The doctor who twice treated accused murderer, Nancy Kissel, for sleeping problems in the week before the alleged murder and then again on November 4 following the alleged assault of her husband, will today continue her testimony in the High Court as a defense witness.

The prosecution claims Kissel went on a shopping spree for drugs in the last week of October, visiting separate doctors to acquire the same type of drugs that were later found in the stomach of her late husband, banker Robert Kissel.

On October 23, Annabelle Dytham prescribed 10 tablets of Rohypnol for Nancy Kissel because she was told the milder sleeping tablets had no effect on her.

On October 30, another physician Desmond Fung, who testified last Thursday, prescribed her Stilnox, Amitriptyline and Lorivan, because of her ``very tenacious sleep problem.''

Kissel has testified that she switched from Dytham to Fung, because she realized she should not have been seeing a general practitioner, but a psychiatrist. Dytham testified Friday she had known Kissel to be a ``normal mother, good with her children,'' and believed she had been assaulted when she saw her on November 4 and prepared a report in case it was needed in divorced proceedings.

She also recollected feeling frustrated with Kissel's slow movements and thought her response to be ``disproportionate to the actual injury.''

The prosecution alleges that Kissel, 41, served those sedatives and hypnotics to her husband, disguised in a pink milkshake, which left him unconscious as she bludgeoned him to death on November 2, 2003.

She denies the murder charge and has testified that there was a furious fight that night, in which she feared for her life as her husband bore down on her swinging a baseball bat, repeatedly saying, ``I'm going to kill you, you bitch.''

She has accepted that she killed her husband, but claims she cannot recall how she came to inflict five fatal wounds to the side of his head.

Robert Kissel's decomposing body was found wrapped in a rug and locked in a storeroom at the Parkview residential complex on November 7, 2003.

In her testimony, Kissel claimed her husband was obsessed with money and success, and was a cocaine user who routinely abused her with violence and forceful sodomy, sometimes inebriated with whisky. Kissel said that she had developed a relationship with an American, Michael Del Priore, who frequently repaired electrical appliances in their Vermont home, in July 2003, because he was honest and she felt she could confide in him about the abuse, and her loneliness living in Hong Kong's the small expatriate world.

During cross-examination last week, Senior Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Peter Chapman suggested she never told family or friends about her husband's abuse because there was ``nothing to tell.''

Del Priore, an electrical repairman living in a trailer park, kept up the communication because he considered her a ``goldmine,'' Chapman said. The furious fight which involved her husband swinging a baseball bat at her head, ``just didn't happen'' and that her consequent selective memory loss over that fight and her actions in the days leading up to her arrest, was a lie, Chapman said.

On Monday, Kissel said she was not trying to paint a bad picture of her husband and declared: ``I still love him, he was my husband.''

She said she never thought about approaching anyone about her marital problems because it was a gradual change, and it was something she had accepted.

Furthermore, forceful sodomy was not something you brought up at the dinner table or during social events, she said. Chapman said she failed to tell her long-time friend Bryna O'Shea, ``because it wasn't happening'' and didn't tell anyone else about it ``because there was nothing to tell.''

She did not tell her chief psychiatrist in Siu Lam psychiatric center because ``he was mostly interested in my medication and my day-to-day life in Siu Lam,'' she said.

On Tuesday, Chapman suggested that Kissel knew the knowledge of her affair would hamper her chances in divorce proceedings and so she went shopping for drugs, while maintaining intensive communication with Del Priore.

Kissel said there was more frequent communication with Del Priore during this period because the abuse she was suffering from her husband was also intensifying. Throughout the trial, the prosecution has claimed that Nancy Kissel was the primary beneficiary of the deceased's life insurance policies. Robert Kissel's sister, Jane Clayton estimated his estate to be worth US$18 million (HK$140 million). On Wednesday, Chapman said Kissel had told ``plain simple lies'' about what happened to her husband in the days leading up to her arrest.

He said her present claims of memory loss about those days was ``equally a lie'' since she had no problem relating a version of events on that fatal night, albeit a different one, to Dytham on November 4.

Defense witnesses will testify this week before Justice Michael Lunn.

albert.wong@singtaonewscorp.com