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Reiser Murder Case Gets Stranger
Fahrvergnuugen writes "Wired is running a story about how an ex-lover of the missing wife of accused spouse killer Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case. While Reiser will still stand trial for the murder, this development will undoubtedly complicate things."
Does this mean I don't have to reformat after all?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
When I saw this story, I skimmed the first line, then got to the second, which read: "Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case." It was a bit of a jolt. Then I went back and realized that it was referring to his wife's ex-lover, not to Reiser himself.
This is why you don't put a giant 10-word prepositional phrase between a subject and verb, especially if that phrase ends with something that could plausibly by a subject.
in case you mis-read the summary like I did at first: it was not Hans Reiser who confessed, but Sean Sturgeon, someone his wife previously dated. It is also unclear from TFA when they say "a one-time friend of Reiser's" whether they are talking about Hans or his wife.
Irrespective of whether Hans is really guilty, if this isn't enough to show a reasonable doubt I don't know what is. In light of this, it would seem quite plausible that he was framed.
Interesting tidbit at the end of TFA:According to testimony in preliminary hearings in the case, Nina Reiser had once dated Sturgeon, but broke off their relationship in January 2006 because she was unhappy with his lifestyle and taste for sadomasochism.
Sounds like they're all a bunch of real whackos!
If your wife's ex-lover is a confessed serial killer, the evidence against you has to be pretty damning for you not to create reasonable doubt. Like if he was videotaped by a policeman while committing a murder and later signed a statement that he is a person on the video. It's not a big stretch of imagination that someone who killed 8 times and didn't get caught is capable of some creativity when planting evidence.
So Hans Reiser is a full-blown sociopath? Goddamn. Looks like he may have killed ReiserFS, too.
If you can't even RTFA at least read the summary!
"ex-lover of the missing wife of accused spouse killer Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case."
It is not Hans Reiser confessing to eight other killings, it is an EX LOVER of the wife who is confessing to eight other killings.
As far as ReiserFS, I don't really care if that dies since I don't use it myself. I am sure it will still be around a while though no matter what happens.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I am shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that the creepy S&M guy who was into "death yoga" and has now admitted to other murders, is suspected of Nina's murder. I mean, that's just silly. I saw the ELER cartoon, and he wasn't in it.
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Well they did find blood in his vehicle and house. From the article:
"Though no body has been found, Reiser was arrested Oct. 10 after the Oakland Police Department found small drops of blood in his house and in his Honda CRX"
Makes it a little fishy although I am sure I have small drops of blood around my house and in my cars too from small cuts and stuff happening while doing stuff outside. I would hope they need more than that to tie the "murder" to him. I think she just took off somewhere myself, I mean she was cheating on him so I don't think it is too far out of the ballpark.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
"Look law, no Hans."
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Change the wording of the article! Yes, it's from the original article. But it's very clearly misleading and needs to be changed.
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from: http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_256204954.h tml
Apparently Sturgeon was sleeping with Reiser's wife before they finalized the divorce. Also, Reiser accused Sturgeon of trying to steal money from him, and of threatening him. So there's totally motive here for Sturgeon to frame Reiser for the murder.
Bear in mind that in forensics, the "drops" of blood can be microscopic. For example, when we hear that XYZ accused had 100 drops of blood on his clothing, it isn't necessarily the massively blood-splattered shirt it might sound like. Now, I don't know how likely it is that we might have drops of blood of such size around our houses/cars as a result of normal activity (which would normally go unnoticed). Still something to consider, though.
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It was more than "small drops of blood". The front passenger seat in his car had been removed and hasn't been recovered yet.
It's unclear when Sturgeon made the confession -- he would say only, "I have cooperated since day one." Asked why he had confessed at all, he responded with this question: "In a murder case, if somebody has killed, who is a witness, is it relevant? Yes or no?"
When this reporter responded that it was relevant, Sturgeon said, "Then you have the answer to your question."
Sturgeon added that confessing was one of the most difficult decisions of his life. He also regrets being a source of distraction in the case, joking that he is not so much a red herring as a "red Sturgeon."
