PHILADELPHIA – Prosecutors had Ira Einhorn read from his own diaries at his murder trial Tuesday, trying to paint a picture of a man whose violent tendencies toward women led to the 1977 slaying of his girlfriend.

The former hippie guru read entries detailing a 1966 attack on a woman who was ending their relationship. After hitting that woman over the head with a bottle and choking her, Einhorn wrote, “Violence always marks the end of a relationship.”

In an exchange with Einhorn that grew tense at times, prosecutor Joel Rosen tried to show that Einhorn’s violent temperament led to the slaying of Holly Maddux 25 years ago.

Einhorn, 62, is charged with bludgeoning Maddux because she wanted to end their turbulent five-year relationship. Her mummified corpse was found in a steamer trunk in his closet in March 1979, 18 months after she disappeared.

Several of the diary entries made days before Maddux’s disappearance referred to violence and Einhorn’s feelings of rejection and loss of control. “I can feel the frustration starting to rage,” read one entry from September 1977.

Einhorn, however, said Rosen was “twisting” his words.

“It’s literature; it’s metaphorical,” he said.

Rosen read several diary entries himself but had Einhorn take over when Einhorn said the prosecutor was not reading with the correct inflection.

Defense attorney William Cannon also had Einhorn read from the diaries, selecting entries after Maddux’s disappearance in which he wrote of his depression over losing her. “An angel lingers in my mind,” he read from an October 1977 entry and appeared to begin crying.

Closing arguments were scheduled Wednesday.

Einhorn has denied killing Maddux, saying someone else did and put the body in his Philadelphia apartment to frame him. In the past, he accused the CIA of setting him up because of his research into the agency’s “psychic warfare” experiments.

Einhorn said that he used the steamer trunk where Maddux’s remains were found to store important papers detailing “new types of weaponry.” Prosecutors say no such papers were found when police discovered the trunk.

Einhorn became known in local hippie culture by organizing “be-ins,” was involved in the city’s first Earth Day in 1970 and ran for mayor as a “catalyst for change.” He developed an international network of corporate sponsors and wealthy benefactors.

He is accused of bludgeoning Maddux because she wanted to end their relationship. He has said that, as far as he knew, she simply left him.

Einhorn jumped bail weeks before his trial was set to begin in 1981, and lived in Europe under assumed names until he was found in France in 1997. He was convicted in absentia in 1993, a verdict that was set aside to clear the way for his extradition in 2001.