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Betrayal

Extra: Hans Reiser's phone call 06:16

Update: Hans Reiser led police to what is believed to be her body on Monday, July 7, 2008, defense attorneys said. Read more.

California computer whiz Hans Reiser seemed to have it all-a beautiful Russian wife, two children, and a successful career. But the seemingly perfect life hit turbulence when several years into the marriage his wife Nina had an affair with one of his friends. The couple eventually separated and would become embroiled in a nasty custody fight.

Fast forward to September 2006, Labor Day weekend, when Nina dropped the children off at their father's house and mysteriously vanished in the hours that followed. Nina's body has never been found.

Was her husband-or someone else-somehow involved in her disappearance?

Correspondent Maureen Maher reports.



With questions swirling about Nina's 2006 disappearance, Oakland's Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan sent out an army of investigators to the last place she was seen: the Oakland Hills house where she had dropped off her children.

Technology writer Josh Davis, a 48 Hours consultant, has interviewed Hans several times and says parts of the story just don't add up. "How could a mother suddenly just say, 'Snap, that's it, forget it? I'm taking off?' Unless it was a massive orchestrated disappearance?" he asks.

But that is exactly what some people think-that Nina concocted an elaborate plot to escape to her homeland. Asked if there's a chance that Nina is alive and living in Russia someplace, Davis says, "I think there's a slim chance."

Years before she disappeared, a photograph of Nina in a Russian bride magazine first caught Hans' eye. He quickly got in touch and the two seemingly fell in love. "She called me and said 'I'm going to go to the U.S. to visit Hans and his parents and I don't know how it will work out but I really love him and this is probably the real guy,'" remembers Katia Filippova, who has known Nina since childhood.

Apparently it worked out rather well-within a month of setting foot on U.S. soil, Nina announced she was pregnant with their son Rory.

That raised a red flag with Hans' father, Ramon Reiser. He thinks the pregnancy was planned on her part, and points out that she was an OB/GYN and would have known everything about birth control. He also believes Nina's plan was to get a free ride to America and U.S. citizenship.

Ramon demanded to know more about this new woman from Russia. "So I said, 'What are her strong points?' And he said, 'Well, she's widely read, she's had the discipline to be a doctor, she's fairly quick, but compared to the girls I've known, she's very shallow.' And I said, 'Do not marry her,'" he remembers.

But Hans ignored his father's advice and married Nina in 1999 when she was five months pregnant.

"Hans is an unusual person, there's no doubt about it. When you sit in a room with him, there's a kind of an energy that's both intense and a little off-putting," Davis says.

Nina took it all in stride; after all, Hans was a successful businessman who was building up his computer software company.

In 2002, Hans made over $1 million; his code was so ingenious that even the U.S. Department of Defense was a client. "He got a $600,000 grant from them and that financed him for a while," Davis explains.

With Hans a computer star and Nina studying for her U.S. medical license, the Reisers seemed to have it all. They had a second child, a daughter named Nio.

According to Nina's friend Ellen Doren, Nina was devoted to her children. But Hans' work became his life and now he was the one living in Russia while Nina stayed back in Oakland. "Nina ended up raising the children by herself most of the time here in the States," Ellen says.

And Ellen says Nina felt abandoned.

Reiser asked his good friend Sean Sturgeon to look after Nina. It wasn't long before Nina began an affair with Sean. For Hans, it was a betrayal of the worst kind and led to their separation.

Asked if Hans talks about Nina and Sean's relationship, Davis says, "What he said to me I believe was that it was very sad that things turned out the way they did. Sean was like a brother to him."

But Nina eventually dumped Sean, too, and found a new boyfriend, prosperous Bay Area businessman Anthony Zografos.

By then, Nina had filed for divorce and custody of the children. Hans was crushed. "I've seen him be extremely emotional about his kids, very loving and caring and desperate for their well being," Davis says.

Hans and Nina were in and out of court, draining them both emotionally and financially. Hans was sure that Nina was stealing money from his company-a lot of money. "There have been accusations that the money that the company got was mismanaged. Nina Reiser was the company's chief financial officer for a period of time," Davis explains.

Hans' father Ramon says he thinks between $200,000 and $400,000 is unaccounted for. Hans withheld child support payments, and eventually owed Nina more than $12,000.

