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Hans Reiser Leads Police To Nina's Body
jlmcgraw was the first to alert us that Hans Reiser has led police to the location in the Oakland Hills where he buried the body of his wife Nina. (We discussed the rumor that he would do so last month.) SFGate.com reports that remains were recovered but have not yet been identified. Reiser is to be sentenced on Wednesday. CBS5 claims that Reiser made a deal for a reduced sentence, to 15 years, in exchange for revealing the body.
I feel bad for the kids - that is such a messed up situation.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Even after the conviction, given the circumstantial case some doubts remained. This certainly removes all remaining doubts.
At this point, fuck him. Good luck to his kids.
Right. But you'd have to be bloody insane to think that maybe Hans didn't do it at this point. I mean, he knew where the body was buried.
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Personally, because I'd have liked to have seen her turn up alive and well. A living person is better than a dead person any day.
Sadly, circumstantial evidence or not, the guy was clearly guilty as all hell from minute one. Even the weirdest, most anti-social geek I know doesn't do the strange shit he pulled in the days following her murder.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No matter how much we argue or try to make "programming jokes" about this incident the truth is these kids' mother is dead, their father is going away for a long time and they are going to be the ones bearing one of the heaviest burdens in this particular case.
He duped a minority, methinks.
There were lots of us who thought he probably did it: the "she ran away" excuse just never floated, and there was too much stupid circumstantial excuses (I don't care HOW much of a geek you are, doing BOTh the seat AND flooding the car AND saying you slept in the wet sopping car is just ridiculous)
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Oh, come off it ... there was no reasonable doubt. Doubt that isn't reasonable isn't sufficient to let him walk, and the *jury* - not the prosecutor - got it right.
Bottom lne: Hans tried to bullshit them, and they saw through it. If he had shut his moutn, maybe he would have walked, but he thought he could "put one over" on a bunch of "dumb jurors."
He forgot that jurors don't have to be smarter than the accused - in his case, all they needed was a baloney-meter.
I hope he gets his in prison.
As understandable as the sentiment is, that won't bring Nina Reiser back. I've lost a loved one to a drunk driver, and it isn't much comfort that the bastard went to prison. I hope his kids get a little bit of peace from the fact that at least they have a final answer on the matter, and that they'll be able to visit their mother's grave. This is just really sad; everybody involved loses.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
all the people from LA.
last time I saw that sort of hopeful thinking it was kobe and people saying he didnt cheat on his wife. And he did. We all love our heros, dont we?
Well, heros are usually only good at the one thing they are touted for... im not asking kobe to fix my car for sure.
With all the smart people around here, why would anyone think that a computer programmer is any less suceptible to violent acts than any other?
I mean, is it just because computer geeks are well known as the most well adjusted people on the planet? :)
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Wasn't it more a matter of reasonable doubt?
I think most thought it was more likely than not that he did it. Just that there were reasonable alternative theories (ran away to frame him, insane best friend that claims to have murdered people still alive are 2 that I can think of).
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent, perhaps because of the open source connection, perhaps because they could relate to him, I don't know. I always thought that the alternative theories were pretty weak - there was no evidence that crazy best friend did it and no real motive for Nina to try to frame him by fleeing to Russia without her kids. On the other hand there was a large amount of physical evidence, which taken together (and considering Hans' complete lack of a plausible explanations for any of it) didn't leave a reasonable doubt in my mind. Or the juries mind. And now a lot of people here have to admit that the police and the jury were right.
They had physical blood evidence that Nina bled in his car. Doesn't mean she died there, nor that Hans killed her. Seems like that last fact is pretty settled now though.
I think the conviction (first degree murder, i.e. preplanned) is still ridiculous. The evidence for preplanning was very weak. Part of it was that Hans bought a book about murder investigations--but he bought it AFTER Nina's disappearance. You'd think someone planning a murder and wanting to foil an investigation would buy the book BEFORE doing the deed. Another part was that he removed his cell phone battery to avoid being tracked--again AFTER the disappearance. I've been neutral about Hans's possible innocence (60% of Wired Magazine readers in a survey thought he was innocent) but I always thought the premeditation charge was ridiculous. If it was preplanned there are a million less crazy ways he could have done it, such as hiring professionals from Russia or at least making better arrangements to get rid of the body far away. I've felt it more plausible that he lost self-control in the heat of an argument, found himself with a dead wife and a potential giant heap of trouble, and then, after the fact, decided (unsuccessfully) to try to outrun/outsmart the police. That would be second degree murder rather than first, if I remember my Perry Mason reruns.
The urge to divide everything into two -- black or white, friend or enemy, capitalism or communism, christian or heathen, disorganized or organized -- is a recognized mental oddity.
In most cases, there is not only a sliding scale (or shades of grey, if you like), but multiple axes.
That we so easily try place things in a two-bin system might be because it makes it easier for us to make decisions.
