Holly Maddux

It's been a surreal week for the sisters of Holly Maddux. On Tuesday, Buffy Hall and Meg Wakeman were in France, along with their sister, Mary, hoping to hear that the man who murdered their sister would finally be brought to justice, only to learn that the decision on extraditing him would be postponed until Feb. 18. On Wednesday, Hall, who lives outside Fort Worth, Texas, and Wakeman, who lives in Seattle, flew from Paris to Los Angeles....

Ira Einhorn's legal defense team plans to present expert forensic testimony from the chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C., who supervised the high-profile autopsy of missing intern Chandra Levy. Jonathan Arden has prepared a report for the Einhorn case, based on his review of three sets of forensic tests on evidence from inside and around the steamer trunk in which the mummified body of Holly Maddux was found in 1979, defense attorney William Cannon said. The evidence - and conflicting expert testimony on whether the trunk and the rug and floorboards beneath it contained human residue - is a crucial component of Einhorn's defense that someone else killed Maddux and then planted her corpse inside his closet.

Joyce Costello remembers the incident clearly: Her friend Ira Einhorn called her in mid-September 1977, saying he was in "trouble" and asking her to come to his Powelton Village apartment. Costello telephoned a girlfriend who had introduced her to Einhorn a few months earlier, and together they went to his apartment, Costello testified yesterday at Einhorn's murder trial in Common Pleas Court. Rather than invite them in, Einhorn suggested that they take a ride in his car to West River Drive, she said.

French Premier Lionel Jospin has signed papers to extradite Ira Einhorn, the onetime Philadelphia counterculture guru convicted in absentia of the murder of Holly Maddux, to the United States. He fled 19 years ago. Einhorn has 60 days to appeal to France's Council of State, the nation's highest legal administrative body, and it may be months or years before that process is exhausted. Reached by telephone at his home in the village of Champagne-Mouton, France, Einhorn reacted with surprise yesterday that Jospin had signed the extradition papers.

Police arrived at Ira Einhorn's Powelton Village apartment on March 28, 1979, pried open a padlocked closet and found inside a locked steamer trunk the decaying body of Holly Maddux, a former officer testified yesterday at the opening of Einhorn's murder trial. Einhorn answered the door shortly before 9 a.m. in a bathrobe and looking disheveled, said retired officer Robert E. Coates, who went to the apartment with a warrant to search for evidence relating to the woman's disappearance.

Former fugitive Ira Einhorn will have an unprecedented new trial on charges the counterculture guru murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux in 1977, a Philadelphia judge decided yesterday. In a brief hearing without Einhorn present, Common Pleas Court Judge D. Webster Keogh said he would "resist the temptation to consider the constitutionality" of the special law that had been designed to win Einhorn's extradition from France by granting him a second trial. Legislation is always presumed to be constitutional, Keogh noted, and District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham's office supports Einhorn's right to a new trial.

Ira Einhorn's attorney suggested to a jury yesterday that his client's establishment enemies may have disliked him enough to plant Holly Maddux's mummified body inside his Powelton Village apartment. "The mere fact that Holly's body was found in Ira's closet is just a piece of circumstantial evidence," William Cannon said during closing arguments in Common Pleas Court. Cannon said that in the fall or winter of 1978 - while Einhorn was living at Harvard University - someone could have wrapped Maddux's corpse in a rug, used the keys found in her pocket to enter the Powelton Village apartment, and placed her body in Einhorn's steamer trunk inside a closet.

Holly Maddux, Ira Einhorn's girlfriend, died of at least six blows to the head delivered with such force that fragments of her skull were driven into her brain, a former Philadelphia medical examiner testified yesterday. Halbert E. Fillinger disputed that the killer had accidentally killed Maddux, or that her injuries resulted from a fall. "I would certainly rule out the possibility of a fall, since the injuries came from the left, the right and the front," Fillinger testified at Einhorn's trial on murder charges in Common Pleas Court.

Ira Einhorn has insisted for nearly 25 years that he did not murder his former girlfriend Holly Maddux and stuff her battered body in a trunk. Beginning today - in his unprecedented second trial - the former fugitive will finally face her family and friends and a jury of Philadelphians. For the first time, he will be in court to help his appointed attorneys mount his defense. And the man who refused to surrender the microphone at the first Earth Day in 1970 may even take the witness stand and tell a jury he is innocent.

Grisly autopsy photos of Holly Maddux made the courtroom audience gasp yesterday, but accused killer Ira Einhorn intently stared at the giant image of his former girlfriend's smashed skull projected on a screen at his trial. Einhorn, 62, put on his wire-rimmed glasses to look more closely at the colored images of Maddux's corpse. He raised his arm to point out details to his defense team. And at one point, he turned to his attorney and smiled. "That was a really inappropriate reaction," Maddux's sister Meg Wakeman later angrily told reporters.

