by Steve Lehto
Ruppert appealed his conviction. His attorneys argued that the trial court had misled Ruppert and his trial counsel. They claimed they were told that the panel of judges would only be able to convict Ruppert with a unanimous verdict, the same way a jury of twelve would have worked. Ruppert said that if he had known that they could convict him with a split vote, he would have asked for a jury trial. The Ohio Supreme Court said that if it was true that he’d been misled, Ruppert was entitled to a new trial. The prosecutors appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to overturn the state court. While appealing his conviction, Ruppert had been held at the Lima State Hospital for the criminally insane. His attorney told reporters in 1978, shortly after the Supreme Court had refused to rule on the case—which was, for his purposes, the same as winning—that he didn’t even believe Ruppert was competent to stand trial. “His paranoid condition has worsened. Generally, his entire mental processes are breaking down.”
A second trial was ordered and the venue was changed to Findlay, Ohio, for fear that an unbiased jury could not be found in Hamilton. Again, he was deemed competent to stand trial, and he was again found guilty on July 23, 1982. This time he was found guilty on two counts—for the murder of his mother and brother—but found not guilty by reason of insanity for the other nine killings. Many people took the verdict to mean that Ruppert knew what he was doing when he killed his brother and mother but may have then continued the killing in some sort of blind rage. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. He is not eligible for a parole hearing until 2035—the year he would turn 101 years old.
The house where James Ruppert killed eleven people is quite small. It must have seemed cramped even when just James and his mother were home. It is only 1,076 square feet, with two bedrooms and one bathroom. It was built in 1919 and the lot it occupies is just under 3,800 square feet. In 2008, it sold for $54,000. It still stands and is privately owned.
*“Officials Puzzled by Mass Murder,” Lawrence (KS) Journal-World, April 1, 1975.
The Unicorn Murder
IRA EINHORN
1977
3411 Race Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Helen “Holly” Maddux was a peace-loving thirty-year-old woman, a former prep school cheerleader who would never hurt anyone. She was living with Ira Einhorn, a well-known Philadelphian and proponent of world peace and Earth Day. A newspaper reporter from Philadelphia named Ronnie Polaneczky called him “a counterculture icon of the ’60s and ’70s[;] he was a hippie guru to the rich, famous and influential, mesmerizing them with messages of peace, love, intellectual enlightenment and global connectivity.” Among his friends and followers were rock stars, CEOs of huge corporations, and even politicians. One aspect of his character that added to his mystique was his claim that dark forces in the government were out to get him. It is unclear why that would have been, since most people saw his philosophy as little more than that of an old-school hippie who hadn’t changed with the times. His name—Einhorn—translated from German means “one horn.” He often called himself the Unicorn.
After a few years of sharing the apartment in Philadelphia, Holly broke up with Einhorn and moved out. She moved to New York City and called Einhorn to tell him she was starting over and wanted to make arrangements to retrieve her belongings. According to prosecutors who conducted two trials, Einhorn was furious. They say he told her he was going to take what she had left behind and throw it away unless she came and picked it up immediately. She went back to Philadelphia to get her things and no one ever heard from her again. It was September 1977.
Later, prosecutors argued that Einhorn—a huge man—beat the diminutive Holly in the apartment. They did not know if he used a weapon or simply slammed her around, but her skull was crushed with half a dozen fractures. As she was dying, she was stuffed into a steamer trunk, her body was covered with newspapers and old shopping bags, and the trunk was shoved into a closet. Prosecutors said that Einhorn padlocked the closet and went on with his life. When people asked about Holly, he told them that she had simply gone to the store one day and never came back. After all, she had been threatening to leave him. All the while, over almost two years, Holly’s body was in the trunk in the closet, in the apartment Einhorn continued to occupy.
After Holly’s disappearance, the police investigated and even questioned Einhorn. He told them the same story: She had gone to the store and never returned. He had assumed she had finally left him, something she had been threatening to do often, he told them. With nothing else to go on, the police went and looked elsewhere. They had not searched the apartment.
The Maddux family grew frustrated at the lack of progress being made by the police and hired private detectives to look for their daughter. The detectives found witnesses who told them that in the days after Holly vanished, Einhorn had sought help in disposing of a trunk that was too heavy for him to move by himself from his apartment. He claimed it held top-secret documents. The friends did not help him move the trunk and said that as far as they knew, the trunk was still in Einhorn’s apartment.
A little more checking by the detectives—and the police, who were now curious about the secret-document trunk—revealed that Einhorn’s neighbors may also have had something to contribute to the investigation. There was a foul odor coming from Einhorn’s apartment that was so bad that the building supervisor had tried to intervene. When he called on Einhorn to see about it, Einhorn had refused to let him into the apartment. Worse, the neighbor who lived directly below Einhorn had discovered that his ceiling—directly below Einhorn’s closet floor—had a putrid liquid seeping through it. It resisted cleaning and fresh paint wouldn’t fix it. The police sought a search warrant.
