Never Enough (22 page)

“No, he was mostly interested in my medication and my day-today life in Siu Lam. He would ask me specifically if I’d had any suicidal thoughts while I was in prison.”

“But you’d only been there for a day.”

“I don’t know if I said that or not after being there for one day.”

“I suggest to you, Mrs. Kissel, that you have absolutely no psychiatric problems. Do you agree?”

“Yes. There’s nothing psychiatrically wrong with me. I’m not suffering from a mental illness. Depression—yes. Feeling sad, feeling remorseful—yes. Suffering from something tragic—yes.”

“But according to Dr. Yuen’s report, you never suffered from, quote, ‘amnesia or memory loss.’”

Suddenly, Nancy erupted.
“They have no idea! They have no idea of what you’ve been through in your life! You can’t just go in there and say, ‘Hey this is what happened to me!’”

She began choking and coughing. But she wasn’t finished.

“
You have no idea, you have no idea! You have no idea of the grieving process I went through! Yuen was there as a prison doctor, without having any understanding of what it’s like to be there.
”

She collapsed in tears again. The judge declared a recess.

Chapman asked Nancy why—if she’d been regularly battered for at least four years, and especially as the beatings had worsened in 2002—no one had noticed so much as a bruise.

“I wore a lot of makeup, wore sunglasses, long sleeves. I put on a good face so people wouldn’t know.”

“Mrs. Kissel, you were a prominent figure in the Hong Kong International School community. Indeed, you’ve been referred to as an ‘ambassador’ for the school. Given all the people with whom you had such frequent contact, didn’t it ever occur to you to tell anyone about these terrible injuries being inflicted on you as a result of this sexual abuse and escalating violence?”

“I couldn’t. I had to talk about how
great
my life was. I never, ever let anyone know what was really going on. I never once complained to anybody. I didn’t even think about approaching anyone, because—”

“Because it wasn’t happening, Mrs. Kissel,” Chapman interrupted.

“No, because it was something I was very ashamed of. Because it was something I chose to accept for a number of years. It’s something I am still ashamed of. That’s why I could never tell anyone.”

“The alternative, Mrs. Kissel, is that there was nothing to tell.” Chapman paused, waiting for Nancy’s response. There was none. She only trembled and looked away.

“To briefly refer back to something we touched on last week, Mrs. Kissel, you said you never had yourself tested for AIDS while you were married, is that correct?”

“Yes, this fascination—gay anal sex, prostitution—it’s something I was not aware of in our marriage. I’m only putting it together now. It puts things in perspective: why he did what he did with me. It’s quite shocking to find out he was somebody I didn’t really know.”

“Well, this shocking and horrific revelation—has that triggered an impulse to seek medical advice? To get an AIDS test? Even now, after all you’ve recently learned, have you had yourself tested for AIDS?”

“No.”

“No. Because you don’t believe it yourself, do you, Mrs. Kissel?”

She did not reply.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Chapman said, “You’ve told us so much about how your husband mistreated you. You’ve also cited instances where you say he used force to discipline your daughters. Are you trying to paint a picture of Robert Kissel as having been abusive to his children, too?”

“There were isolated times when he was very rough with the children. There were times when he would terrify me because I had no control of him. But I didn’t try to paint a picture of him. I—” She rose halfway out of her seat at the witness stand.
“Do you hear me? I didn’t try to paint a picture of him! I still love him! Things happened! I stayed with him! I loved him! And I am not sitting here to paint a bad picture about him. He’s…he’s…he’s my husband!”
She burst into tears again.

“We’ll take a short break now to allow Mrs. Kissel to compose herself,” Mr. Justice Lunn said.

She turned and spoke through her tears directly to the judge.
“He’s my husband!…I still love him! If it weren’t for these things, I would still be with him…I still love him deeply…Oh, it’s so hard…”

The effectiveness of histrionic displays in a courtroom, like that of exclamation marks on a printed page, is inversely proportional to the frequency with which they are employed. Nancy’s trembling, sobbing, and anguished cries fell on increasingly blind eyes and deaf ears as her cross-examination continued throughout the week. Peter Chapman grew impatient. Mr. Justice Lunn was clearly unmoved. There seemed little sympathy in the gazes of the jurors. Chapman had seized control of the proceedings. His indefatigability, seasoned with ever more overt sarcasm, reduced Nancy’s answers to grist. He didn’t do Del Priore any favors, either.

