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In most countries -- and France is no exception -- extradition isn't something that happens overnight, or even over a period of weeks. It takes months, sometimes years of court hearings, and even then you're not done. Einhorn won the first round, in the fall of 1997, when a three-judge panel refused to extradite because French law prohibits sending back people convicted in absentia unless they will be given a new trial. Pennsylvania hurriedly pushed through a law granting Einhorn a new hearing, prosecutors promised they wouldn't seek the death penalty (the French legal system objects to capital punishment), and they asked again for extradition. This time they won, though, incredibly, considering Einhorn's history, the court released him on bail. A smiling Unicorn returned with his wife to Champagne-Mouton, where for at least a while longer he will continue to live the good life in the wine country. But his time in the vineyard may finally be running out.
TIME's Steve Lopez tells the story of the 16-year search for the Unicorn, and of the determined Philadelphia detective who finally tracked him down.
September 29, 1997
The Search for the Unicorn
By Steve Lopez
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 pounds. 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.