[conspire] Reiser case: Slow grinding away at prosecution testimony
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com
Tue Mar 11 17:14:54 PDT 2008
We 2008-03-05: William DuBois continues to skillfully lead Hans Reiser
through direct testimony. This should continue to be an unsurprising
slow assault on Nina's reputation, undermining of prosecution's
circumstantial case, and raising reasonable doubt -- until, possibly,
prosecutor Paul Hora takes over and gets several days into
cross-examination. That is when the case may be won or lost.
DuBois was asking questions about the Reisers' marriage, following up on
Hans's remarks suggesting that there hadn't ever been any real
commitment.
DuBois: "How would you describe your relationship with Nina after she
got here to the United States?"
Hans: [Nicer than a "marriage of convenience",] "But as I said, I
didn't feel the sort of passionate, deep love that I should have had
when marrying her." [Hans added that he didn't believe Nina had
ever deeply loved him, either.]
DuBois: "At some level did you care for her?"
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: "Do you still care?"
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: [Details?]
Hans: "I enjoy her presence, and I've always liked spending time with
her. We have two wonderful children." [Details disagreements
that grew over time.]
Getting to the matter of sleeping in cars with seats removed, Hans
described the aftereffects of breaking his legs in 1999 in a gymnasium,
so that he could sleep comfortably only in particular ways, with his
feet elevated. He tried various positions in his Honda CRX, saying he'd
been "miserable" attempting it.
Hans: "It was kind of driving me nuts."
DuBois: "So, what did you do about it?"
Hans: "I removed the seat."
Testimony turned briefly to Nina's tendency to leave the children with
nannies for months at a time, which point will undoubtedly come up
again, and to Nina's 2002 extramarital affair with "maid of honour"
and Hans's then-best friend, Sean Sturgeon.
Hans talked about his tendency to carry large amounts of cash,
explaining that this was so he could make Namesys's $15k/mo. payroll in
Russia without continually paying 4.5% wire fees. This is also why he
made lots of $500 withdrawals from multiple ATMs; to work around
withdrawal limits.
He was on one of those payroll-related visits to Russia when Nina told
him about the affair.
Hans: "I think she really wanted me to be upset." [Based on her wording,
it seemed that] "her reason for having an affair with Sean was as
much as to upset me as to have an affair with Sean.'
DuBois: "Were you upset?"
Hans: "Not as upset as she wanted me to be. I forgave her and we
decided to continue on with the marriage, and she said the
affair with Sean would be over, and she stayed with me in Moscow
for, I'm guessing, nine months." [Matters were calm after that,
though Nina didn't like sharing the house with Hans's programmers.]
DuBois: [And were matters ruined with Sean?]
Hans: "Well, when he slept with my wife, yes. It really soured the
relationship."
DuBois: "Anything else?"
Hans: "Yeah. A couple years, like one or two years before Nina and I
got married, he started getting into S&M,"
Hora: "Your honor, I object. It's irrelevant."
DuBois: "I'm not offering..."
Goodman: "No, Mr. DuBois, we aren't having that discussion." [DuBois
asked for a sidebar discussion, but was denied, and told to
wait for the lunch break.]
DuBois: "Were you concerned that the children were exposed to S&M?"
Hora: "Same objection. Also, leading."
Goodman: "Sustained."
DuBois: "Were your children exposed to Sean Sturgeon for a prolonged
amount of time?
Hans: "Yes."
Hora: [Objection: Leading and irrelevant.]
DuBois: "Did Sean Sturgeon live with Nina for a prolonged amount of time?"
Hans: "He wasn't supposed to.... Yes, he did."
(There was a wrangle about when and how long Sturgeon lived with Nina
and the children, allegedly contradicting what she'd testified to in her
divorce deposition -- and until when Sturgeon retained keys to Nina's
house, and started leaving belongings in her medicine cabinet, etc.)
Over the lunch break, the attorneys (predictably) clashed in front of
Goodman again, over whether DuBois or Hans could dwell on Sturgeon's
freakier aspects: Hora claimed it was "just to beat up on" Nina, that
it lacks obvious relevance to the murder trial nor necessarily supports
DuBois's contention that she and Sturgeon conspired to defraud Namesys,
then "skipped away with all (of Hans's) money in Russia. One doesn't
lead to the other. It's more prejudicial than probative. I have never
said Nina was a perfect person. I never said that. What the evidence
has demonstrated is that she would never have left her kids."
