“It’s like all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is what’s really going on, you know, I really actually turned forty and I said to myself, ‘Now, I should be prepared to face reality.’” Susan laughed aloud. “I just started to not lie to myself about certain things, including the relationship with one of his clients, another psychologist,” Susan said in reference to the woman whom Susan had seen her husband romantically embrace five years before his death.
Talking to her about Felix’s alleged indiscretions, I couldn’t help but wonder if this could have been the motive when she killed him. Whether or not Felix actually did cheat, it was clear that he had maintained relationships with some of his patients that were eerily reminiscent of his inappropriate relationship with Susan. In Susan’s situation, a revelation of infidelity might have pushed her over the edge, as this replayed her father’s betrayal of her mother. This possible motive deserved some serious attention, as adultery touched at the very root of Susan’s psychological issues.
Susan claimed that once she announced her intention to leave the marriage, Felix made all sorts of threats.
“‘I’ll drive you crazy.’ ‘I’ll kill you if you leave me.’ ‘I’ll destroy you.’ ‘I’ll throttle you.’ ‘Pull you down the drain.’ ‘You’ll wind up in an institution.’ ‘You are a bad mother.’ ‘You are so ugly.’…
“I think he was very crazy, a little more than I realized…. He was very, very split, you know, it was like night and day, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There were two sides to his personality. And he was extremely impulsive and malicious….
“It takes a certain kind of person to kill somebody’s dogs or to threaten their children… he would sabotage their progress in school. He was just a very dangerous, damaged person.”
PART III
THE TRIAL
Chapter Twenty-two
A MACABRE TWIST
Dressed conservatively in a gray suit, her short hair overgrown and brushed off her face, Susan unceremoniously entered the courtroom of the Contra Costa County Courthouse on October 11, 2005, for the opening remarks in her murder trial.
Onlookers watched from the gallery as Susan slid into a chair at the defense table between her lawyers, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde. Next to the tanned Horowitz, she looked pale and fragile, having lost a considerable amount of weight since her incarceration.
In the days leading up to the trial, her lawyers publicly proclaimed they would prove Susan acted in self-defense when she stabbed Felix in the guest cottage on October 13, 2002. They asserted that responding officers contaminated the crime scene that night by moving the body from its original position on the floor of the living room.
Pointing to police crime scene photos, Horowitz claimed that documented blood smears around the body and on the floor nearby indicated that Felix had been turned over by investigators, thus destroying potential evidence of Susan’s innocence.
Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady had replaced Judge Mary Ann O’Malley on the bench after Susan complained bitterly of O’Malley’s bias. Judge Brady, a square-shouldered woman with graying hair and a conservative manner, had been appointed to the bench in 1996 by then-Governor Pete Wilson. Susan was unhappy with her assignment as well. Brady had served as a prosecutor with both the Contra Costa and Solano County District Attorneys Offices, and had presided over numerous murder trials. She was married to Larry Brady, a longtime member of the Richmond Police Department who had recently retired after twenty-six years on the job. Using her preemptory challenge, Susan had asked that Judge Brady also recuse herself, but the court denied her request, ruling that Susan had filed it too late.
The trial had already been delayed two times by Judge Brady, who cited her “extensive calendar” as the reason for the postponements. In addition, Susan’s constant bickering with the judge, when she was acting as her own attorney, had nearly doubled the length of the hearings. Prosecutor Tom O’Connor had exhibited great restraint, despite the repeated delays. During his eleven years with the district attorney’s office, O’Connor had won several convictions on charges of first-degree murder and he appeared confident he would secure another in the Polk case.
After eleven days of jury selection, the trial finally got underway that Tuesday with O’Connor’s blow-by-blow recounting of the night that Gabriel Polk discovered his father’s “motionless body” covered in blood and lying on the floor of the family’s guest cottage.
A commanding figure at well over six feet, O’Connor grabbed the courtroom’s attention when he stood to address the jurors. In his opening remarks, he told the panel of six women and six men that the Polks were in the middle of a “heated divorce” when Susan confronted Felix that October night. According to O’Connor, Susan was furious after learning that a judge had awarded Felix custody of their minor son and given him sole occupancy of the house while she was out of town. Even worse, Felix had managed to have her monthly support payments slashed from six thousand eight hundred dollars to one thousand seven hundred dollars.
It was enough to kill for, according to O’Connor. Felix’s injuries were “of a man fighting for his life,” he continued. “In contrast, the defendant had almost nothing. Clearly, it was a one-sided battle.”
The prosecutor pointed out that Felix had been stabbed numerous times; sustaining six incise wounds and defensive-type wounds on his hands, forearms, and the soles of his feet. Police observed redness around Susan’s eye and small cuts on her hand. It was most telling, though, that she publicly denied any involvement in her husband’s death for some time, although she claimed to have privately admitted her role to family members and her attorneys soon after her arrest in October 2002.
“Now she claims she killed him in self-defense,” O’Connor said, resting his gaze on the jurors. “The defendant is nothing but a cold, callous, calculating murderer. She got wind of what was happening in the divorce proceeding. She became angry… and came home [from Montana] to take care of business.”
