Convicted murderer Nancy Kissel testified Thursday at her retrial, recounting details of life with her cocaine-addled and abusive husband, her extramarital affair and attempts at suicide.

Kissel, 46, set out these as the events leading up to the slaying of her husband, Merrill Lynch executive Robert Kissel, on Nov 2, 2003.

Speaking in hushed, halting and at times inaudible tones on the second day of her testimony, she told the nine-member jury that her husband, who worked around the clock, used cocaine "just like aspirin sometimes" to keep awake.

He was also addicted to Scotch whisky, she said.

Kissel recalled her husband struck her on Christmas Eve 2002 for not arranging Christmas presents beneath their tree properly.

Her marriage, which she described as "spiraling down", came under further stress in 2003, after the family fled to the United States following the SARS outbreak.

Kissel said suicidal feelings came over her after physical exhaustion from the relocation and her husband's brutal sexual practices.

Once during that time, she said, she sat in a car with the motor running inside a sealed garage, in an attempt to commit suicide, although later she stopped herself because she did not want to abandon her children.

Kissel broke down and repeatedly apologized to her family members sitting in the gallery after she recounted her husband locked himself and their then nine-year-old daughter Elaine away after Elaine failed to make her bed.

"I couldn't do anything to help her," she said, speaking almost incomprehensibly, implying her husband had "touched" their daughter in an inappropriate way.

Jane Clayton, sister of the deceased and guardian of Kissel's three children, stormed out of the court room following the suggestion.

One ray of light for Nancy Kissel during those days, she said, was an electrician who was working in their vacation home in Vermont and eventually developed an intimate relationship with her, while Robert was away working.

Calling the electrician a soft-spoken man, she said that "he was the recipient of many years of built-up emotions", and that "he touched me emotionally before intimately".

She said that her husband discovered her infidelity in July 2003.

By then, she said, Robert had forbidden her to contact her own father.

In response to the Web search history of "medications causing heart attacks" recovered from the family computer, Kissel admitted she initiated it.

But she said it was not because she wanted to harm her husband but because she was contemplating suicide again, adding she had consumed a bottle of sleeping pills, but forced herself to vomit them back up when she thought of her kids.

Kissel was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005, after prosecutors accused her of bludgeoning her husband to death with a metal statuette after drugging him with a sedative-laced milkshake.

She won a retrial on Feb 11, 2010, when the Court of Final Appeal ruled that her original trial was biased.

Her defense lawyer Edward Fitzgerald argued she acted because she was depressed and provoked after suffering years of abuse.

Prosecutors have countered, saying that Kissel wanted her husband dead in order to inherit his HK$140 million estate.

A manslaughter conviction may mean a sentence of eight to 12 years. Kissel has already served more than six years in prison.

China Daily

(HK Edition 02/25/2011 page1)