transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] I sold my car in Carvana last night.
Speaker 2:
[00:02] Well, that's cool.
Speaker 1:
[00:03] No, you don't understand.
Speaker 2:
[00:04] It went perfectly, real offer, down to the penny.
Speaker 1:
[00:07] They're picking it up tomorrow.
Speaker 2:
[00:08] Nothing went wrong.
Speaker 1:
[00:09] So, what's the problem? That is the problem.
Speaker 2:
[00:11] Nothing in my life goes as smoothly.
Speaker 1:
[00:13] I'm waiting for the catch.
Speaker 2:
[00:14] Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
Speaker 1:
[00:18] Wow, you need to relax.
Speaker 2:
[00:19] I need a knock on wood.
Speaker 1:
[00:20] Do we have wood?
Speaker 2:
[00:21] Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
Speaker 1:
[00:24] Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Caravana.
Speaker 2:
[00:29] Pick up these may apply.
Speaker 1:
[00:30] Okay, Jessie, last week we had a classic love murder archetype of our camping hunting murder mystery. What's the story this time?
Speaker 2:
[00:39] A bright young woman from Texas falls in love with a self-proclaimed counterculture guru in Philadelphia in the 1970s. The relationship that ensues is incredibly toxic and results in a missing persons case. When the truth comes out, the suspect goes on a flight from justice that lasts for years and spans countries. I'm Andie Cassette, and I'm Jessie Pray, and this is Love Murder.
Speaker 1:
[01:29] Andie, hi, Jessie.
Speaker 2:
[01:30] Welcome back, everyone, to Love Murder, a podcast about pretty sins, trashy grins, and love gone fatally wrong.
Speaker 1:
[01:37] You can find Love Murder on TikTok and Instagram at Love Murder Pod and on Facebook by searching Love Murder Podcast.
Speaker 2:
[01:44] If you are enjoying this show, please love slash murder a five-star rating on your podcast app, subscribe and review to help new people discover the show. Thank you, guys. If you left a review for my birthday, Andie did a very cute post, and then she put up a story that was like, well, if you really want to say happy birthday, we've just seen a review, and we did get a handful, and they were so sweet. So thank you guys so much for the birthday wishes. Thank you for the reviews. As always, just thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 1:
[02:10] Did you get my gift? No, it hasn't come yet.
Speaker 2:
[02:13] Wait, that wasn't my gift?
Speaker 1:
[02:14] I mean, that was your gift, but then I have a separate little thing coming your way, so I should look in tracking. But yeah, no, I think Jessie loves the reviews more than most things in the world.
Speaker 2:
[02:27] They're very sweet. I also, I guess I'm just the type of little kid that always likes positive feedback. Yes. Keeps me going, guys, so thank you.
Speaker 1:
[02:36] Also, if you're interested in supporting this show more directly, head on over to patreon.com/lovemurderpod, where you can learn all about the different tiers of support.
Speaker 2:
[02:44] This week, we are very thankful to shout out an amazing new set of patrons.
Speaker 1:
[02:49] So thank you to Michelle N and Samantha I, Jamie R and Caitlin N.
Speaker 2:
[02:55] Thank you guys. Thanks for being here again. Thank you for the birthday well wishes. And happy Earth Day.
Speaker 1:
[03:03] Happy Earth Day.
Speaker 2:
[03:04] That's what it'll be Earth Day when this one comes out. And I timed it precisely because there's an Earth Day theme in today's episode.
Speaker 1:
[03:12] Oh, God.
Speaker 2:
[03:12] Okay. Are you ready?
Speaker 1:
[03:14] I don't know if I'm ready for like an Earth Day murder plot, but...
Speaker 2:
[03:18] It doesn't happen on Earth Day, but it's associated with Earth Day. And you will see why soon. On a cold morning in late March of 1979, a team of Philadelphia homicide detectives climbed the stairs to a run-down second-floor walk-up in Powleton Village and knocked on the door. The investigators had a search warrant tipped off by private investigators and former FBI agents who had been searching for a missing person as well as neighbors who had complained of a god-awful smell emanating from the second-floor unit.
Speaker 1:
[03:51] Oh, no.
Speaker 2:
[03:52] The police were finally going to take a good, hard look at the last-known location of the missing much-beloved person. The detectives turned that apartment upside down. They checked every room, every corner, every drawer. But there was one closet that the tenant refused to open. They had conveniently lost the key. A key that the detectives would later find hanging on a hook mere feet away from where that conversation took place.
Speaker 1:
[04:25] Nice try.
Speaker 2:
[04:26] Yeah. But this was not a problem for the Philly PD. They broke the lock. And once they did so, they found cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling. When they removed the boxes, they found a steamer trunk. Two of the latches opened, but a third was locked. As detectives pried it open with a crowbar, the foul odor intensified. And then the grim makeshift coffin popped open, revealing layers of plastic, styrofoam and old newspapers. And then behind that, the near mummified body of the person that had been missing for 18 months.
Speaker 1:
[05:07] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[05:08] This is a story about obsessive love, intimate partner violence, massive egos, counterculture, climate change, tragedy, escape, and a flight from justice that would last 20 years. Which definitely has to be our longest one yet.
Speaker 1:
[05:26] Yes, for sure.
Speaker 2:
[05:27] I think so. Usually people get caught in a couple months. We will also be talking about the alleged or self-proclaimed founder of Earth Day.
Speaker 1:
[05:37] Excuse me?
Speaker 2:
[05:38] Uh-huh. One of the people we will be talking about today claims to have founded Earth Day. There is disputes about that claim. So, this is your very special Earth Day episode, even if the subject of today's case didn't actually found Earth Day.
Speaker 1:
[05:56] Who did found Earth Day?
Speaker 2:
[05:58] It was a Wisconsin senator.
Speaker 1:
[06:01] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[06:01] Yeah, I'm going to get into some of the details when I get to that section about kind of how it came up and how one of the people we'll be talking about, a guy named Ira Einhorn, became involved. Today's main source is the excellent book, The Unicorn's Secret, Murder in the Age of Aquarius by Steven Levy.
Speaker 1:
[06:20] Oh, Age of the Aquarius.
Speaker 2:
[06:25] Thank you for that. If you guys are interested in this case, I think the book is like 350, 400 pages long, and it really, really goes deep. The author did an incredible job. It was a true pleasure to read. So, highly recommend that one. Our story today begins with a love story, as most of our stories do. In October of 1972, a 25-year-old woman named Holly Maddux was reading a book in a French restaurant near the UPenn campus when she was approached by a 32-year-old counterculture guru named Ira Einhorn. Holly was a petite blonde possessing what other people described as ethereal beauty. Well, Ira had the charisma of a cult leader, and the kind of hippie looks that one would associate with that era. Long hair, long beard. Charles Manson. Yeah. He's even got more of the longer hair and the longer beard. But that hippie, generally unkempt appearance, not to be derogatory about it. I kind of love the hippie look. But he also had electric blue eyes, an incredible intelligence, and a major force of personality. He struck up a conversation with Holly about what she was reading, and the two began a witty volley. Holly was at Mensa-level smart herself, truly the whole package. And the mutual interest was obvious from that very first meeting. What neither person knew at the time was that this union would come to define, and in one person's case, end their life. And the ensuing mystery and investigation would take more than 30 years to resolve. So let's give you a little back story on Holly and Ira starting with Holly, who's a little bit younger. Helen Holly Maddux was born on May 26, 1947 in Tyler, Texas. From my understanding, it was a very conservative, very baby, like she's born kind of at the beginning of the baby boomers. Football and God is Life type of upbringing for Holly in East Texas. She was the eldest of five children. Her younger siblings were named John, Mary, Meg and Buffy.
Speaker 1:
[08:40] Buffy?
Speaker 2:
[08:41] I know, I love that. Her parents were extremely traditional. Dad, Fred, worked as an engineer for the Texas Highway Department and mother Elizabeth was a homemaker. Fred Maddux, that's Holly's father, was a World War II vet and had actually been part of the 82nd Airborne who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day.
Speaker 1:
[09:01] Oh, my God. Her dad?
Speaker 2:
[09:04] Her dad, yes. So he was like a legit war hero. He was also a very conventional, strict father of the era, bordering on authoritarian. He's military, he's war hero. He believed in church, God and football.
Speaker 1:
[09:22] The girl's not having a boyfriend until they were 17.
Speaker 2:
[09:25] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[09:25] Like that vibe.
Speaker 2:
[09:26] Exactly. Very.
Speaker 1:
[09:27] Perfuse.
Speaker 2:
[09:28] Very strict, this guy. He was proud and very regimented. He had more conservative values. His eldest daughter, Holly, was both his pride and joy, but also his exasperation because she had a much more modern way of thinking and a different set of values starting at an early age.
Speaker 1:
[09:47] Yeah, but she's a self-thinker and is confident. So it's like you want to raise children to be able to be opinionated and make decisions on their own and then-
Speaker 2:
[09:57] And express themselves, even if it's a different opinion from your own.
Speaker 1:
[10:00] You can't keep them in a cage. So it's like great that she's strongly opinionated.
Speaker 2:
[10:05] Yes, Holly was a standout young person and student. She was not only gorgeous and a kind of- So her sister said she looked like Michelle Pfeiffer. I got kind of like Carolyn Bessette vibes from her because in all of the pictures, she's not wearing much makeup or any makeup at all. She's thin. She's got that kind of otherworldly, very paired back beauty.
Speaker 1:
[10:29] Okay. I mean, Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface isn't wearing a lot of makeup.
Speaker 2:
[10:33] Yes, and that's what her sister said that Holly reminded her of. I think probably just there's been a lot of press about JFK Jr. and Carolyn lately because of the show with Ryan Murphy. So maybe that's why she was in my head already as a template. I feel like my mom too was kind of like that back in the 70s and 80s. She didn't wear a lot of makeup. It was definitely a vibe, the paired down hippie vibe.
Speaker 1:
[10:58] Totally. Well, because the other option was crazy blue eyeshadow and blush and fuchsia lips. So if you're working with neutrals, you're definitely paired back.
Speaker 2:
[11:09] Yes. So she was beautiful, but she was also wickedly smart. It made her both popular but almost unknowable. Steven Levy talks about this in his book. He interviewed several people that knew Holly during high school and beyond. There was a real feeling of her never really quite exactly finding her place because she was like a beauty pageant girl and a cheerleader, but she was also the salutatorian and voted most likely to succeed. This was an era where I think they wanted women to be like, oh, you're like a disney cheerleader or you're a nerd. She was just everything. Yeah, and she also was really interested in an eclectic mix of activities, and she excelled at a lot of things. She was a very, very good dancer. She excelled in ballet, but she also did judo. She was a talented artist. She even did synchronized swimming.
