by Steven Levy, Inquirer Sunday Magazine
This was excerpted from the book The Unicorn's Secret, by Steven Levy. The names Rita Siegal, Judy Lewis, and Jill Hamill are pseudonyms to protect the women's privacy.
Less than two weeks before he would be accused of murder, the man who called himself the Unicorn flew home to Philadelphia. It was March 15, 1979, the cusp of a new era, and the Unicorn was at the peak of his powers.
Here was a man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with top yippies when the anti-war protesters levitated the Pentagon in 1967 - but only two days earlier had been rubbing elbows with Prince Charam Pahlavi-Nia, nephew of the Shah of Iran. They had driven back to London together after the Unicorn addressed an intimate gathering sponsored by the prince - a conference "where environmental, ecological and spiritual concerns meet internationally." The Unicorn's turf.
A month before that, he was in Prague, meeting with government officials to help promote relations between America and Yugoslavia, and arranging a centenary celebration of Nikola Tesla, a legendary Yugoslavian inventor. And just months before that, the Unicorn was at Harvard, lodged in the Establishment's belly as a Fellow in the Kennedy School of Government.
The whole thing verged on a goof, a cosmic giggle, a sudden hit of irony unleashed by cannibis truth serum. Yet Ira Einhorn, who had adopted the Unicorn nickname in the Sixties, was utterly serious. He had gone from a media guru who promoted LSD and organized Be-Ins to an Establishment-approved, self-described "planetary enzyme," a New Age pioneer who circulated vital information through the bloodstream of the body politic. Without making compromises in his outlook or lifestyle, Ira Einhorn and his pro-planetary vision had attracted the attention of some very powerful people: leading-edge scientists, influential politicians and captains of industry. Through his networking, consulting, lecturing and writing, Einhorn was doing his best to inject the values of the Sixties into the global mainstream, and amazingly, he was making some headway.
These days, Einhorn looked more like a Sixties creature than ever - long brown-to-gray hair knotted in a ponytail; thick, graying Santa Claus beard; loose-fitting dashiki; and ratty corduroy pants. But his appearance was not so much social gambit as physical fact. No Philadelphian would need to question the striking look of this man only two months from his 39th birthday. The answer to the puzzle was tautological: Ira looked that way because he was Ira.
In the days after he returned from England, Einhorn vigorously resumed his routine of keeping watch on the planet and stage-managing his efforts to save it. Mornings in his tiny West Philadelphia apartment he would telephone business contacts, scientists, editors - anyone who ventured into his orbit and seemed susceptible to the latest on what he considered the transformation to a New Age. Favorite topics included Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic; evidence that Western intelligence agencies were actively suppressing information about UFOs; and Soviet studies of the paranormal.
Between calls, he might work on correspondence or read; Einhorn devoured books more efficiently than a shredding machine. Lunch would invariably be on the Penn campus at La Terrasse, a French restaurant that Einhorn had helped to popularize. Erudite and charming, he would mesmerize the corporate executive, journalist or institutional leader who was picking up the tab. Then back home for more calls and correspondence to be circulated on his network. Financing for this network - the cost of duplicating the materials and the postage - came from the world's largest corporation: the telephone company.
On March 19, 1979, after a busy morning on the phone and lunch at La Terrasse with a woman who had recently awarded him a $5,000 grant to continue his work, Einhorn hopped a train to New York. He met with two close friends, one of them the managing director of a prominent investment firm, the other an executive Vice President of AT&T. Then, in a crosstown hop that could well stand as definitive of his present existence, he rode in the phone company executive's limousine to former radical Jerry Rubin's apartment, where Einhorn would stay the night. The Sixties veterans rapped until 2.
The next day, Einhorn saw futurist Alvin Toffler, whom he was instructing in the hands-on aspects of computer conferencing. Then he was off to Washington, to the Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future. His hectic pace would not abate until a week later, when his life changed forever.
On March 28, homicide detective Michael Chitwood and six other police officials arrived at Ira Einhorn's second-floor apartment at 3411 Race St. in Powelton Village shortly before 9 a.m. with a warrant to search for any evidence relating to the disappearance of one Helen "Holly" Maddux, 32.
Holly Maddux (right) was the woman Einhorn had lived with on and off since 1972. A blond, Texas-born beauty, she was shy and waif-like. People who described her always seemed to use words like delicate and ethereal. Einhorn had not seen her since September 1977, when, he told friends, she went out to shop at a nearby food co-op and did not return.
Chitwood virtually ignored the apartment. He walked purposefully to a French door on the north wall, removed a maroon blanket that was hung over the door, and stepped onto a screened-in, unheated porch. On the east wall of the porch was a closet. After breaking off a thick Master padlock on the closet door with a crowbar, he found two-foot-wide shelves crammed with cardboard boxes, bags, shoes and other paraphernalia. Some of the boxes were marked "Maddux." On the floor of the closet was a green suitcase, the name "Holly Maddux" and a Texas address on the handle. Behind the suitcase was a large black steamer trunk.