Then came Labor Day weekend 2006. "It was her weekend to have the children but Hans insisted for him to have the kids so that's when she took the children to his house on Sunday," Ellen explains.

Nina dropped off Rory and Nio at 2:30 p.m.; she was supposed to meet Ellen later that evening for dinner but never showed up. "The first time I called her was at 6:45, asking her if she was running late. I called her every half hour after that. Then at 9:30, her phone went straight into the voice mail," Ellen remembers. "I thought maybe something has happened to her but I believed she was alive."

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2006, Ellen got a frantic call from Nina's boyfriend Anthony Zografos, who could not find Nina anywhere.

But before contacting the police, Ellen decided to go to Rory and Nio's school that Tuesday afternoon; Hans was to drop them off that morning and Nina was due to pick them up. "Even if something happened to her and she's able that she's alive, she's going to come pick up her children no matter what. She would've been there," Ellen says.

But Nina didn't show up.

That night, Ellen called police, who took a missing person's report. And with police standing by, Ellen phoned Hans. "I told him that I picked up the children and Nina's missing and I know that you saw her last. Do you know anything about her or where she might've gone afterwards? And his answer was, 'I want to talk to my lawyer,'" she says.

Overnight, Nina's disappearance became big news all over the Bay Area and police treated her disappearance as a missing person's case. Police did not believe she had gone back to Russia.

Detectives turned their attention to the men in Nina's life-her boyfriend Anthony, ex-boyfriend Sean, and her estranged husband Hans.

Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan says Hans became very defensive and uncooperative. "And he did not show any remorse or any concern at all for his wife," Jordan says. "I knew that they were in the midst of a very, very bitter child custody battle."

Asked what she thinks happened to Nina that day, Ellen says, "I think that Nina went grocery shopping with the kids and then she took them to Hans' house at 2 o'clock just like she was supposed to and she never came out of his house. That's what I think."

Nina's friends continued the massive search and hoped for the best; there was even a billboard campaign to highlight her case.

Then, six days later, police found Nina's minivan just three miles from Hans' house.

Asked what she thinks happened to Nina there, Ellen tells Maher, "I think that's for Hans to answer.

But Hans is a tough guy to pin down. The cops began following Hans, but, says writer Josh Davis, Hans was afraid because he had no idea who was after him. "His father called him and said, 'Who knows why Nina disappeared? Maybe she was involved with the KGB. They could be some Russian mafia involved and now they may be following you. You should do everything in your power to ditch them,'" Davis explains.

"Hans became aware of our presence and did his own counter surveillance by speeding up on the freeway, getting off suddenly at an exit, parking his car, getting out, walking, running. So, he was pretty crafty in terms of trying to avoid our surveillance," Jordan says.

As police tailed him, they realized that Hans was no longer driving his 1988 Honda CRX and they couldn't find it anywhere.

Meanwhile, the couple's two young children were placed in foster care by authorities who were unwilling to have them live with the number one suspect in Nina's disappearance-their own father.

Within a week, Nina's mother Irina flew all the way to Oakland from St. Petersburg, Russia. Irina and the children moved into Ellen's house after Ellen had become their foster parent.

Asked what they told the children had happened to their mother, Ellen says, "We kept telling them that she got lost and everyone's searching for her."

But five weeks after Nina had gone missing, Hans was charged with Nina's murder. When authorities picked him up, he was carrying almost $8,000 in cash and his passport.

Investigators said the search of Hans' house turned up a small smear of Nina's blood on a wooden post. And that's not all: "Eventually, the police followed Hans long enough that they tracked him to his car which had been previously missing," Davis explains.

In their search of Reiser's Honda CRX, police also found blood on a sleeping bag stuff sack and two books Reiser purchased just after Nina went missing.

"He's buying books about murder. Hans' point of view is that he knew that he was a suspect in her disappearance and so he wanted to try understand how the police operated," Davis explains.

Even more bizarre is what was not found in the car: "When they find the car, they find that it's missing the front passenger seat and that the floor boards are soaked with water as if they had been recently cleaned," Davis says.

But then, just when all the evidence pointed directly at Hans, the case suddenly took a dramatic turn: Sean Sturgeon, Hans' former friend and Nina's ex-lover made a startling confession. "Sean confessed to the district attorney that he had killed eight and a half people," Davis says. "He wasn't sure if the last person was dead when he left him."

