Blood Everywhere
The moving men were not pleased as they sat in their truck, waiting. It was after 8:00 AM on Monday, April 3, 2006, and the front gate of the mock-Tudor mansion at 10 Dairy Road in ultra-rich Greenwich, Connecticut, was locked. They’d rung the bell several times, but no one answered. The foreman was particularly annoyed because this had been an unusual rush job. The lady of the house, Hayley Wolff Kissel, had called the previous Friday to get a crew to empty out the place and store the contents for a week or so until she figured out where to put it.
Two days earlier moving crews from J. B. Moving in Stamford, Connecticut, filled three vans with furniture, clothing, and other belongings. They would have finished the job if Mrs. Kissel’s husband, Andrew Kissel, hadn’t insisted on staying for the weekend. The couple was in the process of divorcing, and it was obviously not an amicable parting. After a nasty argument that some of the movers had witnessed, Hayley Kissel relented and agreed to let Andrew stay for the weekend. These were his last few days of freedom, after all. He was scheduled to appear in federal court the next week to plead guilty to widespread fraud charges. His next address would be a federal penitentiary, so he wanted to spend what time he had left in posh surroundings. The movers were asked to come back on Monday morning for the bedroom set, which Andrew would be using, and the last of the Kissels’ belongings.
The movers were now eager to get this job finished, hoping they wouldn’t have to see any more of the Kissels’ bickering. Frustrated that they couldn’t get into the house, they called their boss, Doug Roina, the manager of J. B. Moving. Roina called Hayley Kissel to explain the situation, and she gave him the code that would unlock the gate, which Roina passed on to the men on the job.
The moving men opened the gate and backed their truck up to the front door. They rang the doorbell and knocked, but no one answered. One of them tried the door and found that it was unlocked. The men let themselves in and got to work, dismantling the bed and loading up the last of the furniture.
One of the men went down to the basement to see if there was anything left to move down there. What he found turned his stomach.
A man sat slumped forward in a chair, hands and feet bound. His t-shirt was pulled up over his head, covering his face. He was covered in blood, and it had spread onto the floor around him. There was blood everywhere.
The movers immediately called the police who later identified the dead man. It was Andrew Kissel.
Andrew Kissel had plenty of enemies, as the Greenwich police would soon discover, people with sufficient motive to kill him or have him killed.
Among the many people he had wronged were the residents of 200 East 74th Street, a high-rise luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From 1995 to 2002 Andrew Kissel had been the treasurer of the building’s co-op board. During that time he had an unusual degree of autonomy and had sole signing authority over the co-op’s bank account. He had spearheaded a $12 million refinancing effort that allowed the co-op’s owners to buy the land the building was built on in 1962 and dissolve the land lease that could someday imperil the value of their apartments. The New York Times wrote that the reason for taking this huge loan was financially sound, but putting Andrew Kissel in charge of it was not.
This refinancing plan included setting up a reserve fund of $802,000 for contingencies, which is normal for such an undertaking. What wasn’t normal was that Andrew Kissel siphoned money out of this account and into his own personal accounts.
During his tenure on the board, Kissel also oversaw the renovation of the building’s lobby and hallways in 2001. The final bill came to over a million dollars, “four times what the neighbors had been told it would cost,” according to the New York Times. One resident estimated that it cost them “$50,000 a floor” for paint, wallpaper, and carpeting in just the hallways. A forensic audit later revealed that six-figure payments were made to vendors suspected of being under Kissel’s control. According to New York magazine, Kissel started a line of credit for the building, “forged signatures, cut-and-pasted bank statements, and eventually borrowed $2 million under the co-op’s name.”
During this period Kissel had also renovated his own apartment, purchasing two studio apartments adjacent to his one-bedroom unit and combining them to create a deluxe duplex. Records show that he had paid $295,000 for the one-bedroom apartment in 1992, then paid $160,000 and $350,000 for the two studios. He eventually sold the duplex for nearly $3 million.
All told, Kissel managed to embezzle $3.9 million from the building during his time on the co-op board. The board eventually discovered what he had done and confronted him with it. Kissel confessed to his misdeeds and agreed to pay the board $4.7 million if they promised not to pursue the matter in court. In October 2003 Kissel paid the settlement money, confident that the matter had been resolved and the board would not go public.