When Chitwood opened the trunk, he found pages from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin dated September 15, 1977, and pages from the New York Times Book Review of August 7, 1977. Underneath the newspapers was a layer of styrofoam packing material. Scooping the foam aside, Chitwood saw something else.
At first he couldn't tell what it was - it looked wrinkled and tough. Then he made out the shape: a wrist, palm and five fingers, curled and frozen in their stillness. Chitwood dug a little deeper, following the shriveled, rawhide-like hand, down the wrist... and saw an arm, still clothed in a plaid flannel shirt.
Chitwood backed away from the trunk. He removed a pair of rubber gloves. He headed to the kitchen to wash his hands. There, he turned to Ira Einhorn, who was maintaining a studied nonchalance. "We found the body," he said. "It looks like Holly's body."
"You found what you found," said the Unicorn.
On April 3, Ira Einhorn's friends appeared at his bail hearing to verify his reputation as the benevolent, energizing spirit of his generation. The witnesses were sober, substantial members of the community, described in the newspapers the next day as "upper-crust professionals." His lawyer was Arlen Specter, who is now a United States senator.
In all his years on the bench, Common Pleas Court Judge William Marutani had never seen such an impressive array of character witnesses. There was a corporate attorney, a lecturer at an Ivy League university, an Episcopal reverend. Now a vice president at Bell Telephone was describing Ira Einhorn's reputation as "excellent." And here was an economist, the former London bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. The economist was followed by the dermatology consultant, who was followed by the businessman, who was followed by the playwright, who was followed by the restaurateur... So many prominent people were ready to bestow equally vigorous honorifics that Einhorn's lawyer had them stand at their seats and acknowledge that their experiences of the defendant were congruous with the testimony thus far. There simply was not enough time for their praises.
How could this man who moved the community to such respectful odes be charged with premeditated murder? How could this generous, peace-loving paragon such as the witnesses described kill the woman he loved, and cold-bloodedly cover up his fatal deed?
Bail was set at $40,000. The $4,000 cash bond was provided by another prominent Einhorn supporter, Barbara Bronfman, wife of Seagram Liquor heir Charles Bronfman. And the Unicorn was free.
Einhorn's initial strategy was to portray his plight as a global problem, something that affected everyone's well-being as much as his own. He would imply that this was not a case of murder but a scandalous conspiracy demanding investigation. This attitude was implicit in a fund-raising letter for the "Ira Einhorn Legal Defense Fund":
I am very conscious of the general shock and pain that my arrest has brought about. Due to the nature of the legal situation, I am not able to talk about the facts of the case.
However, I can share with you that I am sick to heart at this interruption of work that I have slowly and patiently created over a period of many years. The psychological shock of such an abrupt transition has left me dazed and totally without a context. I feel as if I have lost my home planet. It would be so easy to give up or disappear.
Yet I know that I must not desert at such a critical time, for the transformation is accelerating rapidly and must be understood if we are to survive...
Though Einhorn's network contacts generally were willing to believe that his arrest was part of some grand scheme to suppress his flow of information about "psychic warfare," many of his friends were not. It was just too bizarre. So when he was challenged with the ultimate question - "Did you do it, Ira?" - the Unicorn would draw on what he knew was his most effective weapon: His belief in himself. He would coolly look his accuser in the eye and answer in the negative. It was a rare person who engaged Ira Einhorn's deep blue eyes in that exchange who walked away thinking that he was guilty. Moreoever, he would pose some cutting questions: Do you know me as a violent person? Why would I kill Holly Maddux, a woman I loved? Even if I did kill her - and I didn't - would I really be so stupid as to leave the body in the trunk in my apartment for so long?
Nonetheless, a sizable contingent of Einhorn supporters slowly withdrew, particularly as they learned more details of Holly Maddux's death. At a pretrial hearing two weeks after Einhorn was freed on bail, the coroner described the cause of death as "cranio-cerebral injuries to the brain and skull." He elaborated: "There are at least 10 or 12 fractures and maybe more." Apparently, crushing blows had been delivered to the victim's head from above and from the right and left sides.
So much for the "semi-accidental" theory that some of Einhorn's friends had been formulating, in which Ira momentarily lost his temper and struck Holly once, whereupon she fell backward, hit her head against the bathtub and fell suddenly dead.
As his friends slipped away, Einhorn became increasingly uncomfortable in Philadelphia and, despite his status as an accused murderer, traveled extensively. He spent weeks in California, considerable time in Canada, and even ventured to England.
