Reiser leads police to wife’s body
- July 8th, 2008
- 9 Comments
Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, an popular alternative filesystem, led Oakland, CA police to his murdered wife’s body yesterday afternoon. Nina Reiser disappeared on September 3, 2006 and no murder weapon or body were found. Reiser’s case lasted six months and it is believed that he brought the police to the body in order to bargain for a reduced sentence.
“It was difficult to reach the body,” Dubois continued. “There were steep hills involved. It wasn’t as bad going down it turned out, but we had to use ropes to get back up. It was an arduous process, and a difficult emotional trip for Hans Reiser. Very difficult.”
Reiser’s admission closes one of the oddest and most discussed crimes in open source hackerdom. “Admissions” of guilt were even found in the ReiserFS code and open source supporters held that Reiser was innocent.
Roy Rubin (Who am I?)
4 months ago
There was an article in Wired magazine a while back which is an interesting read about this case.
Piers (Who am I?)
4 months ago
I’ve been following the trial on one of the Wired blogs. I don’t understand how, having basically lied to the courts, he can get a reduced sentence. But I don’t understand the US legal system anyway.
mdmadph (Who am I?)
4 months ago
Well, because it looks better for the prosecutors to have this case wrapped up. Lying to the courts or not, Hans was in prison (probably not having a very nice time at all…), and they approach him with a deal: “Tell us where the body is so we can put a feather in our caps, and we’ll help you get out of Big D’s cell block — hell, we’ll even give you a reduced sentence.” The morality of him having lied to the court doesn’t even come up.
Dan Perlman (Who am I?)
4 months ago
The Reiser case is certainly the stuff of true crime books and movies of the week.
bored to tears (Who am I?)
4 months ago
So when are you guys going to ditch ShareThis? Any site I visit that uses it takes 20+ seconds to resolve w.sharethis.com. Meanwhile the page isn’t visible until the dns lookup times out (which it usually does) and then no ShareThis button appears anyway.
John Biggs (Who am I?)
4 months ago
just took it off. you’re right.
Mohak (Who am I?)
4 months ago
I am sure he could have set hidden attributes to the wife’s body! But sad!
mathew (Who am I?)
4 months ago
http://slashdot.org/~hansreiser/friends/
(Yes, that’s his real Slashdot account.)
Alex (Who am I?)
4 months ago
mdmadph:
Being cynical about the prosecution’s intentions in this instance is, of course, valid. Particularly, when viewed in light of other prosecutorial screw ups.
However, I think anytime you can bring closure to the victim’s family by finding a missing loved one alive or, sadly, dead reducing a convicted murderers sentence is warranted.