Computer Programmer's Attorneys Use 'Geek Defense'

"I met Hans a couple of times socially, and he did not strike me as being all that peculiar for a technical person," Moen said. "A little bit intense, a bit highly focused. Quite bright."

Now 44, Reiser was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley at age 14. He wrote a role-playing game to compete with Dungeons & Dragons and dabbled in science fiction. His signal adult achievement was ReiserFS, a file system he named for himself, unusual in the programming world. The system organizes data on Linux, the "open source" operating system.

After opening a company in Russia, he met Nina Sharanova, a striking obstetrician-gynecologist using a dating service to meet foreigners. They married when she became pregnant, but after the second child was born in 2001, Nina began an affair with Hans's best friend, Sean Sturgeon. The cross-dressing bondage and discipline enthusiast had been "maid of honor" at their wedding.

The ensuing divorce was ugly. Hans accused Nina of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, saying she made their son ill for her own gratification. Nina complained of Hans's avowed enthusiasm for violent video games, which he encouraged the boy to play as a rite of passage. Relations were so brittle that a police officer seeing them exchange the children one day advised Nina to "get a gun."

She was last seen at Hans's house, where she was dropping off the children for Labor Day weekend 2006. She was 31 then.

"His undergraduate thesis is on how if you change the perspective, the reality is different," said Ramon Reiser, the defendant's mathematician father, folding a pair of pants in the courtroom hallway as he waited to testify.

The thesis might apply to the evidence, which the judge in the preliminary hearing termed thin. Ramon Reiser argued that it's likelier that Nina is back in her native Russia with funds embezzled from her husband's business than in an unmarked grave she was carried to in the soaked, seatless Honda CR-X. The children are with Nina's mother in St. Petersburg.

"When you look at it, would Hans Reiser turn a hose on a car to wash it? Absolutely, his mother told him to get that car cleaned up," the elder Reiser said.

"I and my brother -- maybe it's genetic -- have driven our cars without the front seat. It's really convenient."

If Hans Reiser testifies in his own defense, his attorney said the risk is that "this guy is so weird, it's a little tricky to wrap yourself around it if you're a juror." He described his client as borderline for Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that self-described geeks call unusually common in the computer industry, combining as it does an exceptional ability to focus with an inability to read social cues.

Gilmore added that the unforgiving nature of computers demands of coders "a perfectionism that makes it hard sometimes in social situations. When I see something that's a little bit wrong, and I ought to just shut up and roll with it, but I comment and it causes trouble with the people around me. Back-seat driving and that sort of thing."

Yet not all the strangeness in the case arises from computers. Du Bois takes every opportunity to mention Sturgeon, who in addition to his role as Hans's friend and Nina's lover, told investigators that he killed eight people years ago. It's unclear whether the claim is true: Sturgeon remains free. But the judge forbade attorneys from mentioning the claim in court.

In any event, Sturgeon reportedly has insisted that whatever his crimes, he had nothing to do with Nina's disappearance. Wired quoted him as saying that, in the Reiser case, he is red herring, or rather, he said, "a red Sturgeon."