The Adderall Diaries (12 page)

It’s Friday. There’s a party on a boat, just south of the ballpark where Barry Bonds has finished his glorious drug-addled career. The pitchers were taking drugs too. He wasn’t competing against tubby old Babe Ruth. He was competing against the new century, Roger Clemens and the pharmaceutical millennium. He wanted it more than anyone. He didn’t worry about the side effects; his home runs sailed past the bleachers, clearing the wall and landing in the tiny inlet that makes up the China Basin below downtown.

The city has built a new train line in this area, from the ballpark to the shipyards. The University of California is expanding and all the empty lots are sectioned off, filled with bulldozers and trailers. The eastern side of the city is the only place left where any kind of development is possible. The city owns the land but we’re selling it for as much as we can get. The last of San Francisco’s poor will be pulled from the earth like weeds. Where will they go?

The trial starts.

There’s a twenty-one minute video taken in 2005 of a boy’s sixth birthday party at a children’s gym in Emeryville, a shopping mall-packed landfill wedged between Oakland and Berkeley. It’s an ordinary party. A dozen children run races on rubber mats, dive headfirst into foam pools, crawl through tunnels, and flip over horse bars. The soundtrack is filled with screaming and giggling and the instructions of counselors in the background.

Ten minutes in, the camera centers on the mother bouncing on the trampoline with the birthday boy and his younger sister. She’s barefoot, wearing a green and white print dress. She doesn’t look like a woman with two children, though maybe that’s just a stereotype. She’s gorgeous and full of energy. She doesn’t look like a murder victim and she’s nothing like a movie star. Her beauty is warm and lacking in glamour. She’s in her thirties, but there’s something younger about her. Her focus on the children is so complete it’s as if there were no one else in the entire world.

Hours are like weeks at this age, minutes disproportionate to a world children are only starting to notice. These images are all that will last. The dress hugs the woman’s hips and floats toward her knees as she falls. The kids jump as high as they can to impress their mother. There are three men who love her. Within a year one of them will kill her. The lens tries to hold her, the viewer rising and dropping imperceptibly, the steady male gaze of the man holding the camera.

At the end of the video all the children sit around a long table. The mother comes from behind her son with a large knife in her hand. She wraps her arm around the boy, holding him against her breast, while she cuts into the cake.

Officer Benson was manning the desk at the Oakland police station when the mother arrived and took a seat in the open vestibule. She came every Wednesday, always early or on time, and Benson looked forward to seeing her.

The husband arrived late with his four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, playing with the children before surrendering them. Benson thought he was trying to antagonize her, he thought the father stood too close. He’d spent twenty-seven years on the force, enough time to recognize the messages implicit in the way a man holds his shoulders and squeezes his fists, the self-justifying set of a man’s mouth. And he could tell when a mother cared about her children and when she didn’t. He’d seen it both ways.

The father was not a large man yet he loomed over the wife who ignored him as she zipped the children’s jackets and took their hands. It’s always like this, the late arrival, the big show, the husband like a kernel of corn shivering on a hot pan as the pretty woman with the soft accent gathers her children together and says goodbye as if nothing is wrong.

But this time something was wrong. Benson abandoned his desk and walked outside. The father crossed the street, opened the door to a small hatchback, and drove away. The lights went on in the minivan as the children climbed inside. The night was clear. The buildings of downtown like dark obelisks framed against the hills in the distance.

The mother waved as she drove off. He nodded then turned back to the station. He was going to give her some advice next time she came in. He was going to tell her in all seriousness, “You better get yourself a gun.”

“Remain seated. Court is now in session.”

There he is, the husband, the father, Hans Reiser, sitting with his attorneys at a large table in the middle of Alameda County Courtroom Nine. No one would ever notice him walking down the street, but now he’s the center of attention. He’s small and not quite handsome, with dark curly hair and the beginning of a bald patch blossoming on his crown. His bright lips come to sharp points high on his cheeks, giving him a resemblance to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker. Two bailiffs sit behind Hans at a small industrial desk, and behind them, after a low wall, are the sixty wooden seats of the gallery.

