Blood brothers

The sticky monsoon season was approaching—hot and humid—and in Hong Kong’s courthouse, a murder trial to match the climate was about to begin.

Nancy Kissel was charged with the bludgeoning murder of her banker husband Robert.

Hong Kong couldn’t get enough of it all summer long.

Albert Wong, reporter: For three months it was just intense. 

Reporter Albert Wong says the headlines  started from day one—with the defendant’s dramatic new look.  Investigator Frank Shea also attended the trial.  He says the transformation of stylish Nancy Kissel was astonishing.

Frank Shea, investigator: I couldn’t believe it was the same person. She had changed dramatically. She looked oriental. She had black hair.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: As a defense strategy or as a way to appear to jurors?

Shea: I would say absolutely to appeal to the jury, to put a more local nature on her defense.

Also in the gallery, watching, stunned: Robert’s father William and sister, Jane Kissel Clayton.  Mercifully, perhaps, Robert and Nancy’s children were thousands of miles away, in Connecticut with Uncle Andrew, shielded from their mother’s unfolding drama. 

And high theater it was.  The prosecution outlining the case against Nancy Kissel in classic strokes:  a calculating wife in love with another man, hungry for her husbands millions, unwilling to put up with a messy divorce.  Before she killed him, prosecutors said, Nancy Kissel had trolled the Internet researching drugs to poison her husband.

Wong: I mean, right from the start, they say it was a cold-blooded killing. Simple as that and—

Murphy: And it had been in the works for months and months?

Wong: For months and months—premeditated, planned. She wanted to kill him, take the children and go to the U.S.

Prosecutors also laid out the last hours of Rob Kissel in grisly detail. They said Nancy knew full-well her husband was about to ask for a divorce, so she launched a preemptive strike:  she blended a pharmacy of drugs including the substance Rohypnol  into a pink-colored milkshake and gave it to one of her daughters to serve to daddy.

Murphy: This is known as date rape drug in the States.

Wong: Yes, exactly date rape drug.

Murphy: Knocks you out, you can’t remember details.

Wong: exactly.

After drinking the pink shake, Rob Kissel reportedly played with his son for one last time and  spoke on the phone with a colleague about that all-important, upcoming conference call.  Prosecutors said that at some point, as the drugs kicked in, Rob Kissel got into his pajamas—staggered toward his bed and collapsed, unconscious, on the bedroom floor.

Then, said the prosecutor, Nancy pounced, a leaden family heirloom in her hand.

Wong: She took up this ornament. It was a heavy ornament, bludgeoned him five times.  Each one could have been fatal and so with such a force that his skull bone broke and pierced his brain.

What happened next, prosecutors said, was a hasty and botched cover-up:  a local upscale home furnishings store, Tequila Kola, reported how Mrs. Kissel bought new linens and carpets the next day and prosecutors added a gruesome detail not reported earlier.

Wong: The prosecution says she slept with the body for two nights.  She locked the door

Murphy: She slept with the body?

Wong: As in the same room. She told her domestic helpers don’t bother to clean up the room while she continued changing the linen changing the rugs. And then eventually wrapping him up in the rug, tying it up and ordering removal men to take it to a storeroom.

As bizarre as the state’s presentation was, it paled against what was to come.  The defense started its case with a dramatic star witness.

It was Nancy Kissel’s turn to tell her story in her own words.  She took the stand, steadying herself on a rail as she teetered toward the witness chair.  Then, in just a whisper of a voice, she turned the tables and put her dead husband Rob on trial.

Joss Gistren, fellow ex-pat, attended Nancy’s trial every day...

Joss Gistren, fellow ex-pat: It was a very emotional moment. It was her chance to actually tell what she felt had happened.

And tell she did, describing in minute detail scenes from an abusive perverted marriage: How at night her husband did a Jekyll and Hyde—peeling off his conservative skin to snort coke and drink scotch ‘til he was smashed and how he routinely forced her into humiliating, rough sex. 

Elizabeth Lacause, Nancy Kissel's friend: Her self esteem was probably absolutely nothing.     

Liz Lacause says her friend was crying out for help—finding some temporary solace with a lover in Vermont.

Lacause: She wanted the loving husband, and she had that.  And that fell away and then she had nothing.

On the stand, Nancy did acknowledge that—at least on one occasion—she had sedated Rob to calm him down.  Though she denied lacing her husband’s milkshake that day with the five types of sedatives found in his body. 

But for all her sordid testimony, Nancy Kissel’s memory of her husband’s murder was spotty, at best:  she remembered acting in self defense—her husband threatening her.  But striking him five times with a lead statue?  That was a complete blur.

Wong: He tried to pick a fight by mentioning divorce.  He says, supposedly, ‘I’m taking the kids. I’m going.’ and he’s holding a baseball bat.  And then eventually through a lot of shouting she gets dragged into the bedroom.

Murphy: A violent fight is underway?

Wong: Right and she goes blank. 

On cross-examination, the prosecutor cut bluntly to the chase.

Wong: ‘Mrs. Kissel there’s just one thing we have to get over and done with.  You do of course, accept you killed your husband?’ and she said ‘yes.’

Murphy: Gasps in the courtroom?

Wong: Right. Gasps in the in the courtroom.

In the end, after three months of trial, the jury of five men and two women didn’t buy the battered wife syndrome.  Its unanimous verdict: guilty. Nancy Kissel would spend the rest of her life in a Chinese prison.  Rob’s friends in New York couldn’t spare her much sympathy.

Roz Lichter, Kissels' neighbor: The legacy that she leaves to her children is she murdered their father and said he was a terrible person.

Hillary Richard: From a personal, level it didn’t comport with any aspect of Rob I had ever seen. I hope the children don’t believe what’s been written and said by their own mother about their father.  He loved them very, very much and I hope they can retain some little tiny shred of that as they get older.

Everyone hoped the children’s healing could begin under the care of their uncle Andrew.  But by then, he may have been too preoccupied with something else—there was yet another storm heading toward the Kissel family.

It was Shakespearean, almost Biblical, what was about to happen to the surviving brother.  Surviving, but not for very long...

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