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Ira Einhorn’s charisma didn’t work on jurors
AP, Oct. 19, 2002
http://www.reporter-news.com/
By JOANN LOVIGLIO
PHILADELPHIA (AP) – It seems Ira Einhorn, who charmed scores of women, rubbed elbows with rock stars and revolutionaries and moved in a world of wealthy eccentrics and well-connected executives, has lost his magnetism.
His testimony about his top-secret paranormal research and his worldwide network of cutting-edge minds studying futuristic weaponry fell flat, as jurors took just a little more than two hours to convict Philadelphia’s former head hippie of the 1977 murder of girlfriend Holly Maddux. Maddux was a native of Tyler.
Einhorn, 62, who skipped bail and spent nearly 17 years on the run in Europe, was convicted of first-degree murder Thursday for bludgeoning Maddux and stuffing her corpse in his closet a quarter-century ago.
He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He planned to appeal, according to his lawyer.
Einhorn earned a living in the 1970s by working as a “far-watcher” for corporations seeking to tap into the counterculture. He traveled in the same circles as rock star Peter Gabriel and yippie Jerry Rubin.
But it appears that jurors saw Einhorn as conniving and conceited, not charismatic.
They barely stifled snickers at the testimony of some of the people that testified on his behalf, including a self-described “psychic archaeologist” and another woman who seemed so confused on the witness stand that Einhorn’s own attorney later called her a “throwback” to the spacey 1970s.
Then there was the testimony of the self-described “planetary enzyme” himself. Einhorn tried to engage jurors with tales of growing up in the city’s West Oak Lane section to winning a University of Pennsylvania scholarship and living a bohemian existence of free love and war protests.
But his tales of watching football with buddies seemed forced, and his oft-repeated asides about penthouse apartments and European mansions of his wealthy “international network” sounded like bragging. Jurors also didn’t buy his testimony that he and Maddux were in an open relationship where both were free to have other sexual partners.
After the verdict, jury forewoman Diane Green called him a “megalomaniac,” adding that it would be “fair to say that he’s a fraud.” Added juror Tracy Garrett, “It’s like he thought he was God.”
But for all its bizarre twists — from Einhorn’s claiming he was framed by shadowy killers seeking to halt his psychic mind-control weapon research, to the defense allegation that female prosecution witnesses were “pro-feminist … man-haters” in love with Maddux and jealous of Einhorn — the case was a tragically simple story of domestic violence.
Friends testified seeing Maddux change from introspective and creative to intimidated and silenced during her five years with Einhorn; her siblings said he tried to drive a wedge between her and her family. And when she broke from his grip in 1977, telling him they were through, he “freaked,” prosecutor Joel Rosen said.
“Her friends testified that this was a different woman,” Rosen told jurors in his closing argument Wednesday. “She wasn’t playing the defendant’s little hippie girl anymore; she was coming into her own. … He freaked because he was losing his control of her.”
Einhorn may have had a better chance of being found innocent back in 1981 — when he fled the country on the eve of his trial — than in 2002, because domestic violence is now in the public’s consciousness, Cannon said.
“I don’t think they convicted him for any reason other than the testimony they heard regarding domestic abuse,” Cannon said outside court after Thursday’s verdict. “That testimony was devastating; it allowed the jury to make a connection that the same thing probably happened to Holly Maddux.”
Judith Sabot testified that when she tried to end her relationship with Einhorn in 1966, he sneaked up behind her, hit her over the head with a bottle and tried to strangle her.
“I believed I was dying,” she said. “But then he stopped and he was gone.”
Einhorn had described the Coke-bottle attack in detail in a poem titled “An Act of Violence,” which was read to the jury. He also read an entry in his diary from 1962 about choking another girlfriend, Rita Resnick, who was leaving him: “To kill what you love seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right.”
Cannon, who unsuccessfully attempted to bar jurors from hearing about those incidents, plans to appeal Einhorn’s conviction on the grounds that testimony from 1962 and 1966 “paint an unfair picture of what he was like in 1977. He was a changed man.”
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