ALSO BY JOE MCGINNISS
The Big Horse
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
The Last Brother
Cruel Doubt
Blind Faith
Fatal Vision
Going to Extremes
Heroes
The Dream Team
The Selling of the President 1968
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Copyright © 2007 by Joe McGinniss
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use illustrative material: photo 11: Douglas Healey/Polaris; photos 12 and 18: Sing Tao Daily; photos 13 and 19: The Standard; photo 16: Eastweek; photo 17: William Farrington/Polaris; photo 21: Patrick Andrade/Polaris.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGinniss, Joe.
Never enough / Joe McGinniss.
p. cm.
1. Murder—China—Hong Kong—Case studies. 2. Homicide—China—Hong Kong—Case studies. 3. Americans—China—Hong Kong. 4. Kissel, Nancy. 5. Kissel, Rob, d. 2003. I. Title.
HV6535.C63H856 2007
364.152'309225125—dc22 2007029729
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5442-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5442-4
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For Nancy
Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.
—RICHARD M. NIXON (1913–1994),
IN HIS WHITE HOUSE FAREWELL SPEECH
PROLOGUE
THREE DAYS IN NOVEMBER 2003
IT WAS 8:00 P.M. MONDAY IN HONG KONG, 6:00 A.M. MONDAY in Chicago when Nancy Kissel called her father, Ira Keeshin. She was crying.
“Rob and I had a huge fight last night,” she said. “I’m pretty badly beaten up. I’m sure he broke some of my ribs. And I’m afraid. I’m afraid he’s going to come back and hurt me more.”
“Wait. He hit you?”
“He was drunk. It was horrible…” She started crying so hard she couldn’t talk.
“Where is he now?”
“I…I don’t know. He left. He could be anywhere.”
“How are you? Have you been to a doctor?”
“I’m going in the morning. My ribs are killing me. I’m all beat up.”
“And you don’t know where Rob is?”
“He could be anywhere. I’m scared he’ll come back.”
“How are the kids?”
“They’re fine. They don’t know anything.”
“Are Connie and Min there?”
“Yes, they’re here.”
“Make sure they stay with you. And keep the door locked. Double-bolt it. This is awful. What the hell happened?”
Instead of answering, Nancy broke down in tears again.
“Never mind. Listen, I’ll get down there as fast as I can. If he comes back, call the police. Stay safe. That’s the most important thing. Don’t go out anywhere he might be able to grab you. Keep Connie and Min with you. Call some friends to come over. I don’t want you alone until we know where he is.”
She was sobbing.
“Maybe he just lost it for a minute Maybe he’s ashamed, that’s why he left.”
“No. This wasn’t the first time.”
“What—”
“Just get here, please. I don’t know what to do.”
Ira was sixty years old, five seven, physically active, physically fit. He thought fast. He talked fast. He was impulsive. He was not a long-term planner. He had a quick sense of humor. He had a temper. He had a heart. He didn’t have much contact with his first ex-wife, Nancy’s mother, but he’d stayed on good terms with his second, even after he’d married for a third time.
He was the number two man at a specialty bread company that supplied bread and rolls of the highest quality to many of Chicago’s finest restaurants and huge quantities of lesser-quality product to such national chains as Chili’s, Cheesecake Factory, and TGIF.
He arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday night. He had visited Nancy and Rob there before. Nancy had said she’d have a car and driver meet him at the airport, but he found no one waiting for him. He took a taxi to Parkview, the multitower luxury apartment complex where Rob and Nancy lived. He checked into the hotel on the grounds, walked to their building, and took the elevator to the twenty-second floor.
Nancy was thirty-nine but looked younger. She was short and blond, flashy and feisty. She had lively eyes and a brilliant smile. Her shapeliness did not suggest that she’d borne three children. Heads still turned when she entered a room. Normally. Now she looked haggard and scared.
“Has he come back?”
“No.”
“Has he called?”
She shook her head.
He started to hug her.
“Don’t! Didn’t I tell you he broke my ribs?”
Ira smelled scented candles. He glanced around the living room. Dozens of candles were burning. He thought he smelled lilac and vanilla. But he was too tired to smell straight, too tired to think straight, almost too tired to stand.
“Will you be okay overnight?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning after I’ve had a little sleep. We’ll go to the police, file a missing persons report.”
“And an assault and battery complaint.”
“That, too.”
After kissing each of his three grandchildren as they slept, Ira went back to the hotel and to bed.
Isabel was nine, Zoe six, and Ethan three. Rob and Nancy had arrived in Hong Kong in 1997 when Zoe was an infant. Ethan had been born there. Rob had been sent to Hong Kong to make money for Goldman Sachs and for himself. He’d done both. Three years later, he’d moved to Merrill Lynch to make more.
Ira had breakfast with the children while Nancy got dressed. He took the girls down to their school bus. They were thrilled by Grandpa Ira’s surprise visit. Connie, the nanny—or amah, as nannies are called in Hong Kong—would take Ethan to his preschool later.
