THE SEARCH FOR THE UNICORN

Eugene Mallon lived like a sun king in the South of France, sharing a tile-roofed farmhouse with his strawberry-blond Swedish wife. He read books, put idle thoughts to paper and played in a bridge club every Friday. She baked bread, tended garden and strolled into the nearby village of Champagne-Mouton on market day, tall and delicate, a sight so fair the mayor's tired old heart would stir. The Gold Creek met the Silver Creek near the Mallons' acreage, and all around, the gentlest breeze would set fields of sunflowers ablaze with waves of golden light.

It was paradise, until June 13. A small army of French national police crept in before sunrise and surrounded the house. Three of them, 9-mm Berettas drawn, went to the door and knocked firmly as the others hid in the fields.

Across the Atlantic, the FBI waited. In Philadelphia a low-level bureaucrat named Richard DiBenedetto dangled, weightless with anticipation. For 16 years, across five countries, the Philadelphia district attorney's fugitive-and-extradition chief had hunted the man called Mallon with an obsession that would have impressed Captain Ahab. His name was not Eugene Mallon, as he had conned the French villagers into believing. Nor was he a British writer who had settled in remotest France for quiet inspiration. He was an American fugitive named Ira Einhorn, a man who had risen to fame during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a counterculture guru. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were friends, logically enough. But so was an unlikely battalion of bluebloods, millionaires and corporate executives, many of them so charmed by Einhorn's New Age vision that they stood by him even after his arrest for a murder so grisly an entire city had gasped.

In 1979, 18 months after the disappearance of Einhorn's blond and wispy, tragically beautiful 30-year-old lover, Philadelphia police climbed the stairs to his shabby second-floor apartment. In a steamer trunk no more than a few feet from the bed where Einhorn slept, homicide detective Michael Chitwood found the mummified body of his girlfriend. Holly Maddux's skull had been fractured in six or more places under the angry force of a blunt object. Chitwood, now the police chief in Portland, Maine, remembers the dialogue to this day: "I turned to Einhorn and said, 'It looks like we found Holly.' And he said to me, 'You found what you found.'"

She had been dead so long her wasted remains weighed 37 lbs. Einhorn, never at a loss to explain the mysteries of the universe, calmly assured his minions he had been framed and relished the chance to prove it at his murder trial. But just days before it began in early 1981, he ran.

The D.A., the FBI, Interpol, national police from half a dozen countries--through the decades and across the map of Europe and Scandinavia--they all chased Einhorn. There were stakeouts; interviews with monied acquaintances, including an international rock star and a billionaire socialite; and even a brief attempt by a vigilante cyberposse from Australia to stalk the computer junkie by Internet. Three times in those 16 years, police were close enough to feel his heat. Each time, Einhorn melted away. Now, in remote Champagne-Mouton, another chance.

At 7:30 a.m., the cover of darkness was just peeling back. The Swedish wife, Annika Flodin, 46, answered the knock. "You're living with a dangerous man," a gendarme told her. She said nothing. Quickly, they pushed past her and up the stairs, following their guns. Lying naked in bed was a white-haired 57-year-old man who insisted he was Eugene Mallon, not Ira Einhorn. Police handcuffed him, questioned him at the tiny local police station near the church, whose steeple knifes above the rooftops of centuries-old stone houses, and drove him 2 1/2 hours to a prison near Bordeaux. Though his physical appearance had changed dramatically in his years on the lam--he had lost 50 lbs. and whacked off his long hair and beard--his fingerprints hadn't. In Philadelphia the long-suffering DiBenedetto received a fax from the Justice Department.

13 June Interpol--France Interpol--Washington Please be advised that EINHORN, Ira, was placed under extradition imprisonment at the prison of Gradignan, Bordeaux.

DiBenedetto, who lives with his wife and daughter in a Philadelphia neighborhood of hard work and modest dreams, bought a bottle of Bordeaux to celebrate. "It was way out of my price range. About $13," says DiBenedetto, whose salary is $52,600. But he drank only one glass. He is saving the rest for the day when Einhorn is returned to Philadelphia, where, in absentia, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1993.

It could be a long wait. Through a messy web of international bureaucracy, politics and law, Einhorn is nowhere near being dragged home to serve his life sentence. After his extradition hearing Sept. 2 in Bordeaux, his Parisian attorney, Dominique Tricaud, who claims to have never lost an extradition case, told TIME that in 20 years he has "never been more confident about a case." The French, he says, will not send a man back to a "barbaric" country where he was tried without being present to defend himself. If Tricaud is right, the chase will be over. DiBenedetto, after finally bagging his quarry, will watch Einhorn disappear into the Impressionist painting in which he has lived for the past four years. And the charmed Einhorn, convicted of a horrific murder, will have won a sentence that defies logic and human consideration: Life in the south of France.

