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People
vs. Hans Reiser
THE
CASE SO FAR
Hans Reiser and his wife Nina
were embroiled in divorce proceedings on the Labor Day weekend in 2006. Their marriage bliss ended bitterly (no final
divorce has yet been entered), and there have been struggles with support and
custody. According to family law sources, Nina obtained a temporary
restraining order against Hans in 2004, after accusing him of “pushing” her; he
later agreed to a one year, no harassment order.
On the Sunday of that weekend in 2006, Nina dropped off the
couple’s two small children with Hans when he was alone (Hans lived with his
mother who was then attending the burning Man Festival in
The time was mid afternoon. Nina has never been seen since. Her empty car was discovered later with bags of rotting groceries, intact purse and cell phone from which the battery had been disconnected.
In the absence of a corpus delicti, Mr. Reiser is being tried for the murder of his wife.
After a long holiday recess, the case is about at its half
way point in the
Mr. Reiser, born in December 1963, is a genius; he was
involved in the development of Linux, the open source operating system, and he
has created two file systems (ReiserFS and Reiser4)
for that increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft-based operating systems
and software. Hans Reiser is famous in certain circles. His company, Namesys Inc, is soldiering on in his absence, but there are
rumors that it may be sold to help defray its founder’s growing legal
expenses.
Reiser was working in
Reportedly Nina once dated one of Reiser’s colleagues,
one Sean Sturgeon who reportedly has confessed to several murders, but emphatically
not that of Nina.
One of the continuing mysteries surrounding the current case
is why Reiser’s lawyer has not been allowed to do much with this relationship in
open court. I must assume that DuBois has been ordered not to do so, and
that – for reasons best known to the authorities and the parties – Mr. Sturgeon
has been ruled out as a suspect.
So far, the DA has not yet articulated a single detailed theory
to explain how the defendant has eluded every attempt to uncover Nina’s body.
The couple was in marital trouble before Mrs. Reiser’s
sudden disappearance (yes there are blood traces in suspicious places), and
their children have been spirited away to
To follow the action hour to hour, I recommend the blog by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Henry K. Lee. The link is www.sfgate.com/ZBLH .
I interviewed with Henry Lee today for a Chronicle
article to appear Monday.
As I have already pointed out in this space, the case is
nicely balanced, with a tilt towards the prosecution. Here is the key and
what to watch for:
What will the jury hear – or be able to infer - about
the character of the defendant, Hans Reiser?
To prevail, the defense team will need to fill in the blanks
about this man. Who is he really? Is he capable of
murder? What makes him tick?
If Reiser is ready and willing to testify in his own defense, it would be a mistake – in my armchair opinion – not to put him on the witness stand. Evidently, defense attorney Bill DuBois intends to put his client to the test. Yes, there are always pitfalls with that approach, and any cautious defense counsel is always tempted to run the classic “reasonable doubt” gambit without exposing the defendant to cross examination. But I have a gut feeling that close-to-the-vest approach will not work here.
Will Mr. Reiser be able to undergo cross examination without
doing harm to his own case?
In this atypical murder case, the DA will need overwhelming evidence of at least three things:
This is not a slam dunk case even if the DA carries the day
on all three lines of proof.
It may turn on how prosecutor Paul Hora succeeds in addressing the huge hole that remains:
How, plausibly and realistically, could Nina Reiser’s
body have been disposed of so effectively that now, more than a full year after
her disappearance, the authorities remain stumped?
Hans, a Linux software guru, famous enough in his field that
WIRED is following the trial, and Nina, a young Russian woman, were married in
her home country in 1999.
Flash forward to 2006. The cast of characters (minus
Nina’s mother) now lives in the Bay
Nina has just gotten Russian citizenship for the two
children.
On or about Friday, September 1, Hans and Nina bitterly
argue – with the help of lawyers – over how their kids’ time would be sent on
the coming Labor Day Weekend. An agreement is reached that the time would be
split between the parents.
On
Throughout, Nina is driving her 2001 Honda Odyssey Van.