Speaker 1:
[12:01] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[12:03] Like I said earlier, IQ actually qualified her for Mensa. She was that smart.
Speaker 1:
[12:07] Wow.
Speaker 2:
[12:08] A classmate named Jim Rex remembered her years later and said that she was probably 10 years ahead of everybody else in her thinking. Her siblings, who were all younger than her, just adored her. They described her as radiant, graceful, and curious about everything. She would send handmade cards for every birthday. She wrote long, caring letters. She never went more than a few weeks without calling home. She was, by all accounts, the kind of person who made other people around her feel seen. Yeah, Holly's father wanted her to attend Texas A&M, which was, of course, close to home. But Holly wanted to see the world. She wanted out of Texas entirely. She had the grades and the extracurriculars to go anywhere, and she chose Bryn Mawr, the elite all-women's liberal arts college on Philadelphia's main line. So in 1965, she packed up and moved north. This is such a turning point in the US for counterculture and free love and different types of politics. It was a real like reckoning and civil rights, like everything is in this tumult. There's also a lot of, we're starting to see political rallies about Vietnam, and there's just a lot of stuff going on in the mid to late 60s at this point. The culture shock for Holly was real. She had grown up in conservative East Texas, and now she was surrounded by East Coast intellectuals, anti-war protesters, and all of the early rumblings of the counterculture, which is very different from what she grew up with having a military father, and eventually her younger brother also goes into the military.
Speaker 1:
[13:46] I do feel like though this is what she was craving.
Speaker 2:
[13:50] Yes, it was, but it was still, it's again, I think Holly was always struggling to find where she fit in. She didn't fit in to conservative Texas, but then she got to Philadelphia. It was like she was sticking out as a sore thumb, is like this blonde Texas girl out there, and so she's still trying to find her place, and she kind of struggled with the transition caught between the two worlds, the one that she had left behind, and the one that she was trying to enter and make her new identity.
Speaker 1:
[14:20] Yeah, I mean, think about like how analogal that was back then. It's not like you can go on a forum and try to find your community. You have to literally go in person and meet all these people and then still try to navigate what group within this new community that you're in, what you align with.
Speaker 2:
[14:38] Yeah, and what your identity is. Her brother John's deployment to Vietnam as a Marine made the anti-war movement deeply personal for her. She started attending rallies and protests, and she was drawn to the counterculture not out of rebellion because of how she was raised, but out of a genuine desire to understand the world beyond Tyler, Texas. And it did, even though she was very easily at the top of her class in Tyler, Texas, she suffered a little bit more at Bryn Mawr. It seemed like the academia was a little bit more rigorous than she expected. And she was also getting caught up with all these kind of side quests. So it did end up taking her six years to finish her degree, which she completed in 1971. During those years, Holly explored everything. She traveled all across Europe and lived briefly in Israel. She studied dance and fashion design. She sewed her own clothes and made her own jewelry. She was both searching and also finding her own way in the world with bohemian flair. Holly had a dream of one day potentially opening a dressmaking shop. At the time she met Ira Einhorn, she was still opening up intellectually and searching for meaning. So it was thus that she was reading a book in a cafe called La Terrasse when she met a man named Ira Einhorn who would alter the course of her life. So Holly is thin, she's maybe 110 pounds, and Ira was about 230 pounds and 5'10. So he's a relatively big guy and was described as having electric blue eyes and an equally electric personality. I got to say, I found him pretty spectacularly unmemorable looking. Like there's not even like people I could compare him against. But apparently his charisma could overcome just about anything, including some seriously suspect personal hygiene.
Speaker 1:
[16:38] I literally was going to ask if he smelled.
Speaker 2:
[16:40] Uh-huh. It was beyond just a little bit, not just like I used the Crystal Rock deodorant. This went fully into smells bad, very bad.
Speaker 1:
[16:51] He didn't shower or is there something like chemically wrong with his pH.
Speaker 2:
[16:55] Everything, everything is wrong. A journalist later wrote that he had the worst body odor in the history of the entire world. A friend, now this is coming from a friend who really loved him, said he smelled like a hoagie with onions all the time.
Speaker 1:
[17:12] Okay, that's disgusting. Like sweaty beef.
Speaker 2:
[17:16] Yeah, and onions. The Philadelphia Daily News just called him stinky with a capital S, like that was his nickname. None of that mattered though to the people who were in his orbit and who seemed to almost worship him. He held court at La Terrasse every day and corporate executives were so eager to sit with him and pick his brain that he never paid for a meal. Basically he could just show up at any point and people would be like, oh my gosh, Ira, sit here. What do you want? Let's talk. He lectured at universities. At one point he was working for Harvard. He consulted for Fortune 500 companies. He counted activists, rock musicians, and television producers among his personal friends. In the world of 1970s Philadelphia counterculture, he was very involved. I mean, if not the center of gravity. He was also by his own estimation and maybe his mother's, a genius. He claimed to have an IQ of around 140. He said he read a book a day and people who knew him did say he was very well read. His apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with books, which was basically the only thing he ever spent money on because he would wear his dirty old clothes until they fell apart and he mooched food off of everyone around him. He also claimed that he never slept more than a few hours a night because his brain was always moving so fast.
Speaker 1:
[18:40] Self-proclaimed savant.
Speaker 2:
[18:41] Absolutely. I think that he was so smart and considered so smart from such an early age that that became very ingrained in his identity. He was a very early, early reader. So his mother Bea is definitely his biggest fan.
Speaker 1:
[18:59] And enabler.
Speaker 2:
[19:00] And enabler. We see this often. And she started teaching him to read, I believe, when he was only about two or three years old. So by the time he was even in preschool, he was reading like adult books fully. And when he was tested for going into, I believe, kindergarten, there was a recommendation at the time, now this is very long ago, that he should skip something like three or four grades.
Speaker 1:
[19:27] That's insane.
Speaker 2:
[19:28] Yeah. Because he was so far ahead academically and intellectually.
Speaker 1:
[19:33] Yeah, but socially, that's debilitating.
Speaker 2:
[19:35] Yes. And that's what his father said, actually. His father said no. So his mother was for making sure that he was intellectually stimulated and challenged. And it was his dad who said, that's going to be a nightmare socially. And I don't want him to be a pariah or not ever have friends, because he's so much incredibly younger than his peers. As a result, he stayed in the appropriate grade level, but he actually started doing poorly at school. Because later it would come out that he just wasn't being challenged, so he was bored. And so he kind of became kind of a little smart-ass a little bit, and he just didn't really care about doing well in school. However, when his family moved to a different area of Philadelphia, he was enrolled at a new elementary school. And this was, I think, as the school was more able to challenge him in the ways that he was looking for, and his school performance at that point picked up. Ira was then accepted to a prestigious all-boys high school, specifically for high-achieving pre-collegiate students. So this is where he really starts to thrive. And what he lacked in humility, he made up for in test scores and academic performance. Now, athletics were initially not his strong suit, but Ira had a desire to be the best at everything, and he felt like he could figure out how to be better at sports. So he ended up training, doing weights. He was kind of like a skinny guy, and then he ended up bulking up over one summer, and eventually made junior varsity and varsity in football. He also ran cross country, and he played on the ping pong team. So he was kind of trying to be as well-rounded as it seems like Holly was naturally at that point, where he didn't want to just be the academic guy. However, he had an arrogance especially about his intellect carried over into almost everything. He decided that he was above attending his senior prom, and it ended up falling on the day of his brother's bar mitzvah anyways. So he ended up showing up to prom later. But in a protest, Ira had made a point to show up wearing a t-shirt and jeans instead of the tuxedo that everyone was wearing to prom at the time. And he got a lot of attention from his students and from the teachers because he was against the dress code and kind of making it about himself. So he's like, I'm not going to go. And then he like went wearing the wrong thing and made it all about himself anyway.
Speaker 1:
[22:10] Totally, totally.
Speaker 2:
[22:12] After high school, Ira attended University of Pennsylvania on scholarship. Though he seemed to hold major disdain for formal education and he thought that kind of like the classes were beneath him. He liked to do things like quiz the professors on what books they were using or did you read this? Have you read that? Like in a way to like belittle his own professors and show that he was somehow more well read than even the people who are supposed to be teaching them. Obviously this ruffled a lot of feathers. He was also, we're seeing the birth of this very manipulative personality as well because in the book they talk about there's one professor who gets exceptionally close to him. So there's like one professor that was down with this vibe apparently. And they became really close, so close that he even gave Ira a key to his house. But they had some falling out later on and there was even some question of if there was some sort of homosexual affair or maybe the professor was interested in Ira, which of course Ira was like, oh, he was into me and I wasn't into him. The professor obviously denied this, but it will speak to the way Ira uses his charm and even sexuality to get people to do what he wants.
Speaker 1:
[23:36] Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[23:37] There was other people and other teachers obviously that did not find any of this cute or compelling even a little bit, including one professor that failed him entirely because Ira refused to come to class. He's like, I can't even pick this guy out of a lineup because he doesn't come to my class. And Ira's like, I should be able to just take the test and pass without coming to your class. And the professor's like, that's not what college is about. No, you can't do that. And then when the professor was like, no, I'm failing you. And with this failing grade, you can't graduate, you pen. Ira got his mommy involved to fight the professor in the school for him.
Speaker 1:
[24:16] Embarrassing.
Speaker 2:
[24:17] He was ultimately forced to take a summer session, and then he received his degree in 1961. Ira spent time in every hippie stronghold of the 1960s and 70s. So he was at Haight-Ashbury in Berkeley. He was in Santa Cruz. He took LSD frequently, reportedly in doses three times what anyone else could handle. So let's remember that for later too, because he used a lot of mind-altering drugs. Where the name of the book comes from, The Unicorn's Secret, is because Ira called himself The Unicorn.
Speaker 1:
[24:54] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[24:56] It's because his German surname Einhorn literally translated to One Horn, and because he thought he was very special. He also called himself a planetary enzyme, a catalyst for the world's most important ideas.
Speaker 1:
[25:15] Oh my God, Jessie.
Speaker 2:
[25:17] But he's getting away with it. You look at pictures of this guy, you read some of the shit that he's saying, and you're like, who could fall for this? And people do over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:
[25:30] It's because of the charisma.