"Sean Sturgeon is the type of guy who will stare directly at you. He's got these pale blue eyes," says Davis, who has interview Sturgeon. "And there seems to be a need from him to be totally fixated on you. And for you to totally understand what he has to say."

So who is Sean Sturgeon?

"Sean has admitted to having been involved in the S&M scene in the Bay Area," Davis says.

No doubt, Sean had a taste for the unorthodox. At the Reiser wedding, he was dressed in drag, as the so-called maid of honor. And Davis says Sean has the word "rage" carved into his arm.

Asked if Sean is unstable or crazy, Davis tells Maher, "In my conversations with him, we had rational, normal talks but the things that we're talking about are pretty crazy."

But it was Sean's admission to being a serial murderer that made police sit up and take notice.

Who were these victims and why were they killed? "These he says were people who had abused him as a child and he told me that if you aren't one of these people, you have nothing to fear from him. Now that he's said that he's killed eight people you naturally think maybe he killed Nina," Davis says.

But Sean denied it. Investigators looked into his incredible confession, but until they could come up with hard evidence, he couldn't be charged with a crime. "It's a little troubling because on the one hand you have a guy who is in jail but there's no body. There's no murder weapon," Davis remarks. "On the other hand, you have a man who has said that he's killed eight people who's not in jail."

"Sean is the jilted lover of a missing person, jilted in favor of Anthony Zografos, whom, she was about to marry," notes Defense lawyer William DuBois, who says that fact alone makes Sean a viable suspect. "He was a sadomasochist and had a lot of violent tendencies. Nina Reiser freely associated with him, in fact, had an affair with him. He had a motive equal to Hans' at least."

Exactly right, say Hans' supporters, like his aunt Andree Chicha. "My personal feeling is that she was killed and that she crossed someone like Sean or someone else that she took to the cleaners and dumped because she was basically out there for what she could get," she says.

"You have this cast of characters, all of whom are awkward or suspicious for other reasons but you don't have any direct evidence saying 'Here is a knife that has Nina's blood on it and it was here,'" Davis remarks. "And here's the body. You don't have any of that."

Asked if he thinks Nina is dead, DuBois says, "I don't know where she is, whether she's alive or dead. I don't know, if I don't know where she is."

But DuBois is sure of one thing: "Hans Reiser had no opportunity to kill his wife according to the only eyewitnesses at the scene."

In an interview, Rory talked to a therapist just five days after his mother disappears. Asked about the time when his mother dropped him off at his dad's house, Rory said, "She drove to the Oakland Hills with us and then she dropped us off… She asked us to give her a hug."

Rory said his mom appeared to be happy at the time. Asked what happened next, Rory said, "She left. And then she drove her car somewhere, but I don't know where 'cause I wasn't there."

But Rory is after all just a child, and his memories sometimes seem confused.

Ellen says Rory told her an entirely different story. "Rory has told me, as well as the police, in the first days after Nina's disappearance, that Nina and Hans had a fight upstairs before she left. And the children were downstairs playing computer and then when they come up, Hans told them to back down and that was the last time they saw her," Ellen says.

"Completely conflicting stories," Davis remarks. "So the last moment that she was verifiably there, we have two totally different options for which way the story could go."

And it's not just Nina who had vanished from Oakland: her children were gone too, and turned up in, of all places, Nina's hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Irina got permission to take the children there for a two-week break, but decided on her own to keep them.

48 Hours traveled to St. Petersburg when Ellen was visiting. Asked if they asked about their mother, Ellen tells Maher, "Rory is asking more than Nio cause he's older and he's very sad that he didn't tell Nina enough how much he loved her."

Asked if Rory thinks his dad had anything to do with Nina's disappearance, Irina nods yes.

Hans' aunts are outraged over what they-and Hans-see as a miscarriage of justice. "That our courts would allow children to go to Russia when their father's in jail-there has been no conviction and allow them to go to Russia, out of the country. I mean, it's appalling," Andree Chicha remarks.

DuBois says the children couldn't be brought to the United States by any treaty or any legal means whatsoever. "They have to come of their own free will and the Russians have informed us so far they have no intention," DuBois explains.