He’s lost a lot of weight in the year since he was accused of killing his wife. Caught on surveillance cameras in the weeks after Nina’s disappearance, he was fat with deep rings circling his eyes. He’s changed even since I last saw him six months ago during the preliminary hearings wearing yellow prison fatigues, standing in the prisoner pen holding a box full of papers. Now his features are pronounced, as if his face has come into focus. He’s probably never looked this good.

The room around him is high and wide with smooth wood panels slicing between slabs of white stone wrapping the walls. Decorated plates separate the top and bottom windows, which offer a view of Lake Merritt. On the left sixteen padded juror chairs sit empty; on the right is a mounted flat monitor for exhibitions of evidence. In front, framed by an American and California flag and a bronze seal of the state, sits Judge Larry J. Goodman, a veteran of capital cases. Compact, with ruddy cheeks, Goodman has a reputation for casualness, late starts, early dismissals, and two-hour lunches. Beneath his robe he wears a T-shirt and jeans. His court hears only three or four cases a year and he knows as well as anyone that if every killer in Alameda demanded a trial, the system would collapse into chaos. “If it’s a felony in Sonoma,” he’s fond of saying, “it’s a misdemeanor in Oakland.”

Near the witness box stands a portrait of Nina Reiser holding Cori. She smiles at the photographer. The naked child seems huge against her. In the divorce filings Hans accused Nina of having an affair with the photographer. I wait for Hans to look at the picture of his wife and son but he doesn’t for a long time, working instead through the great stack of papers in front of him and occasionally arguing with his lawyers. When he does look up, one hour, two hours later, he glances at Nina’s picture but nothing happens to his face.

William Du Bois, Hans’ lead defense attorney, stands behind Hans massaging his shoulders while they wait. Du Bois’ jacket stretches across his broad back. He wears his collar high and tight around his thick neck so he resembles a well-dressed turtle. There have been rumors that Hans will fire Du Bois and defend himself. I watch the attorney’s fingers, burrowing into the navy coat, the fabric gathering at his fingertips.

In the hallway the reporters ask about the arguments Du Bois has been having with his client. “It’s hard defending someone so smart,” Du Bois says. “He can memorize nine thousand pages of discovery so sometimes he catches mistakes in testimony and he gets upset.” Then he adds, as if surprised he’d just thought of it, “You’d be upset too if you were falsely accused of murdering your wife.”

The court is packed for opening statements. There are a dozen journalists and people who live nearby and have nothing better to do. There are police officers with an interest and a woman who served on a jury that District Attorney Paul Hora argued in front of before. It was his most famous case, the trial of Stuart Alexander, the Sausage King. Stuart was caught on his own security cameras executing three meat inspectors at his San Leandro plant, returning to shoot each in the head. That trial lasted seven and a half months and the killer was sentenced to death.
¹¹

“He’s a wonderful man,” the ex-juror says.

Hora is over six feet tall, trim and rigidly straight. He says he’s going to introduce us to someone who’s not going to testify at the trial. “She was a mother,” he tells the jury, pointing at the picture. “And she would never,
ever,
have abandoned those kids.” He shows pictures from the inside of her house. On the refrigerator are photographs of the children above a whiteboard detailing their lunch menu for the next seven days.

“In 2004, after five years,” Hora explains, “she left Hans for his best friend, Sean Sturgeon. She shouldn’t have done it. Nonetheless it happens.” In late 2005 Nina left Sean for Anthony Zografos.

When it’s Du Bois’ turn, he takes his glasses off and pulls on the bridge of his nose. “Here we have something,” he says, squinting his eyes, showing an image from a black and white magazine advertising Eastern European women. Nina smiles above an ad for Nina5972, a university student looking for a serious relationship.
You see,
he seems to be saying.
What kind of woman has her picture in a magazine like this? A mysterious woman, that’s who. The kind that disappears.

