Final Analysis

by Catherine Crier

  Included in the lengthy report was an evaluation from a deputy of the probation department who met with both parents regarding Eli’s situation. “The father denies all the allegations of abuse saying when the minor was younger and had hyperactivity from hypoglycemia, the father would ‘swat him’ but that was approximately eight years ago,” the deputy wrote. “The father says he’s a nonviolent person and believes the minor lives in a paranoid environment due to the intensive conflict between the mother and father and their impending divorce. The father said under the current conditions, he wasn’t sure if he wants to live with Eli because of his present hostility, paranoia, and aggressiveness….

  “Mother felt Eli did something very wrong, but felt there was mitigating circumstances to cause him to do it,” the deputy continued, referring to an interview he had with Susan Polk. “The mother says the minor hadn’t been in a fight since reaching physical maturity and felt he wasn’t sure of his own strength. The mother’s concerns are that the minor grew up in a violent household and that he needs anger management. The mother felt Eli was the target of the father’s anger, and so is expressing his anger that he has kept inside. The mother felt the minor could benefit from drug and alcohol counseling, as well as family counseling.”

  The deputy noted that during the interview with Susan, she contradicted Felix’s assertion that Eli had suffered from hypoglycemia as a youth, claiming her son had never been diagnosed with the illness. Also in the report were claims by members of the probation department that Eli had been self-medicating with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to deal with the turmoil at home. Eli told officers that he smoked marijuana on a daily basis and drank alcohol three to four times a month, occasionally experimenting with drugs such as Ecstasy and mushrooms. Denying suggestions that he might be “depressed,” Eli did admit that he suffered from chronic “stomach problems,” which officials attributed to stress.

  During his visit to the probation department on May 22, Eli charged in private that his father was physically and emotionally abusive. Felix had accompanied his middle son to the evaluation that day, but when they arrived, Eli announced that he wanted to speak with a deputy alone. Only then did Eli present the officer with a four-page handwritten letter about “physical and mental abuse” he claimed Felix was inflicting upon him.

  “The minor was periodically shaken and emotional as he talked about wanting to move back with his mother and how he felt he couldn’t live in such close confined space with his father,” the deputy wrote in his report to the court. “The minor described the father as having in the past ‘beaten the crap’ out of him and his brothers and been mentally abusive with continual putdowns, mental mind games, and intimidation.”

  Attached to the report was a psychological evaluation of Eli conducted on May 13, “one where the parents present in a compelling, provocative manner,” the psychologist wrote in a three-page letter to the Court, also dated May 22, 2002. “The father is a mental health professional who appears depressed, ineffective, and passive. [The] mother is aggressive, emotionally labile, and often contradictory in her behaviors and statements,” the psychologist continued.

  Both parents care for Eli but have not been able to address his psychological needs. The greatest “risk” for Eli lies not with each individual parent but within the dynamics of the family.

  The family system is marked by conflict and turmoil. Role reversal is common with Eli, often given more power and recognition than is warranted for any child of his age. Authority issues are flagrant and pervasive for both parents. When one adult tries to be in charge, even in a healthy manner, the other sabotages the process by name calling and undermining. While his mother’s participation in this sabotage is obvious, the father also undermines the mother with his passivity and reluctance to be in charge.

  Eli is very identified with his mother who is viewed by Eli as a victim in the dynamic. Part of this identification is based on the natural fact that his mother has been his primary caregiver with his father, by his admission, over involved at work. Part of this identification is also a defense against maternal anger and feared abandonment. It is not surprising that according to Eli and police records, his involvement in the crime was as a protector—looking out for his friend, the underdog in this case.

  Chapter Twelve

  CHASING DOWN LEADS

  As local news channels were airing details of the gruesome Orinda murder, Detective Costa and his team were chasing down leads. Their first stop was Felix’s Berkeley office. It was late morning on October 16 when Costa and his colleague, Jeff Moule, climbed the steps to 3001 Dana Avenue. The two men looked almost like father and son as they strode into the office building. Costa was in his fifties, with jet-black hair parted to one side. His mustache was short and neatly trimmed, just like Moule’s.

  Moule was fair-haired, twenty years younger and forty pounds thinner than his superior officer. But still, the two men were of similar height and possessed the authoritative demeanor of law enforcement officers. Once inside, they found the office door locked and an “out” sign posted on it. There was no receptionist; it wasn’t that kind of complex.

  Costa knocked on the door of an adjacent office. A psychiatrist named Justin Simon poked his head out the door. He told the detectives he was the building’s owner and that he leased space to Felix Polk, but theirs was strictly a tenant/landlord relationship. Still, Dr. Simon indicated that he was aware of marital difficulties between Felix and his wife. Detective Costa elected not to inform Simon of Felix’s murder given the vague nature of his relationship with Felix. He was certain Susan had mentioned Dr. Simon during their interview at headquarters as the psychiatrist who supposedly prescribed medications for her husband. Costa would check into it.

