Final Analysis

by Catherine Crier

  “Nothing indicating that Eli had any prior knowledge that this incident would occur,” the report stated.

  On a desk in the office was an Apple Macintosh laptop computer, and a check of the hard drive revealed some lengthy documents apparently created by Susan Polk that showed she agreed with her middle son’s views of his father. One document, dated March 16, 2001, which was submitted as evidence at her trial, outlined what Susan believed was Felix’s “unethical conduct” and spoke of abuse “throughout their marriage.”

  “She claims that her husband has drugged her in the past and has even struck her,” investigators noted.

  The purpose of this letter is to document the unethical conduct of Felix Polk, a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in private practice in Berkeley. I was referred to Felix Polk in 1972 when I was a student at Clayton Valley High School in Concord. During the course of therapy, I was drugged by Felix and coerced into having a sexual relationship with him. We married in 1982. We have three children together, Adam, Eli, and Gabriel, aged 18, 15, and 14.

  Throughout our marriage, Felix has been psychologically and physically abusive. He has punched me on numerous occasions, and threat ened to kill me if I ever left him. He has also hit the children. On one occasion, he punched Eli who was twelve years old at the time in the face with a closed fist, knocking him to the floor where he lay stunned and unable to stand up. The violence, psychological and physical, has escalated as I have become more and more convinced that a separation was necessary.

  The psychological abuse has taken several forms. Felix has threatened to withdraw financial support from me as well as the children…. When I have stated that I would be willing to leave without receiving a division of our property, he has threatened to kill me or, in his words, drive me crazy. Felix has throughout our marriage told me that I am crazy and told our children that I am crazy. He states that I come from a crazy family and that the dynamics in our family reflect my family dynamic rather than his…. Felix tells me that I am bad, ugly, evil, and destructive. At these times, I cannot help but being reminded of the family scene in which I was raised. As Felix knows, my mother subjected me to harsh criticism. The adjectives Felix chooses to employ are identical to those employed by my mother.

  In October of last year, in order to avoid another violent scene, I informed Felix that I was going to spend the day at the beach. Felix responded by hitting me in the face. When I burst into tears, he told me to leave the house and not come back. Felix told the children that I was crazy and destroying the family. He then ordered me: “go to your room.” He dragged me up the stairs and shoved me into our room. He said that he felt like hitting me because I was so provocative. One of my sons then stepped forward and punched me in the face…. These family scenes do indeed remind me of the way in which I was brought up. As Felix knew, there were constant violent confrontations in which my mother goaded my older brother into beating me up. It was part of my motivation to escape from my family that I submitted to Felix and agreed to marry him. While the despair that I feel in response to Felix’s violence is reminiscent of the despair I felt growing up in an abusive family, it is not just transference as Felix states. When Felix threatens to destroy me, to kill me, to leave me with nothing if I leave him, I do feel hopeless. After the last violent scene, I attempted suicide despite the fact that apart from my marriage, I love life.

  During the course of our marriage, Felix has at times drugged me. Almost four years ago, when I talked of getting a divorce, Felix employed hallucinogens. Felix then hired a psychiatrist to evaluate me for antipsychotic medication while I was experiencing flashbacks. He refers to this period of my life as a psychotic episode. He denies the use of drugs in therapy, and would most certainly deny using hallucinogens. I know of no other way to account for the flashbacks, which I experienced during that time period. I have never willingly used LSD or hallucinogens. I do not drink excessively or use drugs.

  Also on the computer’s desktop was a document “My diary.” During her interview at headquarters, Susan had mentioned that she kept a diary, and suspecting this was it, investigators confiscated the laptop for further examination. Continuing their search of the office, police recovered a receipt from the Best Western Hotel in Bozeman, Montana, for the dates that Susan had given during her interview with Detective Costa, and a Blockbuster Video rental receipt dated October 12, 2002, at 2:34 PM. There was also a piece of paper listing the residence at 1530 Arch Street, Berkeley, the five-unit apartment complex jointly owned by Felix and Susan Polk. According to the paper, Felix occupied Unit 1532. Gabriel claimed that his father vacated the unit prior to his murder, and the apartment was currently empty.

  Other paperwork showed that the couple had nearly $5 million in real estate assets, including the Miner Road home, the Arch Street apartment complex, and a third building with four units on Linda Avenue in nearby Piedmont. The papers indicated that their debts totaled just under $1 million, and it seemed there was substantial money at stake in the divorce proceedings.

  Officers observed an unusual number of books throughout the house. On the mantel in the living room above the stone fireplace were collections of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Biographies of Europe’s master painters sat on a coffee table near the room’s enormous flat-screen TV. The glossy red and white cover of The Joy of Cooking stood out among the myriad cookbooks stacked on a counter in the kitchen.

  On the second level of the home was a small laundry room. Inside the washing machine, police found a wet area rug, and the dryer held several towels, but a check of all the items revealed no visible bloodstains. No blood was detected on any of the clothing in the hamper near the appliances.

