Final Analysis

by Catherine Crier

  When forensic pathologist Brian Peterson took the stand, Susan levied similar accusations at him, attempting to show that he too was also a member of the elaborate conspiracy to frame her for Felix’s murder. “You have a bias to produce evidence for the prosecutor, isn’t that correct,” she asked the pathologist when he took the stand later that week. She went on to insinuate that he was paid by the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department to render results favorable to the county.

  “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Dr. Peterson balked. “Everybody is paid by somebody.” He insisted the sheriff’s department would have to be “stupid” to try and force him to alter his findings.

  Peterson said the stab wounds found on Felix’s hands, arms, and feet were the result of the victim trying to defend himself from a knife-wielding attacker. “There might be times when you want to get your feet between you and the blade,” he explained. “Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to get wounds on the bottom of your feet.”

  When asked by Sequeira if the wound on Felix’s head was the result of falling or getting “whacked,” Dr. Peterson said, “I believe it was more consistent with being hit with something.” This statement directly contradicted Susan’s claim that Felix had struck his head on the tile floor when he fell backward shortly before his death. According to Peterson, there was no medical evidence to support Susan’s purported chain of events, and instead, he reiterated his opinion that Felix’s wounds to the head were the result of being hit rather than a fall.

  In addition, Peterson and Susan differed on the subject of what had actually killed Felix. While his post-mortem examination revealed that Felix suffered from advanced heart disease that could have played a role in weakening his ability to stave off an attack, he testified that Felix Polk died as a result of stab wounds to his stomach, lungs, and the area close to his heart—not heart disease. Susan, on the contrary, maintained that Felix’s injuries from the knife were not life threatening and that his death was the result of a heart attack he suffered while aggressively assaulting her in the guest house that night. In order to support her views, Susan intended to call another forensic pathologist to challenge Peterson’s testimony when it was her turn to present evidence.

  Over the course of the trial, Susan had worked diligently to discredit Felix’s professional reputation. On March 27, Neil Kobrin, the clinical psychologist and former president of Argosy University, was called by the prosecutor to testify about a phone call he received from Felix in the days before his murder.

  “He [Felix] said that his wife, Susan, was going to kill him and that he was at a hotel hiding out,” Kobrin told the court. He also said that Felix told him that Susan had a gun.

  Susan responded by raising allegations that ranged from Felix’s supposed affair with his patient turned colleague, to cocaine abuse. She pushed Kobrin to acknowledge that he was aware of Felix’s many indiscretions. Unfortunately for Susan, Kobrin could not substantiate the claims.

  Once Kobrin’s testimony had concluded, only one witness remained before the prosecution would rest its case. On Tuesday, April 17, Adam Polk took the stand, ready to face his mother for the first time in several years.

  Sitting on the witness stand with thick curly brown hair and a soft, cherubic face, Adam told the court that his father did not abuse his mother, while also shooting down Susan’s claim that Felix had threatened to kill her during their marriage.

  Adam’s testimony for the prosecution lasted just thirty minutes.

  But the well-spoken college senior would be on the stand for three days responding to questions from his mother, and it did not take long for the twenty-three-year-old’s testimony to degenerate into a family therapy session gone haywire.

  “Do you recall saying that you would come into court and say the worst possible things about me unless I give you irrevocable power of attorney?”

  Adam told his mother, “You’re a cruel, heartless person and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Susan presented her son with the letter he wrote for her bail hearing in which he called his mother “a gentle and intellectual mother who enjoyed movies, cooking, and baking cookies.”

  Adam testified that he wrote the letter to win her favor and gain the use of Susan’s car. He also claimed that the letter was “intended to manipulate Eli into giving me access to you.”

  “I was in a precarious position for mediating for my two minor brothers’ financial future,” Adam continued.

  Susan’s eldest son admitted that he had promised his mother he would testify at her trial “if she called him.” But Adam claimed that he never agreed to take sides. He would simply tell the truth, which Susan assumed would be in her favor.

