It’s Earth Day again, so for the 49th time, mankind must suffer through another harangue about impending doom. But the one thing you won’t hear anywhere in that harangue is the bloody history of Earth Day’s illustrious co-founder, Ira Einhorn.
An inconvenient truth about him, as The Daily Caller quipped in borrowing Al Gore’s movie title, is this: He murdered his girlfriend in September 1977, composted her in a closet, fled to Europe, and hid for nearly two decades until the long arm of the law caught him.
Leftist Nutter Becomes Killer
Einhorn, who dubbed himself Unicorn, was “a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie,” as NBC described the murderer in 2011.
The hirsute “charismatic spokesman” for the radical Left, however, “had a secret dark side,” which girlfriend Holly Maddux didn’t find out about until it was too late.
When Maddux broke up with Einhorn and split for New York, he told her to fetch her belongings from his apartment or he’d toss them in the street. “And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again,” NBC reported. “When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.”
The Unicorn lied.
Cops went back to his apartment 18 months later, NBC reported, after a neighbor “complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.”
Cops arrested Einhorn, but he posted bail and fled the country in 1981. His attorney was future Senator Arlen Specter, who “assembled a group of his client’s supporters to serve as character witnesses, which helped Einhorn get released on bail,” OZY reported.
Lawmen nailed him in 1997, and while waging a four-year battle against extradition, the Associated Press reported, “Einhorn thumbed his nose at American authorities by appearing on television shows to discuss his plight and sipping wine while posing naked for photographers in his garden.”
Extradicted in 2001, Einhorn actually claimed the CIA murdered Maddux and framed Einhorn, NBC reported, because he was the real-life version of the man who knew too much. Einhorn expected jurors to believe the CIA whacked Maddux because Einhorn might spill the beans about the agency’s research into the paranormal.
Einhorn, who viewed himself as a “planetary enzyme,” and “catalyst for change,” told jurors about his “Virgo Moon,” AP reported.
The judge called him “an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced.”
In 2002, a judge sentenced Einhorn to life in prison.
Envirohoax
The judge was on to something, and not just about Einhorn. The movement he helped found also preys upon the “uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced.” One might also say the credulous.
The American Enterprise Institute, using a no-longer-available article from Reason magazine, compiled a list of the myriad failed, but widely accepted, outlandish claims in 1970 from the movement’s leaders and its scientists, who retailed them as what they call “settled science,” or as Gore might say, “inconvenient truth:”
• The New York Times, after Earth Day 1: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• Population control fanatic Paul Erlich: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes: “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Life magazine: “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…. By 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
• Ecologist Kenneth Watt: “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Image: photos of Ira Einhorn from 1979 and 2001
