“I think he was very crazy, a little more than I realized…. He was very, very split, you know, it was like night and day, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There were two sides to his personality. And he was extremely impulsive and malicious….
“It takes a certain kind of person to kill somebody’s dogs or to threaten their children… he would sabotage their progress in school. He was just a very dangerous, damaged person.”
THE TRIAL
Chapter Twenty-two
A MACABRE TWIST
Dressed conservatively in a gray suit, her short hair overgrown and brushed off her face, Susan unceremoniously entered the courtroom of the Contra Costa County Courthouse on October 11, 2005, for the opening remarks in her murder trial.
Onlookers watched from the gallery as Susan slid into a chair at the defense table between her lawyers, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde. Next to the tanned Horowitz, she looked pale and fragile, having lost a considerable amount of weight since her incarceration.
In the days leading up to the trial, her lawyers publicly proclaimed they would prove Susan acted in self- defense when she stabbed Felix in the guest cottage on October 13, 2002. They asserted that responding officers contaminated the crime scene that night by moving the body from its original position on the floor of the living room.
Pointing to police crime scene photos, Horowitz claimed that documented blood smears around the body and on the floor nearby indicated that Felix had been turned over by investigators, thus destroying potential evidence of Susan’s innocence.
Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady had replaced Judge Mary Ann O’Malley on the bench after Susan complained bitterly of O’Malley’s bias. Judge Brady, a square-shouldered woman with graying hair and a conservative manner, had been appointed to the bench in 1996 by then-Governor Pete Wilson. Susan was unhappy with her assignment as well. Brady had served as a prosecutor with both the Contra Costa and Solano County District Attorneys Offices, and had presided over numerous murder trials. She was married to Larry Brady, a longtime member of the Richmond Police Department who had recently retired after twenty-six years on the job. Using her preemptory challenge, Susan had asked that Judge Brady also recuse herself, but the court denied her request, ruling that Susan had filed it too late.
The trial had already been delayed two times by Judge Brady, who cited her “extensive calendar” as the reason for the postponements. In addition, Susan’s constant bickering with the judge, when she was acting as her own attorney, had nearly doubled the length of the hearings. Prosecutor Tom O’Connor had exhibited great restraint, despite the repeated delays. During his eleven years with the district attorney’s office, O’Connor had won several convictions on charges of first-degree murder and he appeared confident he would secure another in the Polk case.
After eleven days of jury selection, the trial finally got underway that Tuesday with O’Connor’s blow-by-blow recounting of the night that Gabriel Polk discovered his father’s “motionless body” covered in blood and lying on the floor of the family’s guest cottage.
A commanding figure at well over six feet, O’Connor grabbed the courtroom’s attention when he stood to address the jurors. In his opening remarks, he told the panel of six women and six men that the Polks were in the middle of a “heated divorce” when Susan confronted Felix that October night. According to O’Connor, Susan was furious after learning that a judge had awarded Felix custody of their minor son and given him sole occupancy of the house while she was out of town. Even worse, Felix had managed to have her monthly support payments slashed from six thousand eight hundred dollars to one thousand seven hundred dollars.
It was enough to kill for, according to O’Connor. Felix’s injuries were “of a man fighting for his life,” he continued. “In contrast, the defendant had almost nothing. Clearly, it was a one-sided battle.”
The prosecutor pointed out that Felix had been stabbed numerous times; sustaining six incise wounds and defensive-type wounds on his hands, forearms, and the soles of his feet. Police observed redness around Susan’s eye and small cuts on her hand. It was most telling, though, that she publicly denied any involvement in her husband’s death for some time, although she claimed to have privately admitted her role to family members and her attorneys soon after her arrest in October 2002.
“Now she claims she killed him in self-defense,” O’Connor said, resting his gaze on the jurors. “The defendant is nothing but a cold, callous, calculating murderer. She got wind of what was happening in the divorce proceeding. She became angry… and came home [from Montana] to take care of business.”
Rising from his seat at the defense table, Dan Horowitz disputed the prosecutor’s allegations. “My client defended her life against an attack by a rage-filled, brutal, aggressive man who was also her husband,” Horowitz began in a soft voice.
Promising to dispel the prosecution’s claim that his client killed her husband for financial gain, he said, “This concept of the financial divorce is wildly unsupported.”
Susan wore a blank expression as her lawyer pointed out that she was the one who kept the family finances and was aware that once the court-appointed accountant reviewed the couple’s financial background it would become clear that the information Felix had provided to the court was inaccurate.
“Susan Polk was going to get her money back retroactively,” Horowitz insisted.
The defense attorney used his opening remarks as an opportunity to relate details of Susan’s childhood and to tell jurors of her early sessions with Felix Polk as a fifteen-year-old patient. He described the therapist as a delusional narcissist who “hyper-controlled” his wife and children and proclaimed that Susan and her family members would take the stand to testify as much.
At one point, he even drew a parallel between Felix Polk and fanatical cult leader James Warren “Jim” Jones, the American founder of the Peoples Temple Church in San Francisco and later Jonestown in Guyana. It was Jones who organized the mass suicide of 914 of his followers, including nearly three hundred children, and convinced them to collectively drink a Kool-Aid cocktail laced with poison in November 1978.
Horowitz insisted that just as Jones gained control over his disciples, Felix won psychological control over Susan by molesting her under hypnosis at the tender age of sixteen, and then continuing the abuse with threats and beatings over the course of their marriage.
From the front row of the gallery, Horowitz’s wife, Pamela Vitale, listened intently as her husband next introduced Felix’s little-known secret: that he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a “schizophrenic reaction” in the mid-fifties while serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. It was news to many in the courtroom that Dr. Polk had spent nearly one year in a locked ward of a U.S. Naval Hospital. Horowitz promised more on Felix’s hospitalization through testimony from a defense expert who would explain how Felix’s mental condition made him prone to “outbursts of rage, violence, and anger.”
“Susan Polk defended her life against an attack by a vengeful, rageful, aggressive man,” Horowitz insisted. “She was on her back. She fought him off and lived.”
In spite of Horowitz’s strong opening, the trial did not get off to a good start. Jurors seemed skeptical of the defense’s claim that police had mishandled evidence. In addition, Horowitz’s explanation for Susan’s initial denial and subsequent cover-up of the crime did not appear to ring true with the twelve jurors—especially after they heard the prosecutor describe her elaborate efforts to cover up the crime during his opening remarks. O’Connor pointed out that Susan cleaned and hid the knife used in the attack, got rid of her bloody clothing, and placed her husband’s car at the train station in an effort to cover her tracks. Those were hardly the actions of an innocent woman, he insisted.
The following morning, jurors boarded a bus for the Polk’s hillside residence to get their first look at the
