Final Analysis (24 page)

When Adam Polk learned that his mother had asked Horowitz and Golde to take her case, he admonished the lawyers to be careful.

“The first time I met Dan and Ivan, I told them, ‘Listen, in two months, you guys are going to be unemployed,’” Adam later explained. “My mother has, throughout her life, for as long I have known her, exhibited a pattern of warming up to outsiders and then completely turning on them.

“I have experienced it my whole life. She is a lady who values control and when somebody else maintains control over her life, I believe she contrives fantasies. Rather than use the word ‘delusion,’ I like to use ‘contrives fantasies’ to gain control of the other people [outsiders].”

In spite of Adam’s warning, the two attorneys forged ahead with their defense of Susan. In September 2005, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde filed a motion on her behalf, claiming Susan was the victim of legal maneuvering that was tantamount to bribery and extortion in connection with the civil suit. Horowitz claimed that Bud Mackenzie, the lawyer representing the Polk estate, was trying to put a “squeeze play” on Susan—raising the possibility that the Orinda house would go into foreclosure if she didn’t act. However, when Golde went back to the attorney and offered to put up his own money to halt the pending foreclosure proceeding, Mackenzie reportedly said the house was not in danger.

The motion alleged that Adam Polk was aware that the Miner Road house was not at risk but wanted his mother to believe it was in order to push her to settle. It also claimed that Susan had received veiled threats from an unnamed party that Adam and Gabriel would “testify with great anger and fear about the financial ‘situation’” if she did not agree to settle the suit.

While that motion as well as several others that the Horowitz/Golde team filed were denied, the civil suit was settled shortly thereafter, presumably in hopes that Adam and Gabe would be more friendly to the defense on the witness stand during the criminal case.

With the civil trial moving along, Horowitz and Golde began to hone their strategy for the murder trial. They publicly declared they could win Susan an acquittal at trial. Horowitz told ABC’s
Good Morning America
that he had no intention of presenting an insanity defense or a battered woman/burning bed syndrome. Susan was a woman who was abused regularly by her therapist husband, and she truly believed Felix intended to kill her the night the two argued in the couple’s guest cottage, the lawyer maintained. Dan Horowitz would argue a straight self-defense case on Susan’s behalf—or at least that’s what he intended to do.

T
he temperature had already reached seventy degrees when I arrived at the West County Detention Facility on October 1, 2005, nearly three years to the day after Felix Polk’s murder. I had come to the modern, tidy jail in Richmond, California, at Susan’s invitation for the first in a series of jailhouse interviews for my show,
Catherine Crier Live.

Much had happened since Susan’s arrest in the fall of 2002. The most significant was Susan’s about face. For more than two years after Felix’s death, she had publicly maintained her innocence—although she claimed she told her mother and her attorney of her involvement five days after Felix’s death. As the investigation progressed over the years, she eventually changed her story from innocence to self-defense. No one has been able to pinpoint exactly when the change occurred, but Detective Mike Costa later told Court TV’s Lisa Sweetingham that he believed it was sometime in 2003 that he first heard Susan’s new claim.

While Susan had privately detailed the events in the guest cottage to her mother and her then-attorney soon after her arrest in October 2002, the first time she publicly uttered the self-defense argument was in an April 2005 article in the
Contra Costa Times.
In the article, written by reporter Bruce Gertzman during a time when Susan was not represented by counsel, she insisted that she and her husband were arguing on the night of October 13, 2002, when an enraged Felix came after her with a knife. She fought back vigorously, ultimately killing him in an attempt to save her own life.

A uniformed jail official escorted me to the small interview room where I would meet Susan for the first time. The jangling of keys alerted me to her entrance into the small room on the opposite side of a Plexiglas partition. Her well-groomed appearance surprised me. After nearly three years in jail, she was slender and graceful, even in the baggy prison outfit that hung from her gangly 5
6
frame. Her once long dark hair was now streaked with gray and cut in a stylish bob. She wore little makeup, just lipstick and white eye-pencil, artfully applied to enhance her beautiful, unblemished skin.

I watched as she slid into a sturdy, metal-framed chair on her side of the cubicle, placing her neatly manicured hands atop the small table we shared. Looking up at me through the divider, she flashed a half smile and then glanced around nervously. Susan and I were about the same age, and during the interview we found several commonalities. Like Susan, I too, had married young. And while I had long since divorced my first husband, Susan had stayed married and raised three children with Felix. She claimed it wasn’t until her fortieth birthday that she realized she could no longer remain in the relationship. Felix was abusive and she wanted out.

