April 19–26, 2001

news

Holly’s Holly

West Philly activist Randy Dalton has a plan to make life uncomfortable for fugitive Ira Einhorn.

by Daryl Gale

A house divided: Bushes at the Community Education Center at 35th and Lancaster commemorate Ira Einhorn (left) and Holly Maddux (right).

Philly’s other famous murderer had better be looking over his shoulder in his adopted country of France. Because if Randy Dalton has his way, Ira Einhorn could soon be less of a folk hero and more of a pariah over there.

Dalton’s plan is to flood the French countryside with letters and petitions from Philadelphians demanding that Einhorn be sent back here to face justice, and a probable life sentence. His idea is to send the petitions over in a trunk, symbolizing the hideous fate that befell Einhorn’s ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux, whose desiccated body was found stuffed in a trunk in Einhorn’s closet.

Dalton, 52, has been living in Philadelphia for 30 years, and in the ’70s was a young political activist living in Powelton Village. As such, he became acquainted with both Einhorn and Maddux, and worked with them on various projects pertaining to social justice.

"When Holly left Ira, she sought refuge with a friend who lived across the street from me," Dalton says via e-mail, "After she disappeared, I ran into Ira at a friend’s house and asked him if he knew what had happened to Holly. He told me he had no idea."

Subsequent phone calls to Dalton led to a goose-pimpling revelation.

"I’m pretty sure I might have been in the apartment when Holly’s body was in the trunk in the closet," he says. "He never gave an indication. That’s why I feel it’s so important that we warn the people of France about what a cold, callous and dangerous man Einhorn is."

In 1978, a few weeks after her body was found and nearly a year and a half after her murder, a group of Holly Maddux’s friends collected money on her behalf and purchased a pair of male and female holly bushes to plant in her memory at the nearby Community Education Center at 35th and Lancaster. Chosen to plant the bushes at a small memorial service was Randy Dalton.

"While I was digging the hole for the male plant, I looked up for a moment and who was passing by in a car but Ira Einhorn," Dalton says. "He had been released on bail pending trial, but fled shortly after that. Since then, I have always identified the male plant with Ira and the female plant with Holly."

Now, almost 23 years later the plants have grown to more than 10 feet tall, according to Dalton, and have to be trimmed and pruned back constantly so that they don’t interfere with the entrance to the building. He was pruning the holly bushes not long after Einhorn was discovered in France when another idea hit him. He decided to put the male plant in prison. So he surrounded it with some borrowed pieces of iron fence and a padlocked chain, symbolizing the prison Einhorn should be in if justice were done.

But just locking up the male plant in a makeshift jail wasn’t enough. Seeing that the plants still encroached upon the building, one of the bushes had to go. Deciding which one was easy, but Dalton’s latest plan is to dig the male plant up and move it to a far corner of the property.

"He desecrates the spot," Dalton says, "and I really want to get the male plant away from Holly."

Turns out moving the male bush is a daunting task. And one that will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 for professional landscapers to remove and replant the giant bush to the new location.

"I talked to Holly’s sister, and she really liked the idea," he says, "so right now I’m looking into maybe selling T-shirts or buttons to raise the money for the landscaping."

Sure, he could just cut the thing down and be done with it, but since the whole thing was a symbolic gesture to start with, Dalton says simply hacking it down would send the wrong message to the people of France he’s trying to sway.

"We want to let the people of France know that we don’t intend to kill Ira, just like we won’t kill the plant. But we’ll isolate and imprison it, just as he should be isolated and imprisoned for life."