Du Bois refers to the men who had keys to Nina’s apartment as “the key club” but he only names Anthony and Sean as members. He shows a picture of Nina and Sean. “An interesting character, Sean Sturgeon. A drug addict. A sadomasochist.”
Du Bois portrays Nina as promiscuous, but offers little to back it up. He says she kept pictures of the children around because she was concerned about her own image. She wanted people to believe she was a good mother, which is not the same as being one. It quickly seems like Nina’s the one on trial, but she’s not here to defend herself.
During recess one of the local newscasters says to me, “They’re never going to convict him. That girl was a freak.” The newscaster is well known, at least on this side of the bridge, and dresses in tailored beige suits for his reports on the morning news. He’s built like a quarterback, with a square, rugged face. I imagine doing a little research, finding out what he’s into, how many times he’s cheated on his wife, and posting pictures with his statistics. It wouldn’t take much.
I wake before court at six and pop my pill before typing my notes. I like going to court every day. I like the structure. A parade of schoolteachers take the stand. They recall Nina volunteering, escorting the children on field trips, bringing home and washing the class towels. Ron Zeno, the executive director of Safe Exchange, says every time Nina walked through the door she would get down on one knee, spread her hands, and the children would rush into her arms. Hans told Ron, “You’d be surprised if you knew what she was into. If you knew what her boyfriend was into.”
According to witnesses Hans, the opposite of Nina, was openly hostile toward them. A parent from the school remembers a party during which Hans stated that his family was a burden to him and that he’d be better off financially if he didn’t have to take care of them. An instructor recalls Hans interrupting her class to force Cori to write cursive for an hour, and the principal recalls having to talk to Hans about his disruptive behavior. He was irresponsible with the kids’ documents, always late, incapable of even cleaning up after himself. He treated his mother like a servant. Some Monday mornings, after his weekend with the children, Hans’ mother would have to call Nina and ask if she could come help get the children to school.
Paul LaRosa from 48 Hours tells me Hans is the least sympathetic defendant he’s ever seen.
After Nina left Hans, he sent her notes, one of which said, “I think you are evil because you cannot help it.” He made threats, like “Those that are slow to anger are slow to cool.” He became defined by a hatred of his wife so pure and radiant it obliterated everything in its path. “It is June 1941,” he wrote, “and you are the Nazis and you think we will not suffer the necessary amount to defeat you. We will.”
When Hans met Nina he was like all clients of bride services: he was searching for a good deal, a woman who was smarter, prettier, and kinder than the women willing to spend time with him back home. He paid $20 for Nina’s contact information. He didn’t think that maybe she was looking for something too. Nina had her own ambitions. Hans told Nina he was a famous scientist, and he might have been. The only thing holding back wider acceptance of his innovations was his personality. He thought if he brought Nina to America she would be so grateful she would love him forever, ignore his narcissism, his months away, his bitter ugly view of the world. Hans thought he could convince her to love him without becoming loveable. He was wrong about that. No relationship can survive contempt. Every con is based on the mark’s own greed.
“You’re transferring,” my friend Kay says. “You think Nina is your mother and Hans is your father.” Several times a week I call Kay to talk about the trial. Because her mother is a psychologist she often sees the world through subconscious motivations.
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. But I do find myself pulled toward Nina, understanding the fierce attractions in orbit around her. Who doesn’t want a mother who volunteers at the school, won’t accept a job that won’t give her time with her children, and keeps a dry erase board with a meal schedule on the fridge so you always know what to expect?
Hans was convinced that Nina had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare disorder in which the affected create illnesses for their children to draw attention to themselves. He reported her to the child abuse hotline, explaining for over half an hour how his estranged wife was forcing their son into unnecessary medical procedures because she wanted the boy to be weak, because she hated him. The decision was made not to investigate.
