While the Jury Is Out

The Hans Reiser murder trial has almost all the classic elements of a great criminal proceeding: a prominent defendant, the mysterious vanishing of a lovely young woman, a pair of orphans, bizarre friends and relatives, kinky sex, hints of espionage and international crime, a bitter divorce, charges of embezzlement, and an unusual mental health defense.

All that's missing is any trace of Nina Reiser, 31, beyond a few bloodstains.

But the Reiser trial is also peculiarly Silicon Valley, given its mix of money, high tech, Craigslist, BDSM, playful transvestism, Burning Man, the Berkeley Bowl, and Asperger's Syndrome. The trial is getting gavel-to-gavel coverage, not just in such local papers as the Chronicle, but also in Wired. Their case timeline is helpful in trying to follow the story.

A former Alameda County public defender, Jay Gaskill, is also blogging it, and his blog is absolutely invaluable for the clarity and special knowledge he exhibits.

The lady vanishes

On September 3, 2005, Nina Reiser took her kids grocery shopping at the Berkeley Bowl. Then she dropped the kids with her estranged husband, who was living at his mother's house at the time. (His mother, a 64-year-old artist, was away at Burning Man.) They were in the midst of a genuinely nasty divorce.

Nina Reiser hasn't been seen since. That night she missed a date with her boyfriend, whom she had met on Craigslist; they had been thinking of moving in together, or even getting married.

On September 5, Hans Reiser went to pick up his kids at school, although it wasn't his day to do so, hours before he supposedly became aware that Nina was missing. Oh, and his small car disappeared for weeks; when it reappeared, the passenger seat was missing and the floor was awash in water. He had hosed it out -- just as he had hosed down his mother's driveway just after the disappearance. He claims he was living in the car, although his mother had to rent another one for him to drive.

September 9 her minivan was found a few miles away, still full of groceries. Billboards appeared in Oakland, then all over the East Bay, including my neighborhood.

Suspicion

Within weeks Hans Reiser was fighting for custody of his children. The Oakland police were watching him -- hell, I'd watch anybody whose spouse had disappeared and who had reacted by living full-time in a sports car, especially if they were taking professional-level evasion measures against surveillance. (The 1988 Honda CRX Si was a two-seat hatchback sports car. Not exactly like moving into a Land Rover.)

His father offered a reason for the anti-surveillance measures: he testified that, a week after Nina disappeared, he told his son to be careful of the Russian mafia and the "techno-geek S&M crowd."

On October 10, 2006, Hans Reiser was arrested for murder. He claims Nina Reiser framed him for her murder: that she simply went home to Russia (where their children are now living with their mother's family), leaving him high and dry. Along with $4500 in her bank account, $2000 in her apartment, and a mini-van full of groceries she never unloaded. Not to mention that Nina had just accepted a job offer to help Russian immigrants with their health concerns.

Hans Reiser, a prominent Linux guru, developed the ReiserFS filesystem. He has explained all his strange behavior after his wife's disappearance as the result of Asperger's Syndrome. In Silicon Valley, Aspies rule. Many of the stars of the high-tech industry are far from neurotypical.

(Speaking as a member of the techno-geek S&M crowd, I suspect this area may be one of the few where Hans Reiser could get a fair trial. His repeated courtroom outbursts, rambling monotone delivery, and paranoid behavior after the disappearance don't look good, but people here do understand that computer geeks are often a little strange in their behavior. Very few of them commit murder.)


Into the Labyrinth

Nina Reiser, trained as an OB/GYN in her native Russia, is often referred to as a mail-order bride. She did apparently have her name in a Russian dating catalog. However, according to one source, she was the translator accompanying another Russian woman to an arranged date with Hans Reiser.

They married in 1999; she was five months pregnant. Even in Silicon Valley, the Reisers' wedding was unconventional. It featured a belly dancer and a Minotaur leading the pair through a stone labyrinth -- not exactly auspicious symbolism, since the Minotaur fed on human sacrifices.


Friend, lover, adviser, and more

The maid of honor was a male truck driver in drag: Sean Sturgeon, founder of the Lake Merritt Socrates Cafe, and Hans Reiser's close friend and financial adviser. Later, Sturgeon became Nina's lover. Nina broke up with him because she didn't enjoy BDSM.

In addition to his sidelines in amateur philosophy, truck driving, wedding attendance, BDSM, adultery, and financial advice, Sean Sturgeon claims to be a serial killer with 8 or 9 notches on his belt, although he says he didn't kill Nina. Nobody seems to have arrested him.