It was March 1979 when the police searched Einhorn’s apartment. They immediately noticed the locked closet, but Einhorn told them that he had lost the key and pretended that nothing was amiss. As they searched the apartment, detectives broke the lock off a closet and opened the door. Inside the closet they found Holly’s belongings, including her purse, her luggage, and her ID. She had obviously not gone anywhere or “left” Einhorn. There was a large trunk in the closet, the obvious source of the smell and the fluid that had been seeping into the apartment below. The detectives opened it and found Holly’s body inside, under a layer of old newspapers and shopping bags.
Einhorn stood to the side and watched it all calmly. When a detective said to him that it looked like Holly, Einhorn famously responded, “You found what you found.” Einhorn was arrested. Detectives photographed everything they could find in the apartment and gathered evidence. Among items they found were numerous journals Einhorn had kept, diaries that detailed many of his personal relationships.
Despite the apparently overwhelming evidence against him, Einhorn was granted bail. Einhorn had many wealthy benefactors and managed to hire one of the most famous attorneys in Pennsylvania: Arlen Specter. Specter would become a senator in 1980 but first found fame as a member of the Warren Commission. There, as a young attorney, he had been the one who postulated the “single bullet theory” to explain the various bullet wounds to John F. Kennedy and John Connally. For Einhorn, he worked a miracle. Specter talked the judge into releasing Einhorn on bond, despite the fact that he was facing a murder charge. The judge allowed a ridiculously low bond of $40,000—and then made Einhorn post just ten percent of it. It meant that $4,000 was all it took for Einhorn to walk out of court a free man before his trial. The money was posted by one of his many supporters, apparently convinced that the peaceful Unicorn could not possibly have had anything to do with the rotting dead body in the closet in his apartment.
Shortly before his trial, Einhorn vanished. He fled the country and went to Ireland, where he began a new life with a new name. He then spent the next few years eluding the authorities, running from one country to the next—England, Sweden, France; all the while he had supporters who sent him money, believing in his innocence. He would later brag that whi
le he was on the run, he spent time with rock stars and rich people, often just sitting and discussing his philosophies and how they believed him when he told them that the U.S. government was trying to frame him for murder.
While Einhorn was absent from the United States, the prosecution had decided to try him for murder. Since he had been notified of the trial and ordered to appear, the court could legally proceed and try him in absentia. It is an uncommon occurrence but perfectly legal under Pennsylvania law. Einhorn could have appeared and defended himself if he wanted to; he clearly chose not to. The jury heard the evidence and found Einhorn guilty of murder in 1993.
Einhorn managed to evade capture until 1997. A prosecutor in Philadelphia had dedicated himself to bringing Einhorn to justice and spent decades studying Einhorn’s life and a stack of journals he had left behind. After several near-misses, he found out about a woman in Sweden who seemed to have some connection to Einhorn. When questioned, she feigned ignorance. Then she disappeared. The prosecutor asked international law enforcement to look for her, and they found that she had recently applied for a French driver’s license. Some more legwork revealed that she had moved to France and married a man whose name was an alias Einhorn had used previously.
The police tracked the couple to a farmhouse in a small village in France, where they found Einhorn. He had married the wealthy Swedish woman and the two had started a new life together in a place Time magazine likened to living in an “Impressionist painting.” Einhorn first told the police they had the wrong man, but it was to no avail. They took him into custody. Even so, it would be a while before the Unicorn was returned to America.
Einhorn’s luck continued. Coupled with his ability to use the legal process to his advantage, he managed to foil the efforts of the Americans who wanted to bring him back to America. Once again, Einhorn hired the best attorneys money could buy. When the U.S. sought to extradite Einhorn, his attorneys in France noted two irregularities in the proceedings, at least from the French perspective. International law does not favor verdicts resulting from trials conducted with a defendant in absentia, even when the defendant fled the country to avoid the trial. And Pennsylvania had the death penalty. Einhorn’s legal team told the authorities in France that Einhorn had been sentenced to death. This caused a stir in a country with no death penalty. Eventually, officials from the United States convinced the French authorities that Einhorn had been given a life sentence and could not, at this point, be sentenced to death. His attorneys then made a convoluted argument: Although he had been sentenced to life in prison at the first trial, what if prosecutors sought the death penalty in a retrial? The French government would not extradite Einhorn if he faced even the possibility of the death penalty in the United States. Einhorn would use these arguments to delay his extradition. After six months in a French prison while these arguments were being hashed out, Einhorn was set free.
Time magazine noted that Einhorn had managed to end up in a rather unusual circumstance. As long as he stayed in France, he would be a free man despite having been convicted of murder in the United States. In essence, he had been sentenced to “life in the south of France.”
The only solution was a diplomatic one: The State of Pennsylvania had to agree to let Einhorn have another trial. To do this, the state legislature had to pass an actual law for this purpose alone. And they had to agree to not seek the death penalty in the new trial. None of this had anything to do with the merits of the case. It was simply to appease the French government so they would release a convicted murderer who had sought refuge in their country.
