HONG KONG’S expatriate community is riveted by the daily courtroom revelations of an American woman accused of murdering her banker husband in a case involving sex, adultery, drugged milkshakes and high finance.

Nancy Kissel, 41, wept in court yesterday as she said that she had hit her husband with a metal statue only after he had threatened to kill her. “He was going to kill me,” she yelled repeatedly from the witness stand. A day earlier she had said that she still loved her husband, the father of her three children, despite what she described as his abuse and demands for anal sex.

Mrs Kissel, a member of Hong Kong’s wealthy foreign community is accused of giving her husband, Robert, an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, a strawberry milkshake spiked with sedatives before she beat him to death in their bedroom in a luxury residential complex on November 2, 2003.

She admitted last week that she had killed her 40-year-old husband, originally from New York, but denies drugging him and has pleaded not guilty to murder. Mr Kissel’s body was found four days after his death, bundled in an expensive carpet in a storage room near the apartment complex.

Mrs Kissel testified yesterday that she had tried to help her husband when his forehead was bleeding from her first defensive blow but he had picked up a baseball bat and threatened to kill her. She fended off his attacks with the statue, she said.

Peter Chapman, for the prosecution, accused Mrs Kissel of fabricating the events, saying that she had been able to strike five accurate blows to Mr Kissel’s head because he had been drugged. “You have rendered him defenceless because you have drugged him,” Mr Chapman said.

“No, no. That’s not what happened,” Mrs Kissel replied. “We had a fight and he used that bat. He was telling me he was going to kill me with that bat. He kept repeating it and I defended myself from him.”

Mrs Kissel had said earlier that her husband had regularly physically and sexually abused her, leading her to consider suicide. She said that she was so depressed that she had an affair with a television repairman during an extended stay with her children in the United States to escape a SARS epidemic in 2003.

The prosecution has argued that Mr Kissel had planned on the night that he was killed to tell her he wanted a divorce.

The prosecution repeatedly questioned why Mrs Kissel never told anyone of the abuses that she said she had suffered. She said that the expatriate life did not permit her to do so and she had done everything to hide her unhappiness. “It was something I was very ashamed of and am still ashamed of,” she said.

The couple married in the US in 1989 and arrived in Hong Kong in 1997 with the children. Mrs Kissel worked as a volunteer at the Hong Kong International School, where the children studied, and lived in the expensive Parkview residential complex on a hill overlooking the city and its harbour.

The trial is expected to last until late this month.

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