Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (46 page)

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from nongovernmental organizations; the rising prominence of the

National Association of Medical Examiners shows how concerned

professionals can take the lead in education and training even when

government lags behind.

Q

Close the ‘‘missing persons’’ loophole
.

Eraser killers hope that by making their wife or partner appear to

have simply gone missing, she will be forever lost in a vast shadow land

of hundreds of thousands of seemingly inexplicable and unsolvable

cases.

The truth is that missing adults can be divided into two groups:

those whose past history, medical or mental condition, and demon-strated lifestyle make it much more likely that they have only

temporarily ‘‘gone missing’’; and those adults who have none of

the conditions or risk factors that might explain a voluntary dis-appearance, no previous habit of running away or dropping out of

sight, and who are highly committed, involved, and responsible in

their current lives.

But law enforcement agencies have no national standards to follow,

no established procedures that are developed and implemented

across the country to quickly and efficiently distinguish those who

are voluntarily missing and will soon return home from those who are

involuntarily missing, endangered, or very likely already the victim

of a homicide. In far too many police departments, missing persons

cases—especially those of adults—represent a low priority in terms

of the expenditure of manpower and resources.

Many eraser killings simply get shuffled in among the large stack

of nondeadly missing persons reports, never advancing to the level

of a homicide inquiry or doing so only after the killer has had time to

get rid of any evidence linking him to his victim’s murder. Thomas

DiBiase, former assistant U.S. attorney, is blunt about the need to

change police procedures and standards so that camouflaged cases

of intimate partner homicide are not simply stuck in a police file

waiting for evidence to walk in the door or for the killer to confess.

He believes these hidden homicides are so prevalent that missing

persons cases need to be triaged to identify those that meet the typical

profile of a suspected eraser killing. Those that do should be assigned

as quickly as possible to a homicide detective for investigation.

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Basing his judgment on almost a decade of prosecuting homicides

in one of America’s homicide hotspots— our nation’s capital—as

well as on the unique database he has assembled of virtually every

homicide ever brought to trial in the United States in which no

body of the victim had been recovered, DiBiase understands how

an intimate partner killing often lurks behind the misleading phrase

‘‘missing woman.’’

‘‘Most of the cases I have looked at across decades, where there

was no body, it was the boyfriend or husband or ex-husband who

killed the woman and pretended that she was missing,’’ he says.

‘‘Clearly, there is a pattern here, and the police have to be able to

identify the pattern. When there is a woman who has a history of

being responsible, a history of being in touch and no history of dis-appearing or taking sudden trips, homicide detectives should ideally

be involved in a matter of days. We should be reacting even faster

if the woman is a mother and known to be responsible. That just

cannot be called a missing persons case.’’

Appealing to commonsense notions of human behavior, DiBiase

asks, ‘‘What mother, unless she is out of town on business or some

other trip, does
not
have contact with her children no matter what

is happening? After two or three days of not hearing from her, I

would argue that there is something very wrong and we need to

find out what it is. And it isn’t just the women who are mothers.

If these women have been known to be responsible, have a history

of keeping in contact with people—whether it’s Kristin Smart or

Chandra Levy—they don’t just run away or disappear and cut off

contact with the outside world. The pattern here is that when these

women are reported missing, they’re not just missing; they’re dead.’’

It took several years of highly publicized and emotionally wrench-ing news stories about ‘‘missing’’ children— especially the stranger-abduction cases that first gained national attention with Adam Walsh

and continuing through Polly Klaas—to bring about critical changes

in law enforcement strategy based on the cruel fact that if a young

child is abducted by a stranger, the chances of finding her or him

alive drop dramatically after the first six to twelve hours.

Before the efforts of Marc Klaas and other family members who

became advocates for victimized children, and before the media began

doing serious, in-depth reporting of the closely linked problem of

predatory pedophiles who are repeat offenders, very few people knew

that the abduction of young children was a widespread problem

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that had to be named, defined, and challenged. Those efforts have

been extraordinarily successful in many ways. Guidelines have been

published for investigating reports of missing children. Forty-eight

states have adopted a fairly standard ‘‘best practices’’ set of procedures

to issue Amber alerts. Registries for both missing children and sexual

offenders have been established. And many states have substantially

increased criminal penalties for violent child predators.

