Murder.com

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  At 5.58pm, telephone records showed, the banker made one last call to his secretary, Moris Chan, about getting tickets for the Harbour Fest.

  Seven-thirty came, and Robert Kissel missed his conference call. Shortly afterwards, he fell asleep. It was a sleep from which he would never wake, for Nancy Kissel crept into the master bedroom and bludgeoned her husband to death with a heavy double figurine.

  She slept with his battered body that night and for two nights afterwards.

  The following day, Nancy emailed a casual friend, Scott Ligerwood, a children’s entertainer, whom she was meant to meet for coffee at the cafe at Repulse Bay, saying, ‘My husband’s not well, I need to take care of things. Sorry, I will be in touch soon.’

  At 7am, Nancy Kissel told her maid Maximina Macaraeg, one of two Filipino sisters employed by the family, that her hand was bandaged because of an injury caused by the oven. She also told the maid not to clean the master bedroom for several days. Later that day, Kissel went on a shopping spree at the Tequila Kola furniture store. Wearing dark glasses and being extremely loud, she spent over HK$15,000 on carpets, bed covers, cushions and a chaise longue. The next day she would return and buy two carpets costing HK$27,120.

  On 4 November, Nancy told a doctor that her husband had assaulted her two nights before. She showed Conchita Pee Macaraeg cuts and bruises, explaining that she had had a fight with her husband two days previously. Nancy then sent Maximina off to the Adventist Hospital to buy a Velcro belt, saying that her ribs hurt and that she had broken them after playing tennis at the Aberdeen Marina Club. When the maid returned, she was sent out again, this time to a hardware store in Stanley to purchase rope.

  The following day, Kissel called the Parkview management office and spoke to the supervisor. She requested that four maintenance workers come to her apartment to help her haul a thick roll of carpet to a storage area. She paid them HK$500. When the maid noted that the roll seemed unusually bulky, Nancy said that it contained pillows and blankets. The workers said that it smelled like rotting fish.

  On 6 November, Nancy Kissel and her father, Ira Keeshin, went to the police station to report that her husband had assaulted her on the night of 2 November after she refused a sexual demand from him. Barely hours after she had filed the claim, Robert’s friend David Noh filed a missing-person report on the banker. At 10.50 that night, police investigators interviewed her at her apartment. Then they searched the storage area and found the body of Robert Kissel.

  A subsequent search by CSI officers revealed four boxes containing bedding, tissues, pillows and clothing belonging to both Nancy and Robert Kissel – all of which were stained with blood. Forensic scientists later confirmed that the DNA of the blood matched that of Robert and that his wife’s left thumbprint had been found on the duct tape used to seal the boxes. They found bloodstains and specks of brain tissue in the bedroom, and among the sealed boxes was a metal ornament comprising two figurines which had become detached from the metal base. Body tissue recovered from the ornament was confirmed as that of Robert Kissel. It had been used like a hammer.

  The pathologist reported that there were severe lacerations to the right side of the head of the victim which resulted in ‘massive spillage of brain substance’. Lab tests found in Kissel’s stomach and liver five types of hypnotics and antidepressants that would have impaired consciousness during the attack.

  Government toxicologist Dr Cheng Kok-choi said that never before had he encountered the combination of drugs found in the deceased’s stomach: Flunitrazepam (Rohypnol), Lorazepam (Lorivan), Amitriptyline and salicylic acid, which he claimed could be a product of the chemical breakdown of aspirin. In the liver, Dr Cheng found Amitriptyline and Axotal – the second was not registered for use in Hong Kong and had been purchased by Robert Kissel in the US.

  No sign of defensive injury was found on the body and a chemist found ‘insignificantly low’ amounts of alcohol.

  Nancy Kissel was arrested at 2.41am on 7 November after having been taken to Ruttonjee Hospital for a check-up. The bespectacled woman was diagnosed as suffering from emotional distress and was trembling, crying and unable to speak. Doctors found abrasions on her lip, chest and knees. Her palms were red and there was bruising on her forearms and shoulders. Blood samples revealed she was suffering from muscle injuries resulting from vigorous exercise. However, the prosecution later argued that this was caused by the ‘considerable effort in wrapping the body with the carpet and placing it into the rug’.

