Her name was Nihal Gussal, but everybody who knew her called her Nina. Focused and no-nonsense, she always seemed a little older and a little wiser --even as a child. Maybe it was the time she had spent in the U.S. Army, but Nina seemed to exude leadership and confidence as she reached her 40th birthday. Even her older sister, Nesime, a shy and soft-spoken woman who clung more closely to the immigrant family’s Turkish-Circassian traditions, deferred to Nina whenever there was a problem.

"Even though Nesime was older, Nina was the one who was more take-charge," Nina’s lawyer and friend, Nancy Feinberg, recalled.  "Whenever Nesime had a problem, she went to Nina, and Nina said, ‘OK, this is what we're going to do.’"

There was something adventurous about Nina, her friends and relatives said. And so it came as little surprise when in 1985, she took up with Abequa, a charming and somewhat mysterious man who had immigrated to the U.S. from his native Jordan.

Nina’s family knew little about Abequa’s life before he came to the United States. They could see that Nina and the auto mechanic were very different people. He was a traditional man in many respects, Nesime would later say. He detested what he saw as the permissive lifestyle of Americans. But Nina, who had emigrated from Turkey as a child, had embraced American culture. She felt she had earned that right after spending four years in the Army during the Vietnam War, stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. Her office had been bombed by terrorists but she escaped injury.  When she returned to the United States, she worked as an insurance claims adjuster.

Mohammed Abequa (AP)

Colleen Leadbeater, a close friend of Nina’s, recalled in a 1994 interview that even in the months before her death, Nina described her estranged husband as a deeply religious and charismatic man. "She said he could charm anybody," Leadbeater said.

Leadbeater said she believed that it was that charm that persuaded Nina that she could live with a man whose traditional Muslim ways and unmasked distaste for anything American were in sharp conflict with her own secular upbringing.

Nesime, in an interview about the same time, put it this way: "My sister was very much an American. She was religious, but she was a Muslim-American, whatever that means."

For his part, Abequa once remarked that "he would have married a prostitute to stay in this country," Leadbeater recalled.

Abequa family portrait (AP)

According to court records, the couple married in January 1986, but within three years their marriage had started to deteriorate. Nesime recalled that Mohammed and Nina moved around quite a bit.  They lived in Bordentown and East Windsor, just outside of Trenton, N.J., and later moved to Garfield in northern New Jersey.

In 1989, according to the couple’s divorce papers, police were summoned to the Abequas’ Bordentown apartment, after Nina complained that her husband had attacked her. The charges were later dismissed.

But, Nesime would later say, the incident fit a pattern of abuse.  "He was from there,” she said, referring to Jordan, where, in Nesime’s words, women are considered second-class citizens in many respects.

Abequa, by all accounts, seemed to believe that women were somehow less worthy of respect. Women shouldn't work, he thought, or pay bills, or have any rights other than those explicitly granted by their husbands, Nesime would later say.

That put him on a collision course with his wife, whom Nesime described as very much a modern American woman, independent and assimilated.  Although her friends and family described her as a faithful Muslim, she never made a show of her religion.  In fact, Leadbeater said it wasn’t until shortly before Nina’s death that she discovered that her friend practiced Islam.

"We were signing the kids up for CCD, Catholic catechism classes and I asked her if she wanted her kids signed up, and she told me no, she was going to send them to classes about her religion," Leadbeater said.

By the early 1990s the marriage had reached an end. Abequa would later tell an interviewer in Jordan that he worried that his wife had been unfaithful and that she had turned the children into Americans.

The first allegation was nonsense, Leadbeater said. Even after their separation, Nina consistently refused to date. But he was right about one thing, Leadbeater said. "These kids are American."

When Nina finally filed for divorce, friends and family members said, she did it in large part because she feared for her children’s safety. "She told me he used to beat the children when they disobeyed," Leadbeater said.  "She said he beat them with a belt."