Holly Maddux

Case background and investigation

Helen "Holly" Maddux grew up in Tyler, Texas, the oldest of five siblings, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. She had been in a relationship of about five years with Ira Einhorn, a well-known figure in Philadelphia's counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. NBC News reported that she had ended the relationship and moved to New York, and that on September 9, 1977 she went back to the Philadelphia apartment the two had shared to collect her belongings. She was not seen again. She was 30.

According to NBC News, when police asked Einhorn about her some weeks later, he said she had gone out to a neighborhood co-op and had not come back. The Inquirer reported that her parents hired a retired FBI agent to look for her, and that his report led Philadelphia police to search Einhorn's apartment in the Powelton neighborhood in March 1979. The Guardian and NBC News both describe a neighbor's complaint about a foul-smelling liquid coming through the ceiling below Einhorn's closet. Inside the locked closet, detectives found a steamer trunk containing her remains, packed with newspapers and Styrofoam.

Einhorn was arrested and charged with murder. He was released on $40,000 bail, a decision the Inquirer says shocked the Maddux family. In 1981, shortly before his trial was due to begin, he left the country. The Guardian reported that he lived in Ireland and later in Sweden. In 1993 a Philadelphia court tried him in absentia, convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Investigators traced him to France in 1997, where, according to the Guardian, he was living under the name Eugene Mallon. A French court at first refused extradition because French law entitles a person tried in absentia to a new trial. Pennsylvania then passed a law allowing such a retrial, and the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that Maddux's siblings travelled to France to testify at a later extradition hearing. Einhorn was returned to the United States in July 2001.

At his trial in Philadelphia in October 2002, Einhorn testified in his own defense and denied killing Maddux. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder after deliberating for about two and a half hours, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported, and the conviction carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Einhorn died of natural causes on April 3, 2020 at the State Correctional Institution at Laurel Highlands, aged 79, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections as quoted by the Inquirer. Maddux's father died in 1988 and her mother two years later, before the case was concluded.