Deadly Divorces (10 page)

Who knows what unspoken pact was reached when Jamila and Anthony Ashley-Cooper decided to get married. Was he, weakened by the effects of alcohol abuse and age, looking for a glamorous carer who’d slip effortlessly in and out of her dual bedroom roles as
sex-provider
and nursemaid? And was she, ever conscious of the ticking of the clock, resigned to trading sex for material comfort and a secure future? Or was there a genuine affection between these two mismatched and ultimately lonely people? Was there a real shared vision of a future in which they helped and supported each other, steering one another through the under-lit, seedy night-time world they’d both come to know so well?

At the beginning at least, the Earl was certainly besotted with his new bride – Madame La Comptesse as he liked her to be called – and she indulgent with him as with a misbehaving child who can’t really be held responsible for his actions. But the honeymoon period lasted barely as long as the gaps between Jamila’s nail treatments.

‘He’s always taking Viagra and having testosterone injections and then wanting sex in the middle of the night,’ Jamila would complain to her sisters. Her new husband’s family were equally unimpressed with his choice of bride. Lady Frances, who met her new sister-in-law only once soon after the wedding, found her to be ‘cunning’ and ‘calculating’.

Anthony bought his wife a sumptuous
£
500,000 apartment in a converted Normandy-style house in the desirable La Californie area of Cannes, an exclusive hilly enclave of multi-million pound villas, but he himself spent less and less time there. Jamila was always griping about something or so it seemed. At the start she’d seemed so happy to take care of him but now she just got irritated with everything he did. She spent hours on the phone disparaging him to her sisters or to her younger brother Mohamed. And who wanted to make love to a woman who reacted to his advances with a look of mild disgust? Especially when there were plenty of other younger, prettier girls more than willing to take her place.

The Earl had his own house in Antibes, a favourite holiday hangout of the international yachting set, and
conveniently placed between Nice and Cannes. Increasingly, he began to leave Jamila to her own devices in the Californie flat, preferring the company of other hostesses who didn’t complain about his heavy drinking or sexual demands. After feeling like he’d missed out on his youth due to the burden of family responsibility, all he really wanted as his early 60s gave way to his mid-60s was an easy life. Jamila wasn’t about to give him that, however.

There are people who are prepared to work at their relationships when they start going wrong and then there are others who decide to cut their losses and run. In later life Anthony Ashley-Cooper definitely fell into the second camp. The problem was that there were just so many women and so little time. Why would he want to get bogged down trying to please a wife who just seemed to find fault with everything he did?

As his domestic affairs became increasingly tense, the Earl’s drinking – always prodigious – stepped up a gear and there were always plenty of liggers at the hostess bars he frequented who were more than happy to take advantage of the drunken aristocrat’s legendary booze-induced generosity. Jamila would later claim to have come back to her flat one night to find two strange women helping themselves to her belongings while her husband slumped nearby in an alcoholic stupor.

By spring 2004 it was clear that the marriage had run its course. The Earl knew he’d made a mistake but, true to
form, he wasn’t about to sit around moping over what might have been or to throw himself into an intensive round of therapy to try and work out what might have gone wrong. Instead he just wanted to move on. Jamila, however, wasn’t going to rush things. The relationship might be on the rocks but she wasn’t about to bail out completely without having all her financial bases covered. Unlike her wandering husband, Jamila had looked at life from both sides of the poverty line and she knew which she preferred. Typically, her close-knit family gathered around her to offer advice on how to ensure she got the best possible outcome in any divorce settlement. Particularly vocal with his suggestions was factory-worker Mohamed, currently living with his second wife in Munich.

At the time of their separation, Jamila’s 18-month marriage to the Earl netted her the flat in Cannes, a windmill in a different region of France, a top-of-the-range 4x4 car and a monthly allowance of around 10,000 euros. But what would a divorce court make of the arrangements? Might she be entitled to an even larger slice of the Ashley family pie or would her generous allowance be slashed instead? Jamila knew she was walking a legal and financial tightrope. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury wasn’t going to let niggling worries about money intrude in his hedonistic lifestyle. After his separation from Jamila, he continued his nocturnal habits and eventually hooked up with another hostess, this time a Moroccan woman called
Nadia, who was at that time in her early thirties. Before long he’d set her and her two children up in their own flat and was promising to make her his fourth wife. All he had to do was just sort out this bothersome business of the divorce from Jamila.