IRA EINHORN still has the white hair and goatee he sported in 2002, when he was convicted of killing his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, whose mummified remains were found in a trunk in Einhorn's Powelton Village apartment in 1979. And those blue eyes haven't lost their freaky intensity as he approaches the eighth anniversary, this Sunday, of his conviction. But, at 70, Einhorn is thinner than the husky bear we knew back then. His hairline has receded, revealing a scalp that looks like marbled ham, and he has lost some front teeth.

Montgomery County Coroner Halbert E. Fillinger Jr., 79, of Ambler, a forensic pathologist whose scientific sleuthing helped solve hundreds of homicides, died Sunday of complications from Parkinson's disease at Abington Memorial Hospital. Dr. Fillinger had been the county coroner for 14 years and was at work until a week ago. Fillinger testified in some of the region's highest profile murder trials, including the 2002 murder trial of Ira Einhorn, the counterculture figure who had killed his girlfriend and stuffed the body in a trunk.

A charismatic career cop, known as "Batman" by some, is thinking about coming back to the Philadelphia area he left nearly two decades ago. Michael Chitwood Sr., 61, police chief in Portland, Maine, said yesterday that he was negotiating with Upper Darby officials, who are looking for a leader to replace Superintendent Vincent J. Ficchi, who is retiring in the fall. "We're still talking," said Chitwood, reached in Portland. "Right now, we haven't finalized any deal. " In Philadelphia law enforcement circles, "Chitwood" is a household name.

Cable TV's gaping maw demands programming, and it can turn the most respectable intentions into sleaze city. Tonight's case in point: Interpol Investigates at 10 p.m. and its luridly uninformative rehash of the famous case of Ira Einhorn, which cheapens the often distinguished National Geographic Channel. "When crimes are committed," breathless narrator Michael Shapiro gushes, "an international organization unites police officers to deliver justice. " You know the show's dying to follow that rip-off of the Law & Order prologue with the distinctive musical dunh-dunt, but that would unite an international organization of copyright lawyers to deliver subpoenas.

Former Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge William M. Marutani, 81, a civil-rights advocate who was no stranger to discrimination, died Monday at home in Lumberton, Burlington County. He had suffered from Parkinson's disease. Gabriel Bevilacqua, chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, said yesterday: "Judge Marutani was an ideal Philadelphia lawyer. He was committed to pro bono, a leading jurist, and a caring colleague and friend. " The association was scheduled to give Judge Marutani the Bar Medal for lifetime achievement next month.

The unflappable and methodical prosecutor who twice convicted Ira Einhorn of murder and put the hippie fugitive away for life has left the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office for private practice. Joel Rosen, who worked in the office for 22 years and once headed the elite Major Trials Unit, began work this week as a personal injury lawyer for the Center City firm Kessler Cohen & Roth. The firm handles plaintiffs' litigation in product liability and medical malpractice. "It's a group of great lawyers - very bright attorneys - and they have great cases," Rosen said yesterday.

In a terse, hand-printed letter from prison, convicted murderer Ira Einhorn attempted to fire his defense attorney during his appeal. After two decades on the run in Europe, Einhorn, a counterculture guru, was convicted in October of the 1977 slaying of his former girlfriend Holly Maddux. Veteran defense attorney William Cannon was appointed by the court to handle the high-profile murder trial and initial appeal. But in a Feb. 21 letter to Cannon, a copy of which Einhorn sent to The Inquirer, Einhorn wrote: ". . . To reiterate for the third time, I no longer wish you to act in any way as my lawyer.

IN HIS Dec. 7 op-ed, Christopher Hitchens was dead on with his appraisal of Henry Kissinger as a friend of tyrants and keeper of America's dirty secrets. Kissinger's crimes against humanity and the democratic ideal have been exhaustively documented by scholars, activists, and, most importantly, by the families of his many victims. The Daily News waged a campaign for years to have Ira Einhorn extradited from France in order to have some semblance of justice served for the family of Holly Maddux.

NOW THAT the Ira Einhorn situation is mercifully behind us, perhaps the Daily News - with its "journalistic license" - can take a long look at your deplorable and irresponsible methods of journalism throughout the chase, capture, trial and conviction of Einhorn. The Daily News treated the Holly Maddux murder case as nothing more than a joke. As if the stupid tomato-toss contests didn't provide readers with enough juvenile behavior from so-called adults, later came a "news" article (Oct.

For 22 days last month, the Philadelphians who convicted Ira Einhorn of first-degree murder lived and dined in the Courtyard by Marriott hotel across the street from the Criminal Justice Center - at a cost to the city of more than $95,000. But the full price of tracking down the fugitive and bringing him to justice a full quarter-century after the murder of his former girlfriend Holly Maddux is probably incalculable. After the counterculture leader jumped bail in 1981 on the eve of trial, investigators from the District Attorney's Office and the FBI followed his trail through Ireland, England, Sweden, Denmark and France.