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PRESUMED DEAD: A True Life Murder Mystery

By Henry K. Lee

Berkley, 445 pages, $7.99

Reviewed by Steve Weinberg

Nina Sharanova Reiser disappeared from her life in Oakland, California, on Sept. 3, 2006, leaving behind her six-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. Her estranged husband, Hans Reiser, insisted Nina left of her own accord while trying to throw suspicion on him as a murderer.

It is uncertain whether anybody believed Hans Reiser. Certainly the police did not believe him. But police could not find Nina’s body. It is conventional wisdom within the law enforcement establishment that it is unwise to file a murder charge against a suspect without physical remains to prove somebody is dead. After all, a wise defense lawyer could say on behalf of a client during trial something akin to “reasonable doubt must prevail. The alleged victim could walk into the courtroom 60 seconds from now. You cannot convict my client of a violent crime because perhaps no crime occurred.”

Police and prosecutors in Oakland decided to defy conventional wisdom, believing they could convict Hans Reiser based on circumstantial evidence. 

Henry K. Lee reported about the Reiser case for the San Francisco Chronicle, as he has reported about many other cases, from the dramatic to the relatively mundane. As Lee says in the Foreword to his book about the Reiser case, “I have written about gang shootings, horrific traffic accidents and all manner of incidents that have irreparably changed—or claimed the lives of—the young and the old, the rich and the poor, hardworking citizens and drug offenders, police officers and criminals. I chronicle the heartbreak and the pain, telling stories of the horrible things that people do to each other.”

After 18 years of such reporting, Lee says it is reasonable to ask why he continues. “The answer is simple, and it comes in the form of these fundamental questions: What would it mean for society if these crimes were just swept under the rug? What if nobody cared? What if victims weren’t given a voice, an opportunity—sometimes from beyond the grave—to be heard?”

Lee gives Nina Reiser a voice, as he chronicles her upbringing in Russia, her education as a physician there, her agreement to marry Hans after he searched in the unfamiliar nation for a bride. Lee brings remarkable detail to a marriage that start out oddly but well, and how it fell apart, with the two children suffering even when their mother still lived.

Inexpensive paperback books, especially of the true-crime variety, generally carry a reputation as sensationalistic, and often shoddily reported. Berkley, part of the Penguin conglomerate, is one of several publishers that offer true-crime paperbacks regularly, sometimes as often as every month.

Lee’s book, published as an inexpensive paperback, is gruesome on many pages, but never sensationalistic. The reporting is impressive and the writing is clear. Lay readers (those who are not part of the criminal justice system) will receive not only entertainment (of a depressing nature), but also learn a great deal about how police detectives, forensic analysts, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, jurors and child welfare workers function.  An easy-to-digest yet didactic murder story is quite an accomplishment.

My blog has addressed the role of false confessions in wrongful convictions previously. I call attention to the Chicago Tribune story partly to make a positive point about investigative journalism, which is under siege these days.

The point is this: More than a decade ago, the Chicago Tribune assembled three reporters, Mills, Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong. They investigated wrongful convictions from numerous angles. Along with theireditor and photographer colleagues, the three reporters accomplished what might be the best sustained, consequential investigative reporting in the history of the craft.

One result: The governor of Illinois, who had entered office as a death penalty supporter, placed a moratorium on the death penalty in the state. Why? Because he realized he could no longer trust the conduct of police, prosecutors, judges and juries in Cook County capital cases.

The Chicago Tribune has fallen on tough times in recent years, in large part because of its new owner, Sam Zell, who might represent the nadir of newspaper publishers. Armstrong and Possley left. So did many of their editor and photographer colleagues. Mills, obviously, remained.

Every contribution Mills and his Tribune colleagues make to understanding the ridiculously common phenomenon of wrongful convictions will be welcome.

Well, Terry Ganey, a superb investigative journalist in mid-Missouri, has recently published an in-depth look at what appears to be the wrongful conviction of Dale Helmig. The story appeared last Saturday (July 10) in the St. Louis Beacon, an online only newspaper.

I have never read any clearer explanation of how much can go wrong during a murder prosecution, and why. (I have investigated the Helmig conviction on my own, although I have never published anything in depth about it. I am 99 percent certain of his innocence, and, assuming Dale Helmig is indeed innocent, I agree with Helmig’s current appellate lawyer about the identity of the most likely actual murderer.

But I mention the song not for the entertainment value. Rather, it entered my mind unbidden after yet another day of me reading the Innocence Blog.

Regular readers of “In Justice” have seen my words praising the daily compilation of news regarding imprisoned women and men who are actuallhy innocent and working for their freedom against huge odds imposed by the criminal justice system.

Well, like the Anne Murray character in the song, I’d like to experience a day without reading the Innocence Blog–not reading it because nobody who helps compile it could find anything new to share about wrongful convictions.

I hope fervently that police detectives, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges will collaborate to repair the criminal justice system so that wrongful convictions never occur again.

A resident of southern California, Allen and his wife design custom database solutions for mid-size businesses. Previously, he worked as an aerospace engineer.

He has been called for jury duty lots of times. The fourth time, Allen says, he cast the only “not guilty” vote among a dozen jurors, then played a role in shifting the vote to 10-2 in favor of not guilty. After the hung jury, the prosecution tried the defendant again. Convinced that the prosecutor was traveling a path to wrongful conviction, Allen says he volunteered to help the defendant, uncovering evidence that led to another hung jury and freedom from prison for the accused–although the accused then had to deal with a $500,000 debt owed to defense lawyers.

