News Blog

It's looking like there could be a deal in the works in which Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer convicted in April of murdering his estranged wife, would lead authorities to her body in exchange for a reduced sentence. That's according a Wired report confirmed in part Friday by the prosecutor in the case, Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff.

"The defense has made overtures" to that effect, Orloff told CNET News.com Friday, declining to comment further because "it's still very preliminary."

In April, following a drama-filled six-month trial, a jury found Reiser, 44, guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of Nina Reiser, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. Reiser is currently behind held without bail pending his sentencing scheduled for July 9.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Reiser is known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software, which is available for Linux. Nina Reiser, then 31, was last seen alive on September 3, 2006, in Oakland, Calif., as she was dropping off the couple's two children for the Labor Day weekend. Despite exhaustive searches by authorities, Nina's body has never been found.

Throughout the trial, Reiser maintained his innocence. Arguing the so-called "geek defense," his attorney maintained that while Reiser may be strange, arrogant, even abnormal, his odd behavior following Nina's disappearance wasn't evidence of murder.

A completely different story may unfold, however, if the potential deal in the works comes to fruition. Wired writer David Kravets quotes an anonymous source familiar with the deal who says Reiser's cooperation could reduce his April conviction from first-degree murder to second degree. A second-degree conviction in California carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life, Kravets wrote.

And the deal "would be off if an autopsy of the body somehow demonstrated that it was first-degree, premeditated murder with, for example, 'two bullet holes to the back of the head,'" Kravets wrote, quoting the source.

A jury in Alameda County, Calif., on Monday afternoon found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, according to news accounts.

The jury made its decision after three days of deliberation following a drama-filled six-month trial. The jury had the option of considering a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Hans Reiser, 44, is known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software, which is available for Linux. Nina Reiser, then 31, was last seen alive on September 3, 2006, in Oakland, Calif., as she was dropping off the couple's two children for the Labor Day weekend. At the time, the couple had been involved in a bitter divorce.

Despite exhaustive searches by authorities, Nina's body has never been found. And there was very little forensic evidence presented during the trial--only a tiny amount of Nina Reiser's blood found on a pillar in Hans Reiser's home and another speck on a sleeping bag cover in his car.

That left the jury relying heavily on circumstantial evidence. Much of that evidence surrounded Hans Reiser's strange behavior following Nina Reiser's disappearance, such has his hosing down of the car's interior, which he said seemed a logical way to clean it; his removal of his car's passenger seat, which he said allowed more room for him to sleep in his car; and his attempts to elude police.

Arguing the so-called "geek defense," Hans Reiser's attorney William Du Bois said those behaviors may have been odd, but weren't evidence of murder. In his closing statements, he likened his client to an odd "duckbill platypus," and later stipulated to the fact that Hans Reiser "isn't normal," according to news accounts.

Wired blogger David Kravets, who covered the trial from gavel to gavel, said the turning point in the trial came when Hans Reiser, defying his lawyers' advice, took the stand in his own defense.

"By the time he was done, Reiser had succeeded only in dispelling the cloud of ambiguity surrounding his actions in the case, replacing it with a storm of very specific explanations that each strained credulity," Kravets wrote. "Jurors had to choose between Reiser's strained version of events and the plain conclusion that he was lying."

Apparently, they chose the latter. Hans Reiser faces a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. He's expected to return to court Tuesday morning to have a sentencing date set, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

This post was updated with the correct spelling of David Kravets' name.

This post was updated with the correct spelling of David Kravets' name.

The most undisputed assertion in the trial of Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer accused of killing his estranged wife, is that he's a geek to the nth degree. He's been called strange, socially inept, devoid of emotion, and paranoid...and no one disagrees.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Even the typically easy-going Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman, who is presiding over the Oakland, Calif.-based trial, called Reiser arrogant and rude and at one point, in the jury's absence, said "there are not enough words in the English language to describe what you are,'' according to news accounts.

What remains unclear, however, as the jury starts deliberating Reiser's fate, is whether Reiser's eccentric behavior following the disappearance of his wife, Nina, was the result of his extreme intellect and nerdy personality...or a guilty conscience.

Reiser, 44, is known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software, which is available for Linux. Nina Reiser was last seen alive on September 3, 2006, in Oakland, Calif., as she was dropping off the couple's two children for the Labor Day weekend. At the time, the couple had been involved in a bitter divorce.

Despite exhaustive searches by authorities, Nina's body has never been found. Reiser has long suggested she could be hiding in her native Russia after stealing money from her husband's former company, Namesys.