The Reiser’s son, R… - age about 6 - once said (in evidence
now left ambiguous) that he saw Mom depart after he and his sister were dropped
off. Rory also once said that he had a dream or a vision of someone
carrying a large, heavy object down the stairs the night of September 3. That,
too, is in dispute.
Hans’ mother was not home at the
.
It was not until Tuesday, September 5 that someone reported
Nina missing. Nina’s friend Ellen, called the police after picking up the two
kids at school, apparently around
His reply: Uh uh”
(that I take to be a negative).
Then Ellen told Hans that she knows Nina was at his house Sept 3.
Hans’ reply: “I need to talk with my attorney.”
On that same date, Hans was seen hosing down his driveway at
about
On September 6, Nina’s van is discovered parked on the
street about three miles from the
This is what police discovered in the Odyssey van:
When Police finally obtained a search warrant, they searched
the “
There was a
floor-to-ceiling post near the front entrance. There were one blood spot &
two smears about 3 and ½ feet from the floor. Most of the blood was ID’d as Nina’s and some of the blood as Hans’.
Hans’ car is a Honda CRX,
“missing” for some time after suspicion focused on him, but located by police
on September 18 after surveillance and a chase. It was parked on
street. The front passenger seat was missing; the floorboard was
saturated with water. The socket wrench set used to remove the
seat was recovered from the car (later traced to a purchase by Hans in
Other interesting items recovered included a siphon pump,
trash bags, masking tape, paper towels, a copy of Masterpieces of Murder,
and Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.
[The books were purchased by Hans on September 8.]
Traces of Nina’s blood were found in Hans’ car.
It is still unclear exactly where in the vehicle the blood was found, but the
DNA match was solid.
When Hans was brought in for a DNA sample, his fanny pack
was searched. He had $9,000 cash and his passport. His cell phone had its
battery removed.
The Reiser son, now 8 years old, has testified. Young R…
unequivocally stated that he had no contact with Mom since the day she
disappeared; there were no letters, phone calls, nothing whatever from her.
This alone was worth the trip for the prosecution because it will make it next
to impossible to persuade the jury that Nina is alive and well in
After a colloquy about unanswered correspondence with Dad, R…
was allowed to recount his vision, dream or recollection (not at all clear
which) that on the night Mom vanished Dad was carrying a heavy bag down the
stairs that might have contained Mom.
I have to assume that DuBois objected to this testimony (if
it was a dream it is clearly inadmissible, for example) but made his arguments
in chambers outside the presence of the jury. If, after cross
examination, it develops that the stairs testimony was just a dream I would
expect the defense to request a strong admonitory instruction and – failing
that – a mistrial. I can only infer from the ruling that Judge Goodman
thinks the account will qualify as the recollection of a real event.
Cross examination of a sympathetic eight year old is full of
many traps. The last thing that the defense wants to do is to elicit even
more damaging testimony or – by engaging in a heavy cross examination that
doesn’t shake the witness – to strengthen the testimony against the
defendant.
But DuBois could not just let it go. He asked the eight year old son of Han Reiser about the boy’s account that on the day of Mom’s disappearance; young R… he was disturbed by the image of Dad carrying “something big” down the stairs in a bag. He asked whether the boy was dreaming.
[Defense cross examination handbook, Rule One: never ask a question for which you do not already know the answer.]
The answer was a defense nightmare – “I was not asleep”.
This jury obviously likes the Reiser boy. DuBois was placed in the unfortunate position that, having asked for it, he must devote the rest of the defense case to discrediting the answer.
Recall that the DA, wisely, did not portray this eight year
old witness as necessarily having a perfect grasp of events. As of the
‘nightmare’ question and answer, the defense was in the unenviable position of
having made things worse.
In repair, DuBois asked: “You remember you saw your mom go
up into the street?”
“Yes.”
But on redirect, the DA partially rehabilitated the witness.
Hora: “Do you remember whether
your mom even left after she gave you a hug?”
Witness: “No…. She left.”
“How do you know?”
“What can she do?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“No one stays in a house if they say goodbye.”
