I worked with Hans and his team a few years back on an experimental ReiserFS-based filesystem for Squid (still the fastest Squid ever, as far as I know), and find the whole thing difficult to believe. He very likely suffers from Aspergers ("suffers" in this case, since it seems to have led to his conviction due to his insistence on taking the stand and deep misunderstanding of human nature and how his behavior would appear to others...it seems to be a beneficial condition for some folks, ordinarily, at least with regard to productivity, but when it comes to a jury they aren't likely to be your peers), or a similar condition, and I always found his famously obstinate behavior more amusing than threatening.
I, of course, have no idea if he committed the crime, but I find his bizarre explanations far more believable than the jury. He really is just that kind of person...a bit paranoid, extremely analytical, and significantly smarter than the vast majority of people. This is true even among extremely smart folks, like those on the Linux kernel mailing list, he's probably among the smartest in the conversation. But he's also lacking in many social skills to the point that his involvement in a discussion usually hurts more than helps--reading his numerous arguments on the LKML is like seeing a warm up for his bizarre performance on the stand.
So, one could make the case that Hans' feeling of superiority, which might be hard to avoid for someone as smart as he is, and his paranoia combined to produce this very result. Perhaps he figured he'd get away with it, because he's so much smarter than everyone else. And perhaps his paranoia convinced him that Nina had plans to steal away with his children and he'd never see them again (there is some evidence that this was actually her plan). Since the average American has a rather deeply ingrained mistrust of really smart people, his particularly ornery and superior attitude certainly didn't help him.
I genuinely like Hans, and think very highly of him as a developer...so I'm not going to spend a lot of time dwelling on the uncomfortable thoughts of whether he committed the crime or not. I'll just hope that if he did, he gets some help for his mental illness while imprisoned (I'm assuming that if he did it, it's due to his paranoia being far worse than is apparent in his public persona), and that he's able to accept responsibility for the act. And, if he didn't do it, I hope that something comes out that exonerates him before he's too old to enjoy a return to freedom.
Sorry, but from what I have been reading the guy comes out as a narcissist/sociopath. Just being an aspie doesn't justify anything. I have aspie friends, (very smart ones), and they know wrong to right.
1. Reiser showed up at his childrens' school the day after Labor day, the first school day after Nina disappeared and a day when Nina was supposed to pick up the kids. The prosecuter claims he was making sure the police didn't show up to ask where the kids' mother was. Reiser claims he went there to add his mother, Beverly Palmer, to the list of people that could pick up the kids. He was scheduled to pick up the kids the next day.
2. Hans' Honda CRX was missing the front passenger seat. It went missing sometime after he got a speeding ticket (after Nina disappeared) and before the police seized the vehicle.
3. Hans admits his hosed out the inside of the car. He removed the seat and threw it away. He also removed the carpet and disposed of it.
4. The car was also missing a piece of trim that Hans admits to throwing out.
5. Han's admits he was trying to hide the car from the police.
6. Nina's van was found three miles from Hans' home. Her cell phone was found in the van with the battery removed.
7. When Hans was taken into custody his cell phone did not have a battery in it. On the stand he claimed that he did not remove the battery from his own phone. He later admitted he lied about that. He actually removed it frequently after Nina disappeared.
8. Along with his cell phone, Hans was carrying his passport and several thousand dollars in cash.
9. Reiser was seen hosing down the driveway to his mother's home shortly after Nina disappeared.
10. The police found two books on murder in Reiser's car. He had purchased them with cash shortly after Nina disappeared.
11. He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case. He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.
Regardless of whether he did it or not, this seems like a failure of the justice system - sentencing someone to 25 years in prison for a murder in which there is "no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence". He must have had an absolutely horrible lawyer.
The very first thing he did when he took the stand on cross from the DA was to admit that he had lied about a material fact of the case, allowing the jury to be instructed that the rest of his testimony was untrustworthy. He did a pretty spectacularly bad job on the stand.
I'm surprised he went down for murder 1, but there was a pretty damning array of things lined up against him. Aspergers or not, he admittedly ripped up and flooded his car while trying to actively hide it from the police in a storage locker; he claimed a 6-inch(!)-wide blood stain on a bag (not a sleeping bag, but its pouch) in that car was from having sex; and finally, he built his case not on the premise that he didn't kill Nina, but that she was still alive --- a very simple assertion for the DA to knock down.
Once you take the stand, you have no control over how long you will be on the stand. The fifth amendment insures you don't have to testify if it will hurt your case...but if you agree to be questioned, both sides get to ask pretty much all the questions they want within the bounds of the law and the patience of the judge.
But, yes, it's clear that him taking the stand was the worst possible thing he could do and he apparently fought loudly and repeatedly with his lawyer over this decision.