On 3 November 2004 Anthony Ashley-Cooper flew into the Riviera after telling his eldest son that he was going to sort things out with Jamila once and for all. The Earl was in good humour. He always loved being in Cannes, with its grand architecture and designer shops… and of course, its seedy bars where he’d become such a familiar figure. Free from obligations and expectations, he felt at home there. Booking himself into the Noga Hilton, a luxury hotel right on the seafront and just a short walk from his favourite regular haunts, he breathed in the fresh sea air. November in the south of France can be bitterly cold, with the savage Mistral wind blowing in from the north, but Anthony didn’t mind the chill. In a strange way it reminded him of Dorset and besides, it was amazing how a few stiff vodkas could take the edge off the cold.

His new girlfriend Nadia was at first delighted to have the generous Earl back again, but she soon grew fed up when she realised that he had other ideas for celebrating his first few days back in France rather than cosy nights in with her and her children. ‘What do you have to go out drinking for?’ she yelled at him. ‘Why do you need to talk to women in bars when you’ve got me here? If you go out, we’re
finished!’ But to the Earl, frequenting seedy hostess bars and clubs had become a natural part of life in France. He simply wasn’t prepared to compromise the freedom that had come to him so late in life.

On the evening of 5 November, while his family and tenants back home were celebrating Guy Fawkes night, the Earl set off as usual to see whether he could find any fireworks of his own in the side street dive bars. Bar staff recall the gangly Peer seemed perhaps a little less exuberant than normal, but he still chatted to a few of the hostesses in his eccentric, charming manner and downed several large drinks. Perhaps the 66-year-old Lord was upset after a quarrel with his latest lady friend, they speculated, or just a little tired. No doubt he’d be back to his usual form as soon as he’d had a chance to readjust to the strange hours demanded by nocturnal Riviera life.

But Anthony Ashley-Cooper never did get a chance to hold court once again in the seedy basement bars and clubs the Cannes tourist board never sees fit to mention. After 5 November, the flamboyant Earl quite simply disappeared. Used to hearing from him every few days, his family started to compulsively re-check their answer-phone messages, wondering if there was something they’d missed. Friends he’d been due to meet up with became uneasy about his uncharacteristic silence. Sure, it was possible he had decided on a whim to jet off somewhere – he’d occasionally done such things before when pressures got
too much for him – but never without letting anyone know where he was.

As days went into weeks and still no contact, the mystery of ‘Le Lord disparu’ intensified. His mobile phone was dead and someone had withdrawn
£
200 cash with his Barclaycard but it wasn’t clear who it was, or where this had occurred. Rumours began circulating through the back streets of southern France’s ritziest resorts. Le Compt had serious money troubles, he’d been conned by an underworld gang who had stolen a valuable painting from his Versailles flat, he’d been kidnapped, he’d jumped off a cliff into the sea… It seemed everyone had a theory about what had happened to the man his lawyer described as ‘likeable and generous but also weak and fragile.’

As time went on with still no word, any innocent explanations were reluctantly ruled out and foul play now seemed to be the only reasonable assumption. To his family’s horror, by December 2004, the French police were treating Anthony Ashley-Cooper’s disappearance as a murder inquiry.

Now the rumour mill really went into overdrive. Owing to his penchant for sleazy bars, the Earl had been involved with some very shady people in recent years. With the kind of company he’d been keeping, who knew what could have happened to him? Vice rings, Mafia gangs – anything was possible on the Côte d’Azur.

The increasingly fanciful speculation finally ended on 25
February 2005 with the dramatic news that Jamila – the Earl’s former wife in his third and shortest-lived marriage – had been arrested by French police. The following day her brother Mohamed was also arrested and they were being investigated for murder.

Over the next days and weeks, a broken, desperate Jamila admitted she had been involved in her husband’s death. He’d come to the flat to talk to her about money, she told police. They were trying to iron out details of the divorce settlement in which she hoped to receive several hundred thousand pounds. Her brother Mohamed happened to be there as well on that day and he’d joined in the discussions, trying, she claimed, to look out for his sister’s interests.

As so often happens when money becomes an issue in the wake of a recent marriage break-up, the conversation soon became heated. Jamila claimed both her husband and brother had been drinking heavily and eventually the combination of alcohol and dissent erupted into a blazing row during which her brother unintentionally bludgeoned her husband to death. Afterwards Mohamed panicked and bundled the Earl’s body into the boot of his car before driving off alone to dispose of it. Jamila had been an emotional wreck ever since, she said, and had been receiving treatment for depression.