And though he continued to express confidence that he would be exonerated, he had in fact always considered the possibility of fleeing. Not long after his arrest, he wrote a note to a friend in London:
... I'm not about to go to jail for life for a crime I did not commit... a country house, a room on a large estate, a cottage in some safe far-off place. I prefer Northern Europe and I'm open to anything. I should have enough $ to live quietly for two to four years and friends will add to that...
In the early days of 1981, Einhorn sold his car and withdrew what was left of his bank account. By Jan. 14, the date of another pretrial hearing, he was gone. A week later, Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Ribner summoned officials to ask why Einhorn had not been recaptured. An assistant D.A. stated the problem: "It's not easy to find a planetary enzyme, your honor."
The Flight
Where was Ira Einhorn? He and his girlfriend, Jeanne Marie Morrison, were apartment-hunting in Dublin, Ireland. Besides being an English-speaking country, Ireland had the ultimate amenity for a fugitive: no extradition treaty with the United States.
Jeanne Marie Morrison was in her early 20s, a quiet redhead who had lived with Einhorn for some months after his arrest. According to her mother, Morrison had met Einhorn at Barbara and Charles Bronfman's estate in Charlottesville, VA, where Jeanne Marie had gone to college. Friends of Einhorn remember her as very quiet and deferential, much in the way they recalled Holly Maddux's behavior in the early stages of her relationship with Einhorn.
It was about Feb. 1, 1981, that they set out for the Rathmines section of Dublin, south of the city center, a middle-class residential quarter with rows of roomy brownstones with apartments for rent. They were responding to a newspaper ad for an apartment at 22 Greenmount Rd., but it was raining, and the house numbers were not clear. Einhorn and Morrison rang the bell of the orner house, No. 26.
Dennis Weaire, a 39-year-old physics professor, answered and told them that the house they were looking for was a few doors down. As they turned away, Weaire had second thoughts. There was an unoccupied flat in the upstairs portion of his house; he called them back and offered the flat as temporary quarters. They agreed. They introduced themselves to Weaire and his wife, Collette, as Ira and Jeanne Marie Einhorn.
Jeanne Marie, with her jeans and long red hair, seemed to the Weaires a familiar student-type. Einhorn was more difficult to buttonhole. He claimed to be a writer, and he spent his days upstairs, presumably working on his book. He did not discuss the subject and was extremely protective of the manuscript. On the other hand, he could be garrulous and entertaining. Not infrequently, he would drop into the Weaires' cozy sitting room on the first floor and chat on any number of subjects. Dennis Weaire found him quite capable of an intelligent conversation about physics, though eventually the professor was turned off when Einhorn insisted that the annuls of science should accommodate paranormal phenomena.
As the weeks went by, Einhorn did venture out into Dublin, mostly at night, but generally he led a reclusive life. He had no visitors. His mail was not voluminous.
Collette Weaire, an effervescent woman who considered herself a student of human nature, could not help but observe the unusual dynamics between Jeanne Marie and her "husband." The young woman was obviously discomfitted by living abroad, and she began to stay away during the day, explaining that Ira did not like her around when he was writing. Collette suspected that something was wrong - no surprise, really, since Einhorn seemed to dominate the poor girl, belittling her in front of the Weaires. Collette's suspicions were confirmed when, after she knew the American woman better, Jeanne Marie told her, "You know, we have no relationship at all now." The mystery was why she didn't leave him.
As Einhorn became more trusted by the Weaires - he was scrupulous about discharging his debts and performing any household favors asked of him - he, too, opened up somewhat. He had experienced some difficulty in his home country, he said, intimating that his involvement in the anti-nuclear movement had earned him disfavor. He had been framed for a crime, and the book he was writing would clear his name. This admission seemed plausible and did not diminish Einhorn in the Weaires' estimation. Certainly by April, the Weaires had no compunction about leaving the house, and the care of the family dog, in the hands of the Einhorns when they traveled to visit friends - in America.
Before they left, Einhorn casually remarked that it would not be a good idea to mention his name to anyone in the United States; if his enemies discovered his whereabouts, he might be captured. Collette agreed, but silently vowed to look into the matter.
In Chicago, Collette Weaire told the story to the friend she was visiting. The friend contacted a Sun-Times reporter, who called The Philadelphia Inquirer, and it was then that she learned exactly why Ira Einhorn had left the United States. On April 14, when Dennis Weaire joined his wife in Chicago, she excitedly spilled the story to him - the man living in their house was an accused murderer!
Dennis Weaire called the Irish Consulate in Chicago, which directed him to the FBI. On April 16, at the FBI office, Weaire identified a photograph of Einhorn.