DuBois claims this entire plan was all part of Nina's grand scheme to move herself and her children to Russia to get away from Hans. "All I know is that two months before she disappeared, she got citizenship for her oldest son, who is now in Russia with his sister."

And with Hans' murder trial about to begin, DuBois believes Nina is having the last laugh-back in Russia. "We could make a strong case that she is there now and that she is, as we're speaking here, sitting on the Black Sea somewhere having a Stolichnaya no doubt and finding it humorous that Hans is looking at spending the rest of his life in prison," he says.

Just weeks after the first anniversary of Nina's disappearance had passed, Hans' trial got underway.

Among those in the crowd was Hans' mother Beverly Palmer, and of course Hans' lawyer William DuBois, who remains confident but admits that having an ornery genius as a client is, as he says, "challenging."

"We are apprehensive to a certain degree because we don't know how he will come across because of his intellect," DuBois explains.

On the prosecution side, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Paul Hora has his own problems. "Number one, I had to prove that Nina was dead. Number two, I had to prove that Hans killed her. And then number three, I had to prove that the crime he committed was actually murder," he explains.

Hora begins his case by unveiling this portrait of Nina with baby Rory. "It's more important for the jurors to understand that she really was a committed, devoted mother, and she wouldn't have left her kids," he explains.

Then, piece by piece, the prosecutor methodically introduces the most incriminating evidence against Hans: the smear of Nina's blood found on a post inside Hans' house, Hans' 1988 Honda, missing its front passenger seat, and a wiretapped phone call between Hans and his mother, recorded three weeks after Nina vanished.

On the tape, Hans gives his mother an earful about Nina. "She really was nuts, mom, she really was," he said.

And whenever Beverly expressed concern about her daughter-in-law, Hans just didn't want to hear it. "It was incredibly powerful to show his state of mind at a time when you would expect-a man to have some compassion, or some sympathy for the mother of his children. At least for his children. But he just had none. In fact, it was just the opposite. It was hatred," Hora argues.

When it's DuBois' turn, he tells the jury that Nina was nothing more than a conniving Russian bride who was looking for a free ride to America. And he reveals on the day before she disappeared, Nina was online cruising the personal ads from men who were looking for sex.

Aside from sullying Nina's reputation, graphic personal ads suggest that perhaps Nina had a rendezvous with a mystery man, another possible suspect.

"Here's the best possible defense: she's dead and somebody else did it. It's Oakland. They have a homicide every second day," says Jay Gaskill, a veteran trial lawyer following the case closely on his blog. Gaskill says DuBois' argument that Nina ran off to Russia makes no sense at all.

But prosecutor Hora brings the jury back to earth by calling his first witness. It is none other than little Rory, just off a plane from Russia, accompanied by his grandmother who has decided Rory must tell what he knows.

"I thought it was important for jurors at trial to see and hear Rory in person and hear him say that he hasn't seen his mother," Hora explains.

Jurors hang on Rory's every word as he shows them this picture he drew just prior to the trial; Rory says it shows Hans carrying something big down the basement stairs.

"Here's a boy that has an image in his head of dad carrying a mom-sized bag down the steps. And mommy's missing," Gaskill notes. "What that means is on some deep psychological level, the boy is willing to believe that daddy killed mommy."

Asked if Rory might not have been coached by his grandmother, Gaskill says, "It might've been coached. It might not have been but the fact that he can have the image. He came up with that image himself."

Rory's testimony, his drawings, and a stack of heartfelt letters to Hans repeatedly asking 'Where is Nina?' are powerful evidence for the prosecution. In one of the trial's most dramatic moments, Rory calls his father a liar and says he no longer loves him.

The trial goes on and on. Jurors would hear four months of prosecution evidence.

Retired police officer Benjamin Franklin Denson testifies that he observed Nina and Hans when they were sharing custody. Their relationship had become so tense that they exchanged their children at police headquarters.

Denson says he didn't like the way Hans looked at Nina and told her so. "I was standing right here, she was on the other side of the counter there and that's when I told her. I said 'Hey, you need to get yourself a gun. You need protection from this guy.' I saw you know a real menace in his eyes a real hostility toward her. And I thought at that time he was a real, a genuine threat to her wellbeing, her safety."

