Dressed conservatively in a gray suit, her short hair overgrown and brushed off her face, Susan unceremoniously entered the courtroom of the Contra Costa County Courthouse on October 11, 2005, for the opening remarks in her murder trial.
Onlookers watched from the gallery as Susan slid into a chair at the defense table between her lawyers, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde. Next to the tanned Horowitz, she looked pale and fragile, having lost a considerable amount of weight since her incarceration.
In the days leading up to the trial, her lawyers publicly proclaimed they would prove Susan acted in self-defense when she stabbed Felix in the guest cottage on October 13, 2002. They asserted that responding officers contaminated the crime scene that night by moving the body from its original position on the floor of the living room.
Pointing to police crime scene photos, Horowitz claimed that documented blood smears around the body and on the floor nearby indicated that Felix had been turned over by investigators, thus destroying potential evidence of Susan’s innocence.
Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady had replaced Judge Mary Ann O’Malley on the bench after Susan complained bitterly of O’Malley’s bias. Judge Brady, a square-shouldered woman with graying hair and a conservative manner, had been appointed to the bench in 1996 by then-Governor Pete Wilson. Susan was unhappy with her assignment as well. Brady had served as a prosecutor with both the Contra Costa and Solano County District Attorneys Offices, and had presided over numerous murder trials. She was married to Larry Brady, a longtime member of the Richmond Police Department who had recently retired after twenty-six years on the job. Using her preemptory challenge, Susan had asked that Judge Brady also recuse herself, but the court denied her request, ruling that Susan had filed it too late.
The trial had already been delayed two times by Judge Brady, who cited her “extensive calendar” as the reason for the postponements. In addition, Susan’s constant bickering with the judge, when she was acting as her own attorney, had nearly doubled the length of the hearings. Prosecutor Tom O’Connor had exhibited great restraint, despite the repeated delays. During his eleven years with the district attorney’s office, O’Connor had won several convictions on charges of first-degree murder and he appeared confident he would secure another in the Polk case.
After eleven days of jury selection, the trial finally got underway that Tuesday with O’Connor’s blow-by-blow recounting of the night that Gabriel Polk discovered his father’s “motionless body” covered in blood and lying on the floor of the family’s guest cottage.
A commanding figure at well over six feet, O’Connor grabbed the courtroom’s attention when he stood to address the jurors. In his opening remarks, he told the panel of six women and six men that the Polks were in the middle of a “heated divorce” when Susan confronted Felix that October night. According to O’Connor, Susan was furious after learning that a judge had awarded Felix custody of their minor son and given him sole occupancy of the house while she was out of town. Even worse, Felix had managed to have her monthly support payments slashed from six thousand eight hundred dollars to one thousand seven hundred dollars.
It was enough to kill for, according to O’Connor. Felix’s injuries were “of a man fighting for his life,” he continued. “In contrast, the defendant had almost nothing. Clearly, it was a one-sided battle.”
The prosecutor pointed out that Felix had been stabbed numerous times; sustaining six incise wounds and defensive-type wounds on his hands, forearms, and the soles of his feet. Police observed redness around Susan’s eye and small cuts on her hand. It was most telling, though, that she publicly denied any involvement in her husband’s death for some time, although she claimed to have privately admitted her role to family members and her attorneys soon after her arrest in October 2002.
“Now she claims she killed him in self-defense,” O’Connor said, resting his gaze on the jurors. “The defendant is nothing but a cold, callous, calculating murderer. She got wind of what was happening in the divorce proceeding. She became angry… and came home [from Montana] to take care of business.”
Rising from his seat at the defense table, Dan Horowitz disputed the prosecutor’s allegations. “My client defended her life against an attack by a rage-filled, brutal, aggressive man who was also her husband,” Horowitz began in a soft voice.
Promising to dispel the prosecution’s claim that his client killed her husband for financial gain, he said, “This concept of the financial divorce is wildly unsupported.”
Susan wore a blank expression as her lawyer pointed out that she was the one who kept the family finances and was aware that once the court-appointed accountant reviewed the couple’s financial background it would become clear that the information Felix had provided to the court was inaccurate.
“Susan Polk was going to get her money back retroactively,” Horowitz insisted.
The defense attorney used his opening remarks as an opportunity to relate details of Susan’s childhood and to tell jurors of her early sessions with Felix Polk as a fifteen-year-old patient. He described the therapist as a delusional narcissist who “hyper-controlled” his wife and children and proclaimed that Susan and her family members would take the stand to testify as much.
At one point, he even drew a parallel between Felix Polk and fanatical cult leader James Warren “Jim” Jones, the American founder of the Peoples Temple Church in San Francisco and later Jonestown in Guyana. It was Jones who organized the mass suicide of 914 of his followers, including nearly three hundred children, and convinced them to collectively drink a Kool-Aid cocktail laced with poison in November 1978.
Horowitz insisted that just as Jones gained control over his disciples, Felix won psychological control over Susan by molesting her under hypnosis at the tender age of sixteen, and then continuing the abuse with threats and beatings over the course of their marriage.
From the front row of the gallery, Horowitz’s wife, Pamela Vitale, listened intently as her husband next introduced Felix’s little-known secret: that he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a “schizophrenic reaction” in the mid-fifties while serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. It was news to many in the courtroom that Dr. Polk had spent nearly one year in a locked ward of a U.S. Naval Hospital. Horowitz promised more on Felix’s hospitalization through testimony from a defense expert who would explain how Felix’s mental condition made him prone to “outbursts of rage, violence, and anger.”
“Susan Polk defended her life against an attack by a vengeful, rageful, aggressive man,” Horowitz insisted. “She was on her back. She fought him off and lived.”
In spite of Horowitz’s strong opening, the trial did not get off to a good start. Jurors seemed skeptical of the defense’s claim that police had mishandled evidence. In addition, Horowitz’s explanation for Susan’s initial denial and subsequent cover-up of the crime did not appear to ring true with the twelve jurors—especially after they heard the prosecutor describe her elaborate efforts to cover up the crime during his opening remarks. O’Connor pointed out that Susan cleaned and hid the knife used in the attack, got rid of her bloody clothing, and placed her husband’s car at the train station in an effort to cover her tracks. Those were hardly the actions of an innocent woman, he insisted.
The following morning, jurors boarded a bus for the Polk’s hillside residence to get their first look at the Miner Road crime scene. The group spent several hours viewing the pool area and the guesthouse where Gabriel found his father’s bloodied body.
That Wednesday, the jury heard from prosecution witnesses, among them the 911 operator who took Felix Polk’s call on October 6, exactly one week before the murder, to report that his wife had threatened his life.
“I remember the caller saying, ‘My wife threatened to kill me,’” police dispatcher Randee Johnson testified.
Another witness, Deputy Sheriff Shannon Kelly, one of the first officers on the scene, testified that Susan denied having done anything wrong during the ride to police headquarters on the night of October 14,2002. Although his role in the criminal investigation was limited, Kelly endured two hours of cross-examination by Horowitz, who was trying to cast doubt on police competence at the crime scene. This strategy proved lost on jurors, two of whom were overheard in the men’s room trying to figure out why Horowitz had spent so much time with Kelly. Apparently the men were unaware that defense lawyer, Ivan Golde, was also in the bathroom at the time.
“They didn’t see me,” Golde later complained to Judge Brady. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
The judge denied Horowitz’s request to have the two jurors removed from the case, but warned the men to refrain from further discussion of the case. “I know this is not like what you see on TV, but it is important,” Judge Brady told the jurors.
O’Connor closed the first week of testimony with a victory, as the judge accepted into evidence the letter Susan wrote describing Felix’s alleged involvement with the Mossad. The defense was successful in convincing Judge Brady to admit a second letter that Susan wrote to her children in which she detailed the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of Felix.
But the trial would take an unexpected turn when, four days into the case, Daniel Horowitz made a grisly discovery.
It was just before 6 PM on Saturday, October 15, when the lawyer punched in the security code for the locked gates barring entrance to his home at 1901 Hunsaker Canyon Road. He steered his red Honda S2000 up the winding dirt driveway. At the top of the remote hill was an expansive construction site, where Horowitz and his wife, Pamela Vitale, were building a lavish, seven-thousand-square-foot Italian-style mansion. Off to one side was a rundown trailer where the couple had been living with their dogs for nearly a decade while they oversaw the construction of their dream house.
The temporary home was cramped and without amenities. The couple had been pumping their water from a well on the property, where Dan intended to start a winery once construction was complete. It was no secret that Horowitz was wealthy, although it was unclear exactly how he had made his fortune.
Dan first met Pamela, a single mother of two, in 1994 when she moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles County, according to a website maintained by Pamela’s family. At forty-one, she was a striking brunette, two years Dan’s senior and nearly three inches taller than the lawyer.
The couple was introduced by Pamela’s sister, who arranged for Pam, an independent film producer, to read a script that Dan had written about one of his cases. Bright, ambitious, and sophisticated, Pamela was employed full time as a software-marketing executive and was raising a sixteen-year-old daughter and nineteen-year-old son. Later, she would apply her computer savvy smarts to Dan’s law firm, maintaining databases and supervising the construction of their twelve-acre mountaintop estate.
Horowitz knew something was wrong the minute he spotted his wife’s car in the driveway. She was supposed to be going to the Kirov Ballet in Berkeley that night. His suspicions increased when he found the front door of the trailer unlocked. Stepping inside, he gasped at the sight of his wife lying on her right side in a pool of blood, her body pushed up against the couple’s sixty-five-inch television set. She was dressed in a T-shirt and panties, and there was a giant gash on her head. The carpet beneath her was red with blood, and the living room furniture had been moved about. The giant TV had been shoved nearly two and a half feet from its usual spot.
Hysterical, the lawyer called 911.
“Help me, she’s dead!” he yelled into the receiver and then knelt down beside his wife’s body. Cradling her in his arms, he tried to absorb the sight of her beaten and mutilated face.
“Who could have done this?” he raged.
The sound of a police car roaring up the driveway startled him to his feet. Racing outside, he shouted to the responding officers from the Lafayette Police Department. Almost immediately, they pushed him into the police car and ordered him to wait while a team from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department inspected the crime scene.
That night, sheriff’s officers took Horowitz to department headquarters, where he was escorted to a room normally used to interview child victims. Over several hours, investigators fired a series of questions at him, first trying to determine if he was suicidal. Next, they handed him a pen and paper and directed him to reconstruct his movements; they wanted a detailed accounting of his whereabouts that day.
Horowitz told officers he hadn’t heard from his wife all day. He left home early that morning, around 7:30 AM, to meet a friend for breakfast. Upon arriving at his Oakland law office around 9:30, he tried to reach Pamela on her cell phone. She didn’t answer. He met with a private investigator at 10:45 and finished up some work on the Polk case.
It was 2 PM when he dialed Pamela for a second time with no success. Though he found it strange that she was not answering her phone, he wasn’t alarmed. His wife was a former high-tech executive who had traveled extensively, both domestically and internationally. At 5′9″ and 178 pounds, she was no pushover. He assumed she was probably just busy with things at the house.
Horowitz told investigators that he left Oakland shortly thereafter. Later he made a deposit at the bank, and grabbed a Starbuck’s coffee in town before heading to the gym. After his workout, he headed for home, where he found his wife murdered.
Though short and slender, Horowitz had a wiry strength. While he stood barely 5′8″, with thinning brown hair and rimless eyeglasses perched atop a prominent nose, he had honed the physique of a person who worked out seriously at the gym. Like many defense lawyers, Horowitz had received his share of threats over the years. Staying in top physical shape gave him a sense of security. He informed police he was licensed to carry a gun.
An initial investigation by members of the Contra Costa crime lab determined that Pamela Vitale was savagely beaten with “multiple objects” during the attack that claimed her life. Evidence collected at the crime scene indicated that she was hit numerous times with several different weapons, although police declined to reveal further details of the brutal assault other than to say that Pamela’s death was “violent.”
A coroner’s report would later reveal that the fifty-two-year-old was found facedown on the carpet. She was struck more than two dozen times in the head, some of the blows so powerful they dislodged her front teeth and exposed sections of her skull. She had also been stabbed in the abdomen while she lay dead in a pool of blood.
News of the horrific killing quickly drew national media attention to Susan Polk, as speculation swirled that Vitale’s death might somehow be linked to the Polk case. It seemed an eerie coincidence that both Felix Polk and Pamela Vitale had been brutally stabbed, although initial media reports stated only that Vitale had been bludgeoned to death. It was not long after Pamela’s body was discovered that police began looking into the possibility the cases were linked.
Among those interviewed by investigators was Susan’s middle son, Eli Polk, his younger brother, Gabriel, and lawyer Barry Morris. Investigators also questioned a number of the construction workers employed by Horowitz, as well as a neighbor, Joseph William Lynch, who had recently sold the couple four acres in Hunsaker Canyon.
A subsequent investigation revealed that Vitale and her husband had filed a restraining order against Lynch in Contra Costa Superior Court in June 2005. In the complaint, they charged that Lynch was mentally ill and a methamphetamine and alcohol user who routinely harassed them and other neighbors in the Lafayette area. Police were surprised to learn that the couple later elected not to serve Lynch with the court order after hearing that he had signed up for a drug rehabilitation program and was trying to clean up his act.
Lynch denied any involvement in the murder, claiming that Pamela and Horowitz were good people who had supported his efforts to get sober. “Dan was trying to help me,” Lynch told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I have a drug problem, an alcohol problem, and a big mouth. I’m clean and sober now. Dan and Pamela were really trying to help me.”
There was also mention of a former boyfriend of Pamela’s who had been trying to get back together with her in recent months, but Horowitz expressed doubt about the man’s involvement in his wife’s death. “I just think he knows what he missed out on,” the lawyer told a reporter for a local newspaper. “But to think of him as a suspect would be a grave injustice.”
On Monday, October 17, Dan Horowitz was at home making funeral arrangements when Judge Laurel Brady, at the request of Susan’s other attorney, Ivan Golde, dismissed the Polk jury and declared a mistrial in the case. Brady cited extensive media coverage of Pamela Vitale’s murder as grounds for her decision.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it would be hard to miss, despite my admonitions,” the judge told jurors over the sobs of Susan Polk. “I have reached the conclusion at this juncture that it is not possible to continue the trial.”
Brady ordered all parties back to court on December 2 to set a new trial date, but no one—including Dan Horowitz—knew if he could put aside the turmoil in his own life and represent Susan. Horowitz acknowledged his own uncertainty in an interview with the local daily, the Contra Costa Times. “I don’t know,” he told the newspaper when asked about representing Susan Polk. “I don’t know if I’m alive. I don’t know if I’m in hell.”
Outside the courtroom, Horowitz’s cocounsel, Ivan Golde, pointed to “a whole host of conflicts” that could arise since the same police agency that investigated Felix Polk’s murder was now looking into the death of Dan’s wife.
“You’ve got the same pathologist doing both investigations,” Golde told journalists gathered at the courthouse that Monday. “This creates a huge conflict. I don’t even know if we can try both cases now in Contra Costa County. We were doing well in there,” Golde said optimistically of their first week in court. “We were winning this case. I hope we can pick up where we left off.”
Still, members of the Polk jury said they did not hear enough of the case to form an opinion as to Susan’s guilt or innocence. “The prosecution was the only one who had the chance to present information,” said juror Mark Zigler of Concord. “There was not any reason to dismiss anything.”
Pamela Vitale had been seated in the front row of the courtroom on October 11, when her husband delivered his opening remarks in the high-profile Polk murder case. Now, just seven days later, her battered corpse lay on a gurney in the coroner’s office, awaiting an autopsy by Brian Peterson, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Felix. Horowitz was not pleased to learn that Peterson was going to conduct the post mortem examination of his wife, since he had intended to dispute several of his findings at trial.
It was just after 10 AM on October 17 when the medical examiner removed a large gold and diamond ring from Pamela Vitale’s left ring finger, and a gold band with a dark-colored stone and multiple clear stones from her right ring finger. After placing the items in the office for safekeeping, Dr. Peterson began the two-and-a-half-hour post mortem examination on Vitale.
In his official report, Peterson listed the cause of death as “blunt force head injury.” Pamela Vitale had sustained at least twenty-six crushing blows to the head and thirteen more to other parts of her face and body. “There are extensive scalp lacerations and abrasions,” Dr. Peterson recorded. “On the right side of the scalp, at least 8 distinct injuries are identified…”
An examination of the victim’s torso revealed a post-mortem four-inch stab wound to the left upper abdomen that had perforated the stomach, exposing the intestines. There was also “an H-shaped figure” carved into the skin of the “posterior torso area.” Scratch marks on Vitale’s breasts, arms, legs, and body indicated she had fought very hard for her life that morning. There were no signs of sexual assault. Still, a rape test was performed with negative results.
That Monday afternoon, police released an affidavit revealing that Pamela Vitale was not only bludgeoned but also savagely stabbed by a killer who wore gloves. In addition, crime scene investigators had located a “large-sized blood shoeprint” on the cover of a storage container found at the crime scene.
Two days after the autopsy, police made an arrest in Pamela’s murder. Surprising to some, the accused seemed to have no connection to the Polk case. The alleged killer was a sixteen-year-old boy named Scott Dyleski who lived with his mother and two families—eleven people in all—in a ramshackle house about one mile from Dan and Pamela on Hunsaker Canyon Road. Investigators linked Dyleski to a scheme with another youth to buy equipment for growing marijuana with stolen credit cards. The fraudulently obtained equipment was to be shipped to Dyleski’s address but listed Vitale’s home as the billing address. Homicide detectives speculated that Dyleski had gotten into a confrontation with Vitale when he went to her house thinking the package may have been accidentally delivered there.
Homicide detectives zeroed in on the teen just two days into their investigation after receiving a tip from a neighbor claiming that someone had obtained a credit card under his name and used it to purchase equipment often used to grow marijuana. In recent months, several of Vitale’s neighbors on Hunsaker Canyon Road had reported mail being stolen from a common mailbox area along the road at the base of a hill. An investigation into the thefts had yielded no suspects until one resident, Doug Schneider, reported that Horowitz’s remote hilltop address was provided as the shipping address for the hydroponics equipment that had been charged to his credit card on October 12.
Police got a second break on October 19 when a youth came forward to confess to a marijuana-growing scheme with his former classmate, Scott Dyleski. The youth, Robin Croen, told police they had been using fraudulently obtained credit cards to purchase the hydroponics lights used for growing marijuana. Croen, a student at Acalanes High School in Lafayette, told police that he and Dyleski, a classmate, intended to grow the plants in Dyleski’s closet.
According to Croen, the night before the murder Dyleski claimed that “there was some sort of problem with the orders” and assured him that he “just needed some more time to do something.” Police later learned that Dyleski and Croen, who was not implicated in the murder, allegedly conspired together in the mail thefts—including the one that lead to Vitale’s death.
Croen also told police that Dyleski had scratches on his face when he saw him on October 15—the day of the murder. Three days later, Dyleski showed up at Acalanes High School during lunch period and announced that he was going to tell his housemates about the credit card scam. “He said he was going to admit it because somehow this would separate him from the [Vitale] murder,” Croen told authorities. The comment concerned Croen, who could not understand how their credit card scheme could be linked to the woman’s murder. He asked Dyleski what he was talking about, and Dyleski “said he was afraid his DNA was on her because she had grabbed him at some point (while he was walking in the woods). I asked how or why, but I didn’t get an answer,” the youth told police.
Police subsequently alleged that Dyleski went to Vitale’s home that Saturday, October 15, to pick up the marijuana-growing equipment he ordered, but the package was not in the mailbox. Investigators suspected that Dyleski went inside the trailer to find out what happened to it, where he confronted Pamela Vitale and beat her to death. Dyleski had no way of knowing that the hydroponics equipment had never been shipped because the supplier suspected that something was amiss.
According to detectives, the gangly 5′5″, 110-pound teenager was wearing gloves and a Balaclava mask (a mask which covers the entire face, with slits only for the eyes) when he entered the trailer home. Evidence collected at the scene indicated that he struck Vitale more than thirty times about the face and body with a broken piece of crown molding and other items before carving a “gothic signature” in the shape of an “H” into the small of her back.
After the murder, Scott Dyleski allegedly poured himself a glass of water, rinsed his hands in the sink and had a shower: a forensic examination of the bathroom faucets revealed traces of blood. Apparently unconcerned about the blood-stained crown molding he left, the teen used a little-traveled trail through the woods, arriving home sometime between 10:20 and 11:00 that morning. Croen wasn’t the only one who noticed Dyleski’s injuries that day. Several of his housemates later told police that they observed a gash on the boy’s face that morning. When asked about the wound, Scott claimed he scratched himself during a morning hike in the woods.
A forensic examination of Vitale’s laptop showed Pamela was on her computer, surfing the Internet for various things, including Court TV’s website, for articles about Dan’s criminal representation of Susan Polk, when Dyleski entered the trailer that Saturday morning. Logs show that at 10:12 AM her computer searches ceased.
On the evening of Wednesday, October 19, investigators served two search warrants on the home of Dyleski’s mother, Esther Fielding, “looking for any type of murder weapon that would cause blunt-force trauma or other injury.” Posters covered nearly every inch of wall space in Scott’s bedroom. Amid the clutter were drawings of symbols similar to the H-shape found carved into Vitale’s back. Three computers were seized by investigators, along with several knives, bedding, and other items. In a van behind the house, police found a duffel bag with Dyleski’s nametag. Inside, they found bloody clothes, shoes, and a ski mask that later tested positive for DNA from both Dyleski and Vitale.
The following morning, as friends and family were saying a final good-bye to Pamela at her funeral, her alleged killer was arrested and held in lieu of $1 million bail.
Six days after the killing, on October 21, the teen was brought before a Superior Court judge and charged with first degree murder as an adult. Handcuffs encircled his bony wrists, and strands of dark, wavy hair covered much of his angular face as he was led into the courtroom. Dyleski said nothing during the brief court appearance.
Details of his brief and troubled life would emerge in the days and weeks ahead. Interviews with schoolmates painted the teen as a loner who was mercilessly teased about the way he dressed by his classmates at Lafayette’s Acalanes High School. Friends said that Dyleski endured endless taunts for being “nerdy” while growing up in the small, rural town as a Boy Scout, a basketball player, and a good student in elementary school.
But something inside Scott seemed to die in 2001 when his eighteen-year-old half sister, Denika, was killed in a car crash. The once easygoing student suddenly began shaving parts of his head, wearing dark eyeliner and black nail polish and dying his brown hair jet black. He began dressing all in black accessorized by heavy silver jewelry and a long black trench coat like the one worn by rocker Marilyn Manson, the self-proclaimed “Anti-Christ Superstar” whose stage name merged that of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.
One former classmate told the San Francisco Chronicle he believed Scott was trying to be noticed with his strange appearance and clothing. “I always thought he was trying to get attention,” Kevin McDonald said of Dyleski. “But he seemed like a nice guy, not someone who would ever do something like this.”
Dyleski had been reportedly studying hard for his GED, desperate to escape Acalanes High School and the teasing he endured. He was taking art classes at Mt. Diablo College in Pleasant Hill, the same junior college that Susan Polk had attended as a teenager, and had submitted some of his dark, imagery-driven art for grades. He was to celebrate his eighteenth birthday two weeks after the murder.