It would appear at this point that the flight of the Unicorn was doomed. Though no extradition treaty existed between the United States and Ireland, often these matters were handled informally. Moreover, one would have expected the FBI to do something about a positive identification of a fugitive wanted for murder. But when Dennis Weaire returned to Dublin on April 19, no one was there to meet him, as the FBI office in Chicago had promised. No agency seemed to know anything about the situation.
It was not until two days later that the Weaires were able to convince Irish authorities of the validity of their story. After apparently checking with American and Irish diplomats, the police decided they had no standing to arrest the accused murderer, or even to hold him for any reason. All they could offer Weaire was to accompany him home - fearful, he and Collette had been staying at her father's house - and observe as he threw out his tenant. Which they did.
Meanwhile, no one in Philadelphia had been told about any of this. It was not until May 8 that police Sgt. Richard King heard that a couple in Ireland had spotted Ira Einhorn. The news came from Drew Carr, the FBI agent in charge of the Einhorn case in Philadelphia - apparently he hadn't heard about the sighting until after Einhorn had been allowed to go free. King was boggled by the foul-up but was unable to get much information, let alone action, from overseas. It was not until September that the Irish police sent word confirming that Einhorn had indeed been there. But where was he now?
On October 14, 1981, Sgt. King flew to Dublin to investigate in person, but he soon learned that, even if he could find Einhorn, he could not arrest him. Until the United States and Ireland ratified an extradition treaty, King was told specifically, "do not molest Einhorn - he is not to be touched."
Though Irish officials promised to check all possible leads, King had no confidence that they were motivated to help, and indeed, they did little in subsequent months. When King retired in 1984, responsibility for the search was passed to Rich DiBenedetto, the extraditions officer of the Philadelphia district attorney's office. Even though Einhorn remained a high-priority fugitive, Philadelphia could not afford to send DiBenedetto on a world tour. The best he could do was keep in touch with people with whom Einhorn might keep in touch.
Five years after Einhorn fled, DiBenedetto's interest in the case had not waned. He believed that Einhorn probably was still in Ireland - two years earlier, Jeanne Marie Morrison had renewed her passport at the American Embassy in Dublin - and funds might soon be available to allow DiBenedetto to go to Ireland himself (it was expected that an extradition treaty finally would be in place later in the year).
Then, in late May 1986, DiBenedetto got a call from Dennis Weaire. He had seen Einhorn. Weaire and his wife, Collette, had spotted him in the faculty cafeteria of Dublin's Trinity College. His hair was still long, tied back in a braid, but he had no beard. In the last half-decade, he had gotten heavier and grayer.
"My God, Ira," Collette said, "what are you doing here?" Confronted, Einhorn quickly turned to leave, but Dennis Weaire, furious that this outlaw had the temerity to dine in his place of employment, followed Einhorn out the door and down the stairs, shouting at him to get out.
"I just want to be left in peace," the Unicorn said.
Einhorn's companion in the cafeteria had been a German professor, and the next day, Weaire went to his office. The professor seemed astonished at Weaire's contention that his friend was an alleged murderer named Ira Einhorn. The professor knew him as Ben Moore, an intelligent fellow to whom he'd been giving German lessons; in exchange, Einhorn was educating the professor about matters of philosophy and science.
As usual, the Irish police provided little help. It was midsummer by the time information filtered back to DiBenedetto that officers had stopped at the address the German professor had given for Ben Moore - and found no one.
Late in 1986 came another break. Jeanne Marie Morrison had returned to the United States, and, in exchange for a guarantee of immunity, she agreed to an interview with Rich DiBenedetto. Apparently, Einhorn's brush with Weaire had indeed led to his leaving Ireland. Jeanne Marie said that the last time she saw him was a few weeks after that confrontation, and when he left, he did not say where he was going.
In Dublin, she said, he had lived a disciplined, quiet life in a roomy two-bedroom apartment in one of the city's best neighborhoods. Under his assumed name, he conducted limited correspondence with noted authors, including letters to classicist Guy Davenport and mathematician Rudy Rucker. As Ben Moore, he attended poetry readings in Ireland and was acquainted with some Irish poets of repute, such as Seamus Heaney. He did research and worked on a book. His interest seemed to focus on pagan history, particularly in the Roman Empire, and he was building a collection of early texts, including pre-Christian Bibles. He would not let her see his mail. She did not handle the money. DiBenedetto persisted - who was sending money? Eventually, she gave police a name: Barbara Bronfman.
(Though Morrison's identification was not necessarily accurate, it intensified DiBenedetto's desire to speak to Barbara Bronfman. But in the next year, he was unable to do so. There is only so much an American authority can do to investigate the actions of a Canadian citizen, particularly a citizen with the lofty status of a Bronfman. Even if DiBenedetto had spoken to her, it is questionable whether he would have learned much. Asked about Einhorn, Bronfman authorized only this statement: "The main thing I can say is that I miss him very much because he was a great friend. He enriched many people's lives, including mine.")
