Hong Kong ‘milkshake murderer’ Nancy Kissel loses final bid to appeal
Kissel lost her final bid to appeal against her conviction in Hong Kong for the 2003 murder of her banker husband
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 24 April, 2014, 12:45pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 24 April, 2014, 10:34pm
Julie Chu and Lana Lam, Agence France-Presse
Nancy Kissel arrives in court in 2011. Photo: SCMP
American housewife Nancy Kissel, dubbed the “milkshake murderer”, on Thursday lost her final bid to appeal against her conviction in Hong Kong for the 2003 murder of her banker husband.
The 49-year-old expatriate, serving a life sentence since 2005, was found guilty of drugging her husband Robert - a senior executive at US bank Merrill Lynch - with a sedative-laced strawberry drink before clubbing him to death with a lead ornament in their luxury home.
A panel of three judges on the city’s Court of Final Appeal rejected Kissel’s application - the end of a long legal road that began with her first conviction in 2005.
The panel of judges said they will give their reasons later, Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK reported.
Nancy Ann Kissel at the High Court in 2005. She has been serving a life sentence for murder since then. Photo: SCMP
Kissel has maintained she acted in self-defence against an abusive spouse.
“We dismiss this application,” presiding judge Robert Ribeiro said at the Court of Final Appeal as a frail-looking Kissel sat quietly in the dock behind bars.
She was then taken out of the court room on a stretcher.
Her defence team had told the court that Kissel suffered from depression and “had only killed the deceased in a frenzied attack provoked by threats and the deceased’s physical assault on her”.
Kissel’s trial gripped the city, shining a spotlight on Hong Kong’s elite expatriate community, and featuring sensational allegations of a heady mix of adultery, violence, spying, greed and enormous wealth.
The Kissels had moved to Hong Kong from New York in 1997, with Robert joining Merrill Lynch in 2000 from Goldman Sachs.
The 2005 trial heard that Kissel had an affair with a television repairman, Michael Del Priore, in the US state of Vermont, where she took her children during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak. When she returned to the city, she drugged her husband with a sedative-laced milkshake before bludgeoning him to death with a metal ornament.
The Michigan-born mother-of-three was first convicted of murder and handed a life sentence in 2005, but the Court of Final Appeal overturned the conviction in February 2010, citing legal errors, and ordered a fresh hearing.
She was convicted again in 2011 after the jury rejected her plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, after the court heard tales of infidelity, homosexuality, violence, sodomy and greed.
The defence had argued that she suffered from depression and was provoked into killing Robert after enduring years of sexual and physical abuse, and threats to take away their three young children.
Hong Kong media outside the luxury Hong Kong Parkview estate in Tai Tam in2003, where Nancy and Andrew Kissel lived. Photo: SCMP
Her journey from luxury flat to prison cell spawned at least two books and a television movie. The public was captivated by testimony during the 2005 trial that the banker had searched websites on gay pornography and sex services in Taiwan before a three-day trip there.
Media coverage intensified after Robert Kissel's real estate developer brother Andrew was found stabbed to death in 2006 at his Connecticut home, his hands and feet tied. The Kissels' three children also sued their mother that year for the wrongful death of their father.
An appeal against the second conviction was rejected in December last year, and her bid to overthrow that ruling went to the city’s highest court after an application was rebuffed in a lower court in January.
Kissel had admitted to killing her husband and offered to plead guilty to manslaughter.
At the 2005 trial, Kissel said she killed her husband, whom she married in 1989, in self-defence when he came at her with a baseball bat while she was carrying a heavy metal ornament.
She described him as an abusive and brutal man who frequently assaulted her and forced her to commit depraved sexual acts.
On the night he died, November 2, 2003, there had been a confrontation about divorce and custody of their children. She said the last thing she remembered was him coming at her with the baseball bat screaming, 'I'm going to kill you, you f****** b****'.
After killing her husband in their Tai Tam home, prosecutors accused Kissel of rolling up his body in a carpet and covering his head with plastic, leaving it in the bedroom for days before hiring workmen to carry it to a storeroom.
Prosecutors also argued that Kissel stood to gain up to US$18 million from the death of her wealthy husband, saying she planned to run away with Del Priore.
At Thursday's hearing, Barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC, representing Kissel, claimed the prosecution was wrong to address to the jury in the second trial saying that Kissel was not suffering from any psychiatric illness during the incident. He said the prosecution failed to provide any proof or evidence while making such suggestion.
He also said the trial judge had erred in directing the jury during the second trial.
Prosecutor David Perry QC responded that they told the jury that the defence evidence on whether Kissel suffered from mental illness was “unsatisfactory”.
The parents of Robert Kissel, Jane Clayton and Bill Kissel, on Thursday released a statement commenting on the court's decision:
"We miss Robert very much. He was a talented, upstanding father who loved his children and three beautiful children very much. He did not deserve to be maligned as his wife sought to do to justify her insatiable greed.
"To the Hong Kong legal system, we wish to express our especial thanks. The capable Judges, the two dedicated juries, the outstanding prosecutors and the fine police are a credit to be held aloft for the world to see. They were not fooled by Nancy Keeshin Kissel's fabrication of lies. Justice has been served and Nancy will have a long time to contemplate her affront to her family and the world.
"Jane and I would also like to thank our attorney in Hong Kong, Andrew Powner. His advice and support was valuable and very much cherished.
And lastly, we wish to thank all the fine people of Hong Kong with whom we had the good fortune to know. through a most trying time."
