PHILADELPHIA – Former hippie guru Ira Einhorn, who hid out in Europe for nearly 17 years after being charged with killing his girlfriend, was found guilty Thursday of murdering her and stuffing her mummified corpse in his closet.

Einhorn, 62, was given an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole on the first-degree murder charge.

He showed no emotion upon hearing the verdict, which drew smiles from the family of his victim, 30-year-old Holly Maddux.

Einhorn was a 1970s counterculture superstar who held “be-in” events and counted yippie Jerry Rubin and rock star Peter Gabriel among his acquaintances.

He insisted he was innocent and said he last saw Maddux in 1977 as she left to make a phone call. He said he had no idea how her body turned up in a steamer trunk in his apartment closet.

Judge William J. Mazzola had harsh words for Einhorn after the verdict was read, calling him “an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced people.”

After the verdict, Michael Chitwood, the police chief in Portland, Maine, said Einhorn had finally reached his “day of destiny” after 20 years on the run in France. Chitwood was a Philadelphia detective when he found Maddux’s body in a steamer trunk in Einhorn’s apartment in 1979.

“He’ll no longer be in the wine vineyards drinking his wine and eating his cheese,” Chitwood said. “He’ll be in a state penitentiary in Pennsylvania where he belongs.”

Defense attorney William Cannon said Einhorn planned to appeal.

The guilty verdict, reached after 21/2 hours of deliberations, capped a stunning fall for a gadfly who lived the life of a country gentleman during his time in France. He talked on television shows after his arrest five years ago and posed naked in his garden for Esquire magazine.

Prosecutors said Einhorn was a loutish womanizer who turned violent whenever a woman wanted to leave him. They had him read to jurors from his poems and diary entries, in which he wrote “to kill what you love when you can’t have it seems so natural” and “violence always marks the end of a relationship.”

Einhorn was captured in France in 1997, 20 years after Maddux vanished. He was returned to the United States last year after assurances were made to the French government that his 1993 conviction in absentia would be vacated and he would not face the death penalty.

“Metaphorically speaking, Ira Einhorn and his Virgo moon are toast,” said District Attorney Lynne Abraham, whose office had pursued Einhorn for years.

Maddux’s sister, Meg Wakeman, told jurors that Maddux was “the leading light and life of our lives” and called her killing “a simple act of utter selfishness.”

During the trial, friends and acquaintances of Maddux described seeing her bruised and intimidated during her tumultuous five-year relationship with Einhorn.

Former friend Michael Hoffman testified that Einhorn once discussed attacking a former girlfriend in 1966.

“He thought that at the base of all human interaction was violence, at the base of our internal being was violence,” Hoffman testified, adding that Einhorn drew his ideas from the writings of the Marquis de Sade, among others.

Prosecutors also called to the stand the former owner of a bookstore who said Einhorn once asked for a “how-to” book on mummification – one that specified the “herbs or any liquid used in the process.”

Einhorn, the final witness, said Maddux had trouble with his womanizing.

He denied abusing or killing her, and suggested that someone could have gotten into his apartment while he was away from home in 1978. He also said he didn’t learn until a court appearance that Maddux’s remains had been found in his closet.

“When I finally found out it was Holly, I broke up for days. It ripped me to pieces,” he told a packed courtroom.

Einhorn said he was framed by the CIA because of his knowledge of what he called their secret mind-control weapon experiments. He did not say in court who he believed was responsible for her death.

On Thursday, Cannon said Einhorn felt he had no choice but to testify.

“We wanted to put ourselves in a position where we could neutralize what they put on and win or lose with Ira. Ira has been mesmerizing and charming people his whole life,” Cannon said.

But jury forewoman Diane Green called the evidence against Einhorn “overwhelming” and said that Einhorn didn’t help himself by taking the stand. “We felt he conflicted some of his own statements,” she said.

Another juror, Tracy Garett, said he was angry that Einhorn couldn’t get the death penalty.

“He had a warped mind,” Garett said. “Even on the stand, it was like he thought he was God.”

Einhorn once hobnobbed with the influential players of Philadelphia’s moneyed establishment, as well as counterculture figures.

He demonstrated against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and took part in the first Earth Day in 1970 – though an Earth Day organizer testified that was only because he forced his way onto the stage. His New Age philosophy got him jobs as a consultant and speaker for big firms, including Bell Telephone, which looked to Einhorn to explain how they could tap into the counterculture.

Represented by soon-to-be Sen. Arlen Specter at a 1979 hearing, Einhorn was released on an unusually low $40,000 bail – largely thanks to testimony from prominent Philadelphians about his excellent character. To be released, he needed only $4,000, which was paid by Barbara Bronfman, then an heiress by marriage of the Seagram distillery family, who shared Einhorn’s interest in the paranormal.

Einhorn vanished on the eve of his 1981 trial. In 1993, he was convicted in absentia of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.