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.”
Susan’s tale of that night was not the only thing that she had in store for me that afternoon. With help from Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde, Susan had obtained a startling medical report from the U.S. Navy that detailed the psychological evaluations of Felix in the days after his suicide attempt in 1955. Sitting across from me and staring through an inch and a half of Plexiglas, I asked her: “Why was Felix hospitalized for a whole year after his suicide attempt?”
Susan paused, and looked directly at me before answering. Breathing in deeply, she began to explain how the naval records revealed that Felix had received treatment for a “schizophrenic reaction,” following his suicide attempt in the fall of 1955. This psychologist who had been treating patients over the course of more than twenty years had, in fact, been hospitalized himself for serious emotional troubles. Felix, who had accused Susan of being crazy for years, had his own set of psychological problems, problems that he never attempted to address.
“Well, what the naval records say is that he was unable to give a rational explanation for what he’d done.” She grew animated as she recounted her findings. First, she pointed to her own suicide attempt in January 2001. “I was asked by the psychiatrist, ‘Why’d you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, in this moment of despair, I thought my husband would do the things he was saying he was going to do: destroy my life, take my children away, all these things. And I just had this moment of complete despair, and I’m very glad I’m alive and realize that I have options.
“My husband was very different. The records show he was unable to give a rational explanation for what he did. He talked about supernatural forces having been at work. He talked about hearing an echo when he spoke. He couldn’t remember what had happened. He had amnesia. And his suicide note made it sound like he had other periods of amnesia.”
Susan said that Felix mentioned his suicide attempt during their early therapy sessions in Berkeley but claimed that he was in despair over the breakup of a relationship when he tried to take his life. As far as Susan knew, this was the reason that Felix was overly sensitive to being abandoned. At least, that is what she says he told her each time she threatened to leave the marriage.
However, after closer inspection of his suicide attempt, Susan learned that Felix’s claim was untrue. Horowitz had located Felix’s old girlfriend and gleaned from their conversation that there had been no break up. Felix, it seemed, had lied to his wife about the circumstances surrounding his suicide attempt. Worse, he had failed to mention his serious medical diagnosis or that this suicide attempt was the result of a “schizophrenic reaction.”
“Psych records describe him as being hostile, as being in the lock-down ward.” Susan explained. “They describe when he got transported to the hospital he got bruises along the way because apparently he got restrained. That’s a picture of someone who was extremely disturbed, who was apparently almost mute. He didn’t talk, you know.”
Susan told me of the journals that Felix kept. And for a moment, she considered my request to turn them over to Court TV. But in the end, she shared little of their content. “He [Felix] described himself in words that he used to describe me and projected all of it because I wasn’t really like that. I didn’t feel that way.”
After our interview, I reviewed the naval records carefully. According to the reports, Felix was taken to a military hospital after his suicide attempt. He was “confused” and “depressed” and claimed “amnesia” for the events prior to his arrival, medical records stated. He grew “excited” upon awakening. In response to questions, he told doctors he had no recollection of his suicide attempt, or of writing the note that police found in a typewriter inside the family home.
Felix was transferred to the U.S. Naval Hospital at St. Alban’s, New York. Records show that he had to be