“He was the man you loved. He was the man in your life.”

“He’s a person I had a relationship with.”

“You went to New York with your husband when he had back surgery only so you could secretly meet with Del Priore.”

“No.”

“You sneaked out behind your husband’s back while he lay on it.”

“Only for about half an hour.”

“A hundred and fifty-eight phone calls to Del Priore in September and October.”

“He continued to give support.”

“Del Priore lived in a trailer, right?”

“No. A stationary mobile home.”

“And you represented a potential gold mine to him, didn’t you, Mrs. Kissel?”

“No, not at all. He understood what my life was about—the struggle of accepting who I was. He accepted me as a person. He didn’t judge me by what I possessed. People assume people with money are so happy with their life. I’m tired of that.”

“Fifty-two calls in September. One hundred six calls in October. The pattern was you would tell him you could talk and he would call you back. He spent hours on the telephone with you; he spent thousands of U.S. dollars, which a resident of a trailer park could ill afford.”

“He worked.”

“I suggest, Mrs. Kissel, he considered it a good investment. The day you searched the internet for ‘sleeping pills…drug overdose and medication causing heart attack’ you spoke to Del Priore for more than three hours.”

“I never talked to him about drugs.”

“On the day you were prescribed Rohypnol by Dr. Dytham, you called him seven times, before and after seeing the doctor. What were those calls about, Mrs. Kissel?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You were on a shopping spree for drugs that week. And before and after every visit to a doctor to ask for drugs, you called Del Priore. Do you remember any of those calls, Mrs. Kissel?”

“I never told him I was getting pills.”

“You had ten tablets of Rohypnol provided on October twenty-third and twenty tablets of dextropropoxythene provided on the twenty-eighth—that’s ten pretty good nights of sleep. Then on thirtieth October, off you go to Dr. Fung and you end up with Lorivan, amitryptyline, and some more Stilnox. Three days after that, those three drugs end up in Robert Kissel’s stomach, along with the Rohypnol. In relation to those four drugs, Mrs. Kissel, how were you supposed to take them?”

“As directed.”

“All together?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, Robert Kissel seemed to have taken them all together on second November with two as an added bonus, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You used the milk shake to conceal the drugs. And
you
didn’t bring the milk shakes to your husband and Mr. Tanzer. You used the girls because you knew Robert Kissel wouldn’t take it from you.”

“No. He continued eating with me. He continued drinking his scotch.”

“By November 2003, there was absolutely no way Robert Kissel was going to take a drink from you, Mrs. Kissel. But Mr. Tanzer’s visit suddenly presented you with an opportunity. You could tell the girls it would be fun to make milk shakes. You could put the drugs in the milk shakes. And you could ask the girls to deliver them.”

“No, no! That’s not what happened!”

“And later you delivered—from above—five accurate, fatal blows, grouped together. You were able to deliver those accurate blows because Robert Kissel was unable to defend himself, because you had rendered him defenseless by drugging him.”

“No! We had a horrible fight and he used a bat! He was telling me he was going to kill me with that bat. He kept repeating it and I defended myself from him.
He was going to kill me and I fought for my life!
”

“You just forgot to mention that to Dr. Dytham, thirty-six hours later. You forgot to mention this furious life-or-death struggle, which nobody heard.”

“I can’t remember that visit.”

“The account you gave to Dr. Dytham is significantly different from the account you’ve given here as evidence. As well as depicting a different version of events without mention of a life-or-death struggle or a dead husband, there’s not a single reference in that report to you having any difficulty recalling events.”

“I didn’t know then that I was suffering from memory loss.”

“At seven forty-one a.m. on November third, you called Del Priore and talked for twenty-four minutes. By that time, you didn’t need a sympathetic ear about an abusive husband. What did you talk about in that call, Mrs. Kissel?”

“We always spoke about a lot of issues.”

“Did you tell Del Priore that you had solved the problem with your husband?”

“I can’t remember that call.”

“Your claim of memory loss is a lie, isn’t it, Mrs. Kissel? What Dr. Dytham’s report records is an attempt by you to embark on a process of deception, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not. I don’t have a memory of that day, nor the visit.”

“But you
did
have a memory on November fourth. That’s your problem, isn’t it, Mrs. Kissel?”