On January 12, 2006, Susan stood before Judge Laurel Brady and asked that she be allowed to fire Horowitz and Golde, her fourth attorneys, and represent herself in the murder trial. While the lawyers knew beforehand that she wanted them removed, Susan’s action both surprised and disappointed them, after having invested so much into the high-profile case.
Interestingly, her decision to replace them seemed to have little to do with Horowitz’s personal tragedy. As most lawyers who worked with Susan discovered, representing her was something of a roller-coaster ride. Just two weeks prior to her announcement, she had expressed concern for Horowitz’s well-being and seemed happy to have him as her attorney, but soon something soured her on his representation.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, Susan had made many calls to Horowitz’s office with countless requests. Horowitz assigned Valerie Harris to handle the multitude of Susan’s needs, but as time went on, that arrangement backfired. Susan began complaining about what she perceived as Dan’s lack of attention to her case and accused him of failing to file legal motions on her behalf. Once she felt neglected, it was not long before she notified Horowitz that his services were no longer needed.
“She has a right to an attorney of her choice,” Horowitz told reporters outside the courtroom. “But the judge may not let me out because we’re so close to trial. I feel sorry for her [Susan]. What can I say? Going through Pamela’s death was a horrible experience. It’s not deliberate. She’s not really trying to hurt me. She’s desperate and scared.”
During the ninety-minute hearing before Judge Brady, Susan claimed that Horowitz had all but ignored her case since his wife was murdered. Though Horowitz had already filed some forty motions with the court, Susan still wasn’t happy, claiming he had failed to file others for her. Despite the severity of the charges, Susan believed that she could represent herself in court. She asked that Harris, with whom Susan had formed a strong bond, be permitted to remain on her case as a consultant.
In addition to her complaints about Horowitz, Susan also filed a lengthy declaration on January 12 in which she outlined several grievances she had with the judge and police department. Among other things, Susan complained that Horowitz had failed to file her motion to disqualify Judge Brady and the entire Contra Costa County judiciary because they were all prejudiced against her. She also claimed that she had been subjected to discriminatory treatment by law enforcement since she had unsuccessfully moved to have Judge Brady removed from the case in August—including being “the only female prisoner” to be transported in shackles.
Susan also claimed that Dan Horowitz was a suspect in the murder of his wife. Later, she told reporters that she believed that Horowitz may have been involved in Pamela’s murder “based on statements he made to me.” She even offered to testify on behalf of the murder suspect, Scott Dyleski, at his upcoming pretrial hearing. Though Horowitz declined to respond publicly to Susan’s allegations, in part because a gag order had been issued, it was clear that he was infuriated by her remarks.
Not surprisingly, Judge Brady denied Susan’s motion to have the entire judiciary of Contra Costa County removed at a hearing on January 20, but she granted Susan’s request to dismiss Horowitz. The judge set a new trial date for February 27, giving Susan six weeks to prepare her defense.
“It is Susan’s story,” a visibly pale Dan Horowitz said while waiting in the hallway of the courthouse after the hearing. “She lived it and she wants to tell it. She has the absolute right to present her own defense.”
Ivan Golde chose to phrase it a bit differently: “It’s a very sad day,” he said.
On February 27, 2006, three hundred prospective jurors arrived at the Contra Costa County Courthouse in Martinez to begin jury selection in the murder trial of Susan Polk.
Surprisingly, Polk’s original prosecutor, Tom O’Connor, had announced his resignation from the D.A.’s office just one week earlier to take a job in the private sector. A senior prosecutor, Paul Sequeira, was immediately assigned to take his place. Though new to the case, Sequeira told the media that he was rapidly getting up to speed and regarded the case as fairly straightforward.
With no lawyer by her side, Susan was relying on Valerie Harris and had a jury consultant to help with the selection process. Prospective jurors arriving at the courthouse were first directed to an assembly room where Judge Brady informed them about Susan’s decision to represent herself. She asked jurors if they could fairly adjudicate the case under that scenario. Those who expressed doubts were immediately excused. The others were directed to the courtroom where Susan and Paul Sequeria would conduct their questioning.
As jury selection began, Susan seemed in control of her defense. Her questions were measured and appropriate, although in some instances she revealed too much about the specifics of her case and was admonished by the judge to restrict her comments. Soft-spoken and articulate, Susan’s demeanor was more of a schoolteacher than a murder defendant. She showed up for court each morning in well-tailored outfits, gold-rimmed designer glasses—and a uniformed court officer on each arm. Though she appeared self-assured at the start, it wasn’t long before it became clear that she was very nervous about her case and somewhat uncertain about how to proceed.
Late in the afternoon, Susan erupted into tears after a potential juror voiced alarm over the possible length of the trial, estimated at over two months, and Susan’s decision to serve as her own attorney—or to go pro per.
“I feel this is my one chance,” Susan defended, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I’m taking a calculated risk, and I realize all of you have things you’d rather do.”
In the courtroom, Susan was timid one minute and more like an articulate, thoughtful law student the next. She could be confident, emphatically arguing legal points with the judge and citing information from a law book. Other times, however, she was apologetic and ill at ease. She grew visibly upset one afternoon when she misplaced one of her documents. After Susan spent several anxious minutes rifling through the stack of papers on the defense table, she finally gave up in exasperation and carried on from memory.
By the end of the second day, Susan had dismissed eight prospective jurors while the prosecutor had dismissed six through the preemptory challenge process. Susan’s questioning made it clear that she was most anxious to have a juror who could be objective in adjudicating a case in which a defendant was acting as her own attorney.
While questioning one prospective juror, a building inspector, Susan crafted an analogy, asking him how he would react if he went to someone’s house and found that the homeowner had fixed his own toilet and done his own construction and wiring, while following the appropriate rules.
The man said that wouldn’t trouble him.
“And so, here in the courtroom, if I follow the rules, although I sometimes might make mistakes, would it annoy you that I’m doing it myself?”
“No. It wouldn’t annoy me,” he said.
Despite his positive responses, Susan would later strike the building inspector from the jury because of his friendships with a local judge and members of law enforcement. She excused another potential juror after the woman told Judge Brady that she thought Susan “was a fool” for choosing to go pro per. And she let a third man go after he joked about her decision to represent herself.
“It’s like a game of wrestling, where a flyweight is with a heavyweight,” the retired draftsman chuckled. “If I bet on it, I bet with the heavyweight.”
While Susan took the courtroom proceedings seriously, she invoked a little humor when one prospective panelist raised concerns over how Susan intended to cross-examine her sons and take the stand on her own behalf. With a giggle, Susan recounted a scene from a Jim Carrey comedy in which the actor played a defendant who was representing himself, leaping from the podium to the stand as he conducted his cross-examination.
“I’ll actually have notes and questions for myself and an outline leading me through what I need to tell you,” Susan told the woman, a registered nurse, who was later selected to serve on Polk’s jury.
By late Monday, March 6, Susan and Paul Sequeria announced their agreement on a panel of six men and six women, among them a woman who had served in the U.S. military, a retired female U.S. Parcel Service worker, and a sales manager for the local plumber’s union who shared one attribute with Susan—a young son. The jury selection process had taken a full five days.
Judge Brady could have started the case with opening remarks that same afternoon, but at the request of the prosecutor, she agreed to begin the following day, March 7.
The case had drawn considerable attention from local and national media for a variety of reasons—the relationship between Susan and her therapist husband, the allegations of an abusive household, and the anticipated testimony from all three of the Polks sons—two were expected to testify against their mother and one was expected to take the stand on her behalf. The fact that Susan had fired four different defense attorneys and was now going to represent herself at trial made the case all the more interesting.
With people routinely questioning her sanity and judgment, the trial offered her an opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong and show that she could handle the task. Building from the material that Horowitz had prepared, she would present a straight self-defense case, alleging that Felix attacked her with a knife that October night and that she had fought back before fatally stabbing him to save herself. Furthermore, she would present evidence that Felix died from a heart attack—not the multiple stab wounds she inflicted during their heated altercation—and would call an expert to support her claim.
On Tuesday, members of the media, law enforcement, and curiosity seekers occupied most of the fifty seats in the gallery. Others sat on chairs that had been set up along the walls or stood in the rear of the courtroom, awaiting the opening remarks from Paul Sequeira and Susan Polk.
Susan looked drawn and frail as she stood organizing her papers at the defense table. Dressed in a white sweater and khaki pants, Susan’s sporty attire contrasted sharply with the conservative dark suit and solid gray tie worn by her opponent, Paul Sequeira. The prosecutor looked to be about ten years Susan’s junior, with thick, layered hair and wire-rim glasses that tended to perch on the end of his nose. Obviously comfortable in the courtroom, Sequeira made a habit of strolling across the commercial-grade carpet and sometimes leaning on the railing of the jury box.
Polk immediately surprised the crowd when she asked and was given permission to postpone her opening statement until she began her case-in-chief. It was just after 3 PM when the prosecutor rose to address the jury. He told Judge Brady that his remarks would take about fifty minutes to deliver, but in reality the remarks took a lot longer, as Sequeira was interrupted repeatedly by Susan’s objections.
“You are about to embark on a journey through a dysfunctional relationship that ended in murder and destruction,” the prosecutor began. “Felix Polk was a Holocaust survivor. Susan was fifteen when she went to see him. They had a relationship that went wrong. The physical relationship began when she was seventeen or eighteen. They married when she was twenty-four and had their first son, Adam, in 1983. What was born out of dysfunction began to look like a normal, loving relationship.
“The defendant worked in the home raising children, but there were always conflicts. Wherever Susan went, there was a trail of conflict and confrontation. If there were problems in school, it was the teacher’s fault. This also became the children’s reality because it was easier to go along than to take responsibility for their actions.
“Susan also had a theory that Felix controlled the school. Gabe admits that he was sucked into this delusion. As time passed, Susan became more paranoid and began making things up. Then, five years before the murder, Susan’s mental instability intensified on a trip to Disneyland. She had a full-blown break and claimed to have repressed memories. She claimed she was raped as a child by her father and brother, and described in graphic detail the rape scenes to her children.”
“I object, your honor!” Susan announced, rising to her feet. Judge Brady admonished Susan that she was not permitted to object during the State’s opening remarks. But her words fell on deaf ears. In fact, Susan began interrupting the prosecutor at almost every turn. These interruptions set the tone for the entire trial. Throughout the proceedings, Judge Brady would attempt, often unsuccessfully, to control Susan’s flare-ups and accusations, including allegations that she and the prosecutor were colluding against the defendant.
Turning his attention back to the jury, Sequeria took a deep breath and once again tried to complete his opening remarks. The prosecutor described how Susan’s delusional behavior soon focused on Felix. She believed her husband was in the CIA, the FBI, and the Mossad. She believed he had offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. Susan told her three sons that Felix “was a monster,” the prosecutor charged, triggering yet another objection from Susan.
“Felix was a therapist who couldn’t help his own wife with her paranoid delusions,” Sequeira continued amid more objections and yet another stern warning from Judge Brady.
“Until the murder, there was no extreme violence in the house,” the prosecutor went on. Citing the accounts of two of the Polk sons, the prosecutor argued that Felix was not the abuser and that both Felix and Susan provoked repeated confrontations in the household.
“Objection,” Susan yelled yet again.
“Mrs. Polk, I will not admonish you again,” Judge Brady warned angrily. The judge threatened to remove Susan from the courtroom if she interrupted one more time.
Jurors exchanged silent glances as the prosecutor continued.
“There was lots of grabbing and bumping but not extreme violence,” Sequeira said. “One time, Susan slapped Felix in front of a police officer. The boys will say that dad was an older guy and worked long hours. He came home late and tired and Susan would often verbally abuse Felix throughout dinner. Susan would challenge his manhood and poke fun at the size of his penis in front of the boys.”
“Objection!” Susan barked, seething with anger.
“I will remove you from this courtroom!” Judge Brady fumed, glaring at Susan.
For a moment, it appeared as though Susan would be barred from the proceeding. From Brady’s tone, it was clear that this would be her final warning—and Susan seemed to understand the gravity of the judge’s words.
From there, Sequeira continued his opening statement without interruption, weaving the complicated tale of the turbulent times in the Polk household. Painting a picture of dysfunction and psychological disturbance, the prosecutor detailed how Susan routinely belittled and emasculated the aging Felix. He walked jurors through Felix’s final days, detailing the brutal battle for custody of Gabriel and the fight over Susan’s alimony payments. To Sequeira, the Susan Polk who killed her husband was a cold, callous woman, not the victim she made herself out to be. She lied to the police about her involvement from the beginning, and she was still lying about her involvement as they sat there in the court.
“Susan then lies over and over and over and over at the police station,” he told the jurors as the defendant watched his every move. “Does Susan say ‘he came at me with a knife and I attacked him in self defense?’ No, she says she didn’t do it. But then forensic science kicks in and her lies are not permitted.
“She destroys evidence. Bloody clothes. Gone! Knife. Gone! Car—moved! Lies and a cover up!”
Jurors listened intently to the prosecutor’s theory. Sequeira detailed Felix’s injuries, informing them of the savage nature of his wounds and showing the jurors dramatic crime scene photos. Despite the graphic pictures, no one flinched.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence will show the defendant was upset. This festered until she made good on a repeated threat” to kill Felix Polk, the prosecutor charged. “Dr. Polk, abuser or victim of the ultimate attack of murder?”
Following Sequeira’s opening remarks, jurors were dismissed for the night, but Susan wouldn’t leave without one parting shot at the court.
“I want a mistrial!” Susan demanded as the last juror stepped out of the courtroom. “It’s all lies,” she shouted furiously, ticking off each of the prosecutor’s statements. “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t talk about my husband’s penis in front of the boys. It’s laughable.”
Judge Brady angrily directed Susan to move on to evidentiary issues that needed addressing, but Susan wouldn’t let things rest. She complained that her case assistant, Valerie Harris, was not being permitted to visit with her in jail and that she had still not received all of the case documents from Dan Horowitz.
Ignoring Susan, the judge turned to the prosecutor and instructed that he discuss the evidence with the defendant.
“Liar!” she shouted at the prosecutor.
“Lady, I know your act, and if you try to draw me in, and try to control me like you’re trying to control the court, then I’ll deal with Mrs. Harris,” Sequeira shot back.
“Then, I’ll fire Ms. Harris,” Susan said as she promptly terminated her only assistant.
When court recessed for the night, Susan rehired Harris; she was back at Susan’s side the following morning, watching intently as Susan interrogated her youngest son.
Susan’s attention was trained on the witness stand, where Gabriel Polk sat in a suit and tie, ready to testify for the prosecution. Now nineteen years old, the teen appeared composed and in control that Wednesday morning. It had been three years since Susan last saw her youngest son. Susan’s cross-examination of Gabe would mark the first time the two had spoken since Felix’s death. A restraining order had barred any contact between the mother and son during the intervening period, and Gabe had refused repeatedly to read any of Susan’s written correspondence.
Gabriel was the State’s strongest and most sympathetic witness. That Susan had allowed the then-fifteen-year-old youth to find his father’s dead body in the family’s guest cottage would be a major obstacle for jurors to overcome as they considered her explanation of self-defense. Sitting before the jury, Gabe’s once slender frame had filled out and what had been gaunt, sullen cheeks were now bright and healthy. He had grown into a handsome young man, with his mother’s strong jaw and deep-set eyes framed by thick, dark lashes.
Susan, dressed in black slacks and a blouse, appeared unsettled as she sat at the defense table. She blotted away tears with a tissue and sipped on a glass of water she poured from the gold and black carafe on the table. Saying that she felt ill, she took two Tylenol after getting permission from Sheriff’s deputies.
When asked by Sequeira to identify his mother, Gabe Polk looked in Susan’s direction and pointed. The two seemed to avoid direct eye contact. In response to questions from the prosecutor, Gabe described how he stopped attending school as a youth because his mother insisted that administrators were “out to get him” and were purposely giving him bad grades. Susan believed that his father was behind a conspiracy being perpetrated by members of the school faculty, that Felix had designated Adam for success and Gabe and his middle brother, Eli, for failure.
Jurors scribbled in notebooks as the teen responded to questions about Susan’s breakdown during the family’s visit to Disneyland. Gabe said he was nine or ten when the family made the trip and recalled his mother crying “uncontrollably.” Later he was told that while on the trip she had remembered being abused by her father, mother, and brother as a child, and that she believed her parents had murdered a police officer and buried his body in the basement of her childhood home. On the stand, Gabe recounted his mother’s recollections of the alleged abuse, which included “very disturbing details,” information he was ill-equipped to handle at the time.
Recalling Felix and Susan’s dramatic accusations of molestation against their sons’ day care providers, Gabe claimed that it was Susan who had convinced his father and brothers that he and Adam were victims of a satanic sex cult. Gabe went on to say that he now believed that his mother had “brainwashed” him against his father and described her as “full-blown delusional.” During his testimony, he recalled how she would sit at the breakfast table, scanning the newspaper for hidden codes and messages sent to her husband from the Mossad. She later elaborated on this, saying that this was how Felix communicated with undercover operatives. Gabe had no reason to doubt his mother’s claims; he simply went along with what she was saying. It was easier to agree than to debate what she was telling him.
During the courtroom proceedings, Gabe seemed distant, wearing an inscrutable stare as he sat in the witness chair or raised his eyes to the ceiling when contemplating answers to the prosecutor’s questions. Throughout the morning, Gabe used the word “delusion” countless times to describe his mother’s behavior. He recalled a car ride with Susan six months prior to the homicide during which she began speaking of ways to kill Felix. “She talked about drugging him and drowning him in the pool, hitting him over the head and drowning him in the pool, running him over with the car, or tampering with his car.”
Mentioning that she had been making threats for almost five years, Gabriel was accustomed to Susan’s emotional outbursts and, at some point, stopped taking her seriously. “She talked about killing him every day,” he said.
Still, Gabe said he was alarmed when she announced in September 2002 that she intended to leave him with Felix while she traveled to Montana to look for a place to live. He told the court that he found it odd that she would leave him with the man she deemed a monster, but after spending several days with Felix, Gabriel began rethinking his feelings about his dad. He was both surprised and pleased to find that Felix wasn’t the ogre that Susan had portrayed.
“Dad’s not such a bad guy,” Gabe told Susan during one call, recalling that his mother was “furious” about the divorce proceedings.
One week before the murder, Gabe said he warned his father that “he feared for his [dad’s] life” because of “all the things that his mother was saying.”
In response to questions from the prosecutor, Gabe said that he never witnessed any physical abuse in the home. “The most I’ve ever seen my dad do to my mother was slap her once,” he said. “About six months before the murder, I saw my mom slap my dad and police came out to arrest her.”
“Objection!” Susan bellowed, voicing opposition to her son’s use of the word “murder.”
Judge Brady sustained that objection, as well as Susan’s second protest over the word “killing.” Susan argued that Felix’s death should be referred to as “the incident.” But the judge disagreed, and substituted “homicide” as an acceptable alternative.
When Sequeira continued his direct examination, Gabe was asked to speak about his parents’ relationship. Here, Gabriel’s testimony corroborated Sequeira’s opening statements, portraying Felix as the dutiful working husband and Susan as the aggressor who would get in his face within minutes of his return home. Susan often degraded her husband, calling him “old” and “decrepit,” and making sexually explicit comments, including derogatory remarks about the size of his penis.
After Gabriel answered questions about the events of October 13 leading up to his gruesome discovery, the judge adjourned the proceedings for lunch and directed the defendant to begin her cross-examination when they returned. It had been a difficult morning for Susan, who spent much of Gabriel’s testimony quietly weeping in her seat. Listening to her son vilify her was hard, but she left the court vowing to return with renewed composure and determined to get Gabriel to admit that his father had been a tyrant.
Questioning Gabriel proved to be an arduous process, one that lasted for five grueling days. During that time, Susan challenged his recollections about his childhood, suggested he was hiding things when he couldn’t remember any abuse, and elicited facts about his early brushes with the law. She asked innumerable questions about the relationship between Felix and herself and probed her son’s affection for his brothers. She repeatedly broke down in tears when their memories differed and when he wouldn’t corroborate her claims of spousal abuse.
Early on, Susan questioned Gabe about the alleged ritualistic sexual abuse of Adam at the day care center in an attempt to demonstrate that the accusations came from Felix, not from her. Over Sequeira’s objections, Susan played a tape of Felix’s speech at the Berkeley Conference of the California Consortium of Child Abuse in 1988. It was at this event that he was introduced as a “parent of a ritualistically abused child.”
Gabe sat impassively as his dead father’s voice filled the courtroom. “The children were raped on stage, raped in every form imaginable,” Felix told conference participants. Meanwhile jurors were transfixed by the audio-taped lecture in which Felix claimed that his eldest son, Adam, had witnessed a baby being stuffed into a plastic bag and “hammered to death,” and that cult members ate flesh, vomit, and blood in front of his son and other children.
“My rage is omnipresent… my fantasy, of course, is to kill them,” Felix’s recorded voice resounded over speakers in the courtroom. “And I’m a rather moral person. I want to kill them.”
“Did you recognize your father’s voice?” Susan asked Gabe when the tape ended.
Gabriel responded affirmatively.
Afterward, Susan asked about allegations that he, too, had been sexually abused while in day care and that both his parents had gone to police to file a complaint. Still, he insisted that he and Adam had no recollection of being molested while in day care. He maintained that Susan was the one who had created the whole scenario and ultimately convinced Felix that it was real.
“Did it ever occur to you that he might be making it all up?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know,” Gabe replied.
While the questions were exhaustive, Susan never really probed Gabe’s recollection of the night he found his father’s body in the guesthouse. After three days of cross-examination, she asked the teen, “On the night you found your father’s body, were you scared?”
“I wasn’t scared, I was completely devastated,” Gabe replied. “But I wasn’t scared.”
Questions like this made it clear that Susan’s examination was going nowhere. She asked her son if he was “completely truthful” with police during his interrogation, and if he recalled how many times he told officers that his mother “had never been violent” with his dad. But she failed to delve further into the events of that day.
Instead, she pushed Gabe to portray his father in a negative light.
“You don’t recall your father poisoning Tuffy, the family dog?” she asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you aware that your father woke up every day thinking about killing people?”
At times, Susan seemed determined to engage her son in a dialogue, invoking Judge Brady to issue a warning that cross-examination “is not a conversation.”
Even the prosecutor expressed frustration after it became clear that Susan intended to question his star witness until she was content with his responses—no matter the relevance to the case.
There was a break in the case during the second day of testimony when Susan arrived for court and told the judge that she had a bad sore throat, vowed that she “wasn’t making it up” and asked for a postponement. The judge acquiesced and instructed everyone to return to court the following Monday, March 13.
Still, Susan felt well enough to object to Marjorie Briner’s presence in the courtroom before the adjournment. She argued that Briner, her son’s guardian, was influencing Gabe’s testimony. She also insisted that Briner stood to profit from the outcome of the trial because she was entitled to Social Security benefits as his guardian.
In a telephone conversation early in the trial, Marjorie Briner expressed Gabriel’s concern over how he was being portrayed in the media. Some members of the press had been speculating over statements the teen had made during a telephone conversation with his brother Adam while at police headquarters that were being aired on Court TV. Briner explained that Gabe was anxious to clarify one remark in which he appeared to say “Dad left us a pile of ‘money,’ when in fact, Gabe claims that he told Adam, ‘Dad left us a pile of debt.’
