Nancy Kissel, dubbed the 'milkshake murderer', has lost her final appeal against her conviction for the 2003 murder of her husband.
"There's nothing more we can do", Kissel’s lawyer Colin Cohen said, after presiding judge Robert Ribeiro dismissed the case at Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal.
The Michigan-born mother of three was handed a life sentence in 2005 for killing her Merrill Lynch banker husband by lacing a strawberry drink with a sedative and clubbing him to death with an ornament in their home in Tai Tam, Hong Kong. Kissel then reportedly rolled up his body in a carpet and left it in a bedroom for days before hiring removal men to take the corpse to a storeroom.
Kissel's defence team maintained that she was acting in self-defence from an abusive husband, claiming she "had only killed the deceased in a frenzied attack provoked by threats and the deceased’s physical assault on her”. The defence team also argued that the 50 year old suffers from depression.
However prosecutors claimed that Kissel stood to gain 112 million yuan ($18 million) from the death of her husband, and had plans to run away with a TV repairman with whom she was having an affair with in the US.
According to SCMP, the case "gripped the former British colony, shining a spotlight on Hong Kong’s elite expatriate community, and featuring sensational allegations of a heady mix of adultery, violence, spying, greed and enormous wealth".
Jurors in 2005 and 2011 had previously unanimously convicted her of the crime.
[Image via Flickr]
0 User Comments