Eventually, Goodman agreed with Hora on the key "more prejudicial than
probative" criterion, and reiterated that his rulings banning certain
topic about Sturgeon would continue to be enforced (which apparently
covered his S&M activities, his alleged drug abuse, and his reportedly
having the word "rage" carved into his arm, not to mention his
confessions of being a serial murderer).
After the lunch break, direct testimony returned to Nina's having left
the children for two month in Russia, while she returned to Oakland to
study.
Hans: "And I started visiting them every weekend, and spent a week or
two.... I started becoming a more and more unwelcome guest at
her mother's house, because the kids were really freaking out
about being separated from their mother."
DuBois: "More and more unwelcome, is that what you said?"
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: "But what I'm interested in is just the period of time in two
years, 2002 and 2003. Is it true or not that your wife left the
children in Russia for a period of at least two months, on each
occasion?"
Hans: "Yes." [Describes going back and forth between his business
and Moscow and the children in St. Petersburg.] "And they
played a little hide-the-passports game and...." [Hans says
Nina and Sharanova informed him that Nina, departed to Oakland,
had taken the children's passports _with_ her.] "I was told she
had taken the passports, and you cannot get on a train out of
Russia without a passport, much less an airline."
DuBois: "So, by 2003, Nina had left the kids on at least two occasions,
for no less than two months on each occasion in Russia, is that
correct?"
Hans: "Would you like me to explain the psychological effect on the kids?"
DuBois: "You became aware back in 2003 that these kids missed their
mother, right?"
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: "You became aware that these kids were tied emotionally to
their mother, is that right?"
Hans: "Well, yeah."
DuBois: "And, as a matter of fact, you care deeply about the children,
is that right?"
Hans: "Yeah."
DuBois: "And, as a matter of fact, with that frame of mind, would you
ever deprive them of their mother?"
Hans: "No."
Moving forward to 2003-2004:
Hans: "We started running out of money, and the marriage was
unraveling." [Reiser kept trying to call from Russia to Oakland
where Nina was supposedly studying at Kaplan Test Prep. Nina
claimed there was no cell reception there.] "I would wonder
whether she was really at Kaplan. And the amount of time she
told me she was at Kaplan was not consistent with the Kaplan
records that we've seen in this case." [Hans had to cut the
salaries of his employees roughly in half, about this time.]
DuBois: "What about -- was there a connection between lack of money and
unraveling of the marriage?"
Hans: "I thought that there was, and I thought that if she wanted to
leave me, I didn't have money, then it was best that you leave
now before someday I had money again. I think she started to
dislike me at that point in time, intensely."
DuBois: "She disliked you intensely?" [Asks for examples.]
Hans: "Um, the affair with Sean. [pause] Well, there are things in
retrospect now, like we're running really low on money, and yet
her credit-card records show that she spent $20,000 on clothing
in 2003. Um, at the time I had cut somebody's salary from $5
an hour to $3.75 an hour, she spent over $1,000 on jewelry
purchases at the House of Jewelry, in credit-card debts. And
this seemed kind of nasty. She told me this laptop that she
had gotten, a laptop from Dell as part of -- because they had
failed on her warranty, so they decided to compensate her by
letting her have a new top-of-the-line laptop. Later, I found
out she actually purchased it."
DuBois: "Basically, you were scrimping and she was not necessarily
scrimping?"
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: [What about Nina's divorce filing in 2004? Did Hans] "get the
hint at that time?"
Hans: "Well, that was 2004. I forgot your definition of timespan."
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Sa 2004-05-15, Nina announced she
wanted a divorce and kicked Hans out of their house on Jordan Street @
35th Ave / MacArthur Blvd. She announced "that my stuff was going to be
loaded into a, I guess a U-Haul or something, a minivan that Sean was
going to help with loading, and I told her not to involve Sean. She
told me she had talked to my mother and my mother had agreed that I
should move out and live at my mother's house."
Nina wanted him to continue paying the rent on his house, and he indeed
did so for one additional month after being thrown out, he testified.
