Final Analysis

by Catherine Crier

  The supposed inability of authorities to prosecute those allegedly responsible for harming his son prompted Felix and Susan to establish a new organization, “ENOUGH!” to help victims of ritualistic and other forms of child abuse. Its main goal was to change legislation so that children could testify against their alleged attackers in a public court of law.

  While Felix denied charges from some in the psychological community that he was using his son as a way to gain publicity for his practice, his behavior with Adam was certainly not that of a trained therapist. He clearly exhibited poor judgment when he paraded the youngster before an audience during one presentation and detailed the abuse he supposedly suffered while in day care. Even Felix’s daughter from his first marriage had raised questions about her father’s conduct and motives in a letter to him in early 1988. Though the twenty-six-year-old Jennifer Polk had recently joined her father and his new family on a vacation in Hawaii, in the letter she made it clear that she was now estranged from her dad, expressing her frustration that during the trip she was unable to live up to either her father’s expectations or Susan’s. She expressed distaste for Felix’s crusade in Adam’s name and accused her father of always needing a cause to cling onto.

  Her accusation evoked a response from Felix, who responded venomously in a return letter: “It is a lie that I need to hang onto a cause, that I need something to be upset about,” Felix replied in a four-page typewritten response on March 4, 1988. “However, I note that is true of you…. Your latest cause to refer to Adam enrages me,” he continued. “I want to shove those words down your throat. My son Adam was brutalized, and I, his father, have not been able to protect him or see that something happens to the people that raped him.”

  Felix’s response was ironic and telling. Was he really disappointed in Jennifer’s comments or in himself for what he perceived as another “failure” to protect a loved one from harm? Now he was facing the prospect that he delivered his son to a cult, proving once again that he was unable to protect his charge from evildoers. Worse yet, his own daughter was condemning him for trumping up false accusations in order to satisfy a need to be needed.

  In the letter, Felix denied being judgmental of his daughter, yet went on to voice disapproval of Jennifer’s recent weight gain and assertive behavior, which he described as “lacking femininity.”

  “It is a lie that I have not recognized your changes or that I haven’t liked them,” he wrote. “It is true that I haven’t liked some of them such as your putting on tons of weight, your increased rigidity and pseudo-feminism.”

  Was he now projecting his negative feelings about his own mother, whom he once described as the “power” in the family, onto his daughter? Or did Jennifer represent someone else? Jennifer Polk had just turned sixteen when Felix and Sharon legally separated in October of 1978. Perhaps Felix was not leaving Sharon when he left the couple’s comfortable Berkeley home that year, but the temptation of his pretty teenage daughter.

  Notably, it was around the time that Jennifer was maturing that Felix began his affair with young Susan.

  “I have examined by looking inside myself and by talking with others what the basis may be for my reaction to your irresponsible and hurtful behavior,” Felix wrote in a second letter to Jennifer in March of 1988:

  What I will take responsibility for is that I have a particularly strong sensitivity to loss, to having somebody I love dearly taken away from me….

  You have ripped yourself away from me, and to me that feels like a deep and familiar loss…. I tried to meet your needs in growing up…while I well may have been overly protective of you at times (to balance out your attacking and critical mother)…. You need to work on the tendency to project and to have good and bad people in your life.

  Mom [Sharon Mann] is in now, and I am out.

  Interestingly, the theme of “good parent,” “bad parent” would reemerge in Felix’s second marriage to Susan Bolling.

  Chapter Ten

  THE MIDDLE CHILD

  In the days following the discovery of Felix’s bloodied body, it became clear to investigators that the victim’s sons were divided. While Gabriel and Adam believed that their mother was “delusional” and capable of committing the murder, the Polk’s middle son, Eli, described Susan as a woman who tried to hold her family together while living with an “abusive” husband.

  On October 15, 2002, the day after Gabriel Polk found his father’s body in the guesthouse, detectives from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s department interviewed Eli at the Byron Boys’ Ranch. At over six feet tall, Eli towered over the officers as he followed the men to a small, private office to talk. It was unclear to the detectives whether family members had contacted Eli about his father, and Detective Steve Warne thought that he might be the first to deliver the sad news.

  Taking a seat across from the strapping teen, Detective Warne motioned his colleague, Roxanne Gruenheid, to join him behind the desk. He observed that Eli’s physical stature and crew cut made him appear older than he really was. Warne was anxious to see the teen’s reaction to news of his father’s murder.

  It was soon apparent that Eli had no idea what had transpired at the Miner Road compound that past weekend. He was “appropriately shocked” and “upset” as he struggled to come to grips with the news, Detective Warne wrote in his official report.

  “It’s definitely not my mom,” Eli insisted. “She would just never do it. That’s not even a remote possibility. My mom did not do it. That’s a fact.”

  Though Eli tried to answer the detectives’ questions, it was clear he was in shock.

  His troubled world suddenly collapsed around him. Away from home for just two weeks, now his father was dead and his mother was in jail charged with Felix’s murder. It seemed his parents had gone berserk without him there to keep the peace.

