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.
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