The Unicorn

Ira Einhorn was one of the best-known figures in Philadelphia’s counterculture. He spoke at the city’s first Earth Day gathering in 1970, moved among executives and academics, and called himself “the Unicorn,” a play on his surname. In the early 1970s he began a relationship with Holly Maddux, a Bryn Mawr graduate from Tyler, Texas.

By 1977 Holly had left him and moved to New York. That September she returned to Philadelphia to collect her belongings and was never seen again. Einhorn told her family she was traveling. Her parents hired a retired FBI agent, and his findings finally moved police to act: on March 28, 1979, detectives pried open a padlocked closet in Einhorn’s Powelton Village apartment and found Holly’s mummified body in a steamer trunk. Einhorn was charged with murder, but well-connected friends helped him make bail, and in January 1981, just before trial, he fled the country.

He was convicted in absentia in 1993. In 1997 he was found living under another name in southwestern France with his Swedish wife. France refused to hand him over until Pennsylvania passed a law guaranteeing him a new trial, and he was extradited on July 20, 2001. A Philadelphia jury convicted him of first-degree murder in October 2002, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Einhorn died on April 3, 2020, at SCI Laurel Highlands, aged 79.