The story had been absolutely epic in Philadelphia, touching off endless rounds of horror and disbelief. Ira Einhorn? Peace-loving, earth-hugging Ira Einhorn? In the March 29, 1979, Philadelphia Daily News, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island was nearly invisible under the mutant block letters at the top of Page One.

"HIPPIE GURU" HELD IN TRUNK SLAYING

Dominating the page was the man who, with atomic energy and electric-blue eyes that alternately charmed and haunted, had dominated every conversation he'd ever had. Einhorn wasn't on a weight-loss program back then. Cross a bear with a man, take away all grooming implements and you get Ira, who considered himself too mythic to bathe regularly or use his given name. Einhorn means "one horn," so he called himself the Unicorn. When it wasn't fair maidens he was after, it was the company of nags like Rubin, Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. He ingested enough drugs to kill a whale. He organized be-ins. He called himself a planetary enzyme and "sort of smelled like a hoagie with onions all the time," as a friend puts it. For Philadelphia, a social and political backwater in which consciousness raising was a billy club to the head, Einhorn was, all alone, a connection to the psychedelic world.

But the irony and magic of Einhorn were that countless establishmentarians were his friends too. Ira had a "brilliant network," says George Keegan, a Sun Oil Co. executive who later formed a touchy-feely neighborhood-development group with Einhorn. "He knew enough corporate people to get our projects funded simply by strolling into people's offices and asking for the money."

Not everyone bought into the World According to Ira. A lot of ideas but "nothing to hold onto," recalls Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Claude Lewis. "Total b.s.," concurs Joel Bloom, president emeritus of the Franklin Institute Science Museum. But with knowledge stolen from years of voracious reading, Einhorn charmed many into believing the planet was warping into new frontiers and only the Unicorn could lead them into the Age of Aquarius. Whether it was politics, environment or computer science, "he was three or four steps ahead of you at every turn," says Norris Gelman, one of Einhorn's attorneys. As if hypnotized, the suits responded with free lunches, grants, consulting contracts, four-figure speaking fees. A local communications company hired Einhorn to mediate a neighborhood power-plant dispute, then for years afterward sponsored his space travel by mailing copies of his scribblings and those of other "forward thinkers" to a growing list of international contacts.

Einhorn won a teaching fellowship at Harvard in the '70s. In the '60s he had taught an alternative-education class at Penn, his alma mater, and once reportedly broke out the joints, stripped naked and danced in the classroom. Thirty years ago, not everyone was after an M.B.A.

Warts and all, "Ira charmed the city," says Lewis. And countless women.

Back then, says Harry Jay Katz, an acquaintance, "guys never asked girls what they thought about politics or poetry. Ira did. He feigned that he cared."

He met Helen ("Holly") Maddux in 1972 at La Terrasse, the bistro where he held court but never picked up the tab. Maddux was described as a woman of such mesmerizing elegance, everything around her would fall away. "Michelle Pfeiffer has the same kind of fragile beauty," says Holly's sister Mary, 34. (Years later, the comparisons to his wife Annika would seem chilling--both she and Holly were described as delicate and ethereal. Both dancers, both seamstresses, both Earth Mothers.)

In the middle of the antiwar movement, Maddux had left Tyler, Texas, and a home ruled by a proud and disciplined World War II veteran to attend Bryn Mawr College, a select Main Line liberal arts school for women. By some accounts, she never recovered from the shock and drifted like a wind-blown leaf through relationships and jobs after graduation. Within days of their meeting, the Unicorn carried this wounded deer back to his lair, a squalid apartment near Penn.

"Around women, Ira was a stunted teenager," says his old friend Keegan. "He was all brain, no heart. Sex was an addiction for Ira. If he was interested in a woman, that was the only thing that existed. For many women, getting all this attention from Ira Einhorn was flattering, and it would be easy to succumb." Keegan remembers a party where Ira "came over and said, 'Would you take Holly home? I'm going home with someone else.' Holly just sat there, silent. She put up with it, and unfortunately, so did we."

