Never Enough (19 page)

NANCY WAS TRANSFERRED TO THE SIU LAM PSYCHIATRIC
Centre in the western New Territories in late November. Her expat status may not have been the only factor in the decision to incarcerate her there instead of in the notoriously overcrowded maximum security Tai Lam Centre for Women, but it did not work to her disadvantage.

Not even Human Rights Watch could find much wrong with Siu Lam. A 1997 report noted that “the facility is quite pleasant: its rooms and corridors are spacious, airy, and painted in soothing colors. It also possesses attractive gardens with flowers, fish, and birds, tended by some of the inmates. As the facility is located on the side of a hill, inmates held there enjoy rather dramatic views of the surrounding area.”

On the day of her admission, Nancy was evaluated by psychiatrist Henry Yuen, who was chief of service at Siu Lam’s Department of Forensic Science. Yuen summarized his impressions in a report he wrote the next day: “consciousness level: alert; mood: neutral; attitude: cooperative; speech: relevant and coherent; suicidal idea: deny.” At no time did any doctor who examined her at Siu Lam detect any sign of mental illness.

Nancy was soon adopted by a small coterie of Parkview wives who believed that turning her into a cause might bring meaning to their lives. They made into an article of faith the proposition that Nancy had been a battered wife who’d finally put an end to years of abuse by the only means available to her.

Siu Lam’s liberal visitation policy (hours were from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. seven days a week, except Mondays and Wednesdays, when the hours were 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.) allowed these women to spend half their waking hours in Nancy’s presence. The closer to her they claimed to be, the greater Parkview cachet they acquired.

Nancy decided she also needed her mother. She asked her new friends to tell Jean that she would welcome a visit. Offered a reprieve from the shunning that she’d expected to last for the rest of her life, Jean flew to Hong Kong immediately. In their first moment together in almost five years, Jean said, “We just kind of melted into each other.” From that day forward, Nancy and her mother were inseparable. They never discussed the past. To both of them, only the future mattered.

In July 2004—more than seven months after she’d arrived at Siu Lam—Nancy contacted her children for the first time. They’d been in Andrew and Hayley’s custody all year. Ira would have fought Bill in court until he was bankrupt, but he would not let Bill harm his son. Because he had no doubt that Bill would carry out every threat he’d made against Ryan, Ira allowed Andrew and Hayley to bring the children back to Greenwich. Andrew used the private Marquis jet in which he owned a time-share. He billed the seven-thousand-dollar cost to the estate. Andrew and Hayley’s expansive house—newspapers described it as a mansion—on two and a half acres in the exclusive backcountry section of Greenwich became the children’s fourth home in eight weeks, not counting hotels.

On July 4, Nancy wrote to Zoe and Ethan in Greenwich, and to Isabel at summer camp in Maine. To Zoe and Ethan she wrote: “Hello!! What’s new and exciting today? Enjoying your summer activities? I’ll bet you both do about 100 things each day…There are so many fun things to do all summer long…”

To Isabel she wrote: “Is it really hot at camp right now?…I’ll bet you are making some really nice things in Arts and Crafts…How is the camp food this year?…I remember at Parent Weekend, sneaking back through the back door to grab more potato chips!! I’ll bet your drinking tons of Coke…My favorite too…Keep having lots of fun!!”

She didn’t say anything in either about where she was, or why, or when (or if) she might ever see them again.

In August, she sent Zoe and Ethan drawings of strawberries. She asked, “Can you count all the times you ate ice cream? I’ll bet you both have had at least 100 ice cream cones this summer!! I love strawberry and chocolate ice cream ymmmmm…I miss you…I’m feeling a little better but still need some rest…”

She also drew strawberries on her letter to Isabel at camp. She wrote: “I went to camp at age 9 for 8 weeks—a girls camp in Indiana called Camp Pokegan (Poe-kay-gen)…I always ate a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with
extra
bacon!!”

Ira drove to Maine to pick up Isabel at camp and bring her back to his house for a visit. Nancy wrote to her there: “How is Chicago…remember when Zoe took our picture in the car park? I was hugging you and I was wearing my jeans with the Red Dragon on the front…I’m sure Grandpa Ira has plenty of macaroni and cheese & waffles. Make sure he takes you out for pizza!!…I’m feeling much better but still need to rest a bit longer…”

She wrote to Isabel again in early September: “How was camp? I’ll bet this summer was better than last summer…Did your horse remember you?…Was the food the same? Did they still have that giant bowl of potato chips? I can’t believe you’ve been to camp 2 summers in a row!! It will be really fun to have Zoe go with you one of these summers…she’ll have a blast!!”