Rising from his seat at the defense table, Dan Horowitz disputed the prosecutor’s allegations. “My client defended her life against an attack by a rage-filled, brutal, aggressive man who was also her husband,” Horowitz began in a soft voice.
Promising to dispel the prosecution’s claim that his client killed her husband for financial gain, he said, “This concept of the financial divorce is wildly unsupported.”
Susan wore a blank expression as her lawyer pointed out that she was the one who kept the family finances and was aware that once the court-appointed accountant reviewed the couple’s financial background it would become clear that the information Felix had provided to the court was inaccurate.
“Susan Polk was going to get her money back retroactively,” Horowitz insisted.
The defense attorney used his opening remarks as an opportunity to relate details of Susan’s childhood and to tell jurors of her early sessions with Felix Polk as a fifteen-year-old patient. He described the therapist as a delusional narcissist who “hyper-controlled” his wife and children and proclaimed that Susan and her family members would take the stand to testify as much.
At one point, he even drew a parallel between Felix Polk and fanatical cult leader James Warren “Jim” Jones, the American founder of the Peoples Temple Church in San Francisco and later Jonestown in Guyana. It was Jones who organized the mass suicide of 914 of his followers, including nearly three hundred children, and convinced them to collectively drink a Kool-Aid cocktail laced with poison in November 1978.
Horowitz insisted that just as Jones gained control over his disciples, Felix won psychological control over Susan by molesting her under hypnosis at the tender age of sixteen, and then continuing the abuse with threats and beatings over the course of their marriage.
From the front row of the gallery, Horowitz’s wife, Pamela Vitale, listened intently as her husband next introduced Felix’s little-known secret: that he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a “schizophrenic reaction” in the
mid-fifties while serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. It was news to many in the courtroom that Dr. Polk had spent nearly one year in a locked ward of a U.S. Naval Hospital. Horowitz promised more on Felix’s hospitalization through testimony from a defense expert who would explain how Felix’s mental condition made him prone to “outbursts of rage, violence, and anger.”
“Susan Polk defended her life against an attack by a vengeful, rageful, aggressive man,” Horowitz insisted. “She was on her back. She fought him off and lived.”
In spite of Horowitz’s strong opening, the trial did not get off to a good start. Jurors seemed skeptical of the defense’s claim that police had mishandled evidence. In addition, Horowitz’s explanation for Susan’s initial denial and subsequent cover-up of the crime did not appear to ring true with the twelve jurors—especially after they heard the prosecutor describe her elaborate efforts to cover up the crime during his opening remarks. O’Connor pointed out that Susan cleaned and hid the knife used in the attack, got rid of her bloody clothing, and placed her husband’s car at the train station in an effort to cover her tracks. Those were hardly the actions of an innocent woman, he insisted.
The following morning, jurors boarded a bus for the Polk’s hillside residence to get their first look at the Miner Road crime scene. The group spent several hours viewing the pool area and the guesthouse where Gabriel found his father’s bloodied body.
That Wednesday, the jury heard from prosecution witnesses, among them the 911 operator who took Felix Polk’s call on October 6, exactly one week before the murder, to report that his wife had threatened his life.
“I remember the caller saying, ‘My wife threatened to kill me,’” police dispatcher Randee Johnson testified.
Another witness, Deputy Sheriff Shannon Kelly, one of the first officers on the scene, testified that Susan denied having done anything wrong during the ride to police headquarters on the night of October 14,2002. Although his role in the criminal investigation was limited, Kelly endured two hours of cross-examination by Horowitz, who was trying to cast doubt on police competence at the crime scene. This strategy proved lost on jurors, two of whom were overheard in the men’s room trying to figure out why Horowitz had spent so much time with Kelly. Apparently the men were unaware that defense lawyer, Ivan Golde, was also in the bathroom at the time.
“They didn’t see me,” Golde later complained to Judge Brady. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
The judge denied Horowitz’s request to have the two jurors removed from the case, but warned the men to refrain from further discussion of the case. “I know this is not like what you see on TV, but it is important,” Judge Brady told the jurors.
O’Connor closed the first week of testimony with a victory, as the judge accepted into evidence the letter Susan wrote describing Felix’s alleged involvement with the Mossad. The defense was successful in convincing Judge Brady to admit a second letter that Susan wrote to her children in which she detailed the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of Felix.
But the trial would take an unexpected turn when, four days into the case, Daniel Horowitz made a grisly discovery.
It was just before 6 PM on Saturday, October 15, when the lawyer punched in the security code for the locked gates barring entrance to his home at 1901 Hunsaker Canyon Road. He steered his red Honda S2000 up the winding dirt driveway. At the top of the remote hill was an expansive construction site, where Horowitz and his wife, Pamela Vitale, were building a lavish, seven-thousand-square-foot Italian-style mansion. Off to one side was a rundown trailer where the couple had been living with their dogs for nearly a decade while they oversaw the construction of their dream house.
The temporary home was cramped and without amenities. The couple had been pumping their water from a well on the property, where Dan intended to start a winery once construction was complete. It was no secret that Horowitz was wealthy, although it was unclear exactly how he had made his fortune.