Speaker 2:
[25:31] It's the charisma. It's the intellect paired with the charisma. I was even thinking about, I mean, he's so different than my husband, but the way Nathaniel says things, you just 100% believe him. And my husband is genuinely smart guys, I promise, and not a jerk.
Speaker 1:
[25:49] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[25:50] But I think it was like how well read he was, paired with the charisma and the gravitas he had and the way he was speaking, that people just fully ate it up with like a spoon. They were loving it. A lot of people talked about his cult of personality. A friend named George Keegan said, In those days, he was part of everything that was happening in Philadelphia. Everybody knew him and he knew everybody. He had a lot of magnetism and he drew people into his orbit. What he really desperately wanted to be was a great American writer, like a capital G great American writer. But unfortunately for The Unicorn, he was a terrible one. This is an awful writer. It just goes to show, sometimes readers just don't turn into great writers.
Speaker 1:
[26:42] Nope.
Speaker 2:
[26:43] An underground newspaper editor who received his first column submission described it as sloppy, incoherent, everything uppercase, no punctuation. A fellow writer called his prose melodramatic grandiose and cliched. One of his own passages read, December 29th floated by. I softly grabbed it and I began to peel it like a grape.
Speaker 1:
[27:05] Oh my God. Who's peeling a grape?
Speaker 2:
[27:08] He's peeling December 29th like a grape apparently. Ira was a man who needed to be admired and considered the smartest person in the room at all times. He had to be the center of attention. He did really freaking weird stuff too. Like he would answer the door nude or he would arrive at friends houses and immediately strip naked regardless of who was present or how uncomfortable it made people. Which is kind of like a power play to like unnerve people and get them off balance.
Speaker 1:
[27:39] It's also like predator vibes.
Speaker 2:
[27:41] Yes. Oh, lots of predator vibes. He led guided LSD trips. He once taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania in which he let everyone smoke a joint, then took off all of his clothes. Well, he's teaching y'all. And danced around the room in front of his students. This is so weird.
Speaker 1:
[28:00] So bad.
Speaker 2:
[28:01] Okay. So now, at my ripe old age of early 40s, this man sounds absolutely exhausting. But I can see how 25-year-old Holly would find him exciting. Remember, she's finding herself and her place in the counterculture. And this is the guy who is at the center of everything, who's got a huge personality, who is very intelligent, who is charismatic, and she was pretty swept away by him. At the beginning, at least, Ira, who was very highly regarded, really also seemed to pay attention to Holly's thoughts, opinions, and feelings. According to an acquaintance of Ira's, quote, guys never asked girls what they thought about politics or poetry, but Ira did. And then he went on to say, he feigned that he cared. Spring is when you suddenly realize that your glasses are in every photo.
Speaker 1:
[29:00] Every wedding, every trip, every outside brunch, every accidental close-up.
Speaker 2:
[29:05] And if you don't love your frames, you really feel it.
Speaker 1:
[29:09] That's what I like about Warby Parker. They made the whole process feel so much less annoying.
Speaker 2:
[29:15] Their virtual try-on is genuinely useful. You can use your phone and actually get a real sense of how the frames will look on your face.
Speaker 1:
[29:22] Which matters, because tiny product photos are not enough when something is going on your actual face.
Speaker 2:
[29:28] And the quality is so great. Their prescription glasses start at $95, so it feels stylish but also really affordable.
Speaker 1:
[29:35] They also have contacts, sunglasses, online eye exams, and retail stores if you want the in-person option too.
Speaker 2:
[29:42] It's the perfect time to upgrade your glasses for spring. Buy one prescription pair and get 20% off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com/lovemurder.
Speaker 1:
[29:52] That's 20% off additional prescription pairs when you go to w-a-r-b-y parker.com/lovemurder.
Speaker 2:
[30:01] Mother's Day is one of those holidays where the right gift really matters.
Speaker 1:
[30:06] And flowers work for a reason. They feel classic but they still feel personal.
Speaker 2:
[30:11] What I like about 1-800 Flowers is that they've done this for a really long time. More than 50 years.
Speaker 1:
[30:17] And right now, when you order one dozen roses, they'll double the bouquet to two dozen for free.
Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[30:52] That's 1800flowers.com/lovemurder. 1800flowers.com/lovemurder. So he definitely presented as a feminist, as somebody who believed that women were intellectual equals. But was that really what he thought?
Speaker 1:
[31:11] No.
Speaker 2:
[31:11] No, he's-
Speaker 1:
[31:12] It's another manipulation tactic.
Speaker 2:
[31:13] It's very performative.
Speaker 1:
[31:15] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[31:16] By Ira's recollection, once they met in La Terrasse, he gave his phone number to Holly because he was completely mesmerized by her. He found her very lovely and mysterious. That's where I get like kind of the Carolyn Bissette thing, is that she had this way of being both beautiful but kind of unknowable.
Speaker 1:
[31:34] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[31:35] And that was what Ira was attracted to about Holly. So she did end up calling him that day and they ended up chatting for a while, setting up a date, but Holly didn't actually end up meeting up for this date. Ira later claimed that Holly said she wasn't feeling very well psychically. Now this is only keeping him more on the hook. He's more interested in her because girls were kind of falling all over themselves for him.
Speaker 1:
[32:02] Totally. And did she just blow him off?
Speaker 2:
[32:04] She kind of just blew him off, yeah. When she finally reached back out to him, he invited her over, and within an hour, they had had sex. So she had kind of blown him off, but then when they get back together physically, it seems like there was a lot of chemistry.
Speaker 1:
[32:21] Could you imagine having sex with someone who smells like a hoagie? I honestly can't.
Speaker 2:
[32:28] No, I really truly cannot. But he had to have some going for him because he was really-
Speaker 1:
[32:34] Maybe he just had a lot of incense burning.
Speaker 2:
[32:35] It's just a lot of patchouli covering up that hoagie smell.
Speaker 1:
[32:38] That combo.
Speaker 2:
[32:42] Okay, so they slept together in one hour, and then within three days, they were living together. Okay. This is love bombing.
Speaker 1:
[32:49] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[32:50] Ira was seven years her senior, and she was completely captivated by his charm, conviction, eloquence, and even his lack of polish. It feels like a manipulation tactic too, that there's some parts of him that are so dressed down and just like a regular guy, because it's like, oh, I'm just like you. It's just a very weird combination of personality traits that's coming together to form this being.
Speaker 1:
[33:15] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[33:16] The early months of the relationship were intoxicating. Holly was completely swept up in Ira's world. He had a lot of famous friends. He was friends with Allen Ginsberg, activist Abby Hoffman, Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune. So these were all people that he counted as friends who were unbelievably influential during this time period. So this is very exciting for Holly. Ira brought her deeper into political rallies and activism, and he seemed to care about all of the same things she did, the environment, social activism, art. He also claimed to be a feminist. Okay, now here's where we get into the Earth Day allegations. He also told Holly and pretty much anyone who would listen, that he was the founder of Earth Day. To clarify, the actual founder of Earth Day, a Wisconsin senator named Gaylord Nelson, has disputed Ira's involvement in the formation of the event ever since.
Speaker 1:
[34:22] Oh my gosh, that's really embarrassing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[34:25] So it turns out that Earth Day was already something that was cooking, and they were just trying to raise awareness for climate change, essentially. Yes. And they had set out to throw basically Earth Day events around the country in several major cities. And they were trying to get local activists involved, obviously, in the first ever Earth Day celebrations across the United States.
Speaker 1:
[34:55] Yeah, like grassroots.
Speaker 2:
[34:57] Exactly.
Speaker 1:
[34:58] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[34:58] And so when they were discussing how to throw the event in Philadelphia, everyone's like, oh, we have to get Ira involved. He knows everybody. He's involved in everything.
Speaker 1:
[35:08] He's so well read.
Speaker 2:
[35:10] They asked him to essentially be the emcee for the event, which he was supposed to just hype up the crowd and introduce the guest speakers. But apparently he hogged the mic. He refused to let the actual speakers speak. He was supposed to literally be like, OK, next up, we have so-and-so and talk for two minutes. And he was talking and dancing and doing all this stuff for 30 minutes before they had to basically go on stage and be like, give us the mic.
Speaker 1:
[35:37] Yeah, he's acting like he's the host of the emmys or something. Yes.
Speaker 2:
[35:41] So he completely took over the event. And then because he was so public, there's obviously lots of media around his involvement at the Philadelphia event. And he started telling people that he founded Earth Day.
Speaker 1:
[35:55] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[35:57] Yes. This happened April 22nd, 1970, this event, which is now, it's still Earth Day today. April 22nd is when this episode comes out. So again, happy Earth Day. And this is just about two years before he meets Holly. So he was already very plugged in when he meets Holly. Okay. So minus the fact that he's smelly as hell, Ira seemed very impressive to Holly. He seemed like a forward-thinking feminist, but behind closed doors, naturally, I think you know where I'm going with this.
Speaker 1:
[36:31] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[36:31] He was an absolute piece of shit.
Speaker 1:
[36:33] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[36:35] Yeah. So the first couple of months are great. They're living together right away. She is so into him. She gets very enmeshed in his life, in his lifestyle, just in this chaos that is Ira Einhorn. But he cheated on her.
Speaker 1:
[36:49] Does he always go by his full name?
Speaker 2:
[36:51] I don't know. I mean, I don't know what they called it. I wonder if people actually called him The Unicorn or Unicorn, because that would be so weird. I do think people just called him Ira, too.
Speaker 1:
[37:00] Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:
[37:01] But right from the jump, he cheated on her. And throughout the course of their relationship, he cheated on her incessantly. This is an insane claim. He later estimated that his appetite for sex and so-called free love had led him to have over 1,800 sexual partners over the course of his life. Guys, 1,800.
Speaker 1:
[37:25] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[37:26] I was like, how would you even? I can't.
Speaker 1:
[37:29] Also, like, are you keeping a tally?
Speaker 2:
[37:30] I know. Is it on your bed, like wall?
Speaker 1:
[37:33] Are you journaling this?
Speaker 2:
[37:35] I am like the opposite of a slut-shamer. I am all for you guys doing safely what you want to do with your bodies, with consent, because we are only getting lucky enough to live in these beautiful bodies of ours one time, maybe more if you believe in reincarnation. But you should have sex. It's great. But if you're having sex with up to 1,800 people, how are you even having that human connection? How are you having any connection?
Speaker 1:
[38:03] No, it's just peg in whole connection. Exactly.
Speaker 2:
[38:06] It's like you're not even getting the best part of sex, which is like the humanity and the connection.
