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Juror: ‘He thought he was God’
The Philadephia Inquirer, Oct. 18, 2002
http://www.philly.com/
By Julie Stoiber
They convicted him, and then they trashed him.
In a rare post-verdict news conference, some of the six men and six women who yesterday declared Ira Einhorn guilty of the 1977 murder of ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux shared their thoughts about the man they helped send to prison for life.
“He had a warped mind,” said juror Tracy Garrett, a Fire Department dispatcher from North Philadelphia. “I can’t say it no plainer: It was like he thought he was God.”
Jurors said that as a witness Einhorn lacked credibility. His testimony was inconsistent, at times “laughable,” one juror said.
“We were stronger on our verdict because he testified,” said juror Colleen O’Leary, a day-care worker from the city’s Roxborough section.
Common Pleas Court Judge William J. Mazzola also skewered the former counterculture guru. In sentencing Einhorn, Mazzola described him as “someone who would buy a book and read the first and last chapters of the book and feign a special understanding – the type who would, for example, buy a hardbound version of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and put it on the coffee table and give everyone the impression not only that he had read it but that he was, to use a metaphor, drowning in insight as to what was expressed.”
If Einhorn, 62, once possessed that ability, he was not able to muster it for the jury.
Jury forewoman Diane Green, chief of microbiology for the city’s Department of Health, said jurors were doubtful about Einhorn’s testimony as a whole, particularly his contention that someone planted Maddux’s body in his Powelton Village apartment because he knew too much about secret mind-control weapons.
“Someone carrying a mummified body up the steps?” she said. “I don’t believe we thought that was likely.”
Most shocking to jurors was the idea that Einhorn could go about his life while his ex-girlfriend’s body rotted in a steamer trunk.
“He was able to live in the apartment with the stench of a body,” Garrett said. “He was able to get up every morning, take a bath, eat his breakfast… . And there was a body in his closet.”
Einhorn’s attorney, William Cannon, said he did not regret his decision to have the defendant testify.
Einhorn’s only “window of opportunity” to avoid a first-degree-murder conviction in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence was to tell his story to the jurors, Cannon said.
“Here’s a guy who’s been an influencer of people all his life,” Cannon said. “He was able to shape people through the sheer force of his personality.”
Not, however, when his life depended on it.
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