  Like Gabriel, Adam denied his mother’s claims of spousal abuse, calling Susan “bonkers” and “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” during her questioning of him. Judge Brady, usually reserved, covered her mouth and fought back a smile during the bruising exchange.

  Later, he recalled that Susan broke down in tears when he first went to visit her in jail two days after her arrest. “What happened?” he asked his mother. To which she replied, “Things just got out of control.” Adam testified that Susan then said, “you can have everything, I’m just going to plead guilty.”

  He said his mother had a change of heart after she learned that she was being charged with first-degree murder after stabbing Felix twenty-seven times. Adam claimed that his mother said that she had not stabbed her husband that many times and was convinced she was being set up.

  “They might as well execute me because I’m being framed for murder,” Susan allegedly told Adam at the jail that day.

  During the heated cross-examination, Susan repeatedly brought up unfavorable incidents from Adam’s past in an attempt to discredit his testimony, at one point calling him “a bar room brawler.” Adam sat twirling a marker and staring at the ceiling as Susan once again played the fifteen-minute audiotape of his father telling an audience about his alleged sexual abuse by a satanic cult while a toddler in day care.

  Pressing the stop button on the tape recorder, Susan asked her son if he thought that she “put those ideas in his father’s head.”

  “I don’t think it’s a huge leap, that it’s outside the realm of possibility.”

  On Thursday, after three days of questioning, Susan was informed that this would be her last day of cross-examination. Frustrated, Susan resumed her questioning of Adam over his father’s daily treatment of her, but as the day wore on, Susan’s time was running out, and she angrily complained about the “unfair” constraints. Still, she continued to ask him about topics that Brady had ruled inadmissible or irrelevant.

  At 4:15 that afternoon, the prosecutor requested an adjournment. “Your honor, I’m feeling quite faint, can we take a break for the day?” It was not clear if Sequeira was ill or if he had just had enough of Susan’s courtroom antics.

  “I think we can get a little more out of this witness,” the judge replied, signaling Susan to proceed.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Brady ended the cross-examination. She was angered by Susan’s flagrant disregard for her instructions to avoid questions about Adam’s alleged prior bad acts and Gabe’s relationship with the Briners.

  “Okay, we’re done for the day,” Brady ordered, instructing court officers to remove jurors from the courtroom.

  Rising to her feet, Susan shook her finger at the judge and shouted at her from the podium. “I move for a mistrial for judicial misconduct on your part! You’re putting time limits on me, you’re not allowing me to recall him [Adam]…”

  “SIT DOWN MS. POLK!” Brady instructed, as jurors filing out of the courtroom looked on in stunned amazement. “Recess until 9 AM Monday.”

  Susan continued her ranting even as deputies rushed to the defense table and shut off her microphone.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  DEFENDING HER LIFE

  On Monday, April 24, Susan arrived at court ready to begin her case. A blue, long-sleeved T-s
hirt and chinos replaced her drab prison attire. She looked very thin and bony; reports were circulating that Susan now weighed less than 110 pounds. It was not clear who delivered the clothing to her at the detention center, although her former case assistant, Valerie Harris, was amid the journalists and spectators cramming the gallery that morning.

  Susan’s trial had already filled thirty-four days when she informed Judge Brady that she had subpoenaed more than one hundred witnesses and anticipated her case would take another three weeks to present. On Susan’s extensive list were both her mother, Helen, and her son, Eli, who was still being held at the West County Detention Facility in Richmond on charges of misdemeanor battery and violating a restraining order. These charges stemmed from the incident with his girlfriend, but Eli also faced a probation violation for the high-speed chase that resulted in charges of evading a peace officer. Authorities had agreed to push back his trial date from May 2 to May 16 so that he could testify in his mother’s case. Also on the list were the doctor who examined her in January of 2001 after her failed suicide attempt at Yosemite National Park, a high-tech crime investigator, a psychic, and a forensic pathologist who would testify that Felix Polk died as a result of a heart attack—and not from the multiple stab wounds she had inflicted.