“This young man is under a great deal of stress, and it’s not unreasonable to have a support person in the court,” Sequeria argued with regard to Briner’s presence in the courtroom, telling Susan that just because she thinks something is happening doesn’t make it so.
Judge Brady ruled that Briner could remain in the courtroom, except when Gabriel was responding to specific questions about financial matters.
“I am going to need a therapist when this is all over,” Sequeira told reporters outside court that Wednesday afternoon.
That following Monday, Susan confronted the judge over the recent arrest of her middle son, Eli, on charges he beat up his girlfriend. On March 9, police arrested Eli and charged him with misdemeanor battery based on claims that his then-girlfriend made to authorities at the Polks’ Miner Road home.
Eli had been released on bail and was standing in the doorway of the courtroom when his mother asked the judge to issue a restraining order against his girlfriend.
Brady refused and instructed Susan to get on with her cross-examination. “Mrs. Polk, your son is an adult, and if he feels a restraining order is necessary, there is an appropriate process for him to go through.”
“His life has been threatened,” Susan went on. “There are physical marks on his face. He called police for help.”
Susan claimed that it was Eli who had summoned police that past Thursday after his girlfriend entered the house without permission and assaulted him for not returning her phone calls. She then argued that Eli was entitled to an emergency restraining order from Brady because he was a witness in her case.
“I’m not going to issue a restraining order unless I hear from both parties,” the judge declared.
It was then that Susan spotted her son in the vestibule outside the courtroom. “This is my son,” she shouted, pointing to the courtroom door. “Look at his face!”
Susan directed her case manager, Valerie Harris, to retrieve Eli and bring him inside. But her son declined to enter, prompting Judge Brady to set a hearing date for March 16 to address the matter. She also ordered that Eli’s girlfriend be notified of the court date.
A second interruption occurred when Judge Brady advised Susan that she was not permitted to have witnesses in the courtroom after spotting her mother, Helen Bolling, in the third row of the gallery. Susan appeared surprised at the judge’s comment. Turning to look in the gallery, Susan smiled. “Oh, there she is! Hi Mom!” she shouted, waving at the gray-haired woman in the ankle-high cowboy boots. “I didn’t know she was here.”
Judge Brady instructed Susan’s mother to step out of the courtroom, explaining that she was a witness in the case and could not stay for testimony.
By the end of the day, Sequeira was throwing his hands up in exasperation. “I give up,” he said, after Susan repeatedly questioned Gabriel about a pair of brass knuckles that he supposedly kept in his car, despite the D.A.’s objections.
“She’s been cross-examining her son for three days and she’s been talking about Tuffy and Ruffy and whatever else she’s got going,” Sequeria complained. “She’s absolutely torturing that kid. And she’s abusing her cross-examination privileges. She’s abusing the process.”
Finding it pointless to continue objecting, the prosecutor stood silent as Gabe again explained that he carried the brass knuckles because he was scared of his mother and brother Eli. He said that Eli told him he would do “whatever” it took to prevent him from testifying against their mother. Gabe took his brother’s remark as a threat and obtained a restraining order against Eli. According to Gabe, Eli held “a lot of resentment” toward both his parents and acted out a lot, both at home and in school.
Susan then turned to the family’s time in Piedmont and Gabriel’s difficulties while in middle school, where he admitted to being involved in fights and being suspended for “drugs.” Responding to Susan’s insinuations, Gabe blamed the constant arguing at home for his behavior, for his acting up in school, and for the hard time he had making friends during childhood.
“Parents in the neighborhood were scared of you,” he said. “Scared of our family, generally.” Gabe went on to name one parent who refused to let her child play with him and his brothers because of concerns about Susan’s mental state—or as Gabe put it “you and your delusions.”
His sharp remarks did not appear to faze Susan, who plowed ahead, at one point displaying photographs of family trips to Disneyland and Gabe as a child playing with a friend and the family dogs, Max and Mitsie, in an attempt to elicit fond memories of their times together.
“Didn’t you say ‘even if she is delusional, we love her because she’s fun?’” Susan asked, holding up the “Best Mom” plaque that her three sons awarded her in 1997.
“Yeah, we loved you. This [the plaque] was Dad’s idea by the way,” he shot back. Susan wept when Gabe said he couldn’t confirm her claims that his dad punched her in the face, dragged her up the stairs by her hair, and told her that he would never give her a divorce.
“He threw water in your face one time,” the teen acknowledged.
“One time?” Susan fired back.
Gabe admitted that his father may have picked up and thrown small items around the house during arguments with Susan but said that he never threw anything directly at her.
Continuing, Susan asked Gabe about his strained relationship with Eli, tearing up as the questions came out of her mouth.
“Do you recall telling your brother Eli that he was your best friend?”
“Yes,” Gabe replied in a monotone.
“Do you remember when you went to school wearing his oversized clothes and shoes?” Susan asked, referring to Gabe’s time in elementary school. “Do you miss your brother?”
There was silence in the courtroom as Gabriel contemplated his answer. “Yes, I do miss him,” the teen replied, straightening himself in the chair. “I still have affection for Eli, Dad, and you…. I do have good memories. I do love you. But there’s terrible memories with the good memories.”
“You still have affection for your brother?” Susan posed. “Then why did you sue him?”
“I didn’t sue Eli, I sued you.”
“Didn’t you and your brother settle a wrongful death suit with me for $300,000?” Susan said, referring to the civil action that Gabe and Adam filed after her arrest.
Gabe was visibly upset when his mother brought up the suit in court, insisting that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it because of a confidentiality agreement that both parties had signed. “You know that,” he snapped at his mother.
“Couldn’t you have just left him off?” Susan asked, referring to Eli.
Gabe told his mother that he was not a lawyer, but it was his understanding that he and Adam had sued her, and that since Eli took her side, he had to be named in the suit.
“These things are obviously very important to you but they don’t seem to add or subtract from your case,” Judge Brady told Susan.
“I hope you don’t think I’m picking on you,” Susan told Gabriel before court adjourned that night. “You are aware that I loved all three of my sons the same?”
“Yes, I know,” he acknowledged. “You appreciate Eli a lot more now because he buys into your delusions and we don’t.”
On Tuesday, jurors arrived for a third day of cross-examination. Instead, they learned that Susan had asked for another delay.
“I’m sick and I think I’m getting bronchitis,” she sniffled.
The judge arranged to have her seen by a doctor; Brady also let Susan know that she was anxious to keep the proceedings moving along and hoped to resume court after lunch.
When Susan returned that afternoon, she reported that she had been prescribed antibiotics for her condition. She then requested an adjournment until the following Monday to get some “much needed rest.” “I was up half the night coughing,” she told the judge. “This is a murder trial and I want to be at my best.”
Judge Brady was sympathetic to Susan’s infirmity—she, too, was nursing a sore throat, but denied her request for what she deemed an “unreasonable” delay and ordered all parties back to court on Thursday, March 16. This adjournment was further evidence of the judge’s extraordinary patience. Brady rarely lost her cool even as Susan accused her of conspiring with the prosecutor or showing bias against the defense in front of jurors.
At times, Brady’s interchanges with Susan were akin to a kindergarten teacher scolding a young student, soothing the child until she calmed down. When it became clear that Susan could not be reigned in, Brady would order a “time out,” punishing Susan with fifteen minutes in a holding cell to regain her composure. Remarkably, Susan continued to push even as the judge reprimanded her. “Well, then I’m taking papers with me to read!” she told Brady after being ordered to the holding cell one afternoon.
“No,” the judge shot back. There was no reading during a time out.
It seemed that Susan had mastered the art of knowing just how far to push before landing in serious trouble, and she continued to press throughout the trial. Sometimes the judge’s latitude went too far as Brady allowed Susan to disrupt the flow of testimony and antagonize the prosecution. The end result was a highly irregular relationship between the bench and the attorneys, but in this case of many bizarre relationships, no one seemed particularly surprised.
On Thursday, jurors learned of yet another delay. An alternate juror had called in sick and, of course, there were more objections from the defendant. This time, Susan was upset that the leg shackles she was being forced to wear were causing runs in her pantyhose. Next, Susan objected to the prosecutor’s request to interrupt her cross-examination of Gabe so that he could put Adam on the stand. Adam had been waiting in the wings to testify for the prosecution since the trial had begun and was on the State’s list to take the stand after Gabe. But Adam was growing increasingly concerned that all the delays would prevent him from returning to UCLA in time for final exams and a scheduled trip to South Africa with his girlfriend.
Susan argued that it was unfair to disrupt her case merely to accommodate her son’s vacation plans. Besides, she felt that Gabriel’s testimony was too important to interrupt.
“You would think that the defendant might have some consideration for her child,” the prosecutor said.
“I object,” Susan shot back. “That’s an outrageous comment.”
“We will start fresh on Monday and hopefully move along,” the judge ruled, choosing to postpone the trial another day rather than replace the sick juror with an alternate. Already, one juror had been excused from the case and with the trial expected to last another two months, she did not want to risk losing another. This postponement would be the fourth delay since the trial began one week earlier.
Susan took two final shots at the prosecutor before the court adjourned Thursday. Out of earshot of jurors, she accused the D.A.’s office of “coaching” her two sons to slander both her and Eli on the stand. She also accused Sequeira of prosecutorial misconduct, charging that he deliberately tried to provoke a mistrial with his supposed underhanded strategies.
“I’d rather have needles shoved in my eye than have a mistrial,” Sequeira shot back.
“I would be very careful about making such accusations without any proof,” Judge Brady admonished Susan.
Court reconvened on Monday, March 20, with Susan continuing to question Gabriel about his childhood. “I don’t remember, I was five,” the teen responded to one question. “I was just a little kid,” he replied to another.
“I think we’re having a forest-for-the-trees problem,” Judge Brady told Susan at one point during her examination. “A lot of time is being spent on minutiae about events that are extremely important to you—again, I’m not telling you how to try your case, but my concern is that [the jury’s] attention will be lost for the important things.”
At the end of Monday’s proceedings, the judge informed Susan that she would allow her just one more day to question her son. She refused to bend even as Susan demanded to continue for “as much time as it takes to get to the truth.” Susan would have to finish her cross-examination by 5 PM Tuesday.
The following day, Susan escalated her attack, engaging the prosecutor in a number of heated exchanges.
Before Gabriel even took the stand that morning, Susan accused Sequeira of “making faces” in the courtroom. She claimed the prosecutor was rolling his eyes at jurors to imply that her cross-examination of her son was tedious.
“I can’t freeze my face,” Sequeira replied dryly, remarking that he had an expressive face.
Judge Brady intervened, telling Susan that she had not seen any “eye-rolling” on the part of the prosecutor, only a look of fatigue when Sequeira briefly shut his eyes in court.
“He is goading me,” Susan complained, talking over the prosecutor as he tried to defend against her latest accusation.
When he finally got the floor, Sequeira charged that Susan was making a “farce” of the trial with her unending objections, demands for a mistrial and accusations of prosecutorial misconduct “every fifteen minutes,” and he implored the judge to revoke Susan’s right to represent herself in court.
“We have gone far beyond the pale of what is reasonable,” he said, after jurors were cleared from the courtroom. “This jury, God knows what they’re thinking now.”
Even the court reporter voiced complaints about Susan’s behavior in court that day, at one point rising from her chair and telling the judge that it was impossible to record the proceedings with Susan repeatedly talking over the witness. When she complained a second time, Susan instructed the judge to “admonish the court reporter!”
Sequeira froze in disbelief. He had never seen anyone instruct a judge to reprimand a member of the court staff. But Brady remained calm, giving Susan more latitude until she, too, reached her limit and threatened to revoke Susan’s pro per status if she continued to ignore the court’s rules.
“The jury is getting forgotten in this equation,” Brady warned. “This pattern of behavior that we seem to be going through is alienating the jury.”
“The defendant’s style in this case is to be passive-aggressive,” Sequeira roared, accusing Susan of slyly introducing evidence in the pretext of questions. “She flouts this court’s authority at every opportunity so that it makes this trial somewhat of a farce.”
“Objection, your honor,” Susan yelled out. In a lawyerly tone, she informed the prosecutor that she was objecting to him raising his voice during his “diatribe” and for taking “inappropriate personal potshots” at her.
“Maybe he should start acting like a lawyer instead of being a baby,” she goaded.
It was an amusing quip and one that underscored the increasingly hostile relationship between Sequeira and Polk. For days now, Susan had been inciting direct arguments with the prosecutor, and Brady had done little to stop it. Like two siblings who loathe the sight of each other, they bickered back and forth instead of trying the case. In what was becoming the most entertaining aspect of the trial, Sequeira was routinely drawn into arguments with Susan. While her repeated objections were quite disruptive, it was surprising that she was so successful in eliciting a reaction from the seasoned lawyer.
The more she interrupted the court, the more it seemed that her actions were part of some coherent strategy, not just idle comments meant to annoy the prosecutor. While her behavior was clearly ruffling his feathers, it was also distracting him from his arguments and disrupting the flow of discussion for the jury. Perhaps looking back on Sequeira’s case during their deliberations, the jury would become confused by seemingly inconsequential and incomplete testimony. If intentional, this strategy’s effectiveness would not be known for months, but one thing was certain: by reacting to Susan, Sequeira was playing right into her hand, allowing her to dictate the pace and manner in which the case was progressing.
During the afternoon questioning, Susan probed Gabriel about his relationship with Marjorie and Dan Briner, his surrogate parents since Felix’s death.
“I consider myself their foster child,” Gabe told his mother. “I consider them my parents.”
Gabe’s remarks clearly rattled Susan. She immediately objected to his characterization, insisting that Gabe was not a foster child, as that term is legally defined.
“I am doing extremely well now,” Gabe next told Susan.
Fueled with rage, Susan sought to paint the Briners as greedy individuals who were trying to cash in on her son’s circumstances. She claimed that they held Gabe back in high school so that they could continue to collect social security benefits. “Isn’t it so that if you hadn’t been held back a year at school, your Social Security benefits would have ended when you turned eighteen?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gabe said, holding back tears.
Gabe told the court that initially he gave the Briners his entire twelve hundred dollar Social Security check. More recently, he paid half the money to help cover his room and board.
As the day wore on, Susan grew more and more confrontational. She demanded yes or no answers from her son and continued to pursue topics that were irrelevant to the murder case. Disturbingly, she grilled him about his alleged hatred of Felix.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to ‘gut him’?” Susan asked tearfully.
“No, God no, I never said that.”
“Didn’t you express absolute hatred of your father?”
“I’ve made mistakes. I have to live with that,” he said, anxiously rubbing his forehead. “It’s not easy that he’s dead, that I can’t say I’m sorry.”
It was just before 5 PM when Gabriel Polk finally rose from the witness chair and waved good-bye to jurors. “See you later,” he said, exiting the courtroom.
“I call for a mistrial!” Susan shouted, citing her son’s banter with the jury.
On Wednesday, the crowd in the gallery had dwindled for Sequeria’s second witness, former Orinda Police Chief Dan Lawrence. The prosecutor had rearranged his witness list to accommodate Adam Polk’s vacation plans. He would call Susan’s eldest son later in the trial and forge ahead with testimony from members of law enforcement.
Lawrence, who was now the chief of a neighboring police department, was called to testify to the phone call he received from Felix Polk one week before his murder. During the call, Felix claimed that Susan had “threatened to blow his head off.”
Sequeira’s examination of Lawrence lasted just five minutes, however, Susan kept the law enforcement officer on the stand for more than one hour, arguing that Lawrence was an expert on police protocol and had expertise on domestic abuse cases. It seemed she was anxious to introduce jurors to the idea that victims of domestic abuse don’t always report incidents to police, thus explaining why she had not reported the alleged abuse she now claimed occurred throughout her marriage.
“Isn’t it true that women who are victims of domestic abuse back out, get scared, fail to appear, and make bad witnesses?” Susan asked Lawrence.
The police chief agreed, saying that Susan’s scenario was possible.
Seemingly pleased with Lawrence’s response, she next asked him why her husband wasn’t prosecuted for his knowledge of underage drinking parties at the Miner Road house. She also wanted him to explain how Felix’s influence with people in high places might have spared him from being charged.
Lawrence was unable to answer many of Susan’s questions, including a number that stemmed from a letter she wrote to Moraga police complaining about their search of her home after Eli’s arrest on felony assault charges. The letter alleged that officers had roughed her up, handcuffed her, and threatened to tear her house apart, thus coloring her perception of the police department and leaving her distrustful of law enforcement officers.
Susan argued that it was her mistrust of police that caused her to flee to Montana—instead of reporting Felix’s murderous threats to authorities. She wanted to introduce her “state of mind” through Chief Lawrence. Susan had sent him a copy of the letter and was anxious to introduce it into evidence.
But Judge Brady ruled that she could not question the police official about the search warrant because he was not there. Susan’s accusations in the letter amounted to “hearsay” and could not be proven through this witness. Nevertheless, Susan ignored the judge’s instructions and continued her line of questioning.
Once Chief Lawrence had been excused, Susan questioned several more police witnesses, using their testimonies to present her theory that the sheriff’s deputies had contaminated the crime scene by pouring water over Felix’s head to make the dried blood look wet and to make his death appear more grisly. “Doesn’t that look like a puddle of water next to my husband’s bloody scalp?” Susan asked Sheriff’s Deputy Melvin Chamblee, one of the first officers on the scene. According to her, their carelessness and poor police work had resulted in a crime scene that looked much more like murder than the self-defensive struggle that Susan claimed it was.
She accused police of sloppy work, pointing out that officers were not wearing protective booties when they examined the crime scene. In addition, she also insisted that a photo of bloody footprints found at the scene appeared to depict two right feet, side by side. Meanwhile prosecutors maintained the footprint belonged to Susan and was the same size as the shoes found in her bedroom closet.
Dressed stylishly in a tan and green tartan kilt skirt, Susan looked lawyerly as she stood at the podium and thumbed through her papers. Displaying a photo of the bloody footprints found at the crime scene, she asked Chamblee if he saw, “two right feet.”
The deputy studied the photo, and then hesitantly agreed that it was possible, although he could not be sure.
To Susan, Chamblee’s uncertainty confirmed her claims of a tainted crime scene. Seeming pleased with her momentary victory, she shot a triumphant look at Sequeira. The prosecutor sat slouched in his chair, listening to Susan’s questions.
“What size shoe do you use?” he asked the officer on redirect testimony.
“I use size 11,” Chamblee replied.
“Size 11? And that’s men’s?”
The officer smirked, eliciting laughter from the gallery and from jurors. “Yes, men’s.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but do you wear women’s shoes?” Sequeira asked.
“Not to work,” Chamblee grinned. His response brought a half smile to Susan’s lips.
Nevertheless, the day was not without its challenges. Susan caused a ruckus when she complained that the overhead projector or LMO, pronounced “ELMO,” that both sides used to display photos and other exhibits was blocking her view of Juror Number 10. Susan had been watching this juror and another female juror over several days, seemingly convinced the two were quietly conversing during the proceedings. During a break, and with jurors out of the courtroom, she insisted that Judge Brady change places with her so that Brady could see the way her view was being obstructed.
Ordering Susan to the other side of the courtroom, the judge reluctantly stepped down from the bench and sat at the defense table, continuing her remarkable tolerance for Susan’s antics. Still, she seemed more a ringmaster than an arbiter of the law as she worked to tame Susan. It was almost comical to watch the nearly fifty-year-old woman in the flowing black robe plop down in Susan’s chair and study the jury box.
“Can I sit in the jury box to show you what view I’m not getting,” Susan asked the judge.
“No.”
After sitting in Susan’s seat, Judge Brady determined that her view was fine. But Susan continued to argue, telling the judge that it was a serious violation of her rights if she couldn’t see the jurors’ faces and whether they were communicating with one another—which would be grounds for a mistrial.
“It will be moved after lunch,” Brady finally conceded.
Sequeira could not let the moment pass without voicing his objection. He told the judge that he had gone out his way to let Susan use the “ELMO” and to teach her and her assistant, Valerie, how to operate it. “Now she’s just trying to delay and control!”
“Objection!” Susan shot back. “Prosecutorial misconduct.”
Judge Brady closed her eyes and drew a deep audible breath. But the moment was quickly disrupted by Susan’s finger pointing. Now, she wanted Brady to punish members of the gallery for snickering.
“She’s just being obstreperous and obstructionist,” Sequeira barked, “for the record.”
“Prosecutorial misconduct,” Susan retorted, “for the record.”
Next on the stand was Sheriff’s Deputy Shannon Kelly. Kelly was the officer who drove Susan to police headquarters the night Felix’s body was discovered. He said that during the ride, Susan was “unemotional” and claimed to have no knowledge of Felix’s death.
“I didn’t do anything,” Susan allegedly told the officer during the ride. “Are you sure it’s my husband? Did my son identify the body? Because his car isn’t here.”
Susan jumped up when it was her turn to question the officer. “Do you think if you had someone who was under arrest, and was accused of murder, sitting in the backseat of your car crying, and you had the music on, that you could hear them crying?” she asked from the podium.
“I could, depending on how loud the music was.”
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘crying inside’?”
“No,” Kelly replied.
The following morning, March 24, Susan was brimming with complaints, but her latest grievance was not immediately clear to members of the court.
“I’ve informed the court of the harassment and outright brutality I’ve been subjected to while in custody,” she told Judge Brady. Judge Brady looked bewildered as Susan detailed her alleged confrontation more than two years earlier with a court officer. She claimed the deputy had pulled her from the courtroom and clubbed her on the elbow with a blackjack, thus breaking her arm.
“This incident has already been dealt with,” the judge advised Susan. “I believe the facts surrounding it are quite disputed, but anyway, what’s your point?”
“Instead of giving me medical treatment I was locked in a padded cell for hours,” Susan rambled on. “Denied painkillers for the broken arm…. I have been locked in cells with urine and feces on the floor, urine soaked mattresses, broken sinks.”
The judge was losing her patience and instructed Susan to “move it along.” Susan responded that she had been given “secret” information from an officer who claimed there was a conspiracy in the works. Susan was going to be “set up.” A deputy was going to claim that she attacked him, providing a reason to discipline and harm her, Susan told the judge.
“I want bail, or to be moved to another county,” Susan demanded.
Judge Brady was incredulous. “I can’t act on information based on unnamed sources about vague allegations on some future event,” she told Susan. “I need more evidence, statements from the officer, who has a legal duty to report that kind of information to his superiors.”
“I’m certainly not going to reveal my source,” Susan huffed. “This officer is trying to help me.” Again, Susan claimed that she didn’t feel safe and asked to be moved to another county.
When the judge denied her request, Susan angrily retorted, “Well, I’ve made my record.”
Sequeira was in court for the bizarre exchange but remained silent. Once the matter appeared resolved, he informed the judge of his problems with several witnesses. One was sick and unavailable to testify. He was having trouble finding accommodations for several others who had flown in earlier to testify and had gone home because of delays in the proceedings. Now, all the hotels in town were booked because of the NCAA basketball tournament at the arena in Oakland.
“I object,” Susan interjected. “This is a violation of my right to a speedy trial.”
Sequeira shot Susan a look, then asked the judge to instruct her not to discuss the State’s delays in front of the jurors.
But Susan exhibited her usual defiance and continued to voice objections.
“Mrs. Polk, DO NOT interrupt me again!” Judge Brady threatened.