Speaker 1:
[38:11] Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[38:13] It's crazy. And we will see. I'm going to keep talking about his treatment of women. And you can tell, despite what he's saying outwardly, he does treat women like absolute objects.
Speaker 1:
[38:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're planning to sleep with over 1,000 women, I would imagine so.
Speaker 2:
[38:31] So a friend of theirs, who's now friends with Holly too, George Keegan, said that it was just very flagrant, all of the cheating. And basically, one time Ira came up to George at a party and was like, oh, hey, can you give Holly a lift home because I'm going home with this other girl? And Holly's just standing there.
Speaker 1:
[38:52] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[38:53] Yeah. And George said, quote, she put up with it, and unfortunately, so did we. They were operating under the assumption that that was the condition of their relationship. And Holly, guess what? She wasn't allowed to sleep with other people.
Speaker 1:
[39:07] Oh, no, of course not.
Speaker 2:
[39:09] So it's rules for the and not for me with Ira. Okay. To bring the just total scumbaggery to a new level, he was also physically abusive with Holly. He admitted to striking her on at least one occasion. However, of course, it absolutely happened much more than once.
Speaker 1:
[39:29] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[39:31] And this was not the first time that Ira had been violent in his romantic relationships. Not by a long shot. I will get more into details of those relationships in a little bit. Another friend of his also said that he was arguing with his girlfriend at one point, and Ira was like, why don't you just fucking pop her?
Speaker 1:
[39:47] Oh my god.
Speaker 2:
[39:47] And the friend was like, what? This is a guy who was promoting feminism and peace, and all of those free love and general, was very involved in social justice, and he's just saying, why don't you just hit your girlfriend?
Speaker 1:
[40:02] Yeah, that's insane.
Speaker 2:
[40:04] Friends and family alike reported that Ira ordered Holly around like a servant. When Holly took Ira home to meet her family in Texas, they were all stunned, and not in a good way. So already, you can imagine her dad, Fred, was not super excited about this relationship because she's living in sin with him. Yeah, so it's already, there's a big hurdle to overcome with Ira making Holly's family feel comfortable with their arrangement and hopefully, feeling positively about this union, and that didn't happen at all. It almost seemed like he was purposely trying to piss Fred off. Really? Yeah, he did not use this cult of personality on Holly's family at all. All of the commentary from the siblings and parents were that he was just so grossly uncouth and just had no manners whatsoever. They talked about how when the family was saying grace, he was scratching at scabs from Poison Ivy at the dinner table, Jessie around the food, and then they served him first because he was the guest. And before they could even get around the whole table to serve, because remember she has four younger siblings too, before everyone in the family had been served, he grabbed the dishes and started serving himself a second portion before literally everybody had even had their first.
Speaker 1:
[41:35] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[41:36] Yes. He put his feet on the dinner table.
Speaker 1:
[41:41] No.
Speaker 2:
[41:41] While they were eating.
Speaker 1:
[41:43] No.
Speaker 2:
[41:45] He was clearly not showered, which was disgusting in general, and they said that in the middle of dinner, because he had already eaten two portions, while everyone's just having their first portion, he grew bored with the conversation and just got up and walked over to the TV, turned it on, and then put his feet on either side of the TV. So even if somebody had wanted to watch it with him, they couldn't see anything because he was literally straddling the TV.
Speaker 1:
[42:12] So weird. Is this how he behaved all the time, or he was putting on an extra show for her family?
Speaker 2:
[42:16] I think he was generally pretty gross and solipsistic, but I think that this was... he was really, like, bringing it up a notch. To really kind of, like, show her family who was boss in her life, because Holly wasn't doing anything to say, don't do that, take a shower, impress my family. It was like he was rubbing it in their faces, that he took their shining, beautiful example of a daughter who was smart and lovely and independent and had basically turned her into a servant for him. At one point over this weekend that they're visiting, he grew bored with the conversation, interrupted what was going, what was being said, and instructed Holly to brush his hair. And she did it.
Speaker 1:
[43:01] Ew.
Speaker 2:
[43:02] Holly's brother John called Ira dirty and gross and extremely dominating. Buffy said he was a Neanderthal. Their father, Fred, was so disturbed by the relationship that he stopped speaking to Holly for a period of time after this visit. Sister Buffy said that she believed the real purpose of this visit was to provoke a fight between Holly and their father. Ira went on to make statements, or I think in writing, say that sometimes Holly treated him like a father figure, and he thought that she had replaced her father with him. But he's saying this too. And this did seem like he went in there with a show of dominance, and also to maybe drive a wedge between Holly and her tight-knit family, as abusers do.
Speaker 1:
[43:54] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[43:54] It seemed like he wanted to isolate her. He wanted to wedge himself between her and the people who loved her. And it's a pattern, obviously, that we've seen that anyone who has studied abusive relationships can recognize immediately. Holly's brother John would later sum him up like this. In his mind, he is the only individual in the world with real intelligence. The rest of us are supposed to sit at his feet, spellbound by his every nonsensical word. So they did have some issues, I believe, after this trip. Clearly it was distressing to Holly how badly this trip had gone. She was also having mixed feelings about the constant infidelity. So they would go through cycles of Holly leaving him, but she seemed to always return. So there's the toxic cycle now starting to play out in the relationship that would stretch over five years. And it got to a point that even some of Ira's friends were feeling uncomfortable about their dynamic. OK, they said that they watched this toxic cycle play out over and over again, and they kind of felt powerless to stop it. George Keegan again said about Ira, around women he was a stunted teenager. He was all brain, no heart. Sex was an addiction for him. If he was interested in a woman, that was the only thing that existed. For many women, getting all this attention was flattering, and it would be easy to succumb. So he's saying that it was just conquest after conquest for Ira.
Speaker 1:
[45:25] I mean, clearly, he's got to get his tally up.
Speaker 2:
[45:29] Holly also learned that her boyfriend, the man who proclaimed himself a feminist and talked about women's liberation in public, was writing very different things in private. In an interview he gave before he and Holly even met, he would say things about women's bodies that were so degrading that it would make your skin crawl. He talked about sex acts with the detachment of someone describing a transaction. Holly's journals, which were later recovered from Ira's apartment, documented his insatiable sexual appetite and described how it sometimes frightened her and made her feel uncomfortable. In his private journals, he wrote things that were better left not said out loud. He wrote about violence with something that looked like sexual longing. One entry read, quote, To beat a woman, what joy, the violence that flowed through my being tonight could result in the murder of that which I loved so deeply.
Speaker 1:
[46:27] Eww.
Speaker 2:
[46:27] Like a almost fetishization of violent sex. So after five years, Holly's now 30, and she is realizing what kind of man she's with. There was also the manipulative push-pull of him promising marriage or even monogamy and it never happening. And so every time she would leave him, he'd go to her and he'd be like, we can get married and we can have a baby, because that was something she wanted. And then she'd get pulled back in and then he would be back up to his old tricks as soon as he got her back.
Speaker 1:
[47:02] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[47:03] So in the summer of 1977, Holly finally decided to leave him for good. She and Ira had been traveling in Europe on a four month so-called research trip that was for Ira, even though it was almost exclusively paid for by Holly.
Speaker 1:
[47:21] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[47:22] So they were on this trip traveling together when the relationship finally came undone. They ended up arguing all throughout Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The relationship had been falling apart in real time, thousands of miles from home. In London, in late July, she saw her teenage sister Buffy, who was there on a high school trip. And Holly at that point said, I'm done. I'm leaving Ira. This is over. I'm going back to the States. And she was going to try to like get home and get her things out of Ira's place so she could really start a new life.
Speaker 1:
[47:55] I was going to ask, is she working during this time or she just sucked into the relationship?
Speaker 2:
[47:59] She had several different jobs that she worked that were like not exactly careers. Like I think she worked at like a bagel shop and she worked at like a co-op and she sewed clothes. So throughout their entire relationship, she was working a lot of different types of jobs. Well, he was paid to consult with the Bell Telephone Company and I think that he was paid to lecture at UPenn and Harvard. But I think she was doing like the day-to-day grind for them.
Speaker 1:
[48:34] Totally. Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:
[48:35] Yeah. She told Buffy in July that she was done in 1977. Buffy called her parents to say she's finally leaving this guy. And she said that they were quote, so thrilled that they wanted to dance in the street about this.
Speaker 1:
[48:51] I mean, I would as well.
Speaker 2:
[48:52] Which is another thing, guys, like, when you're... People who really love you and know you are celebrating your relationship ending, it's a good idea to stay away. So it was thus on July 28th, 1977, that Holly finally asserted her independence and flew home alone. So she left him mid-trip and she's like, I'm out, I'm done. Rather than going back to Philadelphia and immediately getting her stuff out of Ira's apartment or the apartment they shared together, which would come to be a mistake, she ended up going first to Fire Island. And she lived in Fire Island, New York in the small beach community of Salterre. And while she was there, she stayed with a friend named Joyce Petchek. And Joyce ended up introducing her to a man named Saul Lapidus at a dinner party. And Saul was a really great guy. And he was the opposite of Ira in a lot of ways. Meaning that he presented his worth through like actions and kindness. Rather than a lot of blow hard, pontificating.
Speaker 1:
[49:59] Power hungry.
Speaker 2:
[50:00] Yes, he, you know how real, like alpha men are not like the Manosphere, Andrew Tate bullshit alpha men. A real like alpha guy is a guy that, let's everyone else talk, who is calm, who is just very like quietly secure. And that is how Saul presented. And so there was an immediate attraction there. And while she was living with Joyce, she started dating Saul, who was very kind and attentive. He also had a beautiful sailboat, and they began planning a two-week sailing trip for the fall. So she was gonna go back to Philadelphia and get her things. But they were planning to do this two-week sailing trip together, and they were kind of fully dating pretty much right away.
Speaker 1:
[50:50] Did Ira know Saul?
Speaker 2:
[50:51] No, they had never met.
Speaker 1:
[50:53] Okay, they didn't like know of each other.
Speaker 2:
[50:55] Saul definitely knew of Ira, but he also knew the things that Holly told him about Ira. So obviously, Saul did not have a very good impression of Ira, but he was aware of who he was and that they had been dating seriously for the last five years. While she was still staying with Joyce, she also lined up a new apartment in Philadelphia through one of her friends. She went and got the keys, so she was fully ready to move into her new place. Everyone was very supportive of her having some distance from her abusive boyfriend, and she was planning her next steps, and that's when Ira got wind of the fact that she was fully moving on and even dating somebody new, and he went totally apeshit. He started calling her incessantly. He threatened to throw everything that she had left in their apartment out the window. I think he got home and found out she wasn't there, found out that she was seeing somebody in New York, and he just went crazy. So she had left a lot of her personal items at Ira's. Again, it was the apartment they had shared for quite a while together, including a lot of her personal documents, her driver's license, her bank information, I think like her birth certificate, all of that stuff was still with her belongings at Ira's, and she was told that if she didn't show up in Philadelphia and pick it up, he was going to essentially throw it all away.
