There was also a property assessment for the Arch Street apartment complex that the Polks co-owned with Susan’s mother, Helen Bolling, showing a value of $675,000 as of May 17, 1999. A typewritten letter found on the fireplace mantel from Susan to her mother, dated May 21, 2002, indicated that Helen had recently requested that Susan and Felix sign the property over to her:
Dear Mother,
…You seem to be claiming that your share has increased from 50% to 100% because you did not receive your share of the income for the last few years and proceeds from the refinance. In addition, you have written me out of your will.
It is not worth my while to waste any more time on this property when it does not benefit me….
Please have your attorney contact me…with a proposal for buying me out if you think that I am entitled to any share of the equity.
Sincerely,
Susan
Inside a yellow folder, marked “Divorce—Landes,” was a typewritten letter from Susan to Felix dated May 21, 2002. In the four-page, single-spaced document, Susan coherently made recommendations on what the divorcing couple should do with various properties, pets, and tax returns, as well as accounting and spousal support issues. Susan also used the letter to alert Felix that Gabriel’s “excessive absences” from Miramonte High School had resulted in his being “dropped from classes.”
“Miramonte has a unique policy of dropping students when their absences exceed fifteen…. In Gabe’s case, all of his absences were related to illness and were excused,” Susan wrote, claiming that the teen “appears to have mononucleosis.”
“As you well know, Gabe does not cut school or get into trouble… so all of Gabe’s excellent and hard work this semester has been un-credited [sic].”
As to Gabe’s custody, Susan wrote, “Judge Berkow, at your request, ordered me to undergo a psychological evaluation as a precondition.
“In your declaration filed in February, you described me as ‘healthy.’ Now, you are taking the position that I need to be evaluated. You are a psychologist. You have known me for some twenty-five years. Surely, no one would know better than you whether I am fit or not to parent my children…. It is clear that you are determined to punish me by taking the kids away from me. You have said repeatedly… that you will not let them go. It’s time to move on.”
Pulling open the desk drawer, Costa discovered more letters that were written and signed by Felix Polk. One was his appeal to the vice provost at UCLA to keep Adam from being dismissed. Another, dated Saturday, June 15, was addressed to Gabriel, and detailed Felix’s belief that his teenage son had vandalized his Saab several months earlier:
“I know that you are very, very mad at me and won’t talk on the phone,” the one-page single-spaced letter began. “I do want you to know that I think about you all the time and miss you terribly and have some deep concerns about what the future holds for us…in spite of the way you have rejected me and turned on me, I am not angry at you. Frustrated yes!
“Both you and Eli seem to have bought into mom’s horror stories about me. They are for the most part not true stories, but I don’t really have a chance to speak up for myself. I am faced with a closed system in which mom says what she says so hatefully about me, and I have no chance to point out what is true and what is not…. I have some real flaws and yet I am not the monster she portrays me to be.
“What you did to my car was uncalled for, destructive and senseless. You must really have been worked up into a lather to have done that. I am holding you responsible for the damage.”
There were also typewritten letters from Felix to Peter Weiss, an attorney, asking for a five thousand dollar disbursement from the “children’s trust” to cover legal fees in connection with Eli’s assault and subsequent probation violation, as well as several requests for monies for Adam’s UCLA tuition. During the course of the investigation, Costa learned that Weiss was Felix’s cousin and was serving as executor of a trust fund the Polks had set up for their children.
Detective Costa perched himself on the desktop and listened to the thirty voice mails on Felix Polk’s answering machine as investigators marked the mounds of paper into evidence. Most of the calls were from patients wanting to schedule appointments. Two were from a “Tom Pyne” also requesting an appointment.
“I recognize that name!” Detective Roxanne Gruenheid announced. Gruenheid was among those executing the search warrant that day. She explained that Eli Polk had offered his father’s patient, Tom Pyne, as a possible suspect during the interview that she and Detective Steve Warne had conducted at Byron Boys’ Ranch several days after Felix’s murder.
In another drawer, investigators found an envelope with Pyne’s return address in El Sobrante, a small East Bay city north of the Richmond Bridge. They would pay him a visit later that week.
Moving their search to the office closet, police discovered a manila envelope containing the blue .38-caliber revolver that Susan had mentioned in her first interview and a red plastic ammo container, along with the keys for the trigger lock. The gun was loaded with the trigger lock in place, and a quick check of the weapon confirmed that it was registered to Susan Polk. The detective noted it hadn’t been fired in some time. Unloading the weapon, Costa booked it into evidence for safekeeping.
Also in the closet was a rambling six-page letter Susan had faxed from the T-4 Bucks Motel on Highway 191 in Big Sky, Montana, on October 3, 2002. The letter appeared to be a portion of Susan’s personal diary. In it, she wrote about Felix being a member of the Israeli “Mossad” and knowing about the September 11 terrorist attacks, Costa noted.
“Susan mentions the recent divorce court rulings in which she claims that Felix got his spousal support reduced,” the detective wrote in his report. “Susan writes about being a medium and how Felix used to put her into trances. Most of the letter is talking about the Israeli army and the Mossad and how Susan believes they were involved in the 9/11 attacks.”