  During her one-hour opening statement, Susan called Felix “Dr. Frankenstein” and told jurors that he drugged, molested, and manipulated her during their twenty-year marriage. She quoted from Thoreau and Dickens and referred to other literary works to illustrate that many narratives have surprise endings and that innocent people are sometimes wrongly accused of horrific acts.

  In her speech, Susan maintained that she went to the guest cottage “just to talk” with her husband that fateful night and that Felix fell back and hit his head during the violent struggle.

  “I was framed,” she said. “I did not stab my husband twenty-seven times, nor did I hit him. He fell.”

  Susan promised a “nail biting, edge of your seat thriller” defense. “You may think you know all there is to know,” she told jurors. “But it’s my turn now.”

  As her opening progressed, Susan insisted that she was a medium and claimed her husband had used her psychic talent to gain information that he reported back to his “handlers.” Though she warned Felix about her vision of the 9/11 terror attacks, he failed to report her prediction to authorities. Despite her unique abilities, Susan explained that hers was an ordinary situation, one that could have happened to anyone in an unhappy marriage.

  “What happened to me could happen to any family,” Susan said. “The D.A. will have you believe that I was controlling…that I was a Lolita.”

  This was a case of systematic spousal abuse that had gone on for far too long. To Susan, the events were clear: she had not killed Felix that night in the guest cottage; he had a heart attack. Further clouding his death was the conspiracy that she alluded to concerning her family members and law enforcement.

  During the final minutes of her remarks, Susan revisited the parallels found in literature. Jurors had heard only one side of the story, but before they could truly pass judgment, before they could decide her fate, they had to hear her version of the twenty-four years. When that happens, “it will be up to you to write the ending.”

  Jurors immediately took a liking to Susan’s mother, Helen Bolling. Petite and high-spirited, Helen had the panel in hysterics with her humorous responses to Susan’s questions. Barely five feet tall, she almost disappeared in the witness chair beneath the judge. Clutching her daughter’s childhood writings, school assignments, and photos, Helen adjusted herself in the seat and waited for Susan to begin.

  “You’ve only been married once?” her daughter asked, referring to Helen’s marriage to her father, Theodore Bolling.

  “Oh yes, once was enough, it cured me,” Helen cracked, as the courtroom erupted into laughter. Susan’s seventy-three-year-old mother grinned as she told jurors that she was “almost a virgin” when she married Bolling. “You know what I mean,” she smiled.

  During her testimony, Helen boasted of her daughter’s creativity and imagination. Her pale blue eyes sparkled with pride as she pulled out the awards, prize-winning writings, and photographs of Susan’s youth that she brought to court that day. Her props, and the homespun stories that accompanied them, provided jurors their first glimpse into the tender side of Susan Polk—a side that most had not witnessed in the courtroom.

  “Did you see any signs that I was going to grow up like the D.A. says, a homicidal.”

  Helen interrupted her daughter mid-sentence. “No.”

  Helen did not hold back her dislike of her son-in-law, and in defense of Susan, told the story of her own life-and-death encounter. While she did not identify her attacker, who had throttled her violently, she described how she had to react in an instant to save her life. Helen “played dead” to thwart the attack, but her daughter had not been as fortunate. Susan had no choice but to resort to violence against Felix’s onslaught, she said.

  “Boo-boo Susie” as she lovingly referred to her daughter, was not the violent type. Helen maintained that Susan didn’t have it in her to deliberately harm anyone. As far as she was concerned, it was her son-in-law who had provoked the assault.

  She claimed Felix “had an exterior of being acceptable. Hidden under that, is all that shit. Excuse me, I beg the court’s forgiveness, that’s not proper language.”

