On Monday, as part of deal for a reduced sentence, Hans Reiser, the Bay Area Linux programmer convicted of killing his estranged wife Nina, led police to her shallow grave. Five days earlier, California journalist/author Stephen Elliot went to cellblock nine of the Santa Rita Jail looking to talk to Reiser for his current project, a book that Elliot says is “… really about me … half memoir, half true crime.” Elliot, who attended Reiser’s trial, writes about the jailhouse interview at Salon.

He was a sociopath, incapable of caring about another human being. A narcissist. A manipulator who thinks everybody else is stupid. The strangest thing about this murderer is how he never gets away with anything. Nobody ever believes him but he keeps lying anyway. He’s a genius who invented a new way to store information, supervised millions of lines of complex code, and he has no idea how he is being perceived.

Read more at Salon.