Hong Kong — An American housewife on trial in Hong Kong for allegedly killing her banker husband said Tuesday the man was an abusive cocaine user and that she sought refuge in an affair just months before his death in 2003.
The widely watched trial, which began about two months ago, entered a new phase as the accused, Nancy Ann Kissel, took the stand to testify in the bizarre case commonly known as the “milkshake murder.”
The woman is accused of giving her husband Robert Kissel a strawberry milkshake laced with the potent date-rape drug Rohypnol before beating him to death with a metal ornament in their Hong Kong luxury apartment on Nov. 2, 2003. His body was found wrapped in a rug in storage space rented by the couple.
Ms. Kissel, who has pleaded innocent, took the stand for the first time Monday and described her husband -- an investment banker at Merrill Lynch -- as a violent man.
Nancy Kissel leaves Hong Kong's High Court on Tuesday. (Vincent Yu/AP)
She said Tuesday that her husband knocked her off the top of a staircase after an argument while on vacation in Canada and was rough during sexual intercourse, often wanting to perform sodomy on her.
“He's just extremely forceful,” the woman told a seven-member jury at Hong Kong's High Court.
She also alleged he violently shook the couple's daughter once. She said he was so upset by the incident that she put sleeping pills into her husband's drinks to calm him down.
Ms. Kissel, 41, characterized her husband as detached and leading an extreme lifestyle that involved long hours, hard drinking and cocaine use.
She said her husband in 2002 trained for a trekking competition in the wee hours of the morning despite working long hours. By early 2003, the couple barely spoke and communicated by notes and e-mail, she said.
The defendant said she found refuge during her summers alone with the children in the United States, where she had an affair with an electrician who worked on the couple's vacation house in Vermont in the summer of 2003.
Ms. Kissel called her lover, Michael Del Priore, a reliable confidant who was a great source of emotional support.
“It was very easy, very comfortable. I could cry. I cried a lot,” Ms. Kissel said.
She said Mr. Del Priore accompanied her to get a tattoo of the Chinese characters of her children's birth years, a move that her husband had objected.
Ms. Kissel said she brought letters from her lover back to Hong Kong and hid them in her closet, but her husband discovered them and ripped them to pieces.
However, despite the tension in her marriage, Ms. Kissel said she was determined to “work through things in my marriage however they played out” and never thought about leaving her husband.
If convicted, Ms. Kissel faces up to life in prison.