As Ben Moore, Einhorn cultivated a circle of friends among artists and intellectuals who considered themselves lucky to know him. They accepted him as a font of creative energy, and he became their guiding force, both in Dublin and during weekends in a New Age retreat in nearby Avoca, south of the Dublin mountains. Some of these friends would regularly go to his apartment for informal seminars on Hegel, Descartes, Kant and other philosophers. This strange, somewhat overbearing American dominated the sessions. Since he was so fascinating, the other participants did not object.
"To me, he was a positive person," said Dubliner Toby Hall, who shared Einhorn's interest in Celtic and pagan studies. "I've never met a more useful person for society."
When, months later, his Dublin friends learned the identity of Ben Moore and the crime he was accused of, they could not believe it. They were immersed in the same air of unreality as Ira Einhorn's friends had been seven years before, when the news of Holly Maddux's murder first exploded their illusions about the Unicorn.
The Dark Side
Ira Einhorn's arrest for murder seemed incredibly inconsistent with the image of nonviolence and good feelings he had long cultivated, and the disbelief among those who had known him for years was universal. "It's not classic Ira," summed up a friend since high school.
Indeed, when Holly Maddux disappeared in September 1977, the police were inclined to believe Einhorn's story that she had simply taken off; Holly was known as a free spirit. Even friends who knew she was trying to end the relationship saw no reason to think Einhorn had anything to do with her abrupt departure.
But this is what the friends of Ira Einhorn, and even the police at the time of his arrest, did not know: If Einhorn killed Holly Maddux in a violent rage at the time she made it clear she was leaving him, the act would not have been an isolated instance of violence.
Fifteen years earlier, Einhorn had assaulted a woman in a dormitory room at Bennington College in Vermont. Graduated from college, not yet enrolled in graduate school, Einhorn cut a figure of wolfish intensity, charming many he met, but most of all absorbed in himself. So it was that when he met Rita Siegal in early 1962, their relationship was more a function of what he imagined it to be than what it actually was.
Siegal was a Bennington student, smart and direct in her speech. She was a dancer, with a fine dancer's body, and Einhorn became captivated. Siegal says she was not nearly so attached to him: "The, quote, great romance of the century was what was in his head. I never got the feeling that this was a love relationship. I got the feeling it was a sick relationship."
Indeed, Einhorn's behavior became increasingly weird. Exulting in the words of thunderous loners, individuals who set their own rules for behavior - Nietzsche, Lawrence, the Marquis de Sade - he fell into primal reveries. Some of his outbursts gave Siegal the frights. "It was as if somebody were talking about something, and all of a sudden he would become the thing itself," she says. "And he would start glaring at you and leering at you."
She became more and more uncomfortable. She wanted to leave him but was afraid to. She felt trapped. She was convinced that Einhorn was capable of horrible things. At one point he actually showed a bizarre propensity for torturing small animals. He would, she says, "take a kitty-cat into the shower and listen to it scream."
This is what Ira Einhorn was writing in late June 1962:
Sadism - sounds nice - run it over your tongue - contemplate with joy the pains of others as you expire with an excruciating satisfaction. Project outward the vision of inward darkness. Let no cesspool of inner meaning be concealed. Reveal the filth that you are. Know the animal is always there... sacred mystery of another person must be preserved - only death can do that.
Einhorn finally began to realize that Siegal was determined to end the relationship. On July 24, he wrote that "death may join us where life fails."
By the end of July, Siegal recalls, she had told Einhorn that the relationship was over. He came to her dorm room. She made it clear he was not welcome. "I probably said, 'We need to end this thing,'" she says. It was then that she saw Einhorn shift into a darkly determined being. "It wasn't like he lost his reality," she says. "He totally knew what he was doing.
"He just went over and locked the door. It was quiet, premeditated. It wasn't a rational buildup of temper at all. It was almost like, you watch one of those supernatural movies on television, and eyes change. Like a werewolf. It was like that, truly. And so I knew when that happened, I was in the room with a madman."
Einhorn moved steadily toward her. He did not rush. For a moment, Siegal tried to fight him off, but then she let go. Einhorn's hands were around her neck, choking her. She passed out.
On July 31, 1962, Einhorn wrote: "To kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right."
Einhorn later told Rita that he returned to the room to see if she was still alive. She did not recall that visit. She had awakened with his fingermarks still visible on her throat, and spent the night in the school infirmary. She says that she filed no charges against him but did arrange with the college that he be banned from the campus.