Kissel moved out of the co-op in Manhattan and relocated to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was building his dream house, a custom-built mansion at 58 Quaker Lane. A childhood friend told The Advocate of Stamford, Connecticut, that as a boy, Andrew Kissel loved model cars: “He would put together… hundreds of them… meticulously paint them and detail them with little stripes.” Kissel never outgrew his passion for cars, and at the time of his death he owned 30 vintage automobiles, including four Ferraris and a customized Mercedes station wagon, a collection worth millions. He also owned a 75-foot Hatteras yacht worth $2.85 million, according to Bloomberg.com. Kissel had an insatiable lust for luxury toys, and he rarely denied himself. Of course, he didn’t have the income to support his lavish wants, but that didn’t stop him. He had learned that money was always available if a person knew how to work the system.
Kissel’s childhood friend remembered him as being aloof and “kind of stuck up” when he was a boy. He was “shy” and “often avoided eye contact.” As an adult, his personality problems were compounded by drug and alcohol abuse. Court papers revealed that he had been “diagnosed with alcohol dependence, bipolar disorder, cocaine abuse, impulse control disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and anti-social personality disorder,” according to The Advocate. Perhaps it was this combination of personal problems and addictions that led him to bilk millions of dollars from investors, family members, banks, and other lending institutions.
“Andrew took money from everyone possible,” his father William Kissel, told the New York Times. “From his father-in-law, from friends, from [his brother] Robert, from everybody, and they’re all holding the bag.”
Andrew had founded a real-estate development company called Hanrock with offices in Stamford. The name Hanrock was derived from the first initials of his wife Hayley, himself, his sister-in-law Nancy, and his brother Robert. According to New York, when a notary public who worked for Hanrock left the company, Kissel managed to get her stamp and used it to file false mortgage releases on real-estate properties in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Vermont. The New York Times wrote that Kissel “claimed that old lenders had relinquished claims on the properties and tricked new lenders to make fresh loans on them without proper collateral.” With fraudulently borrowed money, Kissel was able to maintain his lavish lifestyle. But when his financial juggling act was finally exposed, his many creditors were furious, and every one of them is now a possible suspect in his murder—except for one investor, his brother Robert.
Three years before Andrew’s death, Robert Kissel had also been murdered.
On November 6, 2003, Robert Kissel’s body was found wrapped in an oriental rug in the basement of a Hong Kong residential high-rise, his head bloody from blunt-force trauma. A subsequent autopsy found several prescription medications in his system, including Rohypnol, the date rape drug. His wife, Nancy Kissel, had previously received prescriptions for those same medications from two separate doctors. She was later charged with her husband’s murder, accused of sedating him with a pink milkshake containing enough medication to render him defenseless, then beating him to death with a metal statue.
The local press dubbed it the “Milkshake Murder,” and Nancy Kissel’s trial riveted Hong Kong and much of East Asia during the summer of 2005. Thin, pale, and drawn, Nancy Kissel appeared in court every day dressed in black. She was almost unrecognizable to her friends and acquaintances who remembered a more stylish woman, well-dressed with dyed blond hair, the wife of a high-flying international investment banker. Like the wives of many other ex-patriot businessmen in Hong Kong, she had a lot of money and a lot of time on her hands. Investigators discovered that she also had a boyfriend in America, a TV repairman she had met when she and her three children had fled to the family’s Vermont vacation home during the SARS epidemic in 2003. Hong Kong prosecutors accused her of killing her husband so that she’d be free to be with her lover.
But Nancy Kissel claimed that she was the real victim, beaten and abused by a short-tempered husband who constantly demanded anal sex. At her trial she took the stand and admitted that she had hit him with the figurine, but only in self-defense as he was attacking her. When questioned about the details of the events of that day, she claimed to have only partial memory of what had happened.