The war between the Reisers

The marriage produced two children, whose rearing and education were the focus of enormous conflict between the Reisers. The emails Nina sent seem reasonable; they were produced in court.

Reiser continued traveling to Russia on business, being gone months at a time. When he was home, he wanted to teach his children -- especially his 5-year-old son -- how to survive. His idea was to play violent videogames like Battlefield Vietnam with young Rory. In that game, napalm explosions envelop villages in fire, bodies are hurled through the air, and, when shot, characters collapse to the ground and choke on their own blood, realistic sound effects included.

Rory started drawing violent pictures that worried his mother and teacher. According to the teacher, Rory had become hostile; he said to her, "I don't need to listen to you, you’re a woman. Women shouldn't have rights in this country." And Nina became afraid that her son was getting PTSD from the violent films and videogames.


Means, motives, opportunity

During the vicious divorce and the murder trial, the prosecution characterized Nina Reiser as a loving mother who would never abandon her children. The defense has accused her of being a terrible mother, of having connections with the Russian Mafia and the KGB, of making up diseases for her son to get attention for herself, and of embezzling funds from her husband's company. How much this is the usual blame-the-victim tactic and how much is true, God knows.

Could Hans Reiser be violent? At one point he pushed Nina violently enough that she got a restraining order. And an experienced Oakland cop, now retired, advised her to get a gun.

The money is an issue: Hans Reiser claims Nina was embezzling, but he also owes or owed her large sums in child support. The company Namesys was in some financial trouble, and Hans had publicly complained that Nina and the kids were a financial burden.

The high-tech angle continues into other evidence. Reiser pulled a couple of hard drives from his computer and entrusted them to his lawyer. Nothing of interest was found on them when the police tech expert examined them.

Much more to the point, when the minivan was located, Nina's cell phone was inside with its battery removed -- a way to make sure that it couldn't be tracked. Hans Reiser's cell phone was either turned off or had its battery removed for several days around the time of the murder.

The jury has been two days. At this point, the sketch artists are sketching each other.


If he did it

This case is heartbreaking, because I do think Hans killed Nina, but I believe he did it in defense of his children -- or rather, in defense of the child he had once been.

Hans Reiser was a boy genius who dropped out of school after eighth grade because, as he said in an interview before the disappearance, I . . . couldn't handle junior high school and the insistence on sitting in neat rows. He was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 15.

Like a lot of geeks, Reiser had a miserable time being teased and bullied in school. Reiser said, "All of my life people have been doing things like... in grade school, kids would pick on me, they would chase me. And I had a talk with my parents, it takes two to tango and you should use words like this, you should run away." As an adult, he became a Judo black belt.


Is it any wonder that he insisted that his boy watch bloody movies and play violent videogames? He wanted to prepare his son for life -- to protect him from bullies.

Hans Reiser's emails are full of concern for the children, but not in an day-to-day fashion of providing shoes or meals; he was worrying about their future. He scorned the local Montessori school, saying Ordinary people cannot educate genius children. It does not work. And he was obsessed with getting them into the highest status, wealthiest social circles.

When his attorney brought up the children, who are now in the custody of their grandmother in Russia,
Reiser broke down and began weeping, saying his children were "really important to me" and deploring that Nina had accused him of causing his son to have traumatic stress disorder because of violent computer games.

Nina seems to have been a warm, loving mother; a charming and beautiful woman; a person of intelligence and heart. Despite the smear campaign, she comes across as a decent human being. But to the eye of someone like Hans, her desire to protect her children from early exposure to violence must have seemed like the ultimate cruelty. In his mind, she was sentencing them to the kind of misery he had gone through. Only his toughening-up technique could help them.

I think he killed her in a sudden rage, strapped her to the car seat, and dumped it somewhere in the mountains or even in a reservoir. I think the sour-milk smell he was obsessed with washing out of his car was really the smell of her dead body. Sour milk stinks, yes, but it's also the ultimate symbol of bad mothering, and that in Hans's eyes was Nina's crime. Probably there was a smell only he could detect -- the stench of his own guilt.

ETA Convicted of first-degree murder. "I've always been a good father to my children," Reiser said as he was being led out.

Eviction Wars

In Pacific Heights a charming young couple buys a house in San Francisco and rents part of it to the tenant from hell. The opposite story seems to be happening South of Market, where a charming young couple bought an occupied building and tried to evict all the tenants. One, a disabled man, got a year's extension -- rental laws in SF generally favor the tenant. And according to the San Francisco prosecutor's office, the landlords did everything they could to get rid of the guy.