There was very little forensic evidence presented during the six-month trial--only a tiny amount of Nina's blood found on a pillar in Reiser's home and another speck on a sleeping bag cover in his car. So the jury, which is expected to receive instructions from the judge Tuesday afternoon, is left to rely largely on circumstantial evidence, as Alameda County District Attorney Paul Hora pointed out in his closing statements last week. "We don't know it all, but we know enough," Hora said.

And much of that evidence surrounds Reiser's behavior following Nina's disappearance, such has his hosing down of the inside of his car, which he said seemed a logical way to clean it; his removal of his car's passenger seat, which he said allowed more room for him to sleep in his car; and his attempts to elude police. Arguing the so-called "geek defense," Reiser's attorney William Du Bois said those behaviors may have been odd, but aren't evidence of murder. In his closing statements, he likened his client to an odd "duckbill platypus," and later stipulated to the fact that Reiser "isn't normal," according to news accounts.

"You may dislike him--that would put you in the majority of people who know him--but he didn't commit the crime," Du Bois said, adding that the jury need look no further than this video presented in court of Reiser giving a seminar at Google headquarters about his file system to see he's a "genuine nerd," according to news accounts.

And that theory may work on some jurors, especially those who are familiar with such ubergeeks. After having seen Reiser in action--his rambling testimony, his arguments with the lawyers and even the judge, his bizarre remarks, and his lack of emotion--they may have grown to understand and empathize with Reiser and might not see him as capable of murder.

Defense could backfire
They might however, go the opposite way, and conclude that Reiser's social ineptitude makes him all the more capable of murdering the mother of his children. And the fact that Reiser took the stand against the advice of his own lawyer, might also work against him. David Kravets, who's been covering the trial for Wired, pointed out that Reiser went into details on the stand--like admitting he was trying to hide his car from police--that the jury wouldn't have been privy to had he kept quiet. "Judging by the jurors' reactions, they didn't seem to be buying what the defendant was saying," Kravets said.

The trial has its many followers, fueled by online news coverage and forums. The San Francisco Chronicle's Henry Lee, who has been live-blogging from the courthouse, is amazed at the "vehement back and forth" on the comments section of his trial blog from people convinced of either Reiser's guilt or his innocence. (I interviewed Kravets and Lee for Tuesday's CNET News.com daily podcast.)

Alexander Lyamin, for one, who worked for Reiser's Namesys as a systems administrator and tester, has been watching the trial and doesn't see it playing well for Reiser.

"It's more like a very personal apocalypse," he said in an e-mail, noting that Reiser never could grasp that how you communicate something is just as important, if not more, as what you are trying to communicate.

"Can you be more stupid than aggravating the judge AND your lawyer? No? Oh yes. You can," Lyamin wrote. "You can aggravate the whole kernel community."

AUDIO

Inside look at the Reiser trial
News.com's Michelle Meyers talks to reporters David Kravets and Henry Lee about the "geek defense" and live-blogging from the courtroom.
Download mp3 (5.70MB)

OAKLAND, Calif.--There are stereotypical nerds...and then there is Hans Reiser. He's in a class all by himself, or at least that's how he was being portrayed here Monday in his first day on the stand in his own murder trial.

Between getting him to talk about the game he created at age 17 to compete with Dungeons and Dragons, to highlighting his interest in Russian mail-order brides, to having him explain a Linux kernel to a jury of laypeople, Reiser's attorney is laying his client's geekiness on thick.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Reiser, 44, the founder of the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux, is accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina, whose body has never been found. Experts for the prosecution have presented biological and trace evidence tying Reiser to Nina's death. But Reiser has long suggested that his wife might not be dead at all, but could be hiding in her native Russia after stealing money from her husband's former company Namesys.

As in his earlier testimony Monday at the Alameda County Superior Court, defense attorney William Du Bois seemed to be making a special effort to present his client as the computer wonk he clearly is. Du Bois flashed back to Reiser's days at U.C. Berkeley where he spent years in Evans Hall playing computer games and watching his compadres hack into the university's computer system. "I wasn't the cracker, but my friends were."

The idea for Reiser's file system first came to him around 1984, he said, and he developed the idea until about 1993, he testified. At that point, Reiser was working as a system administrator at IBM's Almaden Research Center and he brought his idea to some computer scientists there. It didn't go over well, he said. "One of the researchers fell asleep during my talk."

After reading an article about computer programmers hungry for work in Russia, Reiser then hired a Russian team to work on his file system. It didn't hurt that "the women in Russia were beautiful," said Reiser, who also decided to visit some agencies there he said were for "mail-order brides."

The Russian programming team eventually quit, perhaps out of frustration with Reiser's management style, he said. "They didn't like my telling them how to write code," Reiser said. That's when Reiser renamed his file system ReiserFS so his contribution to it would always be known, he said.