Yep... a regular old Hannibal Lechter. Do you think he might have had some sort of grudge against Reiser? Spurned love, and then his friend gets the girl... yathink? Maybe he set it up so that not only does Reiser lose his wife... but then has to defend a murder case for killing her.
From what's been in the press, it seems that all the evidence is circumstantial. A criminal case can be proven by circumstantial evidence, but only when it's enough to exclude all other reasonable conclusions based on the evidence. Looks like this shoots the prosecution right out of the water.
On the other hand, if the prosecution had this confession a long time ago and they are still moving forward, it's possible they have some other evidence that we don't know about yet.
Hans was friends with this guy Sturgeon...
Sturgeon was allegedly molested as a child which directly motivated the killing of the other eight people AND the development of extreme sado-masochistic sexual tendencies... Which is a purported reason that Hans's woman both began and ended her affair with him.
The missing link is how Hans became friends with this guy and a gossipy answer at this point is that BOTH of them were involved in some very dark sexual practices & became close friends because of this.
Please note: I hope Hans is innocent, but this development does not appear to help him at all. If anything it may cause Hans's character to be called further into question based upon investigations into this other side of his life that was previously undisclosed.
"Wired is running a story about how Sean Sturgeon, an ex-lover of Hans Reiser's missing wife, has confessed to having killed 8 people. Hans is currently standing trial for the murder of his wife. Though the confessed murders are unrelated to the current case, this new information is sure to complicate things."
Finally the court will put it to rest. Did Hans shoot first, or was it the other guy?
Oh, wait... wrong movie.
Note to self: get a sig.
He probably muttered "kill -9" and the cops thought it was a confession.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I always wondered where they got some of the crazy idea's for Soap Opera's, I don't wonder anymore. I really feel sorry for poor Hans, assuming he is innocent. This is a nightmare of unimaginable proportions. Even if he "wins", he will probably be bankrupt from paying the attorneys.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
If Hans Reiser is guilty, that means Nina Reiser went from dating one killer to another killer... What are the odds of someone just happening to date two murderers?
Lol. You're missing the point of open source, which is that, if something is mission-critical, and the maintainer falls off the face of the earth, anyone, and I mean anyone, can pick up the code and continue on. The practical upshot of this is that, if suddenly overnight and with no warning your software became unsupported you could hire someone to provide support because you have all the code.
SRSLY.
By confessing to something really horrible you aquire a curious kind of trust in people: if he says that he didn't kill Nina then who would doubt him now that he so flippantly admitted to the killing of 8 others?
This of course can be a strategy in itself, it's a card he's earnt by confessing and can play against Reiser, someone he clearly wants to see lose everything (re 2004 case for attempted seizure of Reiser's business, Namesys Inc.).
I think you're missing the point, which is that the OSS philosophy that someone will just come along and pick up the project is quite different from reality, as evidenced by the cratering of ReiserFS since this happened. If you're using a product from a business, it's a different story since a business can hire someone experienced enough to replace the previous developer. You're right that a business could pick up the project since the code is out there, but then why isn't that happening with ReiserFS?
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm still running Windows 98 on an old computer; who at Microsoft do I call to get a bug I found fixed???
Don't worry about the facts. Hollywood will pick this story up and turn into "Entertainment".
"Nicholas Cage in... HellReiser!"
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
>It was more than "small drops of blood". The front passenger seat in his car had been removed and
>hasn't been recovered yet.
I understand all about rules of evidence and presumption of innocence, but this was a very strange detail.
I've been a vintage car enthusiast for a long, long time, and I could probably name the time, place, and parties to almost every single car part that was ever traded, installed, or removed from one of my cars. I'd definitely be able to tell you what happened to something as significant as a passenger seat. Of course, in my case, that would probably be the whole front seat from a 1959 Chevrolet which would be a $3000 part, but still. It's weird that we know about the seat, the tools, the blood, but we don't know Hans' explanation. Without his explanation, the jury is only going to hear the prosecutor's theory, which is going to sound quite plausible to a jury.