To which Susan replied, “Well, you interrupted me.”
Susan was still ranting when the judge adjourned court for the weekend, stepped down from the bench and disappeared into the hallway. Proceedings would resume on Monday with testimony from more law enforcement officers. Among those scheduled to take the stand that week was the lead homicide detective, Mike Costa.
Of all the police officers on the case, Susan was most interested in Detective Mike Costa. Susan watched from the defense table as the thickset detective climbed into the witness box Tuesday morning. Costa had recently retired from the force and had been flown in from his new home 100 miles away to testify. His first order of business would be to address the videotaped late-night interview he conducted with Susan at police headquarters on October 15, 2002.
Susan tried to get the judge to suppress the tape, claiming that she had not been Mirandized before the interview. When that failed, she insisted that the detective should have halted the interrogation after she complained of being “very, very tired” and “showed obvious signs of shock.”
Judge Brady denied her requests. “There was a clear understanding of the rights and a clear waiver,” the judge told Susan during a sidebar that morning. “It was probably the gentlest interview I’ve ever seen in a homicide investigation.”
Jurors waited in the hushed courtroom as Sequeira cued up the videotaped recording of the two-hour interrogation. Susan was now sitting at a table adjacent to the jury box so that she could watch along with the panel. The lights had been dimmed and the vertical blinds on the two windows on either side of the judge were pulled shut for the presentation.
As an image of Susan flashed onto the television screen, sobs could be heard from the defendant—emotional at the sight of herself in the interrogation room. She was dressed in a pair of shorts and a polo shirt; an official police jacket was draped over her shoulders. The jury could not see her at the counsel table, but they could hear her whimpers, which grew louder as the videotape played on. She was so upset that her case manager, Valerie Harris, slid a box of Kleenex in front of her.
“Do you want to talk to me about what happened?” Costa’s voice boomed from the TV monitor.
“I do, and I am very, very tired,” Susan responded. She appeared toned and at least ten pounds heavier in the videotape and her hair was styled and neat—nothing like the overgrown, bushy mop that she wore to court each day.
“So am I. I haven’t been to bed all day either, but we have to do this.”
Susan wore a puzzled look, “What did happen?”
“Well, that’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”
For the next two hours, Susan repeatedly denied any involvement in her husband’s death, even as the detective presented evidence to the contrary.
In the courtroom, Susan managed to quiet down and now sat beside Valerie wiping tears as jurors listened carefully to the interrogation tape.
“And you don’t know what happened to your husband?” Detective Costa asked for a second time.
“No.”
“Something happened, obviously. That’s why we’re all here. That’s why you’re here. You’ve had ongoing marital problems for sometime now, living in different places, money difficulties. So something happened, Susan.”
“That doesn’t mean that I killed him.”
“Was he seeing any other ladies?”
“I don’ t even know that he’s dead,” Susan replied. “All I know is I was lying in my bed reading and I heard Gabe get on the phone and ask to speak to a police officer, so I got out of bed and asked him ‘What’s wrong?’ He accused me of having…killed his dad.
“I did not kill my husband,” Susan insisted. “I am not that kind of person.”
Jurors listened to Susan dance around the detective’s questions, spending an inordinate amount of time detailing the couple’s financial woes and how Felix had terrorized her during their marriage. Finally, she told Costa about the call she received from her husband while in Montana, alerting her to a judge’s ruling to cut her spousal support and award Felix custody of their minor son. “And I said, ‘Are you kidding?’”
Her reaction to the phone call was crucial to the state’s case. Prosecutors claimed that the conversation triggered Susan’s murderous rage, prompting her return to California and killing her husband. The videotaped interrogation was intended to demonstrate how she initially denied any role in the homicide—an outright lie.
On the stand, Detective Costa reported that his investigators had confiscated a number of incriminating items during their search of the Miner Road crime scene, including Susan’s computer, which contained her diary and the knife with “red dried stuff” on its tip. Although that knife would not match Felix’s stab wounds, the prosecution tried to show that investigators had come away from the Miner Road home with physical evidence that could be used against Susan.
During his testimony, Susan demanded that Costa be reprimanded for conversing with a juror while seated in the witness box. According to Susan, her case manager, Valerie Harris, had witnessed the exchange and Susan wanted the detective admonished.
Out of earshot of the panel, Costa admitted to Judge Brady that he had inquired about the climate in the courtroom. “Is it me, or is it warm in here?” he had asked the juror seated closest to him in the jury box.
“Don’t talk to the jurors,” Brady instructed. “You know better.”
But Susan couldn’t leave well enough alone. “Are you acquainted with courtroom decorum?” she asked the detective once jurors had returned to their seats.
Brady immediately reprimanded Susan for improperly raising the subject in front of the panel.
Despite her lack of experience in the courtroom, Susan did a commendable job of cross-examining Costa about his investigation. Her first line of inquiry focused on whether police had looked into her claims of spousal abuse.
When the detective replied that they had not, Susan went after him.
“It was a murder investigation, wasn’t it?” she asked derisively.
“Yes,” the detective agreed.
“And you didn’t check any of these things out?” Susan demanded.
“Not personally.”
“Did anybody?” Susan asked, firing off questions like a veteran lawyer. “Yes or no?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Costa replied.
“Were there any individual sources, not from the defendant’s mouth or pen, that you came across that gave you a domestic violence background?”
“No.”
“Not even Eli?” Susan asked, referring to her middle son.
Costa said he hadn’t heard any accusations, not even from Eli.
Susan criticized the detective for not conducting more interviews with her son. She also raised questions as to why police had only confiscated some of the knives from her kitchen and not others. She even got Costa to concede that approximately thirty law enforcement officers had “trampled” around Felix’s body that first night.
“That could be—not all at once I assume,” Costa said.
Susan also elicited admissions from the detective regarding Felix’s computer. Costa told the court that his officers found only the monitor and the keyboard in the trunk of Felix’s Saab. Susan suggested that her husband’s computer might have contained evidence to support her claims of spousal abuse. She also noted that police had not interviewed her eldest son, Adam, until October 2005, just days before her first, aborted murder trial got underway.
For all the salient points, Susan suddenly lost momentum when she veered into an outlandish inquiry that put her own mental stability in question. It was a pattern throughout the trial that repeatedly overshadowed her productive moments.
“Didn’t I accuse my husband of being a Mossad agent?” she asked, referring to an entry in her computer diary. “Did you follow up on that at all?”
The detective said he had not.
Susan next pointed to her written claim that Felix had betrayed his country by failing to turn over information provided to him about the September 11 terrorist attacks. Susan later admitted that she gave that information to her husband while under hypnosis and in a trance.
“Did you report it to the FBI?” Susan asked Costa.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Do you believe there is no such thing as the Mossad?”
“Do I believe? Yes, they exist.”
“Normally, if there is some kind of treasonable activity, doesn’t that get reported?”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that my husband believed he was a psychic?”
To raised eyebrows from jurors, Costa said he was not.
“Do you believe in psychic phenomenon?”
“No, not really.”
“No?” Susan was incredulous. “Are you aware that most Americans do?”
“No, I was not aware of that.”
“Did anybody tell you that I am supposed to be a medium?” she persisted.
Costa had not heard that, nor had his investigators looked into accusations that Felix intended to overthrow the U.S. government, as Susan claimed in her diary. This elicited jeers from the gallery. Still, Susan continued firing questions at the detective about her husband’s supposed anti-American activities. Claiming that two private investigators had looked into Felix’s dealings, she said that the pair had stumbled upon writings that detailed his plan to bring down the U.S. government and take over the country.
Susan grew surly when the detective suggested that Felix had several restraining orders against her at the time of his death. “To your recollection, how many restraining orders do you think my husband had…?”
“Maybe two,” Costa replied with an air of confidence.
“Oh really? Two? How about zero?” Susan snipped.
“At least one I can think of,” the detective assured the court.
Susan retorted in a mocking tone to chortles from the gallery. “Oh you do, do you?” She got him to admit that he was incorrect in his belief that Felix had gotten some type of order of protection as a result of his 911 calls to police.
Her offensive continued when the detective said that, during the course of his investigation, he never learned that Felix was violent. Susan pointed to two letters she wrote detailing Felix’s alleged abuse; one that was found on her computer hard drive and another that police confiscated from a safe hidden beneath the wet bar in the master bedroom.
“How’d you guys get my safe open?”
“Again, I don’t know anything about a safe and I don’t know who might have opened it,” Costa said, claiming that he did not know about the safe.
Susan handed the detective a copy of the letter that she claimed was locked inside the safe. “You don’t recall that the letter contains a history of my husband’s threats, violence…”
“Objection!” Sequeira interrupted.
“Ms. Polk, this is inappropriate,” Judge Brady said, sustaining the prosecutor’s objection.
“Did you investigate whether my husband did the things in that letter? For example, did you investigate whether he raped me when I was a patient in his care?”
“Objection!” the prosecutor jumped up again.
Talking over Sequeira, Susan quoted the evidence code.
“Do not argue with me,” Judge Brady snapped.
Brady’s admonishment did little to deter Susan. Handing the detective a crime scene photo depicting the safe lying open on her bed, she asked, “It’s not likely I’d keep my safe on the bed.”
“No,” the detective agreed.
Once Susan jarred his memory with the photo and had him read the letter while on the stand, he vaguely recalled entering it in his police report.
“So how can you say nothing ever came to your attention about spousal abuse,” Susan demanded. She was visibly annoyed with Costa and his claims.
“No other sources indicated your husband was violent,” the detective retorted. He admitted that he had not read Susan’s complete diary. To do so would have violated the terms of the search warrant that detectives used to seize evidence from the house. Susan was incredulous, charging that detectives read the diary before the warrant was even signed.
In spite of this setback, Susan pressed on. At one point during the cross-examination, she trotted out police photos of the overturned ottoman that detectives claimed was kicked out from under Felix after he was struck on the head during the attack. Susan argued that the position of the ottoman, upside down and on the opposite end of the living room from its cover, proved her claim that Felix had used it as a weapon and thrown it at her early in the fight. Marching to an easel set up in the courtroom, she sketched a diagram of how police claimed to have found the furnishings. To Susan, it was apparent that officers had “staged” the crime scene.
“Why is the ottoman cover across the room from the ottoman at the ‘so-called’ crime scene?” Susan asked Costa. She was so thin in her black slacks that it looked as though they would fall from her hips if she moved too quickly.
Costa studied the photo. “It was due to the fight.”
“Is an altercation between a 110-pound woman and a 170-pound man a fight?”
“Yes,” the detective replied matter-of-factly.
“And how much do you weigh,” Susan asked.
“Too much,” Costa grinned. “Two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds.”
Susan asked that the clerk and bailiff bring out the ottoman for jurors. She continued to suggest that police had moved it in an attempt to bolster their theory of events in the guest cottage that October night.
Susan’s own omissions would prevent her from questioning Costa about the pepper spray she said she used on Felix that night. More than two years passed before she told authorities about the spray, and the window of opportunity for effectively testing the ottoman for residue had come and gone. Had the authorities been able to find evidence of the chemical, it would have given credence to Susan’s argument that Susan felt threatened by Felix that night, and she went to the guest house armed with the spray for protection.
Unable to use that argument, she was forced to focus on the ‘inconsistencies’ in the crime scene. She asked again about the bloody footprints she believed were made by “two right feet.”
“I think you’re wasting your time,” the detective told her. “It’s a question for a criminalist.”
“Oh really, you’re a detective. You’ve accused me of murder. I’m asking you for your professional opinion as a detective.”
Refocusing Costa’s attention on the photo, Susan intimated that the only way the bloody prints could have been made is if somebody had taken a shoe, “stuck it in some wet blood and then stamped them on the floor.”
Still, the detective maintained that he did not see “two right feet.”
Unwavering, Susan pointed to blood found on the soles of Felix’s feet and inquired as to why investigators hadn’t found any bloody footprints from him on the floor of the living room.
“There was nothing in this case that led me to believe that this scene had been staged,” Costa huffed.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Susan learned that Costa was asking to leave the trial so that he could refill a medical prescription for an unspecified condition. Although she had been questioning him for two full days, she insisted that she needed one more day to complete her cross-examination. Susan recommended that Costa have the prescription called in to a local pharmacy.
The detective complained, saying he didn’t feel he should have to do that. He also pointed out that the questions she was now posing were out of his area of expertise and would be better answered by a criminalist.
Despite Costa’s argument, the judge told him to contact his doctor about phoning in the prescription so that Susan could continue the cross-examination.
“Well, what’s his condition?” Susan demanded, after the matter was resolved.
“It’s completely irrelevant,” the judge told her.
“I think it’s relevant, I mean, is he on psych meds?”
“It’s a physical condition,” the prosecutor jumped in. Sequeira was anxious to move the case along to accommodate the out of town witnesses he had waiting to testify.
“Is it visual?” Susan wanted to know.
“It’s totally irrelevant and I don’t want her to make references to it in front of the jury,” Sequeira told Judge Brady.
“I had no intention of doing that, but now I’m curious. This IS a deviant prosecutor,” Susan charged.
Her remark elicited laughter from the gallery.
“All right, that’s it,” Judge Brady warned. “We’re done. Ladies and gentlemen of the gallery, this is not for entertainment.
“Mrs. Polk, there will be no mention of this issue in front of the jury.”
By Friday afternoon, Sequeira was asking Judge Brady for help. “I’m at my wits end,” he announced. “At this point, it’s becoming absurd. She won’t follow the rules. She won’t stop interrupting. I don’t know what else to do. I’m asking the court for guidance.”
Finally, Sequeira tried helping his opponent. Susan kept questioning about a March 16, 2001, letter in which she alleged domestic violence. The judge had ruled the letter inadmissible when offered through the detective but explained that Susan could enter it later during her own testimony.
During a break, Sequeira offered Susan advice on how to question the detective about the letter. “You can ask him if they investigated claims made in the letter.”
“I understand your point,” Susan replied. “But the jury has to see the letter to understand what I’m referring to.”
“Ms. Polk, for the fifth time, he cannot testify to the contents of that document,” Brady told Susan. “Move on please.” Sequeira just shrugged.
Susan was now completely on her own at the defense table, having fired her case assistant, Valerie Harris, the previous afternoon. She did not provide Harris a reason for her second dismissal since the trial began.
Harris later told reporters that Susan simply said, “I think I have to do this alone.” Those close to the case later learned that Susan was angry that Harris had given her dog away after Eli was arrested and incarcerated at the same detention center as his mother. She could find no one to care for Dusty.
Having Harris off the case would present additional challenges for Sequeira. The prosecutor had been using Harris as a middleman after citing his unwillingness to deal directly with Susan. He would later admit that trying the case against Susan was extremely challenging—something he would have been ill-equipped to handle as a younger man.
Meanwhile, Susan would also suffer. Valerie had been selecting Susan’s clothing for court each day. The chore was not without its challenges. On days that Susan didn’t like the outfit, she would refuse to get dressed. Now, she would have no one to bring her clothes and came to court in prison attire. Court watchers remarked that even in jail garb Susan still managed to look elegant. She had a natural flair for making sweat pants and a T-shirt look stylish.
On Tuesday, April 5, the prosecutor called former Contra Costa criminalist Song Wicks to the stand. Wicks had collected and evaluated evidence at the Miner Road crime scene on the night of October 15, 2002. He testified that he found Felix Polk’s body splayed on the tile floor of the couple’s guesthouse when he arrived at the crime scene that night. When Sequeira brought up Susan’s accusations that he and other members of the sheriff’s department had moved furniture to bolster their theory of the homicide, Wicks scoffed indignantly.
“Who had the most time to spend at the crime scene—the detectives, the criminalists, or the defendant?” Prosecutor Sequeira asked Wicks.
“The defendant.”
“Would your job have been made easier if you had the defendant’s bloody clothing?”
“Objection!” Susan shouted from the defense table. She was quickly overruled by the judge.
“It could have allowed me to draw conclusions, if I had the defendant’s clothing,” Wicks said over a second objection from Susan.
Anxious to get the query out before Susan could object again, Sequeira shouted his next question. “Did you find any bloody clothing anywhere?”
“No,” the investigator replied.
Judge Brady interrupted. “Mr. Sequeira, I am not hard of hearing. Please moderate your tone.”
“Sorry,” the prosecutor apologized, glaring at Susan, who sat grinning at the defense table.
“I’d like to just finish without you interrupting,” he told her after she voiced yet another objection. But Susan continued, claiming a conspiracy.
By late Wednesday, Sequeira had regained his sense of humor and was mockingly referring to Susan as “Madame Defendant.”
“The sarcasm can be done without,” Susan scolded. “Ms. Polk is fine.”
During her cross-examination of Song Wicks, Susan accused the criminalist of plotting to frame her for her husband’s murder and claimed that he and some thirteen other law enforcement officials were responsible for dousing water on Felix’s bloody head to “create a more dramatic photo opportunity.” Once again, she brought up the ottoman, accusing Wicks of having moved furniture at the crime scene. Addressing the bloody footprints, Susan went a step farther than she had with Detective Costa, suggesting that Wicks or other officers on the scene that first night took a shoe from her bedroom closet and “stamped” footprints into the blood encircling Felix’s head to further implicate her in the homicide.
Wicks shot Susan an incredulous look.
“When you frame someone for murder, you don’t think you are going to have to come up with an explanation, do you?” Susan retaliated.
“I don’t know,” the officer shot back. “I have never framed anyone for murder.”
Wicks agreed with the prosecutor’s charge that a person who defended herself against an armed attacker wouldn’t need to dispose of her bloody clothes—as Susan had allegedly done.
When forensic pathologist Brian Peterson took the stand, Susan levied similar accusations at him, attempting to show that he too was also a member of the elaborate conspiracy to frame her for Felix’s murder. “You have a bias to produce evidence for the prosecutor, isn’t that correct,” she asked the pathologist when he took the stand later that week. She went on to insinuate that he was paid by the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department to render results favorable to the county.
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Dr. Peterson balked. “Everybody is paid by somebody.” He insisted the sheriff’s department would have to be “stupid” to try and force him to alter his findings.
Peterson said the stab wounds found on Felix’s hands, arms, and feet were the result of the victim trying to defend himself from a knife-wielding attacker. “There might be times when you want to get your feet between you and the blade,” he explained. “Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to get wounds on the bottom of your feet.”
When asked by Sequeira if the wound on Felix’s head was the result of falling or getting “whacked,” Dr. Peterson said, “I believe it was more consistent with being hit with something.” This statement directly contradicted Susan’s claim that Felix had struck his head on the tile floor when he fell backward shortly before his death. According to Peterson, there was no medical evidence to support Susan’s purported chain of events, and instead, he reiterated his opinion that Felix’s wounds to the head were the result of being hit rather than a fall.
In addition, Peterson and Susan differed on the subject of what had actually killed Felix. While his post-mortem examination revealed that Felix suffered from advanced heart disease that could have played a role in weakening his ability to stave off an attack, he testified that Felix Polk died as a result of stab wounds to his stomach, lungs, and the area close to his heart—not heart disease. Susan, on the contrary, maintained that Felix’s injuries from the knife were not life threatening and that his death was the result of a heart attack he suffered while aggressively assaulting her in the guest house that night. In order to support her views, Susan intended to call another forensic pathologist to challenge Peterson’s testimony when it was her turn to present evidence.
Over the course of the trial, Susan had worked diligently to discredit Felix’s professional reputation. On March 27, Neil Kobrin, the clinical psychologist and former president of Argosy University, was called by the prosecutor to testify about a phone call he received from Felix in the days before his murder.
“He [Felix] said that his wife, Susan, was going to kill him and that he was at a hotel hiding out,” Kobrin told the court. He also said that Felix told him that Susan had a gun.
Susan responded by raising allegations that ranged from Felix’s supposed affair with his patient turned colleague, to cocaine abuse. She pushed Kobrin to acknowledge that he was aware of Felix’s many indiscretions. Unfortunately for Susan, Kobrin could not substantiate the claims.
Once Kobrin’s testimony had concluded, only one witness remained before the prosecution would rest its case. On Tuesday, April 17, Adam Polk took the stand, ready to face his mother for the first time in several years.
Sitting on the witness stand with thick curly brown hair and a soft, cherubic face, Adam told the court that his father did not abuse his mother, while also shooting down Susan’s claim that Felix had threatened to kill her during their marriage.
Adam’s testimony for the prosecution lasted just thirty minutes.
But the well-spoken college senior would be on the stand for three days responding to questions from his mother, and it did not take long for the twenty-three-year-old’s testimony to degenerate into a family therapy session gone haywire.
“Do you recall saying that you would come into court and say the worst possible things about me unless I give you irrevocable power of attorney?”
Adam told his mother, “You’re a cruel, heartless person and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Susan presented her son with the letter he wrote for her bail hearing in which he called his mother “a gentle and intellectual mother who enjoyed movies, cooking, and baking cookies.”
Adam testified that he wrote the letter to win her favor and gain the use of Susan’s car. He also claimed that the letter was “intended to manipulate Eli into giving me access to you.”
“I was in a precarious position for mediating for my two minor brothers’ financial future,” Adam continued.
Susan’s eldest son admitted that he had promised his mother he would testify at her trial “if she called him.” But Adam claimed that he never agreed to take sides. He would simply tell the truth, which Susan assumed would be in her favor.
Like Gabriel, Adam denied his mother’s claims of spousal abuse, calling Susan “bonkers” and “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” during her questioning of him. Judge Brady, usually reserved, covered her mouth and fought back a smile during the bruising exchange.
Later, he recalled that Susan broke down in tears when he first went to visit her in jail two days after her arrest. “What happened?” he asked his mother. To which she replied, “Things just got out of control.” Adam testified that Susan then said, “you can have everything, I’m just going to plead guilty.”
He said his mother had a change of heart after she learned that she was being charged with first-degree murder after stabbing Felix twenty-seven times. Adam claimed that his mother said that she had not stabbed her husband that many times and was convinced she was being set up.
“They might as well execute me because I’m being framed for murder,” Susan allegedly told Adam at the jail that day.
During the heated cross-examination, Susan repeatedly brought up unfavorable incidents from Adam’s past in an attempt to discredit his testimony, at one point calling him “a bar room brawler.” Adam sat twirling a marker and staring at the ceiling as Susan once again played the fifteen-minute audiotape of his father telling an audience about his alleged sexual abuse by a satanic cult while a toddler in day care.
Pressing the stop button on the tape recorder, Susan asked her son if he thought that she “put those ideas in his father’s head.”
“I don’t think it’s a huge leap, that it’s outside the realm of possibility.”
On Thursday, after three days of questioning, Susan was informed that this would be her last day of cross-examination. Frustrated, Susan resumed her questioning of Adam over his father’s daily treatment of her, but as the day wore on, Susan’s time was running out, and she angrily complained about the “unfair” constraints. Still, she continued to ask him about topics that Brady had ruled inadmissible or irrelevant.
At 4:15 that afternoon, the prosecutor requested an adjournment. “Your honor, I’m feeling quite faint, can we take a break for the day?” It was not clear if Sequeira was ill or if he had just had enough of Susan’s courtroom antics.
“I think we can get a little more out of this witness,” the judge replied, signaling Susan to proceed.
Less than fifteen minutes later, Brady ended the cross-examination. She was angered by Susan’s flagrant disregard for her instructions to avoid questions about Adam’s alleged prior bad acts and Gabe’s relationship with the Briners.
