Blood brothers

In the spring of  2003, Andrew Kissel, lucky to be only spanked by the apartment neighbors he’d swindled, continued buying up commercial and residential properties all over wealthy Connecticut.

It was about then that worrying news was coming out of Asia.

The airborne killer SARS had put that region on high alert including Hong Kong, where Rob and his family lived. There was no question Rob had to get Nancy and the-now three kids out of Asia. The natural safe haven was the Kissel family ski house in Stratton, Vermont. Rob, always the dutiful breadwinner, elected to stay in Hong Kong—one of those fateful decisions.

Frank Shea, investigator: He wanted the confirmation. He was pretty convinced it was going on, but he wanted the evidence.

Frank Shea is a former New York City police detective-turned-private investigator.  During that separation from his family Rob Kissel got that funny feeling  -- the one that tells you your spouse is doing something they shouldn’t.  He hired Shea’s investigators to survey his wife at the Vermont ski chalet.  Shea called Rob in Hong Kong to report what they were seeing in real time.

Shea: This gentleman arrived in his van and parked on a dirt road and snuck into the house. I told Rob what was going on. He said...

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Same time?

Shea: Same time.

Murphy: This is ongoing as we’re talking?

That ‘gentleman’ was Michael del Priore, a local TV/stereo installer.  On the phone, Shea says Kissel took the news stoically, hung up and immediately called his wife.   Minutes later, there was a stir in the Vermont house.

Shea: The male came out of the house, got in his van, and drove off. So Rob called me back at my house and he told me that he had spoken to Nancy. He didn’t let her know that the house was being watched. He just said, ‘Nancy don’t do anything stupid. We have the children. We promised each other we’d get this back together.’

It seemed she’d been chastened.  Nancy quickly returned to her husband in Hong Kong, presumably to work on the marriage.  A month  later, Shea received an email from Rob saying he was in New York for back surgery and that Nancy was with him.  In fact, he was posing another job for the investigator, who obliged.

Shea: What we found then was that while Rob was in the hospital and during the course of this operation, she was seeing this gentleman.

Murphy: The same guy from Vermont?

Shea: That’s correct.

This time, he says, the unwelcome news pierced Rob’s tough guy exterior.

Shea: He was broken over it. He was broken up over it. But he said ‘Well, if I can just get her out of New York and get her back home,’ he said.  ‘We can work on our marriage.’

Murphy: He thought this was a solvable problem, this relationship?

Shea: He really did.

By late August 2003, the couple was back in Hong Kong.  At one point, Rob opened up about his troubled marriage in an email to his big brother Andrew.

Yet, no one on the outside was sensing the dangerous turn Rob and Nancy’s lives were taking.  No one, that is, except Frank Shea.  At one point, 8,000 away, Rob told the detective something unsettling.

Shea: She would come home and have a two finger scotch, but the scotch was making him feel much different than he normally felt. It would make him feel woozy, disoriented, not something he was used to.

The former cop’s instinct kicked in.  Shea urged Rob, someone he considered now a friend, to rush a sample of the scotch to a lab for testing.  Shea realized his friend might not do it.  So he decided to do something extraordinary. He’d pay Rob Kissel a visit at the exclusive China Club in Hong Kong to spell it out.

Shea: I sat down with Rob Kissel and I looked him right across the table at the China Club and I said ‘Rob, I think Nancy’s trying to kill you.’

Murphy: How do you react to that kind of thing? Your marriage may be on the rocks, but "she’s killing me?"

Shea: He he took in my statement.  He didn’t say that he bought it 100 percent, but he really was concerned about his safety.

Still the urgency of it all seemed lost on Rob. Before he knew it, it was Halloween weekend, the end of one month and the beginning of another.

Rob Kissel never did send that sample out for testing.  But he had made a decision.  He was convinced that his marriage had broken down and he was going to ask his wife for a divorce.  In fact, friends of the couple say they were supposed to talk about the split on that Sunday in November.  

We know Rob Kissel spent the day with his  three kids he was crazy about. At one point, his daughter gave him a pink milkshake—mixed up by her mom—a “secret recipe” she called it, in the spirit of Halloween.  It seemed at the time a cute gesture but not that significant.

He had to have had so much on his mind that afternoon:  the impending divorce, the possible loss of his children ... and on top of it all, a critical conference call at home later that evening.

It was so important that a colleague phoned him to talk about strategy for the meeting.  Hong Kong reporter Albert Wong says the colleague thought Rob sounded as though he were on another planet. 

Albert Wong, Hong Kong reporter: He was just bizarre—completely.

Murphy: Groggy? out of it?

Wong: Completely. Exactly.

Maybe stress was finally taking its toll on Rob Kissel.  Or maybe something else was afoot.  Maybe the goblins of Halloween had one more trick to play.

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