HK banker suspected wife weeks before his murder

HONG KONG - An American banker who prosecutors say was poisoned and clubbed to death by his wife suspected that she was plotting to kill him weeks before he died, according to the testimony of a family friend.

Robert Kissel, a high-flying Merrill Lynch banker in Hong Kong, had installed spy software on his wife's laptop in August 2003 and found that she had made searches with key words like "drugs" and "death", according to their friend Bryna O'Shea.

O'Shea's statements to police were read out in the High Court on Friday by prosecution lawyers. She did not appear herself.

Prosecutors have accused Nancy Kissel, 40, of feeding her husband a glass of strawberry milkshake laced with a cocktail of anti-depressants and hypnotic drugs before clubbing him to death on the night of November 2, 2003.

Nancy Kissel has denied the charges.

O'Shea said Robert Kissel confided in her about his marital problems on an almost daily basis in the months before he died. In one telephone call, O'Shea related, Kissel asked her: "Do you think she (Nancy) is trying to kill me?".

O'Shea never took that suspicion seriously but said Kissel had then told her to make sure his three children were well taken care of if anything happened to him.

Kissel's murder and his wife's arrest shocked Hong Kong's expatriate community and the case has riveted the city since the trial opened in early June.

The trial is expected to last until the third week of August. If convicted, Nancy Kissel could face life in prison.

The couple sought the help of a marriage counsellor in September 2003 and things seemed to improve until the next month, when Kissel found that Nancy was keeping a secret mobile phone.

O'Shea said the marriage deteriorated rapidly after that discovery because it gave Kissel reason to believe Nancy was still in touch with her TV repairman lover in the United States.

Prosecutors said she apparently met the repairman when she returned to the US with their three children to escape the SARS epidemic earlier in 2003.

"She was always in touch with Mike (the lover). There were phone calls, emails ... (In October) Rob was thinking about divorce because he thought she was constantly lying to him," O'Shea said in her testimony to police.

Police found Kissel's body on November 6, 2003, in a storeroom that the couple rented in the luxury residential estate where they lived with their children.

Prosecutors said Nancy disposed of the body by wrapping it in a carpet and then asked four workmen on the estate to take it to the storeroom.

- REUTERS