00:00:00
Two brothers, both living the good life, but here's the strange part, both died the same terrible way.
00:00:10
It's like a horror movie. What are the chances brothers would both be murdered by different people almost three years and 8,000 miles apart?
00:00:19
As soon as they opened the door, they knew there was a dead body in there. One had marriage troubles.
00:00:25
She wanted a loving husband and she had that and that fell away and then she had nothing.
00:00:30
The other money troubles. How much did he sting the building for? $4.7 million. But who had killed them and why?
00:00:37
The courtroom was dead silent. Everyone's jaws dropped. Money and murder mixed in a deadly concussion.
00:00:47
Thanks for joining us. I'm Lester Holt. You may have heard of the Kissel brothers.
00:00:52
Their story has been told in books, magazines, and a movie. In a terrible coincidence, both brothers were murdered, but not in a single crime.
00:01:01
They were killed at different times, in different places, and by different people.
00:01:06
Here's Dennis Murphy. They were known in their old neighborhood as the Kissel brothers.
00:01:14
Two New Jersey boys raised in the burbs, born to achieve. And did they ever. Robert, by working his way to the heights of international banking.
00:01:22
Andrew by simply working it. To be honest with you, I didn't and frankly couldn't imagine
00:01:29
that someone in our building would steal from us. Oceans and aspirations would separate the two.
00:01:36
Robert, his wife Nancy and three children, would live the jet-lagged but privileged lives of expats in Hong Kong.
00:01:42
What you find out is the husbands are never at home, even the ones that don't travel.
00:01:47
Andrew and his family would find themselves ensconced in the luxury of Greenwich, Connecticut.
00:01:52
their wealth a house of cards two brothers whose lives played out in monopoly game board fashion
00:01:58
and whose deaths looked like an all-too-real round of clue robert clubbed with a lead statue
00:02:05
andrew stabbed in the chest their bloodied corpses found in basements thousands of miles away
00:02:11
and years apart it's unbelievable it's it's just it's like out of a movie and really it's like a
00:02:20
It's like a horror movie. Tonight, more on the strange deaths of the Kissel brothers,
00:02:26
a final chapter in the killing of Andrew, and in Hong Kong after seven years in prison,
00:02:32
Nancy Kissel goes on trial for a second time. She had moments when she couldn't move on
00:02:37
and was crying and just stopped. The whole courtroom stopped. Will the latest verdict mean freedom for Nancy Kissel?
00:02:47
I mean, there was a gasp in the courtroom. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
00:02:54
Let's go back in time to where this story really begins. In that New Jersey suburb with Danny Williams, a boyhood friend who knew both brothers back when.
00:03:03
You know, Andrew and Robert were two different people. Rob, he recalled, as the better athlete, the friendlier of the pair, outgoing.
00:03:11
Andrew was a different cat altogether. With people, he was a little bit shy, I think, more shy than Robert.
00:03:18
Did Andy have to work a little harder at being liked or likable than Rob? Did it come more easily to Rob?
00:03:24
I think that's exactly right. I think it did come easily for Rob. He was more approachable.
00:03:29
Different as they were in temperament, they shared a gift for math. I remember going to a Yankee game, for example, with Robert,
00:03:37
and he'd bring a pad and he'd write all the stats down, who's got the runs batted in and all that.
00:03:43
and Andy would do the same thing. There wasn't much doubt that the brothers would both turn to careers in business.
00:03:50
Andy was first out of the box with a retail car accessory shop. It was a bust. I think he wanted it so bad, but the customers weren't coming in, you know.
00:03:59
I think it lasted maybe a year and a half. Always the more cautious younger brother, Rob set out on a more conventional path to success,
00:04:07
college, then business school. I think Rob was more studious and understood that it took a great deal of hard work to succeed,
00:04:15
and I think Andrew was in a rush. College buddy Michael Paradise says he was struck by Rob Kissel's methodical approach to everything.
00:04:23
Studies, sports, even dating. He was attractive, he was funny, he was smart, he had a great future ahead of him.
00:04:31
Athletic. You can go down the list and just check them off. And the woman who would become his fiancée was a fun-loving restaurant manager from New York City, Nancy Keishin.
00:04:43
Rob's college friend was there at the beginning, in 1987, when Rob and Nancy, both in their 20s, met and made sparks during a Club Med vacation in the Caribbean.
00:04:53
She was artistic. She was funny. She was friendly. She was outgoing. And she seemed to love Rob incredibly.
00:05:04
In just a few years, the handsome young couple was married and starting a family in the big city.
