I dreamed of footsteps, then screams, then something hitting my face. I woke trying to hide from my father’s fists. He pulled me by my hair into the kitchen where he had a set of clippers waiting. He forced me to kneel at the cabinets while he shaved my head. It was the second time he had shaved my head. There wasn’t any reason for it, except perhaps control through humiliation. He didn’t know what else to do. I had put a cigarette out on the windowsill.
He gave me $5 when he was done, then went to the local pharmacy and told them not to sell me any razors. It was early in the morning and we sat outside the pharmacy and he placed his hand on my shoulder and said something conciliatory.
“I hate you so much,” I said.
When the police found me that night sleeping beneath the mailboxes in the entryway to an apartment building, I had a giant gash in my wrist. I had gone to a different pharmacy for razor blades. It was my sixth suicide attempt that year.
“Where do your parents live?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. All I knew was the location of the empty house. That was the night I fell into the Illinois juvenile system. The officers stared at me lying there, the room lit by the flashing red and blue lights filtering through the windows, like in some twisted disco.
The hospital they took me to was on the northwest side surrounded by a field of weeds and crabgrass and a tall fence, a place for abandoned children called Henry Horner Children’s Adolescent Center. It’s been closed down for years but it was the kind of place you’d never end up in if you had someone advocating for you. There were no towels, no soap, no doors on the washroom stalls. The inmates punched the air and spread shit in long brown streaks across the walls.
The year on the streets had drained me. I’d followed a man into a hotel room and sat at a plastic table snorting lines of coke while a john with a black mustache and blond wig wearing a nurse’s dress sucked off two or three homeless men at a time. I’d hitchhiked to California with my best friend and spent three days in the Las Vegas detention center. I slept with strangers, ate out of garbage bins, panhandled for change. I got in cars every time a driver opened a door. I’d become too adept at moving around. It was good for me to stay in one place for three months with locked exits and a bed.
The hospital was filthy but there was heat, televisions bolted near the ceiling in the day room, a pool table. The children were doped up on Thorazine and Haldol and walked around like zombies. The point of the pills was to keep the children manageable but I was so subdued when admitted they didn’t bother. I made friends with Jay, who had burned down a church, and Malcolm, who had unsuccessfully tried to kill his stepfather. I hung out with French Fry, who was tall and good looking with thick black hair, but three fourths of his body was covered in mottled red scars from lighting himself on fire. We played cards throughout the day and smuggled in pot, which we hid inside the foam roof panels. At lunch we smacked butter patties onto the ceiling and they turned rancid so they stopped giving us butter. When Malcolm was placed in restraints I slid a magazine below the door so he would have something to read. I was reprimanded and locked in timeout, a small room with a thin mat and a window on the hallway for staff to look in.
When a bag of thirty ice-cream cups was discovered in one of the freezers the janitor asked who it belonged to. “That’s Carol’s,” I said, referring to a nurse who had problems with her weight. I was put in timeout again.
One night, staff was lecturing us on our bad attitudes and one of them said, “You act like you’re in hell.” And French Fry stood screaming. “You want to see hell, motherfucker? I’ve seen hell!”
Shortly after my phone call with Sean Sturgeon I head to Alameda County Courthouse. I take a rush-hour train to Oakland surrounded by all the other morning people with places to be.
It’s the beginning of Hans Reiser’s trial and I’ve been gathering information on the case, unsure whether Hans will be at the periphery or center of my true crime book. Hans met Nina in 1998 when he visited a bridal office in St. Petersburg, Russia. His company was doing well and he had hired several Russian programmers to help with the next generation of the file system he’d been working on. He paged through the women’s profiles, paying $20 for each one he wanted to be introduced to. The women would come in to a conference room for fifteen minutes and if he liked them they made other plans. Nina Sharanova didn’t want to come to the office so her profile was marked “phone first.” She was the last woman Hans contacted and they arranged to meet near the Church of the Spilled Blood where Alexander II had been slain in 1880, one link in a chain of events leading to the October Revolution of 1917.
