---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 11:42:29 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Einhorn murder case goes to jury
Einhorn murder case goes to jury
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/4298420.htm
Oct. 16, 2002
His attorney suggested that Holly Maddux's body was planted at Einhorn's
home. A prosecutor scoffed at the idea.
By Jacqueline Soteropoulos
Inquirer Staff Writer
AP
[image not shown here]
Defendant Ira Einhorn cries as he reads from his diary Tuesday.
Ira Einhorn's attorney suggested to a jury today that his client's
establishment enemies may have disliked him enough to plant Holly Maddux's
mummified body inside his Powelton Village apartment.
"The mere fact that Holly's body was found in Ira's closet is just a piece
of circumstantial evidence," William Cannon said during closing arguments in
Common Pleas Court.
Cannon said that in the fall or winter of 1978 - while Einhorn was living at
Harvard University - someone could have wrapped Maddux's corpse in a rug,
used the keys found in her pocket to enter the Powelton Village apartment,
and placed her body in Einhorn's steamer trunk inside a closet.
But in his arguments, Assistant District Attorney Joel Rosen called Cannon's
theory "ridiculous."
"It's so laughable, it's so ludicrous, it's so outrageous - you should be
offended by it," Rosen told the jury during the 13th day of Einhorn's trial
in the murder of his girlfriend in 1977.
"Twenty years he's avoided justice. Twenty years the victim's family has
been waiting for a trial, for a verdict. I ask you for justice in this
case," Rosen told jurors. "The defendant is guilty of murder in the first
degree."
The six women and six men on the sequestered jury deliberated for about an
hour before retiring to their hotel. They are scheduled to resume
discussions tomorrow.
In 1993, a jury took about two hours to convict Einhorn in absentia of
first-degree murder. The Pennsylvania legislature granted Einhorn this
unprecedented second trial to secure his extradition from France.
If convicted of first-degree murder in this case, Einhorn will receive an
automatic life sentence.
Some of Maddux's siblings - who have been steely and determined through a
four-year extradition battle and the long days of trial - became emotional
during Rosen's powerful 90-minute summation.
Rosen led the jury through Einhorn's history of violence toward women,
evidence of his domination of the 30-year-old Maddux, and how the blond
Texan was killed by six or seven powerful blows to the head.
"I don't often let myself consider everything at once - everything he did to
her, everything we've been through," Elisabeth "Buffy" Hall later told
reporters, her voice thick with emotion. "It brings it all back."
On a giant projection screen, Rosen reviewed photographs of the black trunk
in Einhorn's closet, where investigators made the grisly discovery in 1979.
Another photograph showed Maddux's body curled into a fetal position in the
trunk.
"Look at how the body exactly, exactly, exactly fits into the contours of
the trunk," Rosen told the jury.
Her frozen position - and the stains on the trunk, rug and floor below -
proved that Maddux's body was placed inside before decomposition and
mummification, Rosen said.
And the date of the newspaper on top of her body, which was enlarged for all
in the courtroom to see, was Sept. 15, 1977 - four days after Maddux was
last seen alive.
During lengthy testimony Monday and Tuesday, Einhorn denied abusing or
killing Maddux.
Cannon told the jury that during that era, his client had a certain
"mystique" in Philadelphia as a leader of the counterculture movement.
"He was a radical. He did things differently than other people. He did
things differently his whole life. That's why he's Ira Einhorn," Cannon
said.
"There were people who simply didn't like Ira Einhorn. People who were
capable of doing something about it. People, I would suggest, who did do
something about it," he said.
Cannon accused the District Attorney's Office of "shopping around" forensic
evidence in the trunk until they got the results they wanted. He also said
former prosecutors handling the case hid information that three witnesses
saw Maddux alive in 1978.
That, Cannon said, is why his client fled the country in 1981 on the eve of
trial and remained on the run in Europe for two decades.
But Rosen said that the three eyewitnesses were mistaken, and that Einhorn
fled the country when the defense's own forensics experts generated reports
unfavorable to Einhorn's case.
Using the words from Einhorn's own daily journals, Rosen emphasized the
violence when the man who called himself "the Unicorn" was rejected. He said
Einhorn went into a jealous rage and killed Maddux because she made plans to
be with another man and to start a dressmaking business.
" 'Violence always marks the end of a relationship,' " Rosen recited to the
jury from the diary. "These aren't my words, ladies and gentlemen; they're
his."
Outside Common Pleas Court, standing in the rain, Maddux's brother and three
sisters reflected on the 25 years since their sister vanished and Einhorn's
lengthy flight to avoid trial.
"We only wish our parents were here with us to witness this, and we feel
that in a sense they are," John Maddux said.
Hall added: "Holly was in that room today. This was finally our opportunity
to present what this did to Holly, and by extension, what it did to us.
"I miss her."
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Contact Jacqueline Soteropoulos at 215-854-4497 or
jsoteropoulos@phillynews.com.
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