00:05:10
Rob, with his knack for tracking baseball stats, was a natural at the real thing, Wall Street banking.
00:05:16
By the mid-1990s, he was well into a career that would make him millions. But New York neighbor Roz Lichter says Rob Kissel never lost his down-to-earth style.
00:05:24
He wasn't flamboyant. I think what he was interested in was making that career, You know, going up that ladder as an investment banker.
00:05:34
If anything, says Roz, it was the missus who relished the perks of the job. Rob's wife Nancy was really into money.
00:05:42
Disproportionately interested. Loved money. Loved money. And wasn't afraid of flaunting it either.
00:05:47
The New York neighbor recalls one particularly catty remark from the banker's wife.
00:05:52
One day she was wearing this great beaver coat So I said Nancy this is a great coat And she said it is a great coat but you never be able to afford it Is that what she said Yeah And I looked and I thought what a strange thing to say to somebody
00:06:08
You're giving her a compliment and trying to get a little upside the head. Right.
00:06:11
But if Nancy could be fast with a buck and a barb, her friend says conservative Rob was also quick to wag his finger at her.
00:06:20
Liz LaCause remembers one incident between the couple. We would just be in their neighborhood and, you know, ring the buzzer to see if they were home,
00:06:27
and we'd go up and walk in on them, and it was obvious that they had just had an argument.
00:06:33
Obvious how? The tension. You can feel the tension. And Nancy would kind of look at me and roll her eyes and say, money.
00:06:39
She had a lot of clothes. She had a lot of shoes. She had a lot of nice stuff. Another friend, Hilary Richard, agrees that Nancy liked to strut her husband's success.
00:06:49
But she says Nancy also liked to share her good fortune, buying unexpected gifts for others.
00:06:55
Though Richard does admit that every now and then, a sudden unpleasant streak would show itself.
00:07:00
She was one of those people who had the ability to basically cut someone out of their lives
00:07:07
completely, entirely, absolutely as if they no longer existed without what appeared to me to be much of a reason whatsoever.
00:07:16
But was that on-off switch a simple quirk or a shadow of something more troubling?
00:07:23
It depends whom you ask. One thing is certain, though. Given time and just the right circumstances, Nancy Kissel, a fun-loving live wire,
00:07:32
would give all who thought they knew her the shock of their lives. The friends and family of Andrew Kissel were also in for a shock.
00:07:43
How much did he sting the building for? $4.7 million. When Deadly Concoction continues.
00:08:00
For a banker looking to score, Hong Kong was the place to be in 1997. Southeast Asia's currencies were in free fall,
00:08:11
and cash-strapped industries were eager to sell off assets for nickels on the dollar.
00:08:15
Rob Kissel's bosses at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, wanted him there to pick up the fallen fruit.
00:08:23
Rob was just excited. This was an opportunity, so it was like he was just excited about getting the offer.
00:08:30
Rob, Nancy, and their two children, a three-year-old and an infant, packed up their stuff, said goodbye to friends and family.
00:08:38
The ardent New Yorkers were about to become American expatriates, and wealthy ones at that.
00:08:43
It was goodbye New York, hello Hong Kong. And their new home, a sprawling $20,000 a month apartment in the luxurious Parkview Towers.
00:08:53
The two of them fit right into the expat lifestyle here, where the banker husbands like Rob
00:08:57
earn millions of dollars a year but work 16 hours a day. And the banker wives like Nancy fill their hours with children and charity work.
00:09:06
The Kissels had begun their great life adventure. There was so much Hong Kong to explore.
00:09:15
A clamorous city of 7 million people with business on its mind. But it was also Asia, culturally alien for some Westerners.
00:09:25
After a long day, the Kissels could retreat to Parkview Towers, which was like America under glass.
00:09:30
It really is like Disney World. It's kept green areas, pools, waterfalls, restaurants, tennis, driving range.
00:09:41
So it has all the resort amenities. It does. The tragedy is you can actually live at Parkview and not have to leave.
00:09:49
American Joss Gistron lived at Parkview at the time. She never met the Kissels there, but understands the initial giddiness they would have felt in this shiny new world of limos,
00:09:58
world-class shopping, and endless pampering. She also knows the darker side of the adventure.
00:10:05
What you find out is the husbands are never at home, even the ones that don't travel.
00:10:10
They leave early in the morning and come home very late at night. So the woman is isolated in many cases.
00:10:15
Yes, the woman and the children are isolated. But friends say Nancy Kissel seemed to make the best of it.
