Eygptian civil engineer Mamdouh Hamza offered to pay a hired killer $100,000 to assassinate an Egyptian government minister and three other government officials. Hamza called his plan "the final solution." The hired killer — actually an undercover British police officer — arrested Hamza, who went to trial in 2005.

In 2006, prosecutors charged Chinese national and Canadian citizen Xiaodong Sheldon Meng with 36 felonies, including economic espionage to benefit a foreign government. Meng's crime? Stealing code his former employer, Silicon Valley-based Quantum3D uses in fighter-pilot training software. A judge sentenced Meng to 24 months earlier this summer.

In 2007, Lan Lee, 42, of Palo Alto, and Yuefei Ge, 34, a Chinese national living in San Jose also faced charges of economic espionage after prosecutors accused the pair of stealing computer chips from Mountain View-based NetLogic Microsystems with plans on selling them to the Chinese government. Their indictment alleges the pair formed a company, Sico Microsystems, in order to create new chips based on stolen designs.

In May 1995, Silicon Valley engineer Bill Gaede rushed into a New York Times office and told a reporter: "I'm a spy, and I think they're going to kill me, so I want you to know what has happened." Gaede claimed he'd stolen computer chip designs from Intel and tried to sell them to Cuba, China and Iran before the CIA got onto his case and began hunting him down. The Times reporter didn't believe it at first, but it all turned out to be true. Gaede began serving a 33-month sentence in July 1996.

Richard Wade Farley goes by three names in the newspapers — never a good sign. In 1988, Farley was fired from Sunnyvale-based ESL, accused of sexual harrassment. Not long after, he returned with a shotgun. Seven of his former coworkers died. He barricaded himself in the office for six hours before police dragged him out.

In a way that reminded some of Farley's rampage, recently fired NEC Electronics employee Kenneth M. McMurray came back to his old office and forced Maria Elizabeth Lualhati, his ex-girlfriend and an associate systems programmer, into a lab where he shot her and then himself.

Aptix founder and ex-CEO Amr Mohsen faced charges of perjury, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice after prosecutors said he forged engineering notebooks in a failed attempt to sue a rival for patent infringement. When that case started to go against Mohsen, he allegedly told another inmate he wanted the judge to "disappear." The plan failed. Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years on January 5, 2007. According to AmrMohsen.com, "Amr and the family believe the 17-year punishment to be excessive."

Legendary Linux developer Hans Reiser, a hero to the open-source community, murdered his wife, Nina. He swore to his innocence almost up to the very end — until a judge agreed to reduce his sentence if he led police to her body. He eventually did. The reaction from Reiser's most ardent defenders: "Whoops."

Hans told me the investigator had failed him. He maintained his innocence and said there was a list of people who should be looked into. The first was "Alexia Orange." (I'm protecting her real name.) He said she had lied about Hans pushing his wife, painting him as an aggressor during a custody hearing. Alexia never testified in Hans's murder trial. But that wasn't the point. The point was that he felt like he was mistreated; his concerns hadn't been taken seriously. Next he named the teachers at the children's school. They had also fabricated information, he said.

"We would like it to be true that S/M is neatly compacted inside the mind," he said. "S/M crosses the wires of pleasure and pain, and those wires run deep. It crosses the wires between loving and hating as well. The result is that the more a sadomasochist cares about someone the more dangerous they are to them." He thought there should have been more of a focus on Sean's sexuality during the trial. But we both knew that Sean hadn't killed Nina.

(Photo by AP)

"Was there a sudden quarrel?" Hora asked. "No." "Did you assault her?" "No." "Did she provoke you in any manner whatsoever?" "No. We did however have a contentious divorce, as we discussed.... I certainly didn't kill Nina. I did not murder Nina," the defendant added, without a question being posed.

I think it's fundamentally unfair for this jury not to know that the woman for two years, lived with a sadomasochist who was also a drug abuser, and she's not just a goody two-shoes that takes her kids to Adventure Time or to little kinder-gyms.

Hans Reiser's neighbor observed the programmer, dressed in heavy clothing despite excellent weather, washing either his car or the driveway late at night just after Nina Reiser disappeared. It was unusual, prosecutors claim, because Reiser was not known for performing outdoor activities and the yard was no cleaner the next day. Natalie Potter, a supervisor at the daycare the couple's two children attend, testified that Hans showed up agitated on the Tuesday following the holiday requesting a meeting. He was not scheduled to pick up the children and never returned for the meeting.

Possibly more damaging was the testimony about Nina's last known activities. She had recently been hired for a new job. The woman who hired her testified that she was excited to start a new job and valued flexibility to spend time with her children over pay. She never returned to complete the hiring process. Also, Nina's mini-van was later found with recently purchased perishable groceries.

Perry Mason may have stressed that a murder prosecution without a body is difficult. CSI purports to teach that there is physical evidence even without a murder weapon and body. But juries weigh evidence, not microscopes. We are a storytelling species, and what real people recount in their own words can often sway more than hard evidence. There's one more story to hear: Hans Reiser will soon have the opportunity to present his own version of what happened to his former wife. (Courtroom sketch by Wired News/Norman Quebedeau)

In presenting the theory that Nina ran off with some man, defense attorney William Dubois displayed several Craigslist dating pages that the woman had visited just prior to her disappearance. One contained several pornographic images. While Dubois continued his argument, fellow defense lawyer Richard Tamor fumbled with the controls, causing the same image to pop up several times.

"You need to lose that picture," Superior Court judge Larry Freeman quipped. To laughter, he told the jury: "Sometimes low tech is better than high tech."