eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
During the cultural shockwaves of the 1960s and ’70s, Ira Einhorn—nicknamed the “Unicorn”—was the leading radical voice for the antiwar movement at the University of Pennsylvania. At his side were such noted activists as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. A brilliantly articulate advocate for peace in a turbulent era, he rallied followers toward the growing antiestablishment causes of free love, drugs, and radical ecological reform.
In 1979, when the mummified remains of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, a Bryn Mawr flower child from Tyler, Texas, were found in a trunk in his apartment, Einhorn claimed a CIA frame-up. Incredibly, the network of influential friends, socialites, and powerful politicians he’d charmed and manipulated over the years supported him. Represented by renowned district attorney and future senator Arlen Specter, Einhorn was released on bail. But before trial, he fled the country to an idyllic town in the French wine region and disappeared. It would take more than twenty years—and two trials—to finally bring Einhorn to justice.
Based on more than two years of research and 250 interviews, as well as the chilling private journals of Einhorn and Maddux, prize-winning journalist Steven Levy paints an astonishing and complicated portrait of a man motivated by both genius and rage. The basis for 1998 NBC television miniseries The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, The Unicorn’s Secret is a “spellbinding sociological/true crime study,” revealing the dark and tragic dimensions of a man who defined an era, only to shatter its ideals (Publishers Weekly).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504042130 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 550,019 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Unicorn's Secret
Murder in the Age of Aquarius
By Steven Levy
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1988 Steven LevyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4213-0
CHAPTER 1
A CONDITION OF MYSTERY
Less than three weeks before he would be sitting in a courtroom seeking bail as a defendant on a murder charge, the man who called himself the Unicorn flew home to Philadelphia. It was March 15, 1979, the cusp of a new era, and the Unicorn was ready for it. He had spent years embracing the future. A survivor from the sixties, he was a man who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the top Yippies when the antiwar protesters levitated the Pentagon in 1967, but only two days earlier he had been rubbing elbows with Prince Chahram Pahlavi-Nia, nephew of the Shah of Iran. They had driven back to London together after the Unicorn addressed an intimate gathering sponsored by the prince. The conference, attended by an elite corps of heavy thinkers, was touted "a focal point where environmental, ecological, and spiritual concerns meet internationally." The Unicorn's turf.
A month before that, he was in Belgrade, meeting with government officials to help promote relations between America and Yugoslavia, and arranging a centenary celebration for Nikola Tesla, a legendary Yugoslavian inventor.
And just months before that, the Unicorn was at Harvard, lodged in the Establishment's belly as a fellow in the Kennedy School of Government.
The whole thing verged on a goof, a cosmic giggle, a sudden hit of irony unleashed by cannabis truth serum. Yet Ira Einhorn, who had adopted the "Unicorn" nickname in the sixties, was utterly serious. He had gone from a media guru who promoted LSD and organized Be-Ins, to an Establishment-approved self-described "planetary enzyme," a New Age pioneer who circulated vital information through the bloodstream of the body politic. Through his networking, consulting, lecturing, and writing, Ira Einhorn was doing his best to inject the values of the sixties into the global mainstream, and amazingly, he was making some headway. Without making compromises in his outlook or life-style, Ira Einhorn and his pro-planetary vision had attracted the attention of some very powerful people — leading-edge scientists, influential politicians; and captains of industry.
Not bad for a bearded-and-ponytailed former hippie still casual enough to greet callers to his home buck naked. He had plenty to congratulate himself on as he rode home on the TWA Heathrow-Philadelphia flight. He could ponder his burgeoning career or his ballooning list of powerful contacts. Or the future. Instead, he watched the in-flight film, Comes a Horseman, and, being an amateur movie critic, considered it "dreadful."
Having drawn his schedule with typical optimism, Ira Einhorn had a speaking engagement the very night he arrived home from England. The flight arrived late, but there was enough time for him to clear customs and return to his West Philadelphia apartment before he had to go crosstown to speak.