00:10:21
She played tennis, she started a business, she had friends, she enjoyed it. Close friend Hilary Richard vacationed with Nancy and Rob during those years.
00:10:32
If the move halfway around the world had put stress on the Kissel marriage, she says Nancy didn't let on.
00:10:38
Quite the opposite. She would speak on at great length about how wonderful and passionate her relationship with Rob remained.
00:10:47
She talked about life in bed sometimes, right? She did, absolutely. And things were okay.
00:10:52
Things were great. She and Rob were a hot ticket, huh? That's the way she portrayed it, yeah.
00:10:57
But every now and then, the veneer would slip just a bit. Former neighbor Roz Lichter saw the Kissels on a home leave visit in 2000,
00:11:05
little more than two years into their time in Hong Kong, and sensed something had changed.
00:11:10
I couldn't connect to Rob. He was working really hard. He was tired. That would be the best thing. I didn't get a sense of joy when I saw him.
00:11:20
No wonder she saw fatigue. The two- to three-year Hong Kong stint was turning into a multi-year slog of meetings, deals, and travel.
00:11:30
Along the way, in 2000, Merrill Lynch wooed Rob away from Goldman Sachs, making him its top man in Southeast Asia.
00:11:38
Rob, the golden son, was doing the Kissel family proud. And he wasn't the only one.
00:11:44
Brother Andrew was on a roll with his investment firm, buying and managing commercial properties around New York.
00:11:50
Andrew now married to wife Haley a former ski champion and stock analyst had bought a co apartment on New York Upper East Side and made it the showplace of the building I just knew him to be somebody who was involved in real estate transactions
00:12:06
Fellow apartment owner Peter Chamberlain says neighbors were so taken by young Mr. Kissel with a golden touch
00:12:12
that they tapped him to be their building's treasurer. He could break into their mutual piggy bank with no questions asked.
00:12:19
Is that unusual? Yes, that is highly improper. As a fellow board member, though, Chamberlain could eyeball some of the books.
00:12:26
And a little quick math told him the numbers there weren't adding up. He says he confronted the other board members and Andrew Kissel.
00:12:34
A face-off he lost. What did you think at the end of that little bit of accounting?
00:12:40
What did you think was going on? To be honest with you, I didn't and frankly couldn't imagine that someone in our building would steal from us.
00:12:49
But someone was stealing with both hands. Eventually, the rest of the board caught on and demanded answers from its treasurer.
00:12:56
But if Kissel was a financial whiz, it seems he was also a master of the con. How much did he sting the building for?
00:13:03
The number that gets floated around the paper is $4.7 million. You might think that explosive discovery would land Treasurer Kissel in a New York City jail.
00:13:13
But that didn't happen. Somehow, from somewhere, he came up with the cash and paid back those missing millions.
00:13:21
In return, he was allowed to leave unpunished. There are stories that people witnessed him on the cameras sliding out the service elevator down to the basement
00:13:32
and running down 74th Street to 2nd Avenue when the whole building became aware of the problems.
00:13:40
Skulking away. Yeah. And where does a disgraced millionaire skulk off to? Why, Greenwich, Connecticut, of course, home to big money.
00:13:49
But instead of contemplating his misdeeds, in 2003, Andrew Kissel was dreaming up more schemes,
00:13:57
playing more dirty monopoly with other people's money. He wasn't the only Kissel in crisis mode either.
00:14:03
Halfway around the world in Hong Kong, his younger brother was worrying about a killer pandemic and his family's safety.
00:14:10
Sadly, it seems Rob Kissel was sweating over the wrong assassin. I said, Rob, I think Nancy's trying to kill you.
00:14:18
when Dateline continues. In the spring of 2003, Andrew Kissel, lucky to be only spanked by the apartment neighbors he'd swindled,
00:14:37
continued buying up commercial and residential properties all over wealthy Connecticut.
00:14:42
It was about then that worrying news was coming out of Asia. The airborne killer, SARS, had put that region on high alert, including Hong Kong, where Rob and his family lived.
00:14:53
There was no question Rob had to get Nancy and the now three kids out of Asia. So he sent them to the Kissel family ski house in Stratton, Vermont.
00:15:02
It seemed the natural safe haven. Rob, always the dutiful breadwinner, elected to stay in Hong Kong, one of those fateful decisions.
00:15:10
Rob Kissel first approached me June of 2003. Frank Shea is a former New York City police detective turned private investigator.
00:15:18
During that separation from his family, Rob Kissel got that funny feeling. The one that tells you your spouse is doing something she shouldn't.