The children’s doctor remembers Cori, three years old, throwing a tantrum, and Nina on her hands and knees, whispering to him until he calmed down. The pediatrician ended treatment after receiving a threatening phone call from Hans. Cori was suffering hearing loss and sharp pains and needed his adenoids removed, a routine procedure similar to removing tonsils. Hans said he would sue the doctor if she went forward with the operation. He had been reading up on the subject. The problem, he thought, was probably allergies related to Nina’s cat.
I close my eyes when the doctor recounts the call. I have a collection of correspondence between the local hospital and my father. My mother is dying of multiple sclerosis and they’re refusing to offer treatment. In his letters to Swedish Covenant, he wrote it was too much of a burden to drive his sick wife to another hospital farther away, but they wouldn’t relent. He was too disruptive, too threatening. When he sent me the letters along with his clippings and his unpublished memoir he must have thought I would see his side of the story. He kept the letters twenty years, evidence of the wrong done to him. But I know exactly why that hospital refused treatment to my mother. My father strongly distrusted doctors. Like Hans, he thought people were stupid, especially experts. What was the point of a college degree when it was so easy to lie on a résumé? My father was fond of books full of predictions made by specialists who turned out to be false. He was accustomed to people backing down and wasn’t aware of the effect his temper had on others. In his memoir he writes about my mother’s friends failing her, not coming around to keep her company after she fell ill. He doesn’t remember slamming the door so hard it seemed the frames would splinter, and screaming, “Get the fuck out of my house!”
“I’ll leave him,” my mother told me once, struggling to hold her chin high. “I’ll get better and I’ll go back to England. You’ll see.” I was ten or eleven years old, sitting on the couch with her, the end of her blanket across my knees. We’d turned the television off and the house was stunned silent. I don’t know if my father had just gone into the bedroom, or his basement office, or left again to meet one of his other women somewhere in the city. But there had been yelling, the kind you never get used to. It came from nowhere, or a place I was too young to understand. The noise was so loud, the violence crashing toward us until our ears threatened to pop. There was name calling; I was a cocksucker, motherfucker. There were accusations: “When we got married we had a bargain. I make the money and you take care of the children. You’re not living up to your end of the bargain.” We sat in the hum that always followed, a silence you could feel creeping across your skin like gel.
I was just starting to use drugs, opening the window near my bed at night, dropping softly onto the lawn. Running with Roger, Javier, and Justin to the park two blocks away. My mother was crying and angry, exhausted, trying and failing to keep her head steady, to sit forward. She wanted me to believe she could stand up for herself. But she couldn’t. And I couldn’t stand up for her. Or I could have, but I didn’t. She should have gone, the day of her diagnosis, home to her parents and sisters in the small hill town outside of Sheffield, England. But it was too late now. Instead she was stuck in the North Side of Chicago. Her body became her prison. Her head shook violently and she leaned back against the pillow.12
As I got older and my mother got sicker she stopped confiding in me. I avoided her, or badgered her for money, with the result that my father stopped leaving money with her. She didn’t complain anymore when she smelled cigarette smoke on my clo
thes or notice the streaks on my face that were left from inhaling spraypaint out of a plastic bag halfway down the alley. A year before she died, recognizing something in my look, she told me if I ran away, it would kill her. I didn’t want the responsibility so I waited. I came home as little as possible, just long enough to do my chores: empty the bucket of urine next to the couch, wash the dishes, take out the trash, maybe make her a cup of instant coffee with lots of milk, maybe open myself a can of something to eat. Like her friends, I was chased away by my father’s rage. Transformed by it, perhaps. That’s what the caseworkers could never understand. It wasn’t the handcuffs or the beatings or his shaving my head. That was nothing. It was the terror. I stayed away. I grew my hair out, skipped school, wore tattered rock T-shirts held together with safety pins. While the chemo glowed across my mother’s atrophied frame I sat in the metal pumpkin at Indian Boundary Park, slid another hit of sunshine below my tongue, and waited for the gang to arrive. My mother cried frequently and I have a distinct impression toward the end she didn’t care for me too much. I hadn’t given her reason to. If she had gone into remission she might have left me behind as well. People tell me it’s not true but I don’t see how they would know.