She wrote to all three children a week later: “Are you all ready for school to start? New school supplies—Zoe—2nd grade! Isabel 5th grade! WOW!! And Ethany-Boy kindergarden! Wow you are all getting so old—so grown up…”

Nancy drew hearts and flowers on the pages of her letters and closed each one with “I love you…I hug you…I kiss you…I squeeeeeze you,” followed by a heart with “Love Mommy” inside.

Not all intra-Kissel communications that summer were so affectionate. The teacher-student bond that Hayley and Jane formed on the Stratton Mountain ski slopes had strengthened over the years to the point where Jane sometimes described Hayley as “the sister I never had.” In June, Hayley turned to Jane in order to vent about Andrew in much the same way as Rob had turned to Bryna to vent about Nancy the year before.

In one phone call, Hayley told Jane that she was going to leave Andrew. She’d learned that he was having an affair with a Greenwich woman he’d hired as a public relations agent as he tried to raise his business and social profiles. “I am busting my ass taking care of five kids, while he’s off having dinner with her in nice restaurants,” Hayley wrote in an e-mail. “It amazes me that I’ve let him treat me like that. I’m a smart person. I can’t believe I’ve stayed in the relationship this long. But this is the ultimate humiliation and I can’t take it.”

Andrew seemed unbothered by Hayley’s pique. He traded in his $2.85 million, seventy-five-foot yacht for a $3.6 million ninety-three-footer. He’d named the first yacht
The Five Keys
after himself, Rob, Jane, Hayley, and Nancy. He was more selective the second time. He called the new yacht
Special K’s
and he liked to point out, “That’s singular.”

Cushioned by the $20 million trust fund, he also began to diversify his business holdings. One of his daughters liked horseback riding, so he bought the stable. He grew annoyed one night at having to wait for a table in a Greenwich waterfront restaurant, so he bought a controlling interest in it the next day. He was drinking more, so he bought a liquor store. Most colorfully, he acquired partners in Sicily and began to import olive oil.

Hayley told Jane she suspected that not all of Andrew’s business dealings were legal. She said she was getting worried, for the children’s sake and for her own. “I don’t want to have to explain to the kids why he’s in jail,” she said.

Shortly before Halloween, Nancy wrote the children another letter: “Zoe’s first Halloween we dressed her up as a baby pumpkin—she couldn’t walk yet and just rolled around on the floor. Isabel—your first Halloween you were Tinkerbell…we took you trick or treating at Uncle Andy’s apartment…Ethan was only two days old for his first Halloween so no trick or treating for him!!”

Then Nancy was released on bail. No one awaiting trial on murder charges in Hong Kong had ever before been freed on bail. And no one would ever know why Nancy was. On November 1, 2004—almost exactly one year after she’d killed her husband—a secret hearing was held in the chambers of Mr. Justice Michael Burrell of the Court of First Instance, the court in which Nancy would be tried. For reasons never disclosed, Mr. Justice Burrell voided Nancy’s no-bail status and set bail at US $1 million, a sum quickly produced by the members of Nancy’s Parkview coterie.

Burrell’s ruling was unprecedented. There is little doubt that it would have stirred controversy in the press. Under Hong Kong law, however, the judge could not only seal the transcript of the hearing but could order the press not to report the result. Thus, when Nancy was set free on the afternoon of November 4, 2004, no one in Hong Kong outside her closest circle knew anything about it.

FROM SIU LAM, NANCY WAS TAKEN DIRECTLY TO A NINTH-FLOOR
apartment in a nondescript housing unit located just below the intersection of Bonham Road and Pok Fu Lam Road, near the University of Hong Kong. Her Parkview coterie had rented the apartment for her.

Paying the rent might not have been a problem for Nancy, but paying her legal fees was. Ira had continued to write checks to Mallesons Stephen Jaques in amounts sufficient to keep Simon Clarke’s batteries charged, but with trial not scheduled to begin until May 2005, the major legal expenses still lay ahead.

Having exhausted his own life savings of $800,000, Ira raised another $225,000 by auctioning a Bridget Riley op art painting that had been in his family since 1975. But Clarke estimated that he’d need at least another million dollars.

At this point Nancy’s fortunes received a boost from an unexpected source. And quite a boost it was. A Goldman Sachs partner—a former colleague of Rob’s in the Hong Kong office—let it be known discreetly that as long as his anonymity was guaranteed he would underwrite the cost of Nancy’s defense. Excitedly, she wrote to Michael Del Priore to tell him that the colleague had just written a check for $1 million, with more to come.