“Okay, we’re done for the day,” Brady ordered, instructing court officers to remove jurors from the courtroom.
Rising to her feet, Susan shook her finger at the judge and shouted at her from the podium. “I move for a mistrial for judicial misconduct on your part! You’re putting time limits on me, you’re not allowing me to recall him [Adam]…”
“SIT DOWN MS. POLK!” Brady instructed, as jurors filing out of the courtroom looked on in stunned amazement. “Recess until 9 AM Monday.”
Susan continued her ranting even as deputies rushed to the defense table and shut off her microphone.
On Monday, April 24, Susan arrived at court ready to begin her case. A blue, long-sleeved T-shirt and chinos replaced her drab prison attire. She looked very thin and bony; reports were circulating that Susan now weighed less than 110 pounds. It was not clear who delivered the clothing to her at the detention center, although her former case assistant, Valerie Harris, was amid the journalists and spectators cramming the gallery that morning.
Susan’s trial had already filled thirty-four days when she informed Judge Brady that she had subpoenaed more than one hundred witnesses and anticipated her case would take another three weeks to present. On Susan’s extensive list were both her mother, Helen, and her son, Eli, who was still being held at the West County Detention Facility in Richmond on charges of misdemeanor battery and violating a restraining order. These charges stemmed from the incident with his girlfriend, but Eli also faced a probation violation for the high-speed chase that resulted in charges of evading a peace officer. Authorities had agreed to push back his trial date from May 2 to May 16 so that he could testify in his mother’s case. Also on the list were the doctor who examined her in January of 2001 after her failed suicide attempt at Yosemite National Park, a high-tech crime investigator, a psychic, and a forensic pathologist who would testify that Felix Polk died as a result of a heart attack—and not from the multiple stab wounds she had inflicted.
During her one-hour opening statement, Susan called Felix “Dr. Frankenstein” and told jurors that he drugged, molested, and manipulated her during their twenty-year marriage. She quoted from Thoreau and Dickens and referred to other literary works to illustrate that many narratives have surprise endings and that innocent people are sometimes wrongly accused of horrific acts.
In her speech, Susan maintained that she went to the guest cottage “just to talk” with her husband that fateful night and that Felix fell back and hit his head during the violent struggle.
“I was framed,” she said. “I did not stab my husband twenty-seven times, nor did I hit him. He fell.”
Susan promised a “nail biting, edge of your seat thriller” defense. “You may think you know all there is to know,” she told jurors. “But it’s my turn now.”
As her opening progressed, Susan insisted that she was a medium and claimed her husband had used her psychic talent to gain information that he reported back to his “handlers.” Though she warned Felix about her vision of the 9/11 terror attacks, he failed to report her prediction to authorities. Despite her unique abilities, Susan explained that hers was an ordinary situation, one that could have happened to anyone in an unhappy marriage.
“What happened to me could happen to any family,” Susan said. “The D.A. will have you believe that I was controlling…that I was a Lolita.”
This was a case of systematic spousal abuse that had gone on for far too long. To Susan, the events were clear: she had not killed Felix that night in the guest cottage; he had a heart attack. Further clouding his death was the conspiracy that she alluded to concerning her family members and law enforcement.
During the final minutes of her remarks, Susan revisited the parallels found in literature. Jurors had heard only one side of the story, but before they could truly pass judgment, before they could decide her fate, they had to hear her version of the twenty-four years. When that happens, “it will be up to you to write the ending.”
Jurors immediately took a liking to Susan’s mother, Helen Bolling. Petite and high-spirited, Helen had the panel in hysterics with her humorous responses to Susan’s questions. Barely five feet tall, she almost disappeared in the witness chair beneath the judge. Clutching her daughter’s childhood writings, school assignments, and photos, Helen adjusted herself in the seat and waited for Susan to begin.
“You’ve only been married once?” her daughter asked, referring to Helen’s marriage to her father, Theodore Bolling.
“Oh yes, once was enough, it cured me,” Helen cracked, as the courtroom erupted into laughter. Susan’s seventy-three-year-old mother grinned as she told jurors that she was “almost a virgin” when she married Bolling. “You know what I mean,” she smiled.
During her testimony, Helen boasted of her daughter’s creativity and imagination. Her pale blue eyes sparkled with pride as she pulled out the awards, prize-winning writings, and photographs of Susan’s youth that she brought to court that day. Her props, and the homespun stories that accompanied them, provided jurors their first glimpse into the tender side of Susan Polk—a side that most had not witnessed in the courtroom.
“Did you see any signs that I was going to grow up like the D.A. says, a homicidal.”
Helen interrupted her daughter mid-sentence. “No.”
Helen did not hold back her dislike of her son-in-law, and in defense of Susan, told the story of her own life-and-death encounter. While she did not identify her attacker, who had throttled her violently, she described how she had to react in an instant to save her life. Helen “played dead” to thwart the attack, but her daughter had not been as fortunate. Susan had no choice but to resort to violence against Felix’s onslaught, she said.
“Boo-boo Susie” as she lovingly referred to her daughter, was not the violent type. Helen maintained that Susan didn’t have it in her to deliberately harm anyone. As far as she was concerned, it was her son-in-law who had provoked the assault.
She claimed Felix “had an exterior of being acceptable. Hidden under that, is all that shit. Excuse me, I beg the court’s forgiveness, that’s not proper language.”
Helen drew a deep breath before completing her thought. “Felix had a way of persuading you into thinking he was a good guy.”
She told jurors Susan had attempted suicide shortly after beginning therapy with Felix but provided few details.
When asked about the possibility that Susan could have been behind the allegations of the ritualistic sexual abuse of Adam and Gabriel, Helen balked. “That was from Felix. It didn’t come from my side of the family. When we hear about Satan, we run like hell.”
On cross-examination, Helen told Sequeira that her “falling out” with Susan happened over time. She denied accusations that she and her husband had abused their daughter during her childhood. “Absolutely not!” she replied. But Sequeira pressed the issue, wanting to know why Susan would make such claims during her police interrogation on the night of her arrest.
Helen sat poker-faced as the prosecutor played the videotape of that portion of the interrogation for jurors. “Maybe when she gets angry at people, she has a falling out with them, she makes up things about them. If she did it to you, she did it to Felix, too.”
Susan jumped up and objected. “Torture of my mom on the stand. It’s not right.” Her repeated protests were overruled by Brady.
Helen continued to defend her daughter, even after viewing the video clip in which Susan called her father a “pervert” and accused her mother of abusing her. She argued that Susan was a victim of Felix’s mind control and was just spitting back beliefs that he had drilled into her. Proof of this was the fact that now, almost four years after his death, Susan no longer believed her parents abused her during her childhood.
On redirect, Helen said she forgave Susan for “the lost years.”
“Of course, you’re my daughter. You’ll be my daughter until my last breath. Furthermore, I think people are placing too much blame on you.”
Susan’s mother expressed disappointment with her grandsons Adam and Gabriel, accusing the boys of being concerned only with themselves in the days and weeks after their father’s death. She described them with their “palms up,” implying that they were looking for money.
Outside court, Helen continued to defend her daughter. “All I have to say is you live practically as a hostage for forty-eight years, and then let’s see how you do.”
In retrospect, Helen would be seen as Susan’s best witness. Her testimony gave a fascinating look into the early years of Susan’s relationship with Felix. In order to win this case, Susan had to convince the jury of the profoundly disturbing psychological impact of Felix’s seduction. Since she was the only witness who could testify to Susan’s behavior before and after she met Felix, Helen was in a unique position to provide insight into the unhealthy relationship between the couple. Her charm and straightforward manner made her words convincing, but with so much of the trial remaining, it was unclear what impact this testimony would have on the verdict.
At 4:30 PM, with Helen’s testimony concluded, Judge Brady suggested they adjourn for the day and put off Eli’s testimony until the next morning, but Susan insisted that her son had been waiting in a holding cell all day, and she wanted to use her remaining time to begin her direct testimony. Ten minutes later, a clean-shaven Eli strolled into the courtroom. Susan broke into tears immediately. Her son was wearing the county’s bright yellow jumpsuit, but his hands and feet were not shackled. Taller and broader than his two brothers, Eli also possessed his mother’s angular features and strong jaw.
“On the whole, did you have a happy childhood?” Susan asked him when he took the stand.
“For the most part, yes.” Eli pulled out a letter he had written to his mother in November 2002 and read it aloud:
Dear Mom,
I miss you a lot. Whatever happens, I will always hold close what you taught me…. Going to Dad’s funeral this Saturday. I don’t think I am going to say anything. What could I possibly say? Nothing good.
Jurors looked on as Eli’s eyes welled with tears and he began to cry. “I pray that one day I will have control over my life,” he read between sobs. “I want so badly to tell you not to change… but jail changes a lot of people.”
The following morning, Eli was back on the stand describing the time he “split his mother’s lip,” testifying that he “threw a punch” at his mom after he found her crying in her bedroom, with his dad by her side.
“I’ll kill you, I could just kill you, Susan,” Eli claimed he heard Felix threaten. “It just popped into my head. Next thing I knew, I was throwing a punch.”
Eli claimed the incident followed a violent display by his father, who, he said, had dragged his mother up the stairs to the bedroom by her hair. Later, Felix rewarded Eli for punching his mother by taking him out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. “It’s not your fault, it’s her fault,” Eli claimed his father told him after the incident, which sent Susan to the emergency room for stitches.
On Tuesday, because of scheduling conflicts, the remainder of Eli’s testimony had to be postponed, and instead, the jury heard testimony from the psychiatrist who examined Susan after her 2001 suicide attempt at Yosemite National Park. Dr. Alan Peters told jurors that he assessed Susan after she was transported by ambulance to Columbia General Hospital in Sonora on January 20 and transferred to the psychiatric unit where he was on duty. She had overdosed on aspirin, Vicodin, and Scotch, he said.
At the time, Dr. Peters said he diagnosed Susan with “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He believed her state of mind was a result of her failing marriage to Felix and Eli’s punch. Referring to his case notes, Dr. Peters related that during his one-hour examination, Susan was articulate, cooperative, and aware of what was real and what was fantasy.
“Your manner was quite proper and composed, there was no delusional thinking,” he said in response to her questions. “You were overwhelmed and increasingly despairing over how you were going to manage.”
Referring to Susan’s description of the “power struggle” she was facing with her husband, Dr. Peters said that she was “constantly on the losing end. You were isolated off within your family as being the quote-unquote ‘crazy one,’” the psychiatrist told Susan in court.
On cross-examination, the witness admitted that Susan was also recalling sexual and physical abuse, supposedly inflicted by her parents, and that Felix Polk expressed concern for his wife and was anxious to take her home. He also testified to a notation in Susan’s record that Felix had requested Susan be committed to the psychiatric hospital for observation. Dr. Peters said that Felix had made no such request to him.
In addition, Sequeira pointed out that it was Felix who called the ambulance that day, arguably saving Susan’s life.
“One could say that, yes,” Dr. Peters replied.
On Tuesday, after calling Eli’s former rugby coach to testify about her son’s character, Susan then called David Townsend, a forensic computer expert, originally hired by Dan Horowitz, to discuss the tests he performed on Susan’s home computer. Townsend, a former police officer, claimed that someone had twice accessed the files containing Susan’s two-hundred-page diary before officers had obtained a search warrant. This contradicted Detective Mike Costa, who, under oath, denied reading the diary, but it remained unclear who might have done so. While this accusation suggested a violation of police protocol, his tests showed that, though the diary was accessed, it did not appear to have been altered. Townsend’s examination also revealed that law enforcement did not document the required chain of custody for the computer.
The court adjourned for lunch but when the session resumed, it was Eli who returned to the stand. He testified that his father was a violent and controlling man who regularly tried to convince his children that their mother was crazy. Wearing a pained looked, he sat hunched in the witness box, listening to an audiotape of himself reacting to news of his father’s death the day after Felix’s body was found.
Eli’s sad demeanor on the stand did not match his commanding figure. Broad shouldered, at just over six feet tall, nevertheless, Eli appeared vulnerable and in need of emotional support. Unlike his two brothers who seemed defiant and expressed a loathing for their mother, it was clear that Eli had a special connection to Susan. Eli’s subdued appearance also stood in stark contrast to his lengthy juvenile rap sheet that included various assaults and encounters with the police.
“Did you love your dad?” Susan asked her son.
“Yeah, he was just a damaged person…. Looking back, he was a really unstable person,” Eli described his father.
For the remainder of the afternoon, Eli confirmed Susan’s claims regarding Felix’s tyrannical behavior, his purported links to the Jewish mafia, and accusations that his brothers had turned on Susan out of greed.
“He tried to get you on medication,” Eli said. “He talked to the kids about how to handle you. His whole thing was ‘you were crazy’ and ‘you imagined things.’”
Eli insisted his mother had every reason to believe that Felix was linked to the Mossad. “We’d be at dinner and he’d talk about his patients,” Eli recalled. “He said he had a patient in the FBI who was an assassin. He said he saw numerous people involved in the FBI and the CIA.”
Eli also contended that two of Felix’s friends regularly spoke of their ties to Israeli Intelligence and the Mossad.
On Wednesday, Eli’s testimony was again interrupted when a surprise witness was wheeled into the courtroom and announced her need to speak out on Susan’s behalf.
Seemingly out of breath, seventy-seven-year-old Elizabeth Bradley’s appearance momentarily created what could only be described as a “Perry Mason moment.”
“Oh my God!” Susan gasped. “Eli, do you remember who this is?”
Eli did not recall the Polks’ former neighbor from Berkeley, but he sat quietly as Mrs. Bradley addressed the court from her wheelchair.
“I didn’t know when I should come,” she said, speaking to Susan at the podium. “But I arranged for a taxi and my son to get off from work, and my cardiologist arranged for some extra medications in case I had a heart attack or stroke, so I came without notice and here I am.”
Her shoulders wrapped in a shawl, Bradley guided her motorized wheelchair to the front of the courtroom. Her son, Edwin, trailed behind and held a microphone to her lips when she stopped in front of the clerk’s desk and addressed the court. “I’m obliged to come to the aid of a very special person.”
Initially, Sequeira objected to the surprise witness, saying that her name was not on the required list. In response, Susan told the court that she was unaware that Mrs. Bradley was planning to attend the trial. Her former Elmwood Avenue neighbor had written to her in jail, upset over the way she was being portrayed in the news. Producing Bradley’s letter for the prosecutor, Susan said that they had spoken about her coming to court but nothing had ever been firmed up.
“Elizabeth, did we discuss your testimony at all?” Susan asked the elderly woman, whose frail body shook intermittently from palsy.
“No.”
“Today is a very special day, isn’t it?” Susan said, addressing her neighbor.
“Yes, April 26 is my seventy-seventh birthday. And I have to apologize for my difficulty speaking, because I’m in the middle of some major oral surgery. If you can’t understand me, let me know and I will try harder.”
During thirty minutes of testimony, Bradley explained that she had been moved to act because the news media “was demonizing Susan in such a way, I was shocked. There was no comparison to the Susan I knew.
“She was an outstanding citizen of the neighborhood and we loved her,” Bradley tearfully recalled.
Elizabeth Bradley said that she was a single mother raising two children when Susan and Felix moved into the neighborhood with their three sons nearly twenty years ago. “We were neighbors and friends. I babysat when Susan had to go shopping. I was like an aunt to the children. They were so adorable. I loved being around them and Susan.”
“You’re being too kind, Elizabeth,” Susan said in between sobs.
“I saw no meanness in the children, except that Eli took a terrible amount of sibling abuse from his older brother, Adam. And his older brother was the apple of his father’s eye.”
Bradley charged that it was not Susan, but Felix, who was emotionally agitated. She recalled one day that she was visiting the Polk house when Felix unleashed his rage on one of his sons. She was not sure which boy it was but said the beating sounded brutal.
“[T]his little boy was screaming something awful. I wanted to cry out but I couldn’t say anything. But the beating was cruel.”
While Bradley disapproved of the physical handling of the boy, she did not interfere, believing that Felix was a therapist and “must know what he is doing.”
“I spent a lot of time around that family and one thing I can tell you, in my lifetime, I never met a more diligent mother, housewife, and assistant to her husband.”
“Thank you for your courage and integrity in coming today,” Susan said.
“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. It breaks my heart. You deserve a better life.”
“I have a brave son like you do, Elizabeth. I have a good life.”
“No further questions.”
Bradley looked to the prosecutor. Sequeira had no questions for the elderly woman. He simply rose and thanked her for coming to court.
Jurors wiped away tears as Susan’s old neighbor rolled her wheelchair out of the courtroom, waving to Susan. “Bye, bye, honey. God bless you.”
Bradley failed to add anything new to the case at hand, but the theatrics meshed brilliantly with Susan’s showmanship. Susan maintained that she had no idea Bradley would come, but she adapted amazingly well to the moment, presenting a surprise witness who had nothing good to say about Felix and nothing bad to say about Susan.
Once back on the stand, Eli continued to bolster his mother’s claims of spousal abuse and her belief that a conspiracy was at work to wrongly convict her of murder.
“He admitted to striking Andy, his son [from his first marriage], and said that’s just the way he was raised,” Eli testified. “He told me his first wife [Sharon Mann] was crazy and delusional, and that’s why they got a divorce.”
The following day, Susan ended her examination and turned the witness over to the prosecutor, but by Friday morning she was demanding a mistrial. Furious at the way Sequeira was cross-examining Eli, she accused the prosecutor of being in cahoots with the judge to discredit the only one of her children to testify on her behalf.
“This is unfair treatment!” Susan said, jumping up at one point to object to Sequeira’s questions about Eli’s criminal past.
“Shame on both of you!” she ranted, directing her anger at both the prosecutor and the judge for their “tricky, nefarious, and devious” actions.
“I fully recognize that watching your son be cross-examined has got to be extremely difficult,” Judge Brady said, adding that the prosecutor’s questions were permissible.
During two days of cross-examination, Sequeira questioned Eli about his run-ins with the police and his on-again off-again relationship with his mother. He intended to poke holes in Eli’s claims that his mother was a victim of abuse, and not a coldhearted killer who stabbed his father in a premeditated rage. Using excerpts from Susan’s diary, Eli’s letters, and his disastrous trip to Paris with Susan when he was a teen, Sequeira stressed the often rocky relationship between mother and son.
Susan’s middle child did little to hide his disdain for the assistant district attorney and the court in which his mother was being tried. His responses to Sequeira’s questions were peppered with sarcasm and he accentuated the word “sir” when he replied to the queries.
With regard to the argument between his parents that had prompted him to strike his mother in the face, Sequeira asked, “Why didn’t you hit the abuser?”
“I don’t know.” Eli replied. He maintained that it was the first time he was ever violent with his mother.
Susan, meanwhile, raised objections when the prosecutor handed her son a copy of the police report that documented another instance of aggression toward his mother. She accused Sequeira of violating the rules of discovery, alleging that he had not provided her with a copy of the report he had just handed Eli. The judge overruled her objection, clearing the way for Sequeira to question Eli about the incident.
The report documented a call to police from Susan after another argument with Eli that turned violent. According to the report, she told police that her son had shoved her out of the house, locked the door, and then took her car without permission.
Eli claimed he couldn’t recall the incident.
Grinning, Sequeira moved on. He next inquired about the fight he had with a fellow teen in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant that resulted in a felony assault charge. Though Eli insisted it was just a “fistfight,” the prosecutor noted that witnesses told police that Eli struck the victim with a flashlight—a claim Eli denied.
“I hit him four or five times,” Eli said.
“You broke his nose and cut his face up pretty good, didn’t you?” Sequeira noted.
“I object!” Susan jumped up yet again. “He’s attempting to interject hearsay information that hasn’t been established.”
“Would you like to see the medical records?” Sequeira smiled, rummaging through the papers on his table.
“He doesn’t even have them!” Susan shot back, watching as the prosecutor fumbled to retrieve the document.
“He’s attempting to confuse and mislead the jury,” Susan complained to Judge Brady out of earshot of jurors, “when the most important part of this young man’s testimony is that his father was violent, and that his father threatened to kill me.”
But Sequeira wasn’t finished with Eli’s rap sheet. There was the October 2003 incident in which he shot a passing motorist with a pellet gun. The bullet lodged inches from the man’s spine.
Eli insisted he struck the man by accident. He wasn’t aiming at anything in particular when he fired the weapon toward the road. “I was sorry. Accidents do happen. That was a terrible one.”
Sequeira also cited the high-speed car chase in which Eli attempted to elude officers, reaching speeds of 130 mph in his attempt to ditch the bag of marijuana he had in his Camaro.
“And then I pulled over,” Eli insisted of the October 2003 incident.
“You had a flat tire.” Sequeira pointed out.
“I was between homes,” Eli protested. “Things were going very badly. I made some mistakes.”
Sequeira also called the jury’s attention to Eli’s troubles in school, noting that he had been suspended from Miramonte High for making racist and homophobic remarks. It was a calculated strategy to portray Susan’s ally as the bad seed. Using Eli’s record against him, Sequeira cast sufficient doubt on his credibility, demonstrating the witness to be an unreliable person whose words were equally unreliable.
Continuing on, Sequeira raised questions about Eli’s allegiance to Susan, pointing out that he seemed to side with his mother when it was convenient. Supporting Sequeira’s claim was Eli’s aborted trip to Paris with his mother, as well as the March 2001 police report in which Eli sided with Felix, telling officers that he witnessed Susan kick his dad during an argument.
“I did what my father told me to do,” Eli defended. He now related that day’s events differently, saying that his father had attacked his mother, shoved her up against the Sub-Zero refrigerator and ordered him to tell police that she had instigated the fight.
Sequeira paused to let jurors digest the information. “And sometimes you do what your mother tells you to do?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you told a third version, too, didn’t you?”
Tossing his hands in the air, Eli blurted out, “I don’t know. I’m lost.”
Striding to the witness box, Sequeira presented the young man with a transcript from a July 2003 conversation with his mother’s former defense investigator in which he claimed that it was his father who kicked his mother that day.
“It seems like there’s been a mistake, a miscommunication,” Eli announced after reading the notes from Susan’s former lawyer, Elizabeth Grossman. Eli argued that Grossman was not really working for his mother. He then provided the prosecutor with a rambling explanation that made little sense to those in the courtroom. “It had to do with a conspiracy, a civil conspiracy, as well as the conspiracy to have my mother convicted.”
Sequeira froze in front of the witness box. “Are you telling this jury that Liz Grossman… is part of a large conspiracy to get your mother convicted and to steal from the estate?”
Eli looked directly at Sequeira. “I never said large. It takes two people to conspire.”
“You’re right,” the prosecutor said in a raised voice. “It takes two!” Pacing before the jury, Sequeira directed Eli to identify the members of the alleged conspiracy for the court.
Dumbfounded, Eli looked to his mother, who was at the podium demanding the questioning of her son be halted immediately.
Judge Brady cut Susan off mid-sentence and directed Eli to answer the question.
Repositioning himself in the chair, Eli listed the alleged participants. There was his Uncle John Polk, John’s lawyer, Bud MacKenzie, the Briners, and his dad’s friend, Barry Morris. “They’ve used their connections in this court and others to control things the best that they can.”
“Am I, me, Paul Sequeira, just some guy who works for the D.A.’s office, am I working for this big conspiracy?”