Maddux had a younger brother and three younger sisters. When she brought Ira home to Texas to meet the family, they were horrified. Like a caveman, Einhorn began eating ravenously. While the family said grace, he scratched and clawed at his poison-ivy blisters, and he treated Holly as if she were his personal maiden. "We concluded that he basically came down there to try and promote a rift between Holly and my father," says Elisabeth Hall, 37, who gave the name Holly to her daughter, a ballerina. Elisabeth was the last family member to see Holly alive. After Elisabeth's high school graduation, she visited London, where Holly and Ira were traveling on Holly's savings. "She told me she was real tired of Ira, and that...when she got back she was going to leave him and start a business."

Maddux had grown too strong, finally, for a man accustomed to weakness. She met another man and in early autumn 1977 told Einhorn it was over between them. He threatened by phone to toss her belongings into the street, and she raced over to retrieve them. She would not be seen again. Ira calmly told anyone who asked that she'd gone to the nearby food co-op and simply never returned.

In Texas, Holly's parents Fred and Elizabeth Maddux became suspicious. Holly had never gone more than a few weeks without checking in. They called Philadelphia police, who made cursory checks but had no reason to suspect foul play. Unsatisfied, the Madduxes hired Bob Stevens, a retired FBI man working as a private detective in Tyler. Stevens hooked up with another retired G-man, J.R. Pearce, in Philadelphia. What they uncovered, in a year of spadework, was a story for Hitchcock.

A Drexel student who lived in the apartment below Einhorn's recalled a "blood-curdling scream" and heavy banging one night in the fall of 1977. In a neighborhood of frat houses and party hounds, the student downstairs thought nothing of it. But the odor that followed within weeks was impossible to ignore, as was the putrid, dark-brown liquid that oozed down through the ceiling from Einhorn's apartment. The tenant and his roommate tried unsuccessfully to clean it away, then called the landlord, who called plumbers. Einhorn stubbornly refused to let the workers into a padlocked closet just off his bedroom.

The private detectives turned it all over to police, and on March 28, 1979, at 9 a.m., homicide detective Chitwood knocked on Einhorn's door. Once inside, he headed straight for the locked closet. He pried it open with a crowbar and immediately smelled a "faint decaying smell, like a dead animal." Next he sprang the lock on the steamer trunk. The newspapers inside were dated August and September 1977. Under them was Styrofoam packing material. Chitwood scooped through it until he came to something he couldn't identify at first, and then it was clear. A hand. A human hand. He scooped some more, and as he did, Holly Maddux slowly emerged. Einhorn stood by, impassive.

Then began the parade. One after another at Einhorn's bail hearing, his supporters took the stand in his defense. A minister, a corporate lawyer, a playwright, an economist, a telephone-company executive. They couldn't imagine Einhorn's harming any living thing. Release of murder defendants pending trial was unheard of, but Einhorn's attorney was soon-to-be U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, and bail was set at a staggeringly low $40,000--only $4,000 of it needed to walk free. It was paid by Barbara Bronfman, a Montreal socialite who had married into the Seagram distillery family and met Einhorn through a common interest in the paranormal. It was Einhorn's new rage, and his orbit of friends had expanded to include Uri Geller, the spoon-bending Israeli illusionist.

The whole thing was a set-up, Einhorn assured followers. Through his antiwar research and with contacts that extended beyond the Iron Curtain, he simply knew too much about weapons development, psychic research and global conspiracies. Maddux was murdered to discredit him. The CIA, the KGB, who knew? The most damning evidence against him was also the most obvious proof of his innocence: Would a man as smart as he murder his girlfriend and keep the evidence at his bedside?

But the evidence against him mounted. Testimony from two friends who were asked by Einhorn to help him dispose of the trunk. The two former girlfriends who ended up in the hospital after trying to break off relationships with Einhorn. One was nearly strangled; the other had a Coke bottle smashed over her head. So much for flower power. The public embodiment of peace and love was in private a monster. Sickened friends spoke of betrayal and wondered if Einhorn had ever cared about anything but Ira. George Keegan: "We were walking down the street together. People who once would come up and hug Ira crossed the street and averted their eyes...He looked at me, sad, and said, 'I'm not going to be able to be Ira Einhorn now.' And I realized he was a selfish, arrogant bastard."

And then, shortly before his trial was to begin in January 1981, Philadelphia's own philosopher king simply vanished into the vapor of his grandiose mutterings.

The year Einhorn fled, DiBenedetto became a father, and it gave deeper meaning to his telephone conversations with Holly's parents. Moved by their grief, he became obsessed with the case. Especially after Ira's friend Harry Jay Katz baited him, "You'll never catch Ira. He's too smart for you."

