I’m not exactly quick on the draw with this but Ira Einhorn this morning was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1977 murder of his girlfriend, Bryn Mawr College graduate Holly Maddux.

Einhorn, who skipped town before his first trial and spent some 20 years “on the run,” including several years on a quaint farm in the French countryside where he enjoyed skinny-dipping with his Swedish girlfriend and enjoyed, at least temporarily, the protection of his host government, received an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole.

“The defendant stood stern-faced as the verdict was read. After hearing his fate, he blinked his eyes rapidly and brushed them with his hand,” report Jacqueline Soteropolous and Terry Bitman of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “He declined the judge’s offer to address the court.” Naturally, defense attorney William Cannon, he of the lesbian obsession, said he would appeal the verdict.

The jury deliberated for two and one-half hours, according to media reports, a time span that I wouldn’t doubt included at least two hours of holding out just to put a good face on the deliberations. Notably, the jurors did not deliberate long enough to get lunch, a detail the significance of which will not be lost on anyone who has served on a jury.

“Judge William J. Mazzola had harsh words for Einhorn after the verdict was read, calling him ‘an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced people,’” which is assuredly a great overstatement of Einhorn’s intellectual capacity.

It’s a shame Holly’s father did not live to see this day. Fred Maddux, filled with grief and ensnared by depression, committed suicide in 1988, a time when Einhorn was frolicking about Europe.