Perhaps strangest of all was Ira Einhorn's reaction. He seemed to regard it as a step in a struggle for self-realization. He did not even seem to think that it need affect his relationship with Rita, and a month after the incident he wrote that "I want to love Rita (my entire being cries and needs the love we could have) but it is so difficult to anticipate the shifting of her unstable sands..."
For the next few years, Einhorn's sexual relationships followed a pattern. The initial encounter would put him in raptures, and he would pursue the woman with such intensity that within a few weeks, or even days, both partners would be exhausted, ready to move on. Other affairs were more casual. It was not until 1965 that he met another woman who fired his imagination - and drew out his emotions - as deeply as Rita had. Again, the union climaxed in an act of violence.
She was Judy Lewis, a student at Penn. Her instructors describe her as magnetic, vital, very tall, very pretty. Einhorn became obsessed with her.
"Ira was so intense that when you got involved with him, he would get inside your head," says Michael Hoffman, who was on the Penn faculty at the time and observed the Einhorn-Lewis affair as a friend of both. "You would have that kind of relationship - inside of one another's heads. He was particularly that way with women because he needed to dominate... It was not a placid relationship, it was obviously a very passionate one, and at a certain point I think she wanted out."
As he had with Rita Siegal, Einhorn constructed a fantasy scenario in which Judy Lewis was a woman he wanted to share his life with. He ignored evidence that the longer the relationship lasted, the less eager she was to continue. "Joy would erupt," he wrote in September 1965, "if Judy could only learn the simple acceptance of the magic which flows between us."
It took months before Einhorn finally came to realize that Judy Lewis really wanted to end it. He would devise explanations that saw her demurals as vacillation; he would mentally produce evidence that she really wanted to continue the relationship. But at times, he fantasized about murdering her. He wrote on March 14, 1966, "How ridiculous the thought of killing Judy appears, yet I held it in my mind just four short hours ago - this particular ability of man is both his horror and his joy."
Three days later, the horror occurred. Einhorn had arrived at Judy's apartment, full of ideas why the relationship should be resumed. The argument broke off momentarily when she left to get milk for coffee. Einhorn's reconstruction of what happened next came in an unpublished poem titled "An Act of Violence." It tells of his lingering over coffee in the shadow of the relationship's finality. It tells of her departing for milk, cynically noting that it was "a rare performance of duty for one she loves." It tells of her returning with milk and doughnuts. The coffee is served, as Einhorn musters up courage for some unnamed act. Then, seemingly, he discards the notion and puts on his jacket, ready to leave.
Suddenly it happens.
Judy Lewis apparently had her back turned and did not see Einhorn start toward her with a Coke bottle in his hand.
Bottle in hand I strike.
Away at the head...
The glass broke. Judy began bleeding. Einhorn wrestled her to the floor, holding her by the neck; she felt her head hit a table as she fell. Einhorn was strangling her. She felt herself going limp... and lost consciousness.
In such violence there may be freedom.
The next thing Judy remembered was seeing her neighbors, who, attracted by the commotion, had come into the room. She told them to call the campus police. Ira Einhorn was gone, alone with his thoughts:
Where am I now after having hit Judy over the head with a Coke bottle, blood on my jacket and pants - then making some feeble attempts to choke her. She wanted to live, that has been established... I'll be able, if she does not have me arrested, to go back to living a normal life. Violence always marks the end of a relationship.
As had Rita Siegal, Judy Lewis spent the night in the school infirmary, nursing the injuries from Einhorn's attack. Also as in the case of Siegal, no charges were filed.
There is no evidence that Holly Maddux ever knew what Ira Einhorn had done to Rita Siegal or Judy Lewis. Certainly she did not act as if she were in mortal danger when she returned to Philadelphia from New York City on Saturday, September 10, 1977. Her mission was to "get Ira off the wall," as she told the man she'd been seeing in New York. Holly was in the process of leaving Einhorn, and he had threatened to throw her belongings out of the apartment. She intended to calm down Einhorn, then return to her new boyfriend.
It may never be known with certainty what happened in the second-floor rear apartment in Powelton Village on Saturday night and the morning of Sunday, September 11. No one would ever see Holly Maddux alive again. Einhorn's private journal recounts that he and Holly were at odds on that Sunday morning - fighting again about her leaving him - and records that she left to make a call and go to the co-op. He also reported this activity: work on messy place.
Another sentence in the entry for that day mentioned his taking a drive with two women friends, one of them named "Jill." He gave no details. However, Jill Hamill remembers the incident clearly. She and her friend Sharon, both barely out of high school, had known Einhorn since the spring. On that Sunday, the three took a spin in Jill's car, to the West River Drive.
According to Jill, Einhorn seemed different. "He seemed like he had a sense of urgency," she says. "He said he wanted to ask us something."
"Sure, ask away," the girls said.
