Ira Einhorn

Einhorn, 58, a leading counterculture figure in Philadelphia in the 1970s, was taken into custody yesterday in the town of Ruffec, not far from the village of Champagne-Mouton, where he had been living quietly in an old mill house with his Swedish wife.

The longtime fugitive was captured last year, but regained his freedom when the French courts refused to send him back to the United States.

Einhorn was expected to spend the night in jail in Angouleme, a small city in the heart of the French Cognac region, then to be transferred today to a larger jail in Bordeaux, where the new extradition effort will be heard.

A three-judge extradition panel -- headed by Bordeaux's top criminal judge, Michel Arreghi, the same judge who presided over an unsuccessful extradition effort last year -- is likely to decide the new extradition request within several weeks, French authorities predicted.

Contacted yesterday in Seattle, one of Maddux's three sisters, Meg Wakeman, applauded the new extradition effort.

"It's good to see that the French are following through on the requests made by the United States," she said.

Einhorn's French attorney, Dominique Delthil, said he would ask the panel to free Einhorn from custody while the extradition effort is under way.

The bearded fugitive had known for months that he could face another fight to avoid being sent back to the United States. In January, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law designed to deal with the main obstacle that torpedoed last year's effort to bring Einhorn back -- his 1993 murder conviction at a trial in absentia, while he was still in hiding.

The new state law would apparently give Einhorn the right to a new trial if he is sent back to Pennsylvania. But Einhorn's attorneys on both sides of the Atlantic are questioning the constitutionality of the new state law, creating an unusual legal situation in which a French court may be asked to guess at the validity of a law passed in the United States.

Einhorn fled the United States in early 1981, several weeks before his scheduled trial for the murder of Maddux, who disappeared in 1977. Her mummified body was discovered in 1979, wrapped in plastic and stuffed inside a trunk in Einhorn's Powelton Village apartment.

At the time of his arrest in 1979, Einhorn claimed he had been framed by CIA agents bent on discrediting his research on artificial intelligence. Various supporters began raising money for his defense and his first attorney -- Arlen Specter, since elected to the U.S. Senate -- convinced a Philadelphia judge to release him on $40,000 bail.

Einhorn evaded capture for 16 years, hiding out at various spots in Ireland and Sweden before Interpol traced him to his French country farmhouse last year.

While U.S. authorities assumed Einhorn would be summarily shipped back to Philadelphia, his French lawyers took aim at the 1993 trial and newspaper coverage of his arrest, arguing that he had been unfairly convicted and would be unable to get a new trial, or a fair one.

The French tribunal shocked District Attorney Lynne Abraham and other U.S. authorities by siding with Einhorn and denying extradition.

Abraham could not be reached yesterday because of the Jewish holiday, and others in her office declined comment on the new developments. A spokesman for State Attorney General Mike Fisher, who had joined Abraham lobbying for the new state law, said Fisher had received no official word of Einhorn being taken into custody again.

Apparently it took no more than a phone call to grab Einhorn yesterday. Authorities said they had telephoned Einhorn at his home and asked him to visit the police station in Ruffec. Once he got there, gendarmes informed Einhorn of the new extradition effort and took him into custody -- leaving his wife, Annika Flodin, to transport clothes to the jail in Angouleme.

Flodin could not be reached yesterday.

But in a letter in April to a newspaper reporter in Bordeaux, Flodin said the couple was aware of a new extradition request making its way through the French justice system.

"In January of this year, a new law was voted in Pennsylvania and this law makes it possible to give another trial to Ira," Flodin wrote. "But this law . . . is not constitutional because this law is made only to trick the French. The big question is now to know if the government of the United States would use this law against the French."

In an interview with another French reporter, Einhorn said he had been working on two books -- one describing his years in hiding from America, and the other covering his entire life.

Einhorn told that reporter that he hadn't murdered Maddux and knew nothing about the crime.