00:15:27
He wanted the confirmation. He was pretty convinced it was going on, but he wanted the evidence.
00:15:34
He hired Shea's investigators to surveil his wife at the Vermont Ski Chalet. Shea called Rob in Hong Kong to report what they were seeing in real time.
00:15:43
This gentleman arrived in his van and parked on a dirt road and snuck into the house.
00:15:48
I told Rob what was going on. He said, same time, same time, ongoing as we're talking.
00:15:53
That gentleman was Michael Del Priore, a local TV stereo installer. On the phone, Chase S. Kissel took the news stoically, hung up and immediately called his wife.
00:16:05
Minutes later, there was a stir in the Vermont house. The mail came out of the house, got in his van and drove off.
00:16:12
So Rob called me back at my house, and he told me that he'd spoken to Nancy. He didn't let her know that the house was being watched.
00:16:18
He just said, Nancy, don't do anything stupid. We have the children. It seemed she'd been chastened.
00:16:24
Nancy quickly returned to her husband in Hong Kong, presumably to work on the marriage.
00:16:29
But any hope that Frank Shea had for the couple was wiped away by late summer 2003
00:16:34
when he got a call from his client, Rob. The banker was telling the detective something unsettling.
00:16:40
he would come home and have a two-finger scotch, but the scotch was making him feel much different than he normally felt.
00:16:49
It would make him feel woozy, disoriented, not something he was used to. The former cop's instinct kicked in.
00:16:56
Shea urged Rob, someone he considered now a friend, to rush a sample of the scotch to a lab for testing.
00:17:03
Shea realized his friend might not do it, so he decided to do something extraordinary.
00:17:07
He'd pay Rob Kissel a visit at the exclusive China Club in Hong Kong to spell it out.
00:17:13
I sat down with Rob Kissel and I looked him right across the table at the China Club and I said,
00:17:17
Rob, I think Nancy's trying to kill you. How do you react to that kind of thing?
00:17:22
The marriage may be on the rocks, but she's killing me? He took in my statement.
00:17:28
He didn't say that he bought it 100%, but he really was concerned about his safety.
00:17:34
Still, the urgency of it all seemed lost on Rob Before he knew it, it was Halloween weekend
00:17:40
The end of one month, the beginning of another Rob Kissel never did send that sample out for testing
00:17:47
But he had made a decision He was convinced that his marriage had broken down And he was going to ask his wife for a divorce
00:17:54
In fact friends of the couple say they intended to talk about the split On that Sunday in November We know Rob Kissel spent the day with his three kids he was crazy about At one point his daughter gave him a pink milkshake mixed up by her mom
00:18:09
A secret recipe, she called it, in the spirit of Halloween. It seemed at the time a cute gesture, but not that significant.
00:18:17
He had to have had so much on his mind that afternoon. The impending divorce, the possible loss of his children.
00:18:23
And on top of it all, a critical conference call at home later that evening. It was so important that a colleague phoned him to talk about strategy for the meeting.
00:18:33
Hong Kong reporter Albert Wong says the colleague thought Rob sounded as though he were on another planet.
00:18:39
He was just bizarre. Groggy, out of it, not making sense. Maybe stress was finally taking its toll on Rob Kissel.
00:18:48
Or maybe something else was afoot. maybe the goblins of Halloween had one more trick to play.
00:18:56
Coming up, did a wife's secret recipe milkshake lead to another secret hidden in the basement?
00:19:03
As soon as they opened the door, they knew there was a dead body in there. When deadly concoction continues.
00:19:21
Feng Shui For thousands of years, a great many Chinese have believed there's a life force that flows around us like wind and water.
00:19:35
Interrupted at your peril. Take one of the most prominent skyscrapers on the Hong Kong skyline, the Bank of China.
00:19:46
Very bad feng shui, people will tell you, because the building, with its sharp edges like glass daggers,
00:19:52
restricts the life flow inside. Bad luck comes to all within and near it, whisper the believers.
00:19:59
It's not clear if Robert Kissel cared a fig for feng shui, but he was focused on the Bank of China.
00:20:05
In 2003, this was a huge market. We're talking about billions of U.S. dollars. Albert Wong was a reporter in Hong Kong at the time.
00:20:14
And it was fiercely competed with, especially amongst Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, all the big ones.
00:20:22
On the first Sunday in November 2003, Halloween weekend, a close friend and colleague of Rob's called to discuss an important conference call on the Bank of China deal later that night.
00:20:32
He said Kissel sounded sleepy and out of sorts. Completely on the... Not making sense.