"I'm in some really, really deep trouble," Einhorn said. "I've got a steamer trunk that has some very, very valuable documents in it. They're documents that belong to the Russians, and I need to get rid of it." He wanted the girls to put the trunk in Jill Hamill's 1976 Plymouth Volare, take it to the Schuylkill, and dump it in.
Jill Hamill says she had a bad feeling about the request. "Sharon and I were looking at each other like, 'This is really weird.' I mean, why did he want to get rid of something like this?" As it turned out, a quick inspection of Jill's car showed that it was not large enough to handle the trunk. Jill was greatly relieved.
The steamer trunk remained in Ira Einhorn's apartment.
A year and a half later, alerted by private investigators hired by her parents, police broke the lock on that trunk and found the body of Holly Maddux. Almost 10 years after that discovery, Ira Einhorn remained a fugitive.
There is no statute of limitations for murder.
Ira Einhorn, captured in France June 13, certainly did not squander cash on suits, shoes or soap during 16 years as a fugitive.
But the guru's comfortable life on the lam begs a question of finances put most succinctly by Joseph Murray, who was the prosecutor when Einhorn skipped bail on murder charges in 1981:
"Even if you're a sack of s--- who's a planetary enzyme, you've got to eat something," Murray said.
Einhorn, who wrote and lectured about paranormal psychology, futurism and mind control, referred to himself as a "planetary enzyme." Before vanishing, he had a reputation in Philadelphia for coaxing money from friends, admirers, even corporations, although he never seemed to hold a job.
In southwestern France, Einhorn followed habits of a lifetime, apparently living off family money from his Swedish-born wife, Annika Flodin. His support has depended on a mix of adoring women and shadowy benefactors fascinated by his theories.
In Ireland in the early days of flight, it was fat checks from Canadian Barbara Bronfman, who married into the wealth of the Seagram liquor dynasty.
Hank Harrison, a California counter-culture author who hung out with Einhorn in Dublin, said last week he was "1 million percent certain" that Bronfman regularly sent Einhorn money.
"She was known as a supporter of those causes," said Harrison, who did not know at the time that the man who called himself Ben Moore was running from a murder charge.
"I saw the bank statements," Harrison said. "He was getting funds wired to him every month from the Cayman Islands, and it was a lot of money. He was getting in Irish money about 1,000 pounds, which was about $1,500 a month. You could live on that fairly comfortably in 1981."
Investigators learned of the Bronfman connection a few years later, and they say it stopped a decade ago.
But there are many missing pieces in a puzzle that has perplexed those who tracked Einhorn as a fugitive from the 1977 bludgeon murder of his girlfriend, Helen "Holly" Maddux.
Einhorn was convicted in absentia in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison. His lawyers say he will fight extradition from Bordeaux.
He had to have benefactors, said Richard DiBenedetto of the Philadelphia district attorney's office, who directed the hunt. "How else could he have survived?"
At his capture, Einhorn and Flodin were living comfortably yet simply, growing vegetables and baking bread. They had hardly enough money to repair their car after paying 500,000 francs, or $90,900, for a converted mill in Champagne-Mouton.
Neither Einhorn nor Flodin had a job. Einhorn, posing as Eugene Mallon, an English writer, claimed to be writing books, but there's no proof he ever published.
DiBenedetto said his suspicion was that the money was coming from Annika.
"Probably her family has money," DiBenedetto said.
But he and Interpol probers in Stockholm steered clear of the Flodins for fear they would tip off their daughter.
At the time of his arrest for murder in 1979, according to The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy, Einhorn told colleagues that he had enough money to live on for three or four years.
Einhorn spent almost two years in Philadelphia free on $40,000 bail, guaranteed by his parents. An impressive list of academics, corporate execs, ministers and professionals testified to his good character and organized legal defense funds, but it's unclear how much was raised or where it went.
The Levy book documents how Bronfman supported Einhorn from 1981, when he fled to Ireland, through 1988, when he was nearly captured at Flodin's house in Stockholm.
DiBenedetto called Bronfman the "main benefactor" for those seven years, although he did not have details. At one point, he said, Einhorn shared a $550-a-month apartment near the U.S. Embassy in Dublin.
Bronfman, he said, flew to Dublin and met with Einhorn and then-girlfriend Jeanne Morrison at least once. DiBenedetto said he thought Einhorn had a powerful influence over Bronfman, but it was a brother-sister-type connection, not a sexual one.
As for Morrison, Einhorn "had her working in a massage parlor" for houshold expenses, DiBenedetto said.
The Daily News was unable to contact Bronfman, who lives in Montreal, and was unable to trace Morrison, who has returned to the United States and has married.
In Sweden, Einhorn lived with Flodin, who later described him as a boarder to investigators but then disappeared herself a few months later, moving to Denmark.