On 5 April 2005 the remains of a body were found in the Vallon de la Rague, 10km west of Cannes. This hidden gully above a luxury marina, where a stream wends its way
through the rocks towards the sea, is used mostly by lone middle-aged Scandinavian hikers or by joggers looking for a more challenging run. On this particular day, however, police – acting on information they’d been given – swarmed the rubbish-strewn beauty spot and eventually found what they were looking for hidden under a laurel tree.

Days later, DNA tests confirmed the skeletal remains were those of Le Lord disparu: the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury. The Ashley family was devastated. The Earl’s eccentricities hadn’t stopped him being well loved. And the family’s grief was compounded still further when, just six weeks after the Earl’s body was discovered, his eldest son died of a heart attack at the age of just 27.

In a hearing in France in September 2005 Mohamed M’Barek admitted accidentally killing his brother-in-law and disposing of the body but claimed it was not premeditated and that his sister had no part in it. It had been a drunken brawl, he said. He hadn’t intended to hurt anyone; it was just a tragic accident.

The French authorities weren’t convinced. On 25 May 2007, a Nice court found Jamila and Mohamed guilty of murder and sentenced them each to 25 years in jail. The court had heard that Jamila had paid her brother £105,000 to kill her husband because she feared losing out financially in a divorce settlement.

‘It further confirms the type of people we thought they were,’ said the Earl’s son Nicholas after the verdict. ‘Cold,
deceitful and without compassion for a man they murdered and betrayed.’

The Earl is buried alongside his eldest son in the family vault of the church at Wimborne, St Giles. Steeped in history, the weathered grey stone church looks serenely out across the village green. It’s a long way from the back streets of Cannes, where a man can spend his life lurching from one dimly lit bar to the next and never see the fabled Riviera sun.

It was the search for love that led the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury to explore the seedier side of life in the south of France. He thought that love could be bought for the price of a high-class cocktail but in the end he paid heavily for his own mistake.

E
veryone who’s ever had teenage children knows their behaviour can be erratic to say the least – polite and friendly one minute, rude and unresponsive the next. But when 15-year-old Susan Bolling, who’d always been such a conscientious student, suddenly started missing classes and making strange claims about her parents, the school counsellor at Clayton Valley High School in Concord, California worried there might be something deeper going on than just the usual adolescent angst.

It was 1972 and psychotherapy was just starting to become the nation’s favourite pastime, particularly in trendy California. The pretty, slim teen’s parents had just got divorced and the counsellor thought she might benefit
from some more intensive therapy. ‘It might help for her to talk to someone who specialises in adolescent behaviour,’ Susan’s mother, Helen, was told. The counsellor recommended Dr Felix Polk, a psychologist who had gained an excellent reputation locally for dealing with troubled teens.

At this time Felix Polk was 40 years old and married with two children. Born into a wealthy Jewish Austrian family, his childhood had been shattered when the Holocaust forced his family to flee. But his traumatic early life had done little to diminish his appreciation for life and culture and art. According to his many admirers, Felix was the kind of man who always saw the good in everything; he embraced new experiences and exuded passion. He was, they all agreed, tremendously enriching company.

With curly brown hair, a high forehead, sensual mouth and hooded eyes that burned with intellectual intensity, handsome Felix cut an attractive figure. Helen Bolling was immediately won over. ‘I’m sure he’ll be able to help you,’ she told her surly, defensive daughter. Privately, she was concerned that Susan would take against the urbane, confident psychologist. After all, she’d been so contrary recently, so difficult to reach. This was the girl who preferred to spend her weekends reading weighty Russian novels engaging in dark themes of death, guilt, longing and futility rather than to go shopping with friends as her classmates seemed to do. She was also known for her
sudden flares of temper and quicksilver mood changes. Who knew how she’d react?

When Susan and Felix clicked, practically right from the word go, Helen was overjoyed. Susan needed a reliable father figure that she could look up to and be guided by. It was such a relief that she’d found someone she could confide in. However, it was only after a good few private sessions with Felix Polk that Susan said something to her mother that made the older woman’s blood freeze within her chest. ‘She said something about sitting on his lap,’ Helen would later recall.

Put yourself in Helen Bolling’s position at this point. Here’s this troubled teenager – your daughter – who’s been becoming increasingly withdrawn from you but then finally, thankfully, you’ve found somebody who can reach her. You’ve invested your hopes in this person who comes highly recommended by all the authorities and believe they can help sort out your daughter’s problems and keep her from going further off the rails. Then something gets said that sets off maternal alarm bells. Are you
overreacting
? Your daughter seems well and happy and, moreover, is making good progress. And this other person is an experienced professional, an expert in his field who has worked with hundreds of other adolescents. Would you stick your neck out and make a fuss, perhaps jeopardising the very progress your daughter has already made?

