Final Analysis (35 page)

“I see that the autopsy evidence exonerates her.” Dr. Cooper reiterated that while the stab wounds Felix sustained were a “contributing factor,” he died as a result of a heart attack suffered during his “aggressive” and “angry” attack on Susan. “I believe it is sound logic to say if he weren’t involved in an altercation, he wouldn’t have died,” Cooper said.

Dr. Cooper contended that Susan’s account of the murder, as depicted in letters she sent him, was “honest” and an “excellent fit” with the autopsy report depicting Felix’s injuries. “My assessment is that she is a reliable eyewitness.”

“Are you aware that Susan believes she is a medium?” Sequeira asked, striding around the courtroom.

“My understanding is that she’s got considerable psychic ability and there’s no reason to doubt that,” Dr. Cooper replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe you don’t believe in psychic ability.”

“Really? So you believe she’s psychic?”

“I have no reason to doubt it.”

Though the questions seemed tangential to the witness’s expertise, Sequeira’s strategy was clear. Dr. Cooper’s strange conduct during his first appearance had already tainted his credibility, and now Sequeira was attempting to sully his scientific reputation further by showing his belief in psychics. It was a clever line of questioning as this placed the doctor in something of a catch-22. On one hand, Cooper could not disagree with Susan’s claims that she was a medium, since such a statement could make it seem as though other elements of her story were suspect. On the other hand, by saying that he believed in her abilities, Cooper inadvertently cast doubt on his own scientific credentials. The doctor emerged from the ordeal looking less and less like a man whose medical word could be trusted.

Sequeira next asked him about Susan’s assertion that her former attorney, Daniel Horowitz, had a role in his wife’s murder.

“I object!” Susan said with a grin. “I never exactly said that. Although, I do think that maybe it’s so.”

On redirect examination, Susan got down on the floor to reenact the events of October 13, 2002. As she lay prone on the courtroom floor demonstrating her position during the attack, she asked Dr. Cooper, “If I were able to kick him in the groin and disarm him, it would be consistent with the fact that I don’t have stab wounds?”

Yes, the pathologist affirmed.

Sequeira was dubious. Walking to the overhead projector, he flashed photos of Felix’s bloodied body and of the deep, swollen defensive wound
on his right hand. He then contrasted the images with photos of Susan’s injuries; a red bruise encircling her right eye and supposed bite marks on her hands. “Somehow she got the knife away without sustaining one nick or cut on her whole body?”

“Yes,” Dr. Cooper replied.

Over two days of heated cross-examination, Cooper maintained that Susan’s lack of bruising did not trouble him, and in fact, was consistent with the crime scene.

“I object,” Susan said at one point during the question. “I did have injuries, they were relatively light compared to my husband. My crime is that I survived.”

“The odds were definitely against her,” Dr. Cooper added. “It’s unbelievable that a woman that size would attack a full-grown man—the chances of her survival are minuscule.”

“Yes, it’s, and I’m using your words, it is unbelievable, isn’t it?” Sequeira grinned.

“I would say miraculous. It’s not unbelievable, because it happened,” Dr. Cooper maintained.

O
n Wednesday, May 17, Susan called her most compelling witness to the stand.

“Mrs. Polk, your next witness?” Brady directed.

The gallery brimmed with journalists and trial watchers looking on in complete silence as Susan announced with a nervous giggle, “Yes, I’m going to testify, so the defense calls myself.”

Raising her right hand, Susan swore to tell the “whole truth.”

Over the prosecutor’s objections, Judge Brady ruled that Susan’s testimony would be a straight narrative; a Q & A with both questions and answers coming from Susan would be too confusing.

“This is not carte blanche,” the judge warned Susan before inviting jurors into the courtroom to begin hearing the testimony. “This is not an opportunity for a speech. This is a privilege, not a right. You may not like it, but the reality is now that the defendant—you—do not dictate how we proceed in this courtroom.”

“I object,” Susan said, telling Brady that it was her legal right as a
pro per
defendant to voice objections. “It may appear impertinent or argumentative or unruly to some members of the audience, but it’s not. This is not a playground. This is a battle for truth. This is not a movie. This is not a script.”

Jurors filed in that morning to find Susan outfitted in prison issue greens and seated in the witness box. “I’m not going to go into every detail,” she assured them. “Everyone wants to get on with their lives.”

Despite this disclaimer, Susan began her testimony with a two-hour slide show depicting her life. She narrated the show herself, with the help of on-again, off-again case assistant, Valerie Harris, on the overheard projector. Throughout the slide show, Susan’s demeanor seesawed between weepy and mournful to thoughtful and contemplative as she identified photos of herself as a young girl, as a twenty-five-year-old bride, and as wife and mother, posing with her husband, children, and the family dogs. She broke into sobs when an image of her son, Adam, popped up on the screen.

“I think he said what he said to survive, and that’s what he had to do,” Susan told jurors of the twenty-three-year-old who called her “evil” on the stand. “I think you saw a different Adam. The real Adam, the one I knew, sent me poems [in jail], came to see me, and was extraordinarily loving.”