I asked Susan what happened that night in the guest cottage. At times, her voice was so soft that I found myself leaning forward to hear her responses through the mesh opening just above the table.

“Well, we had things to talk about, um, and had arranged to meet later that night to have a talk,” Susan began in a quiet monotone. “I got to the door. I knocked. The lights were on, um, around eleven, and it looked like he might have been reading because…he had a book.”

Susan explained that she had a can of pepper spray in her back pocket, which she had purchased at a convenience store in Montana. The clerk told her that one pump would stop a grizzly bear in its tracks, and she was confident the spray would protect her.

I asked Susan about her conversation with Felix. Were they trying to figure out where the two would live? Whether she would stay in the house or return to Montana?

“It was practical,” Susan said. “He [Felix] offered to pay around three thousand dollars a month in spousal support and I wanted to discuss
Gabriel, the kids, selling the house or not selling it. I wanted the kids to stay in the house. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money in a battle. I didn’t think it was worth it because I had been offering for months to just sign papers. It degenerated into an argument. He wasn’t being practical and it just became one of those arguments.”

“How did he get the knife?” I asked.

There was a long pause, as if Susan was searching for an answer. “I really don’t know,” she finally said. “What happened is he came over and backhanded me in the face as he’d done before. I pulled out the pepper spray. Sprayed him. He picked up the ottoman and charged at me with it, then grabbed me by the hair, threw me on the floor, punched me in the face again, and smeared pepper spray into my eyes.

“The next thing I knew, I looked up, and I saw a knife coming down, and I saw it go into my leg. I thought the reason I wasn’t feeling it was because, sometimes, I’ve read, people don’t feel it initially when they’ve been stabbed.

“It was like I flashed on ‘I am going to die. He is going to kill me. If I don’t do something right now, I will be dead.’

“I just thought of the one thing I could do and that was to kick him as hard as I could in the groin and hope at the same time I could get the knife from his hand. I kicked, pulled my leg back as far as a I could and kicked with as much force as I could into his groin, and went for the knife at the very same time, and his hand loosened just enough where I could grab the knife. And, um, I grabbed it, and I felt like I had to say something, and I said, ‘Stop, I have a knife.’

“And then, um, he was going after the knife and I stabbed him in the side, and then he was leaning over, and I think at that point he punched me in the face again, and I reached around and I stabbed him in the back, and then he bit into my hand and bit down as hard as he could. There’s actually teeth, tooth marks on both sides [of my hand] and then he went for the knife at the same time.

“And I thought, well, he was doing what I did and if I loosen up now, he’s going to get it and kill me. And so then I stabbed him again.”

At one point, Susan remembered clenching the knife in both hands and repeatedly slashing at her husband. “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop!” she
screamed, waving the blade from side to side to keep him at bay before driving it into his torso. “Get off! Get off! Get off! Get off!”

“I opened my eyes, and I saw blood, and I thought that I had torn open his chest, but I think I would have seen some blood from the previous stabbing.”

Susan described watching as Felix staggered to his feet and mumbled his final words. “I stood up and dropped the knife, and Felix just said, ‘Oh my God. I think I’m dead.’ And he wobbled back and forth like this,” Susan said, rocking back and forth to mimic Felix’s movements. “Like swayed, and then he just fell back and hit his head on the floor.”

Continuing, Susan described how the pounding of her temples was deafening as she worked to catch her breath. She needed to sit down. Striding to the short flight of stairs leading to the single bedroom, she perched on a step near to where Felix lay on the floor. The room was in a shambles. Blood was everywhere. Staring down at her husband, Susan said that scenes of their life together came rushing back. For one brief moment, she remembered the good times and the love they once shared. But those thoughts quickly disappeared.

It is not clear if Felix was dead at that moment. Susan admitted that she did not check for a pulse. Prosecutors would later insist that Felix was, in fact, alive and still breathing for nearly thirty minutes after the attack. They even suggested that Susan left her husband of twenty years to die alone when she returned to the main house some time later that evening.

