Two Nannies

Commentary : The Filipina nannies as surrogate parents

Isabel Escoda
Inquirer News Service

IT'S not often that a Filipino nanny becomes like a mother and father to the foreign child she cares for. This happened recently to two Filipinas who worked for a wealthy American family in Hong Kong. When the father was murdered, his wife was accused of killing him. Soon after the murder of investment banker Robert Kissell in Nov. 2, 2003, his wife Nancy was taken into custody. The couple's three small children were then whisked away by relatives to the United States, along with their two nannies, Conchita and Maximina Macaraeg.

The incident highlighted the image of the Filipino nanny as a substitute parent to her charges. The sensational trial of this high-profile murder case recently ended in Hong Kong's Court of First Instance, with the jury unanimously declaring Nancy Kissell guilty of murder and the judge meting out a life sentence. Presented during the 67-day trial was overwhelming evidence that she had murdered her husband.

Robert Kissell was a top executive of the Merrill Lynch investment bank. He was an archetypically ambitious, hard-driving individual, whose marriage had been unraveling before his murder. He had told friends he planned to divorce his wife Nancy because of her affair with a man in the United States. In early 2003, during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, she fled with her children and a nanny to their home in Vermont. There she started an affair with a handyman hired to repair their TV set, something that continued by telephone after she returned to Hong Kong-their numerous extended calls were later traced by investigators.

The trial, which transfixed Hong Kong's expatriate community, saw Nancy admitting to killing her husband in self-defense, because he had repeatedly threatened and abused her. Accused during questioning of having drugged Robert before bludgeoning him, she would often lapse into amnesia.

It's presumed that Robert's parents will arrange for the future care of the Kissell children (two girls and a boy aged 9, 6 and 3 at the time of the murder) while custody is being discussed. And it seems natural that Conchita and Maximina would continue to be involved in their care.

During the trial, the two Filipinas were summoned back to Hong Kong to testify. With the help of an Ilocano interpreter, Conchita said she saw no signs of violence between the couple (a testimony which didn't support Nancy's claim of abuse), but she noted that the couple were having problems with the marriage because "there was no sweetness anymore" between them. She also reported that during their stay in Vermont, the handyman would go to the house in the evenings, supposedly to check the TV, and would spend the night-she revealed that one of the girls once woke her up at night, unable to find her mother.

The most damning part of Conchita's testimony was about Nancy telling her not to tidy up the master bedroom, which was kept locked for the next three days after Robert's "disappearance." Nancy apparently spent two nights with her husband's corpse, wrapping it in a carpet and removing traces of blood from the room, after which she called for workmen to move the tied rolled-up carpet to an outside storeroom.

The Kissells were a wealthy Jewish couple, and Robert's job earned him top wages at his bank, which entitled them to live in one of Hong Kong's most luxurious complexes. His shocked Merrill Lynch colleagues declared he was a devoted father, while Nancy's friends said she was equally devoted to her kids-though one revealed that she was a spendthrift and had once paid HK$5,000 to have her hair styled.

Hong Kong newspapers kept the public riveted on the steamy murder saga as the trial unfolded with testimonies and evidence. One of the Kissells' neighbors mentioned having taken his daughter, on the day of the murder, to play with the Kissell girls. He was given a milkshake by Nancy, who had also made one for Robert. He said the drink tasted strange and caused him to pass out briefly by the time he returned home.

The prosecution painstakingly marshaled the evidence, showing how Nancy had laced the milkshakes with drugs; after he passed out in their bedroom, she bludgeoned Robert to death with a metal heirloom. She later claimed she had used it in self-defense because he had tried to rape her and then attack her with a baseball bat-a piece of evidence presumed to have been planted by her later in the bedroom.

During her grilling, Nancy claimed she was often sodomized by Robert. She made a point of going to the doctor some days before the murder, and went to the police on the day of the murder to claim she had been beaten up by her husband who, she said, had disappeared. Her lawyer's defense did not sway the jury.

After the trial, the dead banker's father said his younger granddaughter read the news of the murder on the Internet and told him, "Mommy killed Daddy. I don't want to see her again." Soon after the murder, he said he cried with his eldest granddaughter, then 9, after he informed her that her "Daddy had died" after her parents had had a fight.

The Kissell kids are now in the temporary care of the estranged wife of Robert's brother in Connecticut, who is himself in jail, having been charged with embezzlement. The fact that Conchita and Maximina are the kids' link to their past life in Hong Kong is obvious. They probably have children of their own in the Philippines (Maximina is Conchita's sister-in-law), but they may henceforth be fully engaged in the crucial care of their charges, helping them survive and minimize their trauma. It's a burden the two Filipinas will surely bear with much love.

Isabel T. Escoda has written about Filipinos in Hong Kong in her books, "Letters from Hong Kong," "Hong Kong Postscript" and "Pinoy Abroad," her latest.