Several days after searching Felix’s office, Detective Costa received an interoffice envelope from a deputy sheriff employed at the county’s Court Services Division. It was addressed to a Judge Rivera at 725 Court Street in Martinez and had a return address of Jackson, Wyoming. The postmark indicated it had been mailed in 2002.
Costa immediately recognized the envelope’s contents as a duplicate of the six-page letter Susan had faxed to Felix from the T-4 Bucks Motel in Montana on October 3—only this copy was one paragraph longer than the faxed copy. It began, “thought you might be interested in the journal excerpt about a Mossad agent’s failure to provide a warning to U.S. Intel. Re. Terrorist attacks on U.S.” Looking over the letter, Costa speculated that Susan had mailed a portion of her private diary to Contra Costa Superior Court Judge Maria Rivera in hopes of proving that her husband was a double agent working for the Israeli government and that he had used his influence as a spy to derail her custody efforts. It is not clear why Susan chose to send the correspondence to Judge Rivera. Although she hoped the letter would strengthen her argument, after reading it, it was clear that this wouldn’t help at all. The letter was a shocking window into Susan’s confused world, one in which her paranoia and delusions were abundantly clear:
I called F last night and found out this piece of information straight from the horses [sic] mouth as it were. “Brace yourself, Susan,” he said. “You’re in for a shock.” Yes, I was shocked. I shocked him too, accusing him of misusing his position as a Mossad agent to influence the court. It doesn’t help that the judge is Jewish. At first he tried the “poor Susan you really do need help” routine. But when I persisted, objecting that I had no idea that I was marrying into a Mossad cell when I married him, that I never would have wanted to do that, that all of his friends and family members are Mossad like M. who is stationed in Germany and B the lawyer who trots off to Pakistan on field trips and that I would tell my story on the Internet, F responded “No one will ever believe you Susan.” I said, “The Arabs will.” And he said, “
Are you going to go to the Arabs then, Susan?” And I said, “No, I don’t like them any better than the Jews.” I asked him, “How could he betray his own country?” Doesn’t he think of Americans as his countrymen? Or does he think of himself as part of the Greater Jewish Nations that exists without borders?
“You’d better think about your children,” he insinuated. “You better think about the consequences for your children.”
“What are you going to do that you haven’t already done?” I asked. Eli is in juvenile hall, and Gabe, well Gabe is in a continuation school. “Eli will get six months,” F said. “How’d you arrange that?” I asked. “Did you pay off the judge or did you just have something on him?” And F just grunted.
I don’t know how to get out of the dilemma I am in. Joining is impossible. I will not become an actress like the members of F’s disgusting family, pretending all the time, shaming kindness and humanity when underneath there is nothing but betrayal, sadism, and in the best of them, a kind of robotic obedience. F is evil and he is a traitor.
The letter then spoke about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Susan claimed to be a medium and that she had advised Felix on world events related to Israel through visions she experienced while in a trance:
I am not happy about being a medium,
the letter concluded:
First of all, I am only partly conscious of what is happening when I do what I do, and sometimes, I am not conscious at all until later when I get flashbacks. I don’t know whether this is because F hypnotized me so frequently when I saw him as a patient. (It was under hypnosis that this ability was discovered by F and instructed me not to remember, or whether it is a function of being a medium.)
Later that evening, a canine search and rescue unit was dispatched to the Miner Road crime scene. Investigators were hopeful that dog handler Eloise Andersen and her scent dog Trimble could sniff out some clues. It was after dark when Anderson and Trimble set off from the driveway at 728 Miner Road as investigators recorded the dog’s movements. But it was soon obvious that the direction the dog tracked “was consistent with the way any occupants of Miner Road would go if proceeding to the Lafayette area” and the search was called off.
Interviews with the Polks’ neighbors yielded no witnesses to the murder. Indeed, the neighbors knew very little about the Polk family. One Miner Road resident told police she had met Susan Polk twice since moving onto the block that past June. In response to questions, she said that both she and her husband were at home on October 14, but didn’t see or hear anything suspicious. In fact, she hadn’t seen Dr. Polk in months. Because of the age difference between Felix and Susan, she assumed that he was Susan’s father.
Another woman on the block recalled that the Polks moved onto the street about two years ago, but she thought that Felix Polk had moved out of the residence. Eli Polk had once backed his car into their retaining wall; Felix had paid for the repair.
The woman assured officers she never saw or heard any domestic abuse occurring at the Polk house, although on Monday, the fourteenth, at about 8:30 PM, she did hear “some yelling.” She described the yelling, “as not being out of anger but just in the background” and attributed it to the Giants baseball game on TV.
Chapter Sixteen
PIECING IT ALL TOGETHER
In the days after the murder, Susan steadfastly maintained her innocence, even as police accumulated evidence of her complicity. Detective Costa had no doubt about Susan’s guilt. All the elements were there: strands of her hair in Felix’s death grip, a bloody footprint on the floor of the guest cottage that matched Susan’s shoe size and panicked calls to 911 from Felix in the days before the murder.
