|
Wife of slain HK banker admits to killing him
04 Aug 2005 09:02:28 GMT
Source: Reuters
|
HONG KONG, Aug 4 (Reuters) - The wife of high-flying Hong Kong-based investment banker Robert Kissel admitted in court on Thursday that she killed her husband but she made no move to change her plea of not guilty to murder. "Do you accept that you killed your husband?" prosecutor Peter Chapman asked Nancy Kissel at her trial in High Court. "Yes," she replied. Nancy Kissel, 41, told the court on Wednesday that she had struck her husband with a metal statue after he raped her and began hitting her repeatedly, but she said she had no recollection of what happened afterwards. "Do you accept that you used that ornament to inflict those five fatal wounds?" Chapman asked on Thursday. "Yes," she said. Robert Kissel, an American, was an investment banker working for Merrill Lynch. Earlier this week, Nancy Kissel told the court that she had suffered years of physical and sexual abuse by her husband who often flew into cocaine- and alcohol-fuelled rages. Kissel is accused of feeding her husband a milkshake laced with drugs on Nov. 2, 2003, before bludgeoning him to death. Police found her husband's body several days later in a storeroom that the couple rented in the luxury residential estate where they lived. How Kissel's defence planned to proceed was not clear. But the defence might argue that she acted while temporarily insane, which would give her the protection of "diminished responsibility," or that she acted in self-defence. Kissel told the court earlier that she had become so depressed with her marriage that she attempted suicide and had an affair with a TV repairman during a trip back to the United States. The case shocked Hong Kong's expatriate community. Wealthy, successful and popular, the Kissels were seen for years as a model couple. The prosecution said earlier that Robert Kissel had decided to divorce his wife after discovering the affair and was going to tell her on the night that he was slain. The trial is expected to last until late August. If found guilty of murder, Nancy Kissel could face life in prison.
|
|
|
