An American woman accused of drugging her wealthy banker husband with a sedative-laced milkshake before bludgeoning him to death with a metal statue admitted killing him to a Hong Kong court yesterday.
Nancy Ann Kissel, 41, denies murdering Robert Kissel, 40, and dumping his body among old carpets in a store room.
But she stunned Hong Kong's Court of First Instance with her admission that she killed him during a fight as he tried to force her into having sex.
Under cross-examination in the third day of her defense testimony Kissel was asked by prosecutor Peter Chapman if she accepted that she killed her husband in the fight.
"Yes," she answered, to gasps from the public gallery.
Kissel is accused of murdering the senior Merrill Lynch investment banker in November 2003.
His body was discovered when removal men were called to empty the store room at their luxury high-rise apartment in an exclusive housing complex.
The court was earlier told that tests showed her husband's stomach contained a cocktail of sedatives that were also found in remains of a strawberry milkshake Kissel had given her husband on the night of his murder.
A neighbor who also drank some of the drink told the court he'd felt drowsy later that day.
In the ninth week of the trial, Kissel said she had been routinely beaten and forced to have anal or oral sex against her will by a husband who was often high on cocaine or alcohol.
She had told the court that on the night the banker was killed he told her he had filed for divorce after discovering she had been having an affair with a TV repair man.
She said he beat her with a baseball bat after they began quarrelling. She fought back and grabbed the ornament. She said she remembered only hitting him.
Her admission is the latest sensational revelation in a case that has captured the imagination of this city, where murders are few.
The case has captivated the public with its lurid exposure of life inside the normally closed world of the city's wealthy expatriates, a sector of the community often considered by locals as above the law.
Dressed entirely in black, the diminutive Kissel told the court she had been subjected to often violent sexual ordeals since the family had moved to Hong Kong with her husband's job in 1997.
"When we arrived things sexually changed between us," she said. "His personality changed. Moving to Hong Kong put a lot of pressure on our family."
She said he began forcing her into sexual positions that were "not normal" and also he became sexually aggressive.
When asked if her husband used force in the attacks, Kissel replied "yes"; she had suffered broken ribs and bruising, which she explained away to doctors as the results of rugby injuries.
Kissel said she had endured the attacks because she believed it was her husband's way of getting over the stress of his job.
She said her husband had been a habitual cocaine user since before they met on vacation in the Caribbean in the mid-1980s.
He had been expelled from school as a youngster for dealing in drugs, she said, and she regularly gave him money for cocaine during their courtship while he was a student and she worked in restaurants in New York City.
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