  Before leaving Berkeley, he and Moule conducted a sweep of area streets in search of Felix’s missing vehicle. The Saab was not there. Grabbing the radio, Costa contacted the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police to request that they check their stations for the black Saab. A short time later, an officer radioed back to report that he had located the sedan at the Orinda station in the upper west lot, in space number 1268. Orinda police were directed to secure the vehicle and have it towed to an impound yard to be examined. The officer assigned to move the car told Costa there were no visible signs of blood, weapons, or other evidence that might link the vehicle to the crime. He noted there was a coat in the back seat, along with a collar and dog bed.

  Their next lead took them back to Orinda not far from the BART station. Costa and Moule had heard that Susan’s mother, Helen Bolling, had once lived in the town. They wanted to check out the address. A call to headquarters yielded a listing for a Bolling at 52 Barbara Road.

  The modest residence was across the train tracks from the ritzy country club section, where Susan and Felix lived. While the landscape was mainly farmland and orchards when Helen first purchased the house on Barbara Road in the 1970s, the city of Orinda had grown substantially over the years. The north end, where Susan and Felix bought their home two years earlier, was now sprinkled with million-dollar residences.

  A dark-haired man in his late-forties answered the door. He was not very tall, about eye level with the detectives.

  “Do you know a Susan Polk?” Detective Moule asked.

  “She’s my sister,” the man answered, identifying himself as David Bolling. He told police that his mother still owned the property, and another in San Diego, where she was currently residing and that he and his mother had had little contact with Susan over the years.

  It soon became clear to the officers that in spite of the strained relationship with his sister, David Bolling was aware of the “incident” and that she had been arrested on suspicion of killing her husband.

  “I have a hard time believing that Susan could kill someone,” David told the officers. “But she does have an attitude towards authority.”

  Detective Costa took notes. He told David about his interview with Susan at headquarters the day be
fore. She claimed their father had abused her when she was a young girl. “Do you know anything about that?” Costa asked.

  “I know she’s been telling people that,” David replied. “It’s just bullshit.”

  David said that as far as he knew, his father had never done anything like that. He said he last spoke with his sister about two or three months earlier.

  She had been avoiding family members lately, David told the detectives.

  It was late in the afternoon of October 16 when Detective Moule went to the detention center in Martinez to interview Susan again. Detective Jeffrey Hebel would participate in the interrogation. The two had been paired up on Monday night when they questioned Susan’s son Gabe about the murder.

  This would be the third time in thirty-six hours that Susan was interrogated by police. She was being held at the Contra Costa detention facility on suspicion of murder in lieu of one million dollars bail. Two days had passed since her incarceration and she continued to maintain her innocence. Hebel and Moule decided to take a forceful approach, in an attempt to scare her into admitting her role in the crime.

  But the detectives’ efforts failed. Susan remained detached and composed during the lengthy interrogation. Even as the detectives worked to trip her up, she didn’t break a sweat. It was as if she was disconnected from the entire incident. In response to questions, she again recounted her movements during the past week. While some details differed slightly from her original version, her basic story remained the same. Susan claimed she didn’t see Felix’s Saab at the house that Monday morning when she returned from dropping Gabe at school. She spent much of the morning watering the small garden she tended in the terraced area near the home’s front entrance.

  “I am clear about that time line,” Hebel said. “I want to go back and talk about some other stuff about your background. I understand several years ago you kind of had some recollection about some abuse from your childhood and that caused some tough times for you. Is that correct or am I getting bad info on you?”

  “Well, you are hearing it from my children.”

  “If you tell me something, I am not going to them and say this is what your mom said,” Hebel assured Susan.

  “Partly, it’s a story that my husband cooked up for the kids as to what was happening,” Susan said. From there, she went on to recount how the story of uncovering past trauma was how Felix manipulated the truth in order to avoid informing the boys of Felix and Susan’s marital difficulties. As the detectives hung on her words, Susan once again offered her version of the last twenty years, explaining that she threatened a divorce several times over the course of their marriage. Sitting in the room, Susan coolly told the detectives how her threats to leave him were often met with death threats from Felix, who had even gone so far as telling Gabriel that he would kill Susan if she left. On another occasion, one that Susan later documented in their divorce papers, Felix made another threat on her life, this time in front of Adam and Eli. Coming in 2000, during a time when Eli’s allegiance was to his father, the threat was in response to an ongoing quarrel Susan and Felix were having over his office. Like so many of their fights, this one ended with Susan telling Felix that she wanted a divorce. His response was quick.

  “He [Felix] backed me up all the way across my room,” Susan explained to the detectives, “and he said, ‘You make me so mad, I could kill you. I feel like punching you in the face or punching you.’”

  But unlike past occasions where Felix had hit Susan, this time he did not get the chance. As he raised his fist to strike her, Eli stepped in first, punching his mother hard on her lip. The reaction was instantaneous as blood began to pour from Susan’s nose and mouth, dripping off of her face and onto the floor. Later, in addition to her eyes severely swelling and the side of her face bruising, Susan received several stitches on her lip that would leave a scar.

