“Additionally, Dr. Polk has involved himself in the current litigation between the parents by speaking to the father’s attorney about the boy’s treatment and relationships with his parents without notice or consent from the mother. These behaviors on the part of Dr. Polk are in contrast to current ethical standards and practices.”
Psychotherapist Karen Saeger, a colleague of Dr. Polk’s at the California Graduate School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley from 1979 to 1986, claimed that Felix had a “widespread reputation” on the campus for his twofold relationship with Susan. Saeger portrayed his actions as “disturbing and improper.”
“There were two Felixes,” she said of Polk. “One was tightly coiled like he could spring at you; the other was charming and charismatic.”
Kathy Lucia, a former patient of Polk’s, had a similar reaction. Lucia, who, along with Susan, had participated in the group sessions that Felix led during the 1970s, said that she recalled Felix “was trying to control” Susan during the meetings.
Susan was “dependent on him [Felix] in a lot of ways,” Lucia said.
It is not uncommon for at-risk patients such as Susan to form attachments to their therapists. Professionals are trained to anticipate these feelings of transference and take steps to avoid vulnerability on the part of patients, as well as themselves. In Felix’s case, it seems he threw caution to the wind in acting out his own personal fantasy with his teenage patient.
Despite his professional recklessness, he had to have known the emotional danger that existed when a therapist disappointed or violated his patient in some way. According to the famous 1966 study conducted by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the damage a woman can suffer as a result of a sexual relationship with her therapist is tantamount to rape. (Not surprisingly, Susan often described her sexual relationship with Felix as “rape.”)
Nevertheless Felix ignored all of the studies, judgment, and professional common sense when he crossed the line from therapist to lover with Susan, and in the end the realities of her psychological state overwhelmed him. Indeed to become someone’s doctor and husband is always too much, but in Felix’s case the combination proved deadly. Instead of improving, her problems seemed to worsen over the years and Felix couldn’t possibly absorb all of her love, trust, and paranoia.
Long before his murder, Felix had become the ultimate authority figure in Susan’s life, the embodiment of her years spent listening to others. While once she obeyed his every word, during the final years of their marriage it was clear that her subservience was a thing of the past, and there was nothing he could do to regain his lost ground. Unlike the police or a judge, he could not hold her in contempt or arrest her; he had no rebuttal for the fear she instilled. He was incapable of taking the steps necessary to protect himself—not because he didn’t know what was right—but because the very fact that he needed help was an outward sign of his failure.
It shouldn’t have been this way. In his mind, he believed he had “fixed” her at age sixteen and to think that her persistent problems stemmed from those residual issues was to admit his failings. For Felix to obtain a restraining order against his wife, for him to abandon his home for a hotel, would have been to admit the truth: Dr. Polk had lost his patient long ago. He’d lost her back in his office on Ashby Avenue. He’d lost her when he should have been helping her the most. He’d lost her the moment he laid a hand on her.
It was a reality too intimidating to confront, a failure too grand to realize. And so when all of his friends insisted that he move out, when all of his logic told him to leave the house, he could not, choosing instead to remain in the confines of the guest cottage with the door unlocked, waiting—perhaps even hoping—to find a way that he could heal Susan before it was too late.
Chapter Nineteen
BROKEN BONDS
On October 23, 2002, Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Merle Eaton honored the prosecutor’s no-bail request and ordered Susan remanded to the West County Detention Facility in Richmond. In court, Judge Eaton agreed with Contra Costa County Assistant District Attorney Tom O’Connor’s claim that Susan was a flight risk. He pointed to statements she had made in the letter she wrote to Superior Court Judge William Kolin in September 2002, regarding Eli’s probation violation.
“In one part of the letter, the defendant clearly indicates she would sell her home and leave the area,” Judge Eaton stated in his ruling. “It was those statements that caused Eaton ‘great concern’ and prompted him to make the no-bail ruling,” he wrote.
Susan’s no-bail status meant that Gabriel would need to find another place to live. He was released to the custody of his eldest brother, Adam, after spending the night of October 14 speaking with detectives at the Martinez headquarters. While Adam was technically old enough to care for his minor sibling, he wanted to complete his college education. There was brief talk of Gabriel joining Adam at the frat house at UCLA in Los Angeles, but the authorities immediately rejected that plan.
Since leaving police headquarters, Gabriel had been staying at the home of a Lafayette couple, Marjorie and Dan Briner, who were the parents of Adam Polk’s close friend, Andy. When the couple learned of Gabriel’s situation, they immediately opened their home to the teen. The Briners had never actually met Gabriel or his parents, but they thought highly of Adam and wanted to help. Marjorie was a middle-school teacher and Dan worked in commercial real estate, and the pair lived in nearby Lafayette.
Gabriel’s stay was intended to be temporary, but as time passed, the Briners invited him to remain on a permanent basis. He fit in well with the family and was flourishing in their care. When he arrived, Marjorie noted that he was “the most angry boy I’ve ever met.” He wanted nothing to do with his mother, tearing up some of her letters and leaving them in shreds in the trash. At first, Marjorie taped them back together. But after Gabe threatened to leave if she continued to repair them, she just left the remaining letters in a pile unopened for him to read when he was ready.
Despite the initial setbacks, Gabriel was soon able to form a bond with the family, and the Briners were among the few family friends invited a few days after the funeral to accompany Gabe and his siblings—Adam, Eli, Andrew, and Jennifer—to their father’s cremation and the somber hike that followed. Felix once told Adam that he wanted to be cremated, like his father. Eric and the other children intended to honor that wish, deciding to pay homage to Felix’s love of the outdoors by releasing his ashes at the end of a lengthy trek to the top of Mount Tamalpais. Located just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, it was one of Felix’s favorite hiking spots with more than fifty miles of trails, towering redwoods and oaks, and a serpentine road to the top of the park’s summit. After the long walk, the siblings and the Briners released his ashes into the breeze as the dust of Felix hovered in the air, drifting down on the San Francisco Bay.
Initially, Susan had no objections to her son’s placement with the Briners and even seemed to be fairing well in jail. She sent out homemade holiday cards at Christmas time 2002, and in the months after her incarceration, she wrote furiously to her sons, receiving responses from Eli and Adam, but not from Gabriel. Instead, she learned how he was doing through letters from Dan and Marjorie.
In one letter, dated March 12, 2003, Dan praised Gabriel’s progress. “His studies are really quite good,” Dan wrote. “He is improving on his study skills, reluctantly, like most teenagers that I know and he is beginning to be willing to recognize those areas that he needs to work on.”
Keeping the imprisoned mother apprised of every detail, Dan informed Susan that her son was now a member of the De La Salle rugby team and the junior varsity football team and that he “was getting along well with our family.”
“We have had no problem with him breaking primary rules such as smoking, drinking, or significant defiance,” Dan noted. “And we communicate openly and frankly so that he knows he has both commitment and support. He continues to work with his counselor twice a week…. He is still not reading your letters. We always tell him when they arrive and we keep them unopened for him for a later time. We recognize that they are very important to him…. Gabe sees more and more that he has a lot of opportunity and a lot of potential and Marjorie and I think he will excel.”
These letters to Susan continued until July or August of 2003, when Susan and Marjorie Briner had a verbal confrontation over the telephone. The altercation, which came after months of angry letters and phone calls from Susan, prompted Marjorie to cut off all communication with Gabe’s mother. At first, the couple obliged Susan’s
