Two years ago this past Labor Day weekend Linux programmer Hans Reiser murdered his estranged wife.

Last Friday he was sentenced to 15 years to life as part of a deal that reduced his first-degree murder conviction and its mandatory 25 years-to-life sentence to second-degree murder in exchange for taking authorities to the wooded site where he had buried her body.

Since Reiser maintained all along that he was innocent the deal included a signed confession and an undertaking not to seek an appeal.

According to his confession – in which Reiser answered questions posed by the district attorney’s office – his wife had dropped the children off at his house for the weekend around 2:30 that Saturday afternoon. They argued over their divorce and custody of the children for two hours and then he killed her.

She was at the front door when he hit her in the face.

The blow made her bleed but didn’t knock her out.

Then he clamped down on her carotid artery. She reportedly never screamed or said anything – she probably never had a chance – and he strangled her on the stairs going up to the bedrooms while their two little children played downstairs.

According to his garbled story, “So, she, uhm, so we discussed the divorce, we discussed, uhm, well, much of the discussion goes, it goes quite well for me. She’s willing to give me the company. She's, uh, uhm, uh, I suggest to her that she won’t be able to still get the thousand dollars a month that it wasn’t really important to me, you know, because she didn’t do well at the deposition and but, uh, uhm, the main thing that I can’t get out of her is, is for her to share legal custody. This was the only thing that was really important to me in that negotiations. Uhm, and uh, she, uhm, discussed the falsified ailment and, and, uhm, and makes clear that, uhn, well, it’s clear that she never (unintelligible) falsified ailment. She didn’t believe in it herself and that she had fun and she turns sideways and smiles when she mentions how prestigious the dentist was, you know, after she describes it and, uhm, conveys to me that there’s going to be more of this Munchausen’s by proxy disorder stuff and that I will be unable to do anything about it. And uh, this uh, caused me to become enraged and, uhm, I killed her. And I shouldn’t have done that. I’m very sorry that I did it.”

He never says he strangled her.

According to his testimony, “I stopped the blood flowing to her, uh, to her head….I placed my hands on both sides of her neck. And in the most unsophisticated chokehold that any judo instructor would completely despise you for ever using, I choked her. And this is the kind of choke that people who have no martial skills at all would employ and, uhm, and yet it, uh, uh, was completely painless for her. It’s the least painful way to die.”

He then tried to stuff her body into a trash bag and when that proved impossible, used a duffle bag.

He says he temporarily stored her body upstairs in one of the bathrooms and although he denies that the children heard or saw anything his testimony explains his six-year-old son’s picture of his father toting a big bag downstairs that weekend.

Reiser removed the bagged body first to the back of his wife’s minivan and then – when he couldn’t find the keys to the van – to the back of his Honda hatchback where it remained for the next two days while he dug a makeshift grave at night by flashlight in the fog of the Oakland hills while the children were home sleeping.

During the day he left the car with the body in it in plain sight on a street some blocks away from his house.

He says he cleaned up the blood spatter at the house with the towels his mother said were missing and threw the car’s missing passenger seat into a store’s dumpster because blood from “something” got on it. He says the body was never in the telltale missing seat.

At the end of his confession he says of the woman he maligned throughout the trial, “Uhm, you know Nina was wonderful in so many ways…I’m so sorry.”

Since he’s spent the last two years in jail he will be eligible for parole in 2021. There are no guarantees he won’t spend the rest of his life in prison. According to statistics only a small percentage of capital criminals are ever released from prison in California.

If Reiser hadn’t arrogantly bet that he could get off Scott free and had taken the voluntary manslaughter deal he was offered before his trial started, he would have been out next May.

The San Francisco Chronicle had a reporter at the sentencing Friday and said that Reiser – who had proved difficult, if not impossible, to manage during the trial – was reluctant to admit that he was adequately represented by legal counsel, momentarily putting his second-decree plea in danger. The judge, his patience wearing thin, eventually dragged a “yes” out of him.

Reiser wanted to parse the word “yes.” He said his lawyers had advised him to take 15 years to life instead of 25 years to life and that that could constitute “good assistance of counsel…if those are the only choices available.”

Meanwhile, Reiser’s children Rory and Niorline, now eight and seven respectively, represented pro bono by Morrison and Foerster, a big-time San Francisco law firm, have sued their father for the wrongful death of their mother, seeking unspecified damages for being deprived of her “love, support, companionship, comfort, affection and society.”

The suit, filed last Thursday in Alameda County Superior Court, the day before Reiser was sentenced, charges the Linux programmer with inflicting “severe emotional distress and psychological trauma” on the children.

Their attorney said the children, who now live with their maternal grandmother in Russia, were financially strapped.

Although Reiser has claimed to be practically broke having spent his money seeking custody of his children – which had been awarded to his wife – and then on the murder trial, Morrison and Foerster ain’t quite buying it. It figures his company, Namesys Inc, and some patents he holds might be worth something.

It will evidently also try to attach the proceeds of anything Reiser invents during his long prison stretch.

At his sentencing last Friday, Reiser said, “I’m very sorry for the terrible harm I’ve caused my children” and mumbled something about setting up a trust fund for them for other people to contribute to.

Reiser reportedly said he would leave Namesys and his file system to them but the San Francisco Chronicle quotes Reiser’s lawyer Richard Tamor as saying, “Liability is fairly clear given the guilty plea but, nevertheless, as you saw from the trial, [the children’s attorney] is going to rue the day they decided to engage Hans in litigation – they’ll prevail eventually, but it will be a long, painful journey getting there.”