ReiserFS was eventually accepted into Linux around 2000, he testified. Reiser later corrected his attorney's pronunciation of the OS named for Linus Torvalds.

Du Bois alluded to Reiser's nerdy tendencies as he drew out his client's account of meeting Nina at one of the agencies in Russia. Nina, unlike others, wanted to talk to him on the phone first before meeting him. "She actually heard you talk before she agreed to see you?" Du Bois asked Reiser. "And she still agreed to see you?"

The two of them only met a few times before agreeing Nina would come to the states on a tourist visa, Reiser said. Months after she arrived she got pregnant and they were married, Reiser said.

While he talked Nina as "perceptive," "beautiful" and "a step above all the other ladies I dated," Reiser agreed with his attorney's labeling of the marriage as "one of convenience."

OAKLAND, Calif.--When he was just 14 years old, Hans Reiser entered the admissions office at University of California at Berkeley, and eventually persuaded officials to enroll him without a high school diploma on the basis of his college entrance exams.

Thirty years later, the computer programmer finds himself again arguing his case, but this time it's before a crowded courtroom where he is facing charges he murdered his estranged wife, whose body has never been found.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

The now graying 44-year-old Reiser, donning a blue sportcoat and an occasional smile, took the stand Monday morning at Alameda County Superior Court. He'll continue his testimony in an afternoon session and, by the looks of it, for many days to come.

Defense attorney William Du Bois kicked off his questioning by taking Reiser through his account of September 3, 2006, the last day Reiser says he saw his wife, Nina Reiser.

Reiser said his wife had come to the house to drop off the couple's two children. The adults made the kids some lunch, and the kids went downstairs to play on the computer. Then the two adults talked upstairs for about an hour, mostly about their ongoing divorce proceedings, Reiser said.

Reiser wanted to keep talking, but Nina said she had to go, and the kids came up and said goodbye to their mom, according to Reiser. Then Nina drove off and, Reiser said, he hasn't seen her since.

The testimony, of course, was far more detailed, and it meandered in many different directions. But perhaps most interesting were insights offered into Hans Reiser's personality. Clearly, Du Bois seems to be trying to draw out all things geeky about his client, perhaps in an effort to show Reiser--who is prominent in developer circles as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux--as a mere wonk, not a murderer.

Reiser himself, who appears prone to go off on tangents in court and to lose sight of questions asked of him, grew up in Oakland and "hated" his junior high school because students had to sit in "neat little rows" and go at the teacher's pace. "The only part of school I liked was recess," he said.

Things changed when he started taking self-paced math classes through UC Berkeley's extension program, and he enrolled as a freshman at age 15. He spent his time either reading science fiction novels or playing computer games with other like-minded techies in Evans Hall, Reiser said. He described his Sundays playing Dungeons and Dragons for eight to 12 hours at a stretch from age 14 to his early 20s.

Reiser eventually dropped out of Cal, he said, to take a technical writing job with a small company that paid $10 an hour. "That was great at the time for me...for the first time I could afford sushi," he said.

He went on to outline other employers, including Microsoft and IBM. But those jobs prevented him from working on his two larger goals: his novel and his file-naming system.

The Reisers married in 1999, but separated in May 2004 and were undergoing contentious divorce proceedings when 31-year-old Nina, a Russia-trained obstetrician and gynecologist, disappeared.

Earlier in the trial, which began in November, the prosecution presented biological and trace evidence tying Reiser to Nina's death. But Reiser has long suggested that his wife might not be dead at all, but could be hiding in her native Russia after stealing money from her husband's former company Namesys. The couple's 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter now live with their maternal grandmother in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The courthouse has long been one of the last bastions of gadget-free life. Cell phones, PDAs, and laptops are often banned in courtrooms, and based on first-hand observation, I can warn that you never, ever want to be caught there with a ringing device.

That means when you're covering a trial, you leave your multitasking life behind. Even during the most mind-numbing of testimony, you have to sit tight, a particularly challenging task for San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Henry Lee, who is known for toting around a folder of crossword and sudoku puzzles to help get him through long trials.

Lee is way behind on his puzzles, however, since joining the growing ranks of reporters who are blogging live, straight from the courtroom, thanks to judges who are rethinking their earlier gadget aversions. Lee's first such blog launched in November with the ongoing trial of Hans Reiser, the 44-year-old Oakland, Calif., computer programmer accused of killing his wife.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Now Lee, 34, doesn't haven't to worry about what to do in his downtime any more--he doesn't get any. If he's not typing in notes, composing, fact-checking, and publishing blog posts, he spends trial time responding to e-mail, writing up his traditional trial stories, or even keeping up on other cases he's following.