Jurors were riveted by Susan’s narrative, which she delivered in a soft, folksy manner, her hands folded in her lap, along with a copy of her diary marked with yellow Post-Its. Throughout her testimony, she would refer to the diary that documented the actions of her husband and others who had come out against her.

As she spoke, Sequeira sat quietly in his seat, listening to her testify for much of the morning without voicing a single objection. Instead, he allowed Susan to talk about her relationship with Felix and her realization at the age of forty that she wanted out of the marriage. The twelve-member panel had already heard much of what Susan would testify to through other witnesses and in her opening statement. Still, she insisted the jury needed to hear “her story.”

Susan said the onset of Felix’s alleged abuse came soon after they were married, and she retold for jurors her story of premarital doubts about their relationship, saying that she later felt “ashamed” of her decision to marry “my therapist.” Despite her reservations and subsequent abuse, she never spoke up because she “thought telling someone would precipitate getting me killed…. I kept thinking I could fix it. His refrain was that nobody would ever believe me if I told them anything.”

Susan told jurors the first time she left Felix was in March 2001. He had a restraining order against her so she rented a room at the Claremont Hotel. She compared the experience to “recovering from an accident.”
The peace and quiet was broken only by repeated calls from Felix. Susan held up a photo she took while at the hotel, showing the bruise she allegedly received on her wrist during an argument with him. Later that month, at her then-attorney’s request, Susan documented the alleged spousal abuse she suffered from October 2000 to March 2001 in an attempt to secure a restraining order against her husband. She recited the five incidents for the panel, contending that Felix had slapped, punched, and abused her, once tossing a drink in her face.

Moving on from her abuse, Susan recalled her January 2001 suicide attempt and her decision to move out of the Orinda house and rent a cottage in Stinson Beach. During that trip, Susan decided not to return home but experienced a change of heart when Eli and Gabriel begged her to come back. It was while she was living in Stinson Beach that she began her diary, vowing to look at life with more humor. Normally, Susan said, she would run from the room crying when Felix would bully her. Now, she would not let herself become unglued; she would adopt a more sarcastic attitude when he tried to intimidate her. But according to Susan, her new approach only succeeded in further enraging her husband.

“I finally made up my mind,” she said. “I wasn’t going to behave like a caged bird. I would live my life. I could go shopping if I wanted to.”

Upon her return to Orinda, Susan observed that her three boys had changed. They were growing increasingly chauvinistic, more like Felix. To remedy the situation, Susan arranged to travel with her sons to show them the proper way to act around a woman, taking Gabe to Thailand and Hawaii, and Eli to Paris.

At lunchtime, jurors filed out of the courtroom, notebooks and pens in hand, but they were pretty much the only people who were guaranteed seats upon their return. Interest in Susan’s testimony was so great that court officers returned from the lunch break that afternoon to find a line that stretched from the second-floor courtroom across the hall to the public bathrooms. In a rush for one of fifty seats in the gallery, Susan’s own mother, Helen Bolling, was pushed to a spot in the back of the courtroom to hear the remainder of her daughter’s testimony that day.

While listeners had been riveted by Susan’s testimony in the morning, their interest would wane before she was finished for the day. What
had begun as a poignant story of a flawed relationship between a fragile teen and her much-older therapist would soon degenerate into an outlandish tale of brutality, and spies and conspiracy theories. After the lunch break, Susan described how she had been repeatedly raped and drugged by her therapist husband who used her as a “project” to further his studies of hypnosis and ESP. Susan maintained that as a teenage patient, Felix spiked her tea with drugs, lulled her into a trance, and coerced her into sex. He later demanded that she make predictions on world events that he could pass along to his Israeli operatives.

“I wanted a normal life. I didn’t want to be a medium. I didn’t want to live like that,” Susan said, claiming to have predicted both attacks on the World Trade Center and to have thwarted the assassination of Pope John Paul II.

“Looking back over my life, I became convinced that he was actually poisoning me,” Susan told jurors, recalling that at one point she started experiencing numbness and tingling in her extremities. “Felix smiled and said it was MS,” she said. But when a doctor discounted that diagnosis, Susan surmised that her husband likely was poisoning her. To be sure, she stopped accepting food and beverages from him, a tactic that put an end to her symptoms.

It was soon after her surprise fortieth birthday party that Susan realized she could no longer stay married to Felix. “I looked around that room and saw mostly patients, patients who were his friends,” she recounted. “I thought, my God, what am I doing? I’m married to this guy who’s twenty-five years older, he’s my dad’s age, he was my therapist. I was ashamed of his values.”

When Susan told Felix of her desire to leave the marriage, he allegedly threatened to harm their children and hinted he might alert one of his patients, a lawyer who moonlighted as an assassin, about the situation. “It was a recurrent theme,” she added. “Whenever I brought up divorce, he would say, ‘You better think of the consequences to the children’ and ‘You better think of the consequences to the dogs.’”

The comment about the dogs seemed to strike a particular chord with Susan, who shuddered when she recalled the fate of the family’s German Shepard, Maxi, a dog that Felix had supposedly poisoned. When she confronted him about Maxi’s untimely death, he fingered the neigh
bor as the guilty party.