She also wrote to her children: “Its almost Thanksgiving! Turkey Day gobble-gobble!!…Is it getting cold outside? All the leaves start turning colors—my favorite time of year. I like stepping on the leaves and hearing them CRUNCH!…”

Simon Clarke flew to New York in December to take a statement from Michael Del Priore. Clarke knew the affair could not be kept secret. He also knew that the existence of a lover could be used to explain Nancy’s motivation for killing Rob. When he learned that telephone records documented more than three thousand minutes of talk between Nancy and Del Priore in the month leading up to the killing, and more than a dozen conversations in the days between the killing and Nancy’s arrest, Clarke realized he’d better meet the man. In addition, Nancy would not stop talking about him.

Clarke and his barrister, Alexander “Sandy” King, had seen from the start how unlikely it would seem that in fifty hours of conversation the two lovers had never discussed getting the wealthy and purportedly abusive husband out of the way. And who would believe that after the fact she hadn’t told her lover she had done it and asked for his help in regard to disposing of the body and incriminating evidence?

But unless Nancy were to implicate him—which she could not do without admitting her own guilt—there was no basis for filing charges against Del Priore or even for requiring him to give a statement under oath. Yes, there would be innuendo. But innuendo was not enough for extradition.

Clarke spent two days with him in New York City, explaining that he could have no contact with Nancy until after the trial. The prosecutor would certainly ask her when she’d last been in touch with her lover. Clarke spelled out for Del Priore how vital it was that Nancy be able to deny truthfully that there had been any communication between the two of them since her arrest. By the time of her trial, Del Priore had to be portrayed as just an indiscretion, a regrettable part of Nancy’s distant past.

In Clarke’s absence—growing in confidence daily and urged on by her Parkview supporters—Nancy installed herself in his office at Mallesons. Upon his return, she told him she was taking charge of her own defense. She—not Clarke and not King—would map out the strategy, just as she would determine tactics during the trial. She arrived at Mallesons every morning and soon tyrannized paralegals and clerical help. She spoke to Clarke as if he were a houseboy and, more than once, when irked by his disagreement with a position she took, she threw a coffee mug or paperweight at his head. Clarke found himself facing the double-edged sword familiar to criminal defense attorneys on all continents: money from heaven, client from hell.

She wasn’t much fun to live with, either. Her mother had moved in with her. Ira and Ryan visited. “There was so much tension,” Ira said. “I was walking on pins and needles the whole time,” Ryan said. “The only thing I ever asked her was, ‘What do you want for dinner?’”

On occasion, she would call Ryan into the kitchen and tell him to sit. Chain-smoking, she’d start to talk. Her major topic was how Rob had forced her to have sex. She could talk about that for hours as Ryan choked on the smoke.

He couldn’t quite manage empathy, but intermittently he felt stirrings of compassion for this baffling half sister toward whom—as he’d grown up almost fifteen years younger and a thousand miles away—he’d felt a younger brother’s admiration and affection. He didn’t know how she intended to testify at trial and he was grateful that it was none of his business. His role was to listen when she found herself wanting to talk, not to try to draw her out toward ground that could suddenly give way beneath the weight of her overwrought psyche.

His psychiatric training enabled him to listen to her in ways that others could not. “There was a great separation between what she said and how she said it,” he later remarked. “She’d talk on and on about how Rob raped her and beat her, but her demeanor wasn’t congruent with her subject. Professionally, I suppose you could call it blunted affect. There was never a lot of feeling in her voice. There was something almost ritualistic about the way she’d describe all that stuff.”

It was different with her mother. “She couldn’t talk about any of that,” Jean later said. “She could only talk about the present. If the conversation ever got close to anything to do with that night she would get into a hysterical state. She wouldn’t be able to walk or even stand up. It was clear to me that she was having flashbacks. One day we took the train to a flower market in Kowloon. It turned out to be more than she could handle. She was overcome with panic and we had to take a taxi back to the flat. In the taxi she suddenly said, ‘You know he raped me. A lot. For five or six years. I couldn’t say anything.’ Then she completely broke down, screaming and crying. When we got back she went straight to her room and closed the door and didn’t come out for hours. We never talked about it again.”

Simon Clarke explained to Nancy that Hong Kong’s legal system, by and large, remained based on English law. This would enable her to offer a defense of “provocation.” If the jury found that she had been “provoked (whether by things done or by things said or by both together) to lose [her] self-control,” they could convict her not of murder, but manslaughter. The difference was between a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and a discretionary sentence imposed by the judge—perhaps ten years or less.

She said she wouldn’t do it. The only defense that could lead to acquittal was self-defense. She said she was going to plead self-defense. Clarke tried to explain why she shouldn’t. To acquit on self-defense, the jury would have to find that the amount of force Nancy had used was “reasonable in the circumstances.” Five skull-shattering blows with an eight-pound lead ornament—any one of them fatal in itself—could hardly be construed as reasonable, even if Rob had been punching and kicking her and chasing her around the bedroom demanding sex.

