Deadly Divorces (11 page)

Of course, there are various practical reasons why they may have chosen to remain on the same property even after separating. For a start there was the question of who would get possession of the house itself, the material embodiment of all their early aspirations, the dream home that had so quickly become the setting for a living nightmare. Then there were the children. By this time Adam and Eli were pretty independent but Gabriel was still just 14. Who would get custody? He was already showing signs of being emotionally disturbed by the turbulence in the household and each parent considered themselves better equipped to offer a steadying influence than the other. As an interim measure Felix was ordered to pay Susan $6,500 per month in maintenance, a crippling financial burden for the nearly 70-year-old psychologist. ‘You can afford it,’ Susan would jeer at him. ‘I know you’ve got millions secretly hidden away.’

It was around this time that the last vestiges of the façade of domestic harmony that the Polks had tried to present to colleagues and the local community finally crumbled away. Felix confided in friends that Susan had started to walk
around the house with a gun and he was terrified of what she meant to do with it. ‘I have to barricade myself into my room,’ he told them. On one occasion when the police were called to the house, in a fit of uncontrollable anger Susan hit her husband in front of them and was taken to the police station. Felix refused to press charges, however.

Susan took to openly discussing how she might kill her husband. ‘Hmm, I wonder if I’d be better off shooting him or drowning him. Or maybe I should just tamper with his car,’ she’d muse to Gabriel as if she was debating what to cook for dinner.

It was a blessed relief when Susan announced that she was considering moving to Montana. Over the course of 2002 she spent considerable periods of time scouring the area, looking for the best place to live, the best schools. If she moved away, then at least the bitterness would stop, her friends and family reasoned. With a bit of distance between them, perhaps the Polks could actually come to some sort of truce and start to introduce some sense of stability into the lives of their increasingly troubled sons.

In the autumn of 2002 Susan was once again back in Montana laying down the groundwork for her eventual move. With Susan gone – even briefly – the Orinda house finally became what it had never really been – a home. Felix Polk loved the uncustomary calmness. He relished waking up in the mornings to see the weak autumn sun dancing across the deck and hearing the gentle sway of
trees in the breeze. Now he looked forward to gazing out the picture windows as the sun set and soaking in the sheer beauty of the surrounding scenery. Finally he had some time to contemplate the mess he and Susan had made of their marriage and how it had affected his sons. Being the youngest, Gabriel weighed particularly on his mind. Recently he had been going increasingly off the rails, prompting bitter clashes between father and son.

‘Both you and Eli seem to have bought into Mom’s horror stories about me,’ Felix wrote in a letter to his youngest son at the start of the summer. ‘They are for the most part not true stories but I don’t really have a chance to speak up for myself. I am faced with a closed system in which Mom says what she says so hatefully about me and I have no chance to point out what is true and what is not. I fear you have joined Mom who at times – and certainly about me – has created a reality of her own. I have some real flaws and yet I am not the monster she portrays me to be… I want you to know that I plan to stay around and not go away from you. You are my kid and I love you as fully as I can love anyone.’

Eli had already given Felix enough to worry about. He was presently in juvenile detention following a nasty fistfight. Felix was anxious Gabriel shouldn’t end up there as well. More than ever he was more convinced Gabriel needed some fair but firm – and above all, consistent – parenting. And he was unlikely to get that from his mother. Secretly Felix had filed an application for custody of Gabriel
plus full possession of the home. But what Felix Polk didn’t realise was that by filing that divorce application, he would effectively be signing his own death warrant.

When Susan heard what Felix had done, she was outraged. ‘I’m coming back now to sort this out!’ she stormed. Knowing how volatile his wife had been over the last few months, Felix was seriously alarmed. ‘She says she’s bought a shotgun,’ he told worried friends.

When Susan returned to the Miner Road house, she was blazing with fury. If Felix thought he was going to kick her out of her own home he had another thing coming. On 10 October 2002, as soon as Felix was out of the house she had the locks changed and moved his belongings out of the main house and into the tiny guesthouse by the pool on the lower level of the compound. ‘Don’t do this,’ Gabreil pleaded, as his mother lugged his father’s bedding down the stairs. But Susan wouldn’t listen.

When Felix got back he called the police. He knew Susan wasn’t legally entitled to turn him out, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. Increasingly in fear of his life, he asked officers to stay while he collected some more of his stuff from the main house. He and Gabriel then left to spend the night in a hotel.

The next day the police were again called to find Felix brandishing a court order. It was proof that his divorce application had been granted. He had exclusive control of the house and custody of Gabriel, now 15. Felix’s monthly
payments to Susan were also drastically cut to $1,700 per month. The authorities’ view was that Susan was a
well-educated
44-year-old so there was no reason why she couldn’t earn her own living rather than relying on her
70-year
-old husband.

Now that he had the written evidence of his entitlement, Felix wanted the police to force Susan out of the house but wavered when he was told that a citizens arrest was the only way of getting her to leave if she refused to do so. Angry and scared, the 70-year-old retreated back to the pool house to try to think what to do next. Susan, of course, was seething with anger. She couldn’t believe Felix had gone behind her back to take from her the most precious things in her life – her children and her home. How dare he try to manipulate her like that? He’d soon find out that she was no longer merely a patient to be pushed around. And in getting involved with his teenaged patient three decades before, like Frankenstein before him, Dr Felix Polk had created a monster – and now the monster was fighting back.