The French government did not agree to ship Einhorn back with the new law’s passage, however. They simply agreed to hold an extradition hearing for him. Einhorn was arrested again, but amazingly, the French let him post bail. Oddly, Einhorn did not flee this time. On May 27, 1999, Einhorn lost his first extradition hearing. In 2000, he lost an appeal. The European Court on Human Rights also denied to hear his case in 2001. In July of that year, Einhorn was returned to the United States to face a retrial for the murder of Holly Maddux.
In 2002, Einhorn went on trial, but not before his attorneys trotted out every argument they could think of. They argued that the “Einhorn Law” that had been passed to grant the new trial was a conflict between branches of the government. What right did the legislature have to overrule a court’s verdict? The argument went up on appeal but the higher courts let the new law stand, clearing the way for the second trial. Then his attorneys tried arguing that Einhorn’s second trial violated his double jeopardy rights—that is, he would be tried twice for the same crime. It was a bizarre argument: Most defendants would make the argument about the second trial because they’d rather have the outcome of the first. Here, Einhorn had been found guilty of murder the first time and sentenced to life in prison. Einhorn’s arguments here failed as well. He would stand trial.
At trial, the prosecution argued that Einhorn was violent and had killed Maddux when she had tried leaving him. Einhorn argued that the CIA or other mysterious forces had framed him because he knew too much about top-secret mind-control experiments. Einhorn took the stand, an occasion the prosecutor appeared to enjoy. It allowed him to ask Einhorn to read passages from his diaries to the jury. “To kill what you love seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right.” The “Rita” in that particular passage was—according to the prosecution—Rita Resnick, a woman whom Einhorn had tried strangling shortly before Einhorn wrote the passage. Elsewhere in the same journals he had written, “Sadism—sounds nice—run it over your tongue—contemplate with joy the pains of others.” And, “To beat a woman—what joy.”
The jury did not buy the CIA frame-up defense. Apparently, the jury found it hard to believe that Einhorn spent almost two years in his apartment with the victim’s body in his closet and didn’t know it—even as other people in the building complained about something being amiss in the apartment. The jury found Einhorn guilty of first-degree murder. They deliberated for less than three hours. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The building where Einhorn killed Holly Maddux still stands on Race Street in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood known as Powelton Village. The building itself was first constructed in the early 1870s—dates given range from 1870 to 1875—and has undergone some modification in the ensuing years. It was first built as a two-story structure, and a third story was added somewhere along the way. It is in a style called Second Empire, which, although ancient-sounding today, was not all that old when the building first went up. A large two-story porch was also added to the building at one time but was later sealed in. There are eleven rental units in the building. Recent listings show them priced in the $1,500-a-month range.
For what it’s worth, Einhorn wrote a book titled Prelude to Intimacy. In its foreword he wrote, “I did NOT kill Holly Maddux.”
*Dave Lindorff, “For Ira Einhorn, a Fate Worse Than Death,” Salon, October 18, 2002.
*“Ronnie Polaneczky: The Ira Einhorn Interview,” (Philadelphia) Daily News, October 14, 2010.
*Steve Lopez, “The Search for the Unicorn,” Time, September 29, 1997.
The Murder of John Lennon
THE DAKOTA
1980
1 West 72nd Street
New York, New York 10023
On December 8, 1980, a mentally ill twenty-five-year-old man from Hawaii walked into a bookstore in New York City and bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He had read the book previously and was obsessed with it. He wrote This is my statement inside the front cover and then put Holden Caulfield below that, as if it were his signature. It wasn’t; his real name was Mark David Chapman. Chapman then walked over to a large co-op apartment building named the Dakota. The Dakota was one of the most expensive and well-known co-ops in New York City. It faced Central Park and units in it cost millions of dollars. It housed some of New York City’s richest and most famous residents.
Chapman lingered
near the front entrance of the Dakota. Along with the book The Catcher in the Rye, he also had a copy of the LP record Double Fantasy. John Lennon and Yoko Ono owned five apartments in the Dakota and lived there with their young son. Lennon actually walked past Chapman into the building at one point when Chapman did not see him. A little later, the housekeeper took Sean, Ono and Lennon’s son, for a walk and Chapman recognized the child as Lennon’s. He approached the two and tried shaking the young boy’s hand.
In the early evening, Lennon and Ono walked out the front door of the Dakota and as they walked toward a limo, Chapman approached Lennon and asked him if he would autograph the record he had brought. Lennon obliged. A photographer on the street caught the moment on film, Lennon signing the album cover with Chapman looking on. Lennon and Ono then left. Chapman stayed, lurking near the entrance of the building.
Almost six hours later, shortly before 11:00 P.M., Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota, and their limo let them out at the curb. The two walked toward the entrance. Chapman was still there. As Lennon walked through the door to the building, Chapman pulled out a .38-caliber handgun and fired it five times at Lennon, hitting him four times. Lennon stumbled into the building, entering the office of the doorman. Yoko screamed, “John’s been shot. John’s been shot.” The doorman triggered an alarm and watched in horror as Lennon fell onto the floor of the office, bleeding profusely, his life swiftly slipping away. The doorman called 911 and asked for help to be sent urgently. Yoko and the doorman watched Lennon die.