As the lawyer began to introduce himself, Ira held up a hand. “We’ve all had a great loss,” he said. “And I think this is a family matter. With all respect, we don’t need lawyers here. I’m sure we can work this out ourselves.”
Bill and Andrew huddled with the lawyer. “All right,” Andrew said. “We’ll try it your way.” The lawyer left.
The meeting lasted for an hour and a half and was conducted in businesslike fashion. So much so that it seemed to Ryan as if they were discussing a corporate takeover, not the lives of Isabel, Zoe, and Ethan, three shell-shocked children who didn’t know why they’d lost their father and didn’t know when they’d see their mother and who didn’t know what continent they’d be on by the end of the week.
The continent was about the only thing they agreed on. Nancy had written a note to Simon Clarke saying that she wanted Ira to have custody of the children. Clarke had passed the note on to Ira. Producing it, Ira said he thought that the mother’s wishes should be respected, despite the extraordinary circumstances. Bill’s face grew so red and veins pulsed so hard in his temples that more than one person at the table feared that he was about to suffer either a heart attack or a stroke.
Ira said he was prepared to move the children into the house he and his wife shared in Winnetka and get them into local schools as soon as possible. He said they could be ready to leave within a week. Bill reacted as if Ira had said he was planning to sell the children into white slavery.
Bill wanted the children to go to Andrew and Hayley. As Rob’s brother, Bill said, Andrew had a stronger claim on the children than did the father of the evil woman who had killed him. In addition, Bill said, Andrew and Hayley were themselves wealthy enough so that the children would not suffer any loss of lifestyle. Although Ira was certainly well off, he was not in the multi-multimillionaire league of Andrew, whose real estate empire now stretched from Jersey City to New Haven.
Andrew and Hayley lived in Greenwich, not in some suburb of Chicago. Bill conceded that Winnetka did seem to have adequate schools and a per capita income he approved of, but it was still a part of the wasteland that he considered the Midwest to be, and he was goddamned if he was going to have his grandchildren raised in a wasteland. With Andrew and Hayley, the children would be closer to Stratton Mountain. And Andrew and Hayley had two daughters of their own who were about the same ages as Isabel and Zoe.
What Bill did not say, but what was by far the most important item on his unspoken agenda, was that Andrew and Hayley would protect the children from any attempt by Ira to portray their mother as anything other than a crazed and vicious murderess.
Likewise, Ira’s strongest argument was one he couldn’t make: he truly loved the children, while Andrew, he strongly suspected, was an alcoholic cokehead who loved no one but himself.
Meanwhile, Andrew had his own reasons for wanting custody: the children came with a $20 million trust fund attached. Assuming Nancy was convicted of Rob’s murder—and it seemed obvious to Andrew that she would be—the children would be beneficiaries of Rob’s estate. In the meantime, whoever had custody could bill the estate for all expenses involved in caring for them. This struck Andrew as an extraordinary opportunity.
The meeting ended disagreeably, with no resolution. First thing Monday morning, Bill went to Rob’s Merrill Lynch office, where he was permitted to take the children’s passports from Rob’s desk drawer. Without their passports, Ira couldn’t take them anywhere.
The same morning, Simon Clarke and Ryan went to the Parkview apartment to gather items Nancy said she wanted. Most important, she said, were her laptop and her jewelry. Clarke was amazed that the police were not controlling access to the apartment. Anyone with a key could get inside. One of Nancy’s Parkview friends had a key and had brought several other Parkview wives for a tour of the crime scene the day before. He was even more amazed that the police had not seized Nancy’s laptop. Didn’t they care what she’d been saying in her e-mails? Didn’t they care who she’d been e-mailing? How about Web sites she’d visited? What about searches? Suppose she’d been keeping a diary on her laptop. Even if it contained nothing incriminating, it would have offered insight into her state of mind in the days and weeks leading up to the killing. Now the police would never know. He sensed they didn’t care. No doubt they considered the case open and shut.
As soon as Ryan opened the door to the apartment, he wished he hadn’t. A stink of rot still filled the air. Even five days after Rob’s body had been moved, the stench lingered. Nonetheless, the two of them walked from room to room, gathering as many of the items on Nancy’s list as they could find. They saved the bedroom—where the smell was strongest—for last.
Three dressers stood against a wall on the left side of the bedroom. Two tall ones at either end were separated by a wide, shorter dresser in the middle. Clarke spotted a baseball bat on the floor behind the wide dresser. He got down on his hands and knees and reached under the dresser to retrieve it.
“I’m surprised the police didn’t take this,” he said. He put it, handle end up, in a shopping bag filled with other items from Nancy’s list.
Nancy was scheduled to appear in Eastern Magistrates’ Court on Monday, November 10, to offer a plea in response to the charge of murder. But she began to shake and she fell mute and she was too weak even to get into her wheelchair in the hospital, so Alexander King informed the magistrate that she was “medically unfit” and unable to appear. Her arraignment was rescheduled for Friday.
The police searched Rob’s office and his Porsche. In the car, they found life insurance policies with a value of $6.75 million, naming Nancy as beneficiary. In his office, they found the surveillance reports and videos that Frank Shea had sent. They also found several love letters to Nancy from Michael Del Priore in a drawer.