Speaker 1:
[52:23] Yeah, I mean, ultimately, when you're in these abusive relationships, protecting yourself more than things is what's most important. But obviously, it's also scary back then when you have your confidential items, your birth certificate and stuff like, those are sensitive items that do need to be recovered. But I don't trust this.
Speaker 2:
[52:44] Well, so he tells her like, get back here or they're all going to go. And she said, fine, I'll show up, I'll grab it, but we're not getting back together. At this point, Saul was like, I don't think this is a very good idea for you to do this. If you're going to go, let me go with you. Let me come with you. And of course, because Holly has been navigating this very abusive relationship for so long, she's like, no, that'll just make it worse. I think there's a lot of responsibility also in the community that was surrounding Ira at this point too, because as I recall, some of his friends were calling Holly and being like, Ira's really losing it. He's so upset. He's almost suicidal. Like, can you talk to him? So like, there's people in his circle that are also kind of assisting Ira in drawing her back in.
Speaker 1:
[53:34] Yes. And she is a good person. And obviously doesn't want this for him.
Speaker 2:
[53:39] She cares about him. She's exhausted, but she wants the best for him. And she believed that even though he was abusive, he ultimately loved her. And she believed that she could get out of this okay. She could handle him. I think that's what a lot of people who are in abusive relationships, they think that there was somebody who's maybe a little unstable, but they're the key to calming them or to placating them. And this was magnified in Ira's situation because of how exalted he was within his community and everyone knew that he was treating her badly, but they were like, oh, but she's so good for him. It's like, no, why are we only caring about what's good for Ira? Nobody here is caring about what's good for Holly.
Speaker 1:
[54:28] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[54:29] Holly also wrote to her sister Meg around this time. She said that she had definitively decided to leave Ira and she was really looking forward to living on her own and being fully independent. So she headed to Philadelphia from New York on or around September 9th, 1977, and Saul Lapidus never saw her ever again. And sadly neither did her family.
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
[55:22] I also think that the best photos are usually not the big posed ones. They're the smaller, real life candid moments that actually feel like your family.
Speaker 1:
[55:31] The in-between moments, the ones that really capture your mom's personality.
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Speaker 2:
[56:53] That's shopify.com/lovemurder. All right, so Saul was pretty concerned right away because he had not liked this whole situation. But Holly, well, she always called home every two weeks. There had been that weird time where her and her father weren't exactly seeing eye to eye because of Ira. So she could disappear for a few weeks at a time. And I know that her sister had just seen her in London. So Holly's family's big concerns didn't really turn to object fear until October 2, 1977. So a little less than a month after Saul saw her, because that was Holly's mother's birthday. And no matter what was going on with her family situation, Holly would have never failed to call or send a homemade card.
Speaker 1:
[57:45] Yes, yeah. There's been other cases like this where they knew something was wrong from a tradition like that.
Speaker 2:
[57:52] Exactly. And this was when they said, nope, this isn't just like, oh, Holly's busy rebuilding her life or trying to get away from Ira or doing whatever stuff she's doing. Something is deeply wrong here.
Speaker 1:
[58:04] Something's wrong, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[58:06] So they reached out to Ira, who was extremely casual about the entire phone call and seemed more like a myth that they were bothering him. He told them that Holly had a new boyfriend in New York and she was probably living with him and don't send any more mail to my apartment. Frustrated, naturally, Holly's family reported her missing to the Philadelphia PD. An investigator visited Ira, who admitted to having seen Holly in early September, which was the last anyone had seen her. He claimed that he had last seen her on September 11, 1977 at the apartment. He said he was taking a bath and Holly apparently left to make a phone call and then go on a grocery run to the local co-op. Ira explained that she had been planning to buy some tofu and bean sprouts, but she never returned. He also told the police, look, this has happened as many as like 10 times throughout the time we were living together. Sometimes she just got a wild hair and she just left. He failed to tell the police that, while it was true that a lot of times over their five-year relationship, Holly had left to go stay with friends, it usually coincided with him cheating or beating her.
Speaker 1:
[59:21] Yes, of course he left that out.
Speaker 2:
[59:24] Ira did tell the police that she had called him after a few days and said that basically she had changed her mind about any reconciliation and that she did not want him to come looking for her because she was fine and she just wanted a clean break. He said that he had shrugged this off. He said, okay, I guess that's the end of our five-year relationship. And he moved on. And that was it, he said. And that's where the official investigation into the disappearance of Holly Maddux ended, basically.
Speaker 1:
[59:55] That's insane.
Speaker 2:
[59:56] The police figured that Holly, a grown 30-year-old woman involved in the counterculture hippie scene was simply doing her own thing. And these types of hippies doing their drugs and doing whatever, just disappeared all the time.
Speaker 1:
[60:11] Where is she then?
Speaker 2:
[60:12] Yeah. Holly's family refused to believe this or give up looking for her. So they ended up hiring a two-man team of retired FBI agents who now worked as private investigators.
Speaker 1:
[60:25] Hell yeah.
Speaker 2:
[60:26] Yep. Their names were J. Robert Pierce and Bob Stevens. And they were on to Ira Einhorn, the so-called Unicorn.
Speaker 1:
[60:35] Unicorn guru.
Speaker 2:
[60:37] Yeah. Of course he has a different story for them too. So they came sniffing around and he's like, I don't know. She's probably living in a commune in either California or India. Everyone's like, she gave zero indication that that was anything she was interested in. So they weren't buying it and they soon discovered that none of Holly's friends who had been in this Philly orbit more so than obviously her family, who was all back in Texas, they weren't buying it either. The investigators soon found out that Holly seemingly had fully moved on, including securing a new apartment and even meeting a new man, Saul, who reported that Holly had only gone missing after responding to Ira's angry phone calls.
Speaker 1:
[61:21] And going to see him.
Speaker 2:
[61:22] Yep. Which he admitted to, that she had been, that was the place that she was last seen a lot.
Speaker 1:
[61:27] So you're the last person she saw, bro.
Speaker 2:
[61:30] The private investigators took their work a step farther and started speaking to neighbors of Holly and Ira's. The student who lived beneath them remembered hearing a blood-curdling scream and then continued banging on the night that Holly is believed to have disappeared. They asked him why he didn't report this and he said it's because their neighborhood in Palleton Village was home to many young students and people were often partying, screaming, yelling. So it didn't strike him at the time as anything that was consistent with violence. Only in retrospect did he consider that. But neighbors also soon began to report that an acrid odor was seeping out from Ira's apartment and into the hall. The student who lived below him got fed up and reported a foul-smelling brown liquid that had begun to seep down from Ira's apartment. No, the landlord thought that this was possibly a plumbing issue. The stench was so off-putting that the landlord and the downstairs tenant wondered if an animal had become trapped in the wall and died. They asked Ira if he had noticed the smell and everything that seemed to be going on, any dripping, if he was having any problems with his toilet. And he said that he hadn't noticed anything.
Speaker 1:
[62:51] Well, yeah, because he can't get past his own scent.
Speaker 2:
[62:54] Yeah, that is an issue with him for sure.
Speaker 1:
[62:56] He's like, I don't smell anything else besides my natural vibes.
Speaker 2:
[63:01] There was a closet right above where this foul-smelling odor and liquid was coming from. And he's like, I checked the closet. There's nothing in there, so I don't know what you're talking about. Any time the landlord requested access to his apartment, he demanded that they stay away from this particular closet, which was padlocked.
Speaker 1:
[63:18] Don't you feel like that is suspicious?
Speaker 2:
[63:21] Yeah. So when they were like, OK, we kind of need to get in there, he's like, I can't because my ex who left me, all of her belongings are in there. And it's just too sensitive for me because I miss her so much. So I can't really delve into that stuff right now. On January 10, 1979, so think about how long this has been. We're coming up on a year and a half here since Hollywood was missing, J. Robert Pierce and Bob Stevens, the PIs spoke with Ira, who continued to feign ignorance about Holly's whereabouts. Unbeknownst to the fact that the pair had built quite a case against him, which they then passed along to the Philadelphia PD.
Speaker 1:
[64:02] Thank God, guys.
Speaker 2:
[64:04] It would be 18 months between when Holly disappeared and when she was found, and far longer before justice would be served. On March 28th, 1979, police ascended the stairs to Ira's run-down second-story walk-up and presented him with a search warrant. He greeted them naked but wearing a robe as per use. He was surly and he got very offended when they demanded access. They turned his whole apartment upside down, but they were particularly interested in the padlocked closet, which was adjacent to the screened-in porch. Because it just happened to be located above the spot that seemed to be the source of the mysterious oozing leak in the apartment below. Though investigators later found the key on a key ring, very obviously hanging up on a hook, Ira claimed to have lost the closet key.
Speaker 1:
[65:00] Oh my God. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[65:01] He's like, I don't know where it is. It was literally feet away from him while he was saying that. So detectives are like, no prob, Bob. We'll just break the padlock. That's not going to stop us from getting in there. So when they did that, like I kind of described a little bit at the beginning, they found tightly packed cardboard boxes, some of which contained Holly's belongings. They found a journal of hers, a purse, numerous personal papers, photos, and documents, including her driver's license and social security card. So essentially all of the things she would need to actually have gone and started a new life anywhere. Beneath all the boxes was a steamer trunk, and it was stuffed with newspapers dated the month that Holly had vanished. It also had plastic bags, styrofoam, and air fresheners.
Speaker 1:
[65:51] I don't think that's going to cover that smell, babe.
Speaker 2:
[65:53] No. Then to no surprise but still horror, the investigators spotted a wasted and rotted away human hand. What is absolutely insane about all of this is that Holly's remains were in that trunk in a closet only a few feet away from Ira's bed. He was sleeping in this room a few feet away from her rotting corpse.
Speaker 1:
[66:21] And he's there right now, so they can just arrest him?
Speaker 2:
[66:23] Yeah, he's just standing there while they're doing this.
Speaker 1:
[66:25] Insane.
