Bay City News—Convicted wife-killer Hans Reiser began his defense in his wrongful death trial Wednesday by talking at length about the hormone oxytocin and by attacking his wife’s character.
Reiser, who is serving a term of 15 years to life in state prison for killing 31-year-old Nina Reiser at his home in the Oakland hills on Sept. 3, 2006, also told jurors in his opening statement, “Now that I’ve spent time in prison, psychopaths seem more humanly understandable to me.”
In an apparent reference to his slain wife Nina Reiser, Hans Reiser, 48, a computer engineer who owned a software company that he claimed could have been worth billions of dollars, said women have more oxytocin than men do.
Reiser said the good part about oxytocin is that it’s known as “the love hormone” and “the cuddle hormone” but the bad part of the hormone is that it results in “increased tendency to have envy and to enjoy the misfortunes of others.”
Reiser, who is acting as his own attorney but was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and was guarded by three prison guards, told jurors that he thinks Nina “was jealous of her own children” and “she falsified a large amount of ailments in the children.”
Reiser didn’t expand on that point, but he seemed to echo the allegation he made in his six-month criminal trial in 2007 and 2008 that Nina had invented illnesses in their children, Rory and Niorline, in order to win custody of them after she filed for divorce from him in 2004 after five years of marriage.
Nina was awarded full custody of the children but Hans Reiser was allowed to have the children on alternate weekends. [...]