Blood brothers

Feng Shui: For thousands of years, a great many Chinese have believed there’s a life force that flows around us like wind and water.  Interrupt it at your peril. 

Take one of the most prominent skyscrapers on the Hong Kong skyline, the Bank of China.

Very bad Feng Shui, people will tell you because the building with its sharp edges like glass daggers restricts the life flow inside.

Bad luck comes to all within and near it whisper the believers.

It’s not clear if Robert Kissel cared a fig for Feng Shui.  But he was focused on the Bank of China—

Albert Wong, Hong Kong reporter: In 2003, this was a huge market. I mean they were talking about billions of U.S. dollars.

Albert Wong is a reporter for the China Standard, a business newspaper in Hong Kong.

Wong: It was fiercely competed—especially with amongst Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, all the big ones.

But the Bank of China deal was fast approaching at the worst of times for Robert Kissel.  Beneath the crisp business suit and tie, he was facing a personal crisis:  his marriage was collapsing and he had reason to suspect his wife was drugging him...just as his private eye had warned.

Frank Shea: Almost every conversation. It was brought up that he was still having this disoriented feeling.

On the first Sunday in November 2003, Halloween weekend, a close friend and colleague called to discuss an important conference call on the Bank of China deal later that night. He said Kissel sounded sleepy and out of sorts.  Reporter Albert Wong:

Wong: Completely groggy.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Not making sense?

Wong: Yeah. Exactly.

At first the friend didn’t make much of it.  But when Kissel missed the conference call that night and was a no-show at the office the next day, the friend called Nancy Kissel.  She told him she and Rob were dealing with family issues.  But as days passed, the friend suspected something more sinister at play and filed a missing person’s report.   Police inspectors later knocked on Mrs. Kissel’s door.  She let them in and explained her husband had walked out on her after a fight.

Wong: They don’t suspect anything until they go into the bedroom.  And he says that it’s a gut feeling, just from experience.

Meanwhile, another team of inspectors was investigating reports of a strange smell coming from the Kissel storage unit.  The police eventually asked Mrs. Kissel for the keys.  After some hesitation, she handed them over. 

Wong:  As soon as they open the door, the smell was so overwhelming they knew straight away there was a dead body in there.

Murphy: They’d found the missing husband.

Wong: Right.

40-year-old Robert Kissel had been rolled inside a carpet, padded with pillows and towels to contain the stench. Within hours, his wife was under arrest.

The city of dazzling lights was lit up even brighter by the juiciest story to hit Hong Kong in years: Nancy Kissel, fashionable wife of an ex-pat millionaire banker charged with his murder.  In the backseat of chauffeured limos and over cappuccinos, the expat community savored each new morsel of the investigation.  The body stuffed inside a carpet, whispers about a drugged milkshake.  It was just a feast of speculation about the final days on Nancy and Robert Kissel.

Joss Gistren, fellow Hong Kong ex-pat: What would drive a woman to do this? Nancy has a reputation of being a fabulous mother—very active in the school, stable.

Gistren, a fellow expat at the Parkview apartment towers, says the story got husbands and wives fighting amongst themselves about what could’ve gone so murderously wrong behind closed doors.  8,000 miles away, other old friends in New York were standing slack-jawed, too, wondering if they’d heard the news right.

Roz Lichter, Kissels' New York neighbor: I was in the hallway going out and our neighbor said, “You’re not gonna believe this.” I said “What?” you know, she said, “Rob is dead and Nancy killed him.” You know the shock...

Almost overnight, Rob and Nancy’s three children— a 9, 6 and 4-year-old—had become virtual orphans. Their father stuffed in the basement, their mother in custody for the foreseeable future.  Quickly the children were returned to America, where they eventually wound up in the care of their aunt Hayley and fabulously wealthy uncle, Andrew Kissel, Robert’s brother.

By this point, he was ensconced in a ritzy, Greenwich, Connecticut mansion, its impeccable facade hiding the sins within.

Michael Collesano, court appointed attorney for Rob and Nancy Kissel's children: I got the impression he was a wheeler-dealer.

Michael Collesano, the children’s court appointed legal guardian, interviewed Andrew Kissel on the telephone, routine when recommending child custodians to the court.  But the phone call went poorly.

Collesano: He wanted to tell me how rich he was.  And I wasn’t really looking to get from the conversation how rich he was.  I was looking to get from the conversation that he was gonna be a good custodian to the kids.

Murphy: You weren’t counting cars.

Collesano: Exactly.

Murphy: Did you hang up the phone and think, ‘What a jerk’?

Collesano: Maybe that’s a little strong. But in hindsight, yeah.

But few people were focusing on the psychobabble of Andrew’s money and self-identity issues. Not with a murder trial about to begin in Hong Kong. There was an outpouring of sympathy for the Kissel family that so brutally lost a son, a brother, an uncle.

But what about Nancy Kissel?  One of the few old friends who’d heard her voice was Elizabeth Lacause. Nancy called from her lawyer’s office in Hong Kong.

Elizabeth Lacause, Nancy Kissel's friend: She was shaken.  And she said; “Oh, my gosh, you don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

But Nancy Kissel was about to tell everyone  -- from the witness stand, a shocking story that would blow the buttons off Hong Kong’s smart set.

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