Speaker 2:
[66:26] When the medical examiner looked at Holly's body, they found that she had wasted away to 37 pounds. Her body was now essentially mummified. They found that her skull had been broken in at least six places, the result of blunt force trauma. So when they spotted the hand and obviously attached to Holly's body, homicide detective Michael Chitwood pulled Ira aside and said, it looks like we found Holly. And Ira looked at him matter of factly and blankly and said, you found what you found.
Speaker 1:
[67:01] Am I wrong? Did we find Holly?
Speaker 2:
[67:03] And he's like, you found what you found? He wouldn't say that it was Holly. But he also didn't seem entirely surprised that there was a dead body in his closet.
Speaker 1:
[67:12] Yeah, well, he's just like chilling in a robe.
Speaker 2:
[67:15] Also, psychopathically, he kept a baby picture of Holly displayed in his apartment that people noticed when they came over.
Speaker 1:
[67:24] This guy is a creep.
Speaker 2:
[67:26] He's sick. What's even worse is a gross detail. Based on the position of her body, the medical examiner believed that Holly had been alive still when she was placed in the trunk.
Speaker 1:
[67:39] How could they determine that?
Speaker 2:
[67:40] It seemed like she had tried to move or shuffle or something like that, even though she was badly wounded because of the head injuries. Two of Ira's friends who were questioned in the aftermath of the discovery claimed that he had requested their help in disposing of the trunk. Like he had said, I have some documents that the US government doesn't want me to have.
Speaker 1:
[68:02] Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:
[68:04] He was doing work with the paranormal and with remote viewing, doing the psychic ability to know where your enemies are. And he was working potentially with Russia and all of this stuff. So he's telling them that he's like deeply involved in like the CIA is after me. And so I need you to help me dispose of this trunk that has some highly sensitive material. And I don't remember exactly, they didn't want to, they felt very uncomfortable about it. And then eventually he was like, oh, never mind, I don't need it moved after all or something. But the, it was two women came forward and said that he had asked for their help in getting rid of the trunk.
Speaker 1:
[68:50] He asked two women to help dispose of another woman.
Speaker 2:
[68:53] And there was like another guy who was friends with him who was like, I don't know, you wouldn't believe the amount of people that after he is caught with Holly's body in his closet, behind a padlock, in his room, that still fully believed him and believed that the CIA was somehow setting him up by putting Holly's body in his closet.
Speaker 1:
[69:13] It doesn't matter, the Kool-Aid has been drunk.
Speaker 2:
[69:16] Yes, and there's a shocking amount of otherwise seemingly intelligent people who are believing him when he says he was set up by the CIA.
Speaker 1:
[69:26] People just like want someone to follow. Those types of people, it's like.
Speaker 2:
[69:29] And they're looking for reasons, like this guy's like, Oh, I own a garbage dump. If he really killed her and he wanted to get rid of the body, then he would have just asked me if he could dump it in my garbage dump. So he did, so he must be innocent.
Speaker 1:
[69:42] Which like, not of your brain isn't working properly.
Speaker 2:
[69:46] No, and he's like, and a lot of other people were like, Well, Ira's the smartest guy that I have ever met. So if he really wanted to get away with murder, he could have because he's so intelligent. So clearly he was set up. This is the leaps that some people who support him are making right now. When the police, they arrest him immediately and they start looking into the past about his past relationships to see if there's any history of violence. And they found that there was a very, very strong history of Ira being a serial abuser of women he was in relationships with, especially at the moment that these women wanted to leave the relationship.
Speaker 1:
[70:26] Yep.
Speaker 2:
[70:27] In the early 1960s, he strangled a Bennington College student named Rita Siegel when she tried to end their relationship. Rita, who survived, later said that she was never as taken with Ira as he had been with her. She said, quote, the great romance of the century was what was in his head. I never got the feeling that this was a love relationship. I got the feeling that it was a sick relationship. Rita began to feel very spooked by Ira's behavior, calling his outburst downright frightening. Rita remembered, quote, it was as if somebody were talking about something and all of a sudden he would become the thing itself. And he would start glaring at you and leaning at you. Rita was so afraid of him that she often stayed in the relationship just to avoid what would happen if she broke up with him, which she anticipated a violent reaction, which is exactly what happened when she did finally end things. An animal abuse warning here. She remembered that she knew that he had a sickness because he liked to intentionally get cats wet just to listen to them scream. So Rita tried to leave him, and that was when he attacked her and he strangled her to unconsciousness. So he might not have even known if she was alive or dead when he left her room.
Speaker 1:
[71:52] Oh my god, that's so scary.
Speaker 2:
[71:53] She woke up and she had to be treated by the college hospital, but she never reported the abuse to the police, unfortunately. He wrote in his journal after strangling Rita, to kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right. He even admitted to it in his journals.
Speaker 1:
[72:18] Wow. That's exactly what he did to Holly.
Speaker 2:
[72:22] In 1966, a 19-year-old Penn student named Judy tried to break up with him as well. A friend of both Ira and Judy's later said about their involvement, Ira was so intense that when you got involved with him, he would get inside your head. You'd have that kind of relationship inside one another's heads. He was particularly that way with women because he needed to dominate. His relationship with Judy was not a placid relationship. It was obviously a very passionate one. And at a certain point, I think she wanted out. In a passage that Ira wrote in his journal on March 14, 1966, he admitted to fantasizing about killing Judy as he felt her pulling away from their relationship. On March 17, so only a couple days later, 1966, he showed up at her apartment to continue their relationship. Judy left to get milk and donuts and returned to serve him breakfast and coffee. As she did, so she's coming back into her apartment to bring him food, he approached her with a glass coke bottle and seemingly out of nowhere, cracked it over the back of her head.
Speaker 1:
[73:28] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[73:29] She hit her head on the table as she fell and lost consciousness. Ira then fled. So this pattern is very clear. Every time a woman tried to leave Ira, he escalated.
Speaker 1:
[73:42] Which is crazy because he's not being loyal.
Speaker 2:
[73:45] No.
Speaker 1:
[73:45] He was like, he can do whatever the fuck he wants.
Speaker 2:
[73:48] It was the control. Yeah, it was the control.
Speaker 1:
[73:51] So scary.
Speaker 2:
[73:53] All of this is incredibly infuriating, but I think what's going to set your rageometer off is what happens next. Despite all of this information, despite this history of escalating violence, despite the fact that his ex-girlfriend's body had been in his closet for 18 months, Ira was inexplicably permitted bail.
Speaker 1:
[74:16] What?
Speaker 2:
[74:16] Which was set at just $40,000.
Speaker 1:
[74:19] I was curious about how he was going to flee.
Speaker 2:
[74:23] Only 10% of that 40 grand was needed for his release. That's more like 200,000 in today's money, but still. Remember he has all of these very wealthy friends too.
Speaker 1:
[74:35] Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's only $4,000 at that time.
Speaker 2:
[74:38] Exactly. He had no problem getting bailed out. His bail was actually posted by his friend Barbara Bronfen.
Speaker 1:
[74:46] What? A woman?
Speaker 2:
[74:48] Mm-hmm. She was one of the heirs to the Seagram Spirit's fortune.
Speaker 1:
[74:52] Okay. Well, good thing I like Canada Dry more. Seagram's is disgusting.
Speaker 2:
[74:58] Yeah. And it was like not just the soda. It's the, you know, they made alcohol too.
Speaker 1:
[75:03] Oh, my God. This is foul that a woman bailed him out.
Speaker 2:
[75:07] Barbara was very involved in his ability to flee. Owning a home is great until something breaks, and suddenly your whole day is gone.
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Speaker 2:
[77:47] So Ira was released to await his trial, and while he was awaiting his trial, he told anyone who would listen that he had been framed, that he was being set up by the CIA, he was too smart, he knew too much.
Speaker 1:
[77:59] They all love the CIA. The CIA is the one, the organization that always sets you up.
Speaker 2:
[78:04] Exactly. In his first media interview after his arrest, he maintained that he was being set up for Holly's murder, but he couldn't share who was setting him up. It was too dangerous for him to mention. For the rest of his life, he pointed towards Holly's death being a hit from the FBI or CIA. He's saying that they killed Holly and stuffed her body in his closet.
Speaker 1:
[78:26] That he locked and had the key for. Exactly. Babe, this doesn't even make sense. Your ego is so inflated that you can't even see that this does not make sense.
Speaker 2:
[78:35] He was also so far gone that he didn't even really hide the fact that he had been abusive to Holly. He was like, oh yeah, I cheat on her. You know what, I hit her like once, but I didn't kill her. He said, quote, I have been outspoken in all my life, but never have I been violent. What? You just admitted to hitting her. I want to be very direct about this. I did not kill whoever was supposed to be in there. Whoever was supposed to be in there is what he's saying. I am not a killer.
Speaker 1:
[79:01] You can't even say her name.
Speaker 2:
[79:02] I do not know how a body got in there, if it was a body. So he's going back and forth saying like, they killed Holly and put her in my closet. They killed somebody and put them in my closet. Was there even a body there to begin with?
Speaker 1:
[79:16] You have some like alien shit.
Speaker 2:
[79:18] This guy is like unfucking believable, but somehow his popularity didn't seem to decline. He still had very ardent supporters. So Ira's pretrial hearing was set for January of 1981, but Ira declined to appear. A warrant was issued for his arrest because he missed this hearing. But by then, as you can imagine, it was already too late.
Speaker 1:
[79:44] Of course.
Speaker 2:
[79:45] And Andie, I think you're gonna know why it was too late.
Speaker 1:
[79:48] Cause he's literally fleeing.
Speaker 2:
[79:50] flight from justice. And well, you guys all know, I usually, at least I'm interested in, I wouldn't say I love, but I'm interested in the absolute balls of these offenders, the ones who managed to somehow escape and how deeply satisfying it is when they get caught. But this one is just plain infuriating because of the people who are supporting him, because of the judge that allowed him to get bail, even though he has all of these very wealthy benefactors. And because he gets away with it for so goddamn long.
Speaker 1:
[80:21] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[80:22] It's just like rage-inducing. Okay, so he conned not only Barbara and some other wealthy benefactors, but he also conned this very young woman into running away with him. He could not do this on his own. Even with the money coming in, he needed somebody to essentially be the public-facing partner who could legally be out in the world.
