Poison in a pink milkshake
Nancy and Robert Kissel moved in together shortly after they met in 1987. Two years later they married: the late AIDS activist Alison Gertz was maid of honour. At the time, Robert was studying for a master’s degree in finance at New York University. Nancy had two degrees of her own – in business and design – but she took three humdrum jobs to support the household.
After graduating in 1991, Robert set out on a trajectory that would have brought him earnings of well over $3,000,000 a year within a decade. He began his dramatic rise in New York at the investment bank Lazard Frères, before moving on to the Goldman, Sachs Group. In 1997 he was transferred to Hong Kong. The Kissels then became prominent members of the American expatriate community. It should have been an enviable life – many outsiders thought it was. The Kissels and their two children settled into a luxurious suite at the exclusive Hong Kong Parkview. Robert worked and prospered, eventually joining Merrill Lynch, and Nancy did voluntary work. She assisted at the Hong Kong International School and the family’s synagogue. In 1998, the couple were blessed with another child.
However, despite appearances Nancy would later claim that her years in Hong Kong had been extremely unhappy. If what she claimed was true then the SARS epidemic of 2003 was the answer to her prayers. In March of that year, Nancy and her children joined the stream of Americans who were fleeing Hong Kong for the relative safety of the United States. Leaving Robert to his work at Merrill Lynch, she travelled to the family’s holiday home in the shadow of Stratton Mountain, Vermont. As the months passed and the epidemic worsened, Nancy decided to have an elaborate home theatre system installed. It was as a result of this desire for escapism that she met a twice-divorced electrical repairman named Michael Del Priore.
Before long, Nancy and Del Priore began having an affair. With Robert many thousands of miles away in Hong Kong they were able to enjoy much of the summer together. Nancy bought her lover a $5,000 wristwatch, which was perhaps an unusual possession for a man who lived in a trailer park. By August the SARS crisis had abated, so Nancy and the children were back in their Hong Kong Parkview suite. The marriage continued as normal, but Robert must have noticed a difference in his wife’s behaviour.
Suspecting that his wife was having an affair, he hired a private investigator. It took little effort to uncover the relationship, yet no physical evidence could be obtained.
Shortly afterwards, Robert again contacted the private investigator. This time, though, he was asking for a bit of advice. The banker said he had recently drunk a glass of single malt scotch, but it had not tasted right. After a few sips he had felt ‘woozy and disoriented’. The detective advised Robert to have a sample of the scotch analyzed, but the banker failed to do so.
Nancy became fearful that her husband was on to her. She hid her calls to Michael by getting her mobile phone bills sent to the Hong Kong International School. However, her caution was no match for her husband’s determination. Robert had spy software installed on all of the family’s computers so that he could monitor Nancy’s email and Internet use. He saw that his wife had been using search engines for such terms as ‘drug overdose’, ‘sleeping pills’ and ‘medication causing heart attack’. And yet, despite all these findings, Robert would not act. The most he did was tell his friend David Noh, a colleague at Merrill Lynch, that he was worried about being poisoned.
A cocktail of drugs
On 2 November, Andrew Tanzer, a Hong Kong Parkview neighbour, dropped his daughter off to play at the Kissels’ suite. As he got ready to return to his home, Tanzer and Robert were offered pink-coloured milkshakes, which they both drank. By the time Tanzer returned to his suite he felt heavy with sleep, so he lay down on the couch. His wife was unable to rouse him for a while, though he later recovered somewhat. He drifted in and out of sleep until dinner time. Tanzer’s behaviour then became even more unusual. First of all he appeared disorientated and then he acted in a childlike manner by displaying an almost insatiable appetite. Before falling asleep for the evening, he lost control of himself and soiled the furniture. On the following day, Tanzer found that he could remember next to nothing of what had taken place after he had left the Kissels’ home.
Disturbing though Tanzer’s experience had been, Robert Kissel’s night had been much worse. When Andrew Tanzer woke up the next morning, the investment banker had been dead for many hours. The milkshake that the two men had drunk had been laced with six medications, five of which had been recently prescribed to Nancy. These were Stilnox, a sleeping pill; Amitryptaline, an antidepressant; Dextropropoxythene, a painkiller; Lorivan, a sedative; and Rohypnol, better known as the ‘date rape drug’. Robert would have reacted to the concoction in much the same way as Andrew had. The difference was that Mrs Kissel had taken the opportunity to murder Robert while he was incapacitated.
At five o’clock in the afternoon, a tired and sleepy-sounding Robert spoke to David Noh in preparation for a company conference call. Though the event took place only 30 minutes later, Robert did not participate – it seems that he had forgotten all about it. Curiously, Robert was on the line to his secretary less than half an hour after missing the conference call. It was the last time anyone at Merrill Lynch heard from Robert. At some point in the evening of 2 November Nancy Kissel picked up an eight pound (3.6 kilograms) figurine and gave Robert five blows to the head. She hit him so hard that she cracked his skull wide open.