  At Nancy Kissel’s trial – of which Albert Wong, a newspaper reporter present in court, said, ‘For us, this case is a throwback to the colonial era. It has all the ingredients our readers are interested in – money, murder, gwelos [Cantonese slang for white foreigners], lots and lots of money, and the internet’ – it became apparent that her marriage was not a happy one. Nancy Kissel accused her husband of being a heavy drinker, a cocaine user, tight with his money, a strict disciplinarian, a violent man who was into rough and crude sex. However, the couple’s maids denied witnessing any brutality and confirmed that, far from being tight with his money, Robert Kissel was a ‘thoughtful and loving father’ and extremely generous.

  It was obvious that Nancy Kissel was generous too. Favouring Conchita, she allowed her use of her ATM card with a $7,000 daily limit, took her on holidays and had given her a laptop computer, an Aberdeen Marina Club card and HK$30,000 to renovate her house in the Philippines. Maximina was not shown such trust or generosity, and did not accompany the family on holidays.

  Denying the murder, Nancy claimed that her husband, fuelled on cocaine, had attacked her with a baseball bat because she refused him oral sex. She had picked up a heavy lead figurine to defend herself and had struck a glancing blow to Robert’s head. The fight had continued until he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep. She said that she then left the apartment with her husband still alive.

  A police surgeon saw that she had a swollen lip, bruises and swellings on her face, arms, legs and feet, with fractures in her lower right rib and left hand. The injuries, it was argued by the defence attorney and agreed with by prosecution witness Dr Li Wei-sum, were consistent with ‘classic defensive injuries’ inflicted when a person tries to fend off a blunt, hard instrument. When senior counsel asked, ‘Someone can come off a rugby field or out of a boxing ring with damage to those muscles?’ the doctor agreed.

  The defence then produced Robert Kissel’s wooden baseball bat, suggesting that Nancy’s injuries were consistent with her having fended off blows from this bat wielded by her husband. The bruises found on her body and dents in the metal base of the ornament, identified as the murder weapon, were inflicted by the baseball bat, claimed the defence. However, forensic testing proved that the bat and the ornament had never come into contact, but it seems certain that Robert Kissel used the bat to beat his wife before he fell unconscious.

  When Dr Cheng was asked if his toxicology tests on the murdered man screened for cocaine, the doctor said that such tests would not have picked up evidence of cocaine, which, in any case, becomes immediately hydrolysed, or dissolved, in the stomach.

  Pressing further, defence counsel Alexander King asked, ‘Did you actually carry out a test to see if the hydrolysed products were present in the sample?’

  ‘No,’ Cheng replied, adding, ‘There is no universal screening procedure that could detect everything under the sun.’

  Nancy Kissel’s computers soon came under scrutiny, and forensic science officer Cheung Chun-kit, from the Technology Crimes Bureau, examined them, recovering fragments of emails and website addresses from the accused’s purple Sony Vaio laptop.

  The scientist confirmed that, on 28 August, 2003, the words ‘sleeping pills’, ‘overdose medication causing heart attack’ and ‘drug overdose’ had been entered on the laptop, and that Nancy had spent several minutes browsing the addresses ‘sleepingpills.net’ and ‘medhelp.org’. He also confirmed that the E-blaster spyware secretly installed on Nancy Kissel’s laptop
by her husband had forwarded the same search covertly to the deceased. Also recovered by Cheung Chun-kit were fragments of emails, one of which, sent to her lover, read, ‘After having a private investigator firm follow me, are they going to be watching me forever? Hidden cameras, tapped phones. I recognize what the affair has done trust-wise.’

  The court also learned that Nancy Kissel’s laptop was used to browse Hong Kong Police Force’s websites on missing and wanted persons some four days after her husband’s death.

  But, if Nancy was frequently using her machine, experts soon established that Robert Kissel was using his Dell desktop computer, and not just for work, for at the time when he was staying in Hong Kong, just days before a trip to Taiwan, it was used to search for websites relating to gay sex in Taiwan and other sexual services.

