Admittedly, I didn’t follow the Reiser murder case as it unfolded, though I probably should have. I get the distinct sense looking through all the reporting and media post-conviction, that it’s highly possible it touched a circle of mine, some way or another. What drew my attention to the case this weekend wasn’t that Hans Reiser had been found guilty of first-degree murder of his wife — and that Reiser has been a notoriously controversial figure in the open source and Linux communities for a long time. And I wasn’t totally surprised to read that a wealthy and notably eccentric figure in our Bay Area’s rich tapestry of nutty tech entrepreneurs was practically diagnosed with Asperger’s on the stand. It was the way Ars Technica drew attention last week to the BDSM and local geek connections that hooked me:
Hans Reiser, the software developer credited with the creating the ReiserFS filesystem, has been found guilty of first-degree murder. Jurors concluded that Reiser killed his estranged wife, who vanished suddenly in 2006. A well-known figure in the open-source software community, Reiser was working on the next-generation version of his filesystem with funding from DARPA and Linspire prior to his arrest.
(…) When police officers located Hans Reiser’s vehicle, it was missing one passenger seat, had an inch of standing water in the bottom, and contained two books about police murder investigations, as well as a sleeping bag cover stained with Nina’s blood. Reiser himself was found with a fanny pack containing his passport and $9,000 when he was interrogated by police during an early stage of the investigation. Although the prosecution could not locate a body and could provide only circumstantial evidence, Reiser’s bizarre courtroom behavior and convoluted arguments largely undermined his attempts to defend himself during the trial.
(…) Although the case against Reiser was strengthened by his inability to provide believable explanations for the various incriminating details presented by the prosecution, there was one piece of evidence in his favor that was barred from being presented during the case. Sean Sturgeon, a former friend of Hans Reiser and one of Nina’s lovers during her separation from Hans, confessed to eight unrelated murders. Nina ended her relationship with Sturgeon in 2006, partly because she was disturbed by his fetish for sadomasochism. (…read more)
As Ars put it so eloquently, Reiser is fucked. And the thing I didn’t see mentioned were the footnotes about Sturgeon, who was extremely important to the whole story. He was allegedly Hans Reiser’s best friend at one point, and had cross-dressed as his “best woman” for Hans’ wedding to Nina (while Sturgeon’s gf was the “best man”) and according to ABC7, “acted as his financial agent from 1999 through 2002 and had access to and control over deposits, withdrawals and funds at the Patelco Credit Union.” In that same article, “In addition, Reiser alleged that Sturgeon wrote into a contract that Reiser must participate in ‘Death Yoga,’ which he said has the purpose of ‘slowing down one’s heart to the point of death.’ (…) Reiser said Sturgeon ‘worked with my wife Nina Reiser and eventually drugged her with ecstasy and seduced her.’ Reiser alleged, ‘He then engaged in Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism techniques and continued to redrug her repeatedly over time.'”
The courtroom antics of Reiser’s crazy dad did not help. Ramon Reiser, a former Army sergeant first class and mathematician, did one-handed push-ups in the courtroom (!), then stated testified “(…) that he warned his son that he might be surveilled by people associated with the former KGB, ‘Russian mafia groups in California’ or ‘the techno-geek S&M crowd.'”
As Ryan Paul put it in his Ars piece, you can find out more grisly details in David Kravets’ detailed, gavel-to-gavel reports and article about the verdict over at Wired’s Threat Level. As for me, I hereby stand up for the reputation of our actual, local techno-geek BDSM crowd. I hate to see it used in this context, like a weapon. There’s a *huge* connection between the kink and tech crowds here, not just personally, but it’s steeped in many aspects of our geek culture: geekery and sex-positivity, and kinkiness are quite married in the Bay Area. I think it’s no coincidence that the heart of technology in this country is also at the national heart of kinkiness, LGBT values and sex-positivity — the Bay Area, especially near to San Francisco. I’m working on a column about exactly that this week.
interesting — thank you, anon. I’ll strike my “wealthy” comment.
Reiser was not wealthy by a long shot. He had a difficult time paying his employees and was practically homeless.