The Adderall Diaries (17 page)

“C’mon Cateyes!”

Cateyes jumped into the van, sweating, smiling, everybody patting him on the back and he’s singing along. He knew the music better than anybody.

I remember the crowd near Cateyes’ dresser at the end of spring as he pulled off his shirt, his skin an even brown like toffee, a few tightly curled black hairs on his chest. His body was muscular, sensual, his wide back tapering neatly to his waist. He took off his thick glasses, sat them on top of the dresser, grabbed the tip of his nose with two fingers, shook his head in disbelief. He had been caught stealing by Michael, the other white kid in the home. Michael had been through Cateyes’ things. Now we waited. Cateyes swung his fist into Michael’s mouth and the group expanded to accommodate the violence as it spilled into the hallway. I don’t remember how long the fight lasted or what happened next. I remember the punch was perfect.

Here’s a fact: Cateyes went blind. When he was too old to live in McCormick he moved into the YMCA, tapping a path around the Near West Side just past the Greyhound Station. He was given a six-month independent living allowance. Then he was homeless. Then he died. It was cancer behind his eyes. The cancer was making him blind. Already, when we were roommates, his lenses thick as Coke bottles while the cancer did its work. But nobody bothered to check. He was twenty-three.

Hans Reiser created a file system to reorganize information. There are facts, but we can present them in any order we want. Here is a fact: against his attorney’s advice Hans Reiser takes the stand. Here is another fact: Hans Reiser was the last known person to see Nina alive.

The first thing Hans did when told his estranged wife was missing was spend half an hour hosing down his driveway. The cherry blossoms and leaves covered the pavement and he stood in one place, the hose hanging limply in his hand, spraying a small circle of pavement. The next morning he went to see his lawyer. His lawyer said he needed a criminal attorney and referred him to Bill Du Bois. On September 7, forty-eight hours after Nina was reported missing, Hans met Du Bois for the first time and gave him a $5,000 retainer. The police were calling but he never answered the phone. He never returned Nina’s mother’s calls. He never called Nina to see if she’d been found. He never got the chance to say, “I’m glad you’re OK. You almost cost me $5,000.”

Hans’ testimony begins March 5, 2008, and lasts eleven days, spread over a month to allow a vacation for the judge and jury. Unlike the phone call he made to his mother during which he spoke of Nina in the past tense, on the stand he speaks of Nina in the present tense. He says, “Nina has the most beautiful voice of any woman I’ve ever met. She’s very perceptive, that’s one of her gifts. I remember thinking women like her aren’t interested in me and now I wonder if maybe I should have understood that. She said she loved me but when you look at it objectively it’s hard to come to that conclusion.”

He talks about meeting Nina. It was a time when it looked like Russia was going democratic, before they tried to return the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky to Moscow Square. He liked living with her then but she didn’t like living with him. Du Bois asks why that was and Hans says, “She wouldn’t go to bed until everything was put away. I would just sort of leave things.”

“In 2000,” Hans says, “Nina was having depression issues. There was this artist in Moscow who draws pictures of people on T-shirts. This is a real artist I’m talking about and the picture he drew of Nina was really a shock. It was an extremely neurotic, unhappy Nina that he drew.”

Hans catalogs all the things he dislikes about Nina. His anger shines through as if she left him yesterday. Nothing galls him more than how much other people liked her. “She works people,” he says. “She complimented the teachers. She even stroked their hands.” He remembers her rubbing a fat man’s stomach and saying, “There’s nothing but muscle here.”

The picture he paints is of a patient, considerate woman who enjoys making other people smile. But that’s not what Hans sees. He has no idea how he’s being perceived. He has no idea what the artist saw in Nina on the street in Moscow in 2000.

In a letter to Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele written in June 2006, Hans recommended sweeping changes to child protective services and the court’s supervisory function in custody disputes. The court had sided consistently with Nina, awarding her full legal custody of the children. The only chance Hans had left was to rearrange the system in his favor, which was no chance at all. He wrote,
“This could end up being more important than my two decades of work in computer science, if you decide to back it.”
The letter is many pages long, paranoid, narcissistic. He felt unjustly punished by the state and asked rhetorically,
“Does inaccurate punishment damage the psychology of those punished, and increase the likelihood of later real domestic violence?”

Under cross-exam Hans is unable to account for any of his actions following Nina’s disappearance. He either doesn’t answer or he lies. When his mother returned from Burning Man, Hans had cleaned the house, something he had never done before. He had also never cleaned the car, but this time he did. He says he cleaned the car to please his mother but then he hid the car from her and wouldn’t give it back. Then he changes his testimony to say that he cleaned the car because it smelled of spilled milk. He cleaned the car by filling it with an inch of water. He says he thought there was a drainage hole, but there wasn’t. He says there was a drainage hole in the floor of his previous car, but that turns out not to be true.

Before he was told Nina was missing, Hans showed up at his kids’ school saying he wanted to put his mother’s name on the pickup list, but she was already on the pickup list. He left the school his phone number, in case of emergency, but the number he left was wrong. On Friday, September 8, for the first time, Hans engaged in countersurveillance. He drove onto the highway, got off, got back on going the other way, slowed down, sped up, parked by the side of the road, then pulled out again. He wanted to know if he was being followed, and he was. He says he was feeling paranoid because the day before a man had approached him at the school and offered to watch his children.

