“I think a lot of people in Philadelphia were waiting to hear” that he had died, she said. “He became part of the city’s consciousness in an ugly way.”

In 1972 he began a five-year relationship with Ms. Maddux, who was from Tyler, Texas, and had graduated from nearby Bryn Mawr College. Her family never liked him, considering him a bully, and in 1977 she left him and moved to New York.

He was furious and demanded that she come back to Philadelphia to retrieve her belongings, saying he would throw them into the street if she didn’t. She came back. And then she vanished. She was 30.

Mr. Einhorn denied any involvement in her disappearance, saying she had gone out to the local co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and had never returned.

It was a measure of his ability to make important connections that after he was charged with murder, his lawyer was Arlen Specter, the city’s former district attorney who was then in private practice and who went on to become a United States senator.

Mr. Specter managed to get Mr. Einhorn’s bail reduced to $40,000. To be released from custody, Mr. Einhorn had to put up only 10 percent, or $4,000. It was paid by a Canadian socialite, one of several well-off people who supported him financially and who doubted he could have been involved in murder.

Ira Samuel Einhorn was born on May 15, 1940, in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961 with a major in English.