“I have not seen documentation, proof… no one has said anything to lead me to believe that,” Eli said. He also declined to speculate as to whether members of law enforcement were also involved, or that they had “staged” the crime scene, as his mother alleged.
All eyes in the courtroom turned to Susan, who was now chuckling. Addressing the prosecutor, she insisted that she never accused him of being a party to the conspiracy. “But, I’ve had my doubts,” Susan giggled. “You, too, your honor.”
“Ms. Polk, I do not find anything amusing about this,” Judge Brady reprimanded. “And I don’t think the giggling is appropriate. Stop it!”
Friday’s court session adjourned when the prosecutor announced that he had no further questions.
The following Monday, court resumed with Susan’s redirect examination of Eli. She would keep her son on the stand until Thursday afternoon when Judge Brady announced she had heard enough and halted the questioning. During those four days, Susan trotted out numerous e-mails that her sons exchanged after their father’s death and instructed Eli to read them aloud. “I hope you do join the team and then I can see you soon,” Gabe wrote to Eli in January of 2004.
“I’m disappointed in you,” Gabe wrote in another correspondence. “Get your shit together. You’re siding with a person who murdered our dad.”
Gabriel was not the only brother sending e-mails to Eli. In January 2005, Adam sent one saying he would entertain his mother’s request to write a letter to the court, pronouncing, “I don’t believe my mother killed my father in cold blood, but in self-defense.”
In response to questions from Susan, Eli maintained that his elder brother had threatened to disinherit him if he did not join the wrongful death civil suit that Adam and Gabe filed against their mother.
“If I could just apologize for my language beforehand,” Eli asked jurors before reading Gabriel’s final e-mail correspondence aloud. “Eli, if you believe all that shit, you’re a fucking psycho, and I never want to see you again,” Eli read from the page his mother handed him. “I really should start calling you Susan. Grow the fuck up!”
Looking up from the paper, Eli accused Sequeira of “smiling at him.”
The accusation caught the judge off guard. Straightening herself in her chair, Brady glanced at the prosecutor. For the record, she noted that he was sitting at his table, resting his cheek and chin in his hand and gazing away from the witness box.
“I object!” Susan barked. “The district attorney is making faces at my son.”
Brady drew a breath and instructed Susan to move on with her questions.
“Was it like a smiling face?” Susan asked Eli with regard to Sequeira’s supposed grin.
“Mrs. Polk,” the judge interrupted, warning Susan to move on.
“It was like a smirk,” Eli replied.
Brady instructed Eli not to respond after she had ruled.
“I object!” Susan yelled out.
“Is there any way to take this show on the road?” Sequeira interjected, shaking his head in frustration.
“It is a show,” Eli agreed.
Banging her hand on the desk, Brady terminated the proceedings. “All right! We’re done for the day!”
Humorous though it was, the episode reflected Brady’s growing frustration. Whereas once the judge had been willing to tolerate Susan’s behavior, she was becoming much less lenient. Furthermore, Susan continued to bait Sequeira, and her efforts were clearly taking a toll on everyone involved.
On Tuesday, Susan directed her middle son to read letters he had written to her in jail. She was anxious to point out the sections in which Eli referred to his willingness to take the stand and “tell the truth” about Dad, but she didn’t anticipate the unsettling impact that many of the letters would have on the courtroom. As Eli spoke about his mother’s innocence, his voice sounded less and less like a son, and more like a lover. The impact was palpable, as the jurors shifted in their seats.
“I miss you so much it is driving me crazy,” Eli read aloud from one. “You are everything to me…. The truth about Dad needs to come out.”
“P.S. I wake up and see your face,” the note continued. “I love you enough to burn all I am and meet you in the afterlife.”
Susan cried aloud as her son recited the words to jurors. He had already told the court about the framed photo of his mother that he kept in his locker at Byron Boys’ Ranch. He had made the frame in wood shop and hung it in the locker so he could see her face every day.
The testimony that day was disquieting, and Sequeira recognized that Susan may have alienated the jurors with her son’s writings. Once again the prosecutor had uncovered a weak spot to probe, and the following morning he did just that, announcing his intent to introduce short stories that had allegedly been written by Susan about a wife who murders her husband and a mother who has a sexual relationship with her son.
According to Sequeira, he learned of the stories six weeks earlier during a phone call from Susan’s landlord in Montana, former Congressman Chris Harris, who claimed he and his wife came upon the writings while cleaning the cabin. Harris said the writings were tucked under a mattress in the cabin that Susan had rented from him in the fall of 2001, but he was unsure if his wife had kept them. From the handwriting, Harris’s wife had determined that a woman had written the stories.
Susan argued there was no basis to introduce the material into evidence, as the landlord did not even have them in his possession. “There’s speculation that I wrote the dirty story and that I wrote the murder story,” Susan barked. “That’s totally slander. He [Paul Sequeira] should be ashamed of himself! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t say or do to de-fame me!”
Judge Brady postponed a ruling on their admissibility, saying there were “some issues” that needed to be considered.
Angered at the judge’s response, Susan launched into an attack on Sequeira, at one point blurting out, “The man needs a spanking and the judge should give it to him.” Judge Brady did not respond. Instead, she instructed the deputies to return Eli to the courtroom to resume testimony. Eventually she would rule the stories inadmissible.
In response to questions, Eli portrayed himself as the only one of Susan’s three sons to come to court and “tell the truth,” claiming that his father had hypnotized all three boys during twice weekly therapy sessions at the house. He contended that Felix served them tea and put them in a trance. “I remember not remembering what had happened.” He also believed that Felix was behind the accusations regarding Adam’s sexual abuse by a satanic cult. “It seemed like it was definitely dad’s thing.” And he agreed with his mother that his two brothers were part of a conspiracy to “loot” the Polk estate.
During his final moments on the stand, Eli told jurors that he believed his father’s death could have been prevented if someone had simply reported his abuse to authorities.
“Isn’t it true your dad did try to prevent it and now he’s dead?” Sequeira asked. He reminded Eli that Felix had called authorities several times in the days before his death, saying he was afraid for his life.
“First of all, I believed he attacked her that night, and she defended herself,” Eli argued. It was his contention that Felix was simply trying to set his mother up; that he had “every opportunity” to fix his marriage and had failed miserably.
“Your father’s dead, isn’t he?” Sequeira asked.
“I’m not going to answer that question.”
By late afternoon, Judge Brady had had enough. Susan’s repeated objections and requests to interrupt her son’s testimony with other defense witnesses now seemed like an attempt to keep Eli on the stand—and out of jail—for as long as possible. Brady called an end to Susan’s examination just before 4:30 that Wednesday, directing her to pick up her case in the morning with testimony from Montana real estate agent, Janna Kuntz, and retired forensic pathologist, Dr. John Cooper.
The following morning, Susan’s first witness, Janna Kuntz, testified about conversations she had with Susan in September 2002 while the two were out viewing properties.
“It was not a good marriage,” Kuntz responded to a question from Susan. “You were very unhappy and you wanted to move away, get away.”
The realtor told the court that she was under the impression that Susan’s husband was “a very emotionally abusive human being.”
“Did I express rage?” she asked the realtor, referring to the day she learned Felix had won custody of their Orinda home and their minor son, as well as a significant cut in her support payments.
“I wouldn’t describe it as ‘rage.’ It was more like, ‘Can you believe this? He’s gone and done something again.’”
Under cross-examination, Kuntz agreed that her feelings about the Polks’ marriage were based solely on Susan’s statements. She had never met Felix Polk and could not speak to his character from personal experience. In spite of the one-sided nature of Kuntz’s testimony, her appearance was a relief, as she brought a sense of normalcy to the otherwise chaotic proceedings.
The harmony was short-lived. For her next witness, Susan called Dr. Cooper, a self-employed forensic pathologist from Austin, Texas. Dr. Cooper had reviewed the autopsy report and was in court to dispute the medical examiner’s claims that Felix Polk died as a result of blunt force trauma and bleeding from his extensive injuries. Susan’s former defense attorney, Dan Horowitz, had considered hiring Dr. Cooper when he was in charge of the case, but he opted not to after deciding that the expert witness was a bit of a “kook.”
Susan seemed infatuated by her expert witness, smiling and batting her eyes at the fortyish Texan with the round cheeks, dark hair, and lispy Southern drawl as she stood at the podium. The doctor told jurors that he was an independent forensic expert who was often retained by prosecutors to provide expert testimony at trial. Though he claimed that defense attorneys with “wild theories” often contacted him, he said he usually denied the jobs because “I don’t want to look foolish.” During his career, he performed nearly two thousand autopsies and said he hoped to retire soon to pursue his interest in the medical practices of indigenous cultures.
Dr. Cooper contended that Felix’s heart problems were a “time bomb” and that heart disease, not multiple stab wounds, caused his death. He reached this conclusion after spending more than fifty hours reviewing materials related to the case, including the autopsy conducted by Dr. Brian Peterson, police crime scene photos, grand jury testimony, and letters from Susan that detailed her version of events the night Felix died.
“I believe Dr. Polk died of a coronary event while assaulting his wife,” he testified, noting that the autopsy found that two of Felix’s arteries were 75 percent blocked and his heart was swollen at the time of death.
Dr. Cooper characterized Felix’s stab wounds as “relatively trivial” and claimed they did not cause his death because the “severity of the injuries was really not that great.”
“In your opinion, was my husband killed?” Susan asked, reading from a list of prepared questions she had in front of her on the podium.
“No,” Dr. Cooper affirmed. “I came to the conclusion that the manner of death should be categorized as ‘natural.’
“The stab wounds were not enough for death without the coronary disease. He could have gotten medical attention and survived these injuries,” he concluded.
Rising from his seat in the witness box, the forensic expert strode to the front of the courtroom, his cowboy boots peeking out from beneath dark-colored slacks, and fell to his knees. He was about to provide jurors with a live reenactment of the events of October 13, 2002, as he believed they occurred based on his review of the evidence, and his interpretation was vastly different from that of Dr. Peterson.
Kneeling before the panel, he explained that in order to inflict wounds to Felix’s stomach in the direction they were made, Susan would have to be beneath him, and not standing, when she plunged the knife into his abdomen. Furthermore, Dr. Cooper was critical of Peterson’s findings, particularly his decision to list the exact number of injuries—twenty-seven stab wounds—found on Polk’s body on the autopsy report. It was his contention that Peterson was anxious to dramatize the findings in light of the media attention the Polk case was receiving.
“I would have just said ‘multiple stab wounds,’ because when we fill out these reports we know we’re going to be quoted…. I’ve read the stories in the press.”
“Objection!” Sequeira cut the witness off mid-sentence.
“I’ve read them!” Dr. Cooper shot back, to which the judge issued an admonishment.
Dr. Cooper testified that he found no evidence to support the prosecutor’s claim that Felix was rendered incapacitated early in the struggle by a blow to the head. Holding up a photo of Felix’s head injury, he showed jurors that there was no indication that blood had flowed from the injury to areas of Felix’s neck and back. Blood droplets would be present if Felix had stood up after he sustained the blow, he maintained.
“He hit his head on the tile floor after he fell back from his cardiac arrest,” he concluded.
He testified that Felix’s death was the result of coronary deficiency and that the stab wounds were a contributing factor. This, he asserted, was a clear example of self-defense. Sequeira immediately objected that the witness was not qualified to make a legal assessment. It was one of many objections made by the prosecutor that morning, but his objections never stopped Dr. Cooper from testifying. Ordinarily, a witness stops speaking when a lawyer interrupts; in this case, Dr. Cooper just kept talking. This odd behavior proved quite frustrating for both Sequeira and Judge Brady, who finally called for an early recess.
“I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Brady told the witness out of earshot of jurors. “I’ve never had an expert witness respond to either party during an objection. Whether you agree with the objection or not, it is for me to deal with.”
“I’m sorry,” Cooper replied.
But Susan could not let the matter rest. Once again, she charged that Brady and Sequeira were conspiring, this time to “intimidate” her witness.
“I’m outta here,” the prosecutor announced, throwing his arms in the air.
“He’s playing chicken,” Susan accused.
“She’s right!” her mother, Helen Bolling, shouted from the gallery, an outburst that prompted a court bailiff to expel the elder woman from the courtroom. Once in the hallway, Bolling told reporters that she viewed her daughter’s murder trial as “unfair,” labeling it a “phony trial.”
That afternoon, Dr. Cooper continued his testimony, listing seven reasons why he believed that Dr. Peterson’s autopsy was not “objective.” There was the “physical improbability factor” with Felix standing five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than his wife and “direct evidence” such as the injury on Susan’s face and strands of her hair in Felix’s death grip. According to Dr. Cooper, the “defensive wounds” on Felix’s body supported the theory that he was attacking Susan with his right hand while blocking the knife with his left. He noted that the wounds had a leftward slant and clumps of Susan’s hair were found in his right hand. Cooper insisted that the data indicated that Felix “didn’t turn and run.” The fact that Felix ripped out strands of his wife’s hair, punched her in the face, and bit her on the hand was proof that he was the party responsible for the assault, the expert argued. “To me, he did not try to avoid violence, he was trying to perpetuate it,” he said.
In addition, there was also the “distribution” and “multiplicity” of the stab wounds coupled with “the relative position of the two combatants.” Blood from Felix’s chest and upper thighs had flowed to his knees, but not his shins, supporting his claim that Susan was under Felix during the attack. Furthermore, Cooper pointed out that the county’s medical examiner would have found evidence of blood flowing down the back of Felix’s head and neck if he had been struck first on the head by Susan that night. He called the State’s theory that she had initiated the attack with an incapacitating blow to the head “a bogus suggestion,” noting that Felix’s head wound lacked bruising.
The pathologist agreed with Susan’s assertion that Felix’s body was moved after his death, evidenced by blood smudges found on the floor near the corpse. This comment drew objections from the prosecutor, who took issue with the scope of Dr. Cooper’s testimony. Sequeira argued that while Cooper was qualified to render medical findings, he was not an expert in criminal investigations and should not be espousing theories as to how the crime played out. Judge Brady agreed with Sequeira and sustained the objection.
In the minutes before court ended that Thursday, Dr. Cooper made a stunning admission: He did not write a report of his findings, nor did he have any notes to turn over to the prosecutor. Essentially, he had come to court without any of the supporting materials he had used to render his expert opinion in the first-degree murder case.
“Once one knows the truth of the case, one does not need to remain neutral,” he told Sequeira. “One goes with the truth.”
Sequeira’s frustrations, which he had previously directed only at Susan, came out, as his patience with Dr. Cooper disappeared. The prosecutor retorted, “You don’t think it’s not good professional practice to write a report so people can review what your findings are in a murder case?”
Dr. Cooper challenged Sequeira to “subpoena” him, claiming he had not prepared a written report for fear that it would be used as a tool to prevent him from testifying. He also noted he had not been asked by the prosecutor to prepare one.
“I don’t consider it appropriate for you to know all of the details of what I’m going to testify to,” Cooper added.
The discussion was clearly becoming a problem. Sensing a number of issues with Dr. Cooper’s testimony, Judge Brady intervened, halting the cross-examination and clearing the jury and the witness from the courtroom. She informed Susan that protocol required expert witnesses to provide the other side with supporting documents used to render a decision in a case. Susan told Brady that she hadn’t made copies of her written correspondence and claimed there were no notes. When Brady appeared skeptical, Susan launched into a frenzied attack, repeatedly cutting the judge off mid-sentence and accused her of being “wrong.” Ultimately, Judge Brady sided with Sequeira on the matter and ordered Dr. Cooper to produce his report based on the evidence the next morning.
The following morning, Dr. Cooper failed to produce the discoverable materials he had used to prepare his testimony. Brady demanded an explanation. Initially Dr. Cooper claimed to have left them on the plane—after telling members of the court that he had driven up from Texas to testify on Susan’s behalf. He then suggested that a burglary may have occurred in his motel room. From the witness stand, he said that at one point during his stay, he returned to find the door to his room stuck shut, leading him to suspect a thief. Perhaps the documents were among the items taken, he put forward.
Judge Brady was incredulous. “I must admit I am very troubled by the turn of events this morning. Don’t you have copies in your office?”
Dr. Cooper’s answer was vague, and after some back and forth, he suggested the materials could be at his home in Austin.
“Are you married?” the judge inquired.
“Yes.”
“Then have your wife FedEx them to court,” Brady suggested.
“Um. My wife is out of town,” the expert replied.
“Do you have pets?”
“Yes, dogs.”
“Who is feeding the dogs?” the judge asked.
“Um…I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you and order you to have the letters faxed to the court by Monday.”
It was then that Paul Sequeira lost his temper. The prosecutor, who for weeks had tried to keep his composure, rose to his feet and launched a formal complaint, saying that through all of Susan’s continued attacks and outbursts, he had done his best to remain in control. “But this latest shenanigan is unacceptable,” he remarked. “How is this happening? This is outrageous! The witness is going back and forth on the existence of these letters. Not only that, but he’s testifying way outside the area of his expertise. He’s creating verbal crime scene reenactments for the jury.”
While Sequeira was criticizing Susan and her witness, Susan attacked Brady’s ruling regarding the papers. In Susan’s opinion, she should not have to provide the prosecutor with the disputed papers if he did not explicitly ask for them beforehand. In addition, she also disputed the judge’s assertion that the laws of reciprocal discovery covered the materials, arguing, incorrectly, that discovery “is a relatively new concept and still being developed.” Susan claimed that Dr. Cooper’s testimony “was completely independent, unbiased, and neutral, and she attacked the prosecutor, calling him a ‘cry baby.’
“He doesn’t like Dr. Cooper’s testimony, so he does a little dance in front of the media and says I’m in violation of discovery,” Susan quarreled.
“I want you to listen to me, Mrs. Polk,” Judge Brady intervened. “If you make any more insults, I will sanction you.”
Despite the threat, it was not immediately clear what the judge had in mind. The situation embodied the paradox that the judge faced throughout the trial: Susan was already in custody, so what other punishment could Brady hand down? It was a difficult situation for Brady, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Susan needed to be reigned in. Susan’s respect for the court had been far from exemplary, but now her witnesses were giving testimony that seemed dangerously close to perjury, conduct that could produce serious consequences for Susan.
Monday morning, Judge Brady made an announcement. Out of the presence of jurors, she informed the court that Susan’s expert witness had “skipped out” on the trial. “He is indicating not only is he not going to return, but he will be unavailable by telephone for this week and he will be traveling,” Brady said, referring to a three-page e-mail she received from Cooper over the weekend.
“In all my years that I’ve been doing this, I have never heard of anything like this before,” she added. “I’ve never had an expert witness take on the role of an advocate and then indicate he has chosen not to come back—that is just not an option.”
Like Judge Brady, Sequeira also expressed his shock after reading the letter that day. “I’ve never seen an expert run off like a scared rabbit before he is cross-examined.”
Cooper cited “the hostile behavior of the prosecuting attorney” as a key reason for his decision to withdraw from the case. “It was regrettable that I was unable to fulfill my designated role in the case during the week I had set aside for it,” he wrote in the letter that was made public later that afternoon. Dr. Cooper told Judge Brady that it was a “pleasure” to appear in her courtroom and assured her that his grievances were not “in any way intended to reflect unfavorably upon the Court…. I hold Mr. Sequeira completely responsible for last week’s debacle. Perhaps he has forgotten that justice isn’t always about winning.”
Cooper charged the prosecutor with crafting a “dramatic smokescreen about some discovery issues that have no bearing on the physical evidence and certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that an innocent woman is being held on false charges.” He also expressed “outrage” at the county medical examiner, Brian Peterson, accusing him of “irresponsible, unprofessional, and to my way of thinking, immoral conduct.
“Allow me to review the facts as I see them: Susan Polk is on trial for murder because Dr. Brian Peterson…saw fit to present a distortion of the autopsy evidence to the Coroner, to the District Attorney’s office, to the Grand Jury, and ultimately to the trier of fact in a murder trial.” Dr. Cooper wrote. “Not only has Mrs. Polk been indicted on false pretenses, but she has also suffered from protracted false imprisonment and estrangement from her sons as a result of Dr. Peterson’s false representations.
“I see this man to be nothing more than a public menace,” Cooper said of Peterson.
Meanwhile, Judge Brady informed jurors that morning that a “scheduling issue” had arisen, and the court would hear from Dr. Cooper at a later date. Court officials had reached the runaway pathologist by phone and, after advising him of his obligation to come back to court to finish his cross-examination, set a date of May 16 for his return.
In the meantime, Susan called her first hostile defense witness, Gabe’s foster mother, Marjorie Briner. She believed that Briner and her husband, Dan, had “brainwashed” Gabe into testifying against her. Now, she was anxious to paint the middle-school teacher as a member of a money-hungry conspiracy out to rob the Polk estate.
“I have not gained a single cent from your estate,” Briner insisted during a testy exchange. She also balked at Susan’s claim that she had turned Susan’s children against her by labeling Susan as “crazy and delusional.”
“From the very beginning, Dan and I tried to stay as neutral as possible,” Briner replied. “I tried never to use those words. Because those were words that made you very upset.”
Polk and Briner repeatedly interrupted one another, prompting the court reporter to insist they halt the cross-talk so she could transcribe all of their remarks.
“Mrs. Briner, have you ever heard of Pinocchio?” Susan asked.
Briner insisted that she had “nothing to gain” by testifying against her.
“Nothing?” Susan was incredulous. “Didn’t I put you on notice that I was going to sue you for fraud?”
Smiling, Briner acknowledged that fraud was among the threats Susan had made over the months.
“And wouldn’t a guilty verdict get you off the hook?”
During the heated examination, Susan accused Briner of perjury, in response to the schoolteacher’s claim that Susan had been verbally abusive during phone calls and in letters she sent from jail. Furious, Susan commanded Briner to sift through two mountainous stacks of letters that sat before her on the wood railing and point out an instance of “verbal abuse.”
“We haven’t even come close to the area of inquiry I’ve allowed,” Judge Brady admonished. “Move on, this is not relevant.”
“I object,” Susan shot back. “Perjury is always relevant.”
Week three of Susan’s presentation also included testimony from a former colleague of the slain therapist and a former patient who had participated in his group therapy sessions with Susan thirty years earlier. While their brief time on the stand bolstered Susan’s portrayal of Felix as a controlling husband, her monotonous questioning diluted the effectiveness of their testimony.
Psychotherapist Karen Saeger, a former colleague of Dr. Polk’s at the California Graduate School of Professional Psychology, testified to “two Felixes.” “One was tightly coiled like he could spring at you; the other was charming and charismatic,” she said. Saeger claimed that Polk had a “widespread reputation” at the college for his “taboo” relationship with his patient/wife.
Afterward, Kathy Lucia told jurors of Susan’s dependence on Felix during their group therapy sessions at his Berkeley office in the early 1970s. “He was trying to control you, I felt,” Lucia said in response to Susan’s questions.
Unlike her mother or Eli, Saeger and Lucia were two seemingly objective witnesses, who supported Susan’s claims concerning inappropriate treatment that she had suffered in Felix’s hands—especially during her young, vulnerable years. Indeed, it was on this issue that Susan should have pressed harder. At times, it appeared that she failed to realize the chord of sympathy that she could have struck with the jury had she focused on Felix’s emotional manipulation of her at a young age. Regardless of his alleged abuse, he had clearly violated professional and ethical standards in his treatment of Susan, and this behavior left his character open to question. Unfortunately, Susan found it difficult to exploit this weakness, as her evidence about Felix’s behavior often became muddled in her confused accusations of abuse and conspiracy.