Speaker 1:
[80:46] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[80:47] So he ended up after his arrest, dating a young woman. She was only in her very early 20s. I think she was like 20 or 21. And this young woman, her name was Jean Marie. Jean had met him through Barbara in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had been attending college. She was very quiet and demure. And she seemed like, again, another counterbalance for Ira's big, domineering personality. They ended up going to Ireland through, we believe, Canada. And they moved into a house in Dublin. And it was like a landlord situation where it seems like it was like a duplex or something so that the landlords like either lived above or below them, but they were pretty close. And their neighbors said that Ira seldom left the house. They remember thinking that Jean was afraid of him and that she was kind of withdrawn and that she stayed away from the home when Ira was there as much as possible. And so the neighbors were a little concerned or landlords that maybe there was abuse in the relationship because Jean didn't seem very happy in that circumstance. So they were a little worried about her. And then they had been told that Ira, who was operating under a different name, at the time, of course.
Speaker 1:
[82:19] The Unicorn?
Speaker 2:
[82:21] No. That he had maybe like done some tax evasion or something. They were saying like, oh, you know, he can't go back to the United States. There was like a little issue with something he did legally, but it's not a big deal. And so I guess the same couple ended up visiting the States and while they were visiting family in the United States, either came up or they saw a newspaper article and they realized that their downstairs neighbor was actually an escaped murderer.
Speaker 1:
[82:51] Fugitive?
Speaker 2:
[82:53] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[82:54] Unreal.
Speaker 2:
[82:55] So they ended up blowing the whistle. Oh yeah, he was going by the name Ben Moore. And they eventually, because he had been more, they notified the police but unfortunately, Ira was tipped off to this and managed to escape. And at the time, the United States and Ireland did not have an extradition treaty that wouldn't be put into place until 1983.
Speaker 1:
[83:22] I'm sure he knew that.
Speaker 2:
[83:23] Yeah. So he was able to get away. And I think that even Jean eventually got away from him and she decided to go to the authorities and get immunity for helping him escape by giving away his area or where he was staying. She also said that Barbara Bronfen was the one who was mostly paying for him to live overseas.
Speaker 1:
[83:50] Unreal.
Speaker 2:
[83:51] So that was happening, I believe, by late 1986 is when his girlfriend came back to the United States and tried to rat him out, but he was in the wind at that point. She did point them to Barbara, who I believe denied it originally. But then in 1988, Barbara went to turn him in. So her support had changed. She had completely been taken in by him, she said. She had believed his innocence completely until October of 1988, when the book that I'm using as our main source today, The Unicorn's Secret came out. And she read the whole book, which was like everything about all of the evidence and all of his history with his ex-girlfriends and the fact that he had asked those young women to get rid of the trunk and other people who had been at his house when he was like, don't go near that closet and everything. There's overwhelming evidence in this book. And so she read this book and was like, oh my God, I've been helping a real murderer. Because she had believed him hook line and sinker until it was all there in the written word in black and white that she had been schnookered.
Speaker 1:
[85:04] Yeah, she helped facilitate his flee and put him out on bail.
Speaker 2:
[85:10] Yes, she helped all of it because she thought she was helping an innocent man escape governmental persecution.
Speaker 1:
[85:18] I still like Canada Dry more.
Speaker 2:
[85:19] I know. Let's all drink some more Canada Dry today. So at that point, Barbara had a change of heart. She stopped supporting Ira, and she even gave the investigators an address in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was hiding out.
Speaker 1:
[85:34] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[85:35] But again, I don't know who was still in touch with him or how he figured this out. Ira managed to catch wind of this, and he managed to avoid an arrest again. When the Swedish police descended upon the apartment, a Swedish woman named Annika Flodin answered the door, and she told them that she was Ira's landlord, but she didn't know Ira. She never knew an Ira Einhorn. She said she knew her tenant as Ben Moore, the same name that he had been using in Ireland.
Speaker 1:
[86:02] Yep, yep.
Speaker 2:
[86:04] From the onset of their search, though, the authorities got the feeling that Annika was not telling the whole truth. She was not an innocent bystander in this, and it turned out that they were correct.
Speaker 1:
[86:16] He was still there? Was he still there?
Speaker 2:
[86:19] He probably physically wasn't in the apartment when they searched it, but he was still in Sweden, and Annika knew exactly where he was.
Speaker 1:
[86:24] He's probably hiding naked in, like, the cellar. They're like, oh, it smells like hoagies in here.
Speaker 2:
[86:29] Okay, so we're going to come back to Annika and Sweden and eventually where Ira ends up. But in the meantime, back in Philadelphia, they decided that to bolster their case in hoping that when they did find him, they could immediately extradite him, they actually mounted a trial against Ira in absentia. So they held an entire formal trial just without the accused, which I don't know is something that legally you can do anymore. But apparently, they were able to, the state of Pennsylvania at this time in the early 90s. Despite his whereabouts being completely unknown at this point, Ira was convicted of murder in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison, even though-
Speaker 1:
[87:16] Okay, I mean, this has to help the family a little bit.
Speaker 2:
[87:19] Yes, that they got a conviction but-
Speaker 1:
[87:21] Yeah, no person.
Speaker 2:
[87:22] No actual punishment. Back in Sweden, Ira's so-called landlord, Anika, had told them that she was shocked to hear of his true identity and the crime for which he was being accused. However, when they went back to speak to Anika, they found that she too had disappeared, and it would take years, years for the police to find Anika and then Ira ever again.
Speaker 1:
[87:48] Were they like hiding in this Swedish forest or something?
Speaker 2:
[87:51] In 1994. It's like, what is, it's like, hello. We're there with like the Scandinavian trolls.
Speaker 1:
[88:02] The cast of Frozen.
Speaker 2:
[88:03] Yeah. Then in 1994, Anika applied for an absentee driver's license in Sweden from her new residence in France.
Speaker 1:
[88:14] France.
Speaker 2:
[88:15] When Anika attempted to renew her Swedish driver's license using her maiden name, her application was flagged. Though she had since been using the surname that Ira had adopted, Malin. They're married. So Anika and Ira are married and they're living in France together.
Speaker 1:
[88:32] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[88:33] This alerted Interpol and local police where they descended on a small town in Western France where she had been hiding and knowingly harboring her fugitive husband, Ira Einhorn.
Speaker 1:
[88:44] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[88:45] Yes. It took the authorities three additional years, but the couple was eventually found living in the beautiful French countryside village Champagne Mouton, which has less than a thousand people. They were living in a converted windmill and enjoying their golden years together. Also, it's very fucking annoying that Ira was having his best life. He spent most of his time reading and writing. He would write books that never saw the light of day, dozens of pages a day. And Anika would tend to her garden and she would cook for her husband. They ate well, they drank French wine, they strolled through the countryside together. They were living a dream life. Well, Holly's friends and family were in hell.
Speaker 1:
[89:34] I'm so annoyed.
Speaker 2:
[89:36] The locals took a liking to Anika, but everyone who got to know Ira hated him. They said he was an arrogant asshole.
Speaker 1:
[89:44] Yeah, the French don't have any room for that bullshit.
Speaker 2:
[89:47] And it seems like as soon as Barbara had pulled her support, he had found Anika and glommed onto her. She was the heir to a couture store back in Sweden. So apparently her parents had started some sort of retail or fashion empire. So she came from money and all of the money that she used to hide them that they were enjoying this nice life in France was all for Anika. A lot of people said that she was very similar to Holly in looks and temperament too.
Speaker 1:
[90:21] Really?
Speaker 2:
[90:22] Because he couldn't work and had to live off the grid to avoid capture, she bankrolled their entire lifestyle. So she's kind of like many people who had come before her, who got manipulated into taking care of dirty Ira. She was the one who paid for their home. She grew fresh vegetables and did all the cooking, cleaning, all of the shopping for the house. Ira spent most of his days reading from bed. There was also a note that he enjoyed luxuriating and floating in a filthy wastewater pond outside of their home, which sounds disgusting. Does that mean it's like sewage water? I don't know. A wastewater pond, is how it's described.
Speaker 1:
[91:02] I feel like he would have gotten like subsist or something if that was the case.
Speaker 2:
[91:05] I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[91:06] Maybe it was like gray water.
Speaker 2:
[91:08] I'm hoping it was something like that. I was like, wastewater, gross. So they eventually locate them, but they have to be super on the down low about it. So French authorities started posing as like tourists and passersby to like spy on them until they could determine this was actually Ira Einhorn who had been missing for 20 years.
Speaker 1:
[91:29] Dude.
Speaker 2:
[91:30] On June 18th, 1997, Ira was finally apprehended at home. And as usual, he was found naked.
Speaker 1:
[91:39] Well, oh, shut up.
Speaker 2:
[91:42] When they go to arrest him, he is naked in bed.
Speaker 1:
[91:44] And they're like, yep, definitely him.
Speaker 2:
[91:46] Yes, he tried to say that he was not Ira Einhorn. His name was Eugene Mallon and claimed that he was an author of mystery stories from the United Kingdom. Do you imagine that he was doing a really bad fake accent?
Speaker 1:
[91:59] I honestly, I feel like he's probably just speaking with an American accent.
Speaker 2:
[92:02] Being like, I'm from the UK.
Speaker 1:
[92:04] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[92:05] Really? He spent six months in prison in La Gradillon, a prison facility outside of Bordeaux, about 130 miles from where he and Anika had lived together. Anika continued to fund his lifestyle even while he was in prison, as well as paying for his lawyer and making the drive to see him as often as she could. After visiting Ira in prison, Anika went home and opened a package from a friend who had compiled dozens of newspaper clippings as well as passages from the book, The Unicorn's Secret. This is a friend who's trying to look out for Anika and say, Yeah, dude, look at your husband. He actually did this. Anika said about that evening, quote, That night I went to bed and I was clearly and definitely married to a murderer. The impact of the accusations of all that came through from the papers was so negative I woke up the next morning and I thank God that I was married to Ira and not to the person described in those pages. Honey, what in the self-denial is going on here?
Speaker 1:
[93:10] Honey, that's a little delulu.
Speaker 2:
[93:11] Yeah. She said that she came to two conclusions, that she loved him regardless of whether he had killed or not, but that he hadn't killed Holly. Anika stated staunchly, quote, I cannot say with 100 percent certainty that he didn't kill Holly. He knows, but she stayed with him.
Speaker 1:
[93:30] They're made for each other.
Speaker 2:
[93:32] After six months in prison, he was released back to Anika's care and placed on house arrest. They're letting this guy out of prison.
Speaker 1:
[93:39] I don't understand.
Speaker 2:
[93:40] This is so insane. The amount of breaks this guy gets is unbelievable. The French government decided that it was unfair that he had been tried and convicted in absentia. They said that's not right. We don't believe in that. Despite being in France illegally and a convicted murderer, he was sheltered there until the French government could work out an extradition treaty that included a new trial and not an immediate prison sentence for Ira upon his return.