“Do you remember your mom saying goodbye?’
“Yes.”
“So you think if she said goodbye, she must have
left?”
“Yes.”
Later the jury heard from Ron Zeno who runs something called ‘Safe Exchange’ a place where estranged parents pick up and leave their children. Though innocuous, I suppose it has a sort of Berlin Wall flavor in a murder case. Nina and Hans used Safe Exchange a lot, apparently, and the owner, Ron, was clearly on Nina’s side. The children always ran to her and, in his opinion, she would never abandon them.
This sort of thing is just opinion, of course, but it the
kind of opinion that juries tend to trust because it
accords with common sense and ordinary experience.
An Alameda County Child Support officer confirms that Hans
now owes more than $30k in child support.
A teacher at the children’s school testified that, in her
opinion, Nina would not abandon her children – ‘Those kids were her life.’
Former O.P.D. officer, Ben Denson,
who saw the couple frequently during child exchanges at the police station said
-
“He never put his hands on her
but, you know, I could tell by the way he was looking at her, there was menace
in his eyes…It was very hostile….I told her, ‘You need to get yourself a gun.’’
That had to hurt.
DuBois did the standard cross examination – designed to
remind the jury that a police witness is probably pro-prosecution and so on,
but the damage was done. Most members of the jury will not believe that
former officer Denson was imagining things or making things up just to support
the DA’s case.
As I have already observed, the defense has been gradually
losing ground here on the character issue:
Nina is looking (at the moment) less and less like
someone who would have voluntarily vanished from her children’s lives for a
whole year, and --
Hans – while not yet portrayed as the homicidal character
the DA would prefer – is looking just a bit more dangerous.
THE
TIMELINE ISSUES
Recall that Nina is last seen alive (by anyone except her
killer) at approximately
Tuesday. Nina’s friend picks
up the kids in
What happened between
The jury will soon be trying to imagine a scenario in which
Hans’s could murder Nina out of sight of any witness, then dispose of the body
in the hours following
At this point in the case, the DA may be able to argue that Hans accomplished two things that weekend: (1) He put Nina’s body in the passenger seat of ‘his’ car (a Honda CRX registered to his mother, Mrs. Palmer) and drove to a secluded place, where he temporarily left it hidden. (2) Then he moved Nina’s car to the place where it was eventually found. (3) He disposed of the body somewhere. (4) He washed his car in an attempt to remove all Nina traces (the corpse might have begun to deteriorate by then).
Days later, as police attention on him intensified, Hans removed and disposed of the CRX passenger seat.
MORE TESTIMONY
Monday,
Han’s mother, Beverly Palmer, testified that she returned to
her home (having been at the ‘Burning Man’ festival in
The Honda CRX (owned by Mom but
usually driven by Hans) was missing.
Mrs. Palmer’s favorite car is a Honda hybrid. Hans borrowed
her favorite car – sometime around Sept. 6-8 -
leaving Mom ‘stranded, without any car.’ Hans refused to reveal where her
favorite car had been taken. Apparently Mom rented a car, assuming that Hans’
car (her CRX) wasn’t working.
On September 10, Hans called Mom from
The CRX was recovered by police
(who were tailing Hans) on September 18. The passenger seat was
missing. Mom can’t really remember whether she ever noticed the missing
seat at any pertinent time because she rarely drove it.
Tuesday
Mrs. Palmer answered a phone call from Hans about three
weeks after Nina ‘vanished’. The conversation was wiretapped. Hans
told Mom that his wife was a liar, loose with money, that she was a danger to
her children, that she had kicked him once. After his tirade, Mrs. Palmer
repeatedly asked whether she ‘deserved’ what had happened to her and repeatedly
Hans avoided agreeing with her. On cross examination, DuBois got Mom to
say that Hans was not – in her opinion – a violent person.
Forensic alert:
The defense has now fully opened
the issue of whether the defendant has a propensity for violence. A door
has opened—I wonder if the DA has anything to drive through it.