Despite her very real reservations, Helen Bolling decided
not to report Felix to the authorities. ‘Maybe that’s the way they do things now,’ she said. Even in her own head, she could hear how weak that explanation sounded. She confronted Felix, telling him the inappropriate behaviour had to stop, but she decided not to take the matter any further. She had no idea how bitterly she’d come to regret that decision.

Helen Bolling would later claim that Dr Felix Polk – eminent psychologist and 40-year-old father-of-two – used those sessions to hypnotise or drug her daughter before having sex with her. Could that be true? Of course, his supporters vehemently deny it. What seems clear is that the relationship formed during those sessions went far and beyond a legitimate therapist-client bond. This was so much so that even when the young Susan Bolling stopped her counselling sessions she carried on seeing Felix Polk despite the fact that he was married and more than twice her age.

There’s a recognised syndrome where vulnerable patients or clients fall in love with the professional who’s been giving them advice or counselling, whether it’s a doctor, lawyer, teacher … or psychologist. But what happened between Susan and Felix was reciprocal. It wasn’t an impressionable teenager fixating on her glamorous older therapist, but a mutual passion and one which, given Felix’s status and position, was at best inappropriate and at worst deeply immoral.

If Helen Bolling had hoped that going away to college would cure her wayward daughter of any feelings for Felix
Polk, she was sadly disappointed. Susan went to Mills College and then onto San Fransisco State University to study literature. Instead of the experience making her realise how much more fun it was to hang out with people her own age she just found her peers shallow and unsophisticated in comparison with her older, well-travelled lover.

She did try to break it off once, however. ‘I don’t want to be with you anymore,’ she told Felix, only to retract it almost immediately when she heard how broken he was. Listening to him sobbing because she was threatening to leave him gave Susan a little thrill of power. Sure, he might have all the qualifications and the success and the big career but she was the one in control. What Susan didn’t consider then was that maybe, just maybe, Felix was giving her the illusion of control and these tears were just another way of manipulating her and keeping her where he wanted her.

Nearly a decade passed and Susan and Felix’s illicit relationship had already lasted longer than many marriages. Clearly this wasn’t some schoolgirl crush that was just going to ‘fizzle out’. Finally Felix Polk divorced his first wife Sharon, the mother of his son and daughter. This left him free to marry Susan. The wedding in 1982 evoked mixed feelings in most of the guests. On the one hand the couple looked genuinely in love. Susan, slim and lovely with a garland of white flowers nestling in her cloud of dark hair, giggled with girlish delight while cutting the cake as her debonair, rugged-looking husband gazed
indulgently on. After all those years, they seemed so at ease with each other, so comfortable in each other’s presence.

On the other hand there was the age gap. At 25 years, it was simply too great to ignore. 50-year-old Felix could just as well have been giving 25-year-old Susan away as making her his wife. What were the chances of such a relationship working out? In 20 years’ time he’d be an old man while she’d still be in the prime of life. And wasn’t there just a little touch of the Svengalis about how he treated her? Wouldn’t she end up resenting being constantly in his shadow? Not that everyone didn’t wish the happy couple well but more than one wedding guest went home with a lurking suspicion that this marriage would end badly. What they could never have imagined was just how badly.

For a long while after the Polks’ wedding, it seemed as if the doubters were to be proved wrong. Felix went on consolidating his professional reputation as a psychologist, specialising in disturbed children and adolescents. He built up an impressive private practice in Berkeley, which was a mecca for liberal intellectuals, and, by the late eighties he had also added teaching and lecturing to his already heavy workload. Colleagues and patients were won over by his sensitivity when dealing with patients who were often traumatised, as well as his intuitive understanding of complex emotional problems. Susan, meanwhile, had three sons – Adam, Eli and Gabriel – in close succession and threw herself into motherhood with the same intense passion with
which she did everything else in her life. She, and her husband when he was home, spent a lot of time ferrying their boys around to baseball games and football matches.

As Felix’s professional stature grew, so too did the family’s standard of living. They travelled extensively, drove stylish cars and the boys attended the best schools. By the time they’d been married 18 years, they’d bought their dream home – a spacious, wood-clad house in the leafy town of Orinda, nestling in the Oakland Hills. For the West Coast’s chattering classes Orinda is a suburban paradise. An easy commute from San Francisco or Oakland, it is characterised by the kind of individual, distinctive houses you normally see gracing the pages of
Architectural Review
, and all set against a breathtaking backdrop of rolling green hills and spreading oak trees.