  After several minutes of conversation, Eli suddenly halted the interview. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” he announced. Rising to his feet, he left the room. The officers made no effort to stop him, giving the teen a chance to pull himself together. Five minutes later, he reappeared in the doorway and slid back into his seat across the table. He was visibly upset but agreed to cooperate as best he could.

  In response to questions, Eli told the officers he had been at the Boys’ Ranch for only twelve days, since October 3, 2002, when a judge sentenced him to juvenile hall. He was allowed limited contact with his family—weekend visits and five-minute phone calls. His father had visited him on Sunday, October 6, and Susan had been to see him on October 13, while his father and brothers were driving to Los Angeles.

  During her visit, Susan told Eli that his father was staying at a hotel while she was in town visiting from Montana for a few days. He didn’t know which hotel, only that his father was there because his parents were in the process of getting a divorce. Eli believed that Susan was in Montana looking at homes to buy and that she returned to deal with her financial affairs, mostly a “debate” with his father over “checks” and a court date that she missed. His parents had begun having problems the previous September, causing Felix to move to Berkeley. At the time, Susan said the marriage “was not working out.” She had given the house back to Felix then set out for Montana to find a place to relocate.

  When asked if he could provide any information as to who might be responsible for his father’s death, Eli pointed to one of his father’s longtime patients, a man named Tom Pyne. “My dad had people, patients, who hated him,” Eli added, claiming some were “disturbed” and “wielded razor blades and hammers” when they came for therapy. Detective Gruenheid jotted the name “Tom Pyne” on a notepad, noting that she would check it out later.

  When asked about a court proceeding the previous month in which his mother had been arrested for contempt, Eli said the hearing revolved around a violation of a “time out” while he was on electronic home detention for a probation violation. He was charged with “felony assault with a deadly weapon” in February of
2002 for striking a teenage boy in the face with a mini-flashlight in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. At the hearing in California Superior Court, he told Judge William Kolin that he had gone to the Jack in the Box that night to “get a look” at the boys who had jumped his friend and stolen the boy’s marijuana. Things got out of hand when the alleged victim and about twenty of his friends came after him. Eli unsuccessfully argued that he was only defending himself when he struck the teen in the face, breaking his nose and causing facial lacerations that required stitches.

  Susan was uncooperative when officers came to the Miner Road house and presented her with a search warrant they had obtained after the assault. She refused to put the family dogs away and then blocked the officers from going upstairs to search for evidence that might tie Eli to the assault. Her difficult behavior continued when she would not tell them where the laundry room was located, since it was there that investigators believed they would find the garments Eli was wearing at the time of the assault.

  Susan’s repeated attempts to prevent the officers from carrying out their search landed her in handcuffs, and Eli was temporarily placed in the custody of Felix, who at the time was living in the apartment at the couple’s Berkeley property on Arch Street.

  In April 2002, Eli was ordered to meet with officers from the county probation department to determine an appropriate punishment. A confidential report to the court noted that Eli had adjusted well to juvenile hall. Yet when placed in his father’s custody on Juvenile Electronic Monitoring, he had violations for being “out of range” and “not complying with reporting on time to home supervision.”

  Shortly after he was released into his father’s custody, Eli violated the court order by removing the ankle monitor at Susan’s urging. He subsequently disappeared, and Susan assumed full blame for her son’s actions. In a letter to Superior Court Judge William Kolin, she begged for leniency, but she refused to apologize for convincing her son to break the rules.

  “I have nothing to put forth in my defense other than I felt Judge Kolin’s order served to provide my husband with custody and to divide our family, I mean me and my children,” Susan wrote in the four-page handwritten note to the Superior Court judge. “I do not consider Felix to be a member of my family, nor myself a member of his.

  “I do feel responsible for Eli’s violation of probation,” she continued. “I worked hard to persuade him to do so. He was obeying his mother.”

  Susan alleged that she had convinced her son to “hide” with her in Orinda for the summer. Her letter did little to change the judge’s opinion. To the contrary, Susan infuriated Judge Kolin with her defiant behavior at the disposition hearing, where the judge sentenced Eli for two counts of felony assault. Her outburst, and her refusal to remain in the courtroom until the hearing was over, promptly landed her in jail, but not before she was handcuffed and dragged away.

  Judge Kolin called a break. When the family returned for the afternoon session, Felix Polk asked to address the court.

  “Thank you,” Felix said, rising from his chair. “My son Eli will have a problem with some of this. My perspective is the truth; over the four years we lived in an environment of paranoia at home.”

  “With mother?” the judge asked.

  “Yes, and she in so many ways is wonderful, and that’s also true. It’s just the way it is. The kids have all been affected by that. The kids, Eli maybe especially, is loyal and protective of his mother, which is one of the things that you just saw represented. My youngest son, Gabriel, is also like that. They both protect her, and they love her and protect her. So there’s been a lot of stress in the family,” Felix continued.

  “My son Eli has great values. He’s a good kid and has, like the rest of us, been affected by that. Each of the three boys have [sic] been affected in that way. Eli is. And so that’s just a background to the kind of behavior I think, from my perspective, in terms of what Eli needs.