The morning was cool, the sky clear. November marked the end of Hong Kong’s summer. In November, the daytime temperature dropped into the seventies and the humidity eased. The air pollution lingered—the pollution never went away anymore—but it was slightly less oppressive than in summer.
Ira and Nancy took a taxi to the Aberdeen Division police station on Wong Chuk Hang Road, near the Ap Lei Chau Bridge. As soon as they arrived and stated their business they were led to a conference room and joined by Sergeant Mok Kwok-chuen, who was ready to write down the details.
But instead of speaking, Nancy started to tremble, as if on the verge of a seizure. Then she closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth, her arms crossed tightly in front of her, moaning.
Ira tried to calm her. She quivered and sobbed. Sergeant Mok was attentive and solicitous. Ira told him that Nancy had been badly beaten by her husband, who had then gone missing and who was still missing after three and a half days.
Eventually, Nancy was able to stutter a brief account of what had happened. She said her husband had been drunk and had begun hitting and kicking her when she’d resisted his attempts to have sex. Then he’d left their apartment and she didn’t know where he’d gone. The account came out in fits and starts. Nancy would speak a few coherent sentences, then slip back into a state in which all she did w
as tremble, moan, and cry.
Sergeant Mok explained that he could issue a missing persons report, but that before Nancy could press assault and battery charges a police doctor would have to examine her and record her injuries. He said that could be done at Queen Mary Hospital in nearby Pok Fu Lam, not far from the University of Hong Kong. Ira and Sergeant Mok helped her to a waiting patrol car.
It was almost noon when they arrived. Queen Mary, the teaching hospital for the medical school of the nearby University of Hong Kong, was one of the largest and busiest acute-care facilities in the territory. The lobby was overflowing with patients waiting to be seen. The Hong Kong patrolman who brought Ira and Nancy to the hospital explained to a receptionist why they had come. The receptionist told him that Nancy would have to wait her turn. They sat and they waited. And they sat and waited. Nancy did not like to sit and wait under any circumstances. She didn’t see why she should be made to now. This was the sort of thing she’d been putting up with for six years. The Chinese did not seem able to grasp the obvious fact that certain people should not be made to sit and wait.
Ira asked the patrolman how much longer the wait would be. He didn’t know. Nobody knew. Nancy had already been waiting for two hours. She said enough was enough. She was a busy woman. The children would soon be getting out of school. She and Ira left. Maybe she’d come back tomorrow.
That evening, Ira and Nancy brought Isabel, the nine-year-old, back to school for a dance lesson. Like most children of wealthy expatriates in Hong Kong, the Kissel girls attended the Hong Kong International School, the territory’s most costly and prestigious day school.
After Isabel ran inside, Ira suggested that they drive down the hill to Repulse Bay. He thought the quiet beach, the peaceful waters, the open air, and sense of space—space being Hong Kong’s most precious commodity—might comfort his daughter. On the way she stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of cigarettes. Ira had never seen her smoke. “I’ve been smoking for a while,” she said. “Rob hated it. Fuck him.”
They found a gazebo at the edge of the beach and sat down. They talked about how sad it was that everything had fallen apart. Rob and Nancy had been married for fourteen years. They’d been in Hong Kong for six. At first, Rob had worked for Goldman Sachs. After three years, he’d moved to Merrill Lynch. He had an important job. He made a lot of money. He was planning to make a lot more. Nancy enjoyed the royal lifestyle of the wealthy expat. She liked to spend. Suddenly, all that seemed over.
Ira was perplexed by Rob’s disappearance. Nancy said Merrill Lynch had told her he hadn’t been in his office all week. He found that hard to imagine. Rob was obsessed with his work. He was driven. He’d often said he could not rest as long as anyone he knew was making more money than he was. But now? Ira sensed that divorce was inevitable. Nancy said she’d been living a nightmare all year. No matter how sorry Rob might be, she couldn’t forgive him this time. She’d take the children and move back to the United States and let lawyers hammer out the details. Ira, an emotional man, began to weep. So did Nancy. They sat together at the edge of the bay, his arm gently around her because he did not want to hurt her ribs, and cried together.
They met Isabel in the parking lot after the lesson. They could not talk about Rob in front of the children. Nancy had told them he was on another business trip. He traveled everywhere from Mumbai to Manila, and he was gone more than he was home, so the children didn’t question the explanation.
Isabel climbed into the backseat of Nancy’s Mercedes and asked her to play the Avril Lavigne CD. Her favorite song on it was “Complicated.” On the way back to Parkview she and Nancy sang along.
Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you’re actin’ like you’re somebody else…
They dropped Ira at the hotel. He was still jet-lagged and worn to the nub by emotional strain. He went to his room and fell asleep.
The phone woke him at 11:00 p.m. It was Nancy.
“You’ve got to come over! You’ve got to come over right away! The police are here. They’re asking me questions. There’s just so many police. You’ve got to come over right away!”
PART ONE
CASTING THE DIES
1. GROWING UP KISSEL
ROB KISSEL WAS NOT ONLY THE RICHEST AND BEST-LOOKING kid in his class at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, he was also the most unselfish and considerate. He never spoke ill of anybody. He was as sweet to the plainest girl as to the prettiest. He never kicked anyone when he was down.