00:20:36
Yeah, exactly. At first, the friend didn't make much of it. But when Kissel missed the conference call that night and was a no-show at the office the next day, the friend called Nancy Kissel.
00:20:48
She told him she and Rob were dealing with family issues. But as days passed, the friend suspected something more sinister at play and filed a missing persons report.
00:21:00
Police inspectors later knocked on Mrs. Kissel's door. She let them in and explained her husband had walked out on her after a fight.
00:21:07
They don't suspect anything until they go into the bedroom. And he says that it's a gut feeling just from experience.
00:21:16
Meanwhile, another team of inspectors was investigating reports of a strange smell coming from the Kissel storage unit.
00:21:23
The police eventually asked Mrs. Kissel for the keys. After some hesitation, she handed them over.
00:21:29
As soon as they opened the door, the smell was so overwhelming they knew straight away there was a dead body in there.
00:21:35
They'd found the missing husband. Right. 40-year-old Robert Kissel had been rolled inside a carpet, padded with pillows and towels to contain the stench.
00:21:46
Within hours, his wife was under arrest. The city of dazzling lights was lit up even brighter by the juiciest story to hit Hong Kong in years.
00:21:55
Nancy Kissel, fashionable wife of an expat millionaire banker, charged with his murder.
00:22:01
In the backseat of chauffeured limos and over cappuccinos, the expat community savored each new morsel of the investigation.
00:22:09
The body, found stuffed inside a carpet, whispers about a drugged milkshake. It was just a feast of speculation about the final days of Nancy and Robert Kissel.
00:22:20
And yet it would take nearly two years before Nancy Kissel would stand trial for the death of her husband.
00:22:26
When she finally did, it would be Hong Kong's courtroom drama of the year. The prosecution outlining the case against Nancy Kissel in classic strokes.
00:22:36
A calculating wife in love with another man, hungry for her husband's millions, unwilling to put up with a messy divorce.
00:22:44
Before she killed him, prosecutors said, Nancy Kissel had trolled the Internet, researching drugs to poison her husband.
00:22:51
Right from the start, they say it was a cold-blooded killing. Simple as that. Prosecutors also laid out the last hours of Rob Kissel in grisly detail.
00:23:00
They said Nancy knew full well her husband was about to ask for a divorce, so she launched a preemptive strike.
00:23:08
She blended a pharmacy of drugs, including the substance Rohypnol, into a pink-colored milkshake and gave it to one of her daughters to serve to daddy.
00:23:17
This is known as date rape drug in the States. Is that what we're talking about here?
00:23:21
Yes, exactly. Knocks you out and you can't remember details. Exactly. Prosecutors said that hours after drinking the shake, Rob Kissel got into his pajamas,
00:23:30
staggered toward his bed and collapsed, unconscious. Then said the prosecutor, Nancy Pounce, a Leaden family heirloom in her hand.
00:23:39
She took up this ornament. It was a heavy ornament. Bludgeoned him five times. Each one could have been fatal.
00:23:46
What happened next, prosecutors said, was a hasty and botched cover-up. She told her domestic helpers don't bother to clean up the room
00:23:54
while she continued changing the linen, changing the rugs, and then eventually wrapped
00:24:00
up in the rug, tying it up and ordering removal men to take it to a storeroom. As bizarre as the state's presentation was, it paled against what was to come.
00:24:10
The defense started its case with a dramatic star witness. It was Nancy Kissel's turn to tell her story in her own words.
00:24:17
She took the stand, steadying herself on a railing as she teetered towards the witness chair.
00:24:23
Then, in just a whisper of a voice, she turned the tables and put her dead husband Rob on trial.
00:24:29
She described for the court in minute detail scenes from what she said was an abusive, perverted marriage.
00:24:35
How at night her husband did a Jekyll and Hyde, peeling off his conservative skin to snort coke and drink scotch till he was smashed.
00:24:44
How he allegedly forced her into humiliating, rough sex. Her self-esteem was probably absolutely nothing.
00:24:51
Liz Lacause says her friend was crying out for help, finding some temporary solace with a lover in Vermont.
00:24:57
She wanted a loving husband, and she had that. And that fell away, and then she had nothing.
00:25:03
But for all her sordid testimony, Nancy Kissel's memory of her husband's death was spotty at best.
00:25:10
She denied drugging his milkshake, but remembered acting in self-defense, her husband threatening her.
00:25:16
Striking him five times with a lead statue, though, that was a complete blur. He tried to pick a fight by mentioning divorce.