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There aren't many people actually capable of comitting a murder, so the fact that Nina Reiser's ex-lover is a self-confessed serial killer strikes me as a far too remarkable coincidence.
... it's the right thing to do. There a lot of people in the United States that don't understand that anymore, don't accept that human life is valuable but not infinitely so, and that some are worth more than others. We may all have been created equal, but sadly not all end up that way.
It depends upon the motivation, the stakes. I wouldn't kill someone for money. I wouldn't kill them for revenge. I wouldn't kill them because they angered me. On the other hand, say you tried to kill my fiancee: I'd murder you in a heartbeat without batting an eye. Now, even if I escaped official punishment I would pay a high price for that act. Most of us would, but we're all capable of murder, at some level. We have to be, because sometimes
You're right in that by far the majority of us won't kill for trivial reasons, although one has to wonder how much of that reluctance is due to the sanctions imposed by society against such behavior, or some intrinsic aversion to killing. Sociopathy, to varying degrees, is more common than one might want to believe, so maybe all that's keeping murder in check is the fear of consequences. I mean, all societies feel the need to impose severe punishment for murder, which leads me to believe that, at the core, we aren't quite as civilized as we think we are.
Besides, O.J. Simpson killed two people in cold blood, and in spite of substantially more incriminating evidence, O.J. managed to get off scott free. O.J. had mountains of money to spend on his Dream Team though.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm going to bed.
"Apple did go on without Jobs," ...almost into bankruptcy, until they hired him again, and he turned the company into NeXT 2.0.
...into the latest, most expensive, least-desirable version of Windows yet, a product that makes ME look enchanting by comparison.
"MS is going on without Gates at the helm..."
"And HP is getting along fine without Carly." my point; WITH her, they were not getting along so well.
it just confirms that reiserfs is truly a killer filesystem.
you're going to OJ for your next FS?
I'd like to hear the "People bleed, it happens" defense used in court. It might work well if you give a menacing look at the jury when you say "it happens".
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Quote from wikipedia:
:)
It was also revealed that Nina Reiser obtained Russian citizenship for her daughter 2 years before and surreptitiously obtained Russian citizenship for her son two months before she disappeared.
Now how likely would it be that she is somewhere is big Russia
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it's a different story since a business can hire someone experienced enough to replace the previous developer.
And if they lay everyone who worked on it off and hire a bunch of foreigners, what then? All you're doing is shifting from one set of problems to another.
why isn't that happening with ReiserFS
Good question, it might be that the assumption is that Hans Reiser didn't do it, and will resume working on it. Maybe the assumption is that he did do it, and he'll kill anyone who tries to take the project away from him. Or maybe between improvements on ext3 and development on ext4, all of the resources available for filesystem development is already being consumed. It's not like Lemmings where you can just click on a guy and turn him into a bomb or a filesystem developer.
Yeah, sure you could. However, if you were accused of murder, the first thing you'd do would be to shut your mouth and tell no-one anything about anything (including car seats), besides your lawyer of course.
Does it go on forever?
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
We already have dropped Newtonian physics. It's Einstein and Schroedinger we have to worry about now...although rumour has it that Schroedinger may have killed his cat.
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Do we really need to know the rate of change? duh, its changin or its not.
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There's at the very least a chance she stage her own disappearance to get Hans in trouble and went back to Russia and got her kids brought there.
"On Monday, Superior Court Judge Don Clay issued a gag order barring attorneys on both sides from discussing Sturgeon."
How can they gag that? That seems highly relevant to the case, considering that Sturgeon clearly had a grudge against Reiser.
Most of the other posters seem to assume that the case will be dropped because of this, but if the jury is *never allowed to hear about it* how can the come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that the highly circumstantial evidence against Reiser doesn't amount to much when the victim had dated (and dumped) a known serial killer with a grudge against the defendant?
If the prosecution knew about this, why'd they even bring it to trial?