I don't understand. It sounds like you think that any murderer who can hide a body and clean a crime scene should be impossible to convict.
There's nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. It's used all the time. The ambiguity you're having trouble coping with is the reason we have juries and strict rules regarding admissability.
If there is no body, how does one know it isn't an elaborate framing?
In this case, one could argue as follows:
Nina disappears, and one or more friends help her get to Russia incognito (go through Mexico, perhaps).
Children go into custody of her parents who take them back to Russia.
Meanwhile, Hans is the first suspect, as is always the case in murder cases where there is a spouse or former spouse with some plausible motive and no good alibi...he is known to be paranoid by anyone that knows him, so begins to behave erratically when police begin to pay attention to him.
Perhaps someone (maybe Nina, maybe the serial killer friend, maybe someone else) had sprinkled a little blood on the front seat of his car (and in his house and the sleeping bag). He panics when he sees it and rips the seat out and disposes of it. Since he didn't commit the crime in this scenario he wouldn't have even known about the blood in the sleeping bag or the house.
Since producing some blood is pretty trivial, it means that anyone with the means and willingness to disappear could frame anyone for murder.
There is a reason why murder cases without a body or murder weapon pretty rarely result in conviction. And, I suspect, had Hans taken his lawyer's advice and not taken the stand, he would have probably had a much better chance, even with the pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
I'm not saying Hans didn't do it...I don't know. But I know that circumstantial evidence should be viewed with suspicion, when 25 years of someones life is on the line. The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted, and this principle is even more important than every guilty man being punished.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I imagine in almost every case where someone is convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, there is actual evidence that a murder occurred.
I don't necessarily have a problem with circumstantial evidence, I just think that this is a very harsh sentence when there is no real evidence that anyone was killed.
I have to say, his wife looks cute and very normal. He looks weird. No wonder the jury was sympathetic to the prosecutors claim. It is just normal human reaction.
My theory has always been that this is Sean Sturgeon's tenth murder. Number nine was Nina. And the plan for number ten was getting Hans convicted of murder and put to death by the state. The ultimate thrill for the serial killer who no longer draws excitement from mere axe murdering and dismemberment.
Hans couldn't possibly be a murderer despite the evidence, but you believe some guy killed 8 people with no evidence whatsoever? They might not have found Nina's body, but the supposed other 8 victims don't even have names. It was just a bullshit story to cast some doubt.
Just to be clear, I don't actually believe that. I just think it's a cool idea, but I didn't want to log out and make a new account just to post it as a short story.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to add Paul Graham to the programming language creator or serial killer game?
I don't understand it, the article says he faces a sentence of "25 years to life in prison", but what exactly is the number of years he will have to be in prison? Why is it a range?
The law gives the judge some discretion in sentencing: in this case the judge can pick any duration between 25 years and life. Reiser has not been sentenced yet.
"Never mind the fact that her ex-lover states that he's killed multiple
people in the past, her family has ties to russian organised crime, and the
kids have gone to St Petersburg, most likely with their mother."
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. although, I suppose I don't really trust the US justice system. I've seen people I know innocent get convicted recently. But his behavior is unfortunately highly suspect.
"Hora speculated that Reiser might have choked his wife, based on little evidence except that Reiser was a black belt in judo, a martial art where choking is a specialty."
Judo, meaning "gentle way", is apparently the martial art that teaches you how to kill your wife.
I can just imagine it:
"And Hans Reiser was heard arguing with his wife - just like he'd practiced for years on the mailing lists of open source communities where overly-violent and highly-sensitive people are known to dwell and practice verbal abuse quite often."
As a kid, I had a few years of Judo training and I have never learned how to choke a person. From my experience, Judo is about catching or throwing opponents off-balance (often with their unwilling help) and disarming and immobilizing them so they can't harm you.
Of all martial arts, Judo is one of the gentlest. I can hardly imagine using it to kill someone who does not really want to get killed.
As for Mr. Sturgeon, misreporting a crime, specially if it's done with the intention of compromising a murder investigation, is a serious offense. I am not sure why the police didn't get him.
And, while we are at it, it is a real no-no do screw your friend's wife.
I worked with Hans and his team a few years back on an experimental ReiserFS-based filesystem for Squid (still the fastest Squid ever, as far as I know), and find the whole thing difficult to believe. He very likely suffers from Aspergers ("suffers" in this case, since it seems to have led to his conviction due to his insistence on taking the stand and deep misunderstanding of human nature and how his behavior would appear to others...it seems to be a beneficial condition for some folks, ordinarily, at least with regard to productivity, but when it comes to a jury they aren't likely to be your peers), or a similar condition, and I always found his famously obstinate behavior more amusing than threatening.