Hans’ mother, Beverly Palmer, wears a cobalt blue skirt that runs to her ankles and a matching jacket with a neck collar. She’s almost seventy years old, with defenseless, wide-open eyes. Her bright copper hair, streaked with gold and white, rises in dry curls like an electric storm.
She takes the stand for two days but can hardly remember anything. She remembers Hans telling her he was sleeping in his car in the period between when Nina went missing and when he was arrested and charged with murder five weeks later. She wants to believe her only child isn’t a killer and that Nina is hiding somewhere. She doesn’t recall saying Nina was extremely conscientious and that leaving the children would be atypical of her, totally out of character, but she doesn’t dispute it’s her voice on the recording. She remembers being concerned about Nina’s disappearance but she doesn’t remember telling the police Nina was a lovely person. “I think people are a mixture of things.”
When Palmer came back from Nevada Tuesday night, September 5, Hans met her at her friend’s house. They were unpacking their things after a trip to the Burning Man Festival. Hans got a call while he was waiting. It was Nina’s friend Ellen and a police officer. “Nina has been missing for two days,” Ellen said. “You were the last to see her. Do you know where she might be?”
“You’ll have to talk to my lawyer about that,” Hans said, and hung up the phone.
When his mother was ready to go it was almost ten o’clock. Hans said he had something to tell her but it would upset her so he would tell her in the morning. She thought he wanted to borrow money again. He already owed her $40,000. But what he wanted to tell her was that the mother of her grandchildren was gone.
The next day Palmer found out that Hans had bought all new towels and stolen her car. She has two cars, a Honda Hybrid and a CRX that Hans often used. He wouldn’t give her back the Hybrid. She asked where the CRX was and he wouldn’t say. Up in the hills, without a car, you’re stranded. Hora asks why she didn’t call the police.
“I’m his mother,” she says.
“So if he wants he can just take both cars?” Hora asks.
“I guess that’s what it comes to, doesn’t it?” she replies. She rented a car instead.
Everything that happened then is just a blur, or she’s covering for her son. She remembers the new towels, but can’t remember if the old towels were gone. She says the beam in the middle of the living room, where police found a smear of Nina’s blood, hadn’t been cleaned in twenty years. “I kept meaning to refinish it,” she says. “But I never did.” When the police found the smear, eleven days after Nina disappeared, the blood was still a bright red. The iron in the blood hadn’t rusted into brown like all blood does eventually, and there was no dust or debris on top of the stain.13
Under cross-examination, Du Bois asks about her husband, the man she married after leaving Hans’ father, who died seven years ago. “Is it fair to say he was the love of your life?”
“He was,” she agrees.
“And since he died you have a hard time remembering things. Maybe you no longer care to remember things?”
“That’s true. But I’ve never had a very good memory to begin with.”
“Were you taking medication at the time?”
“No.”
“Are you taking medication now?”
“Yes.”
Hora plays a tape of a call from Hans after the police had tapped Beverly’s phone, made September 23, at 9:06 PM:
HANS: I had wanted to go to a mediator. I guess Nina decided that wouldn’t be enough fun. It was more than that. She really had Munchausen by proxy disorder. She came up with these illnesses for Cori because she hated me and he was her proxy for me so by discovering he was borderline autistic that was her way of degrading me… Cori said he wanted to live only with me. That’s because he understands his mother wants him to be sick and doesn’t really like him on some deep conflicted level… She stole money. And you know, at the time I was asking people to take pay cuts she was spending money like crazy… She did things like kick me and then call the police… Being decent is a mistake. A mistake I paid for heavily… She didn’t just abuse me, she looked for every possible way she could screw me and did it. The fact that I’d been a good husband just seemed like weakness to her.
PALMER: As awful as these things are, it’s still sad whatever happened to Nina. Don’t you think?
