final days, detailing the brutal battle for custody of Gabriel and the fight over Susan’s alimony payments. To Sequeira, the Susan Polk who killed her husband was a cold, callous woman, not the victim she made herself out to be. She lied to the police about her involvement from the beginning, and she was still lying about her involvement as they sat there in the court.
“Susan then lies over and over and over and over at the police station,” he told the jurors as the defendant watched his every move. “Does Susan say ‘he came at me with a knife and I attacked him in self defense?’ No, she says she didn’t do it. But then forensic science kicks in and her lies are not permitted.
“She destroys evidence. Bloody clothes. Gone! Knife. Gone! Car—moved! Lies and a cover up!”
Jurors listened intently to the prosecutor’s theory. Sequeira detailed Felix’s injuries, informing them of the savage nature of his wounds and showing the jurors dramatic crime scene photos. Despite the graphic pictures, no one flinched.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence will show the defendant was upset. This festered until she made good on a repeated threat” to kill Felix Polk, the prosecutor charged. “Dr. Polk, abuser or victim of the ultimate attack of murder?”
Following Sequeira’s opening remarks, jurors were dismissed for the night, but Susan wouldn’t leave without one parting shot at the court.
“I want a mistrial!” Susan demanded as the last juror stepped out of the courtroom. “It’s all lies,” she shouted furiously, ticking off each of the prosecutor’s statements. “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t talk about my husband’s penis in front of the boys. It’s laughable.”
Judge Brady angrily directed Susan to move on to evidentiary issues that needed addressing, but Susan wouldn’t let things rest. She complained that her case assistant, Valerie Harris, was not being permitted to visit with her in jail and that she had still not received all of the case documents from Dan Horowitz.
Ignoring Susan, the judge turned to the prosecutor and instructed that he discuss the evidence with the defendant.
“Liar!” she shouted at the prosecutor.
“Lady, I know your act, and if you try to draw me in, and try to control me like you’re trying to control the court, then I’ll deal with Mrs. Harris,” Sequeira shot back.
“Then, I’ll fire Ms. Harris,” Susan said as she promptly terminated her only assistant.
When court recessed for the night, Susan rehired Harris; she was back at Susan’s side the following morning, watching intently as Susan interrogated her youngest son.
Chapter Twenty-four
THE CHIEF WITNESS
Susan’s attention was trained on the witness stand, where Gabriel Polk sat in a suit and tie, ready to testify for the prosecution. Now nineteen years old, the teen appeared composed and in control that Wednesday morning. It had been three years since Susan last saw her youngest son. Susan’s cross-examination of Gabe would mark the first time the two had spoken since Felix’s death. A restraining order had barred any contact between the mother and son during the intervening period, and Gabe had refused repeatedly to read any of Susan’s written correspondence.
Gabriel was the State’s strongest and most sympathetic witness. That Susan had allowed the then-fifteen- year-old youth to find his father’s dead body in the family’s guest cottage would be a major obstacle for jurors to overcome as they considered her explanation of self-defense. Sitting before the jury, Gabe’s once slender frame had filled out and what had been gaunt, sullen cheeks were now bright and healthy. He had grown into a handsome young man, with his mother’s strong jaw and deep-set eyes framed by thick, dark lashes.
Susan, dressed in black slacks and a blouse, appeared unsettled as she sat at the defense table. She blotted away tears with a tissue and sipped on a glass of water she poured from the gold and black carafe on the table. Saying that she felt ill, she took two Tylenol after getting permission from Sheriff’s deputies.
When asked by Sequeira to identify his mother, Gabe Polk looked in Susan’s direction and pointed. The two seemed to avoid direct eye contact. In response to questions from the prosecutor, Gabe described how he stopped attending school as a youth because his mother insisted that administrators were “out to get him” and were purposely giving him bad grades. Susan believed that his father was behind a conspiracy being perpetrated by members of the school faculty, that Felix had designated Adam for success and Gabe and his middle brother, Eli, for failure.
Jurors scribbled in notebooks as the teen responded to questions about Susan’s breakdown during the family’s visit to Disneyland. Gabe said he was nine or ten when the family made the trip and recalled his mother crying “uncontrollably.” Later he was told that while on the trip she had remembered being abused by her father, mother, and brother as a child, and that she believed her parents had murdered a police officer and buried his body in the basement of her childhood home. On the stand, Gabe recounted his mother’s recollections of the alleged abuse, which included “very disturbing details,” information he was ill-equipped to handle at the time.
Recalling Felix and Susan’s dramatic accusations of molestation against their sons’ day care providers, Gabe claimed that it was Susan who had convinced his father and brothers that he and Adam were victims of a satanic sex cult. Gabe went on to say that he now believed that his mother had “brainwashed” him against his father and described her as “full-blown delusional.” During his testimony, he recalled how she would sit at the breakfast table, scanning the newspaper for hidden codes and messages sent to her husband from the Mossad. She later elaborated on this, saying that this was how Felix communicated with undercover operatives. Gabe had no reason to doubt his mother’s claims; he simply went along with what she was saying. It was easier to agree than to debate what she was telling him.
During the courtroom proceedings, Gabe seemed distant, wearing an inscrutable stare as he sat in the witness chair or raised his eyes to the ceiling when contemplating answers to the prosecutor’s questions. Throughout the morning, Gabe used the word “delusion” countless times to describe his mother’s behavior. He recalled a car ride with Susan six months prior to the homicide during which she began speaking of ways to kill Felix. “She talked about drugging him and drowning him in the pool, hitting him over the head and drowning him in the pool, running him over with the car, or tampering with his car.”
Mentioning that she had been making threats for almost five years, Gabriel was accustomed to Susan’s emotional outbursts and, at some point, stopped taking her seriously. “She talked about killing him every day,” he said.
Still, Gabe said he was alarmed when she announced in September 2002 that she intended to leave him with Felix while she traveled to Montana to look for a place to live. He told the court that he found it odd that she would leave him with the man she deemed a monster, but after spending several days with Felix, Gabriel began rethinking his feelings about his dad. He was both surprised and pleased to find that Felix wasn’t the ogre that Susan had portrayed.
“Dad’s not such a bad guy,” Gabe told Susan during one call, recalling that his mother was “furious” about the divorce proceedings.
One week before the murder, Gabe said he warned his father that “he feared for his [dad’s] life” because of “all the things that his mother was saying.”
In response to questions from the prosecutor, Gabe said that he never witnessed any physical abuse in the home. “The most I’ve ever seen my dad do to my mother was slap her once,” he said. “About six months before the murder, I saw my mom slap my dad and police came out to arrest her.”
“Objection!” Susan bellowed, voicing opposition to her son’s use of the word “murder.”
Judge Brady sustained that objection, as well as Susan’s second protest over the word “killing.” Susan argued that Felix’s death should be referred to as “the incident.” But the judge disagreed, and substituted “homicide” as an acceptable alternative.
When Sequeira continued his direct examination, Gabe was asked to speak about his parents’ relationship. Here, Gabriel’s testimony corroborated Sequeira’s opening statements, portraying Felix as the dutiful working husband and Susan as the aggressor who would get in his face within minutes of his return home. Susan often
