France Rejects U.S. Bid to Extradite Killer

Since 1993, the British writer with the salt-and-pepper goatee had lived in a converted windmill in a village of southern France with his strawberry-blond Swedish wife. On a June day before sunrise, heavily armed police moved in and arrested him as he lay naked in bed.

He claimed that it was a case of mistaken identity. But fingerprints showed that he was Ira Einhorn, a former hippie and New Age guru from Philadelphia convicted on first-degree murder charges in the death of his former girlfriend. He had been a man on the run for almost 17 years.

U.S. authorities wanted Einhorn back so he could begin serving the life term he was sentenced to in absentia. A court in the southwestern wine capital of Bordeaux, which delayed its decision three times, finally gave it Thursday: “No.”

Instead, the Bordeaux Appeals Court ordered Einhorn, 57, subject of a dogged manhunt across five countries, freed.

“The United States has learned today, to its distress, that it still has lessons to learn from old Europe in matters of human rights,” Dominique Delthil, Einhorn’s attorney, told reporters.

The American, incarcerated in Gradignan prison near Bordeaux and, who, as usual, wore faded blue jeans, said “thank you” to the judges.

From the Massachusetts “nanny trial” and the O.J. Simpson case to the existence of the death penalty in many states and the burgeoning size of the U.S. prison population, justice, American style, has a poor reputation in France and much of the rest of Europe. In making their ruling, the Bordeaux judges in effect said that in American hands, Einhorn would not be treated according to the standards of French justice.

In January 1981, shortly before his trial was due to start, Einhorn--an antiwar activist and confidant to Philadelphia bluebloods and millionaires--fled the United States. In 1993, using a new Pennsylvania law, prosecutors tried him in his absence. A jury took two hours to convict him of first-degree murder.

In September 1977, Einhorn’s former lover, Helen “Holly” Maddux of Tyler, Texas, disappeared. Eighteen months later, the former Bryn Mawr College student’s emaciated body, the skull shattered in at least half a dozen places, was found in a trunk in Einhorn’s Philadelphia apartment.

Einhorn said he was being framed and spoke of the CIA and KGB. A friend of Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, he knew people in powerful places. His lawyer, future U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, won him remarkably low bail, $40,000. Barbara Bronfman, a Montreal socialite, reportedly paid it.

His trial was to begin in January 1981. But Einhorn bolted. Since then he has been on the run, from Britain and Ireland to Sweden, Denmark and France.

Like Pennsylvania, France also tries people accused of crimes even if they are not present in court. But under French procedure, once the accused are captured or turn themselves in, they must be retried and thus get the chance to present a defense. Einhorn’s lawyers successfully argued that since Pennsylvania does not have that requirement, Einhorn’s civil liberties would be denied by allowing extradition.

“The court’s decision is in line with our expectations and proves that the American justice system is less advanced than ours,” Delthil said. The legal team also had warned that Einhorn might be retried just so Pennsylvania prosecutors could seek the death penalty, which France abolished as inhumane in September 1981.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Dominique Tricaud, another of Einhorn’s attorneys, predicted that French judges would never send an accused person back to such a “barbaric” system.

In Philadelphia, Joel Rosen, the prosecutor who tried the case and won Einhorn’s conviction, told The Times that he was “angry” and “sickened” by Thursday’s decision.

“The one thing that is clearer than anything is this guy murdered his girlfriend, kept her body in a steamer trunk in his apartment for a year and a half, and he is getting away with murder thanks to the decision of the French court,” Rosen said. “The decision in France is protecting him. He will be allowed to live his lovely life in southern France after he got away with murdering a woman.”

Meg Wakeman, the murdered woman’s sister, told a Seattle television station: “The French judge did not give a decision on the facts of the matter. He gave it on a decision against the United States judicial system, and that’s not the case that was to be tried.”

Einhorn’s legal woes may not be over. He was detained again after the Bordeaux court’s ruling, this time on immigration-related charges of “irregular residence” in France. A tribunal in Angouleme, near the village of Champagne-Mouton--where the convicted murderer was living under the name Eugene Mallon with his Swedish wife, Annika Flodin, 46--released him on condition that he present himself to police twice a week, Delthil’s office said. The attorney earlier said Einhorn wants to stay in France, “where he been residing and owns a house.”

Times staff writer John Goldman in New York contributed to this report.