Women who have been murdered by their own husband or

boyfriend in the supposed safety of their own home, then dumped

into the ocean or simply into the trash, have not yet sparked calls for

a fresh look at laws relating to violence against women. A significant

part of the problem has been the irresponsible and strangely smug

backlash by media opinion leaders—the view that missing women

are not a legitimate topic of news and investigation.

Media treatment of missing and murdered little girls has for-tunately escaped the misplaced scorn and vitriol poured on those

in cable news and other media who have believed that they might

actually be helping to catch a killer or find a young woman, such as

Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking, or LaToyia Figueroa. Media members

who took these cases seriously—including Nancy Grace, Greta van

Susteren, Catherine Crier, and Dan Abrams—deserve our collective

thanks.

Just as recognition of the apparently random, unconnected, and

sporadic nature of child abductions by strangers eventually reached a

critical mass and their perpetrators acquired a name—violent sexual

predators— I hope that the links between apparently unconnected

cases of vanishing women will be appreciated and taken seriously by

the public, the media, and law enforcement as we learn more about

eraser killers.

Q

Start the investigation at ground zero
.

The most difficult challenge facing police if they do mount a

full-scale investigation of a suspicious missing persons case is how to

search what is always the most likely scene of the actual crime—the

victim’s own home.

One of the reasons that eraser killers seem to have such success

in committing perfect or nearly perfect murders has to do with the

carefully constructed legal safeguards that prevent rapid response by

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the police to situations that are not clearly identifiable as murders

or even crime scenes. When an eraser killer physically eliminates

his victim and stages a missing person scenario—even when he

does so very crudely by offering no excuses or minimal explanations

regarding her disappearance to friends and relatives—it may take

many weeks, months, or even years for law enforcement to assemble

enough evidence to reach the all-important ‘‘probable cause’’ hurdle

needed to get a search warrant.

For eighteen months, Ira Einhorn was able to prevent authorities

from searching the Philadelphia apartment he shared with his ‘‘miss-ing’’ girlfriend, claiming he had no idea where thirty-year-old Holly

Maddux had gone, while all that time he was hiding her corpse right

on the premises, under lock and key.

After a long and tempestuous relationship, Holly had finally

decided to break the bond with Ira and move out permanently into

an apartment she planned to sublet from another young woman who

was leaving on a long trip. Einhorn claimed he had been encouraging

her to leave because of her inability to accept his involvement with

other women. But he wasn’t about to let her go like that.

Einhorn was narcissistic to the point of megalomania. He despised

the idea of monogamy, and felt entitled to quench his unceasing

sexual appetite with an endless series of willing groupies. He was

also frighteningly Machiavellian and probably quite sociopathic. He

choked a previous girlfriend into unconsciousness and hit another

one over the head with a bottle. His copious journals later revealed

a long-festering contempt for women in general. ‘‘Violence always

marks the end of a relationship,’’ he wrote in one passage. He also

once declared that ‘‘[w]omen don’t leave me; I leave them’’—a

veritable eraser killer mantra.

He once compared himself in a speech to Charles Manson, saying

‘‘Psychopaths like myself emerge when societies are about to change.’’

He helped found Earth Day but he couldn’t abide the idea of creating

and nurturing a life, forcing Holly to have an abortion when she got

pregnant by him, as he had forced several other paramours before

her to do the same.

Although she had tried to leave Einhorn several times in the

past, Holly was finally both determined and able to make the break.

Although she was beautiful and had shown her own brilliance through

her school and university work, her self-esteem had taken a beating

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from her years with Ira. In the process of extricating herself from

under Einhorn’s shadow— her friends would say from under his

thumb— she had fallen in love with a man she had met on a trip to

Fire Island in New York. Handsome, suave, gentle, and concerned

for Holly’s welfare, he was everything that Einhorn was not.

