The woman accused of killing her investment banker husband in one of Hong Kong's most sensational crimes in the past decade, took responsibility for her crime Tuesday and then broke down wailing.

"I take responsibility. I know that in my head I never meant to harm him," sobbed Nancy Kissel, 46.

"I wanted to help him. I'm responsible for what happened," she told the packed courtroom.

Then she broke down, in a fit of shaking, sobbing and wailing, all the while repeating, "I don't remember anything."

Kissel's outburst was triggered when prosecutor David Perry asked if she had felt unsettled by the killing.

Kissel answered she felt unsettled at the fact that she mixed dangerous drugs into the milkshake in front of her kids.

Kissel was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 for bludgeoning her husband to death with a metal statuette after drugging him with a sedative-laced milkshake on Nov 3, 2003.

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

Kissel has pleaded guilty to manslaughter, though the prosecution has rejected the plea and is pursing a murder conviction.

Breaking down nearly every time her two daughters were mentioned, Kissel's testimony during her three-day cross-examination by the prosecution was markedly different from her testimony days before when questioned by her counsel, with her memory becoming erratic under prosecutor Perry's probing.

Perry also queried why Kissel had written to her husband in Hong Kong in June from their multi-million dollar Vermont summer home where she was sheltering from the SARS epidemic that the reason they were having serious issues was owing to incidents during a 2002 skiing vacation in Whistler instead of the sexual abuse which she alleges.

In her husband Robert's reply, the Merrill Lynch executive appealed for her not to shut him out of the family, apologizing for spending so much time away because of workload and asking her to stop "strategic exclusion" of him.

Perry noted the reconciliatory and supportive email was written at a time when Robert was aware Kissel was having an affair with a Vermont electrician, and was not the portrait of the violence-prone alcoholic which Kissel's defense team painted.

Kissel's half-brother Brooks Keeshan, 31, testified he noticed a marked difference in his half-sister's behavior after she moved to Hong Kong in 1998, describing her as isolated, energy-lacking and lonely while her relationship with Robert became increasingly rocky, adding he thought Robert a caring and warm person who "didn't like to lose".

China Daily

(HK Edition 03/02/2011 page1)