Final Analysis (36 page)

Susan claimed she warned her husband, “Stop, I’ve got the knife.” But he kept coming at her. She recalled stabbing her husband just five or six
times. After repeatedly demanding that Felix “get off” of her, he finally rose to his feet and said, “Oh my God, I think I’m dead.”

“He rocked back and forth on his feet. He swayed…and he just fell straight back.”

Susan ran to the bathroom to clear the pepper spray from her eyes. When she returned, Felix’s eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, but he was not breathing. At that moment, memories of their years together flooded back. She recalled their first meeting, the day they wed, the children they raised, but the good memories soon gave way to bad, and the façade of their relationship crumbled as she thought about the years of abuse and marital difficulties.

According to her version of events, Susan remained in the cottage for about thirty minutes, carrying on a conversation with her dead husband, asking the questions in death that she never managed to ask in life. Standing on the stairs, she spoke to him, trying in vain to understand this man who had been a mystery to her for more than twenty years, at one point yelling at the body, “How could you do that to your children?”

Susan’s testimony proved surreal. While she had long highlighted different aspects of that night, she had never fleshed out the full picture to the court, never provided any of the details that made her narrative seem human. Now, the court was transfixed by her story, picturing her huddled around the body and trying to make sense of her tenuous situation. It was a vivid image, one that displayed her many inner contradictions. Though she professed to have loathed her husband for years, she could never completely let go of him. In this ending, his death was too abrupt, their relationship too flawed to simply be over, but somehow it was.

Once she moved past the initial shock of her situation, her next thoughts were more practical. “I’m going to be in big trouble,” she realized. She didn’t call police. Instead, she left through the kitchen door and returned to the main house. Holding up a pair of black clogs, Susan identified them as the pair of shoes she was wearing that night. “I don’t wear athletic shoes,” she said plainly. “I have no idea whose shoes those are in the blood. They’re not my sons’.”

That night was sleepless for Susan, who said that she drove Felix’s car to the BART station so that her son wouldn’t see it in the driveway and go
to the guesthouse in search of his dad. The following morning, Susan drove Gabe to school, took him out for lunch, ran some errands, and did some housekeeping. “I kept putting off calling the police. I wanted to have a nice day with Gabriel. I just didn’t want to tell him what happened.”

Later in the day, when Gabe asked about Felix, she claimed she had no idea where he might be. “It was like living in two worlds. My husband was dead in the cottage and I was acting and pretending like he hadn’t died,” Susan testified. “I wanted to hang on to some semblance of a normal life for a few more hours.”

She said her son knew better. “He knew. I knew he knew. I just wanted to deny. The look in his eyes,” Susan’s eyes filled with tears. “He thought I’d killed his father…. But Gabe knew there was something wrong. I just wasn’t the mom I always was,” Susan sniffed. “Gabe is so sensitive. We were all so close; we finished each other’s sentences.”

Addressing Gabriel’s earlier claim that Susan had asked Gabriel if he was happy that his dad was gone, Susan claimed that she never actually said those words, but in actuality said “‘He’s gone. You aren’t happy, are you?’” Susan recalled. “I was buying time to put off telling him he’s dead.”

According to Susan, it was this initial lie to Gabriel that enabled her to carry her story forward, even as officers presented her with evidence to the contrary.

“At some point, I decided to lie,” she said. “I thought my best shot at getting out of custody, to take care of my dogs and my son, was to lie. So I did. Once I denied, that was it. I just kept doing that.”

In spite of her lie, Susan admitted that she “would have confessed” if police indicated they were going to arrest Gabe for the crime. “I was relieved that Adam was coming for Gabe,” she said.

Susan went on to maintain, “I didn’t murder Felix, and I didn’t want the stigma of people thinking I murdered him. I just hoped I wouldn’t be charged, but I was.”