Inspector See began to consider the question of motive.
Police also viewed pictures from the Parkview security department’s closed-circuit television cameras. One set showed Nancy Kissel getting out of her Mercedes in the parking lot the previous Wednesday and hoisting a six-foot-long green carpet on her shoulder and carrying it with no apparent difficulty into the lobby of tower 17. It appeared to be the same rug that had been laid over the massively bloodstained section of carpet the police had found at the foot of the bed. It was the second rug she had carried into the apartment in two days. See began to consider the question of how badly hurt Nancy had really been by the ferocious beating she’d said she’d suffered at the hands of her husband.
The police also did a further search of the apartment. On Wednesday, November 12, they found a handbag of Nancy’s tucked away behind a cushion. Inside were bottles of five different prescription medications. They took the bottles to their laboratory for analysis. When the results came back, See compared them to the toxicology report he’d just received that disclosed the presence of five different hypnotic and sedative drugs in Robert Kissel’s stomach. The results matched. The drugs in Rob’s stomach were the same as those contained in five of the six prescription bottles obtained by Nancy in the weeks leading up to Rob’s death.
See began to consider the question of means. He’d been puzzled by Rob’s lack of resistance to Nancy’s attack. Now he saw a possible answer: only hours before he was killed, Rob had ingested five different prescription drugs, any one of which, in sufficient dose, could have rendered him unconscious. But why would he do that? Why would he have taken the five sedatives that his wife had obtained by prescription? Inspector See didn’t know, but he was confident that he’d find out. All in the fullness of time.
Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 12, the police said they had completed their work at the apartment. Connie and Min spent the day cleaning it. The next day, the children returned. The only rule was that they were not allowed to go into the master bedroom. That door stayed closed. None of the children asked why.
In Nancy’s absence, Ryan and Connie acted as surrogate parents. Connie, of course, had served in that role
for several years, especially with Ethan. It was new to Ryan, but he took to it instinctively. He didn’t think it was yet time for long, searching talks with the children about their feelings. His goal was to get them out of Hong Kong without subjecting them to further trauma. He was one future physician who’d managed not to leave his compassion behind in medical school.
When they were not in school, he kept them as physically active as possible and let them watch television with their meals. Television had been used to numb them all their lives. Ryan didn’t approve of that, but he found himself grateful for the effects of it now. For the moment, the less time they spent thinking and wondering, the better.
The police changed visitation procedures at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. No longer could visitors sit in Nancy’s cell, or just outside it, and talk to her. All visits—supervised by the matron—were to take place in a conference room.
Ryan went to see Nancy almost every day, but he often found Parkview neighbors with her when he arrived. A small clique of expat wives, drawn by her sudden notoriety, had suddenly become Nancy’s best friends. During his first few visits, Nancy asked about the children. She said how much she missed them. Any reference to them made her cry. But after a few days, she stopped asking. Ryan didn’t know why. It almost seemed to him that she’d decided she had more important things—such as her own fate—to worry about.
Ira and Bill were still squabbling about custody, but they were running out of time. The children would have to be out of Hong Kong by November 21 because that was the day Connie’s work visa expired. Domestic helpers were not permitted to remain in the territory for more than two weeks after their employment had been terminated. The clock had started ticking for both Connie and Min at the moment of Nancy’s arrest. Min would no longer be needed, but neither Ira nor Andrew and Hayley could contemplate raising the children without Connie.
On the afternoon of Thursday, November 13, as part of the packing process, Min was cleaning out Ethan’s bedroom closet. Suddenly, she screamed. Ryan ran in from the living room. Min was frantically pointing at the closet. Min’s English was imperfect even when she hadn’t had a shock, but Ryan soon understood that she’d found a black plastic garbage bag in the back of Ethan’s closet that didn’t belong there.
Ryan called Simon Clarke. The solicitor called the police. They came to collect yet another bag of potential evidence that they had overlooked. When the bag was opened at Western Division headquarters it was found to contain wads of bloodstained tissues and a bloody glove, as well as the blood-soaked bottom piece that had been sheared from the bedspread before the police had first arrived at the scene.
The implication was clear: whatever detritus Nancy had not disposed of in the packing cartons, she’d tried to hide inside her children’s closets.
On Friday, November 14, Alexander King appeared again in Eastern Magistrates’ Court to say that Nancy remained “medically unfit” and could not be present. The magistrate continued the case until the following Friday, November 21.
Nancy’s level of fitness, both physical and psychological, seemed remarkably dependent on circumstance. In the first days following November 2, she’d not only been able to buy a carpet and tote it home from the store, but to roll up a 165-pound body inside it and then drag it from one room of her apartment to another. Yet since her arrest she’d seemed scarcely able to walk. Doctors found no physical reason for this disability.
She had seemed unable to speak one moment, yet had been able to scream an hour later, such as when she’d seen the ward she was being taken to at Ruttonjee Hospital. She had to blink to communicate with her solicitor, yet she could tell her half-brother that someone in Vermont must be worried about her. She could converse freely with Parkview friends, and with her lawyer, but she couldn’t appear in court to offer a plea.
