A defence counsel for Nancy Kissel accused a senior police inspector of 'playing cat-and-mouse' with him yesterday after the officer repeatedly denied having tried to trick the murder suspect by pretending to be investigating a case of assault and a missing person when questioning her at her Parkview flat.
Alexander King SC argued in the Court of First Instance that police already had reasonable grounds to suspect his client had killed her banker husband, Robert Peter Kissel, when they rang the doorbell of her luxury Tai Tam apartment after 10pm on November 6, 2003.
Mr King said Kissel had never been cautioned or told of her right to silence during the officers' visit, which followed her report to Aberdeen police that her husband had assaulted her and a missing person report filed by Robert Kissel's colleague, David Noh, to Western District police the same day.
See Kwok-tak, the officer in charge of the case, said suspicions that Kissel had killed her husband were 'not that great'.
Mr King asked why, if the senior inspector was investigating an assault case, he had not paid any attention to Kissel's description in the master bedroom about how her husband had beaten her up.
Mr See said it was partly because Chief Inspector Yuen Shing-kit, who was also in the bedroom, was listening to the defendant. The second reason was his attention was drawn to the 'abnormal' situation of the room, which he said was in disarray, with clothes and boxes everywhere and many travel bags in the bathtub of the adjacent en-suite bathroom.
Mr King asked the prosecution witness 'whether the little suspicion you had about a murder, upon your entry to the bedroom, ignited into a very big and real suspicion that you are now investigating a murder?'