As the English Privy Council ruled in the 1971 case of
Palmer v. The Queen
: “If there is some relatively minor attack it would not be common sense to permit some action of retaliation which was wholly out of proportion to the necessities of the situation.”

But what if the attack had not been relatively minor? Nancy asked. What if she’d been fighting for her life? Suppose Rob had come at her with a weapon, intending to kill her? What if Rob had attacked her not with his bare hands, but with a potentially lethal club?

The police had not found a club in the bedroom, but Clarke had. He’d found the baseball bat on the bedroom floor. Suppose Rob had used
that
as a weapon? Suppose he’d charged at her swinging the bat, shouting, “I’m going to kill you, you bitch!”? In that case, she would have been justified in defending herself with the statuette. Why had she hit him five times? She didn’t know, she couldn’t remember. Suppose the trauma of the attack had triggered a state of dissociative amnesia?

The Cleveland Clinic Web site—easily available to an experienced searcher such as Nancy—explains, “Dissociative amnesia occurs when a person blocks out certain information, usually associated with a stressful or traumatic event, leaving him or her unable to remember important personal information. With this disorder, the degree of memory loss goes beyond normal forgetfulness and includes gaps in memory for long periods of time or of memories involving the traumatic event.”

If Nancy had experienced dissociative amnesia, she wouldn’t be able to recall anything between Rob’s attack and, say, the arrival of the police at the apartment. Why had she kept the body in the bedroom for two and a half days? Why had she rolled it up in a carpet? Why hadn’t she simply called the police as soon as she realized Rob was dead to tell them that her husband had just tried to kill her but that she’d apparently killed him in self-defense?

Simple: she couldn’t remember anything that had happened. She’d been in a state of dissociative amnesia.

Once she was free on bail, Nancy could have had her children flown to Hong Kong at any time. She’d chosen not to. She’d said it would have been too much of an emotional strain for her. She had not written to them since November, and she had never talked to them by phone. Now, as her trial approached, she shut them completely out of her life. She told her mother she did not want to receive any more letters from the children, nor photographs of them, nor news about them. She was sure they’d be fine with Andrew and Hayley. She had herself to worry about.

How fine the children actually were as Andrew and Hayley’s troubled marriage staggered toward dissolution was unclear. Hayley, who had filed for divorce in February, said they were thriving, despite the worsening domestic chaos. Jane wasn’t so sure, particularly after a phone call in which Hayley said (according to notes Jane made at the time of the call), “I hate to say it, but every time I see Rob’s kids now, I see Andrew in them. I hate to take it out on them, but I can’t help it.”

Hayley’s filing seemed to have driven Andrew past some personal point of no return. He would bring a bottle of scotch into his Hanrock office in Stamford and spend hours forging and falsely notarizing the documents needed to obtain fraudulent loans. Then he would decide it was party time and nobody would see him for days.

He’d invested in an off-Broadway show called
Pieces (of Ass)
. It consisted of “a series of original monologues from a rotating cast of beautiful women,” a press release said. “These pieces aim to go beneath the beautiful façade and examine the concept of ‘hot chick angst.’” Andrew developed a personal interest in the subject, and in a number of the actresses from the show.

On Friday, May 20, he used the private jet to fly a group of actresses and business associates to Miami, where they boarded the
Special K’s.
Although he was already shopping for a bigger yacht, Andrew made the most of the $3.6 million ninety-three-footer—“kicking off his drinking binges at 11 a.m. and cavorting with a bevy of actresses,” as the
New York Post
reported.

The party ended Sunday night when Hayley, at the end of a long day with the five children, called the yacht. Andrew had assured her that only male business associates were aboard—ostensibly to analyze opportunities in Florida real estate—but a woman answered. She wasn’t sober. Hayley wasn’t pleased. She hung up and sent Jane an e-mail that said: “GOD, I HATE YOUR BROTHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry, just had to vent.”

Jane replied the next morning, asking Hayley if she was all right. Hayley replied:

That was enough for Jane. She wasn’t going to leave Rob’s children in a madhouse. She told Andrew she wanted custody of the children. He said she couldn’t have it. They accused each other of caring more about the trust fund than the children. Jane said she’d sue for custody if she had to. Andrew said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I’ll fight you.” Then Hayley chimed in. She told Jane that Andrew was essentially bankrupt and that she’d be left with nothing after the divorce. But the trust fund could help her maintain her standard of living. “If I keep the kids,” she said, “it may not be the best thing for them, but at least I won’t be on the street. I’m not going to let the Kissels take anything more from me. I’ve given enough. I’m going to do what’s best for myself.” Bill called from Florida to tell Hayley she was “a money-grubbing bitch.”

It was just the Kissels being Kissels.