Working from a closet-size cubicle on the eighth floor of the D.A.'s office in downtown Philadelphia, the deceptively low-key DiBenedetto, now 49, gradually shrank behind a growing wall of cardboard boxes--his Einhorn files. He never had the luxury of devoting full attention to Einhorn, but it was always a priority. Although he sat at his desk, he worked from inside Einhorn's mind, having studied every word in the 63 different 150-page journals Einhorn left behind. Among the lines that stopped him, revealing the cold depths of Einhorn's darkness, were these: "Sadism--sounds nice--run it over your tongue--contemplate with joy the pains of others." "To beat a woman--what joy." "The violence that flowed through my being tonight...could result in the murder of that which I seem to love so deeply."

DiBenedetto dredged up the names of literally hundreds of Einhorn's international coterie of friends and true believers, and he went after every last one of them. The mere thought of the task was daunting, but DiBenedetto, an amateur sculptor and book collector, has no problem with long stories. He owns multiple copies of the Iliad--six or eight, he can't remember which. Einhorn didn't have some burned-out patronage stiff after him. The Unicorn was being tracked by a hard-boiled, law-and-order renaissance man.

"I knew he liked to play a game called Go. It's an ancient Oriental game, sort of like chess, and I found out on the Internet where the Go clubs were in Europe." One was in Dublin, Ireland, one of Einhorn's first stops. He and his new girlfriend rented an apartment from a Trinity College professor named Denis Weaire. When Weaire visited friends in Chicago in April 1981, he told them about this mysterious character named Einhorn. His friends thought the name rang a bell; they called newspapers and got the full story. Weaire evicted Einhorn, but Irish police told him that with no extradition treaty in force at the time, there was no cause for arrest, and the Unicorn jumped.

By phone and fax, DiBenedetto pursued leads through England, back to Ireland and then to Wales. It took four years for another break; again, it was from Weaire. He spotted Einhorn in the Trinity cafeteria. Confronted, Einhorn insisted his name was Ben Moore. Weaire ran for the phone and called DiBenedetto. An extradition treaty was in place by then, but by the time Irish police moved in, the Unicorn was gone. Again.

"It's not like on TV, where you just pick up the phone, call Interpol, and they're there in two hours. With the red tape, it takes forever to make something happen," DiBenedetto says. So whenever Philadelphia cops went to Europe on vacation, DiBenedetto begged them to do some legwork for him. He even used his own vacation time to knock on doors. Hank Harrison, a Grateful Dead biographer and the father of Courtney Love, had lent Einhorn a few dollars in Britain. But neither Harrison nor British rock star Peter Gabriel, twice visited by Einhorn, knew he was an accused murderer. DiBenedetto suspected Gabriel was funneling money to Einhorn. Gabriel told Scotland Yard he had not.

But someone else had, and after years of pursuit by DiBenedetto, she finally relented. Bronfman, by then divorced from the distilling family, at last admitted to DiBenedetto that she had sent Einhorn cash regularly until 1988, when she read The Unicorn's Secret, a damning book about Einhorn by journalist Steven Levy. Find a woman in Sweden named Annika Flodin, Bronfman said.

The D.A.'s office, the FBI, Interpol and Swedish police moved quickly. It had been seven years, and this was the best shot yet. But Einhorn was quick too; once again he slithered away, just hours ahead of the sheriff. As for Flodin, she claimed to know nothing about any murderer named Ira Einhorn. The man's name was Ben Moore, and she was his landlady, nothing more. DiBenedetto didn't buy it. She was attractive, and her family had money--the Daily Double that Einhorn lived for. Flodin moved to Denmark three years later, then disappeared, leaving the address of Dublin bookseller Eugene Mallon. "I knew the name," says DiBenedetto. And he knew that Einhorn was once a customer of the bookseller's.

DiBenedetto would never get to call Maddux's parents with good news. Ill and depressed over a leg amputation, Fred Maddux killed himself in 1988. Two years later, his wife died of emphysema. Holly's murder "ruined their life," daughter Elisabeth says. "And they died thinking that Ira beat them."

In 1993, fearing that witnesses would soon vanish, Philadelphia D.A. Lynne Abraham decided to use a new state law allowing trials in absentia. With only Einhorn's memory filling the defendant's chair, a jury listened for two weeks and then took just two hours to convict the Unicorn of first-degree murder.

It wasn't satisfaction enough for DiBenedetto. Then, early this year, he heard from Hjordis Reichel, a Swedish woman living in California who had seen an Unsolved Mysteries show about Einhorn. She had relatives in the upper echelons of the Stockholm police. Call them, DiBenedetto said. It can't hurt.

