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OUTLINE_OF_EVIDENCE
February 19, 2017
REISERS_GUILT
A brief outline of what we knew
about the case before Reiser's Every point here should be
eventual conviction and confession: taken as tentative-- I'm
working largely from memory,
and am not sure I should've
One morning, Nina Reiser trusted my sources.
dropped off their kids in
Hans Reiser's care-- and then
she apparently disappeared. Apparently, after sending
the kids upstairs, they had
Her van was eventually found an argument, during which
in another location, with her Hans completely lost it and
phone inside it with battery strangled her.
removed from it.
Popping a battery out of a phone to
disable it completely was apparently
a trick that Hans Reiser liked, or so
the prosecution claimed.
The car that Reiser was driving was http://www.wired.com/wired/issue/15-07
missing the passenger seat-- Reiser
had recently removed it, (to make room Looking at the Joshua
to sleep in the car, I believe he Davies article in Wired
said). He said he'd disposed of it in again, I see there are some
a random dumpster some place. details I'd forgotten: he
was juggling the location
He also apparently went crazy trying to of the car with the seat
clean the interior of the car, spraying removed, and trying to use
a lot of water around. He filled up the a car of his mother's
floor of the passenger side to the brim. instead...
He went to an auto parts store and bought
some sort of hand pump (using a credit card),
evidently to drain accumulated water off of
the floor of the car.
I don't think he
Shortly after Nina's disappearence, it was her actually did pick
turn to pick up the kids at school, and Reiser up the kids, rather
showed up instead, ostensibly to talk about he gave the school
something else with the school authorities. approval for a
friend of Nina's
who had been
Immediately after his arrest, the trying to pick them
police were feeding forensic details up to do so.
to the press which were supposedly
damning: a smear of something like
blood (a mix of Hans and Nina's) on a
post near the entrance; another smear
found inside an old sleeping bag case
(as I remember it), found inside his
car....
And in hindsight:
This sounded pretty bad, but didn't we know that Nina
seem quite so conclusive once you was strangled, so
looked into it a little more closely. what's all this about
The police weren't able or willing to smears of blood? At
estimate how old these stains were, the time, we all thought
and Nina had been in that house, and they were implying she
she'd lived with Hans: why shouldn't had been stabbed.
there be traces of her presence around?
Myself, I couldn't quite come up with a
coherent sequence of events that fit
the evidence they were giving us:
In retrospect: after the
Nina's van was on the scene and it had confession, we know that
to be moved. Wouldn't you just use the there was a double-shuffle
van to transport her corpse? Why should with the corpse. Reiser
there have been anything on the passenger apparently stashed it
seat of his car that needed cleaning up? somewhere quickly, and then
later moved it to a better
It bothered me somewhat that the hiding place, burying it
bare fact that he'd thrown out "in the Oakland hills".
the passenger seat was regarded
as damning... I used to know a So the van was probably used
guy who drove a car without a for the first move, but the
passenger seat. second was done later after
which he might not have been
For that matter, I used to willing or able to use the
drive a car that only barely van again.
had a driver's side seat.
A ripening corpse, even a
A lot of the engineers I've plastic-bagged one, might
known had a habit of driving make you worry about traces
old, fucked-up cars that they leaking.
hold together by force of will.
GEEK_DEFENSE
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