She left for Russia, however, on Su 2004-05-30 -- Nina having hired Nina
Gordon and headed straight for divorce court, having no interest in
mediation.
DuBois: [Did Nina pocket Namesys money?]
Hans: [Yes.] "I believe that some of the money went through Sean."
DuBois: "OK. You don't know where it ended up?"
Hans: "I have hints as to where it ended up. Um, I suspected Sean
was used as a conduit, and I suspect that some of the money
went through banks -- maybe I shouldn't use the term 'bank.'
Through Russians that received a wire of money and...."
DuBois: "Do you have any idea of the total amount of money she may
have taken for her own use, while she was managing your
Namesys revenue?"
Hans: "Based upon Sean's note, which we obtained at the settlement,
I think a lower bound on the amount is $150,000, because Sean
claims to have loaned her $150,000 starting in May 2004 to the
time he wrote that note...."
Hora: "Your honor, this is all hearsay. And there's no foundation."
Goodman: "Sustained."
Hora: "Move to strike."
Goodman: "Stricken."
DuBois: "Well, what I'm getting at it how would Nina support herself,
living on Jordan Street without any visible means of income,
traveling to Russia and living there?"
Hans: "Uh, that's very interesting."
DuBois: "You have no idea, is that right?"
Hans: [Says he was thinking Nina continuing to rent a huge, empty
house while she was on a long stay out of the country, and
especially while he was cutting Namesys's already minuscule
salaries.]
There was tussling over Hora objecting that Hans would not know how Nina
was supporting herself, but Goodman said he could answer if he knew:
Hans said Nina "took the ATM card and credit cards, and the ATM cards
worked in Russia, and she took money out of the (Patelco) bank accounts
when she wanted to spend it."
DuBois: "You never became wealthy again?
Hans: "Yeah."
The divorce started on a nasty note immediately with Nina accusing Hans
of causing "dissociative disorder" (detachment from reality: see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorders) and "traumatic
stress disorder" in Rory through exposing him to violent videogames and
movies. Hans lost essentially the entire case, partly by representing
himself "pro se" (with no attorney). Hans commented that he finally
understood just how good Nina was with people skills, as she
orchestrated testimony from psychologists to establish Rory having
psychological disorders that she had, in fact, in his view, invented out
of whole cloth.
Th 2008-03-06: DuBois questioned Hans about his dealings with Alameda
County Supervisor Gail Steele in 2005-2006 about reforming what he
regarded as a biased Family Court system. He'd circulated a voters'
petition urging such reform, and contributed $2000 to Steele's
re-election campaign because of her interest in the issue. (He stressed
that he'd gotten up-to-date on court-ordered payments before doing so.
Nina Gordon, in her separate testimony, contradicted this assertion.)
DuBois claimed he'd never behaved in a menacing manner during any
rendezvous at Safe Exchange. Nor at Oakland PD.
DuBois: "Why not?"
Hans: "Um, I don't think anybody would conduct themselves in a
menacingly manner in front of the police."
DuBois: [What about testimony by non-retired Oakland PD Officer
Ben Denson, who'd been moved to advise Nina to get a gun?"]
Hans: [Made reference to Nina "working him".] "I remember watching
her work him."
DuBois: "What does that mean?"
Hans: "I mean, she just did the whole routine on him. I came in on
part of it, saw 30 to 60 seconds of her working him."
DuBois: [What, for instance?]
Hans: "I can't remember the details of it, but she was...."
DuBois: "Give us something in general -- otherwise it's meaningless."
Hans: "Um." [Long pause.] . "I can tell you stories of her
working other people better than I.... I just don't remember
the whole details. I just don't remember the details. I could
see she had worked him into a state. I can tell a different
officer was more skeptical of Nina."
DuBois: "It's hard to understand what you're saying in the abstract."
Hans: "OK, I'll be a little more concrete. [Goes into a basically
irrelevant digression.]
DuBois: "What does that have to do with Ben Denson?"
Hans: "Well, she just worked him. She'll just look people in the
eyes and she'll smile and she'll say these words of flattery
and I'll be thinking, 'This is just too over the top, it won't
work,' but it does." [Hans digresses onto an anecdote --
finally gets back to the point by saying he was just walking
up to the Oakland PD duty desk when he heard Denson advise
Nina to get a gun.]
