Today is Earth Day. While the events of the day are heralded to showcase the plight of pollution, or as we now call it, climate chaos, the way it all began sure is interesting..
Flashback to Ira Einhorn.. the “unicorn killer.”
A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s.. he was from Philadelphia had he was the ultimate hippie.
He called himself the co-founder of Earth Day. Organizers don’t necessarily like that idea. He was a speaker at the first Earth Day, and he said he helped create the movement. But others like Philly Mag say they aren’t buying it.
Why run from Einhorn?
When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up. 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. 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.
Eighteen months later, investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors 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.
Just one year ago, the unicorn killer died in prison.