She planned to make the move after spending a few weeks in

New York with her new love, sailing on his yacht. But a call from

Einhorn made her return hastily. He lured her back to the apartment

by threatening to throw all her belongings out on the street.

Although people who knew the troubled nature of the relationship

were a little concerned about Holly’s making one more attempt to

calm Ira down, their closest friends were pleasantly surprised to see

them arrive as a couple and enjoy and amicable dinner together on

the evening of September 11, 1977. To their dinner companions,

Ira seemed positively placid following several days of high agitation

about Holly’s plans to leave him and about her new love, and Holly

appeared equally at ease. That was the last time anyone besides Ira

Einhorn ever saw Holly Maddux alive. After that seemingly civilized

dinner, she vanished from the face of the earth.

Ira claimed that while he was taking a bath the following day, Holly

said she was going to the store and never returned. He said he became

worried and began calling around trying to find her, but had no luck.

Then two days later, he claimed, she called and told him that she was

fine but that she didn’t want to see him anymore and asked him not

to try to find her. The local Philadelphia police were only contacted

when friends of Holly’s family back in her hometown of Tyler, Texas,

began making long-distance calls and inquiries, including calls to

old friends of Holly’s from her college days. One of those friends

happened to work in federal law enforcement and took it on himself

to file a missing persons report with the local police. What the

police then did to investigate that report was sadly typical of how

investigations into adult missing persons cases are handled. In their

eyes, she was a ‘‘flower child’’ who happened to live in a high crime

district where the priorities are homicides and other violent felonies.

The police made some phone calls, checked her untouched bank

account, and talked to Einhorn. The hippie chick had just picked up

and left him, was the story he gave the police. He had absolutely no

idea where she’d gone; she had just moved on.

Actually, that cursory investigation was probably more atten-tion than most young adult missing persons cases receive. Finding no

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obvious signs of a crime— other than the fact that a young woman dis-appeared from the face of the earth— the case was simply filed away.

It was only through the efforts of her parents that any ongoing

search was made to find Holly Maddux. As weeks went by and

various family birthdays passed without any word from Holly, their

worry grew. It was completely out of character for their daughter to

suddenly drop all communication—not just with her parents and

her sisters but with all her friends, her associates from previous jobs,

everyone in the world. They knew something had happened to her,

but in order to find out what, they had to hire their own detectives,

starting with a street-smart retired FBI agent named J. R. Pearce, who

had run the regional FBI office in Texas, but who had set up shop as a

private investigator, as many agents do when they hit the mandatory

retirement age of fifty-five. Pearce eventually added another retired

FBI agent based in Philadelphia.

It was the work of these two former G-men working as private

investigators that eventually put the case together. No one in the

Philadelphia police force had mustered the resources or the will to

push hard on that ephemeral category, the ‘‘just another missing

person’’ case.

It took over a year of work— interviewing; tracking down poten-tial witnesses, friends of Holly’s, friends of Ira’s; gathering reams of

information—to finally create the case file that J. R. Pearce turned

over to the Philadelphia homicide squad in early 1979. From that

point, another half year passed while homicide detectives reinter-viewed the witnesses and verified all the information the former FBI

agents had uncovered and gathered more evidence on their own.

All of this work was not necessarily intended to effect an arrest of

Ira Einhorn but simply to establish enough ‘‘probable cause’’ to get

a search warrant to look around the missing woman’s own home. In

the eighteen months since her disappearance Ira had refused to allow

police even a ten-minute ‘‘walk-through’’ of the apartment to look

for clues as to where she might be.

As it turned out, Holly Maddux never left home. After crushing

her skull with some blunt object that caused her to collapse to the

floor with a thud so loud it was heard by a downstairs neighbor,

Ira packed his still-breathing girlfriend into a steamer trunk he had

recently purchased. He tried to talk several people into helping him

get rid of the trunk, claiming it contained top-secret Russian papers

the KGB was after, but could find no one to help him. So he kept it

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