00:25:23
He says, supposedly, I'm taking the kids, I'm going. And he's holding a baseball bat.
00:25:30
And then eventually, through a lot of shouting, she gets dragged into the bedroom.
00:25:35
Violent fight is underway. Right. And she goes blank. On cross-examination, the prosecutor cut bluntly to the chase.
00:25:42
Mrs. Kissel, there's just one thing we have to get over and done with. You do, of course, accept you killed your husband.
00:25:49
And she said yes. Gasps in the courtroom, huh? Right. Gasps in the courtroom. In the end, after three months of trial, the jury didn't buy Nancy's claims of abuse or her argument of self-defense.
00:26:02
Its unanimous verdict, guilty. Nancy Kissel would spend the rest of her life in a Chinese prison.
00:26:09
Rob's friends in New York couldn't spare her much sympathy. The legacy that she leaves her children is she murdered their father and said he was a terrible person.
00:26:19
Those children were sent to live with their Uncle Andrew in his Connecticut mansion,
00:26:24
where everyone hoped their healing could begin. But by then, he may have been too preoccupied with something else.
00:26:31
There was yet another storm heading towards the Kissel family. It was Shakespearean, almost biblical, what was about to happen to the surviving brother.
00:26:40
Surviving, but not for very long. Separated by almost three years and 8,000 miles, a second Kissel brother is murdered.
00:26:50
The body of Andrew Michael Kissel was found dead within his residence at Tendary Road.
00:26:56
When Dateline continues. by the spring of 2005 nearly two years after the murder of his younger brother rob
00:27:12
andrew kissel was in a funk friend and theater producer brian howey said not even a festive
00:27:18
booze cruise on kissel's yacht could cheer him up you know there were parts of the trip where
00:27:23
Andrew would be crying. And so you could tell he was deeply troubled and saddened.
00:27:29
Everyone assumed his grief was over the family's great tragedy. Rob, killed by his wife, the children
00:27:35
left behind. But maybe the tears were for himself. It seems Andrew's crooked Monopoly game was
00:27:43
catching up with him. He was about to draw the go directly to jail card. As his family was sitting
00:27:49
through a traumatic murder trial in Hong Kong, Andrew Kissel was making headlines back home.
00:27:55
Swindling his apartment neighbors in Manhattan was just a taste of what he'd been up to,
00:27:58
according to federal authorities. In the summer of 2005, they arrested him, charging him with defrauding banks in a massive loan scheme.
00:28:07
If convicted of all charges, Andrew Kissel could have spent the rest of his life in a federal
00:28:12
slammer not a rosy prospect for the guardian of his late brother three children who were heirs to Rob estate estimated at about million And there was another worry for those children behind the stately walls of Kissel Manor
00:28:28
War had been declared. Andrew and his wife Haley were splitting up in ugly fashion.
00:28:34
Emails obtained by Dateline show Haley venting her spleen to her husband's sister, Jane Kissel Clayton.
00:28:40
I just hate him, she writes. He will never be a good, responsible person. It goes on to say,
00:28:47
Do you know last night in bed I could actually see myself pummeling him to death
00:28:51
and just enjoying the sensation of each and every shot? That's just one of the emails.
00:28:57
Michael Colisano was the court-appointed lawyer for Rob and Nancy Kissel's children.
00:29:02
There was a pattern of behavior there that clearly indicated a very stressful home
00:29:07
and that clearly indicated to, I think, any reasoned person that the interests of the children weren't served by being in that home.
00:29:16
Andrew's sister Jane agreed. She petitioned for and was granted custody of the three children.
00:29:21
She went so far as to make Andrew and Haley's feud a matter of public record. Andrew, in retaliation, left a message on his sister's answering machine.
00:29:31
Jane, it's your ex-brother. You're famous. You're on the front page of the New York Times.
00:29:35
You should get it. You quote it. and we are going to bury you, James. But Kissel was in no position to be threatening anyone.
00:29:43
He eventually cut a deal with federal prosecutors that included prison time. In the meantime, he was home under house arrest,
00:29:51
ticking off the days watching TV with an ankle bracelet. And I would hear, good, good, he's happy he's home.
00:29:57
He's resigned to his fate. Problem was, fate wasn't resigned to Andrew Kissel's plan.
00:30:04
In April, days before he was due in federal court to confess his crimes, Karma made a house call.
00:30:11
Andrew Kissel was alone in the Greenwich Mansion. His wife Haley and their two kids had moved out that Friday, forced to leave after Andrew stopped paying rent.