But the quality for which he was best known was competitiveness. Rob did not merely have a will to win: he had a need that bordered on the desperate. Anyone who’d ever met his father knew where it came from.
Bill Kissel, a New Jersey native, had graduated from the Case Institute of Technology—now Case Western Reserve University—in 1951 with a degree in chemistry. For twenty years, he worked for Sun Chemical in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Then he realized his true talent was entrepreneurial. He left Sun in 1972 to start a company that manufactured dry toner for printing cartridges.
The dry toner field was one of the many whose lack of glamour defined New Jersey. The state was the dry toner capital of America, if not the world. Dry toner is composed of tiny plastic particles blended with carbon. The smaller the particles and the more uniform their size, the better the result from the copying machine. The conventional method of making dry toner was called pulverization. It involved grinding the dry plastic from which the toner was made into particles of the smallest possible size. But that size wasn’t small enough for a new generation of copying machines. Xerox spent millions of dollars in the 1960s trying unsuccessfully to produce a toner of smaller and more uniform particle size by chemical processes.
Where Xerox failed, Bill Kissel succeeded.
By jiggling a few molecules, he developed—and quickly patented—a means of creating dry toner particles chemically, instead of by brute force. His method created particles less than half the size of those produced conventionally. In the world of dry toner it was as if a new continent had been discovered. The companies who used toner-based print systems beat a path to Bill Kissel’s door. For a few halcyon years, his company, Synfax, was the name of the game. By the time the big boys caught up, his fortune was made.
Bill’s vigor was impressive. He played to win and he won. Acquaintances admired his tenacity and durability. He could be charming and gracious in social situations and he knew how to catch flies with honey, but he was not an easy man to grow close to. The moment he sensed a lack of acquiescence in a subordinate—and Bill considered almost everyone a subordinate—his eyes turned steely and his voice grew harsh. He was five eight, slim, and irascible. He had a reputation for vindictiveness. People said, “You don’t want to cross Bill Kissel.” He took pride in that.
He’d married a woman quite his opposite in every way. Elaine Kissel was warm and welcoming and a testament to the likelihood that Bill possessed virtues not readily apparent to outsiders. She was the velvet glove on Bill’s fist of steel. Elaine nurtured while Bill harangued. She offered safe haven and solace.
They had three children: Andrew, born in 1960; Robert, born in 1963, and Jane, born in 1968. Elaine made the family while Bill made the money that gave the family a standard of living he approved of.
For many years, the Kissels lived in a comfortable house on a quiet street in the pleasant northern New Jersey town of Woodcliff Lake. But when Bill struck it rich he wanted more. He bought a grandiose mansion in Upper Saddle River. It was built on two acres of land and contained 7,500 square feet of living space. It was so big that family members spoke to one another by intercom. Visiting friends got lost in its maze of corridors.
Richard Nixon lived around the corner. He would come down to the bottom of his driveway on Halloween and hand candy to trick-or-treaters through the gate.
Bill acquired a yacht, a Cadillac Seville, a Mercedes-Benz convertible—and the list went on. But they
were mere toys. The possession he cared about most was his multimillion-dollar vacation house at the Stratton Mountain Ski Resort in Vermont.
Bill was a skier, so he determined that the family would ski. And they would learn to ski well enough to please him. Every winter weekend he put his wife and his children in his Cadillac and hauled them up to Stratton Mountain, whether they liked it or not. Except for Andrew, they learned to like it.
To Bill, no offense was minor. For reasons no one ever understood—he didn’t like to talk about his own childhood in a second-generation Austrian-Jewish immigrant family—there was more vengeance than forgiveness in his heart. He had come to believe early on that a man did things for money, not for love, and that he had better do them right the first time. Someone had taught him that second chances were for sissies. Someone had taught him that the father set the standards and that it was the job of the sons to measure up without complaint. Someone had taught him that failure must be greeted with contempt. Elaine tried to shield the children from Bill’s anger, but the oldest, Andy, bore the brunt.
He started out as a bright little boy but grew into an angry, sullen teenager, almost as hard to live with as his father was. Rob would be in the living room with a girlfriend when Andy would come into the house. Rob would say hello. Andy would say, “Fuck you,” and walk into his bedroom and slam the door. His favorite song in high school was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” about a father who never had time for his son: I’m gonna be like you, Dad. / You know I’m gonna be like you…
There had been no family meeting at which Bill announced that he was stripping his hopes and dreams from Andy’s chest and pinning them on Rob’s instead, but by the time Rob entered high school everyone in the family had no doubt that this had occurred. Somehow, Rob shouldered the burden. His competitive instinct—primal in its force—drove him on.
In the classroom, however, Rob’s killer instinct slumbered. Bill blamed the school. He withdrew Rob from Pascack Hills and sent him to the Saddle River Day School for senior year. Rob improved his academic record at Saddle River, but his transcript still lacked the preternatural sheen that might have caught the eyes of Ivy League admissions officers. At Bill’s urging, he went to the University of Rochester to prepare for a career in engineering.