  The master bedroom suite was up one more flight of stairs. The expansive room was tastefully decorated in soft earth tones and bathed in natural light from oversized windows. A queen-size bed with a wood headboard jutted out from one wall. Soft carpeting, an ample master bath, and an enormous walk-in closet gave the space a luxurious feel. In the bathroom, police collected the three blue hand towels that Costa had seen the night before and then searched the walk-in closet for bloody shoes. None were found.

  Across the hall from the master suite on the north side of the staircase, there was a second bedroom and bathroom used by Gabriel. Between the two bedrooms, there was a third door that led out to the covered carport where Gabriel had hidden the previous night while he called the police. That carport, used mostly by Susan, was reached from the higher of the two driveways and provided access to the uppermost living quarters. Susan’s silver Volvo station wagon was still there, along with two additional cars parked farther down the driveway—another Volvo and Eli’s Dodge Ram 1500 pick-up truck that Susan had driven to Montana. The guesthouse where police were collecting fingerprints was south of the main residence and west of the small structure that contained a bathroom and the family’s home gym.

  At 5 PM on Tuesday, October 15, the coroner’s van made its way to the cottage to remove Felix’s dead body, clearing the way for additional examination of the immediate crime scene. The forensic team remained there for several more hours to gather fingerprints and collect other potential evidence.

  It was after 9 PM when Detective Costa and the others wrapped up their work at the Polk house, now encircled in bright yellow police tape. They returned to the Main Detention Facility at 1000 Ward Street in Martinez, where Susan Polk had been transported during the early morning hours after her interrogation. After being processed at the jail, Susan had been booked for the murder of her husband, Felix Polk. She knew both the routine and the facility, since she was processed at the same location eighteen months earlier on charges of “battery” after an argument with her husband had turned physical.

  Once she was secure at the jail, the investigators conducted a second interview with Susan during which they observed several injuries on her body, prompting officials to undertake a full forensic examination of Susan’s hands, face, and body. Among other things
, the examination uncovered bruising and redness on her right eye, and small red cuts on her hands and upper arms. “The injuries were consistent with someone who was involved in a physical confrontation in the recent past,” one of the detectives jotted in his report. “I asked Susan if she would consent to providing hair samples and photos of her injuries. Susan permitted the hair samples, but denied consent to the photos due to modesty.”

  Her refusal prompted police to obtain a search warrant.

  Detective Costa was on hand that night to supervise the photographing of the slight reddish discolorations around Susan’s eyes and the small healing wounds on her hands. He also stood by as an officer plucked a dark brown hair sample from her scalp. He was certain it would be a positive match to the strands found clenched in Felix Polk’s bloody right fist.

  Chapter Seven

  THE DOCTOR’S DISEASE

  Frank “Felix” Polk had been a well-respected therapist and esteemed member of the faculty at Argosy University, where he taught psychology for more than a decade. His faint accent and formal attire reflected his wealthy European upbringing. His intuitive approach ingratiated him to others, from his superiors right down to the Argosy librarian.

  Born in Vienna, Austria, on June 30, 1932, Felix had enjoyed a privileged childhood. His father, Eric Ernst Polk, was a wealthy clothing manufacturer, who was born a Jew in Czechoslovakia and later emigrated to Austria, where he met and married Johanna Hahn. The couple’s daughter, Evelyn, was two years old when Felix and his fraternal twin, John, were born. The children were reared by a nanny and led a charmed life for several years, but all that came to a sudden end in 1938 when SS officers came for Felix’s father. Young Felix could do nothing but hide as the men dragged the elder Polk away. It was a terrifying scene; large men in uniforms and helmets brutalizing his father and carting him away as the boy stood by, unable to help.

  He wanted to run after them, to save his father, but the little six-year-old could do nothing. Losing his father that way changed Felix forever. He would never be comfortable in the real world again.

  With Eric Polk gone, the family was forced to flee the German invasion and abandon their majestic stone house in the country’s capital.

  “We had to keep one step ahead of the Nazis,” Felix recalled many years later.

  He claimed the family headed to the French countryside, where for nearly a year, they secretly lived in the attic of a farmhouse used regularly by German troops. It was a kind of Anne Frank existence in which no one dared speak for fear of being discovered, Felix said. To pass the time, he retreated to an imaginary world—a world in which he was able to save his father.

  While Felix would later say the terrifying experience gave him a “built-in sense of survival,” this knowledge carried a high price. Children who are separated from their parents early in life often do not recover from the trauma. Six is a critical age for a developing boy to lose his father to what the family believed was certain death. For Felix, there was also a powerful belief that he had failed his dad. He had stood idle, his heart pounding in his chest, as the men with the big guns carted away his beloved father.

  In his heart, Felix believed he should have done something. But what?

  The act of hiding and the psychological impact of believing that people are out to get you—because they are—can leave profound and lifelong scars on a young mind. As an adult, Felix would suffer from bouts of severe depression, marked by dark moods, anxiety, and panic attacks.

  At some point, Felix’s father escaped captivity at a concentration camp and rejoined the family for a time, but he soon left to fight alongside the British Expeditionary Forces. This voluntary departure was almost worse than the first. Good fathers weren’t supposed to leave their families, and without his dad, Felix felt lost and unprotected once again.

