Blood brothers

By the spring of 2005, nearly two years after the murder of his younger brother, Rob, Andrew Kissel was in a funk.

Friend and theater producer Brian Howie said not even a festive booze cruise on Kissel’s yacht could cheer him up.

Brian Howie, Andrew Kissels' high school friend: There were parts of the trip where Andrew would be crying and you could tell he was deeply troubled and saddened.

Everyone assumed his grief was over the family’s great tragedy.  Rob, murdered by his wife, the children left behind.

But maybe the tears were for himself.

It seems Andrew’s crooked monopoly game was catching up with him.  He was about to draw the “go-directly-to-jail-card.”

As his family was sitting through a traumatic murder trial in Hong Kong, Andrew Kissel was making headlines back home here in Greenwich --   swindling his apartment neighbors in Manhattan was just a taste of what he had been up to according to federal authorities.  In the summer of 2005 they arrested him, charging him with defrauding banks in a massive loan scheme.

Phillip Russell, Andrew Kissel’s attorney: There was a great deal of evidence against him and there was a great deal of money that could not be accounted for.

Give or take 20 million dollars.  Kissel’s own attorney Phillip Russell says the alleged scheme went like this—Kissel would take out a mortgage for a piece of property.  Then forge another document to make it look like he had paid off the debt—owned the property free and clear.

Russell: And then he went to a different bank and mortgaged the same property again so that there would be more than one loan on a single piece of property.

Bank fraud: If convicted of all charges, Andrew Kissel could have spent the rest of his life in a federal slammer.  Not a rosy prospect for the guardian of his late brother’s three children and heirs to his estate estimated at about $18-million dollars.

Murphy: He presented himself to you initially as a family man.  Concerned about his brother’s family...

Collesano, court-appointed attorney for Rob Kissel’s children: completely upstanding...

Murphy: ...pillar of the community

Michael Collesano, that court-appointed attorney for Rob Kissel’s children was incensed when he later realized that Andrew had conned him into believing he had the best interests of his nephew and nieces at heart.

Michael Collesano, court-appointed attorney for Rob Kissel's children: I believe he said that he had independently raised $100,000 in a separate trust for their well being.

Murphy: Was that true?

Collesano: No.

Murphy: So he just sat there and lied to you?

Collesano: Absolutely.

There was another worry for the children’s lawyer: Behind the stately walls of Kissel manor, war had been declared.  Andrew and his wife Hayley were splitting up in ugly fashion.  Emails obtained by Dateline show Hayley venting her spleen to her husband’s sister, Jane Kissel Clayton.

‘I just hate him!!!!!!!!’ she writes. ‘He will never be a good, responsible person”...it goes on to say “do you know last night in bed i could actually see myself pummeling him to death and just enjoying the sensation of each and every shot...”

Collesano: That’s just one of the emails.  There was a pattern of behavior there that clearly indicated a very stressful home and that clearly indicated to I think any reasoned person that the interest of the children weren’t served by being in that home.

Andrew’s sister, Jane, agreed.  She petitioned for and was granted custody of the three children, she went so far as to make Andrew and Hayley’s feud a matter of public record.  Andrew, in retaliation, left a message on his sister’s answering machine.

Andrew Kissel's voice message: Jane it’s your ex-brother. You’re famous, you’re on the front page of the New York Times. You should get it.  You’re quoted.  And we are going to bury you, Jane.

But Kissel was in no position to be slinging dirt at anyone.

His own attorney, Phillip Russell, says Andrew eventually cut a deal with federal prosecutors that included prison.  In the meantime, he was home under house arrest, ticking off the days, watching TV with an ankle bracelet.

Howie: I would hear ‘good’.  He’s happy, he’s home…. he’s, um, he’s resigned to his fate...

Problem was, fate wasn’t resigned to Andrew Kissel’s plan. In April 2006, just days before he was due in federal court to confess his crimes, karma made a house call.

Andrew Kissel was alone in the Greenwich mansion. His wife, Hayley, and the two kids had moved out that Friday—forced to leave after Andrew stopped paying rent. Movers were coming to clear out the rest of the furniture after the weekend. But when they arrived early Monday morning April 3^rd, 2006, they made a ghastly discovery in the basement.

Police press conference: The body of Andrew Michael Kissel who was found dead within his residence at 10 Dairy road...

According to police, whoever murdered Andrew Kissel had pulled his shirt over his head and stabbed him multiple times.

A second Kissel brother—dead—a victim of foul play.  He was 46 years old.

To date police have made no arrests or officially named any suspects.

But very un-officially there was an amateur detective theory floated that had a weird, appealing logic to it. 

Howie: About a day after it happened, I thought he probably hired someone to kill him.

Friend Brian Howie says Andrew Kissel was broke, but he did have a hefty life insurance policy.  He says Kissel may have loved his own children—two daughters—enough to pull off one last con—against the insurance company.  A policy that would pay off for murder, but not suicide.

Howie: Because if there was insurance money involved...he loved those children.  And if he was going away for a significant amount of time, you know, money mattered in his world. So he wanted to see that they were taken care of.

But it’s just conjecture.  The murder remains a true ‘who-dun-it’ in mystery game-board fashion.  And while the police are asking the close-up investigator’s questions: Who?  Why?

Kissel family and friends are left with the cosmic ones. The unanswerable stuff: How did two brothers, so different in so many important ways, both end up discovered in basements in such grisly fashions?

The childhood friend from New Jersey doesn’t know.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: Here’s one brother murdered by his wife, quite a successful guy.

Danny Williams, Kissel brothers' childhood friend: Right.

Murphy: And there’s the other guy who wants to have the house and the yacht and all that, but runs a Ponzi scheme to keep it going.

Williams: And the sad thing is, he didn’t have to do it that way. He was a great salesman. He could have done it on a legitimate basis. And maybe he wanted it fast, maybe he needed it fast.

Murphy: Some people would say the old adage: money is the root of all evil.

Williams: Right. Maybe the pursuit of money is the root of all evil.

It’s natural for us to want to take the sting out of chaos—murder, cruel fates—with bumper sticker wisdom.

Well, maybe the Chinese, who’ve been at the proverb business for centuries, have the one that applies to the brothers Kissel.

It goes, "Good luck seldom comes in pairs, but bad things never walk alone."

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