Ira Einhorn — a body in a trunk, then sixteen years in Europe

On June 13, 1997, French police arrested a man calling himself Eugène Mallon at a converted mill in the village of Champagne-Mouton, in rural southwestern France. He was Ira Einhorn, a celebrated figure of the 1960s and 1970s Philadelphia counterculture who had jumped bail in 1981 rather than stand trial for the murder of his former girlfriend, Helen “Holly” Maddux. He had lived in Europe for sixteen years under assumed names, the last of them as a married man tending a country property. The arrest ended one flight and opened another contest — a four-year legal struggle over whether France would surrender him at all.

The crime was discovered in 1979. Maddux, a Bryn Mawr College graduate from Tyler, Texas, had ended her five-year relationship with Einhorn and gone to collect her belongings on September 9, 1977; she was never seen again. Eighteen months later, on March 28, 1979, Philadelphia police acting on a complaint searched Einhorn’s apartment in the Powelton Village neighborhood and found Maddux’s partially mummified remains packed in a steamer trunk in a closet off his bedroom. Einhorn, who had styled himself a guru and networker and was nicknamed “the Unicorn” — the English meaning of his German surname — insisted he had been framed.

The case became a study in how reputation and social capital can purchase a head start. Represented by the future United States senator Arlen Specter, Einhorn was released on a bail bond of a few thousand dollars, secured by a wealthy patron, and remained free for years before trial. When the trial finally neared in 1981, he fled. Pennsylvania convicted him of first-degree murder in absentia in 1993, but the conviction itself became the obstacle to extradition once he was found, because French and European law barred surrendering a person tried in his absence.

After the arrest, France refused to extradite a man convicted without a trial, and Pennsylvania responded by enacting a special statute guaranteeing Einhorn a fresh trial if returned. The French government issued an extradition decree, and on July 20, 2001, Einhorn was flown to Philadelphia. He was retried, and on October 17, 2002, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder; he was sentenced the next day to life in prison without parole. He died in a Pennsylvania state prison on April 3, 2020, at the age of seventy-nine.