Through those connections, Reichel got Flodin's Swedish social-security number. DiBenedetto's Interpol contact ran it through motor vehicles in Sweden--and made the discovery that broke the case. In 1994 Flodin had applied for a French driver's license under the name Annika Flodin Mallon.

Mallon.

Either Flodin had married the Dublin book dealer, or, more likely, DiBenedetto suspected, she had married Einhorn, and he had changed his name to Mallon.

That was May 15, Einhorn's 57th birthday. DiBenedetto notified French authorities and gave them the Champagne-Mouton address on the driver's license application. French police, posing as tourists and fishermen, ran surveillance on the farmhouse in Champagne-Mouton. DiBenedetto waited. Days passed. Weeks passed. Finally, on Friday, June 13, word came: there had been an arrest. DiBenedetto could hardly believe it. He didn't trust it until two days later. "That was Father's Day. I thought about Holly's father, about her parents, and I just jumped up and cheered." DiBenedetto's daughter, born when he took the case, is now 15.

The early-to-bed town of farmers was bug-eyed when the case broke, but few people in Champagne-Mouton knew Einhorn, a man who spoke little French and was seldom seen except to pick up his International Herald Tribune twice a week at the village newsstand. A pile of the papers ordered for him sits there now. At the nearby police station, the gendarme who knocked on Einhorn's door wonders if ever again he will see "FBI" on the same line as "Champagne-Mouton" in the papers. There hasn't been a single crime in the village since Einhorn's arrest.

Flodin held a healing party after Ira's arrest, inviting friends to come garden with her. Georges Raynaud, Einhorn's 86-year-old bridge partner, attended. He can't believe Einhorn did it, but his wife jokes with him; make sure your new partner isn't a murderer, she says. When not in crisis, Flodin, the dutiful Earth Mother, still demonstrates against a proposed nuclear-waste dump site nearby. Mayor Jack Jouaron, 68, loves it when she comes to city hall with her leaflets, flush with political passion. "For an old man like me, it was something to talk to a beautiful blond Swedish girl like her," says Jouaron, who wonders how she can be so serene.

Six kilometers up a narrow road, a retired Dutch couple named Hans and Maria Das say they saw Einhorn and Flodin every couple of months. "He was a loudmouth," Maria says, and carried on like an attack dog when someone disagreed.

"I think he did it," she said of the murder. "Of course he did."

All Holly's siblings are older than she ever got to be, and Einhorn's arrest brought bittersweet satisfaction. Meg wants to see Einhorn in court because "I want him to look into my eyes and see what the future of Holly could have been." After the arrest, Elisabeth headed to the cemetery where her parents are buried on either side of Holly. "I want to put some roses on their graves and tell them, 'We got the bastard.'"

Not yet, they didn't.

Ira Einhorn, wearing blue jeans and a tunic made by Flodin, strolled into the Bordeaux courtroom Sept. 2 as if there had never been a body in the trunk or a pack of hounds on his trail or 16 years on the lam. He looked healthy, untroubled, his face ruddy. He played with a silver goatee and casually acknowledged Flodin, who smiled from the back of the courtroom, wearing a bright layered get-up that looked as if it were stolen from the closet of Pippi Longstocking. The Unicorn had had a long time to write himself a new speech, but it must have been 16 years of writer's block. Painting himself large and important, vintage Ira, he dropped such names as Alvin Toffler, claimed he discovered "the Internet before the Internet existed" and said his life was given to the cause of nonviolent social change. He was starting in on the CIA and "the psychological components of weapons systems" when Tricaud, his lawyer, politely told him to shut up.

Tricaud argued that sending Einhorn home to America would violate his civil liberties. The French have trials in absentia, but someone so convicted in France gets a new trial once captured. Extradite Einhorn, and he could be put to death with no chance to defend himself, Tricaud wrongly told the judges. (Einhorn's sentence was life in prison, not death.) In a later interview, an adamant Tricaud described the case as an opportunity for the French to "give the United States a lesson in human rights."

Back home, concerned that French prosecutors had done a lackluster job, as Tricaud gleefully suggested, the Justice Department scrambled last week to bolster the argument for extradition. The decision is scheduled for this Tuesday. "I spent 16 years on this. I'm not going to lie down now," DiBenedetto promised.

If the decision is to extradite, the promised appeal could take years, and Einhorn will remain in French custody. If the decision is not to extradite, that's it. The Unicorn will walk into the cobblestone streets of Bordeaux with his lovely Swedish wife, the dark conspiracies that fill his head and whatever understanding he has reached with the ghost of Holly Maddux.