Exit the Unicorn

As he walked out of the courtroom after the jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree, Ira Einhorn puckered his lips and seemed to whistle to nobody as it finally dawned on him that he would be trading in his crisp navy suit and future hopes for an orange jumper and life in a cage.

His victim's family and Joel Rosen, the man who prosecuted him, were, on the other hand, all smiles. After 25 years, a 200-pound, very smelly gorilla had been lifted off their backs.

The mood in Courtroom 305 of the Criminal Justice Center was festive Thursday morning in the hours prior to the six-man, six-woman jury announcing it had reached a verdict.

Buffy Hall, a bitingly funny, tart-tongued nurse from Texas, and one of Holly Maddux's four younger siblings, was her usual, acerbic self, swapping birthing stories with reporters and explaining how her sister's killer "looked like hammered shit" -- one of her father's favored expressions -- after three weeks of trial.

As she spoke, she clutched a little green alien push-puppet, the kind where you push the bottom and strings move its head and limbs.

The toy was a family totem, a humorous deflection of the conspiracy crapola that Einhorn was spewing about how Holly Maddux was killed by the CIA and then stuffed in a trunk in Einhorn's closet to derail Einhorn's oh-so-important investigation into the CIA's mind-control weaponry program.

Meg Wakeman, the sister with the long red hair, was in pretty good spirits as well, almost giddy that this ordeal was nearing an end. Hugging friends, relatives and supporters, Wakeman and Mary Maddux -- the youngest of the siblings, who later stated that she can't "remember life without a murdered sister" -- gathered some dollars to pay Susan Schary, the courtroom sketch artist, for a portrait of Rosen cross-examining the little alien. The portrait, said Wakeman, was a heart-felt thank-you to Rosen and a symbol of the Einhorn defense's inability to bring up as much mumbo jumbo as Einhorn would have liked.

Rich DiBenedetto and Steve Levy were in the courtroom too, a sign that this was a real be-in, a last blast of the past from an era that would finally end with an Einhorn conviction. Next to the Maddux family, Rosen and Einhorn, DiBenedetto -- the former D.A. investigator whose dogged work tracking Einhorn led to the "planetary enzyme's" eventual capture -- and Levy -- whose 1988 book, The Unicorn's Secret, was credited with keeping interest in the Einhorn case alive over the years -- had the most on the line this morning.

"After all these years, it finally comes down to this," Levy said, the excitement and tension evident in his eyes.

For reporters, there was a sense of history as well, evidenced in the swell of interest in the little white press badges, bearing the inscription "Commonwealth v. Einhorn" that were being distributed as souvenirs by court personnel.

"Now, I don't want to see any of these wind up on eBay," joked Judge William Mazzola.

In a darkly humorous turn of events, whether by sheer coincidence or by design, the Daily News assigned reporter Erin Einhorn to help cover the last day of defendant Ira Einhorn's trial.

Though there is no relation, reporter Einhorn began jokingly pestering fellow scribes for their press passes.

"Who better than me to have one of these?" reporter Einhorn asked, offering cash money to anyone willing to give up a badge.

As the moments melted by, three of the reporters who'd covered every second of this trial -- Theresa Conroy of the Daily News, Mike Dunn from KYW radio and Joann Loviglio of the AP -- took the seats they'd occupied every day: second row, lefthand side, in that order.

"I don't know why, but I feel superstitious about sitting where we've always sat," said Dunn.

Shortly after 10:30, a courtroom employee announced that the jury had reached a verdict.

In an instant, reporters ran out of the room, dashing for pay phones because court rules require cell phones to be turned in downstairs.

"I never thought I would be in a '40s movie," Mazzola said as he watched the newsies flee his courtroom.

It was Mazzola, the deft, thorough and proficient jurist, who kept order in the court and the focus not on hocus-pocus, but on what happened to Helen "Holly" Maddux, who 25 years earlier had been severely bludgeoned by Ira Einhorn, who stuffed her battered and bloody corpse into a steamer trunk.

The gravity of the moment was hammered home by the arrival of District Attorney Lynne Abraham, who, for the first time ever, came to witness a verdict in a case she neither tried nor presided over.

One by one, in the great gangbang outside the Criminal Justice Center, Holly's siblings followed Abraham to the bank of microphones and talked about what it was like to watch Einhorn be convicted.

When asked what message she would deliver to Einhorn, Buffy Hall was short, sweet and cutting.

"See ya, wouldn't want to be ya," said Buffy the Unicorn Slayer in her Texas twang -- reporters, prosecutors and family all cracking up in a moment of unity, unusual to say the least, in which nearly everyone associated with the ordeal was ecstatic that it ended with the bad guy going bye-bye.

For weeks, John Maddux, a short, wiry hay farmer, always intense, always sporting the green, holly-shaped ribbon to commemorate his slain sister, had chomped at the bit, seemingly wanting to vent, but holding back.

"For the first time in his spoiled, selfish, worthless, egotistical life, he pays the price," Maddux said at the podium.

After his turn at the gangbang, Maddux stood next to the Criminal Justice Center enjoying a victory smoke and spoke about putting the pieces together in the wake of the verdict.

"I'll finally be able to drop the thing," said Maddux. "I'll just try to relax, hang loose, watch some TV, read some books and try to become accustomed to the idea that we don't have to think about Ira Einhorn anymore. Along with the rest of the world, we can forget him."

One of the best things about the verdict, said Maddux, is that "we can separate Holly from Ira now, in a sense that Holly is where she belongs and Ira is damn well where he belongs. It was a long time coming."

"We are going to have a party tonight," said Maddux, a smile breaking across his face. "I might even have a drop or two."

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