Hans met more than fifty women through the service but Nina was different. She had a quality he couldn’t fully understand, a sincerity of affection he’d never experienced with the exception of his mother. But she wasn’t his mother and her affection wasn’t only for him. She was magnetic, beautiful, easygoing. When she walked into a room people turned to look at her. It’s easy to see, even in the photographs. The high, fine cheekbones, the easy smile. She never looks like she’s posing for a picture. A woman like Nina had never paid attention to Hans before.
At their first meeting Hans read Nina a poem and told her he was a famous computer programmer. Maybe she thought he was like Bill Gates. As it happens, in the world of open source computer programmers and techno geeks, Hans Reiser is a minor celebrity. His file system, ReiserFS, was the first journaling file system for Linux. The journal is the computer’s own imperfect story. It’s like the black box in an airplane cockpit, but it’s also the flight plan, a record of what the computer did as well as where it intended to go. Storing data on a disk, like committing an event to memory, is almost never a one-step process. If the computer gets interrupted between steps, the file system becomes inconsistent, the computer crashes, and certain data is lost forever. The journal allows a computer to recover from this catastrophe by resolving inconsistencies, reconciling what can be known with what can’t, providing the narrative bridge between where the computer has been and what the machine has become. If ReiserFS became a standard feature of the open source operating system Linux, distributors would pay Hans’ company for support and Hans would be worth millions. The only stumbling block was Hans’ personality. In a community known for eccentric personalities, he had a reputation for being selfish and aggressive and particularly difficult to work with.3
A year after they met, Nina was in America, pregnant with their first child. Hans was frequently away in Russia supervising his team of programmers, and Sean was hanging around keeping Nina company. According to Sean he warned Hans he needed to be more involved in his marriage and sent Hans two books, The Dummies Guide to Better Communication Between Couples and The Dummies Guide to Divorce. He told Hans he was going to need one of those books.4
In 2001 Sean and Nina had their first affair. In California Nina helped Hans with his company, but Hans’ father told him she was embezzling money. She was a doctor and wanted to pass the American medical boards but Hans wanted her to stay home and take care of the kids. He said he didn’t have any use for a smart wife. He told her that in America it was just as respectable to be a good mother as it was to be a doctor. Nina wanted to be both. She filed for divorce in the summer of 2004, leaving Hans for his best friend. The divorce was contentious, with Hans adopting his father’s claims and accusing Sean and Nina of embezzling money.
If I’m going to write a true crime book I’m going to have to figure out what happened between Hans and Nina and Sean. Like Hans, Sean had a motive for killing Nina; she left him as well. In 2005 Nina met Anthony Zografos, an attractive older man with a husky Mediterranean accent and large, sad eyes. She continued to accept money from Sean but refused to see him. Sean left $1,900 in cash in Nina’s mailbox two days before she disappeared. According to Anthony, Nina thought Sean was a psychopath.
On September 3, 2006, Nina dropped the children with Hans for the weekend and was never seen or heard from again. Hans’ f
ather suggested she was probably hiding in Russia. Two weeks later the police found a copy of Homicide by David Simon in Hans’ car.5 Simon, who also created the TV show The Wire, says there are two types of murder cases, the dunkers and the whodunits. The dunkers are slam-dunks, involving, say, a man covered in blood standing over a body saying, “Yeah, I killed him. He hit me first.” The dunkers are easy. The whodunits take time. You have to interview people, gather evidence. And even when you do everything right there’s all that space between the arrest and the trial, so much opportunity, so easy for the killer to get away. Simon says a suspect should never talk to the police. He also says that a murder is rarely solved without a body. Without a body you have to first prove the person is dead.
When I arrive at the court I meet Henry Lee from the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s alone on a bench in the hallway trying to get reception for a tiny battery-powered transistor television. Henry’s a veteran crime reporter and his byline accompanies many of the major cases in the Bay Area. I ask what he thinks of Sean’s confession and how he thinks it will impact the case. He can’t write about Sean’s confession because of a gag order. Henry says the confession is “fantastical.” He says, “People confess to murders they didn’t commit all the time.”