Susan described how she crossed the room to the bathroom at the top of the landing to wash up. Her hands were covered with blood and she wanted to wash the pepper spray out of her eyes. The pool house had not been updated since it was first built in the 1960s. The tiny bathroom, reminiscent of a ship’s head in size and shape, still had the original wood paneling and pull chain toilet. Turning on the faucet, Susan watched as rivulets of red streamed into the sink. It was clear she was not thinking of the consequences when she pulled the pair of blue towels from the towel bar, dried off her hands, and dropped the towels in a heap on the floor in front of the stall shower.

“When I came back, he was dead,” Susan related.

“Do you remember what you thought at that point?” I asked.

“Yes, I thought a number of things. I thought I should call the police. I thought that I had just written this letter accusing the juvenile judge of taking a bribe and I sent it on the way back from Montana to six or seven judges in our county, and I thought, I’m in big trouble.

“Because even if they believed me, which Felix had said nobody will ever believe me about anything, even if they did, they’re not gonna maybe care. And I’d just seen what had happened to Eli in the juvenile justice system, and I thought, ‘Who’s going to take care of Gabriel? Who’s going to get him to school? Who’s going to pay the mortgage? Oh my God!’

“And I waited, thinking the police would magically appear, that they’d heard me scream, they’d know, they’d come, and then it just became easier to just wait. And I just thought, ‘I need time. I need time to tell Gabriel what happened. I need time to make some financial arrangements for the kids. I should call a lawyer.’

“Just, you know, I just put it off. So I went to the [main] house, and I just took about ten showers and took Gabriel to school in the morning and um, was just too tired to do anything. You know, too tired to make any financial arrangements, any plans, and then just tried to get up enough nerve to tell Gabriel and hinted around and…”

“Do you remember what you said as a hint?” I asked.

“Well, he was asking me, and I was just trying to tell him. I don’t remember exactly. I said he [Felix] was gone. I mean we were always so connected. And then he accused me. Straight up. And um, then it was just, um, he could call the police, and um, the police came and that was that.”

“Was your mind working at the time? Were you thinking about denying? Is that a function of buying time?”

“I’d just been accused by Gabriel, it was just, um, I wanted to tell him what had happened, you know, and then all of a sudden he’s accusing me, you know, he’s jumping ahead. He’s making these accusations. And I just didn’t want to be seen in his eyes that way, and I just began to lie, and then there was the whole thing, seeing him, I still wasn’t sure that I was going to lie until I was in the car, and I saw him in custody—he was in the car behind me, and I was told he was being detained.

“I had this thought that I had to do everything I could to keep him and me out of custody so I could protect him. And then I thought, well if they accused him, then I’d have to step forward immediately and say I did it, and so I had to keep track of what’s going on here, and I mean, I think a person who is that fatigued and in shock and that terrified is just not logical.”

It was then that Susan went on to describe how she first admitted her role in Felix’s death five days after the struggle in the guest cottage to the lawyer who came to see her at the West County Detention Facility. She also insisted that in the months after Felix’s death, she repeatedly tried to turn over the knife used in the attack to her defense lawyers but they had declined to give it to police.

“Listen, I tried to turn it over to every single attorney I had from day one,” she said. “As soon as I found myself charged with murder I was like ‘oh my God.’ So I told them what happened. Nobody wanted to hear, nobody wanted to handle it.

“Seven months later, I was offered a deal—I said, ‘No, I’m innocent.’”

Finally, in April 2005, while out on bail, Susan said she went back to the house with Peter Coleridge, who at that point was still her defense attorney. While there, she pulled out the knife and told him that she wanted to place it into evidence.

“And he’s like, ‘oh, you shouldn’t have done that,’ and I’m like, ‘why not?’ and he was like, ‘well now I’ve got to turn it in.’”

Despite this dramatic recounting replete with extraordinary detail, elements of Susan’s version of events that night would later prove doubtful—particularly those pertaining to the ottoman. Because Susan had waited until late 2004 to inform the authorities about the pepper spray, there was no longer sufficient evidence to verify her claim that any chemical residue should be on the ottoman. According to an official lab report, tests for traces of mace or pepper spray performed on the ottoman in March 2005 proved inconclusive. “Due to the length of time elapsed before sampling, it cannot be determined if they were ever present or if they have changed to become undetectable.” In addition, “the ottoman was not packaged in an airtight container” and “some experimentation in the
laboratory suggested it was unlikely to be able to recover spray residues after long-term storage.”