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LIKE PAINT DRYING
Watching the Reiser case unfold is like watching paint dry. The picture is emerging, but with painful slowness. Today the jury heard from an ear, nose and throat specialist - who treated Reiser's boy and interacted with Hans. Then two 'judo" buddies of Hans testified. I'll include these winesses when I pick up the thread later in the week.
THAT TIMELINE
The critical time period is about 50 hours: starting from when Nina left or didn't leave on dropping the kids about 3 PM on September 3 and when Hans picked up his returning mother at about 10 PM on the 5th.
What follows is offered as a guess, only:
Re the first critical 50 hours - it appears that Hans was alone with the kids from say 3 PM on disappearance day,until Sept.5 when he picks up his mom at 10 PM. Assuming, arguendo, he killed Nina on the 3rd, when the children were otherwise occupied with, say, video games, he had to work on the coverup while the kids were asleep, presumably using the nights of the 3rd and the 4th, which is consistent the report that he seemed very tired when he arrived to pick his Mom up.
I don't recall any detailed testimony that addressed where the kids were and what they were doing during any of these key times. But Hans was seen outside hosing down his driveway after his Mom had presumably turned in on the night of September 5.
We can assume that if Hans is the killer, he has concealed the body somewhere away from the house before his neighbor observed him hosing the driveway. We can expect the DA to infer from the removal of the seat of the CRX that Hans (if guilty) thought the seat held crucial evidence that he hadn't been able to efface. One guess is that Nina's body was in that seat long enough to leave traces that Hans feared could be forensically detected. Dubois will argue otherwise, of course.
Since Nina's van was clean & presumably Mom's Hybrid was also clean, the DA will argue that Hans would have used the CRX to facilitate the murder. If, for example, he had dragged the body into the CRX while it was still in the garage, he might have needed to wash the floor, then the driveway. And if he'd taken the CRX into a muddy area, he would want to hose down the tracks.
Again, it's just a guess, but Hans (again assuming arguendo that he did it) would have needed an intermediate disposal area for the body on night one (Sept 3) whether he'd worked out the final disposal method by then or not. So he might have had to attend to "final" disposal night two, Sept 4. Each night, he would have had to rely on the kids' sleeping habits for cover.
No one could keep a fresh corpse near the house unless it was in a freezer and we can assume the police did a thorough search.
As a crude measure, Hans would have had, say, only 6 usable hours each night, roughly two for travel to the site, two for "operations" at the site and two for return. I doubt very much he would have traveled fast or on well lit pathways, so I would estimate a maximum practical distance of about 60 miles.
Again, watch the timeline. The case may not get really interesting until after Christmas....
JBG
