Ira Einhorn turned heads.
He was a hippie with notoriously pungent body odor who became the driving force behind Philadelphia counterculture. He was an eccentric professor who taught an alternative education class at Penn and who is said to have danced around the classroom naked while passing out pot to his students.
A 1961 Penn graduate, Einhorn was an active member of the Penn and Philadelphia communities in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was responsible for bringing the Age of Aquarius to Philadelphia and organizing the first Be-In and Smoke-In and claimed to have started Earth Day and Sun Day. Einhorn was one of the founders of the Free University of Pennsylvania, a movement that advocated alternatives to conventional forms of education. He even ran for mayor in 1971.
Today, however, Einhorn is on trial for the second time for the brutal murder of a former girlfriend -- a crime of which he was once convicted.
Einhorn attracted a large and diverse following. He was chummy with many of the city's prominent citizens, from guru Allen Ginsberg to corporate executives. His charisma and ability to completely mesmerize people was sardonically likened to Rasputin and even Hitler.
Penn History Professor Michael Zuckerman was a friend and classmate of Einhorn's in high school and college, and the two were later colleagues at the University. According to Zuckerman, Einhorn was "magnetic."
"He was brilliant, charismatic, charming," Zuckerman said. "He had more of a following than he knew what to do with."
Zuckerman, who told the DP in 1993 that Einhorn had a streak that was "clearly powerful, violent, experimental and keen to experience feelings and emotions," echoed those sentiments again.
"He wanted to experience life at its most intense, and this included violence," Zuckerman said, adding that Einhorn was constantly pushing the limits. There are countless stories, he said, of Einhorn putting his hand in fire and betting people how long he could keep it in there. In high school, for example, the 5'7" Einhorn made himself the star halfback on the football team by sheer force of will. There were also episodes of allegedly attacking girlfriends, which Zuckerman says were not a pattern of behavior to Einhorn, but rather "an experiment."
In 1979, Einhorn's mystique took on a sinister side. Einhorn's girlfriend, Holly Maddux -- a Texan who had graduated from Bryn Mawr College -- was found dead in the apartment the couple shared. Maddux had been missing for over a year before authorities discovered her mummified remains stuffed in a trunk in Einhorn's bedroom closet.
In 1981, Einhorn was arrested and subsequently released after paying the $40,000 bail. Upon his release, Einhorn fled the country and, aside from random alleged spottings in a few cities across Europe, did not surface for the next 16 years.
From 1990 to 1992, under the pseudonym Eugene Mallon, Einhorn lived in a cottage in the county of Devon, England. Richard Buxton, who identified himself as Einhorn's landlord in England, has vivid memories of Einhorn and his wife, Annika Flodin-Einhorn, whom he married in Europe.
"He was an overbearing and rather intense man with mad eyes," Buxton wrote in an e-mail.
"He used to frighten some of the locals by swimming with [Annika] naked and sunbathing on the lawn," Buxton wrote, and he "spent much time on computers, slept on the floor and painted the house interiors some outlandish colors."
Buxton wrote that when he tried to evict Einhorn as a tenant, Einhorn refused to leave, and Buxton was forced to get a court order to remove him.
"We were suspicious of his status and were within a blink of going to the American Embassy," Buxton added.
In 1993, Einhorn was tried in absentia in a Philadelphia court, where he was convicted by 14 jurors of first degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
Susan Duggan, Penn associate director of the University Scholars program, was one the jurors at the first trial.
"It was the feeling of all the jurors that the case was so rock solid against him, there was just no room for doubt," Duggan wrote in an e-mail. "When we jurors went back to the room to deliberate, we first took a poll to see where we stood. That vote was a unanimous vote of guilty!"
"But," she added, "we felt we couldn't just go running out after 15 minutes or so." She and the other jurors deliberated for two hours, re-hashing the arguments put forth by both sides, but "the case was just a very solid case against him," she wrote.
Though convicted and sentenced, Einhorn's whereabouts remained a mystery. Five years after the trial, Einhorn (still under the alias of Mallon) was apprehended by French authorities in Bordeaux. But U.S. requests for his extradition were denied by the French government on the grounds that Einhorn would not be given a second trial where he could try to prove his innocence in person.
In 1998, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law to specifically deal with the Einhorn case, which held that a person tried in absentia, living in a country that refused to extradite the person, could request a retrial upon his or her return home. After a second hearing in 1998, the French government approved Einhorn's return to the U.S. in 1999, and after a long appeal process, he returned in the summer of 2001.
This Monday, court proceedings finally began in Einhorn's retrial. Twenty-five years after the crime, Einhorn's attorney announced that his client will finally be giving testimony.
"Ira hasn't been around to give his side of the story," Zuckerman said. "I'd be surprised, however, if he could convince me or the jury that he didn't kill Holly Maddux."
"It is, of course, impossible to say what difference his presence would have made," Duggan said.
Nevertheless, Zuckerman said, what is remarkable about Einhorn "is how this 63-year-old man, some 20 years after the case, can still make headlines. It shows how resonant his influence still is."
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