Philadelphia ? A jury on Wednesday began deliberating the fate of Ira Einhorn, the former hippie guru accused of killing his girlfriend in 1979.

Einhorn’s attorney said during his closing argument that the discovery of the mummified corpse in the apartment the couple once shared is “just a piece of circumstantial evidence” that doesn’t prove his client’s guilt.

“It doesn’t mean at all that Ira Einhorn is responsible for her murder,” William Cannon said.

Prosecutor Joel Rosen said the evidence of Einhorn’s guilt is overwhelming.

Jurors deliberated more than an hour Wednesday before retiring for the day. They were to resume their work today.

Einhorn, 62, is accused of killing Holly Maddux 25 years ago because she wanted to end their turbulent five-year relationship. Her remains were found in a steamer trunk in the closet of their Philadelphia apartment in 1979, 18 months after she disappeared.

He could get life in prison if convicted.

Cannon said that there is a lack of physical evidence tying Einhorn to the crime and that Maddux’s bludgeoning death would have left bloodstains in the apartment. The lack of blood suggests she was killed somewhere else and later placed in the trunk, Cannon said.

Einhorn has denied killing Maddux and maintains the body was put there to frame him. He has accused the CIA of setting him up because of his research into the agency’s “psychic warfare” experiments.

“There were people who simply didn’t like Ira Einhorn, people who were capable of doing something about it and, I suggest, did something about it,” Cannon said.

Rosen called those allegations ridiculous.

“It is so laughable and so ludicrous, it is so outrageous, you should be offended,” he said. “If a woman wasn’t brutally murdered, you would almost laugh at it.”

Prosecutors had Einhorn read to the jury 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.”

Prosecutors also called the former owner of a bookstore who said Einhorn once asked for a “how-to” book on mummification.

Einhorn jumped bail weeks before his trial was set to begin in 1981, and he 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.