Einhorn was a natural choice to address the London Group. The radical psychiatrist who organized the semiregular discussion sessions, Ross Speck, tried to challenge the imagination of the mental health professionals who comprised the group. In the first few sessions, the London Group had entertained healers, drug cultists, and a doctor who treated cancer victims by attempting "retribalization" based on anthropological work with African tribes — the therapy included chanting and all the primitive trimmings. It was fitting to present Ira Einhorn to the fifteen or so members who would gather in the living room of the Specks' South Philadelphia town-house during the middle of March in 1979.
The invitation Speck had sent out read,
The London Association
Presents
Ira Einhorn
He is a poet, a philosopher,
a physicist.
Topic: Politics and Dada
Einhorn appeared at the townhouse just a few blocks south of the historic district in time for the scheduled 7:30 meeting. The four-story structure was on a tiny cobblestone street in a recently rejuvenated area.
Twelve years after the publicly declared "Death of the Hippie," Ira Einhorn looked more like a sixties' creature than ever. One would not call it a defiant pose, because he seemed so comfortable with it. The long brown-to-gray hair knotted in a ponytail, the thick, graying Santa Claus beard, the loose-fitting dashiki, and the somewhat ratty corduroy pants ... these were not social gambits as much as physical facts. Comment on those appurtenances, at least direct comment, would be as unlikely as someone making a face-to-face remark on a deformed physical feature.
Of course, those living in Philadelphia for any period of time would not need to question the striking look of this man only two months from his thirty-ninth birthday. The answer to the puzzle was tautological. Ira looked that way because he was Ira. And everybody, it seemed, knew Ira. In a city still formal enough to call its major figures, even in casual conversation, by their surnames (the charismatic mayor would be forever "Rizzo" but never simply "Frank"), Ira Einhorn was someone known in circles journalistic, cultural, even legal and financial, by first name alone. Even those of ephemeral acquaintance with him long recall his greeting: a buoyant, "Hi, I'm Ira!" and a sudden launch into a mind-blowing topic that ordinarily would be dismissed as palaver, but somehow, from the mouth of this person of such confidence, was thrillingly plausible.
This was a process begun in the days of the counterculture, when the lifestyle of Ira Einhorn made news. His fame spread by television interviews, radio talk shows, poetry in underground newspapers, sponsorship of Be-Ins, and broad flaunting of his friendships with the national oligarchy of anti-Establishment figures. In the alternative United States, there was Rubin, Hoffman, Leary, Ginsberg. In alternative Philadelphia, only Ira.
During the past few years Einhorn had faded somewhat from the public eye. But the London Group soon learned of what Ira Einhorn had been up to in the seventies. Sprawled on the couch of the Specks' living room, a cozy space decorated with primitive artifacts collected by anthropologist Joan Speck, Einhorn related his recent adventures to the receptive after-dinner aggregation. He spoke in a soft voice, often punctuating his speech with the characteristic Einhorn laugh — a wild, nervous giggle, almost as high-pitched as a gleeful roar bleated out with aid of helium. He said that for years he had been primarily interested in the relation of nonphysical entities to the physical world. This led him to revelations, he explained, that had startling consequences for our civilization.
A prime example was Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic. Einhorn told the London Group that he had spent years working to inform the world of the significance of Geller's powers of metal bending, remote viewing, and divination. These powers indicated that our current scientific "paradigms" were inadequate. Likewise, the well-known controversy over UFOs was another indicator of how our long-held perceptions of reality were crumbling. Evidence existed that Western intelligence agencies were actively suppressing information about UFOs — not because of any grand plan but due to their inability to cope with such information. The Russians, on the other hand, were conducting some troubling studies in the paranormal, particularly using the technological ideas of Tesla, the genius who devised alternating current. There were experiments in controlling the weather, in sending deadly beams across oceans to affect behavior.
The Unicorn's news was strange indeed. And he knew it. Yes these things are incredible, he told the London Group, yet the world must come to grips with them soon. Einhorn's implications, presented in his upbeat manner but not without the dramatic emphasis required by their dire content, were apocalyptic.
"Anyone who is in a government structure knows their days are numbered," the Unicorn noted matter-of-factly. "Most people in power are waking up not knowing if they're going to wake up [tomorrow] in the same bed. It's as true in the United States as it is anyplace else."