  According to travel records, Nancy Kissel went to the United States in March 2003 to avoid the SARS outbreak in the territory. The travel records also confirmed that Robert Kissel stayed behind, but left for a three-day trip to Taiwan on Tuesday, 8 April.

  Using a programme called Netanalyses, which is said to be employed by law-enforcement agencies in the USA and the UK, to open up Robert Kissel’s computer files, it was shown that on 3 and 4 April he used the computer for about 90 minutes to search for gay porn sites, Taiwan female escort services and ‘sex in HK’. Searches were also made for ‘mpeg sex’, ‘hot male sex’, ‘Taiwan companions’ and ‘married and lonely in Hong Kong’. ‘Twinks’ and ‘Actresses for Hire in Taiwan’ were also among sites visited.

  Jumping on this information, the defence team highlighted the fact that ‘sex in HK’ produced six results. A search for ‘sex in Taiwan’ yielded 516,000 results.

  Further probing of Mr Kissel’s computer records revealed search engine entries such as ‘anal’, ‘cocks’, ‘gay anal sex’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘male ass’. Some had been made over the three days before he flew out to Taiwan.

  Defence counsel Alexander King also pointed out that Robert Kissel’s computer had visited websites offering images of nude gay boys, black gay men, black males, ‘ebony’ men and free black gay porn.

  Deleted files can be removed from a computer as unallocated clusters and can be converted back into web pages using Encase software, but Encase cannot determine from unallocated clusters the dates on which pages were viewed.

  Still not satisfied, King rounded on the computer expert and, in a further effort to discredit the deceased, he said, ‘We move to Europe now, and can you see a search for “Paris girls for Hire”?

  ‘Yes,’ Cheung said, and confirmed he could see searches were made for ‘Paris and home masseuse’, ‘Massage in Paris France’, ‘Paris gay’ and ‘Paris gay massage’.

  Indeed, Robert Kissel had been criss-crossing the planet: on 5 April 2003 he had conducted a search for female and bisexual escorts in Perth, Western Australia, and a photo gallery under the header ‘male cock gay sex gay men’.

  Clearly, Mr Kissel was a dark horse, most certainly into extreme sex as well as a user of both male and female prostitutes, and evidence of his continual visits to porn websites featuring anal sex was starting to suggest that Nancy Kissel’s claim that her husband was sexually abusive towards her was correct.

  But did Nancy’s claim that her husband was also physically violent to her have any foundation in truth?

  Extracted from Nancy’s computer notebook was this email to her husband, dated Tuesday, 7 October 2003: ‘You are still justifying your harsh action in the car with the kids by blaming it on me. You see Rob, at the end of the day it seems that I am the only one making the effort. I have shown you in many ways how I have been trying. But because of that fight and how uncontrollable you got in the car… How you are always telling me we won’t fight in front of the kids… A fight and you give out an ultimatum… I still can’t believe it… Is it how life is going to be? Who should be going to therapy? Whatever happens… to us? You never use those words any more ever.’

  Slowly a picture began to emerge that the Kissels’ marriage had not been a bed of roses for several years. Nevertheless, the couple had been by and large successful in keeping their domestic problems to themselves.

  After giving birth to her eldest daughter in 1994, Nancy Kissel had to abandon her own career – she had been holding down three jobs at once to help support her husband – and her body weight increased to 150 pounds. At the time, Robert encouraged her to lose weight and found all sorts of strange techniques for this purpose. Nancy said that her breasts began to sag after giving birth, which made her husband dislike her. So their sex lives changed as Robert began to force her to do things that she would rather not do.

  Nancy’s character changed from buoyant to moderately depressive after the birth of her third child, Reis, in 1999.

  It also emerged that there was some probability that Robert Kissel had been taking the sleeping drug Ambien for several months before his death. And the suggestion was made that he had been using cocaine for some time. He was certainly under massive stress, and new cocaine users often use the drug to help them work longer and harder, as well as to assist other activities in their lives.

