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Wife of HK banker planned murder, prosecutor says

Posted on: Friday, 26 August 2005, 06:02 CDT

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The widow of American banker Robert Kissel planned to murder him "in cold blood" and there was no basis for her to say she acted out of self-defense, prosecutors told a Hong Kong court on Friday.

Summing up the prosecution's case in a murder trial that has riveted Hong Kong for almost three months, lawyer Peter Chapman said the evidence showing that Nancy Kissel plotted to kill her Merrill Lynch banker husband was "unassailable."

Police found she had searched the Internet for information on drugs and obtained sedatives from her doctors a few months before the killing. She fed him those drugs in a milkshake she prepared on November 2, 2003, and then clubbed him to death as he laid drugged and unconscious in their bedroom, Chapman told the High Court.

Dressed in her usual black attire, Nancy, who has been charged with one count of murder, was expressionless in the dock.

She has admitted to killing her husband but has pleaded not guilty to murder. She has also denied having spiked the milkshake that she made for him with a cocktail of anti-depressants and hypnotic drugs.

During the trial, she told the court how she suffered her husband's physical and sexual abuse for years, who often flew into cocaine and alcohol-fuelled rages.

She said she struck her husband five times on the right side of his face with a metal statue after he hit her repeatedly with a baseball bat, but added that she had no recollection of what happened afterwards on the night of November 2.

"COLD-BLOODED KILLING"

But Chapman said: "These were five fatal blows with murderous intent ... Self defense has no basis in this case."

An autopsy found six types of sedatives in Kissel's stomach -- evidence the defense has not contested. Detectives also found that Nancy had gone to doctors a few months before the killing complaining of insomnia and obtained four of those drugs.

Chapman said the drugs were so strong that Kissel was likely to have passed out and he could not have threatened Nancy.

"Even if he was conscious when she struck him, his ability to defend himself would have been impaired by the drugs. There is no provocation in this case," Chapman said.

"This meant that Nancy Kissel was able to take the ornament from the kitchen and inflict the injuries on Robert Kissel as he was lying down," said the lawyer.

"These injuries (found on Robert) did not result from a life and death struggle. There were no screams, there was no baseball bat, there was no provocation. This was cold-blooded killing."

Chapman also said Nancy had been plotting to kill her husband from as early as August 20, 2003, when she made searches on the Internet using key words like "drug overdose."

"The seed to kill her husband was planted firmly from August 20 ... to remove the obstacle in her life that Robert Kissel had become," Chapman said, adding that by that time, her TV repairman lover in the United States had become "the man in her life."

During the trial Nancy admitted to the affair, which happened between March and July 2003 when she fled to the United States with their three children to escape the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong.

If convicted of murder she could face life in jail.

Police found Robert Kissel's body four days after his death rolled up in a carpet in a storeroom in the luxury residential estate where they lived with their children.

The case has shocked Hong Kong's expatriate community since the trial began in June.

The prosecution said earlier that Kissel had decided to divorce his wife after discovering the affair and was going to tell her that on the night that he was murdered.

The defense will sum up the case next Monday and a verdict from the jury is expected by the end of next week.

Source: REUTERS

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