The London Group learned of the conference Einhorn had just attended, and his unofficial diplomatic mission to Belgrade just weeks earlier. The members heard of his tenure at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. And Einhorn told them how he had been sending carefully selected missives from reality's fringes to his personal network of significant figures in science, philanthropy, business, and parapsychology. The network was financed by the world's largest corporation: the telephone company.
The men and women in the London Group seemed disoriented by these facts. Just who was this person? His life seemed more far-out than his rap. He obviously could draw on an encyclopedic storehouse of cultural knowledge. Though not a degree-holding physicist, he could rattle off any number of esoteric scientific formulas, applying them with what would certainly be metaphoric brilliance, if anyone knew what he was talking about. He seemed plugged into the workings of global strategy, expounding on items as obscure as Chinese movements into Vietnam. On any subject of consequence he not only had personal command but apparent access to key figures. When talking about the niceties of arms control, for instance, he casually referred to a recent conversation he had with Paul Warnke, the country's chief negotiator.
Uri Geller, the shah, the family who owned Seagram liquors, the vice-president of AT&T, top NASA officials, Timothy Leary, Krishnamurti, the Trilateral Commission — a dazzling display of names and institutions. The namedropping built to a crescendo when Ira Einhorn mentioned that "I was very surprised recently when I was approached by the Rockefellers and offered whatever amount of money I wanted to run for public office." When a woman pointedly asked just why the Rockefellers would ask this guru-with-portfolio to do a thing like that, Ira was undaunted.
"They need a front," he said. "Very badly. They're constantly hunting for people." Their efforts previously had been confined to more conventional potential candidates, he claimed. "It's not succeeding!" he said. "That's why they're looking other places. That's why they would come to some crazy like myself." A Rockefeller aide had approached Einhorn at a party and, said Ira, "gave me this incredible harangue how I had to go eat rubber chicken all over the country and really become a politician and get out front." Einhorn declined gracefully. "I had already been through that process, and I felt I had a lot more power doing what I was doing."
The London Group continued to press for clarification. The questions posed by the liberal social scientists were tentative — no one seemed really unwilling to let go of the titillating possibility that this fellow was for real. The prospect stirred the imagination — a figure born of the sixties, still in period garb, insinuating himself as sort of a free-floating Rasputin to power brokers and opinion makers, lobbying for humane treatment of human beings. Exposing what he called a "psychic Watergate" of mind weaponry in order to make real the clichéd cry of "Give Peace a Chance." But the group could not easily accept its outlandish lecturer, and the polite inquiries between the clinking of cups, saucers, and dessert spoons had a skeptical undercurrent. Ira — explain, please, your identity!
"I'm at the point now where the question of identity is mythic," Ira Einhorn proclaimed. "It doesn't matter. It disappears. I cannot give it any form except through the way I live."
The London Group did not let him escape just yet. They asked about the meaning of his commitment.
"I can't even use those words anymore," said Einhorn sadly, as if assuming his listeners would commiserate at the failure of language. "It's just action. I don't have very good words. Because I've gotten to the point where words do not really describe what I'm experiencing. I stay away from most religious words now. I don't use the word love very often. I'm in a condition of mystery most of the time."
And then he began talking about cattle mutilations.
It was, all in all, a boffo performance. Though he had undergone an exhausting round of motion and activity in the past few weeks — "How difficult it is to travel when you're going through this explosion of consciousness!" he exclaimed at one point — his energy seemed boundless. To promote the cause of peace and nonviolence, he could go on forever. When Ross Speck suggested, several hours into the meeting, that it was a natural time to quit, and perhaps those who wanted to stay a little longer might talk more to Ira, if Ira were not too tired, the words hardly escaped his mouth when Einhorn burst out, "I'm not tired at all! No, no problem!" So the session continued.
Einhorn remained in Ross Speck's house until the last guest left, and it was just Ira, Ross, his wife, Joan, and their twenty-three-year-old daughter, Diane, who had listened with wonder to the speaker's exhortations. And then, to Ross Speck's amazement, Ira Einhorn made a pass at his daughter. Not blatant, but certainly not subtle, sitting next to her, his arm up over the back of the couch, and using the momentum of his bravura performance to charge into an unmistakable flirtation. Nothing came of it, but as Speck later said, "it was kind of inappropriate for him to be putting the make on my daughter in my own house."
