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Thursday, June 19, 1997

``It takes a very long time. It's a very slow process,'' said Fabeanne Rakas, a law professor at the University of Toulouse in southern France.

The bad news for Einhorn, who fled the United States shortly before he was to stand trial in 1981 for the bludgeoning death of his girlfriend, is that he will likely remain in a French prison cell while he wages his legal battle.

France rarely grants bail to people when other countries are trying to extradite them, said Michael Scharf, director of the Center for International Law and Policy at the New England School of Law in Boston.

Scharf, a former U.S. State Department lawyer specializing in extradition, said defendants generally are released in such cases only if high bail has been posted and they have extensive business and real estate interests in France.

Einhorn, who authorities say has lived on handouts from wealthy sympathizers during his 16 years on the lam, is unlikely to qualify, Scharf said.

Officials in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office scrambled yesterday to prepare an initial package of documents for the U.S. Justice Department to get the extradition process started.

Richard DiBenedetto, the district attorney's extradition expert, said officials hoped to have the paperwork in Washington tomorrow. ``Justice intends to send [ the case ] to France next week sometime,'' he said.

Einhorn, 57, the charismatic oracle of Philadelphia's '60s counterculture, is being held in a modern, whitewashed, medium-security prison outside the city of Bordeaux -- a far cry from the bucolic estate in southwestern France where he was rousted from bed and arrested by French gendarmes Friday.

Einhorn's longtime attorney, Norris E. Gelman of Philadelphia, said the defense had retained a French lawyer and was determined to fight extradition.

``We're serious about this,'' Gelman said. ``We're not trying to thwart anything. He has rights under French law, and we intend to pursue them.''

Einhorn, who grew up in Mount Airy and attended Central High and the University of Pennsylvania, was arrested March 28, 1979, after police found the mummified remains of his girlfriend, Helen ``Holly'' Maddux, in a padlocked steamer trunk in a closet in the Powelton apartment they shared.

Maddux, a Bryn Mawr College graduate from Tyler, Texas, had been missing nearly two years.

Einhorn insisted that he was innocent, and a parade of prominent Philadelphians vouched for his character and helped him get released on $40,000 bail. A month before his trial, Einhorn vanished.

Fearing that key witnesses might die or that their memories would fade before Einhorn was captured, the District Attorney's Office in 1993 took the unusual step of trying him in absentia.

Defended by Gelman, who sat in the courtroom beside an empty chair, Einhorn was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. Pennsylvania courts denied appeals filed by his lawyers. The statute of limitations on federal appeals expired in January.

In France, extradition cases contested by the defendant typically take two to three years to wend their way through the courts, said Rakas, the French law professor, who is teaching this year at Fordham University in New York City.

If French courts uphold the U.S. request for Einhorn's extradition, Rakas said, he could appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said this week that Einhorn forfeited his legal rights in the United States when he fled. But experts in international law say the trial in absentia and the expiration of Einhorn's appellate rights in this country could pose serious obstacles to extradition.

Although France and other countries try criminal defendants in absentia, experts say they also guarantee the defendant a new trial if he is apprehended. Without a commitment from U.S. officials to grant Einhorn a new trial, legal experts said, France may be reluctant to return him.

Abraham has said she opposes a new trial.

A potential factor in the outcome is that French authorities take international law seriously, said Abraham Abramovsky, director of the Fordham University International Criminal Law Center.

``His best shot is in France,'' he said.

Abramovsky said that Einhorn probably would be extradited eventually, but that he might be able to extract from U.S. officials a pledge for a new trial.

Virginia authorities recently agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for the extradition of a murder suspect from Great Britain, said Scharf, the former State Department official. It took four years to get the suspect extradited.

Scharf said American officials could be forced into a similar bargain in the Einhorn case.

``It all depends on how much they want him,'' he said.

Extradition involves the collection and preparation of thousands of pages of documents, including the 1979 affidavit police used to obtain a warrant to search Einhorn's apartment; the transcript from his trial in absentia; and police and FBI reports on his status as a fugitive.

The materials will be submitted to the Office of International Affairs at the Justice Department. Once officials there certify that the file is complete, it will be sent to the State Department to have the documents translated into French. The file will then be given to French authorities.

Einhorn spent his 16 years as a fugitive living under aliases in Ireland, England, Sweden and France. The break in the case stemmed from a 1994 application for a French driver's license by his wife, Annika Flodin, a Swedish citizen.

The French asked Swedish authorities to verify that Flodin had held a valid license in that country. From the Swedes, investigators learned that Flodin listed her address as Champagne-Mouton, a town of 1,000 in southwest France. They also learned that she had adopted the surname Mallon, the name of a Dublin bookseller who had befriended Einhorn years earlier.

Authorities surmised that Einhorn was using Mallon's name and living with Flodin. French police staked out their home and arrested Einhorn Friday morning.

Gelman, Einhorn's American lawyer, said he spoke yesterday with Flodin, who said Einhorn was ``in good spirits.''

Gelman also said Einhorn's mother, Beatrice, 86, of Wyncote, had received ``more than 100 calls of support from people who knew her or Ira and who said they want to do what they can'' to help the defense.

At the 20-year-old prison near Bordeaux, Einhorn is staying ``just in a normal cell with other people,'' said Defos du Raw, the French magistrate supervising the case. ``As they are overloaded, I would be surprised if he had an individual suite.

After his capture, Einhorn insisted he was not the fugitive from Philadelphia. His stance had softened by the time he was taken to the town of Angouleme a few hours later. There, prosecutor Philippe Lagarde found him to be ``very polite.''

``When he was introduced to me,'' Lagarde said yesterday, ``he said he was Eugene Mallon -- but with a smile and not much conviction.''

Inquirer staff writers Michael Matza, Daniel Rubin and Suzanne Sataline contributed to this report.