Dan first met Pamela, a single mother of two, in 1994 when she moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles County, according to a website maintained by Pamela’s family. At forty-one, she was a striking brunette, two years Dan’s senior and nearly three inches taller than the lawyer.
The couple was introduced by Pamela’s sister, who arranged for Pam, an independent film producer, to read a script that Dan had written about one of his cases. Bright, ambitious, and sophisticated, Pamela was employed full time as a software-marketing executive and was raising a sixteen-year-old daughter and nineteen-year-old son. Later, she would apply her computer savvy smarts to Dan’s law firm, maintaining databases and supervising the construction of their twelve-acre mountaintop estate.
Horowitz knew something was wrong the minute he spotted his wife’s car in the driveway. She was supposed to be going to the Kirov Ballet in Berkeley that night. His suspicions increased when he found the front door of the trailer unlocked. Stepping inside, he gasped at the sight of his wife lying on her right side in a pool of blood, her body pushed up against the couple’s sixty-five-inch television set. She was dressed in a T-shirt and panties, and there was a giant gash on her head. The carpet beneath her was red with blood, and the living room furniture had been moved about. The giant TV had been shoved nearly two and a half feet from its usual spot.
Hysterical, the lawyer called 911.
“Help me, she’s dead!” he yelled into the receiver and then knelt down beside his wife’s body. Cradling her in his arms, he tried to absorb the sight of her beaten and mutilated face.
“Who could have done this?” he raged.
The sound of a police car roaring up the driveway startled him to his feet. Racing outside, he shouted to the responding officers from the Lafayette Police Department. Almost immediately, they pushed him into the police car and ordered him to wait while a team from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department inspected the crime scene.
That night, sheriff’s officers took Horowitz to department headquarters, where he was escorted to a room normally used to interview child victims. Over several hours, investigators fired a series of questions at him, first trying to determine if he was suicidal. Next, they handed him a pen and paper and directed him to reconstruct his movements; they wanted a detailed accounting of his whereabouts that day.
Horowitz told officers he hadn’t heard from his wife all day. He left home early that morning, around 7:30 AM, to meet a friend for breakfast. Upon arriving at his Oakland law office around 9:30, he tried to reach Pamela on her cell phone. She didn’t answer. He met with a private investigator at 10:45 and finished up some work on the Polk case.
It was 2 PM when he dialed Pamela for a second time with no success. Though he found it strange that she was not answering her phone, he wasn’t alarmed. His wife was a former high-tech executive who had traveled extensively, both domestically and internationally. At 5′9″ and 178 pounds, she was no pushover. He assumed she was probably just busy with things at the house.
Horowitz told investigators that he left Oakland shortly thereafter. Later he made a deposit at the bank, and grabbed a Starbuck’s coffee in town before heading to the gym. After his workout, he headed for home, where he found his wife murdered.
Though short and slender, Horowitz had a wiry strength. While he stood barely 5′8″, with thinning brown hair and rimless eyeglasses perched atop a prominent nose, he had honed the physique of a person who worked out seriously at the gym. Like many defense lawyers, Horowitz had received his share of threats over the years. Staying in top physical shape gave him a sense of security. He informed police he was licensed to carry a gun.
An initial investigation by members of the Contra Costa crime lab determined that Pamela Vitale was savagely beaten with “multiple objects” during the attack that claimed her life. Evidence collected at the crime scene indicated that she was hit numerous times with several different weapons, although police declined to reveal further details of the brutal assault other than to say that Pamela�
��s death was “violent.”
A coroner’s report would later reveal that the fifty-two-year-old was found facedown on the carpet. She was struck more than two dozen times in the head, some of the blows so powerful they dislodged her front teeth and exposed sections of her skull. She had also been stabbed in the abdomen while she lay dead in a pool of blood.
News of the horrific killing quickly drew national media attention to Susan Polk, as speculation swirled that Vitale’s death might somehow be linked to the Polk case. It seemed an eerie coincidence that both Felix Polk and Pamela Vitale had been brutally stabbed, although initial media reports stated only that Vitale had been bludgeoned to death. It was not long after Pamela’s body was discovered that police began looking into the possibility the cases were linked.
Among those interviewed by investigators was Susan’s middle son, Eli Polk, his younger brother, Gabriel, and lawyer Barry Morris. Investigators also questioned a number of the construction workers employed by Horowitz, as well as a neighbor, Joseph William Lynch, who had recently sold the couple four acres in Hunsaker Canyon.
A subsequent investigation revealed that Vitale and her husband had filed a restraining order against Lynch in Contra Costa Superior Court in June 2005. In the complaint, they charged that Lynch was mentally ill and a methamphetamine and alcohol user who routinely harassed them and other neighbors in the Lafayette area. Police were surprised to learn that the couple later elected not to serve Lynch with the court order after hearing that he had signed up for a drug rehabilitation program and was trying to clean up his act.
Lynch denied any involvement in the murder, claiming that Pamela and Horowitz were good people who had supported his efforts to get sober. “Dan was trying to help me,” Lynch told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I have a drug problem, an alcohol problem, and a big mouth. I’m clean and sober now. Dan and Pamela were really trying to help me.”
Final Analysis Page 23