25-year hunt for killer

NEW YORK - A former New Age guru has been jailed for life for murdering his girlfriend 25 years ago and stuffing her mummified body into a trunk in his apartment.

Ira Einhorn, 62, who counted the rock star Peter Gabriel and other celebrities among his friends during his years as a counterculture superstar in Philadelphia in the 1970s, showed no emotion as the 12-person jury returned its guilty verdict after 2 1/2 hours' deliberation.

The verdict brings to an end an extraordinary legal saga that began with the disappearance of Einhorn's girlfriend, Holly Maddux, 30, in 1977.

When police found her body in the trunk two years later, Einhorn was charged with murder. But he skipped bail before trial in 1981 and became a fugitive.

The verdict also brought relief to the victim's relatives, who had campaigned for years to bring Einhorn, once known as the "Unicorn", to justice. Meg Wakeman described her sister Holly as "the leading light and life of our family" and said she had been taken by an act of utter selfishness and cowardice.

Prosecutors said Einhorn had bludgeoned Maddux to death after she tried to end their five-year relationship. Jurors heard poems and diary entries written by him depicting violence as a natural occurrence at the end of love.

"To kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural," one said.

Einhorn was finally captured living in a converted windmill in southern France in 1997 after years on the run that took him also to England, Ireland and Sweden.

He had been convicted of murder in absentia in a 1993 trial in Philadelphia.

France agreed to Einhorn's extradition only after prosecutors agreed to vacate the murder conviction and guarantee that a guilty verdict would not incur the death penalty.

- INDEPENDENT