By day two, Susan’s plodding narrative and penchant for minutiae grew even more tiresome. She had been on the stand almost six hours and had yet to discuss the events that led to her indictment. Surprisingly, Sequeira had only voiced a handful of objections, the majority of which were related to hearsay testimony, but as the day wore on, even he appeared to be wilting.

Susan’s gentle tone grew brusque as she role-played both sides of the argument she had with Felix when she tried to leave the house for Stinson Beach in March 2001.

In a gravelly voice intended to be that of her husband’s, she asked, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To the beach,” she then replied in a soft tone to indicate she was speaking.

“No, you’re not,” Felix fired back, allegedly striking her in the face as she attempted to flee the house.

Susan contended that for much of their marriage, Felix forbade her from having friends, leaving the house without his permission, and shopping for herself.

On Thursday, Susan told jurors she wanted to clear up an inaccuracy in previous testimony provided by Dr. Peters, the one who evaluated her after her Yosemite suicide attempt. It was Dr. Peters who had agreed during cross-examination that Felix’s call to 911 had saved her life that day.

Susan said she wanted to make it clear that she had called Felix, not because she was reaching out to a supportive husband, but simply because his was the only phone number she could remember in her alcohol and drug-induced haze.

Calling the jury’s attention to the actual timeline of these events was not a bad idea. Dr. Peters portrayed Felix as ultimately caring about the fate of his depressed and troubled wife. If Susan could make it seem as though this phone call was her doing, it might make Felix seem more the callous husband who cared little about his struggling wife.

Ultimately it was uncertain what impact the clarification had on the jury, since, on Friday, Susan interrupted her direct testimony to recall her eldest son, Adam, to the stand. It was an interesting move and her under
lying motivation for it was not immediately clear. Susan seemed more concerned with trying to win her son’s affection and stir his emotions with remembrances of the past, than with providing evidence to counter the State’s claim that she murdered her husband in cold blood.

“Adam, you’ve testified that I’m crazy,” she continued.

Adam told his mother that he was the first person to suggest to his father that she was mentally ill. “I was the one who brought it to the table. He refused to believe it at first.”

“Are you aware that your dad tried to have me committed?”

“All that I’m aware of is that you’ll say anything you feel like, drag him and our name through the mud, to serve your cause.”

Susan cried as she read aloud from a Mother’s Day card from her eldest son: “Mom, I know we’ve all had our share of troubled times, but I will always love you.”

“Did you mean that?” Susan asked.

“Yes, I do love you,” Adam said flatly. “And I will always be there, but I’ve stated it before, you need some help.”

Susan asked her son if he was aware that the psychologist who examined her right after her 2001 suicide attempt testified that she was not crazy.

“I have a much better vantage point,” he replied. “I’ve spent twenty years in this situation. You’re a sick, sick person who’s in dire need of a very controlled environment for a very long time. If that doesn’t happen, I won’t feel safe, and I’m sure a lot of other people won’t feel safe.”

O
n Monday, Susan continued her testimony with a long-awaited explanation of the events of October 13, 2002. Her story of that night began by explaining how she went to the guesthouse to talk to her husband. When he answered the kitchen door, he was wearing black briefs but refused to put on pants, saying that he couldn’t be bothered.

Upon entering the house, Susan sat as far from Felix as she could in the tiny cabin-like guesthouse, intending to discuss their finances and a
plan for Gabe’s education. During the conversation, Susan made a sarcastic comment that infuriated Felix, and he hit her in the face.

“I staggered back and pulled out the pepper spray. I sprayed him right in the face, and he was just angrier.”

She reached for the metal Maglite flashlight sitting on the coffee table beside the leather chair and “tapped him on the right temple,” indicating that the “tap” “did not stop him at all.” He was “absolutely enraged” and raced at her with the ottoman, eventually grabbing her by the hair and dragging her to the floor. She was on her back, knees up, and Felix was on top of her.

“He rubbed the pepper spray off his hands and into my eyes,” Susan contended. “It was oily and orange-ish. My eyes were burning. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God. I’m dead. I’m in the worst possible situation.…He punched me again in the face. I was completely stunned. I opened my eyes and I saw the knife coming down and it went into my pants,” Susan said, without explaining how, or where, Felix had obtained the knife.

“It’s hard to see the cut ’cause I sewed it up later,” Susan insisted, holding up a pair of jeans she pulled from a brown evidence bag. Several coins tumbled from the pockets as she scanned the jeans for a tiny “nick” the knife made when it entered her left pant leg. “I saw it come down and go in,” she insisted, putting on her eyeglasses to aid in her search of the garment. Susan noted the jeans were her favorite pair and she had washed them after the tussle. She also showered several times that night.

The bailiff held the jeans up for jurors as Susan described the “flash” she experienced as Felix was stabbing at her with the knife. “I thought, ‘unless you do something right now, you’re going to die. He’s going to kill you.’” With this realization, Susan briefly contemplated letting herself die but quickly changed her mind, and pulling her leg back, she delivered a swift kick to Felix’s groin with the heel of her foot and then grabbed for the knife, which nearly fell from his grip as he reacted to the sharp jolt. “It was a very strong kick,” she said. “He was stunned.”