It was inevitable that Nancy’s relationship with Michael del Priore would be brought up at her trial. In 2000, he had wired the family’s home in Vermont for security and entertainment, but it was not until 2003, when she stayed longer in Vermont with her children, that she really came to know him.
She had regarded Michael, and the family’s Vermont home, as a type of temporary shelter. She agreed that she had written in her diary that Michael offered her unconditional love, but she had added that her real world was the home she had built with her husband in Hong Kong.
In mid-June, Nancy and Michael spoke about tattoos, something she always wanted, but her husband thought ‘corporate bankers’ wives’ should not have them. Del Priore took her to a tattoo parlour, then after dinner she opened up to him about the stress of trying to lead a perfect life as a banker’s wife.
‘[Michael] was very open and honest to me about his childhood,’ she said. ‘His mother was abused by his father and that he had alcoholics in the family. He noticed that this summer I looked like “shit”, compared with the previous year, and had the same look as his mother did, which concerned him.’
‘I broke down and cried,’ she said. ‘It was the first time anybody ever stepped forward and confronted me on an issue that scares a lot of people. People look at you and see change, and they don’t really want to know.’
Nancy testified that she had felt she could finally confide in someone about the ‘little expatriate world’, where people are ‘more interested in what you’re wearing and how big your diamond ring is and your car’. By contrast, with Michael there were ‘no questions, no “do this, do that”. It was just basically letting me talk.’ The relationship continued mostly through phone calls and emails, and involved three sexual encounters.
During a skiing holiday in Whistler in 2002, Nancy told the court that her husband was ‘embarrassed’ that she could not ski, despite the fact that she thought looking after their sick two-year-old son Reis was more important.
On Christmas Eve, he thought she was fussing over the Christmas tree for too long. ‘He grabbed me from downstairs and pulled me upstairs, because he wanted what he wanted. And I let him. And then I went back downstairs and finished with the presents,’ she said, ‘which angered him more because he had told me not to. Then he slammed me against the wall.’
When asked about her internet searches for sleeping pills and information on medication causing heart attack, Nancy broke into tears, explaining that she had attempted to kill herself one night when the maid had left and the children were asleep. ‘I sat in the car in the garage and turned the engine on. I cried a lot. Maybe I got scared of leaving my children, so I turned the engine off and went back into the house.’
She told the jury she searched the internet for information on ‘sleeping pills’, ‘medication causing heart attack’ and ‘drug overdose’ in August 2003 because she was again contemplating suicide.
One of the triggers for this, during a trip to New York they made that month, was that her husband had forbidden her to pick up their eldest daughter, Elaine, from a camp in Maine. She had been ordered to return to Hong Kong, while Robert and his father, William, would pick Elaine up.
‘I thought if I am going to do something like this, taking pills, I wouldn’t want my children to be affected – going through the knowledge of their mother committing suicide.’
Asked if she had at any time spiked her husband’s whisky, Nancy readily agreed that she had. She told the court that her husband was using cocaine, painkillers and whisky – this much was confirmed – and she said that she was worried when she realised that his violence had spilled over to hurt the children. He once got angry with Elaine for not eating vegetables in Vermont. ‘He printed photographs of malnourished people – which she hated – grabbed her, kept shaking her and jumped on her. She said, “Daddy, you are hurting me,” but he just kept shaking her.’
So Nancy put sleeping pills in Robert’s bottle of whisky in an attempt to calm him down, ‘but it had little effect on him’.
By now, it appeared that Robert was controlling every different aspect of Nancy’s life. He told her to stop phoning her father in America, which she did every day, and to stop doing volunteer work for their daughters’ school. And he was furious when he discovered she had returned from Vermont with a tattoo on her shoulder, reminding her that she was a banker’s wife.