DuBois: "Did you do anything whatsoever to cause Ben Denson to say,
'Nina, get a gun?'"
Hans: [No.]
DuBois: "Did it appear that it was in response to something that she
said to him?"
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: "Had you done anything bizarre, anything unusual, anything
menacing just prior to Denson saying to her, 'I advise you
to get a gun?'"
Hans: "Um, no, and actually after I heard that I suggested to him
that he should go talk to George. She's a little
manipulative."
DuBois: "George who?"
Hans: "The other officer who sits at the desk, who's seeing more.
He was seeing people mix stuff up. And in these kinds of
things, people make stuff up."
Nina's accusations that Hans was causing mental disorders in Rory, and
that Rory had a variety of ailments Hans considered fictional (such as
neuromuscular weakness in his wrists or fingers) came up at Grand Lake
Montessori School, in addition to Family Court, leading to his
discussions with head of school Helen Campbell.
DuBois: [Did you raise your voice with Campbell, or break furniture?]
Hans: [No.]
Reiser described a demonstration he'd conducted of having Rory write
cursive for 50 minutes straight, with no problems, to refute what they'd
told him -- which resulted only in antagonising the staff.
Hans: "I don't have a lot of social skills, even when I'm polite.
People can sometimes read in my eyes that I don't respect
certain things."
DuBois: "You don't believe they're correct?"
Hans: "Yeah."
DuBois: "You think they're wrong?"
Hans: "Yeah."
DuBois: "They can see that in your eyes?"
Hans: "Yeah, even if my voice is polite, and all that stuff."
DuBois: "So, this was insulting, what you did to them?"
Hans: "They interpreted it that way."
Hans said Nina cultivated the teachers' favour through small
manipulations like the one where she would "actually stroke the hand of
one of the teachers and give her a smile", as if there were something
"special we're sharing", and flatter them -- which always amazed Hans by
working despite his prediction that the manipulation would be too over
the top. "It seems no matter how much you flatter people, it works."
He'd been concerned about Nina inventing imaginary illnesses for Rory,
a practice referred to in the medical literature as "Munchausen's
[Syndrome] by Proxy", was still reading articles about the syndrome at
the time of his arrest, and had discussed the matter with Campbell.
DuBois: [Campbell had reported Hans had been] "furious that Nina
manufactured problems with Rory." [Was that the case?]
Hans: "Well, wouldn't anybody be, if somebody was inventing illnesses
your kid doesn't have? Wouldn't you find it outrageous?"
DuBois: "But you expressed this to Helen Campbell, right?"
Hans: "Yeah, but I didn't, like, jump up and down or anything, but
she probably saw that I wasn't happy about it."
DuBois: "And why do you think she characterized your state of mind as
'furious'?"
Hans: "Um, I guess that's a word you use when somebody's not happy
about something. It's not the word that I would have used."
DuBois: "What word would you have used?"
Hans: "Um. Well, I thought that it was outrageous."
(About an article on Munchausen's by Proxy that he'd downloaded from the
Web in Oct. 2006, just before his arrest:)
DuBois: "So, what was your intention at the time you downloaded the
article with respect to Nina?"
Hans: "I thought she might come back and it might continue to be an
issue."
DuBois: "And this concern persisted up until the time you were arrested?"
Hans: "Actually, I'm still concerned about some of the illness
reports coming out of Russia."
DuBois asked Hans about Nina's recent boyfriend Anthony Zografos: Hans
considered him a stable person and a moderating influence on Nina, and
judged her plans to move in with him a "good development for her".
Next, DuBois asked Hans about his remark to Clare and Andrew
Conry-Murray and other school parents at a class party that Nina and the
children had been a financial burden to him, and that his finances
would be better "if he didn't have to take care of them".
Hans: "Yeah, I was being a patronizing asshole. So, what I was saying
is that men don't really need for themselves wives and children
that demand to be taken care of."
DuBois: "It does sound like you're being a patronizing asshole."
[Hans asks DuBois to find a note Hans had passed him at the
time of the Conry-Murrays' testimony, explaining what he'd
meant.] "We'll come back to it. But why were you being a
patronizing asshole [pause] on this occasion?"
