Page One
Monday, June 23, 1997

It was that suspicion, and a methodical and determined probe by Stevens and colleague J.R. Pearce, both retired FBI agents hired by Holly's parents, that led to the discovery of her mummified body and to Einhorn's conviction of first-degree murder.

In the wake of Einhorn's capture in France on June 13 after 16 years as a fugitive, Stevens talked last week about how he unraveled Holly Maddux's murder 18 years ago.

Maddux, who was Einhorn's girlfriend for about five years, had already been missing for six months by March 1978, when Stevens had his talk with an uncooperative Einhorn. But it would be another year before she was found stuffed in a trunk on the porch of Einhorn's Powelton Village apartment.

The last time anyone definitely had seen her was the evening of Sept. 11, 1977, when she and Einhorn and another couple had gone to a movie in Pennsauken.

She had told friends she was leaving Ira for her own apartment, but all her possessions remained at his place.

She had no regular job or income, but more than $20,000 from an inheritance remained untouched in a savings bank.

She had been looking forward to a pleasure cruise off New England with another man, but she never contacted him.

Back in her hometown of Tyler, Texas, her parents, both now dead, and siblings had begun to fear the worst.

The first clue that something was amiss came on Oct. 2, 1977, the 58th birthday of Holly's mother, Elizabeth.

Holly, 31, the family's oldest child, had often appeared to be lost, but she never had failed to send hand-drawn cards for family birthdays.

Ira and Holly had made a memorable visit to the family home, ruled with military authority by father Fred Maddux, about two years before. Ira had seemed determined to provoke her proper parents. He set the tone by wolfing food before and during the grace that the family always asked before the meal.

But two days after her birthday, Elizabeth Maddux called Einhorn to ask if he knew Holly's whereabouts.

She later told police that he responded, ``I was going to call you and see if you knew where she was.''

The two had gone on an extended trip to Europe, beginning in May. Einhorn, who had been evolving from Philadelphia's most visible hippie during the 1960s and early '70s, was now its leading New Age guru. He claimed the trip to Europe was for investigation into parapsychology and the ``radiation beams'' that Iron Curtain countries were developing to sabotage American minds.

Maddux, a beautiful former cheerleader with deep insecurities, had long been under Einhorn's bullying domination. Though developing a new assertiveness and talking about leaving him, she still had agreed to make the trip -- and to fund it from her inheritance.

But she apparently made the final break during the trip. She returned early, in August, alone.

On the phone, Mrs. Maddux asked Einhorn if he had seen Holly since his return. He said he had seen her ``for a few days,'' around Labor Day.

When two more family birthdays passed unobserved in October, Mrs. Maddux called Einhorn again.

This time, Einhorn told her that, on the day after the movie double-date, Holly had gone to the store and never returned.

He claimed he had called the police, hospitals, friends, to no avail.

The Madduxes called their local FBI office, then headed by Bob Stevens.

Stevens told them that the FBI couldn't help them with a missing-person case. But Stevens was retiring in a matter of weeks and planning to open a detective agency.

The Madduxes gave him his first case.

The Philadelphia Police Department had previously taken a report and issued a flier with Holly's description.

A city detective had interviewed Einhorn, too. But police appeared to accept his explanation -- echoed by Einhorn's huge circle of influential friends -- that Holly had vanished to start a new life.

So Stevens, based in Tyler, enlisted the help of Pearce, a Philadelphian also recently retired from the FBI, and set to work.

``My first week in Philadelphia, my objective was to try to make contact with Ira,'' said Stevens, who still lives in Tyler.

But Einhorn put him off, saying he was busy organizing the ecological observance known as Sun Week.

Einhorn finally and reluctantly talked to Stevens on the telephone. But he made it clear that he was not sympathetic to the Madduxes. He said the family was one of the reasons that Holly had wanted to escape.

That caught Stevens' interest.

``He told me some things that did not gel with what he had said before and really didn't seem to fit,'' Stevens said.

Among other things, Stevens had seen the affectionate -- and increasingly optimistic -- letters that Holly had sent home regularly until shortly before her disappearance.

``This girl probably wrote home as much as any daughter would at that age,'' Stevens said. He thought it highly unlikely she would break with her family.

And there were other discrepancies. Einhorn waffled, for instance, on whether he had contacted the police.

And when the conversation was over, Stevens said, he was able to guess the truth.

``Up to that point, we really had no grounds to suspect him, but after that conversation, we were very much concerned for her safety, let's put it that way,'' he said. ``And I thought, I don't think this is a missing girl. I think we've got something very wrong.''

Stevens and Pearce -- who had no police powers -- did not approach Einhorn again.

Instead, Pearce -- who has since died -- began doing legwork while Stevens directed the investigation from Texas.

It was not easy. Einhorn's numerous friends -- it seemed that Holly hardly had any -- all supported his version or stonewalled.

Pearce and Stevens located two Drexel University students who had lived below Einhorn's small apartment in Powelton Village.

During September, they recalled, a terrible odor had permeated their apartment, a stink no disinfectant or deodorizer could take away.

They traced it to a mysterious seepage -- a thick, dark brown goo -- coming through the ceiling from Einhorn's place.

The elderly couple who owned the house and lived in one of the other units had smelled it, too. They thought it might be wood rotting from a leak, and called in plumbers.

As workers examined the house, Einhorn refused to let them open a padlocked closet built onto the rear porch of the house. That was where the odor and leak seemed to come from.

One of the Drexel students also remembered that one night he had heard a tremendous commotion from upstairs, and a single bloodcurdling scream.

Stevens and Pearce made notes of all that, and of Holly's intent to leave Ira, and his rage whenever she attempted to move in that direction. Eventually, in early 1979, they took a report of their findings to the police.

They found an interested reader in Detective Michael Chitwood.

``It read like an Alfred Hitchcock short story,'' Chitwood, now police chief in Portland, Maine, said last week. ``When I finished it, I thought, `This guy killed this woman, there's no doubt in my mind.' ''

Chitwood could get what the private eyes could not -- a search warrant.

On the morning of March 28, 1979, Chitwood and other officers knocked on Einhorn's door.

He answered the door naked, Chitwood recalled. The detective told him to get a robe, and handed him the warrant.

Chitwood knew the closet was the place to look. He went out on the porch while Einhorn stood impassively by.

Chitwood asked for a key to the padlock; Einhorn said he didn't have one.

The policeman pried the hasp off the door. Inside were several cardboard boxes, sitting atop a large steamer trunk.

After examining the boxes -- they seemed to hold Holly's effects -- he tried to open the trunk, only to find it, too, was locked.

Einhorn said he had no key. Chitwood pried it open.

Lying on top, like blankets, were newspapers dated Sept. 11, 1977, or earlier. Below that, layers of plastic bags, and below that, Styrofoam packing material.

Chitwood scraped away a few inches of packing material and saw a human hand -- brown and leathery, reaching up ``almost like somebody had tried to get out of the trunk.''

``I said [ to Einhorn ] , `It looks like we found Holly,' and he just said, `You found what you found,' and turned and walked back into the apartment,'' Chitwood said.

Chitwood dug no further. He summoned the medical examiner, who determined that Holly had been killed by massive blows to the head.

Chitwood placed Einhorn under arrest for murder.

It fell to Stevens, in Tyler, to take the news to her parents, and to get the dental records that would help identify the body of their firstborn.

``Neither of them were very emotional people; they were very refined,'' Stevens said of Fred and Elizabeth Maddux. ``And they had looked at this long enough to know that it was not a matter of if they would be notified, but when they would be notified.''