Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist

James GrayAssociated Press/Microsoft James Gray, lost at sea, has been declared dead.

Just over five years ago, Jim Gray, a computer scientist then working for Microsoft, vanished with his sailboat somewhere in the waters beyond the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Because no trace of Dr. Gray or his boat, Tenacious, was found during the extensive searches that followed, he could not be declared legally dead.

That changed on Wednesday when a court in San Francisco granted a petition by Donna Carnes, Dr. Gray’s widow, to establish her husband’s death under California law, which allows for such a determination when a missing person has not been heard from for five continuous years. Dr. Gray is now considered missing but presumed dead.

Ms. Carnes said the court order gave her a degree of closure after five years of learning to live with the mystery surrounding Dr. Gray’s disappearance. “People are quite uncomfortable with ambiguity,” she said by telephone from the home she shared with Dr. Gray in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. “They want an ending. This in-between land can cause great discomfort.”

“Oddly enough, the five-year period gave me time to say, ‘You know what, I don’t know the ending, but I sure miss my husband,’ ” she said. “You have to learn to carry the ambiguity.”

Dr. Gray was a towering figure in the technology industry, responsible for seminal work in developing database and transaction processing technologies that underlie the modern Internet while at I.B.M. and Tandem Computer in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1998, he received the Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computer science. He was also much beloved by his colleagues in academia and the technology industry, as an account of his memorial service at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 shows.

The strong feelings for Dr. Gray partly explain the extraordinary search effort that followed his disappearance, during which friends of his from Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com scoured high-resolution satellite images of 132,000 square miles of ocean between Southern California and Oregon, looking for signs of his boat. After several weeks of above-water searches by the Coast Guard, Ms. Carnes hired a team to conduct underwater searches using sonar and unmanned rovers.

When he vanished, Dr. Gray was sailing on a day trip to the Farallon Islands off the coast of Northern California to scatter his mother’s ashes. Ms. Carnes said he was a superb sailor and that the couple’s boat was in “great shape.” Ms. Carnes, who was in Wisconsin at the time, spoke to her husband by cellphone during his trip.

The ocean can be rough around the Farallons, though. There is speculation that the wreckage of Dr. Gray’s boat could have tumbled over the continental shelf in the area, making it nearly impossible to find.

Following the court hearing, Ms. Carnes sent a simple two-line note to friends and family with the news. “I am in the San Francisco house, with the fire on, drinking tea, with the hope that Jim may rest in peace,” she said in the e-mail, which she said prompted hundreds of responses.

Ms. Carnes said for a time after her husband’s disappearance that she could not bear to look at the waters of San Francisco Bay from her home. That has changed, but she still will not sail in the San Francisco area. “I just don’t want to sail over my own boat and not know it,” she said.

Mr. Gray was 63 when he disappeared. His death certificate, though, will be dated Jan. 28, 2012, when he would have been 68.