By Thursday, the jury had still heard very little testimony relevant to the murder charge when Susan recalled her son Eli to the stand to refute Marjorie Briner’s testimony.
“Is she a liar?” Eli responded to his mother’s inquiry. “That’s just an understatement of her character. She is disgusting, what she’s done.”
Week four got underway with Susan’s list of witnesses interrupted once again by testimony from her “runaway” forensic pathologist, John Cooper. Dr. Cooper returned to court on May 16, and delivered portions of his case file to Judge Brady. After a review of the documents, Brady turned over in excess of fifty pages of documents to the prosecution, holding back portions she ruled to be Susan’s “work product.” Among the materials was a letter Susan sent to Dr. Cooper from jail that detailed her version of the events of October 13, 2002, and was accompanied by a rough sketch. Excerpts of that letter were read aloud in court and released to the public later that day.
Sequeira’s cross-examination of Dr. Cooper focused on the witness’s prior courtroom conduct and his contradictory conclusions regarding the County’s autopsy report. The nondescript carpet muffled the clicking of his cowboy boots as he strode to the witness box that Monday as courtroom spectators poked fun at the Hawaiian shirt beneath his dark suit and tie.
Dr. Cooper was again defiant as he faced off with the prosecutor that morning, repeating his conviction that the murder charges against Susan Polk were “false.” He told jurors that an “injustice” was being carried out in Contra Costa County and he could no longer remain a neutral witness.
“You haven’t sat here and heard all the evidence,” Sequeira rebuked. “You don’t know if she’s being held on false charges.”
“I see that the autopsy evidence exonerates her.” Dr. Cooper reiterated that while the stab wounds Felix sustained were a “contributing factor,” he died as a result of a heart attack suffered during his “aggressive” and “angry” attack on Susan. “I believe it is sound logic to say if he weren’t involved in an altercation, he wouldn’t have died,” Cooper said.
Dr. Cooper contended that Susan’s account of the murder, as depicted in letters she sent him, was “honest” and an “excellent fit” with the autopsy report depicting Felix’s injuries. “My assessment is that she is a reliable eyewitness.”
“Are you aware that Susan believes she is a medium?” Sequeira asked, striding around the courtroom.
“My understanding is that she’s got considerable psychic ability and there’s no reason to doubt that,” Dr. Cooper replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe you don’t believe in psychic ability.”
“Really? So you believe she’s psychic?”
“I have no reason to doubt it.”
Though the questions seemed tangential to the witness’s expertise, Sequeira’s strategy was clear. Dr. Cooper’s strange conduct during his first appearance had already tainted his credibility, and now Sequeira was attempting to sully his scientific reputation further by showing his belief in psychics. It was a clever line of questioning as this placed the doctor in something of a catch-22. On one hand, Cooper could not disagree with Susan’s claims that she was a medium, since such a statement could make it seem as though other elements of her story were suspect. On the other hand, by saying that he believed in her abilities, Cooper inadvertently cast doubt on his own scientific credentials. The doctor emerged from the ordeal looking less and less like a man whose medical word could be trusted.
Sequeira next asked him about Susan’s assertion that her former attorney, Daniel Horowitz, had a role in his wife’s murder.
“I object!” Susan said with a grin. “I never exactly said that. Although, I do think that maybe it’s so.”
On redirect examination, Susan got down on the floor to reenact the events of October 13, 2002. As she lay prone on the courtroom floor demonstrating her position during the attack, she asked Dr. Cooper, “If I were able to kick him in the groin and disarm him, it would be consistent with the fact that I don’t have stab wounds?”
Yes, the pathologist affirmed.
Sequeira was dubious. Walking to the overhead projector, he flashed photos of Felix’s bloodied body and of the deep, swollen defensive wound on his right hand. He then contrasted the images with photos of Susan’s injuries; a red bruise encircling her right eye and supposed bite marks on her hands. “Somehow she got the knife away without sustaining one nick or cut on her whole body?”
“Yes,” Dr. Cooper replied.
Over two days of heated cross-examination, Cooper maintained that Susan’s lack of bruising did not trouble him, and in fact, was consistent with the crime scene.
“I object,” Susan said at one point during the question. “I did have injuries, they were relatively light compared to my husband. My crime is that I survived.”
“The odds were definitely against her,” Dr. Cooper added. “It’s unbelievable that a woman that size would attack a full-grown man—the chances of her survival are minuscule.”
“Yes, it’s, and I’m using your words, it is unbelievable, isn’t it?” Sequeira grinned.
“I would say miraculous. It’s not unbelievable, because it happened,” Dr. Cooper maintained.
On Wednesday, May 17, Susan called her most compelling witness to the stand.
“Mrs. Polk, your next witness?” Brady directed.
The gallery brimmed with journalists and trial watchers looking on in complete silence as Susan announced with a nervous giggle, “Yes, I’m going to testify, so the defense calls myself.”
Raising her right hand, Susan swore to tell the “whole truth.”
Over the prosecutor’s objections, Judge Brady ruled that Susan’s testimony would be a straight narrative; a Q & A with both questions and answers coming from Susan would be too confusing.
“This is not carte blanche,” the judge warned Susan before inviting jurors into the courtroom to begin hearing the testimony. “This is not an opportunity for a speech. This is a privilege, not a right. You may not like it, but the reality is now that the defendant—you—do not dictate how we proceed in this courtroom.”
“I object,” Susan said, telling Brady that it was her legal right as a pro per defendant to voice objections. “It may appear impertinent or argumentative or unruly to some members of the audience, but it’s not. This is not a playground. This is a battle for truth. This is not a movie. This is not a script.”
Jurors filed in that morning to find Susan outfitted in prison issue greens and seated in the witness box. “I’m not going to go into every detail,” she assured them. “Everyone wants to get on with their lives.”
Despite this disclaimer, Susan began her testimony with a two-hour slide show depicting her life. She narrated the show herself, with the help of on-again, off-again case assistant, Valerie Harris, on the overheard projector. Throughout the slide show, Susan’s demeanor seesawed between weepy and mournful to thoughtful and contemplative as she identified photos of herself as a young girl, as a twenty-five-year-old bride, and as wife and mother, posing with her husband, children, and the family dogs. She broke into sobs when an image of her son, Adam, popped up on the screen.
“I think he said what he said to survive, and that’s what he had to do,” Susan told jurors of the twenty-three-year-old who called her “evil” on the stand. “I think you saw a different Adam. The real Adam, the one I knew, sent me poems [in jail], came to see me, and was extraordinarily loving.”
Jurors were riveted by Susan’s narrative, which she delivered in a soft, folksy manner, her hands folded in her lap, along with a copy of her diary marked with yellow Post-Its. Throughout her testimony, she would refer to the diary that documented the actions of her husband and others who had come out against her.
As she spoke, Sequeira sat quietly in his seat, listening to her testify for much of the morning without voicing a single objection. Instead, he allowed Susan to talk about her relationship with Felix and her realization at the age of forty that she wanted out of the marriage. The twelve-member panel had already heard much of what Susan would testify to through other witnesses and in her opening statement. Still, she insisted the jury needed to hear “her story.”
Susan said the onset of Felix’s alleged abuse came soon after they were married, and she retold for jurors her story of premarital doubts about their relationship, saying that she later felt “ashamed” of her decision to marry “my therapist.” Despite her reservations and subsequent abuse, she never spoke up because she “thought telling someone would precipitate getting me killed…. I kept thinking I could fix it. His refrain was that nobody would ever believe me if I told them anything.”
Susan told jurors the first time she left Felix was in March 2001. He had a restraining order against her so she rented a room at the Claremont Hotel. She compared the experience to “recovering from an accident.” The peace and quiet was broken only by repeated calls from Felix. Susan held up a photo she took while at the hotel, showing the bruise she allegedly received on her wrist during an argument with him. Later that month, at her then-attorney’s request, Susan documented the alleged spousal abuse she suffered from October 2000 to March 2001 in an attempt to secure a restraining order against her husband. She recited the five incidents for the panel, contending that Felix had slapped, punched, and abused her, once tossing a drink in her face.
Moving on from her abuse, Susan recalled her January 2001 suicide attempt and her decision to move out of the Orinda house and rent a cottage in Stinson Beach. During that trip, Susan decided not to return home but experienced a change of heart when Eli and Gabriel begged her to come back. It was while she was living in Stinson Beach that she began her diary, vowing to look at life with more humor. Normally, Susan said, she would run from the room crying when Felix would bully her. Now, she would not let herself become unglued; she would adopt a more sarcastic attitude when he tried to intimidate her. But according to Susan, her new approach only succeeded in further enraging her husband.
“I finally made up my mind,” she said. “I wasn’t going to behave like a caged bird. I would live my life. I could go shopping if I wanted to.”
Upon her return to Orinda, Susan observed that her three boys had changed. They were growing increasingly chauvinistic, more like Felix. To remedy the situation, Susan arranged to travel with her sons to show them the proper way to act around a woman, taking Gabe to Thailand and Hawaii, and Eli to Paris.
At lunchtime, jurors filed out of the courtroom, notebooks and pens in hand, but they were pretty much the only people who were guaranteed seats upon their return. Interest in Susan’s testimony was so great that court officers returned from the lunch break that afternoon to find a line that stretched from the second-floor courtroom across the hall to the public bathrooms. In a rush for one of fifty seats in the gallery, Susan’s own mother, Helen Bolling, was pushed to a spot in the back of the courtroom to hear the remainder of her daughter’s testimony that day.
While listeners had been riveted by Susan’s testimony in the morning, their interest would wane before she was finished for the day. What had begun as a poignant story of a flawed relationship between a fragile teen and her much-older therapist would soon degenerate into an outlandish tale of brutality, and spies and conspiracy theories. After the lunch break, Susan described how she had been repeatedly raped and drugged by her therapist husband who used her as a “project” to further his studies of hypnosis and ESP. Susan maintained that as a teenage patient, Felix spiked her tea with drugs, lulled her into a trance, and coerced her into sex. He later demanded that she make predictions on world events that he could pass along to his Israeli operatives.
“I wanted a normal life. I didn’t want to be a medium. I didn’t want to live like that,” Susan said, claiming to have predicted both attacks on the World Trade Center and to have thwarted the assassination of Pope John Paul II.
“Looking back over my life, I became convinced that he was actually poisoning me,” Susan told jurors, recalling that at one point she started experiencing numbness and tingling in her extremities. “Felix smiled and said it was MS,” she said. But when a doctor discounted that diagnosis, Susan surmised that her husband likely was poisoning her. To be sure, she stopped accepting food and beverages from him, a tactic that put an end to her symptoms.
It was soon after her surprise fortieth birthday party that Susan realized she could no longer stay married to Felix. “I looked around that room and saw mostly patients, patients who were his friends,” she recounted. “I thought, my God, what am I doing? I’m married to this guy who’s twenty-five years older, he’s my dad’s age, he was my therapist. I was ashamed of his values.”
When Susan told Felix of her desire to leave the marriage, he allegedly threatened to harm their children and hinted he might alert one of his patients, a lawyer who moonlighted as an assassin, about the situation. “It was a recurrent theme,” she added. “Whenever I brought up divorce, he would say, ‘You better think of the consequences to the children’ and ‘You better think of the consequences to the dogs.’”
The comment about the dogs seemed to strike a particular chord with Susan, who shuddered when she recalled the fate of the family’s German Shepard, Maxi, a dog that Felix had supposedly poisoned. When she confronted him about Maxi’s untimely death, he fingered the neighbor as the guilty party.
By day two, Susan’s plodding narrative and penchant for minutiae grew even more tiresome. She had been on the stand almost six hours and had yet to discuss the events that led to her indictment. Surprisingly, Sequeira had only voiced a handful of objections, the majority of which were related to hearsay testimony, but as the day wore on, even he appeared to be wilting.
Susan’s gentle tone grew brusque as she role-played both sides of the argument she had with Felix when she tried to leave the house for Stinson Beach in March 2001.
In a gravelly voice intended to be that of her husband’s, she asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the beach,” she then replied in a soft tone to indicate she was speaking.
“No, you’re not,” Felix fired back, allegedly striking her in the face as she attempted to flee the house.
Susan contended that for much of their marriage, Felix forbade her from having friends, leaving the house without his permission, and shopping for herself.
On Thursday, Susan told jurors she wanted to clear up an inaccuracy in previous testimony provided by Dr. Peters, the one who evaluated her after her Yosemite suicide attempt. It was Dr. Peters who had agreed during cross-examination that Felix’s call to 911 had saved her life that day.
Susan said she wanted to make it clear that she had called Felix, not because she was reaching out to a supportive husband, but simply because his was the only phone number she could remember in her alcohol and drug-induced haze.
Calling the jury’s attention to the actual timeline of these events was not a bad idea. Dr. Peters portrayed Felix as ultimately caring about the fate of his depressed and troubled wife. If Susan could make it seem as though this phone call was her doing, it might make Felix seem more the callous husband who cared little about his struggling wife.
Ultimately it was uncertain what impact the clarification had on the jury, since, on Friday, Susan interrupted her direct testimony to recall her eldest son, Adam, to the stand. It was an interesting move and her underlying motivation for it was not immediately clear. Susan seemed more concerned with trying to win her son’s affection and stir his emotions with remembrances of the past, than with providing evidence to counter the State’s claim that she murdered her husband in cold blood.
“Adam, you’ve testified that I’m crazy,” she continued.
Adam told his mother that he was the first person to suggest to his father that she was mentally ill. “I was the one who brought it to the table. He refused to believe it at first.”
“Are you aware that your dad tried to have me committed?”
“All that I’m aware of is that you’ll say anything you feel like, drag him and our name through the mud, to serve your cause.”
Susan cried as she read aloud from a Mother’s Day card from her eldest son: “Mom, I know we’ve all had our share of troubled times, but I will always love you.”
“Did you mean that?” Susan asked.
“Yes, I do love you,” Adam said flatly. “And I will always be there, but I’ve stated it before, you need some help.”
Susan asked her son if he was aware that the psychologist who examined her right after her 2001 suicide attempt testified that she was not crazy.
“I have a much better vantage point,” he replied. “I’ve spent twenty years in this situation. You’re a sick, sick person who’s in dire need of a very controlled environment for a very long time. If that doesn’t happen, I won’t feel safe, and I’m sure a lot of other people won’t feel safe.”
On Monday, Susan continued her testimony with a long-awaited explanation of the events of October 13, 2002. Her story of that night began by explaining how she went to the guesthouse to talk to her husband. When he answered the kitchen door, he was wearing black briefs but refused to put on pants, saying that he couldn’t be bothered.
Upon entering the house, Susan sat as far from Felix as she could in the tiny cabin-like guesthouse, intending to discuss their finances and a plan for Gabe’s education. During the conversation, Susan made a sarcastic comment that infuriated Felix, and he hit her in the face.
“I staggered back and pulled out the pepper spray. I sprayed him right in the face, and he was just angrier.”
She reached for the metal Maglite flashlight sitting on the coffee table beside the leather chair and “tapped him on the right temple,” indicating that the “tap” “did not stop him at all.” He was “absolutely enraged” and raced at her with the ottoman, eventually grabbing her by the hair and dragging her to the floor. She was on her back, knees up, and Felix was on top of her.
“He rubbed the pepper spray off his hands and into my eyes,” Susan contended. “It was oily and orange-ish. My eyes were burning. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God. I’m dead. I’m in the worst possible situation.…He punched me again in the face. I was completely stunned. I opened my eyes and I saw the knife coming down and it went into my pants,” Susan said, without explaining how, or where, Felix had obtained the knife.
“It’s hard to see the cut ’cause I sewed it up later,” Susan insisted, holding up a pair of jeans she pulled from a brown evidence bag. Several coins tumbled from the pockets as she scanned the jeans for a tiny “nick” the knife made when it entered her left pant leg. “I saw it come down and go in,” she insisted, putting on her eyeglasses to aid in her search of the garment. Susan noted the jeans were her favorite pair and she had washed them after the tussle. She also showered several times that night.
The bailiff held the jeans up for jurors as Susan described the “flash” she experienced as Felix was stabbing at her with the knife. “I thought, ‘unless you do something right now, you’re going to die. He’s going to kill you.’” With this realization, Susan briefly contemplated letting herself die but quickly changed her mind, and pulling her leg back, she delivered a swift kick to Felix’s groin with the heel of her foot and then grabbed for the knife, which nearly fell from his grip as he reacted to the sharp jolt. “It was a very strong kick,” she said. “He was stunned.”
Susan claimed she warned her husband, “Stop, I’ve got the knife.” But he kept coming at her. She recalled stabbing her husband just five or six times. After repeatedly demanding that Felix “get off” of her, he finally rose to his feet and said, “Oh my God, I think I’m dead.”
“He rocked back and forth on his feet. He swayed…and he just fell straight back.”
Susan ran to the bathroom to clear the pepper spray from her eyes. When she returned, Felix’s eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, but he was not breathing. At that moment, memories of their years together flooded back. She recalled their first meeting, the day they wed, the children they raised, but the good memories soon gave way to bad, and the façade of their relationship crumbled as she thought about the years of abuse and marital difficulties.
According to her version of events, Susan remained in the cottage for about thirty minutes, carrying on a conversation with her dead husband, asking the questions in death that she never managed to ask in life. Standing on the stairs, she spoke to him, trying in vain to understand this man who had been a mystery to her for more than twenty years, at one point yelling at the body, “How could you do that to your children?”
Susan’s testimony proved surreal. While she had long highlighted different aspects of that night, she had never fleshed out the full picture to the court, never provided any of the details that made her narrative seem human. Now, the court was transfixed by her story, picturing her huddled around the body and trying to make sense of her tenuous situation. It was a vivid image, one that displayed her many inner contradictions. Though she professed to have loathed her husband for years, she could never completely let go of him. In this ending, his death was too abrupt, their relationship too flawed to simply be over, but somehow it was.
Once she moved past the initial shock of her situation, her next thoughts were more practical. “I’m going to be in big trouble,” she realized. She didn’t call police. Instead, she left through the kitchen door and returned to the main house. Holding up a pair of black clogs, Susan identified them as the pair of shoes she was wearing that night. “I don’t wear athletic shoes,” she said plainly. “I have no idea whose shoes those are in the blood. They’re not my sons’.”
That night was sleepless for Susan, who said that she drove Felix’s car to the BART station so that her son wouldn’t see it in the driveway and go to the guesthouse in search of his dad. The following morning, Susan drove Gabe to school, took him out for lunch, ran some errands, and did some housekeeping. “I kept putting off calling the police. I wanted to have a nice day with Gabriel. I just didn’t want to tell him what happened.”
Later in the day, when Gabe asked about Felix, she claimed she had no idea where he might be. “It was like living in two worlds. My husband was dead in the cottage and I was acting and pretending like he hadn’t died,” Susan testified. “I wanted to hang on to some semblance of a normal life for a few more hours.”
She said her son knew better. “He knew. I knew he knew. I just wanted to deny. The look in his eyes,” Susan’s eyes filled with tears. “He thought I’d killed his father…. But Gabe knew there was something wrong. I just wasn’t the mom I always was,” Susan sniffed. “Gabe is so sensitive. We were all so close; we finished each other’s sentences.”
Addressing Gabriel’s earlier claim that Susan had asked Gabriel if he was happy that his dad was gone, Susan claimed that she never actually said those words, but in actuality said “‘He’s gone. You aren’t happy, are you?’” Susan recalled. “I was buying time to put off telling him he’s dead.”
According to Susan, it was this initial lie to Gabriel that enabled her to carry her story forward, even as officers presented her with evidence to the contrary.
“At some point, I decided to lie,” she said. “I thought my best shot at getting out of custody, to take care of my dogs and my son, was to lie. So I did. Once I denied, that was it. I just kept doing that.”
In spite of her lie, Susan admitted that she “would have confessed” if police indicated they were going to arrest Gabe for the crime. “I was relieved that Adam was coming for Gabe,” she said.
Susan went on to maintain, “I didn’t murder Felix, and I didn’t want the stigma of people thinking I murdered him. I just hoped I wouldn’t be charged, but I was.”
As the afternoon progressed, Susan presented jurors with “explanations” for the accusations made in court by prosecution witnesses, but the more she talked the more it appeared that she was fabricating stories. For example, she insisted that Gabe had misconstrued her discussion of purchasing a shotgun, saying that it had nothing to do with murder. In her version of the story, she was shopping for a weapon on the advice of huntsmen in Montana who told her a shotgun would provide good protection from bears during her frequent hikes in the woods. Similarly, she also challenged Gabe’s testimony that she threatened to drown Felix in the pool unless he wired millions of dollars into her bank account. Instead she claimed that she had simply expressed concern that his father would get too drunk one night and “drown” in the pool.
On Tuesday, before the jury was brought into court, Susan asked that she be allowed to have attorney Gary Wesley of Mountain View present during her cross-examination by Sequeira. Susan told Brady that if she agreed to allow him to act as assistant counsel, he would be in court solely to make objections on her behalf. Sequeira immediately objected, arguing that the attorney was unfamiliar with the case and had not been in court during the thirteen weeks of trial. Allowing the lawyer to join at this late date would be “setting up a disaster” and could lay the groundwork for an appeal on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel,” he said.
“I’m extremely concerned about his competence. He can’t possibly know the ins and outs of this case,” Sequeira went on, insisting that Susan Polk “knows the case as well as anybody.”
Brady raised an eyebrow when Wesley stepped before her and admitted that since graduating from Santa Clara University Law School in 1978, he had never tried a murder case. Nevertheless, he had tried all felony cases “short of murder,” and ultimately, Brady allowed Wesley to act as assistant defense counsel during Susan’s cross-examination. This was not, however, a blank check; there would be ground rules. He could not offer any unsolicited advice. The judge also warned Susan that she would not be permitted to raise objections if she agreed to Wesley’s participation.
Brady fought back a smile when Susan agreed. “I’m going to hold you to that,” the judge grinned.
Wesley told reporters outside court that afternoon that he came on board at the request of Susan’s case manager, Valerie Harris, and had been providing informal counsel to Susan for several weeks. As if to demonstrate his familiarity with the case, he offered a criticism of Sequeira’s cross-examination of Eli Polk, calling it improper and accusing the prosecutor of crafting questions to “bait” the young man on the stand.
Susan ended her fourth day of direct testimony that Tuesday with what could only be described as a presentation of her kitchen knives. In a testimony akin to a sales presentation on the Home Shopping Network, Susan detailed each piece of cutlery, as a lanky deputy displayed them in his gloved hands. Though she was expressly forbidden to handle the utensils, she appeared happy to provide details about them to members of the jury. Jurors craned their necks to glimpse the family’s bread knife, a butcher knife, and a set of steak knives.
“That knife was everyone’s favorite knife,” Susan said of one steak knife, smiling as she explained how all three of her sons liked that one best. “It was always disappearing…. And that [a different knife] was the knife he [Felix] had in the cottage that he attacked me with,” Susan said of the one with the black handle. “Afterwards, I picked it up, brought it back into the kitchen, washed it, dried it, and put it away.”
