Comment by iaw
2 years ago
I suspect many are aware of this but for those uninformed:
Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.
I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.
I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
He was far less of a mastermind than he fancied himself at the time.
If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.
He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.
For those interested in the trial, the SF Chronicle's Henry K. Lee ran a very detailed blog on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080501184401/http://www.sfgate...
I go back periodically and read the Wired article about it.
It is totally bananas:
https://archive.is/BcMRF
The wildest part was the friend who had an affair with his wife who blurted out unprompted on the stand that he had killed 7 people. They let that guy go!
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I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
I think it was my first experience with absolute egregious fanboism.
That /. thread was amazing. So many people trying to justify behavior that cleanly pointed to murder. Not every action by itself, but the combination of all of them: buying crime books, removing the seat, cleaning his car and there were more actions. But the slashdot technical community defended him until the moment he confessed.
It was really cringey.
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It wasn't fanboism, it was something else entirely: solidarity of the ingroup.
Hard to believe for the younger folks around here, who grew up in a culture that praised and valued technical skills, but Slashdot was a place for the prior generation, for whom technical skills were mocked and ridiculed.
Hans was "one of us", and it's a very human thing to believe that a member of your specific outcast group would ever be one of the baddies.
The fanboys spilled over to HN as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240814
Best comment on that thread, calling out their ridiculous takes:
> I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.
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It is reasonable, although niche enough to be a bad defense.
Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic
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It's certainly not common, but I had a friend in highschool that took out the front passenger seat of his VW bug, to make it easier to get surfboards into the car. He normally just had a folding chair for passengers.
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Here's a 16 year old Hackernews thread from the day after the conviction, you'll see lots of even to this day prolific HN commenters writing that well we don't know if he REALLY did it, and even if he did, he has definitely down a net good for humanity with his contributions to software (and then tptacek reliably shoots them down)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098
It was probably him.
He could have likely gotten away with it
He had a plea deal offer for not much more than time served so he even had a definite option to a form of getting away with it.
I briefly worked with Hans around 2005. My impression at the time was that he declined the manslaughter plea because he thought he was smarter than everyone around him.
Why didn't he take it? It's pretty much the best what murderer on trial can hope for.
... then again, if he was reasonable he'd probably never commit murder.
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Makes you wonder how many people do actually get away with it.
It really depends on what you're looking to get away with.
If you're looking to get away with orchestrating the murder of someone you know, it can be difficult.
However, if you're just looking to get away with murdering someone in general, that's surprisingly easy. Just go a town or two over and knife a random someone in a random parking lot. Police success rates are comically low.
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High levels of calculation in times when high levels of calculation are required to keep you out of prison are not a sign of anything.
Humans are amazing at compartmentalizing things like this away, even while they are happening.
It is impossible to know from this single datapoint if he is remorseful or not, but it is not at all outside of the realm of possibility.
As a child I merely punched my brother and I tried to kill myself afterwards because of the guilt. In the moment I could not have been more prescient about what I was about to do and what I was doing. I recalled how I had observed him fighting others, how he threw punches, how he swung his arm based on how angry he was, and I planned an arc that took advantage of his habits and clocked him. Knocked him out in one punch.
The instant he hit the floor I felt remorse like I had never felt before. Who the hell am I to take an action like that?!
Anyway, how someone feels while doing something like that does not necessarily reflect how they feel at any other time in their lives. It also may reflect how they are at all times, or anywhere in between.
There is no foolproof way to know.
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I think it would be ridiculous for me to presume that I can possibly have any view into whether or not someone has sincerely changed, but why should the fact that someone was calculating once affect whether they have changed? I could see doubting the apparent demonstration of change, because they might have calculated the appropriate words to say, but I don't see any reason that a calculating person is less able sincerely to change than any other.
I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.
So, someone who is demonstrated to be calculating has higher odds of faking a behavior if it is beneficial to them (e.g. leaving prison).
It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.
> It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.
My reference to ridiculous was to the ridiculousness of my thinking that I have any insight into Reiser's character—a disclaimer at the beginning that I was not presuming to offer any. I was in no way meaning to call you or your statement ridiculous.
> I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.
Yes, that was exactly what I was meaning to say. Someone being known to be calculating should create a higher evidentiary bar—they need to do more to convince me that they have changed. But I don't think that it offers any evidence against their having changed. And maybe this is what you were saying:
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?
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I'm with you on that one. I read the whole thing closely and my conclusion is that some of what's there is playing to an invisible audience. And some of the rest of what's there feels like 'the real Hans' shining through because he hasn't really changed, but is actively trying to change how he is perceived. I could try to enumerate those bits but it doesn't matter all that much, it's just the feeling that I get from reading the text.
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the assumption here is that your judgement of calculating is accurate.
Source on premeditated?
Everything I saw made it look like it was spontaneous (and then he put a lot of work and some poor planning into trying to hide it).
I could obviously be wrong, I didn't really spend that much time on it.
(Note: I know he was initially found guilty of first degree murder but it appears that first degree murder doesn't necessarily require premeditation.)
Yeah, I don't think the murder itself was premeditated, but he did treat the event with a sort of self-serving callousness that gave the perception that he did not care about Nina's life beyond how it affected his.
that's not what premeditated murder is though. That's trying to cover up the murder which is also a crime, but a far cry from premeditated murder which is one of the most heinous crimes recognized by the legal system.
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Elsewhere in this thread (or maybe it was another thread I followed on it), didn't someone mention he suspiciously left his phone at home the day he committed the murder, whereas he would normally have the phone with him?
Seems like it was probably premeditated to me if so
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I think he planned it.
* He testified on the stand that Nina was a terrible person and a danger to their children. A bold strategy when you're on trial for murdering your wife.
* He was angry that Nina preferred that one of his sons not play violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, because he believed his son was special and might learn something about how violence really works.
* Right before he was arrested, he handed the hard drives from his computer to his lawyer. His lawyer gave the drives to the court about 3/4 through the trial. The judge was extremely displeased. The court had the county's forensic investigators go through the drives. The drives were formatted with NTFS, NOT ReiserFS. One insane email chain discovered in it was Nina mailing Hans about the logistics of planning for new clothes and school supplies for the 2 kids for the upcoming new school year, Hans response was "It is Moscow 1942, you are the Germans, I will prevail".