Stephen Elliott discusses his jailhouse interview with murderer — and Linux guru — Hans Reiser:
When told two days later his estranged wife was missing, he refused to talk to the police. They started following him but he engaged in counter-surveillance, driving in circles, pulling over to the side of the road, exiting and entering the freeway. Within two days of being notified Nina was missing, he hired a well-respected criminal defense attorney, William Du Bois. Hans withdrew large sums of money from the bank. When the police found his car — it was missing the passenger seat and rear assembly — they uncovered two books on murder, including “Homicide” by David Simon. Simon wrote about the importance of not talking to the police and how a crime is rarely solved without a body. Without a body, you first have to prove the person is dead.
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Everything Hans said reinforced the image I already had of him. He wasn’t interested in what was true, only in whether or not he had been treated fairly. There wasn’t a shred of remorse in his body. He was a sociopath, incapable of caring about another human being. A narcissist. A manipulator who thinks everybody else is stupid. The strangest thing about this murderer is how he never gets away with anything. Nobody ever believes him but he keeps lying anyway. He’s a genius who invented a new way to store information, supervised millions of lines of complex code, and he has no idea how he is being perceived.
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Five days later, Hans took the police to Nina’s body. He had buried her less than a mile from his house, not far from the trailhead. He lived close to the Redwood Regional Park, a place where you could hike for days. Search and rescue had scoured the area with ground troops and cadaver dogs, but the body was hidden in a shallow grave more than 100 feet down a steep ravine. She had been strangled. His lawyers stated that Hans was remorseful; that he was trying to make things right. I knew that wasn’t true. He had maintained his innocence since being arrested in October 2006. I was the last journalist to interview him before his confession. He wasn’t remorseful, he was angry. He still felt the world owed him something.
Reiser had an interesting history:
He grew up in California and dropped out of his junior high school before he was 14, citing disagreements with the conventional schooling system. He was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley at the age of 15, which he attended off and on until he received a BA in Systematizing (an individualized major dealing with physics, math and related topics) in 1992, at the age of 28. Reiser was also one of the founding members of the Open Computing Facility at UC Berkeley. Though preferring higher education, Reiser chose not to pursue a Ph.D., citing the same reasons he had dropped out of junior high school.In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser selected from a mail-order bride catalogue, and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (???? ????????), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist[9] who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN. They had two children.