  Having witnessed the entire drama unfold, Adam excitedly told his father and brother that this constituted abuse and called 911, a move that made Eli fearful of going to jail. Susan was also worried that Eli’s punch would land him in police custody, so in order to avoid seeing Eli in jail again, the family concocted a story in which Susan had hit her face on the bed. Like so many of their lies, this one covered up the painful realities of the family’s life, but still it worked. Eli was never reprimanded for the attack on his mother.

  According to Susan, while her repeated attempts to exit the marriage were rebuffed, at one point, she even went so far as to try and obtain a restraining order against Felix. But her efforts stalled in March 2001 after Felix allegedly incited a physical altercation with her and later claimed, with Eli as a witness, that she kicked him in the back. Once again the police were summoned to the house on Miner Road and while there, Susan apparently attacked Felix again, this time in front of the officers. The incident landed her in handcuffs and promptly ended her attempts at getting a restraining order. Though Felix didn’t press charges, the damage had been done.

  As Susan told her side of events, the detectives continued to remind her of the evidence that was rapidly mounting against her and the fact that she was their number one suspect.

  “We were at your house all day today and the scientists, they’re still there,” Moule said. “They call themselves CSI, crime scene investigators…. We collected all of your shoes…and there’s a shoe present. It’s not the same shoe, I’m not going to say it’s the same shoe…but it’s the same size shoe, it’s your size in the blood, okay?”

  “There is no way that I went in there,” Susan said, referring to the guest cottage where Felix’s body was found.

  “I’m not saying you had some big grand plan and you thought about it for a year. Things happen for different reasons…you had a struggle with him. There’s DNA in his hand. You have injuries on your face consistent with injuries on his body. You were in a struggle with him.”

  “No, I was not.”

  Hebel jumped in. “Your DNA is in that room.”

  “You’re done,” Moule announced. “Your footprint, your DNA. It’s not about an interest, it’s about what happened and about your future right now…. Be honest.”

  “I was not in there,” Susan maintained.

  “Susan, this isn’t going away, you’re not getting out of jail. You need to give your side of this so that we can tell the court. Our job is just fact finders.”

  “Well, then find the facts. Find out who did it.”

  “We found the facts,” Moule said.

  “We’re done,” Hebel added.

  “We have to know why,” Moule said.

  The detectives kept after her, but even under the intense questioning, Susan maintained her innocence. When they brought up the possibility of using a polygraph test, Susan adamantly refused, claiming that if it’s not reliable in a courtroom, then it’s simply not reliable.

  As Susan sat there denying any involvement, it was unclear what, if anything, was her strategy. Susan was a very intelligent woman, and as such, her continued profession of innocence in the face of the evidence against her was baffling. While Moule and Hebel were trying to elicit a confession, the other investigators were in the process of building a substantial case against her. Still, she maintained her innocence, almost as if, in her mind, she really had not been involved. As Susan had on so many occasions, she seemed to be shaping her own version of reality, a version that had removed her involvement in Felix’s death. It was a harmful proposition in any situation, but in Susan’s case it had a profoundly negative impact. Eventually investigators and prosecutors would use these denials and lies to demonstrate the cold-blooded nature of her killing, arguing that her attempt to cover up denoted premeditation, making this a case of first-degree murder.

  Now apparent to Detective Hebel that his current strategy was ineffective, he changed tactics, insinuating that the scratches on her eyes were a result of the deadly fight she had with Felix in the guesthouse that night. Susan said she’d been roughhousing with the family dog wh
en he bit her.

  “I’ve been doing this a long time,” the detective smirked. “That’s not a dog bite.”

  Detective Moule jumped in. “Susan, how did you sustain this mark right here on your right eye?” he asked, pulling at his moustache. “Do you want me to get a mirror and you can look at it yourself, and maybe it will jar your memory?”

  Susan didn’t crack a smile. “I fool around with the dog all the time,” she insisted. “The dog jumped in my face.”

  “Okay,” Moule grinned. “You have a little bit of darkness under your left eye, your left eye right here, a little bit of darkness. Did you also sustain that from the dog?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you mind putting your hands out again?” Detective Hebel instructed. “Can you stretch them all the way out.”

  Susan complied.

  “On your left hand there’s some scratches right in here and some redness right here,” Hebel noted, pointing a finger at Susan’s hand. “And on your right hand near your right index knuckle, there’s…it almost looks like bruising or redness. It’s light bruising.”

  “Uh-huh,” Susan acknowledged.

  “Can you roll them over,” Hebel directed. “You have some cuts on your left hand near the pad under your small finger.”

  “Under the left thumb,” Moule added. “And then right here. Has that redness been there for a while?”

  “There’s also, it looks like a scratch right there under her left arm, a little red mark,” Detective Hebel added.

  “I was gardening barehanded and I played rough with the dog,” Susan persisted.