Susan had the means, the opportunity—and the motive. Her alimony had just been reduced by nearly five thousand dollars a month, and Felix was awarded custody of their minor son and the Orinda residence. Costa had the right suspect in jail, and he was determined to build a solid case. This was not the first homicide he had handled in which a battle over family finances had spurred a spouse to murder.
As part of his investigation, the detective reached out to Janna Kuntz, the realtor that Susan hired to assist in her relocation to Montana. He found a business card for Kuntz during his search of the Miner Road house, and in a telephone interview, Kuntz confirmed that she had shown Susan a number of properties during her two visits to Montana.
According to Kuntz, she met Susan in the late summer of 2001, when Susan came to Bozeman to look at homes. Kuntz took an instant liking to the fortyish woman from San Francisco who was soft-spoken, intelligent, and interesting. The realtor was intrigued by this woman who was tired of city living and wanted to slow down. Susan loved nature and the idea of residing in the country where she could hike and spend lazy afternoons honing her skills as a writer. When they first met, Susan was living with her two sons in a small cabin she rented in Gallatin Gateway, a small farming community about twenty minutes outside Bozeman. Susan liked the country setting, but Eli and Gabe complained bitterly about being so far from town. For them, the location was too remote.
Kuntz had few details about Susan’s first stay in Montana. She and Susan got to know each other better when she returned the following September accompanied by her yellow Labrador puppy, Dusty. After years of abuse, Susan and her husband were splitting up, and she was eager to settle in Montana and “enjoy a quiet life,” the realtor told Detective Costa. Susan had just sold some apartments in California and had $225,000 to put down on a home in the Big Sky area. She wanted to stay in that price range.
While out viewing properties, Susan received a number of calls on her cell phone, mostly from her children. She was proud of her three sons and spoke of them often. In fact, she told Kuntz that she wanted to buy a condo near the ski slopes of Big Sky for them to enjoy. Susan envisioned taking the boys on lengthy treks and spending quiet days reading and discussing literature.
When Costa asked about Susan’s emotional state, Kuntz said she seemed to be taking the bad news in her divorce with a mix of disappointment and frustration. “Can you believe this?” Susan would say, as she related each new development about the couple’s finances and custody battles. Susan appeared calm, seeming more bewildered than angry, Kuntz recounted.
“Did she ever make any statements about wanting to hurt her husband?” Costa asked.
“No. Never, not even after the phone call from her lawyer informing her that she was ‘losing’ the divorce case,” she said. “Susan was upset, but not enraged by the news.”
Kuntz was referring to an in-chambers conference that took place in Contra Costa Superior Court on October 1. Neither party was present at the closed-door meeting that resulted in the temporary reduction of Susan’s support payments, pending a review of the couple’s finances by a court-appointed accountant. Attorneys for the couple appeared on their behalf.
As Costa spoke to Kuntz, it became clear that the timing of that decision couldn’t have been worse. Susan had just plunked down a one thousand dollar deposit on a small two-bedroom condo near Big Sky. Now, she was being forced to make a trip back to California to deal with the fallout. Had Felix left things alone, Susan might have signed the deal and quietly moved out of state, but faced with a reduction in spousal support, Susan would no longer be able to afford such a move. The realtor told Costa that she begged Susan not to return to the West Coast. While Susan never mentioned her husband by name, she had related enough horrific details of alleged abuse that Kuntz feared for her client’s safety. Susan was stoic, assuring the realtor that she intended to pack her belongings and return as soon as she could.
Once en route to Orinda, however, her plans seemed to have changed. Susan called Kuntz from the road. “She phoned to cancel the purchase of the property; a problem had arisen and she needed to take care of some business before she would be ready to buy something in Montana,” the realtor recalled.
Susan promised to call again when she was ready to return.
�
��Did Susan look at any sporting goods stores while she was there, specifically to purchase a shotgun?” Costa asked.
“I have no knowledge of that. Susan never mentioned wanting to buy a gun of any sort,” Kuntz said.
After speaking with Kuntz, Costa again contacted Justin Simon, Felix’s office landlord, and asked if he was treating Dr. Polk, as Susan alleged. “That is not true,” the psychiatrist replied. “Sometime ago I prescribed some medicine for him so he could sleep better. But as far as I know, Dr. Polk was not receiving any psychotherapy from anyone.”
Dr. Simon said that Felix had been a tenant in the building for about two years. “I would not even describe our relationship as friends, just colleagues,” he said.
Neil Kobrin, president of Argosy University’s Point Richmond campus, claimed to be one of Felix’s closest friends. He had known Felix and Susan for more than twenty years, first as Felix’s student and later as a colleague. A longtime member of the faculty at Argosy, Felix taught classes two days a week and was well regarded by students and faculty members, alike. A number of Polk’s students had acknowledged him in thesis papers and during graduation speeches.
After learning of Dr. Kobrin’s close relationship with Felix, Costa set out to interview him. The conversation provided several interesting bits of information. Dr. Kobrin, who was well into his seventies and still holding a full-time post at the university, told Costa that over the years Felix claimed that Susan “was becoming more and more erratic, paranoid and delusional,” Kobrin related. Kobrin said he knew about Susan’s belief that Felix had poisoned one of the family dogs.
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