Four years after police found Ira Einhorn C’61 living under an assumed name in a village in southern France, the former Philadelphia countercultural guru has been brought back to Pennsylvania to serve a life sentence for killing his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in 1977. At presstime Einhorn—who fled the United States in 1981 and was convicted in absentia in 1993—had not decided whether to request a new trial, which French authorities had made a condition of his extradition. He was being held in the Graterford State Correctional Institution, and, at his own request, was temporarily segregated from the other prisoners.
While fighting extradition, Einhorn took the time to pose nude by his cottage for Esquire magazine. When he lost his final appeal, he cut his own throat with a serrated knife—and called in a TV news crew for an interview.
Einhorn, who used to call himself a “planetary enzyme,” offered police no explanation when they found Maddux’s decomposed body in a trunk inside his Powelton Village apartment 18 months after her disappearance, but later claimed he was the victim of a CIA plot.