“No. I don’t know what happened to me after that night. I still don’t know. It’s a part of my life that’s been taken from me.”

“The person who has had a part of his life taken from him is Robert Kissel—because you killed him.”

It was 4:30 p.m. Chapman indicated to the judge that he’d reached a point suitable for overnight adjournment.

Suddenly, Nancy screamed her loudest scream yet:
“He was going to kill me; he was going to kill me! Oh God, he was going to kill me!”
She laid her head on her arms on the lectern of the witness stand and shook convulsively and wailed.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kissel,” Mr. Justice Lunn said drily. “Please return to the dock.”

TROPICAL STORM SANVU, THE FIRST OF THE SEASON, BLEW
into the South China Sea on the morning of August 12, the day Nancy ended her testimony. Sanvu intensified into a severe tropical storm the next day and made landfall near Shantou in Guangdong province, 187 miles north of Hong Kong. Sanvu’s outer rainbands inundated the island with almost six inches of rain.

Nancy viewed the rain from her new cell in the maximum security Tai Lam Centre for Women. At the close of proceedings on August 12, Chapman had asked for a conference in chambers. There, he argued that Nancy’s accusations against her husband and her claims of memory loss were clearly lies and that someone capable of such deliberate falsification must be considered a flight risk. Mr. Justice Lunn concurred, revoked Nancy’s bail (out of the presence of the jury and with orders that the press not report her change of status), and remanded her to Tai Lam. She left court that day—after the jury had been dismissed, so as not to prejudice them—not with her mother, but handcuffed and shackled and surrounded by guards.

From Tai Lam, she wrote to Michael Del Priore:

As a trough of low pressure edged toward the south China coast on August 19, almost eight inches of rain drenched Hong Kong as the wind felled a banyan tree that had stood in Central for more than a hundred years.

The storm battered Hong Kong even harder the next day. As winds grew stronger, the weather service issued an amber rainstorm warning, a strong monsoon signal, a landslip warning, a thunderstorm warning, and a special announcement on flooding in the New Territories. Almost twelve inches of rain fell, causing widespread flooding and more than a hundred landslides.

In the Court of First Instance, the trial was winding down. Doctors Fung and Dytham testified. Ira and Ryan testified. And Nancy’s friends from Parkview, the Aberdeen Marina Club, and the Hong Kong International School testified.

Parkview neighbor Nancy Nassberg recalled an occasion at the club when Rob had spoken sharply to Nancy about letting the children run wild. She said Nancy wanted to let the children express themselves and have fun, while Rob demanded good behavior.

Nassberg also recounted asking Nancy why she was wearing sunglasses indoors in February 1999. Nancy had moved the glasses to reveal a bruise around her right eye and had said, “Rough sex.”

Another neighbor recalled seeing a bruise around Nancy’s right eye sometime in 2002, while a friend from HKIS remembered seeing a bruised right eye in October 2003. Everyone said Nancy had always been friendly and cheerful. No one said they’d ever heard her complain about being abused, but as neighbor Geertruida Samra said, that wasn’t surprising, given that “the expatriate community in Parkview was very gossipy.”

The last witness called by the defense was Bernard Pasco, the computer forensic expert who had discovered Rob’s use of search terms such as “wife is a bitch,” “twinks,” and “gay anal sex in Taiwan.”

Pasco testified that he’d used NetAnalysis and EnCase Forensic software to examine the Kissels’ computers. He said the two programs enabled him to determine exactly what search terms had been entered at a given time on a given date, what results had been obtained, and which sites the user had then visited.

He said Nancy’s lawyers had told him to explore the time period between January 2002 and November 2003. They’d given him a list of keywords to search for. These “focused primarily on the homosexual area,” Pasco said.

He’d examined both Rob’s laptop and the family desktop and had discovered extensive activity in “the homosexual area” on both computers on April 4 and 5, 2003, just after Nancy and the children had left for the United States and just before Rob traveled to Taiwan.

On cross-examination, Chapman asked Pasco to estimate the total number of hours Rob had spent searching for and viewing gay and pornographic Web sites during the twenty-two months covered by his investigation.

An hour and a half on April 4, Pasco said, and an hour and a half on April 5.

“And that’s it?” Chapman asked. “A total of three hours over two days?” Had that really been the extent of Rob’s exploration of “the homosexual area” of the Internet?