As the afternoon progressed, Susan presented jurors with “explanations” for the accusations made in court by prosecution witnesses, but the more she talked the more it appeared that she was fabricating stories. For example, she insisted that Gabe had misconstrued her discussion of
purchasing a shotgun, saying that it had nothing to do with murder. In her version of the story, she was shopping for a weapon on the advice of huntsmen in Montana who told her a shotgun would provide good protection from bears during her frequent hikes in the woods. Similarly, she also challenged Gabe’s testimony that she threatened to drown Felix in the pool unless he wired millions of dollars into her bank account. Instead she claimed that she had simply expressed concern that his father would get too drunk one night and “drown” in the pool.

On Tuesday, before the jury was brought into court, Susan asked that she be allowed to have attorney Gary Wesley of Mountain View present during her cross-examination by Sequeira. Susan told Brady that if she agreed to allow him to act as assistant counsel, he would be in court solely to make objections on her behalf. Sequeira immediately objected, arguing that the attorney was unfamiliar with the case and had not been in court during the thirteen weeks of trial. Allowing the lawyer to join at this late date would be “setting up a disaster” and could lay the groundwork for an appeal on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel,” he said.

“I’m extremely concerned about his competence. He can’t possibly know the ins and outs of this case,” Sequeira went on, insisting that Susan Polk “knows the case as well as anybody.”

Brady raised an eyebrow when Wesley stepped before her and admitted that since graduating from Santa Clara University Law School in 1978, he had never tried a murder case. Nevertheless, he had tried all felony cases “short of murder,” and ultimately, Brady allowed Wesley to act as assistant defense counsel during Susan’s cross-examination. This was not, however, a blank check; there would be ground rules. He could not offer any unsolicited advice. The judge also warned Susan that she would not be permitted to raise objections if she agreed to Wesley’s participation.

Brady fought back a smile when Susan agreed. “I’m going to hold you to that,” the judge grinned.

Wesley told reporters outside court that afternoon that he came on board at the request of Susan’s case manager, Valerie Harris, and had been providing informal counsel to Susan for several weeks. As if to demonstrate his familiarity with the case, he offered a criticism of
Sequeira’s cross-examination of Eli Polk, calling it improper and accusing the prosecutor of crafting questions to “bait” the young man on the stand.

Susan ended her fourth day of direct testimony that Tuesday with what could only be described as a presentation of her kitchen knives. In a testimony akin to a sales presentation on the Home Shopping Network, Susan detailed each piece of cutlery, as a lanky deputy displayed them in his gloved hands. Though she was expressly forbidden to handle the utensils, she appeared happy to provide details about them to members of the jury. Jurors craned their necks to glimpse the family’s bread knife, a butcher knife, and a set of steak knives.

“That knife was everyone’s favorite knife,” Susan said of one steak knife, smiling as she explained how all three of her sons liked that one best. “It was always disappearing…. And that [a different knife] was the knife he [Felix] had in the cottage that he attacked me with,” Susan said of the one with the black handle. “Afterwards, I picked it up, brought it back into the kitchen, washed it, dried it, and put it away.”

Once Susan had finished with the detailed history of the Polk family cutlery, she moved on to an entirely new and until now, unmentioned subject. Susan attempted to raise allegations that her husband had engaged in inappropriate contact with his daughter from his first marriage. She provided no evidence and there is no evidence whatsoever to support these allegations. Nevertheless, it was Susan’s intention to introduce these allegations only by her own testimony. For much of her first four days on the stand, Sequeira had allowed Susan’s testimony to go into the record with few objections, but the period of relative calm in the courtroom came to an end with this latest development.

“I move for a mistrial based on being called a liar!” she demanded during a sidebar with the judge.

Susan flew into a rage after Sequeira objected to this line of testimony. Susan claimed that Jennifer had alluded to the abuse in letters she sent her father. But she could not produce the writings because someone had supposedly stolen her “Jennifer files.”

“I was impressed that we have gone for four days very smoothly,” Judge Brady said. “But this display in front of the jury with such a sensitive
matter, especially when I’m learning for the first time that those letters just don’t exist anymore.”

“That’s not true!” Susan interrupted.

“Stop interrupting me,” Brady instructed. “I’m not done.”

“It is an outrageous abuse of your power to keep me silent on his abuse!” Susan shouted at Brady.

“Nobody’s going to keep you silent,” Sequeira mumbled aloud.

