Nesime Dokur will always remember the precise moment when she assumed her sister's forceful, take-charge personality. "It was at her funeral.  They had just put her in the dirt," Nesime said in a 1994 interview. "And a big wind blew up. I didn't feel it, but everybody else did. My daughter said to me, ‘Did you feel that wind?  It's Nina giving us her strength.’"

She had no idea how desperately she would need that strength. As heinous a crime as her sister’s slaying was Nesime would not have the luxury of wallowing in her own grief. The divorced mother, a medical technician with no political experience, would soon find herself thrust into the international limelight.

Fortunately, she had help.

She had Nancy Feinberg.   Feinberg, who had grown close to Nina while handling her divorce, is a sharp-tongued and witty lawyer, a woman who can move gracefully in the courtroom without ever betraying her intrinsic Jersey-girl toughness. When Nina was killed, Feinberg made it her personal quest to bring the killer to justice, and to make sure that the children, Sami and Lisa, made it back to New Jersey. Together with Murphy, the prosecutor in Morris County where the slaying had occurred, Feinberg  started to call in political chits.

They reached out to Bill Bradley, the former Rhodes scholar and NBA star who was then the senior U.S. senator from New Jersey. They called in Frank Lautenberg, the state’s low-key but driven junior senator, and Bob Torricelli, then an up-and-coming young congressman who would later replace Lautenberg in the Senate. They enlisted Herbert C. Klein, another Democrat, who was then in his first and only term in Congress.

Senator Bill Bradley and Congressman Bob Torricelli (AP)

It was an election year.  And the politicians -- Bradley, Lautenberg, Torricelli, and Klein -- could easily have issued a few histrionic statements, rattled a few sabers, and then let the matter drop. What’s more, there were major political undercurrents developing at the time that could easily have overshadowed the tragedy of one woman’s death and the abduction of two small children who were, after all, with family members.

At precisely the same time that Abequa murdered his wife and kidnapped his children, President Bill Clinton’s administration was trying to help open formal diplomatic relations between Israel and Jordan. Such a step, in the administration’s view, was essential to the ultimate goal of building a lasting Middle East peace.

To help King Hussein bring his reluctant countrymen into the fold, the U.S. was prepared to provide massive economic incentives. From a purely political perspective, the last thing the U.S. government needed was a dramatic confrontation with its new ally in the Middle East. The last thing King Hussein needed was an issue that threatened to drive a wedge between his Hashemite ruling family and the Circassian community, one of a patchwork of ethnic fiefdoms that make up the nation of Jordan. It didn’t make things any easier for the king that, when Abequa was taken into custody soon after landing in Jordan, some of his harshest critics opined that he was simply caving in to American pressure.

It would have been far easier for all the politicians to just let the whole matter simply fade away.

But Feinberg wasn’t about to let that happen. She felt she owed something to Nina.

And Nesime wasn’t going to let that happen either. In retrospect, say most of those who were closely associated with the case, it was Nesime’s forceful, quiet insistance that justice be done that ultimately pressed the governments of two sovereign nations to  push for the prosecution of Mohammed Ishmail Abequa and the repatriation of the children.

Her simple eloquence -- acquired, Nesime believed, when a chill wind blew up at her sister’s graveside -- was evident in a letter she wrote to Hussein.