The mostly male jury didn’t buy her story and convicted her of murder, giving her a life sentence at a Hong Kong correctional facility. American officials declined to intervene in her case. American courts did, however, take an interest in the welfare of Nancy and Robert’s three young children: Elaine, June, and Reis. First, Nancy’s father, then her half-brother, attempted to raise the children, but when the task proved to be too much for them, Andrew and Hayley Kissel made their case for custody to Stamford Superior Court and were granted temporary guardianship of the children who stood to inherit their father’s $18 million estate. After her conviction, Nancy Kissel had written a letter to the court, stating that she wished to have her children cared for by Hayley Kissel.
Andrew arranged to pick up the children from Nancy’s half-brother in Cincinnati. He chartered a private Marquis jet and billed Robert’s estate for the $8,000 fee, New York reported. When he saw that his dining room table wouldn’t accommodate five children and two adults comfortably, he bought a bigger one for $6,000 and billed his brother’s estate for 30% of the cost. He eventually submitted a bill of $171,000 to the estate.
But marital tensions between Andrew and Hayley threatened their vision of a happy conjoined family. Hayley wanted a divorce, but she still wanted to care for Robert and Nancy’s children. Her intention was to raise them by herself along with her own two daughters. But in the fall of 2005, Andrew’s sister, Jane Kissel Clayton of Mercer Island, Washington, challenged that arrangement and was granted custody of Robert’s children. If Andrew had ever dreamed of having access to his nieces’ and nephew’s inheritance, that possibility was now beyond his reach.
In almost all murder cases, the spouse of the victim is automatically considered a person of interest, and in the case of Andrew Kissel’s murder, his estranged wife did little to hide her animosity toward him. By the time Hayley Kissel had filed for divorce in early 2005, she was totally fed up with him. The moving men who had overheard the Kissels’ heated argument days before the murder could attest to her feelings about Andrew. The fact that she had gone to court to remove him from the rented house just a few days before he would be going away to prison shows just how bitter she was. As Andrew Kissel’s divorce lawyer, Howard Garber, told The Advocate, “By the time the motion was heard, she would have, at best, had possession of the home for three or four days.”
In a revealing email message that Hayley Kissel had sent to her sister-in-law, Jane, on May 22, 2005, Hayley vented her frustrations. “GOD I HATE YOUR BROTHER,” the message began.
Despite their haggling over Robert’s children, Hayley considered Jane her confidante. Hayley, who had once been a mogul skiing champion, had been Jane’s skiing coach in Vermont when she was a girl. Andrew, Robert, and Jane loved to ski when they were kids, and Andrew’s father had bought a vacation home in Stratton Mountain, Vermont, to accommodate their passion for the slopes. Jane had introduced Andrew to Hayley when she was taking lessons. Jane and Hayley had remained close over the years.
In that same email Hayley wrote to Jane, “Do you know last night in bed, I could actually see myself pummeling him to death and just enjoying the sensation of each and every shot and then this morning as I pulled out of the garage… all I wanted to do was crash into his Ferraris.”
She was particularly irked by a pole that Andrew had installed in the garage to protect his precious vintage cars. “Do you know that I intentionally bang into the thing every time I park in the garage as an act of defiance?” she wrote.
In the email she characterized her husband as “an awful awful pathetic person.”
But despite evidence of her hatred for her husband, authorities have not pursued Hayley Kissel as a suspect. The circumstances of his death are not consistent with a crime of passion. The murder appears to have been planned rather than a heat-of-the-moment event.
“Who would do a thing like this so brutally?” Andrew’s father, William Kissel, told The Advocate. “Somebody had to be very angry at him. If somebody wanted to kill him they had to put a bullet in his head, not tie him up and stab him to death with a shirt over his head.”
With no signs of forced entry at the house, the possibility of a robbery gone wrong has been ruled out. Andrew Kissel must have known his killers and let them in. Greenwich Police Chief James Walters says that Andrew was “the intended target of the assault.”
Professor Larry Kobolinsky of John Jay College of Criminal Justice says that Kissel’s murder “bears the hallmarks of a personal vendetta.” He told The Advocate that the killer or killers were either “seeking information” or trying to “teach him a long lesson.”
Former Stamford detective Vito Colucci told The Advocate that Andrew Kissel’s murder is “not your typical contract killing where you give a guy a shot.” He suggested that one of Kissel’s enemies might have hired a hit man to make him suffer in death as punishment.