The Polk’s house on Miner Road was situated in its own compound complete with multi-levelled, wood-decked terraces and a separate cottage by the swimming pool. Although the house was hugely expensive, there was nothing in the least bit bling about it. From the polished hardwood floors scattered with warm-coloured rugs to the exposed stone fireplace in the living room, everything was tasteful and subtle. The big picture windows looked out onto the surrounding woods where beautiful
mossy-trunked
trees formed a canopy of greenery that shielded the compound from the harsh Californian sun, throwing dappled shadows onto the natural brick steps and
weathered wooden decks. But although everything outside the Orinda house was peace and tranquillity, inside the atmosphere was anything but.

While the Polks had steadily wrapped themselves in a mink-lined cocoon of luxury and status, their marriage had been busily unravelling from within. Susan Polk had always had a temper. She was quick to lash out when something annoyed her. Sometimes she’d fly off the handle when there didn’t seem to be any good reason for it. And Felix wasn’t the type of man who’d back down on an argument. At times he would deliberately goad his wife, calling her ‘crazy’, trying to verbally wrong-foot her. As with so many warring couples, it was the children who’d invariably end up in the middle. ‘Please stop it,’ they would entreat. ‘Can’t we all just get on?’

But when a couple falls into a pattern of accusations and recriminations, of attack and counter-attack, it becomes very difficult to break that pattern even when those getting hurt are the very people you most want to protect. Susan would tell people later that Felix had routinely emotionally and physically abused her and the children, that he’d tried to control her life so that she was cut off from friends and family and had no chance of developing a support network. Helen Bolling, Susan’s mother, later lent credence to that particular suggestion when she claimed Felix had systematically excluded her from family life, making it clear that he didn’t want her around. Susan accused him of threatening to kill her
and himself, the boys and even the dogs if she ever tried to leave him. For his part, Felix would imply that Susan was emotionally disturbed and that it was she herself who was threatening him with violence. He branded her ‘delusional’ and claimed that she invented situations that didn’t exist and memories of events that never happened.

At one point Susan claimed to have recovered memories of childhood abuse – a claim that was strongly denied. Both the Polks also accused their son Adam’s day-care centre of ritualistic satanic abuse although no evidence was ever found (later, a babysitter also came under suspicion of abuse).

So what was it all about, this attention-seeking marriage? Were the Polks somehow addicted to the drama of it all, unable to cope with the routine of life without an injection of controversy? Did they manufacture confrontation – with each other or the outside world – as a way of getting through the tawdry ordinariness of suburban life? Whatever the truth, neighbours in the upscale Orinda community caught the whiff of dysfunction that wafted down from the Polk compound. They became wary of the volatile couple, reluctant to get too close to them and particularly to Susan, who had a reputation for being nervy and quick to take offence.

As the new Millennium got underway with all its promise of a shiny new beginning, the Polks’ relationship started to nosedive out of control. Susan’s eccentric ideas, her ‘delusions’ as her denigrating husband insisted on calling
them, became more extreme. She claimed to be psychic and to have predicted the 9/11 attacks. Not only this but she also became convinced Felix was actually an agent from the Israeli Secret Police and was passing on her psychic predictions to Mossad. One of her other recurring themes was that Felix was amassing a huge fortune stashed away in secret Cayman Island bank accounts. ‘Your Mom’s crazy,’ Felix would tell his sons, shaking his head in disbelief.

For the three Polk boys, it was like living in a war zone. Each parent began to accuse the other of physical violence and would claim that the other was trying to control their lives. Always slim, Susan now began to look positively gaunt. Happy to play the martyr in family conflicts, she used her physical frailty to back up assertions that it was she and not Felix, who was the victim of domestic violence. In January 2001 she attempted suicide, claiming Felix’s physical and mental cruelty had driven her over the edge.

Several times the police were called out to the $1.85m Orinda property, with its classy wooden balustrades and exposed wooden rafters, to deal with allegations of assault from one or other of the Polk parents. No wonder the three boys began to self-destruct, the two younger ones in particular playing up at school and getting into trouble with the authorities.

By late 2001 it was obvious that the long-lived marriage had become too toxic to be anything but doomed and Susan Polk decided to file for divorce. You’d think a well-off
couple who by this stage couldn’t stand the sight of each other, who were turning their home into an emotional bloodbath that their children were forced to witness, might opt for a clean break – but not the Polks. In a disastrous decision they decided to live separately under the same roof while details of the divorce settlement were thrashed out.