OAKLAND, California — Jurors found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of first degree murder on Monday, concluding he killed his estranged wife in 2006. The verdict followed a nearly six-month trial and nearly three days of deliberation

The 44-year-old developer of the ReiserFS filesystem, sat quietly as a clerk for Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman read the verdict. Reiser faces a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Wearing the same dark coat he’s worn for months, the defendant was immediately removed from the courtroom by one of four bailiffs watching over the courtroom. He asked out loud if he could speak with his attorney.

(Update: We’ve added video of the sentencing to the bottom of this post.)

Reiser and his attorney had argued that Nina Reiser was not dead, and had abandoned her children to sneak away to Russia, where the couple met in 1998, after he accused her of embezzling from his software company, Namesys.

In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead. By the time prosecutor Paul Hora rested his case February 14, he had called some 60 witnesses, but presented mostly circumstantial evidence demonstrating animus between Reiser and his wife, and suspicious behavior by the defendant following Nina’s disappearance in September, 2006.

The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.

In his 11 days of testimony, Reiser offered lengthy and verbose explanations for every piece of circumstantial evidence. But Reiser’s version of events often drew disbelieving head shakes from jurors — and occasional smirks from the trial judge.

In a characteristic exchange under cross-examination, Reiser tried to explain why he’d removed and discarded the passenger seat from his two-seater Honda CRX after Nina vanished. His explanation: He’d been sleeping in the vehicle, and wanted the extra room. Asked why he hosed down the inside of the car, leaving an inch of water on the floorboard, he explained that the interior was dirty, and he mistakenly believed the water would drain out.

"I just assumed that every car engineer would put a hole in the car," he said.

"Don’t you remember sleeping on a nice, soft, wet carpet?" Hora went on to ask.

Reiser replied, "I don’t remember."

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. Jurors had to choose between Reiser’s strained version of events and the plain conclusion that he was lying.

Nina Reiser, then 31, was last seen September 3, 2006, while dropping off the divorcing couple’s two young children to stay with Hans for part of Labor Day weekend. Authorities believe she never left her estranged husband’s house in the Oakland hills alive.

When Nina’s best friend reported the woman missing two days later, the police launched an investigation that quickly focused on the husband. The couple had separated and were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce and custody battle.

Six days after she disappeared, police found Nina’s minivan in the Oakland hills about two miles from Hans Reiser’s house, and the same distance from her own apartment. The car contained Nina’s purse and $144 in rotting groceries that she’d purchased before dropping off the children.

When police eventually located Hans Reiser’s Honda CRX a few miles from his home, they found the interior waterlogged, the passenger seat missing, and two books on police murder investigations inside. They also found a sleeping-bag cover stained with a 6-inch wide blotch of Nina’s dried blood. Reiser later testified that the couple had sex in the sleeping bag on a camping trip prior to their 2004 separation.

The only other physical evidence in the case was a trace of Nina Reiser’s blood found on a pillar inside Hans’ house.

Police arrested Reiser on October 10, 2006, and he was held without bail. "I just keep thinking that I’m stuck in George Orwell’s 1984," he told Wired.com in a jailhouse interview. "The government has taken away my kids, invaded my house, held me in solitary confinement and caused me all sorts of financial problems."

Seeking to short-circuit Reiser’s defense theory, prosecutor Hora called one witness after another to testify that Nina Reiser wouldn’t abandon her children, a boy now 8 and girl now 6. Defense attorney William DuBois cross-examined the witnesses about Nina’s extramarital affair with Reiser’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon. (The jury was not allowed to hear testimony that Sturgeon has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case, in retaliation for child abuse.).

A battery of police detectives took the stand to testify that Reiser performed countersurveillance maneuvers following Nina’s disappearance, and that when he was questioned early in the investigation he had about $9,000 in cash and his passport in his fanny pack.

One Oakland police officer, who’d previously observed Reiser with his wife, testified that he found Hans’ behavior menacing. The officer said he once warned Nina Reiser, "You need to get yourself a gun."

Hora speculated that Reiser might have choked his wife, based on little evidence except that Reiser was a black belt in judo, a martial art where choking is a specialty.

As the prosecutor rested his case, it seemed far from clear that the circumstantial evidence would be enough for the jury of seven men and five women to find Reiser guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Throughout his cross examination of the prosecution witnesses, defense attorney William DuBois aptly painted a picture of Reiser as a misunderstood computer nerd, so inattentive to social cues, and so slavishly devoted to logic, that his innocent behavior could be easily misinterpreted as evidence of guilt.

From his seat at the defense table, Reiser seemed to offer supporting evidence for that so-called "geek defense" in the form of his own actions, frequently quarreling with his attorney, and interrupting DuBois’ cross-examination. In January, Judge Goodman threatened to bar Reiser from his own trial. "I’m not sure whether you’re doing this on purpose to screw up the process or it’s just part of your nature," the judge said outside the presence of the jury. "I’m tired of you disrupting the courtroom."

DuBois made little effort to hide his frustration with his client. The biggest bone of contention was Reiser’s insistence on taking the stand himself — a move that may have been Reiser’s undoing.

On many of Reiser’s 11 days on the stand, jurors were seen shaking their heads in disbelief, laughing to themselves and wearing skeptical looks.

Reiser couldn’t explain why, following his wife’s disappearance, he suddenly drove through the Sierra Nevada mountain range to Reno, to sample casino buffets. And he admitted taking evasive maneuvers while walking and driving to determine if he was being followed by the police, something he attributed to his innate distrust of authority, amplified by the books he read when authorities began investigating him.

He bought those books about murder investigations, he said, because he wanted to know how police behaved. "I was under investigation by the police," he said. Reading up on their techniques was only logical, he testified.

"I have a compulsive tendency to say things that I know are true that people don’t want to be true," Reiser said at one point.

As testimony wrapped up April 14, Reiser offered his assessment of the proceedings in front of the jury. "This whole thing is silly," he said from the stand.

"What do you mean, the ‘whole thing’?" DuBois asked.

"The whole case."

After the jury left, judge Goodman summed up his opinion of Reiser.

"You are rude," he said. "You are arrogant. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are."

But the jurors found a word on Monday: guilty.



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