That experience changed Allen’s life. You can see how by visiting www.skepticaljuror.com

When I can find time, I plan to move beyond Allen’s fascinating Web site to read his first full-scale book, self-published, about the alleged injustice suffered by Byron Case.

One of the repairable problems is the backlog at crime laboratories across the nation. Most of the labs are part of law enforcement agencies. Because of relatively small budget shortfalls, many of the labs encounter testing backlogs that stretch for years. If the tests could be run within a day or so, police would be able to identify rapists, murderers and other criminals quickly. The arrests that would follow would mean fewer rape victims, fewer murder victims.

In hundreds of jurisdictions, however, legislators who allocate money and law-enforcement bureaucrats who channel the allocations give short shrift to crime labs. Instead, money ends up paying for prison systems that do little but send criminals back into society, so-called drug wars that never yield meaningful victories, and other idiotic uses.

The National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Justice Department, has just published a report titled “Making Sense of DNA Backlogs–Myths vs. Reality.” The report can be found, at no cost, by visiting www.ojp.usdoj.gov./nij

It is filled with clear explanations and common-sense recommendations. Making such a study–funded by the very legislators who will not allocate adequate money for crime labs–will actually read it and then act sensibly.

Suspects confess falsely for lots of reasons, some of them linked to varieties of mental illness. Some suspects confess falsely because they undergo torture by police interrogators. During the 1980s, numerous suspects interrogated at a specific police station in Chicago said they had been tortured in unimaginably ugly ways. A police commander named Jon Burge appeared to be the torture ringleader.

The allegations came largely from men with criminal records, so they found it difficult to be heard. Eventually, even Chicago police officials decided where smoke appeared, perhaps fires had been set. In 1993, Burge’s police career ended, but Cook County prosecutors would not file criminal charges against him.

Non-criminal litigation arose against Burge. In his answers to questions posed to him, he denied the torture. Earlier this week, a jury decided Burge lied. Burge could end up in prison because of his behavior.

For years, I have studied the Burge case from afar. Based on my admittedly less than perfect knowledge, combined with what just came out in the trial of Burge, I would have convicted him as a juror.

Whatever his punishment will be, it is too little and too late.

Still, some value will linger: Journalists, defense lawyers, prosecutors and police supervisors might be more willing in the future to listen carefully when suspects–even those with long criminal records–allege torture by police.

Why?

Because it is expensive to purchase state-of-the-art equipment like what the citizenry is accustomed to seeing on fictional television dramas such as “CSI.”

Because the hiring process for lab workers (who call themselves “criminalists”) has been flawed for decades; after an incompetent or dishonest criminalist is hired, firing becomes difficult.

Because supervisors in many crime labs lack the ability or the budget or the will or all of the above to monitor the day-to-day tests run by the criminalists.

Because the labs are housed within police agencies, where a natural bias toward finding suspects guilty exists.

The poster child for dysfunctional crime labs leading to miscarriages of justice is Houston, Texas. For many years, journalists there have documented the situation. When the city mothers and fathers finally recognized the scope of the mess and vowed to solve it, I hoped they meant what they said. But continuing stories in the Houston Chronicle and other local media show the mess might never be solved without a massive housecleaning of the laboratory, police department supervisors and additional budget allocations.

Just last week (June 22), the Chronicle (www.chron.com) published a piece by reporters Moises Mendoza and James Pinkerton under the headline “Parts of HPD Fingerprint Lab Remain in Disarray.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors live with uncertainty whether they can mount a reliable case against suspects implicated in part or in full by the criminalists, defense attorneys wonder whether their clients can receive a fair hearing, actual perpetrators stand better odds of resuming their lives of destruction, and the risk remains high that more wrongful convictions will occur.

In the magazine’s February issue, readers learned from writer Bryan Smith about an investigation by the Cook County (Chicago) prosecutor into the investigative tactics of David Protess, a Northwestern University journalism professor, and some of his students who examine potential wrongful convictions in exchange for academic course credits.

Murphy realized from the magazine feature that the current prosecutor relied in part on law-enforcement criticism of Protess and students from an earlier semester to mount the current examination of the professor. The previous case involved alleged rapists/murderers known as the Ford Heights Four.  Protess and his students played a significant role in finding evidence to exonerate the Ford Heights Four.

Murphy served as a judge on the Ford Heights Four case. She states without equivocation that because of the prosecutor’s behavior, “had the Supreme Court of Illinois not intervened, the innocent would have been executed.” The Ford Heights Four prosecutor should have felt an obligation to dispense justice. But, judge Murphy notes, the prosecutor failed to observe the rules:

“The jury in the case should have been told about the promises made to the only alleged eyewitness in return for her testimony. In addition, I was told that there was no DNA evidence available, when indeed there was.”

Rather than criticizing Protess, the judge says, those who care about the validity of convictions should honor the professor and his students. She suggests, perhaps only half ironically, that Protess and his students be honored with statues in the lobby of the Criminal Court building.
Such an event, Murphy says, might alert everybody about the significance of the statues. “This would serve as a reminder that justice is sometimes achieved by those with no license to practice law in Illinois.”