Now, over the years I've had some bad landlords -- ones who refused to do essential repairs, sexually harassed me, stole my possessions, and repeatedly walked in on me with no notice -- not even a knock. One sold the house from under me and gave me ten days' notice to move. On the day I moved in to a different place, I called to report that the ceiling was pouring water, which was three inches deep on the floor. She replied, "What do you expect me to do about it?"

None of my stories come close to the prosecution case against this couple. In addition to using the usual tactics (noise, utilities shutoffs, nasty notes), they are accused of falsely reporting to police that a homeless man was living in the building; the cops came in with guns drawn, but the landlady admitted she knew the tenant. They allegedly had a contractor cut a large hole in his floor and then remove walls from underneath his apartment, making it uninhabitable. The newspaper reported that some of these allegations are upheld by independent witnesses.

The landlords got a restraining order after they received threatening emails in the tenant's name. The prosecution alleges that the landlords forged the emails and even sent nasty emails to his lawyers in his name.

There are several ways to view this. Possibly the landlords are greedy, entitled, and ruthless. Possibly the tenant is amazingly clever at framing them to look like monsters. But I can see ways it could happen without actual certifiable insanity or even more than everyday evil.

I've bought and sold three houses, and I have rented, and I have shared space with housemates and family -- and they're all potentially volatile situations. We're talking huge freaking amounts of money, personal territory, and all the emotional and psychological complexes people have around their home. It's guaranteed to be a real mess.

Scenario:

The Landlords buy the place (apparently stretching their finances to do so) intending to move in themselves, maybe selling some share as tenants-in-common. They'll fix it up, sell the Palo Alto place, and live happily ever after.

Given Ms. Landlord's real estate expertise, they think they can easily get Mr. Tenant and all the other tenants out.

Then Mr. Tenant digs in his heels and gets an extension. Maybe there has been some argument. Everybody feels angry, and there gets to be some personal feeling in this.

The Landlords have ongoing money pressures -- they're paying two mortgages, they're stuck with this guy, and they're feeling aggrieved. They get angry and resort to childish tactics. Maybe they have entitlement issues. Maybe they're really scared and angry about the money. This guy has no right to be in their space!

The nastier they get, the more Mr. Tenant digs in his heels. He's got migraines anyway and is cranky from the pain. All their assaults are not going to make him feel any better or any more able to find a place quickly. Or any more interested in helping them find any easy solution.

Ms. Landlord may feel a lot of pressure because this was her idea -- she thought they could do the deal, and now they're stuck paying a lot of money on a totally unusable property. It's theirs, and they're caught. Mr. Landlord is pissed, too. Maybe he blames her, or she feels like he does, and she passes on the anger and blame to Mr. Tenant.

So they try harder and harder to get him out -- Mr. Landlord with high-tech, Ms. Landlord with direct solutions like, you know, arson or calling the cops.

And they all end up in court. At least nobody's dead -- New York City had at least one murder over a disputed eviction.

I'll be watching for the results of this trial.

Why I Live in the Bay Area, Part 73

A conga line danced in Union Square. "The red lights were challenging," said Carnivale king Everett Harper. "But we're a polite and politically-correct conga line, and we don't jaywalk. Besides the red lights give you time to move in place and focus your energy."

A mountain lion is roaming near homes in Hayward.

We have all kinds of wild life here.

Here Begins the New Life

The Night Prayer, from the New Zealand Prayer Book:

Lord, it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
What has not been done has not been done.
Let it be.

The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and our own lives rest in you.

The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us, all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
New joys, new possibilities.

in Your name we pray.
Amen.

More New Zealand prayers set to music.

I have left the job. Starting Monday, I will be a full-time writer for at least three precious months. For the moment, I am simply very tired.

Ju$t a $imple Pre$ident

From a PBS interview:

GHARIB: Well, you’ve pressed OPEC to increase oil production –

BUSH: I did.

GHARIB: And they didn’t do it. Let’s say that OPEC did pump more oil. How much do you think that that would bring down oil prices, by $20, $30?

BUSH: You know, I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask the experts that. I’m just a simple president. But I really don’t know what it would do. I do know that the main problem is supply and demand and excess supply obviously would help.


Watch the video. And weep for your country.

Match It for Pratchett

From the noble and determined Pat Cadigan:

Today, it was announced that Terry Pratchett has donated half a million pounds to Alzheimer's research. Hearing that, it occurred to me that if half a million of us all donated a pound to Alzheimer's research, we could match his donation and make it an even million.

So whaddaya say, guys? It's a pound. That's about 2 bucks US dollars, give or take a couple of (US) pennies. You can spare that much. Go here and make your donation. Tell them it's in honour of Terry Pratchett.