One intriguing story has Einhorn seeking support from British rock star Peter Gabriel, a founder of Genesis. But although Gabriel admits meeting Einhorn in the '70s, and DiBenedetto says they met in London within the past decade, there's no proof of any financial aid.
Since late 1992, Einhorn has been hiding in plain sight in wine country.
Einhorn was required by French law to provide proof of his citizenship and financial stability. He used a fake passport in the name of Eugene Mallon, a Dublin bookseller involved in left-wing causes who had befriended Einhorn years earlier, to pass himself off as a citizen of England.
According to records in the Champagne-Mouton mayor's office, Einhorn and Flodin did show they had enough money to live there and to buy their converted mill.
But the process appears to be informal. Approval was handwritten in a village ledger book, and the mayor says no record was kept of the proof provided.
The "Mallonsx" had lived in cottages in two English villages for more than a year before arriving in wine country. They told acquaintances they had been married in England in 1992.
The couple did run into money problems at least once, said Maria Das, a friend. When their red Fiat -- the one with an anti-nuke bumper sticker -- broke down, Einhorn was upset about the cost of repairs. After it was fixed, she said, they lived on a tight budget for a while.
Flodin's home in Stockholm actually belonged to her parents, who "made a good living in the fashion business," Das said. Flodin told friends she had been a shop clerk in Sweden.
Einhorn's only hint of work was writing a book, which he would not show to anyone, friends said. He claimed to lecture occasionally at European universities about medical subjects.
It did not take much for the couple to survive in Champagne-Mouton. Prices are modest, distractions are few.
Einhorn satisfied a voracious appetite for reading by borrowing books at a local library. He claimed he could read better in French than his English-speaking acquaintances, although they doubted it because he spoke almost no French.
Benefactors have been a way of life for Einhorn.
In The Unicorn's Secret, Levy reported that Einhorn was trying to raise money on several fronts as he prepared to flee.
Soon after Maddux's mummified body was discovered in a trunk in Einhorn's apartment, the guru sent out a letter for the "Ira Einhorn Legal Defense Fund."
Because of the legal proceedings, Einhorn wrote, "I am not able to talk about the facts of the case." Without mentioning the murder, he lamented that his arrest was interrupting his work.
Under the city's bail program, an accused defendant had to put up only 10 percent of the bail amount as cash -- allowing Einhorn's release with a payment of $4,000.
That amount was immediately posted by Bronfman, then the wife of Seagram's liquor heir Charles Bronfman, by reputation the richest man in Canada.
Einhorn may have had multiple fund-raising efforts under way.
Levy identifed the treasurer of one fund-raising committee as Terry Harmelin, the wife of attorney Steven Harmelin, an Einhorn crony since high school.
W. Russell G. Byers, now a Daily News columnist but in 1980 the owner of an energy-consulting business, also headed an Einhorn fund-raising effort in which Terry Harmelin had no role, Byers said.
Byers said he could not remember who had asked him to organize the fund but was positive that it had not raised any money. "I never really set up anything," Byers said last week. "I ordered stationery, that was about it."
Still, Einhorn seemed to get money from somewhere, and quietly, he began plotting his life on the lam.
In June 1979, on the back of a fund-raising letter, he asked a London friend, Craig Samms, to discreetly look for "a place where I could disappear for a few years... I prefer Northern Europe and I'm open to anything. I should have enough money to live quietly for two to four years, and friends will add to that."
It was Samms who, according to DiBenedetto, introduced Einhorn and Flodin in London a decade later.
As his murder trial approached in January 1981, Einhorn began converting assets to cash. On January 6, he sold his Toyota for $4,400 and withdrew $500 from his bank account, leaving $9.94, according to Levy's book. Morrison made arrangments to sell a Persian rug and join Einhorn in England.
Ex-prosecutor Murray said he noticed how successful Einhorn was in getting people to help him.
At first, it was defense lawyer Arlen Specter's secretary who signed for the $40,000 bail. Later Einhorn's parents put up their home as collateral.
Einhorn attorney Norris Gelman said the murderer's parents lost neither money nor property. It's not known if Bronfman or others paid the rest of the forfeited bail.
(The father died soon after Einhorn became a fugitive. The mother, who lives in Wyncote, Montgomery County, with her other son, Steve, has declined comment).
Prosecutor Murray, for one, remains stumped.
"How does a guy go from never working to paying for a chalet in France? How does the guy live?"
"Someone was paying his freight. I've heard rumors, everything to him being a paid agent of the CIA..."
"Maybe he was scamming other people. It's hard for me to believe that even after how they heard about how the body was found, that they could funnel money to him. Not only that, but knowingly commit a crime by aiding him as a fugitive."