There was no indication that she’d ever read up on the psychological condition that Freud termed “secondary gain”—an advantage derived from an illness or injury, such as release from responsibility or avoidance of a difficult situation—but she seemed to know instinctively how to achieve it. Secondary gain was often associated with hysteria. From the moment the police found the key to the storeroom, Nancy had seemed hysterical, perhaps gripped by conversion hysteria.
Conversion hysteria, is described by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as “a psychiatric condition in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict are expressed through physical symptoms.” For example: the sudden onset of an inability to walk or talk, or violent, uncontrollable shaking.
The secondary gain associated with Nancy’s symptoms was to postpone the moment when she would have to confront the consequences of her actions in a court of law. The custodial ward of Queen Elizabeth Hospital must have seemed far less threatening to her than a public appearance in Eastern District Magistrates’ Court, or anything else that was waiting down the line.
The question of where the children would go was not resolved until November 15, the day before Ira flew out of Hong Kong. Bill continued to insist—to demand—that the children go to Greenwich to live with Andrew and Hayley. But he’d never sought Hayley’s opinion.
Eventually, she gave it anyway. She said she thought the children would be better off with Ira. “I like him. The kids obviously love him and he loves them. They have a great relationship. I like his wife. They have a lot of extended family in Chicago. Ira’s got the energy to handle this. They’ve got a big house in Winnetka where the schools are great.” Besides, Hayley had two children of her own to occupy her time and energy, and her relationship with Andrew was—to put it mildly—strained. In Greenwich, there would be no guarantee of either tranquillity or stability.
For the moment, Bill was too grief-stricken to fight. He met Ira in the lobby of the Marriott on the evening of November 15 and signed a document that granted Ira temporary custody. Ira flew out of Hong Kong the next day. The children flew to Chicago with Ryan and Connie on November 19. Their father’s body had already been shipped to New York for burial in the Kissel family plot in New Jersey.
Only Nancy stayed behind.
PART FOUR
THE CONSEQUENCES OF TRUTH
Pretrial
27. THE CHILDREN
AS FOR THE CHILDREN: HAVING HAD THE ONLY LIFE THEY’D ever known yanked violently out from under them, in late November they were tossed head over heels halfway around the world to land on Grandpa Ira’s doorstep in Winnetka, Illinois. Two weeks later, they were shuffled off to a Holiday Inn in Cincinnati.
From the day they arrived in Winnetka, Ira knew he and his wife wouldn’t be able to raise them, not even with Connie’s help. His love for the children was abundant, but he was sixty-one years old and traumatized. He’d been under such stress in Hong Kong that he simply hadn’t thought the matter through. He’d also failed to anticipate his wife’s reaction. Sickened by what Nancy had done, Ira’s wife wanted no part of her children, and she’d made that emphatically clear to Ira while he was still in Hong Kong. He’d hoped her reaction would prove temporary. It did not.
Even so, Ira was not about to hand the children over to the Kissels. He knew the Kissels would poison the children’s minds against their mother. Ryan, who was now twenty-four, volunteered to raise them in Cincinnati. He said he’d take a leave of absence from medical school. With the help of both Connie and his mother—Ira’s second wife, Joyce—he was confident that he could provide them with a safe and stable environment.
Fearing that Bill Kissel would seek a court order to keep the children in Illinois until a full-scale custody battle could be launched, Ira took them to Cincinnati, where, as he made arrangements for their future, he stayed with them and Connie in the Holiday Inn. On the spot, he also bought a house that he felt would make a suitable home. It was a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood. While it was being refurbished—a matter of weeks—the children and Connie moved into the basement of Ryan’s apartment. On December 7, Ira wrote the Kissels a letter:
&n
bsp; I feel we have a clear vision of the best scenario for the children long term. We all agree that they need to be in an ongoing loving environment and that [my wife] and I cannot physically and mentally meet the demands of being the care providers for three young children…
It is remarkable how well Isabel, Zoe and Ethan have adjusted to the situation. Because of the continuity of Connie and the care of Ryan, the children are doing Great…
Ryan has shown over the past month that he is certainly, with the aid of Connie, able to manage the children’s every day needs (school, doctors, playmates, homework, bedtime stories to Ethan, getting up at night with Ethan, etc….
Some life events require sound judgments, some require emotion, some experience, some love, and some merely faith. And some life experiences are so extraordinary that they require all of the above and much more.
We have thought long and hard using our heads and our hearts concerning this matter, and although we feel this plan is lacking in some experience and requires a whole lot of faith, we feel as though being with Ryan has thus far been very successful for the children and should continue in Cincinnati.
There is no question that these three little children have an incredible guardian angel that has thus far kept them safe and enabled them to preserve their childhood throughout this whole life-changing ordeal.
Cincinnati will ensure that the works of the angels will not be in vain, but instead continue as these three remarkable children mature and grow in their understanding of the world, their family, and themselves.
It is our hope that this decision will in no way be a source of conflict between the Kissel and the Keeshin families. Now more than ever this is the time for support, love, and committing ourselves to the very best for Isabel, Zoe and Ethan…