HANS: I think my children shouldn’t be endangered by her. All I ever wanted was to be nice to her and give her an opportunity to come to the United States.
PALMER: But she didn’t deserve what happened to her.
HANS: Yeah, and neither did I. Neither did my son. The whole court system made it so much worse than it had to be. These lawyers systematically drained us of everything we had… It may be hard to reach me for a while… Bye mom. I love you a lot.
BEVERLY: Ha. Good. Bye bye.
“You remember that call?”
“Yes. Vaguely.”
“Why did you sound so surprised at the end when he said he loved you?”
“I was nervous.”
“You were nervous?”
“How could one not be nervous about this?”
“You mean when he calls you up and tells you how much he hates Nina twenty days after she disappeared. That made you nervous?”
On September 18, 2006, two weeks after Nina disappeared, Hans met Artem Mishim at a custody hearing for Hans’ children. The county had taken the children. Hans knew Artem from the judo academy where he took classes and Artem had agreed to be a character witness.
“How’s it going, Scott?” Artem said. He was making a joke, referring to Scott Peterson. After court they left together, driving a strange path through Berkeley, avoiding the highway and major streets, then stopping for dinner on Solano Avenue. Following dinner they looked beneath the car, as if they were worried someone had placed a tracking device. At the end of the evening Artem dropped Hans in Berkeley and Hans walked four blocks to the Honda CRX, which he’d left hidden on a side street. It took him thirty minutes to walk to the car, even though it was five minutes away. He walked around the block, past the car, then doubled back before climbing inside. He drove to the bottom of Shepherd’s Canyon, parked the car near the highway where his mother or the police were unlikely to find it, and sprinted up the hill toward his home.
The police had been following Hans the entire day, using at least a dozen vehicles and a fixed-wing plane with glass sides and gyroscope-mounted binoculars. They wanted the CRX, which they thought held the key to unlocking the mystery behind Nina’s disappearance. But the car posed more questions than it answered. The CRX had been thoroughly scrubbed, the floors soaked, the compartments holding an inch of standing water. The passenger seat was missing along with whatever it did or di
dn’t contain. Hans was hiding something, but they were moving farther away from finding it.
“Where did he put the seat?” I ask Du Bois during recess.
“He threw it in a dumpster,” Du Bois says.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “It’s one thing to remove a seat, it’s another to throw it away. It wasn’t even his car.”
I ask him about a drawing Cori drew of his father coming down the stairs to the basement where the two children are sleeping, carrying Nina in his arms.
“That’s ridiculous,” Du Bois says. “Why would Hans carry his dead wife into his children’s room?”
“You want us to accept that he’s rational when it comes to carrying his dead wife down the stairs, but irrational when he throws away a perfectly good car seat?”
Du Bois barely acknowledges my comment. “All of that will come out in the trial.” This is a hallmark of the case, Du Bois promising some exciting new detail in the coming days that will prove his client’s innocence, and then failing to deliver. A TV producer asks Judge Goodman if the case is likely to stretch into a fourth month and he says no. “I don’t think the defense has much of a case.” He means the defense isn’t going to call many witnesses, but the subtext is obvious.
I ask Du Bois why the children haven’t seen or heard from their mother. “If she wants to carry this charade out she has to stay away from her children for now.” It occurs to me that Du Bois must know what he’s saying isn’t true. Nina’s dead and he’s aware of that. She’s certainly not in Russia, where her disappearance is front-page news. Why would she work so hard to get American citizenship only to frame Hans with a murder, abandon her children, and go into permanent hiding? She wouldn’t even know Hans was going to be charged with murder. I point this out to some friends. “He’s lying,” I say. “He’s just doing his job,” they reply. Du Bois continues to say everything will be explained in the trial, but I doubt it. I can see how he communicates. The strategy of the defense is to confuse situations. He’s not going to answer questions; he’s going to propose possibilities. The point is not truth. The point of the defense is that there is no truth.
The Adderall Diaries Page 12