Once Susan had finished with the detailed history of the Polk family cutlery, she moved on to an entirely new and until now, unmentioned subject. Susan attempted to raise allegations that her husband had engaged in inappropriate contact with his daughter from his first marriage. She provided no evidence and there is no evidence whatsoever to support these allegations. Nevertheless, it was Susan’s intention to introduce these allegations only by her own testimony. For much of her first four days on the stand, Sequeira had allowed Susan’s testimony to go into the record with few objections, but the period of relative calm in the courtroom came to an end with this latest development.
“I move for a mistrial based on being called a liar!” she demanded during a sidebar with the judge.
Susan flew into a rage after Sequeira objected to this line of testimony. Susan claimed that Jennifer had alluded to the abuse in letters she sent her father. But she could not produce the writings because someone had supposedly stolen her “Jennifer files.”
“I was impressed that we have gone for four days very smoothly,” Judge Brady said. “But this display in front of the jury with such a sensitive matter, especially when I’m learning for the first time that those letters just don’t exist anymore.”
“That’s not true!” Susan interrupted.
“Stop interrupting me,” Brady instructed. “I’m not done.”
“It is an outrageous abuse of your power to keep me silent on his abuse!” Susan shouted at Brady.
“Nobody’s going to keep you silent,” Sequeira mumbled aloud.
Unable to quell Susan’s rants, Brady adjourned for the day.
Before being led away that afternoon, Susan learned that Eli’s trial had resulted in a conviction on three of the six counts he was facing in connection with the March 2006 fight with his girlfriend. Valerie Harris was the one to deliver the news that a judge had just sentenced Eli to nine months in jail on the charges.
The next day, Susan’s cross-examination by the prosecutor began. That Thursday, Susan quickly charged Sequeira with using “doctored” photos of the crime scene and Contra Costa detectives with “staging” the scene to look like murder. She contended that pictures of her husband’s “defense wounds” appeared to have been magnified to make them appear more dramatic than they really were.
“They [detectives] were primarily focused on ensuring it did not look like self-defense,” Susan insisted when shown photos of the white numbered place markers encircling Felix’s bloodied body to indicate shoeprints found by police.
“Well, it looks as if someone, maybe a female deputy, because they’re really small shoes that fit in your shoe size range, maybe walked around the body and then walked to the bathroom,” Sequeira said in a raised voice. “Is that how it happened?”
“I think you guys goofed,” Susan implied. “I mean, to put two shoe prints, right-side shoes, side-by-side, like, what, I jumped up and did a whirligig?”
Later on, Sequeira stood before an easel, listing the names of all of the people that Susan had accused of lying about an aspect of her case. There was Gabriel, along with several members of the police department under the column labeled “Liars.” During the questioning, Susan pointed out that Felix had also lied and insisted the prosecutor renumber to put Felix’s name at the top of the list. Sequeira obliged, and changed the order to read: “1. Victim, 2. Gabe, 3. Sgt. Hanson.” Appearing at once ridiculous and true to Susan’s form, the display succeeded in demonstrating her confused paranoia. In Susan’s eyes, it was everyone against her—not because she was wrong but because she was persecuted. With this single gesture, Sequeira managed to show the entire court the skewed lens through which Susan viewed the world, while giving the members of the jury a concise look at the “enemies” that Susan claimed to have in the case.
As the cross-examination continued, Susan responded to questions about her motive for destroying potential evidence in the case. Sequeira asked why she laundered and repaired her blue jeans, got rid of the pepper spray, and washed the knife that Felix allegedly wielded that night, stripping it of potential fingerprints to prove her claim he had provoked the attack.
“Did you use that knife the next night?” Sequeira asked Susan. “Did you warn Gabe, ‘Hey, don’t use that knife?’”
“I don’t recall.”
“Is it possible that Gabe used the knife to eat his dinner? The same knife that was used to kill his father?”
Susan recoiled at the implication, claiming she had no idea if the knife was ever used again.
“In emergencies I get very fastidious. That’s just who I am. I cleaned it and put it away,” Polk said. “If you think that makes me a murderer? I mean, c’mon. But it makes a good story, so I guess you like that part.”
“It’s about the truth, Mrs. Polk.”
Expressing frustration with the District Attorney’s implication that she “snapped” inside the guest cottage that October night, Susan insisted that “snapping” was not in her nature, but it was in Felix’s. Susan also pointed out that she had successfully argued against a court order requiring that she submit to a psychological evaluation before going to trial.
“I’m not going to play crazy,” she told jurors. “I’m not going to say I snapped when I didn’t. And I’m not going to pretend this D.A. isn’t out to frame me for murder and this judge’s rulings are not biased, when I believe they are.”
“You’ve used the words ‘shocked’ and ‘appalled’ many times, Mrs. Polk,” Sequeira told Susan during recross-examination. “But do you recall saying in an interview on Court TV that you talked about it in a joking voice—the different actresses that might play you in a movie?”
The prosecutor was referring to an April 2006 interview that aired on Catherine Crier Live, conducted by my senior producer and coauthor, Cole Thompson. During the conversation, Susan said for the first time that she might be losing her case in court. In a moment of levity, she also joked about the possibility of a movie being made about her life, leading her to speculate that Winona Ryder should play the younger Susan, while Susan Sarandon should play her older self.
Though at the time the humor seemed harmless, Sequeira was seeking to use that televised interview to portray her as someone who pokes fun at a murder victim.
“Is it a crime to be able to find some humor in my situation?” Susan asked the prosecutor, charging that the Court TV producer “sand-bagged” her with the question. Breaking into a girlish giggle, she admitted that she still believes that Hannibal Lector is “too nice” a character to portray Felix.
“This is funny to you?” Sequeira huffed.
“I thought so,” Susan chuckled. But her demeanor quickly changed when she realized that jurors were not laughing along with her. Turning on the tears, she reminded panelists of her serious nature as a child, her difficult years as a wife, and her mother’s mantra.
“Have a sense of humor!” Susan said her mother always told her.
“I could look at my life as a tragedy. Or I could see it as a triumph,” she said as the tears flowed and she gasped for breath. “And I made a conscious choice that no matter what happened in my life, I wasn’t going to be a victim.”
Before resting her case on Thursday, June 8, Susan would call a colorful assortment of witnesses to testify. Among them was Laura Castro-Shelly, a fifth-degree Shaolin black belt who used the “fight or flight” response to explain the relatively few bruises Susan sustained during the fight with her husband.
“I believe it’s animalistic,” Castro-Shelly responded when asked how a woman of Polk’s size and stature could survive such a brutal attack by someone so much larger than she. “You become a lioness in the wilderness. You will protect yourself. You will protect your babies…. You will fight back knowing this could be your last breath.”
Susan also sought to direct the court’s attention to the role that psychics can play in crime investigation, calling Roger Clark, a retired Los Angeles sheriff’s lieutenant and self-described psychic detective and expert in crime scene analysis to testify on her behalf. The former police lieutenant took the stand to bolster Dr. Cooper’s assertion that Felix died from a heart attack and not the massive injuries he sustained in the guest cottage. Similarly, Susan called psychic detective Annette Martin to testify; however, Judge Brady limited her testimony to a discussion of how her intuitive abilities are used by members of law enforcement—adding little to Susan’s defense. Susan touted Martin’s abilities, claiming she had a 100 percent success rate on the hundred cases she assisted on. “She testified because she cares about me,” Susan later said.
Next to take the stand was family therapist and domestic violence expert Linda Barnard who supported Susan’s claim that she was a victim of “physical, emotional, and verbal abuse” during her relationship with Felix. The expert admitted she had not conducted a psychological evaluation of Susan in jail, but instead, had based her conclusions on four meetings with the defendant at the West County Correctional Facility and a review of the case documents, including recorded interviews, medical records, and naval records on Felix Polk. In response to questions, Dr. Barnard asserted that Susan suffers from post–traumatic stress syndrome as a result of the ongoing abuse she endured during her relationship with Felix.
“Can you describe for the jury what a delusional disorder is?” Sequeira asked Barnard during the subsequent cross-examination.
Referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), she described someone who might be out of touch with reality, hold false beliefs, and experience hallucinations.
Clutching his own copy of the diagnostic manual, the prosecutor read aloud from a section on “persecutory type delusional disorder.”
“This subtype applies when the central theme of the delusion involves the person’s belief that he or she is being conspired against, cheated on, spied on, followed, poisoned or drugged, maliciously maligned, harassed. Small slights may be exaggerated,” the prosecutor read on. “The focus of the delusion is often some injustice that must be remedied by legal action.”
After a dramatic pause, Sequeira read the final line of the passage aloud: “Individuals with persecutory delusions are often resentful and angry and may resort to violence against those they believe are hurting them.”
“Is this an accurate portrayal of the disorder?” he asked.
Dr. Barnard nodded in agreement.
Sequeira didn’t ask if the description applied to Susan’s conduct; the jury would make the obvious connection on its own.
On the morning of Tuesday, June 13, Susan presented her closing arguments to the jury, ignoring the remarks prepared for her by Valerie Harris and some of her supporters. For months, Harris and several others, including former Miner Road homeowner Roger Deakins, had been holding roundtables at the Polk house to plot defense strategies. Deakins had come to court during several days of testimony to show his support for Susan. But once again, Susan would do things her way.
Before she began, Susan unsuccessfully protested Judge Brady’s imposition of a three-hour time limit on the closing remarks. She also tried to convince Brady to charge the jury on just two possible outcomes—either first-degree murder or an acquittal based on self-defense. But Brady ruled to let the jury consider the “lesser included” offenses of murder in the second degree and involuntary manslaughter.
Meanwhile, Helen Bolling waited in the gallery, lost in a game of numbers. “Numbers are fascinating,” she told Cole Thompson, who secured a seat next to her in the rear of the courtroom. Bolling attracted sneers from the trial watchers, so called gavel groupies, when she continued to crinkle the plastic wrapper of a lemon candy she was fighting to open, seemingly oblivious to the amount of noise she was making. Helen looked up in time to see her daughter searching the gallery for a familiar face.
Susan’s frantic expression melted into a smile when she finally spotted Helen. Susan looked worn, as though she had aged several years since the trial began on March 7. Still reed-thin and wobbly, she stood before Brady in the same dark floral blouse and brown dress she had worn to court the day before. Her tousled salt-and-pepper hair was now mostly gray and her skin was pale and drawn.
It was 9:05 AM when the proceedings got underway. As the prosecution can both open and close the final arguments, jurors heard first from ADA Sequeira that morning. Susan would step before the court that afternoon to deliver her final remarks—after informing Judge Brady she didn’t want her photo taken after the reading of the verdict.
Jurors sat stone-faced as a weepy Susan walked to the podium just after the lunch break. Despite repeated admonishments from the judge, she had objected no less than sixteen times during the prosecutor’s closing remarks that morning.
“Imagine for a second there’s a man on top of you,” Susan began. “What would you do? I kicked him in the groin.”
Susan listed seven reasons why she could not have killed Felix: her arms are not long enough, she’s not big enough to throw Felix to the floor, she had injuries herself, the distribution of the stab wounds, the nature of the head trauma, the physical improbability and a lack of intent to kill.
Compounding her physical inability to murder Felix was the fact that, according to her, a proper investigation never took place. “Anything they found that didn’t fit with murder, they erased.” She contended that police never subpoenaed Felix’s naval records. “I wrote the navy for them and they sent them within two weeks.” In addition, she argued that they didn’t want to locate Felix’s computer “because theoretically it could have shown that Felix was trying to kill me.”
“I made up my husband’s history of violence?” she posed. “Come on.
“According to the D.A., I’m delusional. According to my husband, I was delusional, but I was in charge of our stock portfolio…. This trial has become a witch hunt,” she insisted, anxiously watching the clock in the rear of the courtroom to stay within her time limit. “Am I on trial for saying I predicted the 9/11 terror attacks or am I on trial for murder?”
Susan insisted that even if jurors believed she “is as guilty as a bedbug” they should vote to acquit her because she killed her husband in self-defense.
“Please use your common sense and do not be swayed by the misrepresentations of the district attorney,” she concluded.
And with that, Susan Polk rested her case.
She looked glum as she shuffled back to her seat at the defense table, where a framed photo of a young Eli Polk was propped in front of her. Valerie Harris was seated next to her at the table in a chair traditionally reserved for lawyers. Throughout the proceedings, local attorneys tending to matters in the courthouse had voiced surprise over the court’s decision to allow Harris to sit in that seat. Judge Brady even softened and gave Susan an additional ten minutes to finish her closing remarks that day. But there had been almost nothing traditional about the way Susan’s case had played out over the thirteen weeks. It was on this note that the prosecutor began his last argument to the jury.
“There’s two sets of rules,” Sequeira said during his rebuttal remarks. “There’s one set for Susan Polk and one set for the rest. She lives by her own rules and always has.” He noted that Susan had originally claimed that the sexual relationship with Felix began when she was sixteen. On the stand, she now realized that she was actually fourteen at the time. “The problem is, it’s just like everything else in this case. Sixteen wasn’t good enough. Then fifteen wasn’t good enough. Now it’s fourteen.
“And now she’s being raped and drugged.
“It doesn’t matter, if it was twenty, it’s still wrong.” Sequeira maintained. “But it’s never good enough.”
Walking to the overhead projector, the prosecutor replaced Susan’s childhood photo with a photo of the crime scene. He told jurors, “Susan was not a captive. She was free to leave whenever she wanted. Felix even made arrangements for travel out of the country.”
Reading from Susan’s statements to police during her interview at headquarters that first night, Sequeira strode around the courtroom and replayed her repeated claims of innocence. He also discussed her suicide attempt at Yosemite National Park, her revelations about her marriage at her fortieth birthday party and her theory about Felix’s death.
As he spoke, Susan could not quell the urge to jump up and object to his remarks, but the judge threatened her with sanctions if her protests continued. Once she settled back in her seat, Sequeira laid out his theory of how the murder unfolded. “She did it by surprise,” he said, charging that Susan had the knife with her when she went to speak with Felix in the guesthouse that night. The prosecutor noted that defense pathologist John Cooper had contended the knife used in the assault would not be the weapon of choice to commit a murder. It was too small.
“Oh really?” Sequeira said, raising his arm in the air with dramatic flourish. Standing beneath the judge’s bench, he rapped three times on the ledge of the desk, pretending he was gripping a large knife as Felix answered the door. “‘Can I come in?’” he said, mimicking Susan. “And she’s standing there with a kitchen knife this long?”
Laughter engulfed the courtroom.
Despite the previous warnings from Judge Brady, Susan continued to object, calling for a mistrial no less than five times during the forty-six-minute rebuttal presentation. Nevertheless, Sequeira was not deterred, and when referring to Susan’s accusation that police had “staged” the crime scene, he asked “How did they do it? Couldn’t they have done a better job?
“Felix had blood on his knees. Why would he have blood on his knees if he fell backward? The car, she moved it. Why? The knife, where did it come from? Did it come from his underwear? Susan took the knife from the house. This is evidence of premeditation. The Maglite, if she did not use it as a weapon, then why did she need to wash it off?
“I can only ask you to do the right thing,” Sequeira concluded. “Justice for Dr. Polk and his children is now in your hands.”
Judgment day for Susan Polk was near.
On Tuesday, June 12, jurors got the case—but not before Judge Brady informed Susan that she had failed to enter many of Felix’s naval records into evidence, meaning that jurors could not consider them in their deliberations. Susan was uncharacteristically subdued. Realizing the error was hers, she barely argued with Brady over the pronouncement. She requested only that the judge greet jurors each morning. She wanted to be sure that they were properly admonished not to read or listen to the news or talk outside the jury room about the case. She also wanted them to have a plastic magnifying device that Valerie Harris had purchased for her at Staples to be able to examine crime scene photos and other evidence carefully.
The judge agreed and then directed jurors to begin deliberations in the jury assembly room on the first floor after lunch.
Jurors had been deliberating for four days when the announcement came that they had reached a verdict on Friday, June 16.
That morning, Susan, dressed in a black, long-sleeved shirt, sat alone at the defense table awaiting their decision. Her mother and brother were in San Diego and had asked that someone phone if there was an acquittal. Eli, the only son who had supported her at trial, was still in jail serving his sentence for assaulting his girlfriend.
Outside the courtroom, there were four uniformed deputies posted to handle the crush of trial watchers anxious to hear the decision. Prosecutor Paul Sequeira and Contra Costa District Attorney Robert J. Kochly seemed in good spirits as they stood in the hallway. Sequeira entered the courtroom first, with Adam, Gabe, and the Briners in tow. Susan’s two sons were dressed casually in jeans and short-sleeve, collared shirts.
It was 11:25 AM when a hush fell over the courtroom.
Fighting back tears, Susan turned to look for her sons in the gallery. Adam and Gabe were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the front row, the Briners by their side. Valerie Harris was in the courtroom, but not yet in her usual chair.
“Turn off all cell phones and Blackberrys,” the bailiff instructed. “No one is permitted to leave before the jury.”
“Count one,” clerk Nancy Chertkow read aloud from the verdict sheet. “Not guilty on the charge of murder in the first degree.
“On the count of ‘use of a deadly weapon,’” the clerk said “Not guilty.”
Susan looked astonished and just a bit hopeful. Then the clerk continued.
“Lesser count one, guilty of murder in the second degree,” Chertkow announced. “Use of a knife, true.”
Susan sat expressionless as the guilty verdict resonated in the courtroom. After three months of testimony, jurors had convicted her of second-degree murder and found that the special enhancement, using the knife in the act of murder, applied.
Adam Polk let out an audible sigh when the guilty verdict was read. From his seat in the gallery, he addressed the court. “Susan had no right to take him from us,” he said, thanking jurors for enduring the lengthy trial. Gabe was silent.
Susan Polk was impassive, revealing no emotion as she sat alone with her chin resting in her hand.
Members of the media were on the edge of their chairs, gathering up their belongings as jurors were individually polled and then led from the courtroom. The jurors’ exit prompted a mad dash to the first floor for the much-awaited press conference. After four months of testimony, everyone was anxious to hear what jurors had to say.
“We didn’t think Susan was credible,” jury foreperson, Lisa Cristwell, told the media. “We didn’t believe it was self-defense in any way.”
Picking up on the language of the trial, another juror, Kathy Somesse, described Susan as “delusional,” saying that while jurors didn’t believe the murder was premeditated, they also didn’t believe Susan’s version of events. In a one-on-one interview with Court TV’s Lisa Sweetingham, Somesse said jurors first ruled out self-defense with their own reenactment of the killing as Susan claimed it occurred.
“We actually reenacted the events that Susan said happened, and after doing that, we determined it wasn’t possible for her to inflict those stab wounds the way she said she did.” she said.
During the deliberations, she continued, jurors were “split between murder one and murder two, with some strong murder ones and some strong murder twos.”
“The evidence was pretty clear,” added juror Pat Roland.
Roland noted that Susan hid her husband’s car at the commuter station and initially denied any role in the killing. But, unable to find premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt, the panel ruled out first-degree murder.
Roland also said jurors found testimony from Susan’s middle son, Eli, unconvincing, noting there was “a lot of coaching” going on between Susan and her son. In contrast, all twelve panelists agreed that Gabriel Polk’s testimony was “pivotal” to the case. “He was the first one on the scene,” said juror, Bob Borkenhagen.
“He was fifteen at the time of the murder, and his first reaction after finding his father’s body was not to go and tell his mother, but to hide from his mother and call 911 and say ‘my mother shot my father,’” Somesse added. “That was very telling.”
Somesse admitted that jurors remain perplexed as to Susan’s motive for the killing. “I think we all speculated what the motive was and wondered about it a lot,” she said. “But we really don’t know. I think it was a controlling thing.”
Remarkably, jurors said that Susan’s provocative behavior in court did not sway their opinion of the evidence in the case—though they did find it “painful” at times. “Good or bad, I got to know who Susan Polk is, as a person, and there was a point where I looked at all the facts in the deliberation room, and I asked, ‘Could Susan Polk have killed someone?’ and because I knew her, I felt the answer was yes.”
“Oh, my God, my life is over.”
Susan’s voice rang through the empty courtroom, as she comprehended the jury’s verdict. She had waited until the last spectator had filtered out of the room before reacting, and now, with Valerie Harris at her side, the outcome hit home.
“We’re just starting another phase of the fight,” Valerie Harris assured her, but her words seemed lost on Susan.
Once she regained her composure, Susan asked that Harris talk to the jurors on her behalf. She wanted to know their responses to two questions: how they addressed her credibility as her own attorney, and what she did or said that suggested she should not be believed? Continuing to look at the situation with an element of pragmatism, she asked Judge Brady to advise her about legal options. Brady responded by informing Susan that she would need to file supporting evidence to be eligible for an appeal, prompting Susan to charge anew that county officials could not be objective in her case. “Throughout this trial, there has been fabricated and suppression of evidence by county officials,” she complained. “It would be preferable to appoint the state public defender’s office.”
Outside the courtroom, Sequeira said he was “ecstatic” with the verdict, although he admitted that facing off against Susan “wore me down.” Prosecuting her had been the most difficult task of his career, he said, adding that his courtroom opponent was “the most hateful” person he ever met. Sequeira said his only regret was that he had been unable to counter Susan’s punishing character assassination of her husband. While he had potential witnesses who would have painted a “better perspective” of Felix’s character, the district attorney’s office had chosen to center its case around Susan’s role in the killing—and not on the couple’s relationship.
Over the course of the summer, Susan’s sentencing date was postponed several times. In July, she announced her desire to be represented by counsel Charles Hoehn at her presentencing hearing, but when Judge Brady declined to grant attorney Hoehn’s request for an immediate transcript of the trial, the lawyer stepped down, leaving Susan with no representation. To further complicate matters, the Contra Costa County Bar Association’s Conflict Panel that assigns attorneys for defendants was unable to find anyone willing to take Susan’s case. Nineteen attorneys with homicide experience refused to represent Polk, citing conflicts of interest or jam-packed schedules.
In August, Valerie Harris requested a two-day delay to allow attorney Dan Russo to confer with Susan. But when the parties returned to court on Tuesday, August 15, the judge was informed that Russo was declining the case. He told Brady that Susan was “not completely comfortable with me.”
The lawyer told Brady that Point Richmond attorney Linda Fullerton, a member of the county bar association’s conflict panel, was interested in representing Susan, and the judge scheduled another hearing date. Outside court, Harris said Russo was “fabulous,” but that Susan needed a lawyer who could be available on a full-time basis to “hit the ground running.” They must also be open to the possibility of asking for a new trial, she said. As Harris said, “I’ve got a little laundry list of items to give to the next attorney.”
Meanwhile, Prosecutor Paul Sequeira accused Susan of stalling. He noted that almost two months had passed since her conviction and still there was no sentencing date.
“I’m going to ask for a reasonable date to be set,” he said. “The victim’s family has the right to a judgment entered.”
Susan faces incarceration at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla for a period of sixteen years to life. Opened in October 1990, the facility is located on 640 acres in Northern California and is the largest women’s prison in the United States. Susan would be sixty-two years old before becoming eligible for parole in 2020.
Sequeira raised doubts as to whether authorities would ever release Susan. “The parole board will only let you out after you acknowledge your guilt, say you’re sorry, and go through some therapy in prison,” he told reporters at a press conference. “I’ll let you figure out if any of those three things are ever going to happen.”