That evidence is powerful, but Hora wants jurors to actually see Nina, and so he plays a key piece of videotape captured by a security store camera just two hours before she vanished. "I did think it was important for the jurors to see her alive or interacting with her children, buying groceries, acting like a mom in a grocery store with her kids. I mean it was very important," he says.

Hora's last witness was Nina's mother Irina. "Nina's mother's testimony was valuable because the woman's grief was so palpably authentic that it immediately and permanently disabused any notion that Nina was somehow hovering in the background and being hidden by the family," Gaskill says.

Behind the scenes, defense lawyer DuBois and his co-counsel Richard Tamor wrestle with how best to deal with the prosecutor's portrayal of their client as arrogant-a picture they actually find all too accurate. "He's difficult to like in fact he's downright unlikable. He's an unattractive personality," DuBois admits.

"Quite frankly, there's a lot of times when I just can't stand him. I just don't like him at all," Tamor adds. "I'm not even sure his own mother really likes him. I think she tolerates him."

His lawyers feel that Hans is being prosecuted for his quirky personality, and not the evidence. "The truth is that the prosecution doesn't have evidence sufficient to convict this man and they've thrown him in jail and charged him with murder," DuBois says.

Hans insists he's innocent and decides to take his story directly to the jury, but what will they make of him?

After more than 50 witnesses and five months of testimony, this trial really came down to just one witness: Hans, who with a grin on his face, seemed more than eager to tell his side of the story.

DuBois realized that having Hans take the stand was a huge risk, but a risk Hans insisted he should take.

But the first impression he made on the jury was a good one. "He was quirky and he was weird but he wasn't that weird," one of the jurors noted.

Hans was composed on the stand. In a matter-of-fact, unemotional tone of voice, he told jurors that on the day Nina vanished he saw her walk out the front door of his house, get in her minivan and drive away.

"It was the first time that he ever told anyone in law enforcement what had happened to Nina that day. The first I had ever heard of it, too," remembers prosecutor Paul Hora, who watched and worried. "As a prosecutor, when a defendant takes a witness stand in a murder trial it's a critical witness because if the jurors like him and believe him, he's goin' home."

And initially, the jurors did sympathize with Hans. But then Hora got his turn to question Hans. He got right to the point: why, Hora wanted to know, had Hans removed the front passenger seat from his car?

"He said he removed the passenger seat in order to make a Honda CRX a more comfortable place to sleep," Hora remembers.

Hora pressed him about where had he put the car seat. Hans said a dumpster but that he didn't quite remember where. "His explanations were ridiculous," Hora says. "I mean, they were lies. A Honda CRX is an awfully small car that wouldn't be comfortable no matter you did to sleep in it."

All told, Hans remained on the stand for 11 days, until there seemed to be nothing more for anyone to say. After closing arguments, the case went to the jury.

For three days, the jury deliberated before reaching a verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.

The verdict hit DuBois hard. "I was numb by the case and the trial and the tribulations that we went through to get to that spot," he remembers.

DuBois still feels that the jury was prevented from hearing the truth about Sean Sturgeon. Sturgeon's name was often mentioned at the trial, but the man who confessed to killing "eight and a half" people was never called to the stand. Perhaps more importantly, his bizarre confession was never heard by the jury.

"We tried to point out during the trial that, as a matter of fact, he was a sadomasochist and had a lot of violent tendencies," DuBois says. "There's even more that we can't talk about because there's a gag order, which is still in effect."

That gag order was issued by Judge Larry Goodman, who ruled the jury could not hear about Sean's murderous admissions. In fact, because investigators could find no evidence, Sean was never charged with the eight murders he confessed to. And as for Anthony Zografos, he was cleared by police.

These days, when Nina's friends and relatives think about Nina they focus on the good times. "What will you tell the kids as they get older, what will you tell them about her?" Maher asks.

"That they should be proud that they had a mom like that and I'm proud that I had her as my friend," Ellen says.

Back in St. Petersburg, Nina's mother can't help but remember Nina every time she looks at Rory and Nio. And she thinks back to what Nina would often say: unhappiness is temporary, and when things are bad they will always get better.

Produced by Paul LaRosa, Gayane Keshishyan, and Allen Alter

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