Appeal over HK banker's killing

The "milkshake murder" trial of Nancy Kissel, who killed her investment banker husband in Hong Kong, reopened today as she began an eight-day appeal against the verdict.

Kissel drugged her husband, Robert Kissel, a senior securities trader at Merrill Lynch, with a cocktail of sedatives, including the date-rape drug Rohypnol in a strawberry milkshake before bludgeoning him to death with a heavy ornament.

The original, three-month trial in 2005 was one of the longest in the former British colony's history.

Kissel, an American, said she had killed her husband after a lifetime of domestic violence, when he attacked her with a baseball bat after telling her he wanted to divorce her and take away their three young children.

She disposed of his body by rolling him up in an old carpet and hiding it in storage space at the luxury apartment. The body was found by removal men.