But the defense did make headway
with Mom on the blood issue. According to her, the post in the front room
where traces of blood identified to both Nina and Hans were recovered was
bumped by most everyone at sometime. Moreover, the smudge from which the
blood traces were recovered looked the same before she left town for
Forensic Note: Expect additional blood evidence.
Wednesday
Today, the jury heard sympathetic testimony from Nina’s
boyfriend, Anthony Zografos, a
engineer with a doctorate from UCB who had spent the
day with Nina and the kids in
SOME COMMENTS
During these three days, a stage is being set for a
performance. In the end it will be Hans himself who pulls this case out
or drags it down.
As additional evidence comes in, keep the timeline in mind.
What happened between the afternoon of September 3 and the time that Mrs. Palmer, having returned the previous day, awoke to learn that her daughter in law was missing?
One more thing about the emerging timeline: Yesterday,
it was revealed that Nina’s recovered cellphone number (recall that it was
found in her car - battery removed) had several unanswered messages from
friends. For this, the jury will reasonably draw the inference that she
was out of the picture sometime on the afternoon of September 3, the day she
said goodbye to her kids and happily text messaged her boyfriend.
At a
A month before her disappearance, Nina met with a bankruptcy
attorney. She was deep in debt. One asset was her community
property interest in Hans’ company, but her overall position was so bleak that
she couldn’t possibly get a ‘fresh start’ without filing. She told the
attorney that she was to start a new job at the end of September. They discussed
whether Hans would do a joint filing with her. She vanished before the
follow-up appointment.
ELLEN’S
TESTIMONY
Wednesday, the DA called Nina’s girlfriend Ellen (she was
the friend who picked up the children from school when Nina vanished). Her
testimony shed light on the timeline and I suspect the effect on the jury was
devastating.
It seems that, on the day Nina vanished, she was to meet
Ellen at
Ellen picked up the kids at an
You can be certain that, after hearing this testimony, not
one juror is willing to believe that Nina had just decided to abandon her
children and flee to
DuBois attempted with little success to use his opportunity
to cross examine Ellen (she to portray Nina’s relationship with her nice
boyfriend (Mr. Zografos) as less than fully trusting,
and to draw out derogatory information about the ‘bad’ boyfriend, Mr.
Sturgeon. Neither effort yielded anything materially useful to the
defense.
Dubois asked Ellen whether she had talked to the Reiser boy
about his statement at the preliminary hearing before judge Conger (not before
the jury) where he described Mom as having actually left the
Ellen couldn’t recall anything like that. But DuBois
persisted in the line of questioning, hoping to imprint the matter in the
jury’s mind. This was a high stakes moment in the trial. It appears
that the boy’s prior testimony is not going to be read to the jury, so the
defense is stuck with the more ambiguous version he gave in this courtroom.
WHERE
IS THE BODY?
The jury now knows vividly what it earlier only heard in
outline. The cumulative power of this evidence continues to shift the inquiry
and focus to – How could Hans have pulled this off?
If Hans killed his wife, his behavior at the after school
program not long after Nina was last seen alive was consistent with someone who
had just realized that he’s ‘solved’ his marital problem only to acquire a new
one: What do I do with the body?
When this jury retires to
deliberate some time next year, they will ask for a map and a calendar.
At this stage in the trial Hans is looking to this jury more
and more like the one person who can answer the question: What really happened
to Nina? The jury will probably never buy Hans’ conspiracy defense,
leaving his lawyer to develop an effective reasonable doubt argument in spite
of his client’s ‘KGB’ theories.
The things that Hans must sell personally, while getting
through a long and challenging cross examination are:
That Nina left alive
Why the blood traces were
found where they were.
What happened to the car seat.
A serious failure on the witness stand by this defendant
could greatly help the prosecution. But – unless Hans actually confesses
– the DA still has an evidentiary hole to close.
To convict Hans of killing
Nina, the prosecution will need to advance at least one plausible theory,
consistent with all the evidence and supported by at least some of it, covering
the following questions:
But some of the heavy lifting has already been done.