00:30:21
Movers were coming to clear out the rest of the furniture after the weekend. But when they arrived early Monday morning, April 3, 2006, they made a ghastly discovery in the basement.
00:30:32
The body of Andrew Michael Kissel, who was found dead within his residence at Tendary Road.
00:30:39
According to police, whoever murdered Andrew Kissel had pulled his shirt over his head and stabbed him multiple times.
00:30:47
A second Kissel brother, dead, victim of foul play. He was 46 years old. For a while, it seemed police were intent on quickly nabbing a suspect.
00:30:57
There was even an amateur detective theory floated that had a weird appealing logic to it, that Andrew Kissel hired someone to do him in.
00:31:06
Even his friend Brian Howey says Kissel loved his own children, two daughters, enough to pull off one last con, insurance fraud, a policy that would pay off for murder, but not suicide.
00:31:18
Because if there was insurance money involved or whatever the circumstances, he loved those children.
00:31:22
And if he was going away for a significant amount of time, you know, money mattered in his world.
00:31:30
So he wanted to see that they were taken care of. But instead of a high profile investigation, there was silence.
00:31:36
For a time, police weren't saying much of anything about Andrew Kissel, though others were.
00:31:41
The chilling coincidence of two brothers killed several years apart was too eerie for the rest of the world to ignore.
00:31:48
The lives and deaths of Andrew and Rob spawned articles and books and were turned into a TV movie, The Two Mr. Kissels.
00:31:57
The trouble was, the Kissel saga was far more complicated and bizarre than even Hollywood could imagine.
00:32:03
And it was far from over. In 2008, police arrested Andrew Kissel's chauffeur, Carlos Trujillo.
00:32:11
Carlos, did you kill Andrew Kissel? And his cousin, Leonard Trujillo. Both men insisted they did not kill the real estate developer.
00:32:19
But Leonard pleaded guilty to manslaughter and conspiracy to commit murder. In March of 2011, Carlos, the driver, pleaded guilty to attempted murder under something called the Alfred Doctrine.
00:32:31
It means he recognizes the state has enough evidence for a jury to convict him even though he maintains his innocence Still unanswered did Andrew Kissel in fact pay to have someone kill him
00:32:43
The mystery may never be solved, and this sad tale of two brothers may never be over.
00:32:50
Half a world away, the Hong Kong justice system was having second thoughts about that first Kissel case.
00:32:56
In a move that stunned many people, the Court of Final Appeal overturned Nancy Kissel's murder conviction,
00:33:02
saying her 2005 trial had been flawed. Her supporters were on hand for the decision.
00:33:07
She's elated. She's elated. Hong Kong was about to give Nancy Kissel a new trial
00:33:13
and another chance to tell a jury about Robert Kissel, about their marriage, and her version of what happened that terrible night at Parkview Towers.
00:33:24
Nancy Kissel on the stand, a courtroom on edge. She completely just was screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs.
00:33:35
The courtroom was dead silent. Everyone's jaws dropped. When Deadly Concoction continues.
00:33:43
Nancy Kisson, a wealthy banker's wife, beams healthy and vibrant out of old photographs.
00:33:59
These days, on the rare occasion the camera catches her, it's hard to find even a trace of the woman who was.
00:34:06
She's very, very thin, about 84 pounds. She looks about 5'5", 5'6 to me. So that's obviously a very dangerous weight for a woman of that height.
00:34:16
Deborah Mao was a reporter for Bloomberg News following the Kissel saga. Her hair used to be blonde.
00:34:23
Now she's a brunette. I don't believe she used to wear glasses, and now she's almost never seen without her glasses.
00:34:30
It may be hard for many people to sympathize. After all, Nancy Kissel admitted killing the man she once loved.
00:34:36
And yet, she and her supporters believe her 2005 trial, which condemned her to life in a 7x7 foot Chinese cell, had been unfair.
00:34:46
Primarily because some hearsay evidence they thought had been introduced greatly prejudiced the jurors against Nancy Kissel.
00:34:54
And then in 2010, something remarkable happened. Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal agreed with Nancy Kissel.
00:35:01
The justices overturned her conviction to the delight of family and friends. I think justice has been served.
00:35:10
And the justices ordered a new trial. It began in January of 2011 with officers leading the frail defendant into court.
00:35:19
And it soon became clear to reporters, like Frances Moriarty, then of radio television Hong Kong,
00:35:24
that Nancy Kissel's faltering appearance mirrored something more troubling. Most of the time, she was just sort of sitting, rocking like this in her chair,
00:35:35
wrapped up in a shawl, you know, reading her Bible. When the judge finally asked how she pleaded, Nancy seemed out of it.