  Years later, the family was reunited in Marseilles, thanks to an ad Felix’s father had run in a French newspaper seeking their whereabouts. For a brief time, Felix attended boarding school in France before crossing into Spain with his family, where they converted to Catholicism to gain entry. From Spain, they traveled to Portugal and eventually boarded a ship bound for the United States.

  It’s not known what effect, if any, the involuntary change of religion had on young Felix. An autopsy revealed that, despite his Jewish heritage, he had never been circumcised, possibly to protect him from persecution in war-ravaged Europe. Years later, he would joke of his conversion with friends, who described the psychologist as “culturally Jewish.”

  In 1941, the Polks landed in America and eventually settled in Harrison, New York, where Felix’s father set up a retail business that quickly succeeded. Throughout his life, Eric Polk exhibited a remarkable ability to rebound from tragedy, and America was the perfect venue for his resilience, as he quickly established two profitable five-and-dime stores in Rockland County.

  Despite his father’s success, Felix, who was nine when the family made the transatlantic voyage, proved least able to adjust to life in the land of opportunity. He resented that his family no longer enjoyed the financial status they enjoyed in Austria. He had no time for play because his father expected Felix to work in the family business. His was a Victorian upbringing; crying was not allowed in the Polk home.

  In 1949, at the age of seventeen, Felix left the comfort of his parents’ New York home for St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he had earned a scholarship. Even though Felix started high school late, he still managed to graduate with his class. Nevertheless his parents weren’t satisfied with his academic performance, and they constantly held up the achievements of his twin brother, John, as the example to follow. Felix resented the comparison and John’s ease in forming many friendships. Neither came naturally to Felix. He was plagued by a foreboding he couldn’t explain.

  Once at college, Felix’s academic interests flourished. Philosophy became his passion, and he immersed himself in his studies to the point of obsession. While the work was invigorating, his constant self-analysis seemed to alienate his classmates, and Felix made few friends on campus. Similarly, family members reported that Felix’s dark letters home were filled with “marked preoccupations” and “esoteric discussions,” and that he exhibited “fluctuating moods of unhappiness” during his visits home.

  Upon graduation from St. John’s with a bachelor of arts degree in 1953, Felix enlisted as an officer in the U.S. Navy to meet his military obligations. That summer, he was sent to Officer Candidate School (OCS) at the U.S. Naval Reserve Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Within walking distance of the sandy ocean beaches and the hopping downtown, it was a grand place to be stationed in July and August.

  However, Felix rarely enjoyed these surroundings. According to U.S. Naval records, the twenty-two-year-old officer-in-training was “under greater strain than other students” at OCS. “He disliked the routine, but got through the program,” records stated.

  After amphibious training at a base in Little Creek, Virginia, Felix was assigned to a Landing Ship Tank (LST) on the West Coast and cruised to Japan. An LST carries supplies and troops and has a top speed of ten knots, slower than a champion woman marathoner, and the four-week crossing seemed endless. Aboard ship, Felix held the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade (JG) and served as a stores officer. Though not always content, he adjusted well, according to the naval records.

  But still, something wasn’t right.

  Felix was “moody and depressed” according to family members who advised him to seek help. While on leave from the navy in December of 1954, Felix went to see a psychiatrist named Kurt Goldstein, but he was only able to meet with Dr. Goldstein once before deploying back to the West Coast that month.

  His parents, Eric and Johanna Polk, were aware that their son was troubled. He had always been the “maladjusted” member of the family they reported, but the couple remained aloof, according to naval records, “because of his treatment.” It was the 1950s, and mental illness was something that people feared
. Felix was seeking help—that was all his parents would acknowledge. Discussion of any emotion—love, fear, or sadness—was not encouraged in the Polk house. After all, Felix’s father had been a war hero, and he was a man with high expectations. Weakness was not to be tolerated.

  But Felix felt weak. He tried to function as best he could, completing high school and even meeting with some success in college, but enlisting in the navy proved emotionally difficult. Though he made it through boot camp, he had a difficult time. Wearing a uniform and training for combat went against everything he believed in. Uniforms signified guns, blood, and death. He had seen more than his share as a youngster.

  Once in the navy, that panicky, pulsating anxiety he felt as a child hiding in a farmhouse returned. While at sea, Felix documented his emotional difficulties in a diary. In one entry, dated January 21, 1955, he recounted his disappointment and anger at a letter he received from a woman named Adele that he courted with little success:

  Despite the general stupidity of the letter, there were several thoughts which caused me real anguish. I was accused of being unrealistic, of living in a world which does not exist. I deny that my world is unrealistic, and yet I am tormented by my inability to communicate in the “real” world.

  The entry described a double date the couple attended with Felix’s twin brother, John, and a woman named Evelyn B. The four had gone to Manhattan to see The Saint of Bleecker Street:

  I felt beforehand that I would be self-conscious. This turned out to be the case. I couldn’t speak. I was terribly uncomfortable at the concert. The more I tried to relax, the more self-conscious I became, until it became almost unbearable. When we left… I was near collapse. Of course, she [Adele] must have noticed that something was wrong. The first two times that we met I had the good fortune of having had several drinks beforehand. Alcohol is usually very helpful in subduing my consciousness.