The third week brought two days of testimony from Connie, with details added by everyone from the sales clerk at Tequila Kola to the supervisor of the work crew that moved the carpet to the storeroom.
David Noh described his surreal phone conversation with Rob as the drugs from the milk shake began to take hold.
“After that,” one observer said, “it was Chinese New Year.” Between June 25 and July 29—as waves of violent thunderstorms punctuated weeks of stifling heat—the jury heard testimony from police officers, forensic scientists, toxicologists, lab technicians, and computer experts Yuen Shing-kit, See Kwong-tak, Ng Yuk-ying, Cheung Tseungsin, Chong Yam-hoi, Mak Chung-hung, Tam Chi-chung, Chan Ping-kong, Lun Tze-shan, Chan Kin-wah, Wong Koon-hung, Pang Chi-ming, Li Wai-sum, Cheung Chun-kit, Cheng Kok-choi, Yeung Hok-keung, and Lau Ming-fai.
Predictably, King tried to show that nobody had done anything right. The police had tricked Nancy into talking, they’d failed to secure the crime scene, they hadn’t taken notes, the lab technicians had been sloppy, the toxicology was suspect, the blood spatter analysis flawed, and so on.
In the O. J. Simpson case, Johnnie Cochran and Barry Scheck had shown how effective such a scorched-earth defense could be, but this was not the O. J. Simpson case, where black jurors mistrusted white police. This was Hong Kong, where Chinese jurors respected authority and were not likely to respond favorably to a gweilo lawyer’s attempt to denigrate the professionalism of their fellow citizens.
Although Nancy sat mute, hunched, and trembling during testimony, occasionally giving way to sobs, her demeanor was quite different during breaks. She was often seen inside a glass-walled conference room gesticulating and shouting at her legal team, leaving no doubt about who was in charge.
By mid-July, the defense strategy was clear: to make the jury find Rob so loathsome that in the end they’d give her a medal for having killed him. King used cross-examination to insinuate. Wasn’t it true that Rob had been violent? Wasn’t it true that he was prone to drunken rages? Hadn’t he physically abused his children? Wasn’t he addicted to cocaine? It may not have been true—and no witnesses offered confirmation—but that wasn’t the point. The idea was to plant seeds of doubt about Rob’s character and personality in the hope that flowers of revulsion might later bloom.
The technique was similar to that employed in a Spanish bullfight. First the picadores and banderilleros weaken the animal, then the matador finishes him off in a geyser of blood and gore. Nancy had already done it literally—she was sure she could do it metaphorically, too.
Her most promising breakthrough came with the appearance of prosecution computer expert Cheung Chun-kit. Chapman called him to testify about Nancy’s Internet searches for drugs that killed without leaving a trace. Cheung said he’d found evidence of the searches both on Nancy’s Sony VAIO laptop where they had originated and on Rob’s IBM ThinkPad, to which the spyware had sent them.
On cross-examination, however, King pointed out that the Kissels had also had two Dell desktop computers in the apartment: one for general use and one for the children. Cheung said he’d been told to focus on the laptops and that he “did not spend much time” examining the contents of the hard drives of the Dells.
That was unfortunate, King said. If he had, he might have found evidence of searches conducted on one of the Dell desktops between April 3 and April 5, 2003, when Nancy was already in Vermont with the children and when—presumably—only Rob would have had access to it.
As Rob was preparing for a three-day trip to Taiwan on April 8, the Dell hard drive recorded searches for “Mpeg sex,” “sex in Taiwan,” “hot male sex,” “anal,” “cocks,” “gay anal sex,” “bisexual,” “male ass,” “Taiwan escorts,” “Taiwan companions,” “gay sex or anal sex in Taiwan,” “hardcore gay bondage sex,” “free black gay porn,” “black gay male pictures,” “gay black men,” “black males,” “ebony men,” “married and lonely in Hong Kong,” “wife is a bitch,” and “used Porsches.”