It’s just preliminary hearings. A judge has to be assigned, a jury selected. The prosecution and the defense have to argue over what evidence will be admissible.
I watch the public attorneys in their wrinkled suits. They look just like the men and women I saw periodically in my youth introducing themselves as my guardian ad litem. Or filling out the forms admitting me into the mental hospital. Or picking me up from the group home I lived in deep on the South Side, driving me along Lake Shore Drive, past the giant steel mountains of downtown, and leaving me at the next group home on the North Side. They were there when my friend and protector was removed and placed in drug rehab. They were there for twice-yearly progress meetings on the West Side where I was left with an ashtray and a stack of magazines while they decided what would happen to me next. They were there when my father was found guilty of abuse and neglect, and all the other times. They always looked like they hadn’t showered or shaved or brushed their hair. Their shirts were misbuttoned, often untucked. But they always had buttons on their shirts. They always had collars. And they drove small, messy cars.
These are the people in the court, along with the bailiffs, the judge with a face like a teddy bear, the prisoners off to one side of the room, another box for medium and maximum security prisoners, and the friends and families sitting in various shades of sweat-suit cotton on the dark wood seats. It’s crowded but orderly. People know each other. There’s a lot of smiling and nodding and shuffling of papers, while decisions are handed down, permanently altering people’s lives. When I was young, my father warned me about getting caught in the gears of the system. The system, he said, would not let go once you were inside. The machine would grind you to dust.
But it happened anyway and I’m still alive.
In pre-trial motions Hans waives his right to a speedy trial. His lawyer has another murder to litigate. There’s no date for seating a jury. I think about this trial, and where it’s going to go. Will it grind Hans to dust or will he emerge to complete his next file system? A computer can’t run without a file system. It wouldn’t be able to find anything. The hard drive would be like a library with a billion unshelved books and no card catalog. The county clerk, tapping a polished nail on the partition, her untucked shirt hanging loosely over her skirt, leans over to talk with the court reporter. And it occurs to me that at some point in my life I should have been one of them, a probation officer or a caseworker, if just for a while. It was the logical thing for a group home kid to do.
There’s a small line of cabs waiting at the MacArthur Bart Station. The drivers sit on their hoods or lean back in their seats reading newspapers. A pushcart vendor sells Cokes and pretzels, high school students wait around the bus stop. Oakland lacks all of the charm of San Francisco. The breeze is warmer, the colors are dull, the roads are flat and poorly maintained, the school system is a wreck. It’s a muscular city, dangerous in parts, a different kind of California.
I look around for Sean but don’t see him. In a note he sent following our phone call he claimed we had met before at the Berkeley pier but I have no memory of that. I remember a birthday party and a barbecue and a fight I had with Lissette. But I don’t remember Sean.
I’ve seen pictures of Sean but they weren’t distinctive. They weren’t the kind of pictures that give you a real sense of what the person looks like. And then I see a man standing by the rail at the car park and I see why he wouldn’t stand out. He’s pale and a little short, slightly fat, wearing jeans and a loose black top. He’s unshaven and tired looking. On his neck is a faded blue ink cross, his face is lightly pocked, his red hair is going gray. He keeps his hands in his jeans and slouches forward. Like the city he lives in, he’s drained of color, except for his eyes, which are a deep blue like a protected lake.
“I used to be quite handsome,” he says. “Now I can’t stay awake for more than a few hours.” He says he’s had surgery on his shoulder, another operation for kidney stones. Workers’ comp kept him waiting a long time. He’s been strung out on Vicodin for years.
We talk about Nina. “I took care of her,” Sean says. “Even when she wouldn’t see me.”
I ask him questions and he won’t give me the specifics. Or he will, but not the ones I want. He was born into the middle of an American story. It was the sixties, then the seventies. The Summer of Love had devolved into violent protests and a country split by an unnecessary war an ocean away. Flower children and peaceniks gave way to Charlie Manson, Altamont, bank robberies, guards shot dead at point-blank range, Richard Nixon, and bombs. It was a generation that failed to stop a war and, in Sean’s case, failed to protect its children. He says he was molested and tortured over a period of thirteen years.
