France Rejects Extradition For U.S. Killer: Ruling Outrages American Officials

By William Branigin Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 1997

A French court yesterday refused to extradite to the United States an American self-styled counterculture guru who was convicted 20 years ago of bludgeoning his girlfriend to death and storing her body in a steamer trunk in one of Philadelphia's most celebrated murder cases.

Hours after the decision, Ira Einhorn, 57, who fled to Europe shortly before his 1981 trial and was later found guilty in absentia, was granted conditional release by a second French court that is considering an immigration case against him. He entered France illegally with a false Irish passport and has been living for the past four years under an assumed name with his Swedish wife in a converted stone mill near Bordeaux. The court ordered him to report his whereabouts to French judicial authorities every two weeks pending a ruling on his immigration status.

The decision by a French court of appeals in Bordeaux to reject a U.S. extradition request outraged American officials. Philadelphia assistant district attorney Joel Rosen, who prosecuted Einhorn for the 1977 murder, expressed disgust that the court had "refused to turn over an American citizen who killed another American citizen on U.S. soil." He said the ruling flies in the face of an extradition treaty between the two countries.

The presiding judge in the case based the decision on the fact that Einhorn had been tried in absentia, Rosen said. French law requires a retrial for anyone convicted in absentia, and there was no provision for Einhorn to get a new trial. In his U.S. trial he received a life sentence.

Rosen said Einhorn, represented at the time by defense lawyer Arlen Specter, now a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, skipped out on $40,000 bond and fled the country a week before his trial was scheduled to start. Apparently, the prosecutor said with sarcasm, the French court did not consider that spending 16 years as a fugitive meant that Einhorn had waived his right to be present at his trial.

"The United States has learned today to its distress that it still has lessons to learn from old Europe in matters of human rights," said Dominique Delthil, one of Einhorn's French lawyers, after the decision was announced.

The French government, which has been pursuing the U.S. extradition request since Einhorn was tracked down in southwestern France in June, immediately appealed the ruling to a higher court.

The case has captivated Philadelphia, where Einhorn acquired a reputation in the 1960s and `70s as the city's best-known hippie, an anti-war activist and environmentalist who lectured on paranormal psychology and futurism and won a following among Philadelphia's elite. He became known as the city's original "flower child," called himself "the Unicorn" and served as a liaison between the "counterculture" and local corporate leaders.

According to prosecutors, he was also a jealous lover who murdered his girlfriend, Helen "Holly" Maddux of Tyler, Tex., in his apartment when she tried to break up with him and began seeing another man. He claimed she had left on an errand and never returned, but after a private investigator for her family found evidence of foul play and students living below reported a mysterious fluid dripping into their apartment, police obtained a search warrant and made a grisly discovery.

In 1979, a year and a half after she had disappeared, the mummified body of Maddux was found stuffed in a steamer trunk in a closet of Einhorn's apartment. She had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument and her skull crushed. Einhorn was arrested but proclaimed his innocence, claiming he had been framed by the CIA to silence him because of research he was conducting into psychological warfare involving paranormal phenomena.

It was a claim he repeated in court in France. Wearing jeans and a long, wispy white goatee, Einhorn invoked the CIA and his study of "psychotronics," which he defined as dealing with the "psychological components of weapons systems," in asserting that he was being persecuted.

After fleeing the United States, Einhorn lived under assumed names in Ireland, England and Sweden before moving to France. Towns- people in the village of Champagne-Mouton, where he lived in a century-old mill with his Swedish wife Annika Flodin, knew him as Eugene Mallon, a name he took from an Irish bookseller he knew in Dublin. The couple bought the mill four years ago for more than $100,000 and lived comfortably there, although neither held a job. Investigators have speculated that Einhorn received money from wealthy benefactors, including a Canadian heiress to a liquor fortune.