That was on the Dell desktop. Then there was the ThinkPad. Although Cheung had found approximately seven thousand of Nancy’s e-mails transferred to the IBM ThinkPad by the eBlaster spyware, he had not located indications of searches conducted during May and June of 2003 for “twinks,” “actresses for hire in Taiwan,” “escorts in Taiwan,” “Paris girls for hire,” “Paris gay massage,” “Paris x-rated escorts,” “gay sex,” and “anal sex.”
It was explained to the jury that “twink” was a gay slang term used to denote an attractive, boyish-looking gay man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, slender and with little or no body hair, often blond, often but not necessarily Caucasian.
Bill stormed out of court at the first mention of deviant sex. But there was nowhere to hide from bad news. The day after Cheung finished testifying about Rob’s computer searches, the FBI arrested Andrew in Vermont. He was charged with falsifying mortgage documents in order to defraud banks in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut of at least $25 million and perhaps as much as $50 million. Federal prosecutors said he faced a prison sentence of twenty-five years. After posting a million dollars in bail, he was ordered confined to his house in Greenwich and made to wear an electronic surveillance device on his ankle. His lawyer, Philip Russell, called him “a sick man” and said he was “in extremis.” In Hong Kong, Bill told the press he’d seen it coming for years.
Sandy King introduced the baseball bat into evidence on July 28. He recalled Min to the stand to ask her if she recognized the bat as being the same one she’d often seen in the bedroom when she cleaned.
“I can’t be sure,” she answered in her native Ilokano language.
It didn’t matter. After having been secreted in Simon Clarke’s office for more than a year and a half, the baseball bat was now in evidence.
Sandy King had set the stage perfectly for Nancy.
31. NANCY’S TESTIMONY
NANCY TOOK THE STAND ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, August 1. She wore black, as she had from the start. Trembling, stooped, and tearful, her hair a dull brown, her dark eyes glazed behind schoolmarm’s glasses, she was the farthest possible cry from the grinning, effervescent blonde who’d posed for a photograph with George H. W. Bush less than two years before.
She’d had eight weeks to try to win the jury’s sympathy on appearance and demeanor. Now she could add words and tears. In the front row of the spectators’ gallery, Bill Kissel and Jane Chandler Kissel were sitting almost close enough to touch her. Her mother was not much farther away. The room was hot. The air was still. Nancy’s fate hung in the balance.
Alexander King’s questioning was gentle, deferential, and limned with regret as he coaxed his first answers from his client.
“I don’t know how to talk about these things,” she said.
She told the jury she’d gained forty pounds during her first pregnancy—her weight rising to 150 pounds—and when she didn’t lose it all as soon as Isabel was born, Rob told her she was no longer attractive to him and he couldn’t stand to look at her while making love. He’d begun to insist on anal sex, and when she refused he forced her. That had been the start of years of violent sodomy, she said.
She quivered and gasped and fixed her gaze on the floor. Not in all the years of her marriage, nor even after she’d killed Rob—in fact, not until her lawyers had discovered Rob’s Internet searches for sites related to anal sex—had Nancy so much as hinted to anyone that her husband had been sodomizing her against her will.
Of course, a terrified battered woman would not have spoken about such abuse—wasn’t that part of the syndrome? Nancy’s friends from Parkview and from the Hong Kong International School understood that, so surely the seven jurors would as well.
“Our marriage changed when we got to Hong Kong,” she said. “There was so much stress working for Goldman Sachs. He thrived on it. It’s what made him tick: the power of it all, succeeding. But the hours began to take their toll. It was literally twenty-four hours of having to be
awake. When the Hong Kong market closed, the New York market opened. They were at opposite ends of the globe. He’d always used cocaine to get through the hours, but now it got to be a lot more. And he would drink. Sometimes he’d stay up drinking all night. He was also taking painkillers for his back. He became a different person. He got rougher.”
She said the first time he hit her was in 1999, when she was seven months pregnant with Ethan. He’d wanted her to induce labor so he could be present for the birth before he left on a trip to South Korea.
“To induce labor was nothing to him. When I said no, he said I was disrespecting him and how hard he worked. He punched at me, but he hit the wall because I dodged. He came home with a cast on his hand the next day.”
