and 1970s Philadelphia, Einhorn built a reputation as the city’s “head hippie,” an ecological advocate and anti-war speaker who moved comfortably between the counterculture and the corporate world. Based around the University of Pennsylvania, he persuaded Pennsylvania Bell to fund his mailings of articles and commentary to a network of influential contacts, and corporate executives reportedly sought him out for his read on cultural trends.³

He later claimed to have founded Earth Day, the environmental event first held on April 22, 1970. The claim was false. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day, and a 33-person committee organized the Philadelphia celebration at Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park. Two of those organizers, Edward W. Furia and Austan S. Librach, said Einhorn simply occupied the podium for about an hour, refused to leave, and delayed a keynote by Senator Edmund Muskie.⁴ The social standing he cultivated during these years would later help him walk out of a murder arraignment on minimal bail.

The Murder of Holly Maddux

Holly Maddux was a Texas native and Bryn Mawr College graduate who had been in a five-year relationship with Einhorn. By September 1977, she had ended it and was living in New York, staying on a friend’s boat at Fire Island.⁵ Einhorn pressured her to come back to Philadelphia to retrieve her belongings, threatening to burn them if she did not. On September 10, 1977, Maddux traveled to his apartment. Friends and family never saw or heard from her again.⁶

When people asked, Einhorn said she had gone out to buy groceries and never returned. Her family grew alarmed when she failed to call her mother for her birthday, breaking a longstanding pattern of close communication.⁷ An autopsy later showed that Maddux, 30 years old, died from craniocerebral injuries caused by at least six violent blows to her head and face with a blunt instrument, fracturing her forehead, face, eye sockets, and jaw.⁶

Maddux was not the first woman Einhorn had attacked when a relationship ended. His own diaries, later used at trial, described strangling a girlfriend named Rita Resnick in 1962 (“To kill what you love when you can’t have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right”) and striking a second girlfriend, Judith Sabot, over the head with a bottle and trying to choke her in 1966 (“Violence always marks the end of a relationship”). The Pennsylvania Superior Court later observed that the violence had become “increasingly severe with each break-up.”⁶⁸

The Trunk in the Closet

Philadelphia police initially failed to connect Einhorn to Maddux’s disappearance. Her family hired a retired FBI agent, who teamed up with a second former agent. Their findings pointed to Einhorn, and they brought the file to Philadelphia homicide detective Mike Chitwood.⁵

Chitwood re-interviewed the witnesses and secured a search warrant. On March 28, 1979, police searched Einhorn’s apartment at 3411 Race Street. Maddux’s ID cards and personal belongings were still inside. In a closet on an outdoor porch, Chitwood found a locked steamer trunk covered in foam. He pried it open with a crowbar and found layers of air fresheners, plastic bags, foam peanuts, newspapers from 1977, and a mummified human hand. Downstairs neighbors had complained to the landlord about loud noises, a terrible smell, and fluids leaking through the wall.⁵

According to Chitwood, when he told Einhorn, “It looks like we found Holly,” Einhorn answered: “You found what you found,” and walked back into his apartment.⁵ He was charged with first-degree murder in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County.⁶

Out on $4,000 Bail, Then Gone

At his bail hearing on April 3, 1979, Einhorn was represented by Arlen Specter, a former Philadelphia district attorney who would later become a United States senator. Specter produced a roster of prominent character witnesses, and Judge William M. Marutani set bail at $40,000. Under Pennsylvania law, Einhorn walked free after paying ten percent, or $4,000. An unidentified third party posted it.⁹ Reporters at the time attributed the unusually low amount to Einhorn’s social connections and his choice of counsel.¹⁰

In January 1981, days before his murder trial was to begin, Einhorn vanished. A bench warrant was issued on January 14, 1981, and his bail was revoked.⁶ American authorities would not see him again for two decades.

Sixteen Years on the Run

Einhorn moved across Europe under assumed names, living in England, Ireland, Sweden, and finally France.¹¹ In Ireland he called himself Ben Moore; in Sweden and France he used Eugene Mallon. French acquaintances knew him as “Vieux Baba Cool,” or Old Cool Daddy.¹²

In 1987 he met Annika Flodin, a Swedish woman, and the two married. Flodin’s family money helped fund their life as fugitives, and she later acknowledged she had knowingly supported one for years.¹³ The couple settled in a converted windmill in Champagne-Mouton, in southwestern France, living on about $1,000 a month supplemented by Flodin’s parents and unnamed supporters.³

Their cover unraveled through a French driver’s license application filed under Flodin’s real name. Investigators traced it to Einhorn, and in June 1997, French authorities arrested him at the windmill. Richard DiBenedetto, an investigator for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office who had spent years tracking him, helped locate him.¹⁴¹⁵

Trial in Absentia and the “Einhorn Law”