The police have explored the possibility that Kissel arranged his own death so that his children would be provided for. Like his brother, Andrew had a sizeable insurance policy, and in the event of his death, his daughters stood to collect $15 million. But the policy would be invalidated if he committed suicide, so his death would have to appear to have been a murder. Following the suicide-by-murder theory, the police questioned a man named Carlos Trujillo, a Colombian immigrant who worked for Kissel.
For nearly seven years, Trujillo had been Kissel’s loyal man Friday, acting as chauffeur, babysitter, and housekeeper for the family. The two men had developed a close friendship, and Trujillo admitted that he had gone to the house the weekend that Kissel was murdered out of concern for his friend. Is it possible that Kissel had asked Trujillo to kill him, and Trujillo had carried out the request?
Trujillo willingly agreed to give the police his fingerprints and DNA samples. He also let them search his home and took a lie detector test without the advice of counsel. But when they questioned him a second time “in an aggressive manner,” as the New York Times reported, Trujillo decided that he needed a lawyer.
Trujillo’s attorney, Lindy Urso, professes his client’s innocence and suggests that Andrew Kissel was about to become “an informant for the federal government,” which, according to the Times, would have made him the target of “dozens of people.”
Is it possible that Andrew Kissel was killed because someone feared that he was about to cooperate with the government and offer up incriminating testimony against that person in exchange for leniency in his sentencing? Exactly who that person might be remains uncertain, and law enforcement has not floated that theory to the public.
The police obtained a warrant to search a storage locker in Bridgeport, Connecticut, rented by Trujillo. Among the specific items they were looking for were uncashed checks made out to Trujillo by Betteridge Jewelers in Greenwich. Trujillo had sold jewelry for Andrew Kissel at that store in the past, and the police are exploring the possibility that Kissel had paid for his murder-suicide with jewelry, which Trujillo then sold.
But if Kissel had arranged his own death, would he have really wanted such a painful, bloody end for himself? Wouldn’t a quick gunshot to the head have been a preferable method?
“I think the suicide-by-murder theory is absurd,” Lindy Urso told The Advocate, “particularly when you consider the manner in which he was killed.”
The police continue to investigate Trujillo. But if he didn’t kill Andrew Kissel, and Hayley Kissel didn’t do it, as the police apparently believe since they aren’t investigating her, then who did kill him? And why?
On April 7, 2006, Andrew Kissel was buried in Saddle River, New Jersey, next to his mother and brother, Robert. Andrew’s father and sister attended the funeral services, but the family asked his wife, Hayley, not to come. Hayley Kissel’s attorney, Joseph W. Martini, said that she planned to make “other appropriate arrangements so that her children can say goodbye to their father.”
Friends and associates remember Andrew as a difficult and troubled individual. Michael Assael, a co-op owner at 200 E. 74th Street, remembers Kissel often pacing outside the building, “chomping on a cigar.” In conversation, Andrew would sometimes use big words incorrectly, according to Assael. “He always seemed to try to impress you by show,” Assael told The Advocate. “He didn’t seem to have a lot of depth.”
Though Andrew got along well with his brother, some feel that Andrew struggled to keep up with Robert’s accomplishments. From the time they were boys, Robert seemed to excel without really trying while Andrew, who was very intelligent, just couldn’t figure out how to apply himself. Unlike Robert, Andrew was introverted and impatient. He also believed that a person was defined by his possessions, and he always had to have the best. When the brothers were teenagers, their father had given them both credit cards. Robert used his to buy “a pair of cheap shoes from Sears” while Andrew bought himself an extravagant fur jacket. An ex-girlfriend told New York, “His self-esteem came from what he had around him.”
Perhaps it was this lust for status through acquisition that undid Andrew Kissel. Cars, yachts, houses, real estate, even his brother’s children—he had to have it all, no matter who got hurt. His death might have been pay-back from someone he had wronged. Or perhaps it was his last desperate attempt at big-ticket acquisition, a suicide concealed as a murder in order to obtain a jumbo insurance payout for his children. The murder of Andrew Kissel remains a puzzle as the police continue to investigate.
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