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Wednesday, September 3, 1997

It was not your run-of-the-mill alibi. It was delivered under a painting of the Crucifixion in Courtroom Number Four by a long-lost fugitive fighting extradition to the United States for murdering his girlfriend and stuffing her body into a steamer trunk 20 years ago.

Einhorn -- who always had a penchant for gab -- probably could have elaborated through his court interpreter all day. But after about 13 minutes, just when the man who once called himself ``the Unicorn'' was getting to the part about the CIA, his lawyer whispered for him to cut it short.

``I was in despair. . . . I left the United States,'' Einhorn, 57, said as he tipped his ruddy face toward the three judges, who said the court would rule Sept. 23 on whether Einhorn spends the rest of his life in a Pennsylvania prison for the 1977 murder of Helen ``Holly'' Maddux.

The United States has sought Einhorn's extradition since June 13, when French police captured him at his home in a farming region in the south of France, ending 16 years on the run. Einhorn, who had been living there with his Swedish wife, Annika Flodin, for the last four years, yesterday wore the same jeans and homemade gray shirt he had thrown on the day of his arrest.

A few French photographers gathered at the marble courthouse to snap shots of the man who has stirred curiosity since he went on the lam in 1981 and invented a new life and identity for himself. He was tried in absentia in Philadelphia and found guilty in 1993. Eventually he settled on a new name -- Eugene Mallon -- and wandered through Europe, telling new acquaintances that he was, variously, a writer, a scientist, or a stock-market analyst.

Yesterday, Einhorn sounded like a spy novelist as he spoke of ``psychotronics,'' of a long-ago trip inside the Iron Curtain to Yugoslavia, and of discovering ``the Internet before the Internet existed.'' Except for the blue jeans, he seemed more like a white-haired aristocrat in a Burberry ad than he did a dated, philosophical revolutionary who once plotted ecological activism from his Powelton Village apartment.

Einhorn's French lawyer attacked the fairness of the U.S. justice system and stoked his client's conspiracy theories. Calling the Einhorn case the ``affair of the century,'' lawyer Dominique Tricaud argued that his client was a ``hippie, an antimilitant, and an intellectual subversive'' who had 20 federal agents chasing him around the globe.

``The sentence goes against French law because a life sentence for him means no possibility of parole,'' Tricaud said. ``The fact that he would not be given a chance for parole is inhuman and degrading. . . . Here's Philadelphia, the city of the Declaration of Independence, a refuge two centuries ago, a model of democracy and civil liberties. But in the past few years it's disturbing to see that [ in America ] death sentences are being handed to children and the mentally handicapped.''

If Einhorn loses the extraditon case, he can appeal to the French supreme court. It could take at least two years -- if at all -- for Einhorn to find himself in a U.S. jail cell.

During much of the 90-minute proceeding yesterday, Einhorn sat with his interpreter on a jury bench. He squinted and concentrated, sometimes picking at a long thumbnail as his lawyers spoke. He scanned the back of the courtroom and half-smiled at Flodin, a gardener and seamstress, who was dressed in avocado-colored pants, a print dress of wild yellow roses, and a rust-colored jacket.

One judge looked down over the bench at Einhorn.

``Do you agree to be sent to the U.S. without further debate?'' he asked.

Einhorn glanced at his lawyer.

``No,'' he said.

Shortly after that exchange, Einhorn plowed into his life story.

``I was known as a peacemaker,'' he said, flanked by two French policemen, his lawyers growing more edgy by the minute. Einhorn told the judges he founded Earth Day in Philadelphia and lectured at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania -- all true.

During much of the counterculture era in America, he said, he was the link who helped corporate America better understand the country's young activists and the need to protect the environment. ``I provided for them a sense of a changing society,'' said Einhorn, who dropped names like Alvin Toffler and AT&T.;

Einhorn said the trouble in his life began as he learned more about the ``psychological components of weapons systems,'' which, he added with a smile, were too complex to discuss through an interpreter. These systems, Einhorn said, relied on psychotronics -- the brain's ability to control aiming and firing of weapons similar to those used in the Persian Gulf war.

``I think at the time I probably knew more about this weaponry than anyone in the world,'' he said.

He planned to travel the world to warn people of the dangers, he said, adding that ``the CIA wanted to recruit me.'' In an increasingly rambling monologue, Einhorn said he had been ``invited'' by the ``American corporate community'' to discuss a trip he had made to Yugoslavia in the late 1970s.

``Five days later my life ended,'' Einhorn said. ``The police came into my apartment . . . [ went through ] all my papers, everything disappeared.''

Einhorn said he kept all his papers in a shipping trunk. It was inside that trunk, on March 28, 1979, that Philadelphia police found the mummified remains of Maddux, a Bryn Mawr graduate. Prosecutors later said Einhorn killed her 18 months earlier because she had threatened to leave him.

Yesterday, Einhorn said he had been ``determined to fight'' the charges, but added that he had been dismayed by the way he was questioned in court by Philadelphia prosecutor Barbara Christie.

Einhorn had been released on $40,000 bail after prominent civic leaders, professors and lawyers came to a bail hearing to vouch for his character. In 1981, a month before he was to stand trial, he disappeared.

``I didn't know what to do with my life,'' Einhorn testified yesterday, ``and I left the United States.''

Two hours away, in the village of Champagne-Moutoun, where during the last four years Einhorn kept to himself in a century-old converted fieldstone mill, there was not much interest in his case. There were fields to tend, equipment to fix. Einhorn's initial celebrity has been overtaken by a recent rash of pedophile cases that has riveted much of France. One woman, though, said she felt betrayed by the man who sometimes stopped by for a visit.

``I was glad to learn about his past,'' said Maria Das, ``because it explained many of the clouds. When you asked him a question he never gave you a direct answer. He always clouded things over.''

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