On Wednesday, 3 August 2005 in court, Nancy Kissel was asked to detail the events leading up to the death of her husband. Dressed completely in black and trembling uncontrollably, she said that she was caught completely by surprise when Robert told her he was divorcing her. ‘He said I’ve filed for divorce and I’m taking the kids. He said it’s a done deal and he’d talked to lawyers. He said I was in no condition to look after the kids and that I was sick.’ She said that he later hit her when she started questioning him. He then dragged her into the bedroom and forcibly sodomised her.
‘He grabbed my ankles and pulled me and wouldn’t let go… He said I’m not finished with you yet,’ she testified, her voice shaking and barely audible. ‘He kicked me in the stomach and he wouldn’t stop… I was on the floor and I reached for the statue and swung it back at him. I felt I hit something and he let go… I saw his head was bleeding … and he said, “I’m going to kill you.”’
She said he then hit her repeatedly with a baseball bat as she swung at him with the metal ornament. As for what happened afterwards, Nancy told the court she had no recollection. The autopsy found that Robert Kissel had sustained five fatal blows on the side of his head, but his wife had no recollection of hitting him five times.
Nancy Kissel was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The drugs found in the stomach of the decomposing body of Robert Kissel were prescribed for Nancy, who was struggling to sleep for fear of his violent sexual whims.
At the end of August 2003, Nancy had gone to see Dr Fung, a psychiatrist, because she was physically and mentally exhausted owing to the ‘inconsistency of not knowing’ when the sexual abuse would occur and having an ‘on-guard feeling all the time’. She was prescribed Stilnox, Amitriptyline and Lorivan – three of the sedatives later found in her husband’s body.
It is obvious, when one considers the timing of her internet searches for sleeping pills and medication that could cause heart attacks, that Nancy Kissel was looking for a means to commit suicide. As for the Rohypnol? On the morning of 23 October 2003, she had been prescribed this expensive drug by Dr Annabel Dytham. Not knowing what the drug was, she had searched the internet that evening for details.
‘I just wanted to talk to her [Dytham] as a woman,’ she said. She explained everything about her husband – the physical and sexual abuse; that her life was ‘pretty miserable’.
The doctor wrote in her notes: ‘Alleged assault.’
In her efforts to bring peace to the family home, Nancy attended marriage-counselling sessions, after which her husband accused her of wasting time and money by ‘not listening’, and then violently sodomised her to encourage her to ‘show more respect’. He told her how much the sessions were costing and asked what she was contributing to the marriage, before sexually assaulting her again.
During the second counselling session she told him that she was going to divorce him. The banker stormed out and returned home at 2am the next morning, drunk and angry. Bursting into the bedroom, Nancy says, he started yelling at her, ‘Who do you think you are, asking for a divorce like that? You’ll never divorce me. If anyone’s doing the divorcing around here, it’ll be me.’
Nancy Kissel emphatically denies making the milkshake with a cocktail of sleeping pills, and still maintains that she hasn’t a clue how the drugs came to be in the drink. She supports this contention by saying, ‘I love my kids, I would never harm my kids, or anyone else’s kids. I would never make a drink like that to hurt them.’
At face value, this seems a good argument. However, the children made up
large enough measures to make sundaes for themselves and milkshakes for their fathers, and it was just the milkshakes that Nancy drugged.
There can be no doubt that, after Robert told his wife he was divorcing her and was taking custody of the children, the Kissels had a furious row that evening. I believe that Robert, now realising that he had been drugged, and in some fear, struck out at his wife with the baseball bat, striking her several times before collapsing on his bed.
Nancy Kissel, by now at the end of her tether, waited until he was completely unconscious, then took up the ornament and hit him over the head five times.
SUSAN GRAY AND ‘THE FEATHERMAN’
‘I had never had a climax in my life until I met “The Featherman” on the internet. We met, he raped me and returned to almost kill me.’