That was all he’d been able to document, Pasco said: three hours over two days during a period of twenty-two months.

Other than Nancy’s testimony, the linchpin of Alexander King’s presentation was the baseball bat that Simon Clarke had found on the bedroom floor and kept in his office until the trial was well under way. Specifically, the barrister wanted to persuade the jury that an indentation on the base of the lead ornament had been caused not by Rob’s skull, but by the barrel of the bat—the implication being that Nancy had used the ornament to defend herself against Rob’s murderous attack. It was a case, in other words, of “If the bat fits, you must acquit.”

The prosecution, however, called two rebuttal witnesses: DNA expert Dr. Pang Chi-ming and forensic expert Wong Koon-hung. Pang testified that the only DNA found on the bat was that of an unidentified female—not Nancy, but possibly Min. This indicated that Rob had not been gripping and swinging the bat on the night of November 2, 2003, Pang said.

“You would agree, would you not, that not everyone that touches the end of the baseball bat will leave human DNA material that is detectable by testing?” King asked.

“If I touch this microphone with my finger, it’s possible my human material will not be left on it. But if I held it tightly, and moved it around, I don’t believe that my human material would not be left on it.”

Having made it harder to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Rob had handled the bat on the night he was killed, Peter Chapman asked Wong if the bat had caused the dent in the ornament. It was “doubtful” Wong said. He then drove a stake through the heart of the defense linchpin by stating, “It’s conclusive that the piece of metal had not been struck with the baseball bat with significant force.”

After seventy-seven days, the presentation of evidence was concluded.

The trial was in recess on Thursday, August 25, as Peter Chapman and Alexander King prepared their closing arguments, but the line of would-be spectators formed early Friday morning. By the time the courtroom doors opened, well over a hundred people had been standing in the hallway for more than an hour. The clamor for standing room began the moment the seats were filled. The two crowd-control marshals were no match for the throng that pushed its way toward the doors. Dozens of the avid crowded inside as if boarding a Tokyo subway.

Mr. Justice Lunn was not impressed. “I will tolerate no more than ten standees,” he said. Proceedings were delayed as marshals funneled the overflow back into the hall.

Peter Chapman was in no hurry. In truth, he didn’t know if the case he’d presented was strong enough to overcome whatever innate sympathy the jury—especially its two women—might feel for a mother of three who had sobbed her way through the summer.

“This was a cold-blooded killing,” he began. Making a rare gesture, he pointed his finger directly at Nancy Kissel. “The defendant struck five fatal blows with murderous intent. There is no basis for a claim of self-defense. The injuries sustained by Robert Kissel did not result from a life-and-death struggle. There was no shouting, screaming, yelling. There was no baseball bat. There was no provocation. This was a cold-blooded killing.”

Dressed, as always, in black—newspapers had begun to call her “the Woman in Black,” never a good sign for a defendant—Nancy stared at the floor, expressionless.

“These were not five fatal blows struck in self-defense. Any one of these blows would have been sufficient to kill. These were blows struck with murderous intent while Robert Kissel was unable to defend himself.

“She didn’t want him alive anymore. Michael Del Priore was the man in her life. Her perspective and outlook in life had changed considerably when Michael Del Priore had entered it. The seed of murder was planted firmly on August twentieth, when she searched the Internet for ‘drug overdose,’ ‘sleeping pills,’ ‘medication causing heart attack.’ She decided to remove the obstacle in her life that Robert Kissel had become. And on November 2, 2003, Nancy Kissel would do exactly that. Nothing can possibly be clearer.”

Chapman was speaking deliberately, not forgetting that English was a second language for the jurors.

“She knew divorce was looming. Nancy Kissel, and perhaps Michael del Priore, felt somewhat vulnerable. She knew the messy divorce proceedings could last a long time. She wanted her children, yes, but above all, Michael was the man in her life. And Michael regarded Nancy as a gold mine—as a way out of his life in a trailer park. And so she planned—possibly with Michael del Priore’s tacit encouragement—to remove the obstacle in her life.

“She acquired four drugs in seven days in her various visits to doctors in late October—Stilnox, Lorivan, amitriptyline, and Rohypnol. There was no possible medical reason for her to need them all. Whether the drugs were intended to kill Robert Kissel or to subdue him is an open question, but they were employed successfully.