“He hit you,” Hebel announced, referring to Felix. “That’s why you got into this altercation with him.”
Moule jumped in, lunging forward at Susan’s face. “He was violent with you. He abused you and he had been doing it for a long time. Detective Hebel and I have been involved for years in domestic violence.”
“You know what…it didn’t happen,” Susan declared.
Later, looking back on the transcripts, it was hard to believe that a smart woman, who was so blatantly associated with a crime, would profess her innocence with so much passion. Most suspects, when faced with such insurmountable evidence would, at the very least, have come clean that they played a
Back at headquarters, Detective Costa was juggling calls. Adam Polk phoned that morning. The eldest of the Polk boys wanted Costa to contact a man named Barry Morris, an attorney who represented the family in the past.
It was midafternoon when Costa got the lawyer on the line. During the call, Morris said he had known Felix and the Polk family for twelve years. Felix counseled his son in the past, and Barry, in turn, represented Adam, Eli, and Gabriel in different criminal cases. Morris was aware of the ongoing tension between Susan and Felix. After Susan’s March 2001 arrest ended her entreaties to get a restraining order, Morris had encouraged Felix to file charges against Susan. Despite Morris’s efforts, Felix declined.
Morris told Detective Costa there had been other instances in which Felix declined to involve the authorities. Just over a week earlier on Sunday, October 6, he received a call from Felix, alerting him that Susan had just phoned from Montana. During the conversation with Morris, Felix claimed that Susan had purchased a gun and intended to kill him with it. The information got Morris’s attention and he encouraged his friend to call police immediately to report the threat. But Felix didn’t want to, afraid that the move would further infuriate Susan.
A few days later, Felix called Morris back, informing his friend that he spoke to an Orinda police officer about Susan. Costa learned it was Chief Dan Lawrence who took the call. Lawrence confirmed that Felix phoned headquarters on October 10—just three days before his murder—seeking advice concerning Susan’s impending return from Montana. Felix was concerned because she told their son “she was going to blow his head off” with a gun she’d purchased in Montana, while threatening Felix that she would kill him if he went to the police.
Despite Felix’s terrified voice on the other end of the line, the call was nothing that Lawrence hadn’t heard before. He advised Felix to obtain a temporary restraining order, leave the house immediately, and avoid any contact with his wife. Costa noted that Felix did not heed the chief’s advice. It was as if he wanted people to know that he was in danger but was unwilling to protect himself.
It was almost noon when Costa received a call from Gabe Polk, who said he had just remembered something about the night he discovered his father in the guest cottage. After he found the guesthouse door locked, he returned to the house and asked Susan if she had seen his dad. She said she hadn’t—and then asked if Gabe wasn’t happy that his father was gone, to which Gabe responded that he wasn’t happy about the situation. But Susan then said that she was. Looking back, Gabe said he now believed that his mother was implying that she had done something to Felix.
Susan then said something else that struck Gabe as odd.
“I guess I didn’t have a shotgun, did I?” she told her son.
It would have been an odd statement at any time, but under the circumstances it was downright worrisome.
“Did you ever actually see her with one?” the detective asked.
“No,” Gabe said, although he felt that she had definitely researched some firearms. She was using terminology that indicated she had been shopping around for the right weapon. A subsequent check of the records revealed that Susan did, indeed, own a gun. She was the registered owner of a Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver. She told Costa about that gun during their interview at headquarters on Monday night and said that Felix had removed it from the house at her request. There was no indication that a shotgun had ever been purchased, and a search of the Miner Road residence yielded no firearms.
In addition to Gabriel and Morris, several more calls came in to Costa that afternoon. One was from Andrew Polk, Felix’s forty-year-old son from his first marriage, who was currently living in lower Manhattan and working as an actor. It was the first time that Andrew had spoken to Costa, and he reported a call he received from Felix that past weekend after Susan had threatened to shoot him with a shotgun. It was a call similar to the one Felix had placed to Morris and Chief Lawrence around the same time, with Felix expressing concern that Susan “was going to do something to him” upon her return from Montana.
That same afternoon, Felix’s daughter from his first marriage also contacted Costa. Jennifer Polk was also residing on the East Coast in a quiet suburb of Boston. Her father had left a voice mail on her cell phone that past Friday, stating that “things were getting critical” and “Susan had threatened to kill him.” He also stated that Gabe told him “Susan had a gun.” Jennifer said she never got back to her father; that was the last she ever heard from him.
In subsequent interviews, additional friends and patients of Felix reiterated Felix’s fears of Susan, adding that he had begun barricading himself into the bedroom at night. Upon closer inspection of the Miner Road guesthouse, investigators found no evidence of such barricades. It did not appear that new locks or safety latches had been installed on the three exterior doors, and there was no lumber or heavy furniture strategically placed as a makeshift obstacle.
To Costa, it seemed clear that Felix Polk had contacted a number of people to alert them to his wife’s threats, yet he did nothing to protect himself, ignoring everyone’s advice—including suggestions from the Orinda police. While his inability to take the precautions necessary to protect himself seemed strange to the investigating officers, it was quickly becoming clear that this inability was part of a larger, systemic problem that Felix had when it came to stemming Susan’s threat of physical violence. All he had to do was press charges against her on one of the numerous occasions that he dialed 911, or use past events to obtain a restraining order against her, and then avoid the house.
Instead he opted to stay in the guest cottage, just yards away from the main house, even as Susan allegedly issued her threats. It was a costly decision—one that Felix paid for with his life.
Chapter Thirteen
DISSECTING THE TRUTH
On the morning of October 16, Detective Roxanne Gruenheid was dispatched to the Central County Morgue to attend the autopsy of Felix Polk. Criminalist John Nelson, who photographed the body and collected physical evidence, was already at the Martinez facility when the young officer arrived that Tuesday morning.
The county had retained Brian Peterson, a private forensic pathologist to perform the autopsy. At the time, he had performed close to five thousand autopsies and testified as a forensic expert in hundreds of criminal cases. His resume spanned more than twenty years and included a forensic fellowship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., and work as a general medical officer with the U.S. Marines.
In the months following Felix’s death, Dr. Peterson would gain notoriety for his role in the case of missing Modesto housewife, Laci Peterson, who disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002. Dr. Peterson conducted the autopsies on Laci and her unborn son, Connor, after their bodies washed up in San Francisco Bay. A California jury later found Scott guilty of the double homicide and sentenced him to death for the murders.
At 8 AM, Felix’s autopsy got underway. The body of the seventy-year-old was laying in an opened body bag on a gurney, clad only in the pair of black men’s briefs that Polk had been wearing when he was killed. Peterson began by washing off the dried blood that covered most of his torso and the bottoms of both feet. Once the corpse was clean, it was easier to locate the multiple red stab wounds and countless scratches on his arms, hands, and feet. Dr. Peterson observed that five of the wounds had pierced the victim’s lung, stomach, and kidney, while the remaining twenty-two slashes were determined to be “superficial” cut-type wounds or defensive wounds. One cut that actually penetrated the muscle and tendon of one finger indicated that Felix had tried to grab the blade of the