The London Group's failure to pin down Ira Einhorn on the particulars of his existence was only to be expected. Einhorn's life defied labels, and he was perfectly accustomed to the bogglement of listeners when it dawned on them that the person they were speaking to had no antecedent in their experience. For years, Einhorn had been shaping his work to fit not only his ideals and visions but his own uncompromising life-style. In doing this, he confronted the frustrations of an upstream swimmer with a robust sense of humor. Now that he was finally succeeding at his lifelong career, was it any wonder that this career was so complex that even Einhorn was unable to easily enlighten the puzzled minions who could not grasp exactly what it was that he did?
Why couldn't they accept the simple explanation? That Ira Einhorn had made a career of being Ira Einhorn.
Just what that entailed can best be understood by noting his routines and activities. In 1979, his base of operations, as it had been for seven years, was a small apartment on 3411 Race Street in the Powelton Village section of Philadelphia. It rented for $135 a month. It was not far from the University of Pennsylvania, and recent expansion of Drexel University had almost engulfed the block on which the white stone, three-story apartment house stood. Einhorn's apartment was on the second floor of the building, called Lerner Court. A flight of stairs headed toward the rear of the building, going north, toward his door. Visitors to the apartment would find a narrow hallway with a small kitchen on the left. In addition to the expected kitchen paraphernalia, there were rows of books, and a squat computer terminal, quite unknown as a home appliance in 1979. Proceeding north, one passed a bathroom with a prominent claw-foot tub. Over the toilet was an enlarged photograph of an enchanting little blond girl: a baby picture of Einhorn's former girlfriend, Holly Maddux, who had curiously dropped out of sight in the early fall of 1977.
Still walking north, one entered the main room of the apartment, a cozy twelve-by-twelve or so square that Einhorn used as both living room and bedroom. The bed was a mattress on the floor. There was a small desk covered with letters and papers. The room was furnished with plants — most of them remnants of the days when Holly had tended them — and especially books. Hundreds of books, filling the cinder-block shelves on all the walls, and placed in towering stacks at various points in the room. Otherwise, the furnishings were minimal. There was no television, not even a radio. The room had a spartan, almost oriental, feel.
On the north wall a long maroon blanket was hung over a French door that led to a screened-in, unheated porch.
From the main room, Ira Einhorn kept his watch on the planet and stage-managed his efforts to save it. His normal schedule was to wake around nine, take a bath, and hit the telephone. During the mornings he would talk to business contacts, scientists, editors, anyone who ventured into his orbit and seemed susceptible to the latest on what Einhorn considered the transformation to a New Age. Between calls, he might work on correspondence or do some reading; Ira Einhorn devoured books more efficiently than a shredding machine. Lunch would invariably be on the Penn campus at La Terrasse, an airy French restaurant that Einhorn had helped to popularize. During the course of the midday meal, Ira would mesmerize the corporate executive, journalist, or institutional leader who was footing the tab. Then perhaps a walk on the campus, or a visit to a bookstore, or a subway to cover the twenty-block distance to Center City Philadelphia, where he might have a meeting or two. Back to 3411 for more calls and correspondence. Time spent deciding which papers should be circulated on his network, and to which network members they should be addressed. Then dinner, movie, and home. Up until late — maybe as late as dawn — reading. Einhorn required only a few hours' sleep.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy. Copyright © 1988 Steven Levy. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Prologue: Of Excellent Reputation
- 1 A Condition of Mystery
- 2 The Making of the Guru
- 3 Doodlebug
- 4 The Mayor of Powelton
- 5 Fallen Angel
- 6 Turning the Corner
- 7 Where Fear Comes From
- 8 A Prisoner on the Planet of Patience
- 9 Private Investigators
- 10 “I Didn’t Kill Her”
- 11 The Dark Side
- 12 The Unicorn’s Secret
- 13 The Flight of the Unicorn
- Epilogue
- A Note on Sources
- Image Gallery
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