He lived in a commune near Berkeley, the epicenter of the movement. There were lots of communes then, filled with people protesting the war in Vietnam. Men were coming home from that war and dropping out. And some of those men were getting involved in the anti-war movement, and some of those men had bad memories from the Mekong Delta. And some of those men moved into Sean’s house.
“So, are you writing about children who have been abused?” Sean asks.
“No,” I say. “I’m writing about a person who’s taken justice into his own hands and killed eight people.”
“Why would I talk to you about that?” he asks.
We walk past an auto shop and a Walgreen’s. The weather has gotten cold again. The sidewalks are battered and cracked. He tells me about these men, the men who came into the commune. Some, he says, had been trained at the School of the Americas. “Do you know about that place?”
“I do,” I say. The academy, set up by the U.S. government to train South American soldiers, has been associated with the death squads in El Salvador and Chile and the Nicaraguan Contras. It was one of those sad American mistakes, a bad idea gone worse. But America does good, too. The CIA is involved in everything. We’re not always on the wrong side. Usually we’re on both sides, which means we’re probably right at least 50 percent of the time. He talks about torture, what we see on the news, foreign soldiers detained, humiliated, drowned. Hundreds of pictures we’ve grown used to seeing. A man standing on a crate holding two electrical wires, unsure if he’s about to be electrocuted. “That’s nothing,” Sean says. “That’s not torture.”
Sean says he’s not into BDSM anymore and that he never did BDSM with Nina. He used to be what people refer to as a “heavy player,” which is how we know so many people in common. I’ve heard of him digging a knife in his own arm, carving RAGE, or standing naked in the middle of a room while several women strike at him with leather straps, his blood pooling at his feet. But that was before he became a Christian. Now he goes to church every week, volunteers at the soup kitchen o
n weekends.
“Why should I talk to you?” he asks. “If someone was shooting at me right now, they might hit you. I don’t want any more violence.” I try to understand what he’s saying. Who are these people who would shoot at us if he talked to me, and how would they find us? I imagine diving for cover as a car streaks past, faces hidden behind scarves, guns poking from the windows, the vehicle exhaling a gusher of exhaust thick as a mudslide. He thinks people might come after him, friends perhaps of the people he killed. It’s as if the only reason he hasn’t named his victims is to protect people like me and other innocent pedestrians. It’s a bizarre rationalization, and the challenge is to figure out if he’s afraid of going to jail or if he is lying. And why. He says he’s never killed anyone who didn’t abuse him. Then he adds, “Or came after me with a gun. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” I try to get him to go further with this. What omelet? But he won’t say anything more about it.
Sean says he never sought attention. This is clearly important to him, a matter of honor. He is ready to go to jail but unwilling to name the people he killed. He isn’t sure why he should talk to me and I’m not sure either and I know this could go on for a long time.
But I’m stuck. I want information. An author looking for a story can be like a junky looking for a fix. But it’s worse than that because an author without a story isn’t even an author. I was ten or eleven when I started writing poems, which I brought to my friend’s house to read to his mother. By the time I was twelve my bedroom was covered with poetry I’d taped to the walls. When my father ripped the poetry down, I kept writing, but hid it somewhere else. It was as if I had to express every thought that came into my head. The poems became longer, turning into stories during college. At some point my nervous brain stopped pumping out information so quickly, and I started publishing what I wrote. My reasons for writing changed. I was no longer trying to express every thought, I was writing to understand myself. I rewrote my stories hundreds of times and became dependent on working through problems on the page. In my late twenties I was simultaneously awarded a fellowship for emerging writers and sold two novels I had submitted blindly to a small publisher. At that point I finally thought of myself as a writer. Other writers often called me prolific, which made me vaguely uncomfortable. It sounded more like an accusation than a compliment. Without paying attention I had become what I wrote and I worried what would happen if I became unable to write. And then one day it happened. And it happened the next day, and the day after that. And it lasted for almost two years with the exception of a vignette here or there. I’d gone silent. But now here was Sean.
The Adderall Diaries Page 4