"Having a laptop is a blessing and a curse," said Lee, a self-described technology novice who is also equipped in court with a BlackBerry and wireless card. "I thrive on this...But it's a wonder that I'm not at my wit's end."

Lee sees the live-blog approach as good for journalism and an overall service to readers who want the blow by blow and enjoy discussing the happenings through the blog feedback forum. He tries to be more than a stenographer by offering color from the courtroom scene itself. And this trial has been colorful, to say the least.

Lee and the Chronicle are far from the first to feature live blogging. Even The New York Times has been featuring such coverage prominently on its site. A recent example was the live blog of Roger Clemens' and Brian McNamee's testimony before Congress.

David Kravets has also been blogging from the Reiser trial for Wired's "Threat Level" blog. (It was he who got Judge Larry Goodman to allow laptops in the courtroom). I will join them both at the Oakland courthouse on Monday morning to cover expected testimony from Reiser himself, a prominent developer who founded the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux.

The ongoing murder trial of Hans Reiser, the 44-year-old Oakland, Calif., computer programmer accused of killing his wife, took a rather interesting turn Wednesday with rambling testimony from Reiser's father, who said he had warned his son about "techno-geeks" who are into sadomasochism, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Yep, you read that right. During a break with jurors present, the witness, Ramon Reiser, 65, also did one-armed push-ups in the courtroom, the Chronicle wrote.

The trial has been living up to predictions it would be one of the most sensational in local recent memory. Driving that theory are Reiser's prominence in developer circles as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux; the fact that the body of his estranged wife has never been recovered; and the national TV coverage, including a spot on ABC's 20/20.

Hans Reiser's defense opened Tuesday by portraying the victim, his estranged wife Nina Reiser, as an adulteress and a possible embezzler, the Chronicle reported. Hans Reiser has long suggested that Nina Reiser might not be dead after all, but could be hiding in her native Russia after stealing money from her husband's former company Namesys. The couple's 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter now live with their maternal grandmother in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Reisers married in 1999, but separated in May 2004 and were undergoing contentious divorce proceedings when Nina Reiser, 31, disappeared on September 3, 2006.

Nina Reiser, a Russia-trained obstetrician and gynecologist, was last seen when she dropped the children off with Hans Reiser at his mother's house, where he was living at the time. Although her minivan was later found with groceries inside, efforts to find her body--including search and rescue efforts and reward offers--have been fruitless, according to news accounts.

Expert witnesses testified during the trial about biological and trace evidence found, suggesting Nina Reiser is dead, and also tying her husband to the death.

Getting back to Ramon Reiser's testimony--which reportedly drew smiles from jurors and objections from the prosecuting attorney--he talked of warnings he had given his son that if he antagonized anyone over his relationship with his wife, he might be surveilled by people associated with the former KGB--or more likely by "those who are highly sophisticated in technology who are into S&M...," according to the Chronicle.

The murder trial of Hans Reiser, the 43-year-old Oakland, Calif., computer programmer accused of killing his wife, is scheduled to begin Tuesday in what the San Francisco Chronicle predicts will be one of the most sensational local trials in recent memory.

Among the circumstances driving the likely media circus are Reiser's prominence in developer circles as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux; the fact that the body of his estranged wife has never been recovered; and the national TV coverage, including a recent spot on ABC's 20/20.

Also fueling the frenzy are reports that Reiser plans to take the stand in his own defense, which concerns his attorney William Du Bois, according to the Chronicle.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

"We are apprehensive to some degree, because we don't know how he will come across because of his intellect," Du Bois is quoted as saying, later adding that his client is so meticulous that he can readily identify by memory where key pieces of evidence are amid some 9,000 pages of discovery, the Chronicle reported.

The Reisers married in 1999, but separated in May 2004 and were undergoing contentious divorce proceedings when Nina Reiser, 31, disappeared on September 3, 2006, according to various news accounts.

Nina Reiser, a Russia-trained obstetrician and gynecologist, was last seen when she dropped the couple's two children off with Hans Reiser at his mother's house, where he was living at the time. Although her minivan was later found with groceries inside, efforts to find her body--including search and rescue efforts and reward offers--have been fruitless.

Oakland police have said they found biological and trace evidence suggesting Nina Reiser is dead, and also tying her husband to the death, according to news reports. Hans Reiser has been held without bail in Alameda County, where the trial is taking place.

Until October 2006, Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise products used ReiserFS as the default software to manage how data is stored on hard drives. New versions of Suse Linux Enterprise now use ext3 as the default file system, demoting ReiserFS to secondary, though still supported, option.

The change occurred the same week Reiser was arrested, but Novell had been considering its decision well before that event.

CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.