Murder of Robert Kissel
The Nancy Kissel murder case (officially called the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region v Nancy Ann Kissel) was a highly publicised criminal trial held in the High Court of Hong Kong, where American expatriate Nancy Ann Kissel (née Keeshin) was convicted of the murder of her husband, 40-year-old investment banker Robert Peter Kissel, in their apartment on 2 November 2003. It was arguably the highest profile criminal case involving an expatriate in Hong Kong's history, and was closely covered in the media. Kissel was convicted of murder in 2005 and received a mandatory life sentence. The Court of Final Appeal overturned the conviction in February 2010, citing legal errors, and ordered a retrial. At the conclusion of the retrial on 25 March 2011, Kissel was again found guilty of her husband's murder and sentenced to life in prison. She is serving her sentence at Tai Lam Centre for Women. Coincidentally Robert Kissel's brother, Andrew, a former American real estate developer, was murdered on 3 April 2006 in Greenwich, Connecticut, United States. Murder On a return trip to the U.S. in mid-2003, Nancy Kissel met and had an affair with Michael Del Priore, a twice-married electrical repairman who had rewired the Kissel home in Vermont. Robert Kissel became suspicious of his wife's infidelity and had hired a private detective, Frank Shea, to spy on her. Robert also secretly installed the spyware eBlaster on Nancy's computer. Nancy claimed that her husband had initiated proceedings for divorce and securing custody of their children. Nancy drugged Robert by having their six-year-old daughter give him a strawberry milkshake laced with a cocktail of sedatives. When the drugs had taken effect and the children were out of the apartment, Nancy bludgeoned her husband to death. She then rolled up his body in a carpet and had it placed in their storeroom in the Parkview apartment complex. After her arrest, Nancy admitted to killing Robert in self-defense, claiming that she was the victim of domestic violence including repeated acts of rape and sodomy over a five-year period. She further claimed that Robert habitually abused alcohol and cocaine. The trial began in June 2005 at the High Court, with the prosecution alleging that Nancy murdered her husband; she pleaded not guilty. Nancy admitted under cross-examination that she had bludgeoned her husband to death, but maintained that she was defending herself and further claimed memory loss, testifying she had no knowledge of how she inflicted five head wounds with a heavy metal sculpture. Nancy admitted to using Stilnox, one of the sedatives found in her husband's body, to doctor a bottle of malt whisky when they were living in Vermont in the hope that it would make her husband less aggressive toward their children, but testified it had had no effect on him. Regardless of that, Nancy admitted to trying the same thing in Hong Kong, but testified that when she saw the sediment it left at the bottom of the bottle, she poured out the drugged liquor, bought