Her husband discovered her affair with a TV repairman she met when she took her
children home to Vermont in the US during Hong Kong's SARS outbreak that year.
At 3.30 that afternoon she prepared a strawberry milkshake laced with four
kinds of sedatives she had accumulated on visits to different doctors, and fed
it to her husband and a neighbour, journalist Andrew Tanzer, who had brought
his small daughter to the Kissel home.
Mr Tanzer's wife, Kazuko Ouchi, told the court her husband passed out on a
couch when he returned home at 4pm.
One of the banker's colleagues, David Noh, said Mr Kissel sounded "slurry,
mellow" when he spoke to him on the phone about 5pm.
Prosecutor Peter Chapman charged that Nancy Kissel later killed her sleeping
husband by smashing in his skull with a lead ornament. After keeping the body
in the apartment two days, she rolled it in a carpet. Four workmen called to
carry it to a storeroom complained about the weight and a bad smell. The body
was found three days later and Mrs Kissel was arrested.
Defence counsel Alexander King claimed Kissel had been subjected to five years
of forced oral and anal sex and physical assault by her "controlling" husband
who used cocaine and whose computer showed traces of searches for male and
female prostitutes before his business trips.
In her testimony, Kissel said she hit out in self-defence after her husband
attacked her with a baseball bat in a fight over divorce. A state of
"dissociative amnesia" afterwards explained her "bizarre" cover-up, her lawyer
argued.
"Do you accept that you killed Robert Kissel?" asked her lawyer. "Yes," Kissel
replied. When the prosecutor accused her of trying to conjure a picture of the
victim as an abusive husband, she broke down. "I still love him. Things
happened. I stayed with him. I loved him, and I am not sitting here to paint a
bad picture about him, because he's my husband," she said.
But the prosecutor argued the killing was carefully planned. "These were not
five fatal blows struck in self-defence when one of these blows would be
sufficient (to kill)," he said. "These were blows struck with murderous
intention."
