Suspected Killer Caught In France Guru Hippie Was Convicted In Absentia After He Fled
A hippie guru who gained a following among the rich and influential in the 1970s before he beat his girlfriend to death and stuffed the body in a steamer trunk has been captured in France after 16 years on the run.
Ira Einhorn, 57, fled to Europe in 1981, shortly before his murder trial was to begin. A Philadelphia court convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison in 1993.
Authorities finally caught up with him Friday.
His Swedish girlfriend’s recent application for a French driver’s license and tips that followed a story about Einhorn on television’s “Unsolved Mysteries” led authorities to the charismatic fugitive.
“He will finally get the punishment that the court and the jury decided he so richly deserved,” District Attorney Lynne Abraham said Monday.
Before his arrest, Einhorn was well known in Philadelphia as a leader of the local anti-war movement and a 1971 candidate for mayor. He also was a ladies’ man and eccentric known for answering his door naked.
Although he wore dirty clothes, had a scraggly beard and long hair and frequently smelled bad, Einhorn became a successful New Age guru in the 1970s with an international network of scientists, corporate sponsors and wealthy benefactors.
Fortune 500 companies hired him to tell them about future trends. He counted among his friends and acquaintances activist Abbie Hoffman and poet Allen Ginsburg.
French police arrested Einhorn at the converted windmill in the rural Bordeaux region where he was believed to have lived since 1992. He was using the name Eugene Mallon, borrowed from an Irish friend.
Jack Jouaron, the mayor of Champagne-Mouton, a town of 1,000 240 miles southwest of Paris, said Einhorn and the woman he identified as his Swedish wife moved to a farm just outside of town seven years ago.
“We almost never saw him because it was his wife who did the shopping in the village,” Jouaron told The Associated Press.
Einhorn murdered his girlfriend, Helen “Holly” Maddux, a Bryn Mawr College graduate from Tyler, Texas, in 1977. Police, responding to complaints from neighbors about a stench coming from his apartment, found Maddux’s mummified remains in a trunk in Einhorn’s closet 18 months after she disappeared.
His influential acquaintances packed a courtroom to vouch for his character, and Einhorn was released on $40,000 bail. He then fled the country.
His Philadelphia lawyer, Norris Gelman, said he would fight Einhorn’s extradition from France. “They should not send him back to a place that has already signed and sealed his fate without a proper trial,” Gelman said.