King reminded her that Dr. Wu of Adventist Hospital had testified about treating Rob for a “boxer’s fracture” of the finger. “It was that night,” Nancy said. “And it happened again—the same argument the following week. The second time, he hit me in the face.”
After Ethan was born, she said, Rob became even more disgusted with her body. “From then on, it was predominantly oral sex for him, and anal sex. He’d be sitting at the end of the bed with the TV on and he wouldn’t let me walk past him. He’d start this game, toying with me, and he would say things to me, like he could do anything he wanted.”
“Were you agreeable to that, Mrs. Kissel?” King asked.
“No,” she said. Then she began crying so hard she couldn’t talk. Jane stood up and walked out of the courtroom.
Following a short recess, Nancy said, “After Ethan was born, Rob’s personality changed so much. It was a routine of him coming home, drinking, and sex. It made me feel nonexistent.” She said he would trap her between his legs and pull her hair. “He was just so angry. He wouldn’t even look at my face. Then he would throw me on the bed to finish. It would always be a struggle, because he’d try to make me lie on my stomach. Once, he tried flipping me over. I didn’t want it. He grabbed me by the hips, just twisting. I felt something pop.”
That was the first time he’d broken her ribs, she said. She’d gone to Adventist Hospital and bought a Velcro brace to protect them. “A couple of weeks later, he ripped the brace off and I ended up going to the hospital again. After that, I gave in more and more.” She said she often bled from the anus after being sodomized and had to throw out the sheets because she was ashamed to let Min see them.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, Mrs. Kissel?”
“You just don’t. You just don’t. It’s humiliating.”
Her tears brought the day to a close.
By Tuesday, it was apparent that Nancy would remain tearful and trembling throughout her testimony. She continued her account of Rob’s alleged violence. She described an incident at Whistler Mountain during the Christmas vacation of 2002. Rob was already angry with her for staying in the hotel room with Ethan instead of skiing. He said her conduct “embarrassed” him. On Christmas Eve, he wanted sex. She was wrapping presents and decorating a tree she had ordered for their split-level suite.
“He thought I was fussing too long,” she said. “So he grabbed me and pulled me upstairs, because he wanted what he wanted. And I let him. And then I went back downstairs and finished with the presents. That got him even angrier because he had told me not to waste any more time doing that. He said, ‘You’re not fucking listening to me! I told you not to fucking touch the tree and you did.’” Then, she said, he slammed her against a wall.
They also fought on the day after Christmas, she said. Rob again accused her of not listening to him. She told him to shut up and she waved her finger in his face. “So he hit me. And I fell down the flight of steps and hit my head on the bottom.”
She said things got so bad in the spring of 2003 that she came close to killing herself the night before Rob arrived in Vermont in May.
“After Connie and the children were asleep, I went into the garage and turned on the car engine. I don’t know how long I was in the car. I cried a lot. Then I got scared of leaving my children. So I turned off the engine and went back into the house.”
Rob’s visit created friction. “Everything bothered him. The way the children were sitting at the table, Isabel not eating her vegetables. He grabbed her and started shaking her and she said, ‘Daddy, you’re hurting me!’ but he wouldn’t let go. Finally, he went to the computer and printed out some photos of malnourished people and made her look at them, which she hated.”
There was another pause while Nancy cried.
As for Michael Del Priore, he’d been scarcely more than a shoulder to cry on. Being with him, she said, “was very easy, very comfortable. I could cry. I cried a lot. There were no questions, no ‘do this, do that.’ It was basically just letting me talk. It was the first time anybody ever stepped forward for me. In our little expatriate world, people look at you and see change, but they don’t really want to know. They’re more interested in what you’re wearing and how big your diamond ring is and your car.”
“Had you formed an intention to leave your husband?”
“No. I never thought about it. I was determined to work through things however they played out. There was no question in my mind that I was Mrs. Kissel. I had been for fifteen years. I was a banker’s wife. Vermont, of which Michael was part, was only an escape from my real world.”
Suicidal impulses returned. That was why she’d gone on the Internet to search for drugs that could kill without leaving a trace. They hadn’t been intended for Rob, but for herself.