Robert’s corpse remained in the suite for three days, though it was out of sight of the Kissel children. As it lay locked in the master bedroom, Nancy began spreading conflicting stories. She told a doctor that Robert had assaulted her on 2 November. A maid was shown injuries that he was supposed to have made. Robert was now staying in a hotel, she said. His disappearance was noticed almost immediately. David Noh was disturbed to discover that he was unable to contact the investment banker: Robert was not answering his phone. Another friend, Bryna O’Shea, was also worried. Aware of Robert’s marital difficulties she had made calls to several hotels, thinking that he might have moved out of the Parkview. On 6 November, after comparing notes with Bryna, David notified the authorities.
Closing in
Investigators interviewed Nancy at the Parkview apartment just a few hours later. It was her second contact with the police that day. That morning she had made a complaint against Robert. She had claimed that he had assaulted her five days earlier, when she had refused to have sex with him. Her weak attempt at creating a smoke screen had been in vain. The Parkview maintenance men had told the police that on the previous day Mrs Kissel had asked them to move an oriental rug to her storage locker. It had proved to be so heavy that four men had been required for the job. With this news, the investigators left the building to obtain a search warrant.
As midnight approached, the police entered the Parkview storage room. It took them next to no time to find Robert’s corpse. As they suspected, it had been hidden within the rolled up rug, though not very well. Robert’s remains had been sealed in two layers of plastic – and yet there was an omnipresent stench of death. Shortly before three o’clock in the morning, Nancy was arrested and charged with murdering her husband. Throughout all of her years in Hong Kong, Nancy had been immersed in the American expatriate community. Now she was going to have to face a jury that was composed entirely of ethnic Chinese.
The prosecution presented Nancy as an adulterous wife who had murdered her husband so that she could run off with her lover. The evidence against the widow Kissel was almost overwhelming: the prescription medicine that had been present in the milk shake; the testimony of Andrew Tanzer; and the rolled-up carpet that the maintenance men had moved to the storage room. Faced with these findings, and more, Nancy’s solicitor fell back on British law. This allows the defendant to enter a plea of diminished responsibility if the circumstances surrounding the crime are extraordinary.
Nancy began testifying on 1 August 2005. It was then that she provided a detailed description of a man who was unrecognizable to the other American expatriates. She claimed that her husband had been addicted to cocaine, that he was an alcoholic and that he would beat her and force her to have oral and anal sex almost every single night. The sex had been so rough, she said, that Robert had once broken one of her ribs. Nancy then explained away her Internet research on sleeping pills, drug overdoses and medications that might cause heart attacks. She claimed that she had done it at a time when she had considered killing herself.
The blackening of Robert’s character continued. Nancy told the court that her deceased husband had been a bad parent. When she had been pregnant with their youngest child, Robert had wanted labour to be induced so that the birth would not conflict with a business trip he had planned. At another point, he had become so angry with one of his daughters for playing loudly while he had been on the telephone that he had broken the girl’s arm.
Nancy admitted to the affair with the Vermont repairman, though she claimed that she would never have left her husband. According to Nancy, the same could not be said for Robert. She told the court that on the day her husband had died he had stood in the doorway of the kitchen as she was making the pink milkshakes. While holding a baseball bat ‘for protection’, Robert had told his wife that he had filed for divorce. He also said that he would be taking the children, because Nancy was not fit to care for them.
Nancy then testified that she and her husband had begun to fight. She said that Robert had struck her and had then tried to rape her. The figurine had been grabbed in self-defence, but she had then hit him on the head with it. Robert had sat stunned but when Nancy had tried to help he would not let her. Instead, he had taken the baseball bat and swung it at her legs. At that point, she fell silent. She claimed that she could remember nothing more of the evening or of the days that followed.
The prosecution took issue with Nancy’s testimony. They asked her why she had never mentioned the abuse she had suffered to anyone, doctors included. And why was it that no one had seen any signs of injury? Nancy’s story fell apart even more when the Kissel’s maid testified that the broken arm had been nothing to do with Robert. Indeed, he had not even been home when the accident had occurred.
On the evening of 1 September 2005, the jury reached a unanimous decision – Nancy was found guilty of murder. Under Hong Kong law the mandatory sentence is life imprisonment. Because their mother has been found guilty of the murder of their father, the three Kissel children will one day inherit Robert Kissel’s estate, which is estimated at 18 million dollars.
Family support: Nancy Kissel and her relatives outside the Hong Kong High Court.