Philadelphia prosecutors had not waited for his capture. On March 9, 1993, the Commonwealth petitioned to try him in absentia under Pennsylvania Rule of Criminal Procedure 1117. Judge Juanita Kidd Stout granted the petition on April 15, 1993. After a two-week trial that September, a jury convicted Einhorn of first-degree murder, and on September 29, 1993, he was sentenced in absentia to life in prison.⁶

That conviction became the obstacle to getting him home. On December 4, 1997, the Bordeaux Court of Appeal rejected the American extradition request, holding that the trial in absentia violated the European Convention on Human Rights. France also objected to any possibility of a death sentence.¹⁶

Pennsylvania responded by writing a law for him. On January 27, 1998, the General Assembly passed what became known as “the Einhorn law,” codified at 42 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 9543(c). It guaranteed a new trial, on request, to anyone convicted in absentia and later extradited from a country that had refused extradition on that ground. State Representative Dennis O’Brien helped push the bill through the Pennsylvania House.¹⁶¹⁷

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pressed the case with French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine.¹⁸ Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham provided formal affidavits assuring France that the death penalty would not be sought, imposed, or carried out, since the crime occurred in 1977, before Pennsylvania reinstated capital punishment in 1978.¹⁶

With the new statute and the death-penalty assurances in hand, the United States submitted a second extradition request in July 1998. The Bordeaux Court of Appeal approved it on February 18, 1999; France’s Court of Cassation upheld that decision on May 27, 1999; and Prime Minister Jospin signed the extradition decree on July 24, 2000. France’s Conseil d’État rejected a final challenge in July 2001.¹⁶¹⁹¹⁵

The 2002 Conviction

Under the statute that had been written for his case, Einhorn was granted a new trial. On November 14, 2001, Judge D. Webster Keogh vacated the 1993 conviction and ordered a retrial.⁶

The retrial began on September 30, 2002, before Judge William J. Mazzola in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, with Assistant District Attorney Joel Rosen again leading the prosecution. Einhorn’s defense, led by attorney William Cannon, argued that the CIA had killed Holly Maddux and planted her body in his apartment to punish him for his research into “psychic warfare” and secret mind-control weapons. Einhorn dismissed his own diary entries about strangling and beating earlier girlfriends as “metaphorical violence.”²⁰⁸

Jurors were observed snickering during defense testimony about paranormal surveillance.²¹ On October 17, 2002, after about two and a half hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Einhorn of first-degree murder. Judge Mazzola sentenced him to life without parole and called him “an intellectual dilettante” who “preyed upon the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced.”¹ On November 14, 2006, a three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court unanimously affirmed the conviction and sentence, rejecting all ten issues Einhorn raised on appeal.²²

The $907 Million Civil Judgment

In 1997, while Einhorn was still in France, the Maddux family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Philadelphia, represented pro bono by attorney James E. Beasley. The suit was designed less to recover money than to prevent Einhorn from profiting from any book or movie about the murder.⁷

On July 28, 1999, a six-member civil jury awarded the family $907 million: $155 million in compensatory damages and $752 million in punitive damages. By the time of extradition in 2001, accrued interest had pushed the total past $923 million.⁷ The judgment was essentially uncollectible; Beasley doubted Einhorn had any significant assets, noting Einhorn “never worked a day in his life.”²³

Death in Prison

Ira Einhorn died of natural causes on April 3, 2020, at age 79, at SCI-Laurel Highlands, a Pennsylvania state prison. A Department of Corrections spokesperson confirmed the death was not related to COVID-19.² He had served roughly 18 years of his life sentence, after 16 years as a fugitive and nearly 23 years after Holly Maddux’s body was pulled from the trunk in his closet.

1
Salon. Einhorn Convicted
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NBC Philadelphia. Murderer, Former Guru Ira Einhorn Dies in Prison at 79
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Esquire. Ira Einhorn Profile
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Time. Earth Day Founder
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Delaware Valley Journal. Ira Einhorn: Philly Counterculture Icon, Earth Day Organizer, and Killer
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FindLaw. Commonwealth v. Einhorn
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CBS News. $907M Award in Einhorn Trial
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Los Angeles Times. Einhorn Trial Coverage
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Encyclopedia.com. Ira Einhorn Trial 1993
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The Harvard Crimson. Einhorn Arrested Improperly, Lawyer Gains Hearing
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer. France Sends Fugitive Ira Einhorn Back to U.S.
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The Guardian. Ira Einhorn Profile
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CBS News. Einhorn Flying Solo in Court This Week
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Salon. Annika Einhorn Profile
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Seacoast Online. Fugitive for 20 Years Extradited
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European Court of Human Rights (HUDOC). Einhorn v. France
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CNN. Einhorn Extradited
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U.S. Department of State. Statement on Einhorn Extradition
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ABC News. Einhorn Extradited to U.S.
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CNN. Einhorn Verdict
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Plainview Herald. Psychic Who Had Fling With Einhorn Testifies
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NBC News. Einhorn Appeal Rejected
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Big Trial. Bringing the Unicorn to Justice