All members of this jury now understand why Hans would want to kill Nina, and
many of them are beginning to get used to the idea that he was actually
emotionally capable of doing it.
For now, let’s ask ourselves the
question that the DA must eventually try to answer.
How
could Hans have disposed of Nina’s corpse by himself?
I see six possible means,
listing them in ascending order of likelihood:
A cursory review of the
literature on women’s diving equipment yields the information that the natural
buoyancy of a living woman’s body (remember her lungs would be holding air) is
easily overcome with about 40 pounds of additional dead weight. A cursory
review of salvage companies dealing in wrecked automobile parts suggests that
the Honda CRX passenger seat would weigh enough to
cancel the natural buoyancy of Nina’s corpse.
A quick look at a Google
satellite map of the area north of Skyline Drive in Oakland, i.e., north of
Hans’ location when Nina became “missing”, reveals a convenient body of water
easily accessed by driving through the adjacent Redwood Regional Park. One
easily gets to Chabot Reservoir, 315 acres, average depth 27 feet, with miles
of water access from the road. Also in the running is the upper San Leandro Reservoir. Map at -- http://maps.yahoo.com/#lon=-122.121706&lat=37.78235&mag=3 .
Click on satellite view & note that Hans would be somewhere near the lower
left corner of the map.
If Hans is guilty, it is
manifestly in his interest to get this trial over with (prevailing of course)
before Nina’s body breaks free and floats to the surface, turns up in a remote
storage bin or landfill. Jeopardy will have attached and he could not then be
retried (assuming an acquittal of course).
THAT
TIMELINE AGAIN
The critical time period is
about 50 hours: starting from when Nina left or didn't leave on dropping the
kids about
What follows is offered as
a guess, only:
Re the first critical
50 hours - it appears that Hans was alone with the kids from say
ONE HYPOTHETICAL TIMELINE
I’m indebted to Professor
Maria Chang (political science,
Recall that
two days after Nina’s last visit, on Sept 5, Hans gets a call from his mother
at around
If – as we will assume for
purposes of this hypothetical narrative - that Reiser has killed Nina but
hasn’t yet figured out what to do with her remains, Hans knows he must now
quickly dispose of the body. And he has but a few hours to accomplish
that.
So he drives the CRX somewhere within a 2 to 3 hour perimeter & accomplishes
at least a temporary disposal. [I note that this theory would then entail a
further attempt to move the body to a more secure location still – say outside
the Tahoe area?]
This urgent drive is
stressful & exhausting. This theory explains why - when Hans shows up at
Mark’s house that night, driving not the CRX but
Mom’s hybrid —he is so exhausted that he must lie down on Mark’s couch in the living
room to rest before he can drive his mother home.
After his mother goes to
bed, Hans then takes the CRX out onto the driveway to
hose it down – presumably to wash away incriminating evidence. This soaks the
car floor & possibly gets water into the gas tank. That may explain why, on
Sept 10, Hans buys a bottle of Valvoline fuel-dryer
at Kragen Auto in
The jury will probably
assume that Hans had not yet removed the passenger seat on Sept 5 when he is
seen by neighbor Jack Stabb hosing something in his driveway.
[Hans may still think at this early point that he can wash away all the
incriminating evidence, but seat fabric can retail biological traces.] The officer who gives Hans a ticket on Sept 12
does not report seeing anything unusual about the car. This is a close call –
assuming Hans is the killer. The jury will also likely infer that Hans is so
spooked by this encounter that he resolves to not drive the CRX.
Did Hans take – or plan to
take the car to
Hans may well have removed
the passenger seat on Sept 17. That day, he was in
Apparently Hans changed his
mind about renting a locker to store the CRX. Instead,
he rented a U-Haul truck for a one-way trip from
When the CRX was recovered, the police noticed that the passenger
seat was missing. It was taken to crime technicians the next morning who
eventually found traces of Nina’s blood and that of the defendant.
Was the
We can reasonably suspect (again
as we pursue the hypothetical path of a killer seeking to hide evidence) that
Hans’ goal was to move something from somewhere near
STAY
TUNED….