I, of course, have no idea if he committed the crime, but I find his bizarre explanations far more believable than the jury. He really is just that kind of person...a bit paranoid, extremely analytical, and significantly smarter than the vast majority of people. This is true even among extremely smart folks, like those on the Linux kernel mailing list, he's probably among the smartest in the conversation. But he's also lacking in many social skills to the point that his involvement in a discussion usually hurts more than helps--reading his numerous arguments on the LKML is like seeing a warm up for his bizarre performance on the stand.
So, one could make the case that Hans' feeling of superiority, which might be hard to avoid for someone as smart as he is, and his paranoia combined to produce this very result. Perhaps he figured he'd get away with it, because he's so much smarter than everyone else. And perhaps his paranoia convinced him that Nina had plans to steal away with his children and he'd never see them again (there is some evidence that this was actually her plan). Since the average American has a rather deeply ingrained mistrust of really smart people, his particularly ornery and superior attitude certainly didn't help him.
I genuinely like Hans, and think very highly of him as a developer...so I'm not going to spend a lot of time dwelling on the uncomfortable thoughts of whether he committed the crime or not. I'll just hope that if he did, he gets some help for his mental illness while imprisoned (I'm assuming that if he did it, it's due to his paranoia being far worse than is apparent in his public persona), and that he's able to accept responsibility for the act. And, if he didn't do it, I hope that something comes out that exonerates him before he's too old to enjoy a return to freedom.
Sorry, but from what I have been reading the guy comes out as a narcissist/sociopath. Just being an aspie doesn't justify anything. I have aspie friends, (very smart ones), and they know wrong to right.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/29/...
"significantly smarter than the vast majority of people." -- And criminals too. If he really did it (IF), he did a good job hiding the body.
"And criminals too."
That's not that hard. Criminals are notoriously really dumb. And lazy.
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Summary of the evidence, from /.: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=537280&cid=23231...
1. Reiser showed up at his childrens' school the day after Labor day, the first school day after Nina disappeared and a day when Nina was supposed to pick up the kids. The prosecuter claims he was making sure the police didn't show up to ask where the kids' mother was. Reiser claims he went there to add his mother, Beverly Palmer, to the list of people that could pick up the kids. He was scheduled to pick up the kids the next day.
2. Hans' Honda CRX was missing the front passenger seat. It went missing sometime after he got a speeding ticket (after Nina disappeared) and before the police seized the vehicle.
3. Hans admits his hosed out the inside of the car. He removed the seat and threw it away. He also removed the carpet and disposed of it.
4. The car was also missing a piece of trim that Hans admits to throwing out.
5. Han's admits he was trying to hide the car from the police.
6. Nina's van was found three miles from Hans' home. Her cell phone was found in the van with the battery removed.
7. When Hans was taken into custody his cell phone did not have a battery in it. On the stand he claimed that he did not remove the battery from his own phone. He later admitted he lied about that. He actually removed it frequently after Nina disappeared.
8. Along with his cell phone, Hans was carrying his passport and several thousand dollars in cash.
9. Reiser was seen hosing down the driveway to his mother's home shortly after Nina disappeared.
10. The police found two books on murder in Reiser's car. He had purchased them with cash shortly after Nina disappeared.
11. He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case. He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.
Regardless of whether he did it or not, this seems like a failure of the justice system - sentencing someone to 25 years in prison for a murder in which there is "no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence". He must have had an absolutely horrible lawyer.
His lawyer told him not to take the stand. Instead he testified for 11 days.
The very first thing he did when he took the stand on cross from the DA was to admit that he had lied about a material fact of the case, allowing the jury to be instructed that the rest of his testimony was untrustworthy. He did a pretty spectacularly bad job on the stand.
I'm surprised he went down for murder 1, but there was a pretty damning array of things lined up against him. Aspergers or not, he admittedly ripped up and flooded his car while trying to actively hide it from the police in a storage locker; he claimed a 6-inch(!)-wide blood stain on a bag (not a sleeping bag, but its pouch) in that car was from having sex; and finally, he built his case not on the premise that he didn't kill Nina, but that she was still alive --- a very simple assertion for the DA to knock down.
Once you take the stand, you have no control over how long you will be on the stand. The fifth amendment insures you don't have to testify if it will hurt your case...but if you agree to be questioned, both sides get to ask pretty much all the questions they want within the bounds of the law and the patience of the judge.
But, yes, it's clear that him taking the stand was the worst possible thing he could do and he apparently fought loudly and repeatedly with his lawyer over this decision.
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I don't understand. It sounds like you think that any murderer who can hide a body and clean a crime scene should be impossible to convict.
There's nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. It's used all the time. The ambiguity you're having trouble coping with is the reason we have juries and strict rules regarding admissability.
If there is no body, how does one know it isn't an elaborate framing?