Du Bois refers to the men who had keys to Nina’s apartment as “the key club” but he only names Anthony and Sean as members. He shows a picture of Nina and Sean. “An interesting character, Sean Sturgeon. A drug addict. A sadomasochist.”

Du Bois portrays Nina as promiscuous, but offers little to back it up. He says she kept pictures of the children around because she was concerned about her own image. She wanted people to believe she was a good mother, which is not the same as being one. It quickly seems like Nina’s the one on trial, but she’s not here to defend herself.

During recess one of the local newscasters says to me, “They’re never going to convict him. That girl was a freak.” The newscaster is well known, at least on this side of the bridge, and dresses in tailored beige suits for his reports on the morning news. He’s built like a quarterback, with a square, rugged face. I imagine doing a little research, finding out what he’s into, how many times he’s cheated on his wife, and posting pictures with his statistics. It wouldn’t take much.

I wake before court at six and pop my pill before typing my notes. I like going to court every day. I like the structure. A parade of schoolteachers take the stand. They recall Nina volunteering, escorting the children on field trips, bringing home and washing the class towels. Ron Zeno, the executive director of Safe Exchange, says every time Nina walked through the door she would get down on one knee, spread her hands, and the children would rush into her arms. Hans told Ron, “You’d be surprised if you knew what she was into. If you knew what her boyfriend was into.”

According to witnesses Hans, the opposite of Nina, was openly hostile toward them. A parent from the school remembers a party during which Hans stated that his family was a burden to him and that he’d be better off financially if he didn’t have to take care of them. An instructor recalls Hans interrupting her class to force Cori to write cursive for an hour, and the principal recalls having to talk to Hans about his disruptive behavior. He was irresponsible with the kids’ documents, always late, incapable of even cleaning up after himself. He treated his mother like a servant. Some Monday mornings, after his weekend with the children, Hans’ mother would have to call Nina and ask if she could come help get the children to school.

Paul LaRosa from
48 Hours
tells me Hans is the least sympathetic defendant he’s ever seen.

After Nina left Hans, he sent her notes, one of which said,
“I think you are evil because you cannot help it.”
He made threats, like
“Those that are slow to anger are slow to cool.”
He became defined by a hatred of his wife so pure and radiant it obliterated everything in its path.
“It is June 1941,”
he wrote,
“and you are the Nazis and you think we will not suffer the necessary amount to defeat you. We will.”

When Hans met Nina he was like all clients of bride services: he was searching for a good deal, a woman who was smarter, prettier, and kinder than the women willing to spend time with him back home. He paid $20 for Nina’s contact information. He didn’t think that maybe she was looking for something too. Nina had her own ambitions. Hans told Nina he was a famous scientist, and he might have been. The only thing holding back wider acceptance of his innovations was his personality. He thought if he brought Nina to America she would be so grateful she would love him forever, ignore his narcissism, his months away, his bitter ugly view of the world. Hans thought he could convince her to love him without becoming loveable. He was wrong about that. No relationship can survive contempt. Every con is based on the mark’s own greed.

“You’re transferring,” my friend Kay says. “You think Nina is your mother and Hans is your father.” Several times a week I call Kay to talk about the trial. Because her mother is a psychologist she often sees the world through subconscious motivations.

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. But I do find myself pulled toward Nina, understanding the fierce attractions in orbit around her. Who doesn’t want a mother who volunteers at the school, won’t accept a job that won’t give her time with her children, and keeps a dry erase board with a meal schedule on the fridge so you always know what to expect?

Hans was convinced that Nina had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare disorder in which the affected create illnesses for their children to draw attention to themselves. He reported her to the child abuse hotline, explaining for over half an hour how his estranged wife was forcing their son into unnecessary medical procedures because she wanted the boy to be weak, because she hated him. The decision was made not to investigate.