DuBois's colleague then found Hans's in-court note, which said:
"This was actually a statement that men in general don't have a
financial -- with financial underlined -- need for a wife and kids.
Therefore, my only interest in getting a wife and kids was not
financial and, thus, good. She seemed not to appreciate the selfless
generosity of males in her memory of what was said. We met once at
a kids' party."
Digging himself in a bit deeper, Hans elaborated in court: Marriage is
"altruistic in the financial sense: It's a lot cheaper to hire a
housekeeper."
DuBois: [At that party, you must have been involved in] "scintillating
conversation."
Hans: "So, I was being an asshole. I'm sorry."
DuBois: "Is that a posture you adopt often?
Hans: "I don't think I was consistently an asshole, but I had my moments."
DuBois: "And that was one of them?"
Hans: "Yeah."
[After a break:]
Hans: "I just want to say I don't think I can be psychologically
happy without a wife and children."
DuBois: "Is that the end of the answer from the last question before
the recess?"
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: "Looks like you've been mulling this over."
Hans: "I think that, in my statement that I wrote, I expressed things
with more precision than what I said on the stand."
Hans dwelled on Nina's social "performing" skill, acting very
differently for public audiences and before the divorce filing, compared
to in private and after. "I should say that I think she also, well,
prior to the divorce, she also performed for me in terms of saying nice
things, and she tells people what they want to hear." He characterised
the idea of Nina embodied in prosecutor Hora's court-displayed framed
portrait of her, as a devoted mother, as "That was the image that she
learned was wanted from her, and she responded to that. She was
actually more interested in being respected as a doctor than as a
mother."
"That's my dream, not hers. And I was such an egotistical asshole that I
thought that after I got her pregnant, then she would have changed her
mind and make it her dream, and it didn't." Hans said he was surprised
to find that Nina had no interest in teaching the children or helping
them read, and that, e.g., Clare Conry-Murray's daughter was "far more
advanced than our children were." (He made similar comments about Nina
leaving the children entirely with her mother and nannies for months on
end to cram for medical exams, at a time when the kids were "freaking
out" about the divorce.)
DuBois asked whether it's true that he wrote Berkeley pediatrician Dorit
Bar-Din a letter threatening lawsuit if she treated Rory without his
permission. "Probably." "I wasn't really friendly, really positive
about the whole concept about her being the children's doctor at all."
He noted, in any event, that Bar-Din had withdrawn on her own
initiative.
Was it true that he'd ranted against Nina in front of Grand Lake
Montessori teacher Monica MacDonald, e.g., "Did you know Nina is a
liar?" and "Would you think Nina is a thief?" Hans digressed about
Nina's campaign among the school's teachers, not really answering the
question.
About Hans's neighbour Jack Strabb, who testified to seeing Hans
"watering in his driveway" for half an hour on Tu 2006-09-05:
DuBois: "How did you and Jack Strabb get along?"
Hans: "Um, not well."
DuBois: "Why is that?"
Hans: [Strabb was annoyed at Hans parking cars in "his" parking
spaces on the public street.] "It's remarkable for him to
decide that the parking spaces across the street from our house
are his."
DuBois: "Did he ever say to you that you are not a good neighbor?"
Hans: "In those words? No."
DuBois: "Did he ever express to you that you were not a good neighbor?"
Hans: "I don't think that the concept of neighborliness is a part of
how he views the world. He expressed animosity toward me,"
DuBois: [What about otolaryngologist Peter Koltai, who says Hans
threatened to sue him if he operated on Rory?]
Hans: [Hans heard his divorce lawyer's young son had been told his
adenoids needed removal, but treatment by an allergist had
revealed that the suggested surgery was unnecessary.]
Over lunch, the attorneys heard Judge Goodman order them and all
related staff to say nothing more to the press, "until further order of
this court". This is probably a precaution against jurors unlawfully
reading news reports -- especially after DuBois's statement to the press
yesterday about Sean Sturgeon: "I think it's fundamentally unfair for
this jury not to know that the woman, for two years, lived with a
sadomasochist who was also a drug abuser, and she's not just a goody
two-shoes that takes her kids to Adventure Time or to little
kinder-gyms." (There had been an earlier, sealed order about Sturgeon
that DuBois was quite possibly violating, by making that press comment.)
