Friday’s court session adjourned when the prosecutor announced that he had no further questions.
Chapter Twenty-seven
NO MURDER AT ALL
The following Monday, court resumed with Susan’s redirect examination of Eli. She would keep her son on the stand until Thursday afternoon when Judge Brady announced she had heard enough and halted the questioning. During those four days, Susan trotted out numerous e-mails that her sons exchanged after their father’s death and instructed Eli to read them aloud. “I hope you do join the team and then I can see you soon,” Gabe wrote to Eli in January of 2004.
“I’m disappointed in you,” Gabe wrote in another correspondence. “Get your shit together. You’re siding with a person who murdered our dad.”
Gabriel was not the only brother sending e-mails to Eli. In January 2005, Adam sent one saying he would entertain his mother’s request to write a letter to the court, pronouncing, “I don’t believe my mother killed my father in cold blood, but in self-defense.”
In response to questions from Susan, Eli maintained that his elder brother had threatened to disinherit him if he did not join the wrongful death civil suit that Adam and Gabe filed against their mother.
“If I could just apologize for my language beforehand,” Eli asked jurors before reading Gabriel’s final e-mail correspondence aloud. “Eli, if you believe all that shit, you’re a fucking psycho, and I never want to see you again,” Eli read from the page his mother handed him. “I really should start calling you Susan. Grow the fuck up!”
Looking up from the paper, Eli accused Sequeira of “smiling at him.”
The accusation caught the judge off guard. Straightening herself in her chair, Brady glanced at the prosecutor. For the record, she noted that he was sitting at his table, resting his cheek and chin in his hand and gazing away from the witness box.
“I object!” Susan barked. “The district attorney is making faces at my son.”
Brady drew a breath and instructed Susan to move on with her questions.
“Was it like a smiling face?” Susan asked Eli with regard to Sequeira’s supposed grin.
“Mrs. Polk,” the judge interrupted, warning Susan to move on.
“It was like a smirk,” Eli replied.
Brady instructed Eli not to respond after she had ruled.
“I object!” Susan yelled out.
“Is there any way to take this show on the road?” Sequeira interjected, shaking his head in frustration.
“It is a show,” Eli agreed.
Banging her hand on the desk, Brady terminated the proceedings. “All right! We’re done for the day!”
Humorous though it was, the episode reflected Brady’s growing frustration. Whereas once the judge had been willing to tolerate Susan’s behavior, she was becoming much less lenient. Furthermore, Susan continued to bait Sequeira, and her efforts were clearly taking a toll on everyone involved.
On Tuesday, Susan directed her middle son to read letters he had written to her in jail. She was anxious to point out the sections in which Eli referred to his willingness to take the stand and “tell the truth” about Dad, but she didn’t anticipate the unsettling impact that many of the letters would have on the courtroom. As Eli spoke about his mother’s innocence, his voice sounded less and less like a son, and more like a lover. The impact was palpable, as the jurors shifted in their seats.
“I miss you so much it is driving me crazy,” Eli read aloud from one. “You are everything to me…. The truth about Dad needs to come out.”
“P.S. I wake up and see your face,” the note continued. “I love you enough to burn all I am and meet you in the afterlife.”
Susan cried aloud as her son recited the words to jurors. He had already told the court about the framed photo of his mother that he kept in his locker at Byron Boys’ Ranch. He had made the frame in wood shop and hung it in the locker so he could see her face every day.
The testimony that day was disquieting, and Sequeira recognized that Susan may have alienated the jurors with her son’s writings. Once again the prosecutor had uncovered a weak spot to probe, and the following morning he did just that, announcing his intent to introduce short stories that had allegedly been written by Susan about a wife who murders her husband and a mother who has a sexual relationship with her son.
According to Sequeira, he learned of the stories six weeks earlier during a phone call from Susan’s landlord in Montana, former Congressman Chris Harris, who claimed he and his wife came upon the writings while cleaning the cabin. Harris said the writings were tucked under a mattress in the cabin that Susan had rented from him in the fall of 2001, but he was unsure if his wife had kept them. From the handwriting, Harris’s wife had determined that a woman had written the stories.
Susan argued there was no basis to introduce the material into evidence, as the landlord did not even have them in his possession. “There’s speculation that I wrote the dirty story and that I wrote the murder story,” Susan barked. “That’s totally slander. He [Paul Sequeira] should be ashamed of himself! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t say or do to de-fame me!”
Judge Brady postponed a ruling on their admissibility, saying there were “some issues” that needed to be considered.
Angered at the judge’s response, Susan launched into an attack on Sequeira, at one point blurting out, “The man needs a spanking and the judge should give it to him.” Judge Brady did not respond. Instead, she instructed the deputies to return Eli to the courtroom to resume testimony. Eventually she would rule the stories inadmissible.
In response to questions, Eli portrayed himself as the only one of Susan’s three sons to come to court and “tell the truth,” claiming that his father had hypnotized all three boys during twice weekly therapy sessions at the house. He contended that Felix served them tea and put them in a trance. “I remember not remembering what had happened.” He also believed that Felix was behind the accusations regarding Adam’s sexual abuse by a satanic cult. “It seemed like it was definitely dad’s thing.” And he agreed with his mother that his two brothers were part of a conspiracy to “loot” the Polk estate.
During his final moments on the stand, Eli told jurors that he believed his father’s death could have been prevented if someone had simply reported his abuse to authorities.
“Isn’t it true your dad did try to prevent it and now he’s dead?” Sequeira asked. He reminded Eli that Felix had called authorities several times in the days before his death, saying he was afraid for his life.
“First of all, I believed
“Your father’s dead, isn’t he?” Sequeira asked.
“I’m not going to answer that question.”
By late afternoon, Judge Brady had had enough. Susan’s repeated objections and requests to interrupt her son’s testimony with other defense witnesses now seemed like an attempt to keep Eli on the stand—and out of jail—for as long as possible. Brady called an end to Susan’s examination just before 4:30 that Wednesday, directing her to pick up her case in the morning with testimony from Montana real estate agent, Janna Kuntz, and retired forensic pathologist, Dr. John Cooper.
The following morning, Susan’s first witness, Janna Kuntz, testified about conversations she had with Susan in September 2002 while the two were out viewing properties.
“It was not a good marriage,” Kuntz responded to a question from Susan. “You were very unhappy and you wanted to move away, get away.”
The realtor told the court that she was under the impression that Susan’s husband was “a very emotionally abusive human being.”
“Did I express rage?” she asked the realtor, referring to the day she learned Felix had won custody of their Orinda home and their minor son, as well as a significant cut in her support payments.
“I wouldn’t describe it as ‘rage.’ It was more like, ‘Can you believe this? He’s gone and done something