  “Ideally, he would get counseling. He is in counseling right now. He needs more of that. And ideally, his mother and I both should be involved in that as well,” Felix said. “And he acts out when he just has had it. It’s too much stress for him. It’s been going on for four years. That’s a long time. All of this has been a long time. So I respectfully request that that be a consideration in his disposition.”

  Susan was certain that Felix pulled strings to get Eli sentenced to the Boys’ Ranch. She felt he was hard on their middle son; however, a review of the official court record indicated that Judge Kolin simply followed the recommendations of the probation report when he sentenced Eli to time at Byron.

  “Will I be able to attend my father’s funeral?” Eli asked Detective Gruenheid.

  “You’ll have to work that out with the staff at Byron,” one of the officers replied. The detectives pressed on with the interview. “What about previous domestic violence in the house?” Gruenheid asked.

  “There have been a couple of physical altercations,” Eli replied. He described them as “mutual combat,” claiming that both parents had been responsible for instigating the fights and recalling one argument in which his mother was actually arrested. Eli told the detectives that he hadn’t seen what transpired during that fight. A subsequent check of the police report indicated that, in fact, he was witness to the incident, labeling his mother as “the aggressor” at the time of the arrest.

  “My mom did not murder my dad,” Eli told the officers. “It’s very important that you know that my mom is a very mellow person. She wouldn’t do it. She would just never do it, that’s a fact.”

  Eli’s willingness to cooperate ended when the female detective pushed him to respond to a question that might portray his mother in a bad light.

  “I don’t feel right answering any more of these questions,” he asserted. “I would never do anything to put my mom in jail and that is where this is leading.”

  Springing from his chair, Eli terminated the interview for the second, and final, time. “I think it’s rude and extremely stressful,” he mumbled under his breath as he exited the room and returned to his dorm at the Boys’ Ranch.

  Later, officials at the juvenile hall told Detectives Warne and Gruenheid that Eli had asked to call his mother in Montana on October 10. Eli’s probation officer at the facility said he was nearby when Eli placed the call. After ten minutes, the officer asked Eli if he could speak with Susan.

  Taking the receiver, he introduced himself as Eli’s probation officer and asked if she had any questions regarding her son’s program at the ranch.

  “No,” Susan replied, and hung up on him.

  PART II

  THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CHILDREN UNRAVEL

  Susan’s hands-off parenting style had long been a point of contention with Felix. Whenever there was a problem with one of the boys, Felix was quick to blame Susan, charging either that she was too lenient or that the children were taking after her side of the family. After all, he said, she was the one who dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and it was her household that had been dysfunctional, a comparison that Susan deeply resented. She was upset that Felix would dredge up things she had confided during their therapy sessions at his Berkeley office.

  In truth, Susan prided herself on giving the boys space and allowing them their independence. While other mothers were congratulating themselves on how “obedient” their children were, Susan was chuckling at her sons’ displays of strong will. She believed in free will and self-determination and hoped that by giving her children room, they would find that on their own. She wanted her boys to think things over for themselves, and unlike other mothers, she didn’t want to tell them what to do. To Susan, so much control could only lead to “a society of storm troopers or Spartans.” She was about self-expression. The idea of controlling her children went against all that she believed and all that she experienced under the tyrannical Felix Polk.

  There was another reason, too. She
didn’t want to be like Felix’s mother—completely controlling about everything. According to Susan, Johanna “Joan” Polk was a micromanager, and Susan resented her intrusiveness. Johanna’s approach was quite different from the hands-off style Susan had known with her mother. During her visits to Susan and Felix’s house, Johanna was compelled to comment on things big and small, even on the way Susan washed the dishes. Although he resented his mother’s overbearing nature as a child, now Felix saw no problem with her behavior, hoping that her presence would influence Susan’s parenting. He made no secret of his disapproval of Susan’s skills, constantly insisting that she needed “to train the kids.”

  Susan never liked the sound of it. Training was something people did with animals, not people. Nevertheless, the lack of structure and rules in the household continued to be an issue for the family, and Felix was not the only family member to take issue with Susan’s parenting. Adam had problems with her child-rearing abilities as well, going so far as to accuse his mother of fostering a pattern of antisocial behavior by allowing his younger siblings to blame their troubles on others instead of demanding they take responsibility for their part. In a letter to the court dated September 10, 2004, Adam noted that, when called up to school to deal with misconduct on the part of Gabe or Eli, Susan defended her sons—pointing a finger at administrators for their failure to carry out their duties properly. When the boys were arrested for various infractions, she accused the other party or police of “inappropriate” treatment of her and her sons.

  The letter went on to point out that, as far as Susan was concerned, it was not her children’s fault when things went awry. When Eli was caught with marijuana, it was only because he was “holding it” for someone else. When he struck a schoolmate with a flashlight, breaking his nose and causing a great deal of bleeding and facial cuts, Susan claimed Eli didn’t even have a flashlight in his possession that night.