Einhorn Guilty Of 1977 Murder
Former hippie guru Ira Einhorn, who hid out in Europe for nearly 17 years after being charged with killing his girlfriend, was found guilty Thursday of murdering her and stuffing her mummified corpse in his closet.
Einhorn, 62, was given an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole on the first-degree murder charge.
He showed no emotion upon hearing the verdict, which drew smiles from the family of his victim, 30-year-old Holly Maddux.
"When you have a very strong prosecution case … and a defense theory that reduces the jury to laughter - which is what happened last week in court when defense witnesses testified - it's pretty clear what direction the jury is likely to take and these jurors didn't take long at all to decide Einhorn was guilty," reports CBSNews.com Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen.
"The death penalty never was an option in the case (since) France would not have permitted Einhorn's extradition without a promise to the effect," reports Cohen. "Einhorn is old enough so that he probably won't get out of prison alive even if he could become eligible for parole down the road."
Einhorn was a 1970s counterculture superstar who held "be-in" events and counted yippie Jerry Rubin and rock star Peter Gabriel among his acquaintances.
He insisted he was innocent and said he last saw Maddux in 1977 as she left to make a phone call. He said he had no idea how her body turned up in a steamer trunk in his apartment closet.
The guilty verdict capped a stunning fall for a gadfly who lived the life of a country gentleman during his time in France. He appeared on television shows after his arrest five years ago to discuss his plight and posed naked in his garden for Esquire magazine.
Prosecutors said Einhorn was a loutish womanizer who turned violent whenever a woman wanted to leave him. They had him read to jurors from his poems and diary entries, in which he wrote "to kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural" and "violence always marks the end of a relationship."
The six-man, six-woman jury deliberated for about two hours before reaching its verdict. The jurors had been sequestered since late September to avoid influence from media coverage.
Einhorn was captured in France in 1997, 20 years after Maddux vanished. He was returned to the United States last year after assurances were made to the French government that his 1993 conviction in absentia would be vacated and he would not face the death penalty.
During the trial, friends and acquaintances of Maddux described seeing her bruised and intimidated during her tumultuous five-year relationship with Einhorn. In the weeks before she disappeared, they said, she had grown happier and more confident because of her independence from him.
Former friend Michael Hoffman testified that Einhorn once discussed attacking a former girlfriend in 1966.
"He thought that at the base of all human interaction was violence, at the base of our internal being was violence," Hoffman testified, adding that Einhorn drew his ideas from the writings of the Marquis de Sade among others.
Prosecutors also called to the stand the former owner of a bookstore who said Einhorn once asked for a "how-to" book on mummification — one that specified the "herbs or any liquid used in the process."
Defense attorney William Cannon said Einhorn encouraged an "open relationship" in which he and Maddux had other sexual partners, claiming the hippie guru espoused the concept of "free love" — counter to the prosecution argument that rage toward his lover's new relationship led to murder.
Einhorn, the final witness, said Maddux had trouble with his womanizing.
He denied abusing or killing her, and suggested that someone could have gotten into his apartment while he was away from home in 1978. He also said he didn't learn until a court appearance that Maddux's remains had been found in his closet.
"When I finally found out it was Holly, I broke up for days. It ripped me to pieces," he told a packed courtroom.
Einhorn said he was framed by the CIA because of his knowledge of what he called their secret mind-control weapon experiments. He did not say in court who he believed was responsible for her death.
Einhorn once hobnobbed with the influential players of Philadelphia's moneyed establishment, as well as counterculture figures.
He demonstrated against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and took part in the first Earth Day in 1970 — though an Earth Day organizer testified that was only because he forced his way onto the stage. His New Age philosophy got him jobs as a consultant and speaker for big firms, including Bell Telephone, which looked to Einhorn to explain how they could tap into the counterculture.
Represented by soon-to-be Sen. Arlen Specter at a 1979 hearing, Einhorn was released on an unusually low $40,000 bail — largely thanks to testimony from prominent Philadelphians about his excellent character. To be released, he needed only $4,000, which was paid by Barbara Bronfman, then an heiress-by-marriage of the Seagram distillery family, who shared Einhorn's interest in the paranormal.
Einhorn vanished on the eve of his 1981 trial. In 1993, he was convicted in absentia of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
He lived in England, Ireland and Sweden under pseudonyms before he was caught in 1997 at a converted windmill in the south of France, where he lived with his Swedish-born wife.
Einhorn was returned to the United States in the summer of 2001 after a European court refused to halt his long-fought extradition. He has already been ordered by a civil jury to pay Maddux's family more than $900 million.