Hans Reiser is an odd man out in many ways, but can't be explained this easily. He's not just a disorganized person. He's a complex person. And if you'd ever talked to him, you'd know that in some things he is meticulously organized, while in others, not. Binning him like you did seems silly, but if it makes it easier for you to deal with, hey, whatever sinks your bathyscaphe.
While there ARE certainly plausible ways that he could have been not guilty AND known where the body is, I would imagine that if he was innocent and knew where the body was that he would, oh, I don't know.... maybe.... CALL THE POLICE AS SOON AS HE KNEW WHERE THE BODY OF HIS DEAD WIFE WAS.
I mean, if it was me, I'd be trying to find all of the evidence to clear my name that I could - and if I hadn't done the killing, you better believe I'd be demanding the police go all CSI on her body and the crime scene before we even get to the point of me being arrested. The fact that he knew where the body was and kept quiet is an indicator to me of intent.
And while indicative of intent, it is not further proof of his guilt. At least it DOES bring closure to the family of the deceased.
--endcycle--
Why doesn't he deserve that?
Gandhi? "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"? We are not barbarians.
The punishment is the prison time, not rape, let along the long, drawn-out suffering that is an AIDS death. Yes he's a terrible person for having killed his wife, yes he should be punished and no the 15 years he's getting probably isn't enough for someone who can kill their wife and then calculatingly lie to the police and a jury about it for so long. That doesn't mean he deserves to be raped. At the very least it's mob justice, and the reason we have courts to hand out punishment instead.
The sick individuals gloating at the idea of anyone being raped are no better than the people they wish it upon.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Unless she was pointing a gun at him and it was self-defense, there is *no* excuse.
If a woman makes you angry, are you going to hit her?
If she cheats on you, are you going to kill her?
Will you give her the same rights in return? How about if she just cuts your pecker off instead and feeds it to the dog?
How about if it's your kids? If they don't listen to you, are you going to wack them to "teach them a lesson"?
It's called murder because it wasn't justified. Blaming the victim is just fucked up.
If I were separated from my wife and bound by a restraining order, and she was having sex with her new lover IN MY HOUSE, I would probably kill her, too.
And if you admitted as much to the cops, and testified to such in court, the district attorney would likely seek no more than manslaughter.
Crimes committed in the heat of passion, when the murderer is truthful with the police and penitent, aren't always prosecuted as a capital crime. To do so costs the state much more.
Hans Reiser insisted on lying about every aspect of the disappearance of Nina Reiser from the moment he was questioned by police. The DA had no choice but to prosecute it as a murder case - and given the facts in evidence, he was convicted because he made a lot of stupid mistakes - typical for someone who commits a crime of passion and then thinks they can cover it up because they're so much smarter than the 'average bear'.
If Reiser had even pled guilty and recanted his story after lying to the police and being arraigned for murder, he might have gotten off with a much lighter sentence for murder. But he waited until the sentencing phase, after he'd lied to the court.
No, Hans was so much smarter than everyone else. Now he's going to go to prison for 15-to-life - and lying to the court as Reiser did means his parole hearings aren't going to go well for him, if he even survives 15 years in prison.
Only on fucking slashdot does the one guy who offers a rational opinion NOT get modded up. So far the first page of comments is mostly jokes and inane - "I'd murder the bitch too" remarks - all getting modded up.
Assholes, this is a real person with a real family, not some fucking Manga or Anime or video game.
This doesn't prove he's guilty. He may have had knowledge of the murder, and use that to reduce the sentence. I still have faith that the real story will come out.
He is the O .J. Simpson of nerds. We can't believe he's guilty because he's one of us.
They had physical blood evidence that Nina bled in his car. Doesn't mean she died there, nor that Hans killed her.
No, it doesn't, but look at it like a juror might....
I've had women, including my wife, ride in various cars of mine for over twenty years now. None of them have bled in any significant amounts inside any of the cars I've owned during that period. Also, no bleeding episodes in my car were followed up by the removal of half the seats in the car or the washing of the inside of my car.
Of course, no one who has ever ridden in my car has ever disappeared without a trace after obtaining a restraining order against me, either. Sure, it is circumstantial evidence - but people are convicted on less everyday for lesser crimes.
I do find it worrisome that several jurors basically said that they convicted him because they didn't like him.
Gut feelings, intuition, aren't just random whimsies, they can be your subconscious' way of communicating its' analysis of anothers' subconscious body language and uncontrollable facial subtleties.
You can't take the sky from me...
I think a lot of people here wanted to believe he was innocent
Sure, but that wasn't the reason why there was so much opposition to his conviction. People didn't (and still don't) seem to be able to grasp the difference between probably did it and have proven it beyond reasonable doubt. It's entirely consistent to believe that he did it and that he shouldn't have been convicted. Not because he's a big contributor to open-source, but because the standard for allowing the state to take away somebody's freedom and ability to vote for most of their life should be fucking high and his trial didn't meet it.
