Getting Away With It

Meg Maddux Wakeman can tell you the exact time the phone rang on Friday with the news she dreaded most: 3:52 a.m. Not yet dawn in Seattle, but enough of the day had passed on the European continent for a three-judge panel in the French Cour d'Appel to jam a Gallic finger into America's eye and extend a long-term nightmare for Wakeman and her family. The man who killed her sister, had been convicted of the crime and had eluded international authority for 16 years had been set free.

Twenty years ago last September, Meg's sister Holly was murdered by Ira Einhorn, a man who had once staked a claim as Philadelphia's leading hippie and self-described ""planetary enzyme," networking among activists, scientists and businesspeople. F or 18 months, while insisting that Holly had gone to the food co-op and never returned, Einhorn hid her remains in a steamer trunk in the closet of his small West Philly apartment. In March 1979 the police discovered the body and arrested Einhorn, who wa s quickly released on bail. He claimed innocence, but in January 1981, on the eve of his trial, he fled, and the Maddux family was forced to wait for justice. In 1988 Holly's ailing father took his own life. Two years later Holly's mother passed on. But the siblings--Meg, 41; John, 49; Buffy, 38; and Mary, 35--kept hopes alive that one day Einhorn would pay for his crime.

In 1993, concerned that witnesses might die and memories might fade, Philadelphia's district attorney tried Einhorn in absentia, easily winning a conviction: a hollow victory considering the defendant was on the lam. But last June 13, in a charming village in southwest France, Ira Einhorn was finally captured, and the Madduxes breathed easy, assuming that he would be returned to serve his life sentence.

Here's what they did not know: the prickliness that some French waiters display when foreigners try to order in Parisian restaurants can appear in a more virulent form when French courts consider American requests to extradite criminals. The facts of the case can be overrun by dark accusations of cultural imperialism, patriotic invocations of the French idea of human rights and outright misrepresentations. And suddenly Judge Michel Arrighi, sitting in front of a painting of a crucified Jesus in a Bordeaux courtroom, is decreeing that ""Ira Einhorn soit mis en liberte"--that he be set free. An exultant, bluejeaned 57-year-old killer, looking none the worse from six months at Gradignan Prison, is breaking out in a gap-toothed grin, hugging the weal thy Swedish wife he'd picked up during his travels. And then he is motoring off to his home, a charming old converted mill on a bucolic lane outside the medieval village of Champagne-Mouton.

To the Madduxes, the news was devastating. To Joel Rosen, the Philadelphia prosecutor who won the in absentia trial that the French objected to (on the ground that it violated Einhorn's human rights), it was infuriating that a foreign court would d eny the United States custody of ""an American citizen who killed another American citizen on American soil." His boss, Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham, put it more bluntly: ""The truth is this," she said in a statement, ""he is getting away with murder, and I am incensed, offended, outraged."

Outrage it turns out, is the continuing thread in the strange life of Ira Einhorn. It is a life I know well, because I spent three years writing a book about it: ""The Unicorn's Secret," published in 1988. (The book is out of print; it has been opt ioned for a TV movie.) As I saw it, Einhorn's contradictions came to a head during his extraordinary 1979 bail hearing, when, with the help of his attorney, Arlen Specter (formerly the local D.A., now a U.S. senator), Holly Maddux's accused killer drew t he support of a stellar roster of Philadelphia's movers and shakers. They painted a portrait of a responsible, wise and gentle free spirit. Their praise raised a crucial question: how could a person so well loved, so identified with pacifism, be charged with a brutal murder?