Let's do it!

f you don't live in the UK, you need to click the "don't know postal code" link.

You can also give in the US to the Alzheimer's Association.

The Canadian Alzheimers Association.

Terry's speech:

There's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation. And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much.

It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures. Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's...

I'd like a chance to die like my father did—of Cancer, at 86. (Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time). Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things. He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was. Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don’t get heard.

So let’s shout something loud enough to hear.

The Mathematics of Fraud

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Not that any of this is a surprise; it's the strict tabulation of the minimum number that catches the imagination here.

What can you do with 935 false statements? With that number of deceptions, a family of two adults and three kids could each tell a different lie every day to skip an entire year of work or school, with enough falsehoods left over to excuse the family from church, synagogue, or circle for all but three weeks a year.[1]


But nobody could get away with that. The adults would lose their jobs, and the kids would be chased by truant officers. The Deity or Deities involved have their own ways of responding. Let's see what those 935 lies have actually bought.

Category	Total Number	Number per Lie	Notes
US soldiers killed	3,931	4	Four soldiers--enough to start a band, though most of these kids are a year or two older than the Beatles were. It's actually 4.2 something, but all numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number.
US soldiers wounded[2]	28,938	31	What does it mean to be wounded? Imagine it: 31 wounded soldiers, an entire classroom of healthy young men and women who will spend the rest of their lives dealing with the physical and emotional scars of this war.
Iraqi civilians killed	80,621	86	A smallish symphony orchestra might have 86 players. My annual family reunion usually draws that many -- five generations of preachers, nurses, housewives, writers, farmers, social workers, and truck-drivers. The country church I grew up in might be that crowded at Easter. Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents. I selected the lower number for my computation. Other estimates are far higher: A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.[3]
Journalists killed	125	0.1336	The figure of 125 killed does not include the 49 journalism support workers killed or any of the abducted journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists . . . considers a journalist to be killed on duty if the person died as a result of a hostile action—such as reprisal for his or her work, or crossfire while carrying out a dangerous assignment. CPJ does not include journalists killed in accidents, such as car or plane crashes, unless the crash was caused by aggressive human action (for example, if a plane were shot down or a car crashed trying to avoid gunfire). Nor does CPJ include journalists who died of health ailments. Note that it takes approximately eight lies to kill a journalist.
Direct cost to US taxpayers	$488 billion	$521,925,133.69	These numbers are incomplete--just to the end of 2007; they do not begin to cover the ongoing medical and psychiatric needs of veterans, for example, or the cost of rebuilding Iraq, or the interest our grandchildren will be paying on this monstrous debt. They are also hard to grasp. For each lie, we could have built a new medical school, and still have had enough left over to put 1,918 kids through a year of Head Start. Or we could skip the med school and the education, and just buy 2,372 lucky families a new house at the national median home price of $220,000. For every lie.
Cost so far to taxpayers of Oakland, CA	$574.7 million	$614,652.41	Each lie would pay for 27,938 copies of Ruby K. Payne's excellent A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Or they could have put almost nine new cops on the streets for each lie.
Oakland children who could have been provided with health care	214,364	229	That's right--every lie could have given health care to 229 kids. Instead of killing 4 American soldiers, wounding 31, and killing 86 Iraqi civilians. How would you rather spend your tax dollars?

======


[1] Based on these assumptions: both adults working a 5-day work week, minus the US-average 13 days of vacation; a school year of 180 days; one religious service per week and a year of 52 weeks; the excuses for missing religious services apply to the whole family.

[2]What does wounded mean?

"I think maybe I just need a couple of days without getting blown up." Three articles plus interactive multimedia. But the pictures, distressing as they are, show just a little of what happens. A few smears of blood, an incision, an expression of dazed pain. They don't show shattered bones or gaping wounds. They don't need to.

Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds

The survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war - seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II.

But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress.

Wounded soldiers often economic casualties

Economic forecasts vary widely for the federal costs of caring for injured veterans returning from the Middle East, but they range as high as $700 billion for the VA. That would rival the cost of fighting the Iraq war. In recent years, the VA has repeatedly run out of money to treat sick veterans and had to ask for billions more before the next budget.

"I wouldn't be surprised if these costs per person are higher than any war previously," says Scott Wallsten, of the conservative think tank Progress and Freedom Foundation.

[3] I could not find a reliable estimate of the Iraqi wounded. The number must be immense.

What are they stealing from you with every lie?

Honest, It's Not What It Looks Like

It isn't really a . . . .