I disagree. "Reasonable doubt" is not the same as "proven beyond any doubt", which seems to be your position. Reasonable doubt is not a couple of far-fetched alternative theories coupled with totally unreasonable explanations for the evidence. The jurors saw a lot more evidence than you did. They got to watch Resier as he made his case. According to their comments any reasonable doubt was removed when he took the stand. You may disagree with their conclusions, despite the much smaller amount of evidence (all second hand) that you have access to, but the fact is that they got it right. For you to persist in claiming that they got it wrong is simply the height of arrogance.
"Maybe Nina had it coming."
Maybe he made her make him kill her.
Maybe she made him make mer make him kill her.
Maybe he made hr make him make her make him kill her.
No, fuck you, a line has to be drawn, and it's drawn at the point where you fucking kill someone.
Or worse, we don't care if he's guilty because he's one of us.
I'm all for innocent-until-proven, believe me - but he's been PROVEN guilty at this point. Clinging to an idea of his innocence is a weird sort of cognitive dissonance I can't get behind.
--endcycle--
Stop right there. There is no such thing as "making X kill Y". Reiser always had other options than murder, and phrasing it as "she made him do it to her" is blaming the victim for the actions of a murderer.
No, let's not lay off. Vast numbers of other people extricate themselves from fucked up situations like Reiser's without resorting to murder. Vast numbers of people don't get into fucked up situations like Reiser's because they see problems developing and deal with them rather than hiding behind a geek badge that reads "proud to be aspie". Vast numbers of people suffer through their problems and don't brutally murder someone, hide their body, maintain their innocence in court, and then use their knowledge of their crime to get a reduced sentence for something they're totally, 100% guilty of.
Well, you do.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
This doesn't prove he's guilty. He may have had knowledge of the murder, and use that to reduce the sentence. I still have faith that the real story will come out.
Yeah, because the "I didn't do it but I know where the body is buried" argument will look so good on appeal.
I will refrain from calling you "Jackass" on the basis that you are taking the piss.
>Who knows? Not you or I. So let's lay off the fire and brimstone, what do you say?
Lay off? He murdered a woman! There is NO excuse for murdering someone... ever.. He didn't kill her, he MURDERED her! Soldiers on the battlefield kill, people who work on death row kill, doctors who administer euthanasia kill... Hans MURDERED her. The evil and selfishness of a person who would murder another, just to make their own life a little bit easier, can never be justified.
Sometimes, things really are black and white, right and wrong, evil and good.
>>I'm all for innocent-until-proven, believe me - but he's been PROVEN guilty at this point. Clinging to an idea of his innocence is a weird sort of cognitive dissonance I can't get behind.
Yeah, in the previous Slashdot articles on this case, it was bizarre watching people defend him simply because he wrote a filesystem that some of us use. You're right, it is cognitive dissonance, as the human brain has trouble putting a person in two different boxes for Good and Bad.
Of course, now that he's admittedly guilty, a different mental mechanism will come into play, and half his defenders will post on here that they thought he was guilty all along, and what's weirder, they will actually believe it. Dunno what that phenomena is called - maybe it could be called a false memory.
There were some posts that contained it outright, others that you could see it in the subtext. It is something not surprising since there are an above normal amount of people here who have trouble dealing with women. It leads some of those people to dislike and distrust women. They believe Hans simply because they find it more likely that a woman would screw over a man than vice versa. Now combine that with the OSS hero status and you really have a situation that blinds them to the facts.
I think you'd find that had the situation been reversed (Nina killing Hans) that there would have been no doubt in their minds she was guilty, in no small part because of her gender.
If his ego was worth a damn, it wouldn't have bought a wife from a russian agency.
There is no excuse for murder. Initially my take on this case was that maybe he did it, or maybe he didn't - we just don't know. And now I'm pissed I even gave Hans that much.
What dissapoints me about Hans Reiser is that he didn't do the right thing. He didn't confess and in an attempt to avoid taking responsibility he tried to get away with it. A remorseful, intelligent man would've realized that a life with a murder on your conscience i just as bad as prison, maybe even worse. It suggests to me that he didn't feel guilt for what he had done, and I think it's a testament of poor charachter. He only confessed when he had nothing more to loose.
To further your point - I appreciate humor, but when the reality of what happened to Nina sinks in jokes seems to be of very poor taste. Nina was strangled by the father of her children and then buried to rot in a 4x4 foot grave, nearly upside down. Conjure up an image of what she looked like when they dug her up after all those months and then crack a joke. What - not funny anymore? Assholes indeed.
I think you misunderstand something about the Right to Remain Silent. The warning from the police when you are arrested is "anything that you say can and will be used against you" not "anything you say may help exonerate you". It is NEVER helpful to talk to the police when you are a suspect, even if you are innocent. You can say things that are truthful when you are innocent and still make you look like a murderer. Always talk to a lawyer first. Always. No matter what your circumstances are.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Surely the time to decide to do the right thing would have been just before he murdered his wife, not during the aftermath, when clearly no amount of "right things" would rectify anything but the most comparatively trivial aspects of this situation.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Don't forget that investigators will most likely lie to you, in an attempt to "trick" you into saying something to incriminate yourself. Its all ok for them them to lie to you, but you can't lie to them. Strange isn't that?