(Goodman mentioned Sheppard v. Maxwell, the 1966 Federal case that
established legal standards for protecting juries against the effect of
prejudicial press coverage. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheppard_v._Maxwell )
Resuming testimony, Hans said he felt Dr. Koltai was "disregarding
information that he didn't want to see or hear, because it didn't come
to the conclusion he wanted."
DuBois: "And what was that conclusion?"
Hans: "That information was that (the boy's) adenoids could be
enlarged due to allergies, as the allergist had suggested."
DuBois: [Did Hans take any violent action against the doctor?]
Hans: [No.]
DuBois "To this day, however, do you think you're right?"
Hans: "Actually, I don't know, because I'm a scientist, and a
scientist first checks to see when something is true or not and
checks the data. I have been told that it was a serious
possibility that it could be due to the allergies, and I just
wanted to know, is it due to the allergies and find out whether
it was due to the allergies. Then we could try to find out
some complex thing that involves the cat and whether Rory
should have the cat sleeping in his bed at night or not. I
think he didn't like that I didn't respect his methodology and
chose to believe that I was hostile towards my son instead of
being hostile towards him -- and I should say hostile towards
his methodology. I'm a scientist. I have a lot of experience
with scientists who don't want to make the effort to check the
data, and my entire career, actually, is based upon finding
areas where other scientists weren't willing to make the
effort."
DuBois: [Does Hans, a black belt in judo, have any problems controlling
his temper during judo bouts?]
Hans: [No.]
DuBois: [Did his anger get away from him at the time of the 1985
5000-e-mails incident?]
Hans: [No. He added that having a judo black belt "makes you a
calmer, more level-headed person".]
DuBois: [Did Exeter Drive resident Goli Fahid see you walking on
Shepherd Canyon Road, on Mo 2006-09-18?]
Hans: [Probably. Sure.]
DuBois: [Haven't you in fact run quite a few times up that road?]
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: [Why did Santa Rita Jail informant Arthur Gomez report you
to have shown intense interest in a KTVU/TV2 report about
finding a body in the Oakland hills, and then relaxed when
the reporter said it was a black man's body?]
Hans: "Because I care about my wife."
DuBois: "Did you think that it might have been Nina; is that what
you're talking about?"
Hans: "I didn't know." [But that's indeed why he was interested.]
Hans commented that he'd been quite disturbed by his unfair treatment by
Child Protective Services, Family Court, and Oakland PD.
DuBois: "So, you were not trusting of the legal system, were you?"
Hans: "No, I was not."
DuBois: "By the time were in the divorce, at every turn, you had been
thwarted, is that correct?"
Hans: "I should state that before the divorce, I believed very much
in the legal system, and I thought ours was superior to
Russia's. There's a saying in the technology industry that the
users who complain the most are the users who care the most
about your product. And I think they describe some of my
feelings toward the legal system. I care enough to complain a
lot about it."
DuBois: [How did you feel about CPS taking away your children?]
Hans: (in tears) "I can't say. My kids love me so much... pure,
uncomplicated love that they have for me."
DuBois: "So, when they were taken by the police, did this affect the way
you conducted yourself?"
Hans: "Yes. [pause] I just, uh, I decided to take very seriously
that I was under investigation by the police, and I wanted to
know more about it. I understood that I was, I, uh, that I was
under a very serious level of suspicion, and also, I just didn't
trust them at all."
DuBois: "Well, did you believe you were being followed?"
Hans: [Not long before his children were seized, he realised he was
being followed: When dropping the kids off at school, a strange
man offered to watch them for him. He claimed to be part of a
group of parents who took turns watching children, but Hans
wasn't sure, as his offer came "out of the blue" and his
expression seemed hostile.]
DuBois: [Did you change your pattern of behaviour upon the kids' seizure
on Fr 2006-09-08?]
Hans: [Yes. He'd been told that the usual police pattern was to
seize the children, then wait for him to show up at CPS and
arrest him there. Also, they liked to do this on Friday so
as to have not just the mandated 48-hour hold period before
they'd have to decide whether to file charges, but the weekend
as well. So, he deliberately avoided so doing.]