On the stand he recites the license plate number of the officer who followed him five days after the murder, but can’t remember other, more basic things. He can’t remember where he was when he removed the passenger seat from the car and he can’t remember where he threw it away. He says he threw it away instead of storing it at his mother’s house because his mother was trying to get custody of Cori and Lila and he wasn’t allowed to be there. But he went there almost every day, and slept at her house at least three times that week. He also removed the rear assembly from the car and threw that away. He says he was going to fill it in with futon foam and bring his mother her new, fixed-up car, a bed on four wheels.

None of his testimony adds up. He says he didn’t call Nina to find out why she didn’t pick up the children because he wasn’t supposed to call her. But he had called her twenty-six times the month before. Once he called her three times in ten minutes. He says he withdrew $10,000 from banks and ATMs because of a new policy his credit union had instituted, charging a fee for cash advances on credit cards. But the new policy had actually gone into effect more than a year earlier. He says he was not in the habit of removing the battery from his phone, then admits that was a lie.

“You willfully concealed the fact that you had removed the battery from your phone?” Hora asks.

“Yes,” Hans replies. “And I feel badly about that.”

He drove almost two hours outside of Oakland to examine storage lockers big enough to hide the car and priced out a one-way U-Haul back to the city. He says he wanted to live in the storage locker, seventy-five miles away from his children and his business. He stayed in campgrounds two hours from his home and denies knowing there was a campground just a mile away from the house he lived in for thirty years. He says he was sleeping in his car and went to the campgrounds to shower. But he had a membership at 24 Hour Fitness.

He tells the jury it’s important to understand that since the divorce, Nina liked Lila more than Cori. This is the most important thing. If they understand this, they’ll understand everything. His testimony is bizarre, rambling. He objects. He answers questions he isn’t asked. He answers questions with questions, just as Sean had with me. He says, “All my life people have been doing things. Like in grade school kids would pick on me. They would chase me. I’ve been losing social interactions all my life… I can’t communicate effectively because that’s not how scientists talk. I have a habit; I have a compulsive tendency to say things that I know are true, that people do not want to be true. If you tell people things they don’t want to hear, they don’t like you for it. If you prove it, they hate you even more. I realize now all my problems were caused by not looking people in the eye. A third of the population can be vicious to me. It had been building and building. I’d been losing all these social battles. And then they took away [my children] the only important thing to me. And the facts didn’t matter. They just didn’t matter.”

“Why did you remove the hard drives from your computer?” Paul Hora asks.

“I didn’t want the police to take them. I was the subject of a murder investigation.”

“You said you removed the hard drives on the seventh. Why did you think she was murdered on September 7? She was missing. You just heard she was missing on the night of September 5. Didn’t you think she might have had an accident, that she could be in the hospital? Why would you think it was murder?”

“You’ve convinced me,” Hans replies. “It must have been the eighth.”

During closing arguments Hora walks the jury through the crime. He places a puzzle on an easel next to a picture of Nina. Every piece contains a clue: the missing hard drive, Nina’s last location, Hans’ active cover-up. Hora presents a clear narrative for the jury, from the importance of Nina leaving her children, to Hans’ motives, to his lies on the stand. Each time Hora removes a piece of the puzzle he places it over Nina, revealing Hans, until the only pieces left are the location of the body and the method of murder.

Hora asks the jury, “If you were innocent, why wouldn’t you offer to help? Why would you refuse to talk to the police when your wife is missing, and immediately contact your lawyer?” Pointing at Hans, Hora continues, “He says he spilled milk in the car before his mother went to Burning Man. If you spill milk in the car you don’t throw away sections of the car. You don’t throw large portions of your car away when your wife is missing and you think you’re being investigated for a homicide. Then he [Hans] took it a step further, says ‘I’ve always wanted to build a futon in the back of the car.’ Why wait until your wife’s missing to build a futon in the back of your mom’s car?” Paul talks about the cell phones, how when Nina’s phone was recovered the battery was missing, just as Hans’ battery was missing from his phone when he was arrested.

“Two hundred seventy thousand people drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge every day,” Hora says, displaying an image of the bridge on the screen. “If you stopped every single one of them, how long do you think you would have to wait to find one of them with the battery intentionally taken out of his phone? How many years would you have to wait to find one with the battery out of his phone and the front seat removed from his car?”

Du Bois follows Hora. “This has been a tough case for me,” he says. “Because my client is a difficult person to communicate with, to relate to, to present as a witness. Nina is easy to like and likeable, a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to be around.” He talks about the evidence in the order it was presented, trying to punch tiny holes in each of the sixty witnesses’ testimonies. “Do you really think Officer Denson, a trained police officer with twenty-seven years’ experience, would tell Nina to buy a gun?” He doesn’t link the evidence into a story and perhaps that’s intentional. He wants to remove the file system, to make it impossible to structure the information. He talks a lot about the things that are unknown. What evidence was Hans hiding when he hosed down the driveway? What evidence was supposedly on the car seat Hans threw away? And why didn’t the prosecution call Sean Sturgeon? He projects a platypus onto the evidence screen. “The platypus is odd. Hans is odd. Odd in the way he speaks. Odd in the way he carries himself. Hans Reiser is the duck-billed platypus amongst normal people and gets the same consideration, under the law, as you and I.”