00:35:43
And she stood there looking like a deer in the headlights. She just wasn't moving or whatever, and said, I don't understand, I don't understand.
00:35:52
After prodding from her lawyers, she pleaded guilty, not to murder, but to manslaughter, a lesser charge.
00:35:59
The prosecution promptly rejected her plea. It wanted jurors to see Nancy as the calculating wife who wanted everything except a messy divorce.
00:36:08
The prosecution's case has always been, you know, she intended to kill him. The prosecution said Nancy was guilty of nothing less than cold-blooded murder.
00:36:19
It resurrected the gory details from the first trial. The drug milkshake, the lead statue, the bloody death.
00:36:26
This case is emotionally unsettling. It's disturbing for reporters who've heard it for the first time.
00:36:33
It's disturbing for reporters who've heard it for the fifth time. It's a disturbing case.
00:36:40
In her first trial, Nancy's lawyers had argued that she'd killed Rob in self-defense.
00:36:44
This time around, they claimed something called diminished responsibility. Through psychiatric experts they tried to show that Nancy was a battered woman The argument was she was in the throes of a major depression the night she killed her husband As she listened to the testimony Nancy would sometimes break out in tears
00:37:03
Sometimes audibly, sometimes just sort of to herself. And she's surrounded by three corrections officers
00:37:11
who are constantly, you know, either holding her hand or rubbing her shoulders or, you know, just trying to keep her calm.
00:37:18
But tears wouldn't be enough to convince the jury. To do that, Nancy herself would have to take the stand.
00:37:26
Over the course of five days, she retold her story of abuse at the hands of Rob Kissel.
00:37:31
When the prosecutor challenged her testimony, Nancy Kissel lost it. She completely just was screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs.
00:37:43
And it seemed like she was having a flashback. She was pointing at the floor saying, he's there, he's there.
00:37:50
He wouldn't stop. The courtroom was dead silent. Everyone's jaws dropped. After almost two months of testimony that dissected the state of Nancy Kissel's mind on that terrible night,
00:38:04
both sides rested their cases. Jurors now had two options. They could find Nancy guilty of murder,
00:38:11
or if they believed she'd been mentally damaged when she killed Rob Kissel, they could find her guilty of the lesser charge, manslaughter.
00:38:18
In that case, the judge could take into account the time she'd already served and, in effect, let her walk out of the courtroom a free woman.
00:38:26
After ten and a half hours of deliberations, the jury returned with its verdict.
00:38:31
And the judge says, is it unanimous? And they say, yes, it's unanimous. And the judge says, what is it?
00:38:41
For the second time in more than five years, a Hong Kong jury found Nancy Kissel guilty of murder.
00:38:48
There was a gasp in the courtroom, mainly from family and supporters, and people who may have thought after hearing the evidence that it was going to be manslaughter.
00:38:59
And with the same verdict came the same sentence. Life in prison for Nancy Kissel.
00:39:04
Afterwards, her mother spoke to NBC News. I think for the moment she is probably somewhat relieved that this ordeal is over.
00:39:19
Nancy has since tried and failed to get her most recent conviction overturned. In 2021, a court also denied her request to appeal her sentence.
00:39:29
The fact that she's been found guilty of murder doesn't amount to a complete story.
00:39:37
we'll never know the truth of this case. It just won't be known. Even if we did, it certainly wouldn't satisfy the bigger question here,
00:39:49
the one about Robert and Andrew. How is it that two brothers, so different in so many important ways,
00:39:56
could both end up discovered in basements in such grisly fashion? The childhood friend from New Jersey doesn't know.
00:40:03
One brother, quite a successful guy. Right. And there's the other guy who wants to have the house and the arts and all that, but run a Ponzi scheme to keep it going.
00:40:11
And you know, the sad thing is that he didn't have to do it that way. He was a great salesman. He could have done it on a legitimate basis.
00:40:19
And maybe he wanted it fast. Maybe he needed it fast. Some people would say the old adage, money is the root of all evil.
00:40:28
Right. Maybe the pursuit of money is the root of all evil. It's natural for us to want to take the sting out of chaos, murder, cruel fates with bumper sticker wisdom.
00:40:45
Well, maybe the Chinese who've been at the proverb business for centuries have the one that applies to the Brothers Kissel.
00:40:54
It goes, good luck seldom comes in pairs, but bad things never walk alone. That's all for now.
00:41:04
I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, thanks for joining us.