  There was also the question of how the same milkshake cocktail, served by Nancy to the two men, affected them so differently: Tanzer is a big man and was affected by the drink after just 15 minutes. Surely the drink would have had the same pharmacological effect on Robert Kissel? But it didn’t. Kissel was still behaving quite normally an hour after ingestion, by which time his neighbour had passed out – all of which suggests that he had developed a higher resistance to many of the drugs forming the milkshake.

  While the prosecution attempted to make light of the defence team’s claim that Robert had been searching the web for porn and illicit gay sex, by countering that he had been merely searching for Barbie Dolls for his daughters, this cut no ice. His continuous searches for anal sex and male and female prostitutes clearly showed that his demands for rough, anal sex with his wife were rightly going unmet, so he would seek his pleasures elsewhere.

  With her marriage falling apart, finding a new male companion that she could confide in outside the family circle provided mental relief for Nancy, and this considerate ear would soon become her lover. Robert soon grew suspicious and before long he found confirmation that his wife was having an affair. He decided to divorce her and demand custody of the three children.

  Nancy Kissel now stood to lose everything.

  At her trial, Nancy Kissel painted a black picture of her last few years with her husband. ‘Our early married life in New York was exciting,’ she said, ‘but arguments were already developing because of Rob’s use of cocaine. As a hard-working student, he relied on cocaine to get through the hours. He had a drug-dealing friend who would come round to the apartment and money would exchange across the table.’

  But the new job, in Hong Kong, illustrated the cumulative nightmare of stress, alcohol and cocaine – the last of which Robert Kissel allegedly relied on to stay awake as he worked both the US and Hong Kong stock markets. ‘It’s literally 24 hours of having to be awake,’ said Nancy. ‘On the flight to Hong Kong from New York, he passed out for 15, 20 minutes, probably from drugs, alcohol, altitude and jet-lag. After that incident, instead of shying away from the stress, he thrived on it. It’s what made him tick – the power of it all, succeeding. Everything was based around money.’

  Nancy testified that things really changed after she gave birth to their youngest child, Reis. She claimed that Robert had developed a routine of ‘going home, drinking and sex’.

  She claimed that the first time he hit her was when he realised that the expected birth of Reis would overlap with an important business trip to Korea. He told her to try to induce labour and was angry when she didn’t listen to him. ‘The first time he punched at me, he hit the wall because I dodged. When it happened again for the same argument the following week, he hit me on the face,’ she said.

  Nancy Kissel said that the first punch was so
hard it broke through the surface of the wall. She knew he had broken his hand because the next day he came home with a plaster on his hand.

  This much was confirmed by Dr Daniel Wu of Adventist Hospital, who told the court that he had treated the deceased’s ‘boxer’s fracture’ on his right little finger around August 1999.

  After Reis was born, Nancy testified, her husband became more forceful with her during sex. ‘It was predominantly oral sex for him and anal sex,’ she said. ‘He would be sitting on the end of the bed watching TV whenever he was at home at night. He would not let me walk past him to my side of the bed. He would start those games… having me between his legs, toying with me. He would say those things to me that he could do anything he wanted. He was just so angry… It was like I wasn’t even there… he never had a look at my face.’

  ‘Were you agreeable to that?’ asked Alexander King.

  ‘No,’ Kissel replied. ‘I often had bruises and bleeding from the anal sex forced upon me.’

  She also told of two occasions when her ribs were fractured after Robert tried to twist and flip her over on the bed for anal sex. When it happened the first time, in 2001, she sought treatment at Adventist Hospital and was given a Velcro brace to wear around her stomach. ‘A couple of weeks later, he ripped the brace off and I ended up getting into hospital again,’ she said.

  When asked about the family’s finances, Nancy told the court that when they first arrived in Hong Kong her husband didn’t care about her finances. But from 2002 he began to control her expenses, reducing the number of her credit cards from four to two. If she needed cash, she had to show the shopping list to him for approval. The defence pointed out, when Robert Kissel worked at Merrill Lynch between 2000 and 2003, his bonuses amounted to three million dollars.