  Helen drew a deep breath before completing her thought. “Felix had a way of persuading you into thinking he was a good guy.”

  She told jurors Susan had attempted suicide shortly after beginning therapy with Felix but provided few details.

  When asked about the possibility that Susan could have been behind the allegations of the ritualistic sexual abuse of Adam and Gabriel, Helen balked. “That was from Felix. It didn’t come from my side of the family. When we hear about Satan, we run like hell.”

  On cross-examination, Helen told Sequeira that her “falling out” with Susan happened over time. She denied accusations that she and her husband had abused their daughter during her childhood. “Absolutely not!” she replied. But Sequeira pressed the issue, wanting to know why Susan would make such claims during her police interrogation on the night of her arrest.

  Helen sat poker-faced as the prosecutor played the videotape of that portion of the interrogation for jurors. “Maybe when she gets angry at people, she has a falling out with them, she makes up things about them. If she did it to you, she did it to Felix, too.”

  Susan jumped up and objected. “Torture of my mom on the stand. It’s not right.” Her repeated protests were overruled by Brady.

  Helen continued to defend her daughter, even after viewing the video clip in which Susan called her father a “pervert” and accused her mother of abusing her. She argued that Susan was a victim of Felix’s mind control and was just spitting back beliefs that he had drilled into her. Proof of this was the fact that now, almost four years after his death, Susan no longer believed her parents abused her during her childhood.

  On redirect, Helen said she forgave Susan for “the lost years.”

  “Of course, you’re my daughter. You’ll be my daughter until my last breath. Furthermore, I think people are placing too much blame on you.”

  Susan’s mother expressed disappointment with her grandsons Adam and Gabriel, accusing the boys of being concerned only with themselves in the days and weeks after their father’s death. She described them with their “palms up,” implying that they were looking for money.

  Outside court, Helen continued to defend her daughter. “All I have to say is you live practically as a hostage for forty-eight years, and then let’s see how you do.”

  In retrospect, Helen would be seen as Susan’s best witness. Her testimony gave a fascinating look into the early years of Susan’s relationship with Felix. In order to win this case, Susan had to convince the jury of the profoundly disturbing psychological impact of Felix’s seduction. Since she w
as the only witness who could testify to Susan’s behavior before and after she met Felix, Helen was in a unique position to provide insight into the unhealthy relationship between the couple. Her charm and straightforward manner made her words convincing, but with so much of the trial remaining, it was unclear what impact this testimony would have on the verdict.

  At 4:30 PM, with Helen’s testimony concluded, Judge Brady suggested they adjourn for the day and put off Eli’s testimony until the next morning, but Susan insisted that her son had been waiting in a holding cell all day, and she wanted to use her remaining time to begin her direct testimony. Ten minutes later, a clean-shaven Eli strolled into the courtroom. Susan broke into tears immediately. Her son was wearing the county’s bright yellow jumpsuit, but his hands and feet were not shackled. Taller and broader than his two brothers, Eli also possessed his mother’s angular features and strong jaw.

  “On the whole, did you have a happy childhood?” Susan asked him when he took the stand.

  “For the most part, yes.” Eli pulled out a letter he had written to his mother in November 2002 and read it aloud:

  Dear Mom,

  I miss you a lot. Whatever happens, I will always hold close what you taught me…. Going to Dad’s funeral this Saturday. I don’t think I am going to say anything. What could I possibly say? Nothing good.

  Jurors looked on as Eli’s eyes welled with tears and he began to cry. “I pray that one day I will have control over my life,” he read between sobs. “I want so badly to tell you not to change… but jail changes a lot of people.”

  The following morning, Eli was back on the stand describing the time he “split his mother’s lip,” testifying that he “threw a punch” at his mom after he found her crying in her bedroom, with his dad by her side.

  “I’ll kill you, I could just kill you, Susan,” Eli claimed he heard Felix threaten. “It just popped into my head. Next thing I knew, I was throwing a punch.”