SUSAN GRAY, TO THE AUTHORS
As most people will agree, the feeling of emptiness when one has been rejected by a loved one may be misinterpreted as a need to go shopping, or as a need to eat. The need for companionship and love and the sense of loss that is now associated with this need may be too painful to scrutinise consciously. The person engages in unrelated behaviour that results in a temporary reduction of the feelings associated with loneliness and tends to bring pleasure. Feeling good about one thing masks the pain being felt elsewhere.
We will soon learn a lot about Susan Gray (not her real name) and how, spurned by three husbands, she found herself in an internet chatroom unknowingly talking to a sexual predator. We will learn even more about the man himself – and it is a story that provides a salutary lesson to women looking for relationships in the chatrooms of the world.
Susan Gray, and at least two other British women, fell for a smooth-talking American on the internet. During a five-week visit he raped all of them – there were probably others too – and Susan almost lost her life. Later in this book we encounter two men, a London doctor and a US mechanic, who did.
Susan was born 47 years ago in Maidstone, Kent. Today a tall, natural blonde with blue eyes, she could readily be described as ‘classy’ and ‘hot stuff’, and the combination of her slim figure with sexy clothes, short skirts and high-heeled black boots has always drawn admiring glances from men and women alike.
Intelligent, house-proud and generous to a fault, Susan has a teenage son, although, sadly, by the age of 40 she had three failed marriages behind her.
‘I guess I was a bit possessive,’ she explained. ‘Maybe I was insecure knowing that my husbands and other lovers knew that I was not getting sexual satisfaction from the relationships. I don’t understand it at all, but I admit I was a bit of a control freak and very jealous.’ She added, ‘Yes, I have always been generous to my men. Perhaps I was trying to buy their love. I seem to have attracted the wrong men.’
Susan was always on the move – and she still is. Unable to put down roots as each relationship fell apart, she would diligently pack all of her possessions into cardboard boxes and find somewhere else to live. Gradually, almost step by step, she gravitated to Fareham in Hampshire, where she shared rooms with two other girls above a cafe in West Street.
Within 18 months, Susan moved again, then again, and then, in 2001, she rented a two-bedroomed cottage in Emsworth, in the same county. The former coach house with its ivy-covered wall-enclosed garden, she decorated tastefully. Now unattached, she started working as a sales and promotion agent for a national company. With her winning ways, she was soon easily earning £900 a week with commission.
Susan prided herself on her cooking and loved entertaining so before long she had splashed out £1,000 on a dinner service and new cutlery. She discarded her old wine glasses and bought new ones. A new dining table and chairs followed, then she treated herself to a new wardrobe.
Now settled in, she took stock of her life. The cottage was cute, with a cosy lounge, a proper fire, a dining room where Susan had her computer workstation and a kitchen looking on to the garden. A narrow staircase with a low beam – ‘one has to mind your head,’ she said when we visited her – led to the two bedrooms. The only inconvenience was the location of the shower room and toilet, which was reached via the kitchen – a small price to pay for such an idyllic home.
Susan’s daily routine was simple. She would work five days a week, occasionally on a Saturday, then shop for dinner, after which she would stroll down to the seafront and take in the air. On Sundays she made a point of feeding the swans on the nearby millpond, then driving over to see her mother for lunch.
In June 2001, a girlfriend, Carol, called on Susan, bringing a few bottles of wine. After dinner, she introduced her host to the website of Absolute Agency. Carol was a regular visitor to the site’s chatroom and she told Susan that perhaps they could have ‘a little fun’.
Although she had a high-speed internet connection, Susan had never visited a site like this before and indeed said, ‘It would have been the last thing on my mind at the time because I believed that people who use chatrooms have no real lives.’
Within the hour and after much more wine, Susan was persuaded to log on to the site. Egged on by her friend, who seemed to know a few of the people who used it, she submitted a profile and photograph. Membership was free for women – for obvious reasons – and she became hooked. Susan chose the name ‘Susie Q’ and selected a female avatar with blonde hair.
