Banking, anal sex, cocaine and murder

Expatriate life in Hong Kong

If you have been living under a rock or reading too much of the South China Morning Post, you may not have heard of Nancy Kissel.

She was married to a managing director at Merrill Lynch named Robert Peter Kissel. They had the perfect Hong Kong expat couple’s life: loads of money, all the right friends, and a dream apartment.

Then one day in November 2003, Nancy Kissel gave her husband a drink laced with sedatives. When he fell asleep, she beat him to death with a golf club. She carefully wrapped up his body in plastic sheeting, rolled it up in a carpet, and then had the chutzpah to ask the building service company staff to help her move the grisly package down to the building’s basement, where she left it to rot. She was arrested a few days later, after her husband’s unexplained absence from work caused his colleagues to inform the police.

For some reason, the South China Morning Post has been very shy with its coverage of this sensational murder case, which may be because of sensitivity or good taste but which is more likely to be because of the newspaper’s reluctance, in the last few years, to report on anything of interest to its readers. The Chinese press in Hong Kong have had no qualms about reporting the case in graphic detail, as you can see from the illustration, taken from the Sun (太陽報) tabloid newspaper.

But yesterday’s testimony by Nancy Kissel at her trial was too hot to miss: even the South China Morning Post has published an article about it. According to Kissel, her husband’s cocaine and whisky addictions fueled an obsession with anal sex; if she refused he would beat her up.

There is no doubt that she killed him: it seems that she is just trying to prove that the homicide was justifiable. The affair makes one look anew at square-looking bankers in powder blue shirts.