From the gallery, Bill Kissel shook his head and muttered, as if scarcely able to believe her perfidy.
“I typed this information about ‘sleeping pills’ and ‘overdose’ for myself,” Nancy said. “I was pretty desperate, with everything that had happened, and not wanting to face what was going on in my marriage. So the ‘causing heart attack’ was something I thought about. If I was going to do something like this—taking pills—I wouldn’t want my children to be affected. I wouldn’t want them going through the knowledge of their mother committing suicide. I wouldn’t want them to ever know about it. To feel the loss of their mother caused by a heart attack was something I wanted to do for their protection. It was an out for me from being humiliated.”
She began to weep and Mr. Justice Lunn called a recess until the next day.
All seats in the courtroom had been taken since the first minute of Nancy’s testimony. By Wednesday, long lines stretched down the hallway. Filipina maids vied for places with lawyers, students, and bejeweled Parkview wives who, as one newspaper observed, “had come to see the downfall of one of their own.” Court officers were stationed in the hallway to keep order.
Nancy had laid the groundwork. She’d portrayed Rob as both a psychological and physical abuser—a drunken, vicious, coke-fueled sodomite, to be specific. Now she would have to explain how she had happened to kill him.
“Beginning to tremble,” “trembling uncontrollably,” “her voice trembling and barely audible,” “often tearful,” “shaking as she spoke,” “still shaking,” “speaking almost in a whisper,” “weeping”—as the English-language press described her the next day—Nancy continued her testimony.
She said their two marriage counseling sessions had triggered Rob’s worst behavior yet. After the first, he’d accused her of wasting his time and money by not listening to him when he spoke. He’d said he was going to teach her to “show more respect” and he’d sodomized her twice in especially violent fashion.
During the second counseling session, she had said, “I’m done. I want a divorce.” Rob had stormed out of the room and she hadn’t seen him again until he charged drunkenly into their bedroom at 2:00 a.m.
“He started yelling at me. He said, ‘Who do you think you are, asking for a divorce like that? You’ll never divorce me. If anyone’s doing the divorcing around here, it’ll be me!’ He wanted to make sure I was listening properly: he made the money, he called the shots. Not me. He wanted to make that underst
ood.” Then, she said, he anally raped her, “over and over again, saying how I needed to show respect and that he was in control.”
Nancy also wanted it clear that there had been nothing untoward about her hundreds of phone conversations with Del Priore in the weeks leading up to Rob’s death. “He gave me comfort on a daily basis,” she said, and that was that—at least until cross-examination.
As for the milk shake, nothing could have been more innocent. “Zoe and Leah wanted to have some ice cream. We all went to the kitchen. There were six or seven containers in the freezer, but there was just a little bit left in each, not enough to give them all an equal portion. So we dumped them in the blender to make milk shakes.”
She said that she and the two girls peeled and cut bananas, while Ethan crumbled cookies to make crumbs. Zoe wanted to make the shakes look “Halloweeny” so they added red food coloring. When the shakes were made, Zoe and Leah carried them into the living room to their fathers. After Andrew Tanzer and his daughter left, she said, Rob and Ethan came into the kitchen and drank what was left in the blender.
“It was a milk shake that I made for my children and for someone else’s child,” she said. “I wouldn’t harm my own children. I wouldn’t harm someone else’s child. I made the milk shake for my children in the afternoon. That’s all I remember.”
Even when she wasn’t weeping, Nancy was hard to hear because she spoke in such a soft voice. Repeatedly, both King and Mr. Justice Lunn asked her to talk louder. She would shake her head, sob, and tremble in reply.
“Later that afternoon, I was cleaning the kitchen,” she said. “He started yelling at me, asking if I was listening. Then he said, ‘I’ve filed for divorce and I’m taking the kids. It’s a done deal. I’ve talked to the lawyers.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘If you had listened, you would have heard what I said. I have filed for divorce and I am taking the kids. It’s a done deal.’ He said I wasn’t fit to take care of the kids, that I was sick.”