As Thousands of Americans Celebrate Earth Day Today – Never Forget that the Founder Murdered His Girlfriend, Stuffed Her in a Trunk, and Composted Her Body

Earth Day 2025 will be celebrated this weekend in cities across the US.

Earth Day founder Ira Einhorn died in prison in 2020.

Einhorn was convicted of murder after killing his girlfriend and composting her body.

Via Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage News in 2020.

Sad news for environmentalists.

A former hippie guru who lived the high life in Europe for years after murdering his ex-girlfriend in Philadelphia in the 1970s has died in prison.

Ira Einhorn, 79, died early Friday in a state prison in western Pennsylvania of natural causes, according to Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. The death at SCI-Laurel Highlands was not related to the COVID-19 virus, she said.

Ira had claimed that he founded Earth Day and certainly was popular with enviros. He lived the lifestyle by composting the woman he murdered.

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. 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.

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. 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.

Einhorn was caught red-handed, but was protected by his lefty comrades.

Via TIME Magazine from 1999.
(Warning on content)

A Drexel student who lived in the apartment below Einhorn’s recalled a “blood-curdling scream” and heavy banging one night in the fall of 1977. In a neighborhood of frat houses and party hounds, the student downstairs thought nothing of it. But the odor that followed within weeks was impossible to ignore, as was the putrid, dark-brown liquid that oozed down through the ceiling from Einhorn’s apartment. The tenant and his roommate tried unsuccessfully to clean it away, then called the landlord, who called plumbers. Einhorn stubbornly refused to let the workers into a padlocked closet just off his bedroom.

The private detectives turned it all over to police, and on March 28, 1979, at 9 a.m., homicide detective Chitwood knocked on Einhorn’s door. Once inside, he headed straight for the locked closet. He pried it open with a crowbar and immediately smelled a “faint decaying smell, like a dead animal.” Next he sprang the lock on the steamer trunk. The newspapers inside were dated August and September 1977. Under them was Styrofoam packing material. Chitwood scooped through it until he came to something he couldn’t identify at first, and then it was clear. A hand. A human hand. He scooped some more, and as he did, Holly Maddux slowly emerged. Einhorn stood by, impassive.

Then began the parade. One after another at Einhorn’s bail hearing, his supporters took the stand in his defense. A minister, a corporate lawyer, a playwright, an economist, a telephone-company executive. They couldn’t imagine Einhorn’s harming any living thing. Release of murder defendants pending trial was unheard of, but Einhorn’s attorney was soon-to-be U.S. senator Arlen Specter, and bail was set at a staggeringly low $40,000 — only $4,000 of it needed to walk free. It was paid by Barbara Bronfman, a Montreal socialite who had married into the Seagram distillery family and met Einhorn through a common interest in the paranormal. It was Einhorn’s new rage, and his orbit of friends had expanded to include Uri Geller, the spoon-bending Israeli illusionist.

What a godless group.

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