Unable to quell Susan’s rants, Brady adjourned for the day.

Before being led away that afternoon, Susan learned that Eli’s trial had resulted in a conviction on three of the six counts he was facing in connection with the March 2006 fight with his girlfriend. Valerie Harris was the one to deliver the news that a judge had just sentenced Eli to nine months in jail on the charges.

The next day, Susan’s cross-examination by the prosecutor began. That Thursday, Susan quickly charged Sequeira with using “doctored” photos of the crime scene and Contra Costa detectives with “staging” the scene to look like murder. She contended that pictures of her husband’s “defense wounds” appeared to have been magnified to make them appear more dramatic than they really were.

“They [detectives] were primarily focused on ensuring it did not look like self-defense,” Susan insisted when shown photos of the white numbered place markers encircling Felix’s bloodied body to indicate shoeprints found by police.

“Well, it looks as if someone, maybe a female deputy, because they’re really small shoes that fit in your shoe size range, maybe walked around the body and then walked to the bathroom,” Sequeira said in a raised voice. “Is that how it happened?”

“I think you guys goofed,” Susan implied. “I mean, to put two shoe prints, right-side shoes, side-by-side, like, what, I jumped up and did a whirligig?”

Later on, Sequeira stood before an easel, listing the names of all of the people that Susan had accused of lying about an aspect of her case. There was Gabriel, along with several members of the police department under the column labeled “Liars.” During the questioning, Susan pointed out that Felix had also lied and insisted the prosecutor renum
ber to put Felix’s name at the top of the list. Sequeira obliged, and changed the order to read: “1. Victim, 2. Gabe, 3. Sgt. Hanson.” Appearing at once ridiculous and true to Susan’s form, the display succeeded in demonstrating her confused paranoia. In Susan’s eyes, it was everyone against her—not because she was wrong but because she was persecuted. With this single gesture, Sequeira managed to show the entire court the skewed lens through which Susan viewed the world, while giving the members of the jury a concise look at the “enemies” that Susan claimed to have in the case.

As the cross-examination continued, Susan responded to questions about her motive for destroying potential evidence in the case. Sequeira asked why she laundered and repaired her blue jeans, got rid of the pepper spray, and washed the knife that Felix allegedly wielded that night, stripping it of potential fingerprints to prove her claim he had provoked the attack.

“Did you use that knife the next night?” Sequeira asked Susan. “Did you warn Gabe, ‘Hey, don’t use that knife?’”

“I don’t recall.”

“Is it possible that Gabe used the knife to eat his dinner? The same knife that was used to kill his father?”

Susan recoiled at the implication, claiming she had no idea if the knife was ever used again.

“In emergencies I get very fastidious. That’s just who I am. I cleaned it and put it away,” Polk said. “If you think that makes me a murderer? I mean, c’mon. But it makes a good story, so I guess you like that part.”

“It’s about the truth, Mrs. Polk.”

Expressing frustration with the District Attorney’s implication that she “snapped” inside the guest cottage that October night, Susan insisted that “snapping” was not in her nature, but it was in Felix’s. Susan also pointed out that she had successfully argued against a court order requiring that she submit to a psychological evaluation before going to trial.

“I’m not going to play crazy,” she told jurors. “I’m not going to say I snapped when I didn’t. And I’m not going to pretend this D.A. isn’t out to frame me for murder and this judge’s rulings are not biased, when I believe they are.”

“You’ve used the words ‘shocked’ and ‘appalled’ many times, Mrs. Polk,” Sequeira told Susan during recross-examination. “But do you recall saying in an interview on Court TV that you talked about it in a joking voice—the different actresses that might play you in a movie?”

The prosecutor was referring to an April 2006 interview that aired on
Catherine Crier Live,
conducted by my senior producer and coauthor, Cole Thompson. During the conversation, Susan said for the first time that she might be losing her case in court. In a moment of levity, she also joked about the possibility of a movie being made about her life, leading her to speculate that Winona Ryder should play the younger Susan, while Susan Sarandon should play her older self.

Though at the time the humor seemed harmless, Sequeira was seeking to use that televised interview to portray her as someone who pokes fun at a murder victim.