Speaker 1:
[94:09] I wonder if any of this had to do with Anika's family money.
Speaker 2:
[94:12] I don't know. I can kind of understand it because even though he did technically have a defense attorney representing him in the trial in absentia, a core tenant of our judicial system is that you are supposed to be able to face your accusers in a court of law. So I kind of get where France was coming from, but it's insane to me that he was technically a convicted murderer at this time and had been hiding out illegally in their company and they're like letting him out on house arrest and just chilling with Anika.
Speaker 1:
[94:46] Yeah, when he's already had 20 years of freedom that he didn't deserve.
Speaker 2:
[94:51] And he was really soaking up every minute of his 15 minutes of fame. So he's out on house arrest and he's doing like a media tour. He did a nude photo shoot for Esquire magazine. He was in his sixties too. I did look up the pictures and it's not as Burt Reynolds as you would think, but it's still very off putting.
Speaker 1:
[95:13] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[95:14] Anika conducted interviews as well, including one in which she detailed the fact that she had taken him under her wing and had been caring for him ever since they met at a mutual friend's house in London in November of 1987, which is conveniently about a year before Barbara completely dumped him. On a whim, the pair took a trip together and he glove bombed her the same way he had done to Holly. She said it was a whirlwind courtship and that Ira did admit to her during this trip that he was a wanted fugitive and that he didn't have a scent to his name, but she was so in love with him already, she didn't care. They took off for the Canary Islands, which is beautiful. It's, yeah, islands that are located off the coast of Morocco. Within 10 days of meeting, 10 days of meeting, she had offered to take care of him completely and moved him into her apartment in Stockholm despite the fact that he didn't have a passport or driver's license. When the Swedish authorities had come sniffing around after the couple, Anika lied to the police and then she sold the apartment she had owned for years and she used the money made in that sale to purchase their new home in the French countryside. So she has completely changed her entire life for this loser, murderer, abusive, convicted, fugitive from the law after knowing each other for like 10 days.
Speaker 1:
[96:44] Yeah, I mean, he must have been really good at head. I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 2:
[96:48] He must have been really good at a lot of things. I guess he had the experience, you know, they say. What is the Malcolm Gladwell? 10,000 hours? 1,800 partners?
Speaker 1:
[96:58] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[97:00] Ira was upfront about the fact that he hadn't worked since the year after Holly's murder, admitting that his last paycheck had come from Harvard in 1978. Anika said matter of factly that she was the wallet in the relationship. Well, Ira, this is in this interview, boasted that he provided the quote brain food, and considered reading, writing, and philosophizing his full-time job, and what he contributed to their household.
Speaker 1:
[97:27] You're embarrassing.
Speaker 2:
[97:29] He's like the prototypical homosexual. The guy that you sleep with because he just needs a place to live.
Speaker 1:
[97:36] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[97:37] Annika, however, had to worry about all the things that Ira felt like were beneath them, paying bills, keeping a roof over their head, cooking their meals, cleaning everything else she did. It took years, but the Philadelphia Police Department eventually convinced the French government to release Ira, promising to omit his 1993 conviction and give him a new trial. Annika sold the house that she had bought for them in order to secure a renowned Philadelphia Defense Attorney named Morris Gellman.
Speaker 1:
[98:07] I feel like if they would have come to this agreement sooner, we would have been saved from the Esquire photos.
Speaker 2:
[98:13] I think so too, yes. And also, just think about how much he was probably getting off on all this attention too.
Speaker 1:
[98:20] Loved it, loved it.
Speaker 2:
[98:22] Ira appealed his extradition for three years, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Think about this. This murder occurs in 1977. He doesn't get extradited until July of 2001. When they finally went to arrest him and said, it's really time, you're going back to the United States to face trial, he slit his throat in front of the officers. And he did do it fairly deep, enough that it sprayed the officers, but enough that he got medical tension right away and survived. But it was very dramatic. In his home, yes, when they came to arrest him, he was like, you won't take me alive.
Speaker 1:
[99:05] They're like, please just put some clothes on. Just like a crazy old naked guy.
Speaker 2:
[99:10] Yes, completely unhinged.
Speaker 1:
[99:12] His neck blood spraying all over you while you're just trying to get him back to the United States, like please leave.
Speaker 2:
[99:19] Still also stinky. This is like a nightmare scenario for these French police officers.
Speaker 1:
[99:26] I bet they were happy to get rid of them then.
Speaker 2:
[99:28] They're like, okay, you can have him back now. When asked who he believed could have possibly actually killed Holly, because he continued to say he was innocent, he said that it had most likely been a government entity punishing him for his pursuit of knowledge about the paranormal.
Speaker 1:
[99:44] Totally. Same as invisible cloaking, right?
Speaker 2:
[99:47] Exactly. Ira's US trial began on September 30th, 2002. My mom was in college, I think, when he committed the murder, and I was starting college, by the time he finally faced a court.
Speaker 1:
[100:00] This has gone on way too long.
Speaker 2:
[100:01] Way too long. One key witness was the owner of a bookstore whom Ira had visited around the time of Holly's murder in search of books on mummification.
Speaker 1:
[100:10] Ew.
Speaker 2:
[100:11] Ira naturally took the stand himself as his own final witness, and he told the court that admittedly he had cheated on Holly. That was his only crime. He claimed their only fight stemmed from infidelity. He maintained the stands he had held all along, which is that he was as shocked as anyone else to find Holly's body in his closet. He told the court that he was devastated, and that he even had to excuse himself from the stand so that he could cry. He also claimed that after the discovery, he had been upset for days, when we know that's not true, because he had said so flatly, you found what you found. So he didn't seem shocked, horrified, confused, any of these things that he's describing.
Speaker 1:
[101:01] No, you said he was just standing there. Are those officers there to testify?
Speaker 2:
[101:04] Yes. In October of 2002, almost exactly 30 years since Ira and Holly had first laid eyes upon one another, and over 20 since he had killed her, the jury delivered the verdict. I'm sure you can guess what it is.
Speaker 1:
[101:22] Smelly.
Speaker 2:
[101:23] That as well. You got a misdemeanor. Also added on.
Speaker 1:
[101:28] Unbelievably smelly.
Speaker 2:
[101:30] Ira was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 1:
[101:37] Thank God. Was Annika there?
Speaker 2:
[101:39] Yes. Technically, this was the second time that he was convicted for this. Even in the aftermath of the verdict, Annika maintained her husband's innocence. She called the evidence devastating, but added he has been consistently strong on the fact that he is innocent. She said that the court focused too much on the coincidence of Holly's body having been stashed in his padlocked closet, and Ira's unfortunate decision to flee the country for 21 years despite his alleged innocence. She's like, they convicted him because her body was coincidentally found in his padlocked closet, and then he made a decision to flee, so I guess that didn't look good from him. What? Of course not.
Speaker 1:
[102:24] Yeah. No. The coincidence is that he killed her and put her in the closet. It's like, of course they're going to fucking focus on that.
Speaker 2:
[102:31] She also publicly complained about the fact that he was tried in absentia, and she also believed that the jury convicted him too quickly because they had deliberated for less than three hours.
Speaker 1:
[102:42] Babe, he's just really guilty.
Speaker 2:
[102:45] Holly's four siblings filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Ira and they did win. The payout was supposed to be $907 million or over a billion dollars in today's money, but they knew even then that they would never see a penny and they never did. This is the saddest part, other than obviously the loss of Holly's life and the abuse of all of his ex-girlfriends. But what's truly sad is that Holly's parents never got to see justice for their daughter. So while he was living his best life in Ireland and Sweden, and then the beautiful countryside of France, Fred Maddux's health was very rapidly declining following a leg amputation, and he was in such bad emotional and physical health that he took his own life.
Speaker 1:
[103:40] No.
Speaker 2:
[103:42] And in 1990, her mother Helen had passed away after battling emphysema. Holly's sister Buffy said that Holly's murder had ruined her parents' lives, adding, they died thinking that Ira beat them.
Speaker 1:
[103:56] That's very sad.
Speaker 2:
[103:57] It's very sad. And it's just if you compare those two images of how he was enjoying his life and what hell her family was going through and how they lost their lives before they were able to see justice served, it's incredibly frustrating.
Speaker 1:
[104:12] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[104:13] Buffy later named her daughter Holly after her sister, and she said that her daughter, just like Holly, was a gifted dancer. Oh. Ira passed away from natural causes in prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania on April 3, 2020. He was 79 years old. Annika, whose full name is Ava Karen Annika Florenstam, reverted to using her former surname instead of Einhorn in the aftermath of Ira's arrest and extradition. She declined to share publicly whether or not they divorced, or whether or not they kept in touch, so who knows? She ran an inn out of their former marital home until her death in 2023 at the age of 71, and she's buried in Sweden.
Speaker 1:
[104:58] Where he slit his throat, that home?
Speaker 2:
[105:00] I guess so. That's a fun little piece of trivia about the place you're staying at a B&B. There's some Unicorn blood here.
Speaker 1:
[105:08] Yeah, you're staying at B&B.
Speaker 2:
[105:10] Body odor? Body odor and blood. You're staying at the B&O. Happy Earth Day.
Speaker 1:
[105:19] Gosh, thanks, Jessie.
Speaker 2:
[105:20] Guys, I gotta tell you, I was even texting Farah, our researcher.
Speaker 1:
[105:23] I wonder if you're finished with this episode.
Speaker 2:
[105:24] I was like, I cannot wait for this episode to be over, because this guy is one of the most repulsive, repugnant, arrogant, just most disgusting human beings I've had to even mentally spend time with.
Speaker 1:
[105:40] I'm glad we're finished too. I'm really not looking forward to having to recap it next week.
Speaker 2:
[105:45] Oh, I need to take a shower, so I don't smell like a hoagie with onions.
Speaker 1:
[105:50] God, disgusting.
Speaker 2:
[105:52] In conclusion.
Speaker 1:
[105:53] Oh, thank God this is over. I'm gonna look at Champagne France in a totally different light.
Speaker 2:
[106:01] In conclusion, bathing is your friend and so is deodorant.
Speaker 1:
[106:06] Yeah, I feel like I need to take a shower and I definitely can never look at Champagne France ever again in the way that I wanted to look at it.
Speaker 2:
[106:14] Nor a charming converted windmill. And as always, trust your gut when it comes to love so no one ends up murdered.
Speaker 1:
[106:22] Bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:
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