Hippie activist used celebrity links to evade prosecution for killing girlfriend
Ira Einhorn, who has died aged 79, was an American counter-culture figure who in 2002 was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a former girlfriend. Holly Maddux’s partly mummified body was found by police in 1979, stuffed into a trunk in Einhorn’s Philadelphia apartment; it should have been a simple prosecution. Yet the fact that he managed to elude justice for a quarter of a century shed a toxic light on human gullibility, the benefits of friends in high places, the moral confusions of the hippie era, and the French legal system, which frustrated attempts to have him extradited to the US for several years.
Ira Samuel
Einhorn was born in Philadelphia, and became active in environmental and anti-war groups while studying English at the University of Pennsylvania.He led antiVietnam war protests, later switching to ecology and then parapsychology. He had experimented with LSD in the 1950s, and later organised ‘‘be-ins’’ and Earth Days.
In 1971 he ran for mayor on a ticket of free love and expanded consciousness, and got to know most of the key counter-culture figures of the era – Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, who hailed him as a kindred spirit, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Garcia, among others.
But many who should have known better also took him seriously. He commanded huge lecture fees, addressing conferences around the world on environmental issues. He taught at Pennsylvania University and Harvard, and was paid for his thoughts as a ‘‘far-watcher’’ by leading companies.
His mailing list included multimillionaires and pop stars. British musician Peter Gabriel recalled meeting Einhorn in the mid-1970s when he was ‘‘involved in some interesting research on the paranormal . . . for which he was seeking funding’’.
Despite being hugely overweight, and having a marked aversion to soap (he considered himself ‘‘too mythic’’ to wash), Einhorn appeared to have a magnetic effect on women. In 1972 he began a relationship with Maddux, a blonde Texan hippie. The Maddux family maintained that, by September 1977, fed up with his infidelities and controlling ways, she had told Einhorn their relationship was over.
She had gone to collect her belongings from his apartment in Philadelphia, but disappeared. Einhorn claimed she had gone shopping for tofu while he was taking a shower and had never returned. He then went off on business abroad.
His celebrity status at the time meant that police never considered him a suspect. It was only 18 months later, in March 1979, after Holly’s parents had hired two former FBI agents to investigate, that police finally obtained a search warrant and knocked on the door of Einhorn’s apartment.
Einhorn, who answered the door naked, seemed unperturbed. It was not long before detectives turned their attention to a locked cupboard. There, they found a large trunk containing human remains. ‘‘You found what you found,’’ Einhorn said.
The murder weapon was never discovered, but police concluded that Holly had died from repeated blows to the head. Einhorn was charged with first-degree murder.
He would later claim that the CIA or KGB had been responsible for Holly’s murder and had pinned it on him because he knew too much about secret weapons systems, psychic research and global conspiracies.
At his bail hearing a parade of Philadelphia’s great and good testified on his behalf and he was released pending trial. But investigations began to reveal another picture. Former girlfriends testified that Einhorn had turned violent when they ended their relationships with him.
A month before the trial in 1981, Einhorn jumped bail and fled first to London then Dublin. He frequented the city’s literary gatherings, including the poetry circle surrounding Seamus Heaney, who reportedly told police he had found Einhorn ‘‘very cultivated, though a bit odd’’.
In 1993 the decision was taken to try Einhorn in absentia. It took a Pennsylvania jury less than two hours to find him guilty of murder and he was jailed for life.
In the meantime Einhorn, now calling himself Eugene Mallon, married Swedish fashion designer Annika Flodin and moved to the Charente region of France, where he passed himself off as a writer of mysteries and an anti-nuclear campaigner, and attracted a following of French hippies who called him Vieux Baba Cool (‘‘Old Cool Daddy’’).
Investigators finally tracked him down when ‘‘Mrs Mallon’’ decided to apply for a French driving licence, unaware that this required verification from the Swedish authorities. At dawn on June 13, 1997, armed gendarmes hauled Einhorn naked from his bed.
It was not until July 2001 that he was finally extradited to the US, after repeated appeals. At his trial in 2002, he claimed he had been framed by the CIA, but the jury convicted him in less than three hours.
Consigned to a high security prison, he remained intellectually active. In 2012 the Times Literary Supplement described him as ‘‘a loyal reader of the TLS and a frequent correspondent’’. – The Times