Coochie, it's a couch. Best joke so far: "My boyfriend loves it, but he couldn't find the pillow!" (Heard from someone at work, who got it from a friend.)

Taxi, it's a baby bootie. From .

Cannoli. Or a tin of anchovies. Or whatever. It's an amazingly cool crocheted toy.

Piece of sushi, Maguro or ikura. It's candy.

Landscape, it's a lot of food amazingly arrayed. Go through the photos and check out the bread mountains, cumin-paved roads, and sunset ocean of rippling salmon with a beautiful pea-green boat.

Face, it's a house, a cheese grater, a mushroom, a sneaker sole.

Boring old web page, it's an extravaganza of optical illusions. Also, check out the nifty bridges.

Technolust

Macworld Keynote Speech condensed by almost two orders of magnitude.

Best moment: watching the Air sliding from an ordinary manila envelope . . . I am in awe.

I remember the first laptop I fell in love with. I was a tech writer when the Gavilan, sometimes touted as the first laptop, was announced. God, how I lusted after that sleek, sexy machine! As the reviews said, It was just too much state-of-the-art stuff in one package.

A 9-pound, 5MHz laptop with 64K of RAM , no hard drive, a 300-baud modem, a 400 x 64 monochrome display screen (plus connections for a monochrome monitor!), and an optional four-pound printer. All for only $4,000.

So, no, the Air at $1799 doesn't look bad at all. On the other hand, I'm never in any rush these days to buy the latest technology. It will be faster, sleeker, and cheaper in 15 minutes.

Storm Front

There are sandbags in our courtyard at work.

Although this may be helping keep the conference room dry, the water's ankle-deep in most places, and going to the bathroom means wading through the lake.

It doesn't rain often out here, but it makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in frequency. Some parts of the Bay Area have had eight inches of rain since the first storm hit yesterday -- and when the current storm blows itself out sometime tomorrow, a third will move in with more wind and rain. High winds knocked over a tractor-trailer on one bridge, after which the authorities wisely closed it until further notice. Streets are flooding, power is out, and the mountains are experiencing blizzard conditions -- winds over 100mph and blinding snow.

Snipped from the official report:

Winds in the coastal mountains either side of the Oregon-California border gusted over 150 mph during the morning. Winds gusted to just over 100 mph on the hill tops around Oakland and San Francisco, causing tree and power line damage. . . . Heavy rain totals in the coastal mountains north of San Francisco have reached 8 inches. Heavy rain is gradually shifting southward from northern California into central California and finally into Southern California. Rain totals will range from 2 to 5 inches in the valleys and along the coast to as much as 1 foot in the coastal mountains. Flash flooding is likely along the entire California coast and will not be confined to burn areas. . . . In the mountains of California, hourly snowfall rates could reach 6 to 8 inches. Snow accumulations between 2 feet (valley floors) and locally 12 feet (ridge tops) will bury the Sierra by the end of the weekend. White-out, blizzard conditions will make any travel through the Siskiyou and Sierra Mountains deadly. Damagingly strong wind gusts will continue over California especially in the vicinity of a strong cold front, ranging from between 50 and 70 mph at the lowest elevations to as high as between 150 and 200 mph at the ridge tops of the Sierra. Strong and damaging winds will also impact western Washington and most of Oregon, where winds could gust over 60 mph. Swells along the Washington, Oregon and northern California coasts will peak between 30 and 35 feet overnight and high surf warnings have been issued.

Note to non-Californians: this office building, like many out here, is designed as a series of suites, each opening onto an open central courtyard. The second floor has a walkway all the way around.

This floor plan is admirably adapted to the climate here, and it allows both privacy and shared public space. A company can rent one or many suites, so the space is flexible. Originally used for domestic architecture, this style is a descendant of the grand haciendas, which housed not just nuclear families but multiple generations of family and servants.

The adobe haciendas were and are beautiful buildings, cool, comfortable, elegant. This building, like many, borrowed the floor plan but skipped the Spanish Colonial architectural motifs: no red roof tiles, for example, or Moorish arches. And unfortunately, no drains in the paved courtyard, although we do have a redundant fountain.

Northeasterners visiting here often feel uneasy; these buildings strike them as too informal to be businesslike. Going outside to visit a colleague in a different suite (or the lunchroom, bathroom, conference room) seems undesirable and distracting. Part of the problem is probably climate-related. The open-courtyard design makes no sense whatsoever in any climate less benign than California's. My first thought on seeing those external corridors and staircases open to the sky is still "What happens when it snows?"

But I suspect that the issue is less practical than that. The hacienda- style floor plan is familiar to Easterners as the basic design of a Motel 6.