In this case, one could argue as follows:
Nina disappears, and one or more friends help her get to Russia incognito (go through Mexico, perhaps).
Children go into custody of her parents who take them back to Russia.
Meanwhile, Hans is the first suspect, as is always the case in murder cases where there is a spouse or former spouse with some plausible motive and no good alibi...he is known to be paranoid by anyone that knows him, so begins to behave erratically when police begin to pay attention to him.
Perhaps someone (maybe Nina, maybe the serial killer friend, maybe someone else) had sprinkled a little blood on the front seat of his car (and in his house and the sleeping bag). He panics when he sees it and rips the seat out and disposes of it. Since he didn't commit the crime in this scenario he wouldn't have even known about the blood in the sleeping bag or the house.
Since producing some blood is pretty trivial, it means that anyone with the means and willingness to disappear could frame anyone for murder.
There is a reason why murder cases without a body or murder weapon pretty rarely result in conviction. And, I suspect, had Hans taken his lawyer's advice and not taken the stand, he would have probably had a much better chance, even with the pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
I'm not saying Hans didn't do it...I don't know. But I know that circumstantial evidence should be viewed with suspicion, when 25 years of someones life is on the line. The jury system is intended to insure that no innocent man is ever convicted, and this principle is even more important than every guilty man being punished.
41 replies →
I don't have any data to back this up, but I imagine in almost every case where someone is convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, there is actual evidence that a murder occurred.
I don't necessarily have a problem with circumstantial evidence, I just think that this is a very harsh sentence when there is no real evidence that anyone was killed.
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The article states that he refused to let his lawyer act and took charge of proceedings himself many times, so it is not clear how bad the lawyer was.
Yes that is what is troubling. It seems he is convicted on his own character/personality.
It would be pretty rough in 10 years if some other evidence turns up and his life is wasted.
There is also the children who are obviously victims in some sense as well, this must be horrible for them.
I thought for a conviction there had to be no shadow of doubt? There are shadows here.
I have to say, his wife looks cute and very normal. He looks weird. No wonder the jury was sympathetic to the prosecutors claim. It is just normal human reaction.
My theory has always been that this is Sean Sturgeon's tenth murder. Number nine was Nina. And the plan for number ten was getting Hans convicted of murder and put to death by the state. The ultimate thrill for the serial killer who no longer draws excitement from mere axe murdering and dismemberment.
Hans couldn't possibly be a murderer despite the evidence, but you believe some guy killed 8 people with no evidence whatsoever? They might not have found Nina's body, but the supposed other 8 victims don't even have names. It was just a bullshit story to cast some doubt.
Just to be clear, I don't actually believe that. I just think it's a cool idea, but I didn't want to log out and make a new account just to post it as a short story.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to add Paul Graham to the programming language creator or serial killer game?
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Didn't Sturgeon confess? Not sure how much (if any) corroborating evidence there is, but a confession is something.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser
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I don't understand it, the article says he faces a sentence of "25 years to life in prison", but what exactly is the number of years he will have to be in prison? Why is it a range?
The law gives the judge some discretion in sentencing: in this case the judge can pick any duration between 25 years and life. Reiser has not been sentenced yet.
I'm going to have a bit of a laugh when Nina comes back from her vacation to Russia.
Via Reddit:
:(
Here I was hoping he didn't do it...
I hope it doesn't reflect poorly on the open source community. Next thing you know they will be calling us murderers.
> Here I was hoping he didn't do it...
We still don't know if he did.
"We still don't know if he did." -- well the us justice system thinks he did it, that's what matters.
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. although, I suppose I don't really trust the US justice system. I've seen people I know innocent get convicted recently. But his behavior is unfortunately highly suspect.
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Open-source got off easy:
"Hora speculated that Reiser might have choked his wife, based on little evidence except that Reiser was a black belt in judo, a martial art where choking is a specialty."
Judo, meaning "gentle way", is apparently the martial art that teaches you how to kill your wife.
I can just imagine it: "And Hans Reiser was heard arguing with his wife - just like he'd practiced for years on the mailing lists of open source communities where overly-violent and highly-sensitive people are known to dwell and practice verbal abuse quite often."
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As a kid, I had a few years of Judo training and I have never learned how to choke a person. From my experience, Judo is about catching or throwing opponents off-balance (often with their unwilling help) and disarming and immobilizing them so they can't harm you.
Of all martial arts, Judo is one of the gentlest. I can hardly imagine using it to kill someone who does not really want to get killed.
As for Mr. Sturgeon, misreporting a crime, specially if it's done with the intention of compromising a murder investigation, is a serious offense. I am not sure why the police didn't get him.
And, while we are at it, it is a real no-no do screw your friend's wife.
This case begs for an appeal.
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