Crime: When Murder Runs In The Family

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Greenwich police chief James Walters told reporters the day after the body was discovered that investigators had interviewed Hayley Kissel and that she had been cooperative. The widow spoke only through her attorney. "She right now is focused on her children and trying to help them cope with the loss of their father," says lawyer Joseph Martini. According to Martini, Kissel's father asked his son's widow to stay away from Andrew's funeral. "She plans to make other arrangements so that her children can say goodbye to their father," he says.

For a time Andrew Kissel and his wife also cared for Robert and Nancy's three kids. Nancy Ann Kissel is serving a life sentence for sedating her husband with a doctored milkshake and then beating him to death with a metal figurine from the kitchen. Nancy Kissel claimed at her trial that her husband abused alcohol and cocaine and repeatedly forced anal sex on her, but she also admitted having an affair with a Vermont TV repairman. After Andrew ran afoul of the law, a Stamford, Conn., judge granted custody of the three kids to the Kissel brothers' sister Jane Clayton of Mercer Island, Wash.

By week's end, the whodunit speculation had turned to Andrew Kissel himself. The Times reported that Kissel had an insurance policy worth $15 million for the benefit of his dependents; Kissel may have believed that if he were dead, that money would be available only to his children, not his creditors. (Where the money goes will surely end up in litigation.) It would have been a near impossible suicide, but perhaps Kissel arranged his own hit? "If he did, it's the most incredibly unselfish thing that anybody could do," William Kissel told the Times. After so many selfish years, it would be a sort of noble ending for Andrew Kissel.