DuBois: [Why did he visit the Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley Barnes and Noble
and buy two books on murder investigations?]
Hans: "I was thinking to myself, I'm not going to find books about
missing persons departments." [Initially, he picked out just
David Simon's _Homicide_, but then saw _Masterpieces of Murder_
on sale for $7.98.] "I have never read true crime stories. It
just doesn't interest me. It was on sale, and I bought it, and
it was worthless." Simon's book, by contrast, was "quite
well-written. It has an extensive discussion of a whole bunch
of abusive interrogation methods, and how it explains evidence
and the conditions under which they will plant evidence."
DuBois: [Why did he pay cash and not claim his B&N member discount?]
Hans: "I wanted to read the book, but I didn't particularly want the
government to have a record of my having purchased the book."
DuBois: [Didn't he realise the purchase would be videotaped?]
Hans: "I figured that didn't matter. I just didn't want it on my
credit card."
DuBois: "So, you made a conscious effort not to leave a record that
you're a Barnes and Noble member who purchased these books?"
Hans: "I would describe it as a three-dollar effort."
DuBois: "What does that mean?"
Hans: "I think I lost three dollars by making that effort." [Hans
noted that he never tried to hide his receipts or any of his
purchases, including the books themselves, leaving them all in
his car. However,] "I didn't want to be arrested with the
books in my possession, particularly. It didn't seem to my
advantage."
DuBois: "Carrying 'Masterpieces of Murder' and 'Homicide' would draw
attention in a murder investigation?
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: "That did dawn on you?"
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: "So, did you make an effort to dispose the books?"
Hans: "Well, I was going to finish reading it and then I would have
thrown it away. But I only got to page 104."
DuBois: "Is that a no? You didn't make any efforts to dispose the books?"
Hans: "I made no effort to dispose the books. I had the arrogance of
innocence, back then. I figured if I was innocent, it wouldn't
really matter."
DuBois: "You should revise that theory, right?
Hans: "Yes."
DuBois: [Why was Hans going around carrying large amounts of cash
when picked up by Oakland PD?]
Hans: [He needed to make sure he could pay his employees, and was
concerned about police seizure given their seizure of his
computers, his children, and his underwear. "And I was also
concerned, not just about the programmers, but paying Cheryl
Hicks and paying you.'
DuBois: (pauses, smiles) "That's a sore subject."
Hans: "I gave you all I had." (grins)
DuBois: [Was the three-page rant about problems in the legal system
that police found in his fanny pack the one he'd written, and
that DuBois had had an argument with him about?]
Hans: [Yes.]
DuBois: "You remember my attitude about you doing this?"
Hans: "That I shouldn't release it to anybody?"
DuBois: "Correct -- and here it is in court. [Laughter from the jury.]
I guess you got your way after all, and now it's been released
to the jury." [Is it true that the essay] "was just your
general attitude about things that were going on?"
Hans: "It was a draft." [Yes, though.] "And my unhappiness with
the government, my unhappiness with the legal system."
DuBois: [Why was the battery removed from his Treo when the police
detained him?]
Hans: [Nina had once described how the police in Russia use
cellular-phone detection to find travellers to demand
200 ruble bribes, especially if you're running late for
one of the on-time trains.]
DuBois: "Did she tell you she had personal experience with this?
Did she tell you how she knew these things?"
Hans: "She told me she had a boyfriend who was KGB some time ago,
and then she would tell me things that implied a knowledge
of the FSB -- or should I say, KGB."
DuBois: [Questions Reiser about his trip to Truckee and Reno, for
several days in late September 2006, withdrawing cash
from three ATMs in Truckee.]
Hans: [Mentions that he'd slept in his car, in the parking lot of
the Sands Hotel in Reno.]
DuBois: "Did you pay for anything in Reno?"
Hans: "Uh, yeah, the buffets." [Mentions that he'd driven to Reno
after looking at a map and mistakenly estimating it a 4-hour
drive away.]
Hans mentioned that he's long been in the habit of carrying his passport
with him, as Europeans do: It's a handy habit for someone who
frequently travels, and is valuable additional ID.
Court has adjoined until Mo 2008-03-17 (St. Patrick's Day), because of
Judge Goodman's long-scheduled week-long vacation.
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