Hong Kong case of murdered banker, his wife and her lover

CHINA: It's a society murder straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald, featuring a wealthy banker's body in a rolled-up carpet. Add to this strawberry milkshakes laced with prescription drugs and a TV repairman boyfriend in Vermont and you've got a case that has kept tongues wagging in Hong Kong for the last two months.

Nancy Kissel, the accused, told a Hong Kong court she hit her husband Robert, who worked for the US investment bank Merrill Lynch, with a metal ornament when he threatened her with a baseball bat and began to rape her. Mrs Kissel (for that is what she calls herself) says she cannot remember what happened after that but she denies she murdered her husband.

Hong Kong's well-to-do expatriate community is agog and asking just what happened to the Kissels. To those who knew them, they were a model couple, prominent members of the Jewish community and active in the upper social strata in the territory. Robert Kissel was worth millions. They had three lovely children. Mrs Kissel was organiser of the annual Jewish ball. She seemed a marvel of perfection, perfectly turned out in twinset and pearls at 7 in the morning when she brought the kids to the school bus.

The prosection says Mrs Kissel (41) laced her husband's strawberry milkshake with anti-depressants and hypnotic drugs, leaving him unconscious at the foot of their bed. Then she bludgeoned him to death on the night of November 2nd, 2003.

But what Hong Kongers want to know is: was Mrs Kissel the subject of years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse? Did she simply snap that November night? That's the line the defence has taken.

Mrs Kissel said she and her husband had started fighting on the night he died. Mr Kissel told his wife he had filed for divorce and was taking their three children with him.

Shaking as she testified at Hong Kong's High Court, Nancy Kissel said her husband told her the night he died that he had filed for divorce and that she was unfit to be a mother. She said the announcement came as a surprise.

"He said, 'I've filed for divorce and I'm taking the kids'. He said it was a done deal, and he'd talked to lawyers. He said I was in no condition to take care of the kids, and that I was sick," she told the courtroom, packed throughout the trial.

When Mrs Kissel questioned him, he hit her, then dragged her into their bedroom and began to sodomise her, something she alleges happened often. Mrs Kissel has told the court of years of physical and sexual abuse.

As they fought on the floor of their bedroom in their luxury flat, she reached around and picked up a statue she had dropped as she tried to protect herself. She hit him with the statue, he hit her with a baseball bat. She hit him again with the statue.

According to an autopsy, her husband received five fatal blows on the side of his head, but Mrs Kissel said she did not remember anything.

The more successful his banking career became, the more he dealt with the stress by drinking single-malt whisky and snorting cocaine.

Mrs Kissel attempted suicide and sought solace in an affair with a television repairman in Vermont after she went there with their three children in March 2003, to escape the Sars epidemic.

Mr Kissel was worried his wife was plotting to kill him by trying to drug him. He told his friends and family about it, and he also hired a private detective to obtain evidence for their divorce.

He became suspicious of her after installing spy software on their home laptop. Using the software, Mr Kissel traced his wife's e-mails with her lover and found she had searched the internet using words such as "drug overdose" and "heart attack".

According to the prosecution, Mr Kissel wanted the divorce because of the affair.

Police discovered his body three days after his death, in a storeroom rented by the couple.

He was wrapped in a sleeping bag and a plastic bag, then rolled up in a carpet. Mrs Kissel asked four local workmen to move the corpse to the storeroom.

There was evidence of a little alcohol and no cocaine in his body, according to the autopsy. But what the coroner did find was a milkshake containing a knock-out cocktail of anti-depressants, hypnotics and sedatives, including the date-rape drug Rohypnol, which had been prescribed for Mrs Kissel.

Andrew Tanzer, a neighbour and friend of the Kissels, who drank some of the same batch of milkshake, said he was left drifting in and out of consciousness, acting like a baby and devouring ice cream. He awakened the next morning with "something like amnesia". Mrs Kissel went to police in the western district, far from the couple's home, four days after the killing to report her husband's disappearance. She said they had fought and she had gone off in a rage.

In the cafes and bars of the former Crown Colony, everyone is wondering how Mrs Kissel's defence plans to proceed. Would the defence argue that she acted while temporarily insane, giving her "diminished responsibility" status? Or plead self-defence?

The trial is expected to last until the end of the month. If found guilty of murder, Mrs Kissel faces life in prison.