‘I remember that night very clearly,’ Susan says. ‘All of those people chatting away with each other. But from the moment I logged on the men spotted a new face and I had a swarm of them asking me questions. They were like bees around a honey pot and it clearly upset a number of the other girls who were online.’
The one male icon and name that attracted Susan above the others was an American called ‘The Featherman’. ‘He was very funny, sort of cute and sexy,’ she remembers. ‘The other females liked him a lot, and he teased them along with a few of his male pals in there. His name conjured up the image of a “cheeky little duck”. He was always saying that ducks like water and bubbles, and would anyone like to join him in the bath? It was kind of cute… I expect this sounds crazy. Anyone reading this will say I am mad.’
Carol explained that this guy was very popular. He was a regular and a fully paid-up member – meaning in chatroom parlance that he had ‘cyber cred’. Most of the other males could chat for only 15 minutes because they had not paid to join up.
‘This means “The Featherman” is a serious player,’ Carol explained. ‘Full members are the elite. You get to know the serious guys and they kinda stick together like a club.’
‘The Featherman’ was intelligent and his chat was not overtly sexual. His humour was dry and all of this, combined with his cheeky little duck image, attracted Susan to him.
Over the coming days, she spent ever-longer periods in the chatroom, and she admits that she started to rush home early from work and immediately logged on to the site to see if ‘The Featherman’ was there.
‘I would feel a pang of disappointment if he was not around,’ she said. ‘I would ask the other members if he had been in earlier, or if anyone knew when he would be back. When he did turn up, I competed for his attentions. Looking back now I realise that I was becoming hooked on this chatroom and, this may sound stupid, but I was falling in love.’
Then she made a very interesting comment: ‘When a woman has been rejected so many times, you start thinking too much about yourself and where you are going wrong. My ego was at an all-time low. “The Featherman” cheered me up and I felt somehow wanted again.’
The man then emailed his photograph to Susan, and she returned a number of pictures of herself. They also exchanged phone numbers. He was a little shorter than her five feet nine inches, thinning on top and he had a cheeky smile. Now using his real name, Bill, he informed her that he was single and had never been married. He was a pipeline consultant who travelled the world. All of this was true. He could be away from the USA for months, he told her, while at other times he worked from an office at his home in Augusta, Geor
gia. Photos of his house with its manicured lawns, and of a smart white car, showed that he was a neat and tidy man – an ideal catch for any woman.
‘Because of the time difference between our two countries, Bill usually logged on around 10.30pm our time,’ Susan said over dinner. ‘I could understand that basically he was very much a man’s man, well travelled and a guy who kept himself to himself. He wasn’t flashy, or anything like that. This is why he appealed to me. We were very much like-minded, I think.’
She could never have guessed that her ‘ideal catch’ was at the same time using other chatrooms to stalk and groom several other women from the UK.
Knowing that Susan seriously fancied him, in the chatroom Bill offered just her a Mars Bar. ‘You can play with this however you want,’ he suggested. This offer drew some lewd comments from the other ‘chatterers’ who were vying for his attention.
‘It was so sweet of him,’ Susan recalled. ‘A Mars Bar may sound pathetic, but it was a nice thought… a sexy one at that.
‘After that, we often went into the Private Lounge area of the site, where we could chat discreetly. Often it got pretty sexual, and when we returned to the common area people would demand to know where we had been. Several of the other girls would get very bitchy.’
Susan then told us about some of the other ‘chatterers’. ‘There was a guy from Washington called “InsultBot”. His avatar was an aggressive face with a biker’s cap. It fitted with his rude and blunt attitude … he seemed always spoiling for a fight. “Wicked Maiden” was a female American cop from New York. She was heavily into Bill, and chains and whips. There were dozens of them from all over the world. Homosexuals, bisexuals and lesbians. Some were decent, most were lonely people, others were just filthy perverts.’
Bill and Susan had known each other for about three months. They regularly wrote each other long emails and when he asked her to buy a webcam she did.
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