On 13 October, Felix Polk dropped his 22-year-old son Adam off at UCLA, where he was a student, and then drove back to Orinda with Gabriel, arriving home late at night. Susan had spent the evening pacing the hardwood floors and stewing over the unfairness of the latest court order. She was convinced that this was yet another example of her husband’s overwhelming need to control her and to show
her that he still had power over her. Also to prove that she couldn’t function effectively without him – he was pulling her strings just as he always had since she was his 15-
year-old
schoolgirl patient, Susan fumed. It had taken her over 20 years to get up the courage to leave him and now he was determined to make her pay by taking away her home and, she had no doubt, by turning her boys against her too.

The middle-aged, twig-thin mother pushed back her now steely grey hair and folded her arms over her bony body, rocking slightly in the armchair by the fire as she waited for her husband to return home. She was determined to confront him. He had to realise she wasn’t that child-bride he’d married any more. She wasn’t going to give up everything without a fight. After the hell her marriage had been for the last few years, did Felix really think she was going to agree to walk away with nothing to show for it? It astonished her that even after all this time her husband obviously didn’t know her very well. Which is, after all, the tragedy of many marriage break-ups – that the intimacy and familiarity we once took for granted turns out to be an illusion that fades to nothing in the time it takes for the ink to dry on the divorce papers.

When Felix eventually arrived home – going straight down to the pool house – Susan followed him with the intent of having the whole divorce settlement issue out with him. ‘Not now, I’m tired,’ Felix told her, not relishing the prospect of yet another confrontation with
his brittle, belligerent wife. ‘Another time.’Though Susan went away, now she was even madder. What an underhand coward, she thought to herself. He tries to manipulate the system against me and now he hasn’t even got the guts to talk to me about it face to face. The unfairness of it all was eating into her, so much so that she couldn’t think of anything else. There was the cut in her monthly income, the fact that he was trying to take the house away from her, the way he was poisoning Gabriel against her – it all went round and round in her head until she couldn’t take any more. An hour and a half after her first attempt to talk to Felix, Susan was heading back down to the pool house.

As she made her way down the natural brick steps slippery in places by cushions of green moss, Susan Polk was still seething. It was as if the momentum of her anger itself was carrying her down the stairs. How dare he think he could get away with this! How dare he! Wearing only black underpants, Felix Polk was reading when his wife came storming back to discuss their divorce. How his heart must have sunk when he heard her approach, knowing he was in for a major scene. Couldn’t it at least wait for the morning, for goodness sake? He was tired and had an early start.

But Susan couldn’t wait. What happened when she finally stepped through the door of that poolside cottage to confront the husband she believed was trying to break her emotionally and rob her of what she was entitled to? Only
two people know for sure – and one of them is dead. The incontrovertible facts are these. There was an argument that quickly escalated into violence. During the altercation, a kitchen knife – a paring knife that was later described as the family’s ‘favourite’ – was picked up and Susan used it to stab her husband several times. He was left for dead and lay face up in a pool of his own blood.

Susan later claimed to have acted in self-defence. She said Felix attacked her and then become enraged when she sprayed pepper into his eyes and picked up a knife. While he had her pinned down to the ground and was about to plunge the knife into her, she managed to kick him in the groin and to take the knife away from him. When he tried to take it back, biting her hand, she reached round him to stab the knife repeatedly into his side. According to Susan, after this Felix Polk – renowned psychologist, father and husband –struggled to rise to his feet. ‘Oh my God, I think I’m dead!’ he’d said. And then he was.

Felix Polk’s supporters offered a different version of events. Susan Polk had gone down to that pool house with vengeance on her mind, they asserted. She couldn’t believe her husband had gone behind her back to get custody of Gabriel and ownership of the house, and she wanted her share in the millions she thought he had squirreled away. Either she’d had the knife with her all the time, or she’d picked it up when the discussion became heated. One thing was for sure, the supporters maintained – Susan deliberately
and callously stabbed her 70-year-old husband to death in a final act of cruel rage. Either way, the end result was the same. Felix Polk was dead

What went through Susan Polk’s mind as she gazed down at the lifeless body of the man who’d shaped her life since she was a troubled 15-year-old? Did she think back to happier times they’d shared? Did she see the face of a husband and a father, or just a man she’d come to hate? Whatever thoughts came crowding into her mind, she managed to push them aside enough to stumble out of the pool house and back upstairs. She knew that if she called the police then her life would be over. What was the harming in waiting, she asked herself. Why rush headlong into the hell that was surely coming? Back upstairs, she cleaned the blood off the knife before replacing it carefully in the kitchen drawer. Then she washed her clothes and had a series of showers. Afterwards, incredibly, she went to bed.

It’s a curious thing, the body’s instinctive need to cling to routine and familiarity at times of crisis. It’s as if we try to fool ourselves that doing normal things will somehow make our lives normal again. At times of unbearable turmoil, we take comfort from the mundane, the everyday. Susan Polk – who’d craved drama so much she’d previously tried to manufacture it in the accusations of child abuse, the psychic delusions – knew that what she’d done that night catapulted her into a future where nothing would ever be
the same. How appealing must her dysfunctional, but safe family life have appeared at that moment as she gazed back at it from across the chasm created by killing Felix.

There are some things that, once done, can never be undone.

The next day, 14 October 2002, Susan carried on with the charade of daily life, much as though nothing had happened. In the morning, she took Gabriel to school as normal, returning to the house to find her pet Labrador, Dusty, had gone missing. She spent the day looking for Dusty, cooking and cleaning. Then she picked Gabriel up from school and took him out to lunch, dropping in at her local Blockbuster store to rent the movie
Scooby
Doo
before coming home once more. It was an ordinary weekday in the life of an ordinary housewife.

As she swept floors and put out Dusty’s food, did Susan think about the body lying just yards from the front door? Or did she block it out? After all, it was beyond ludicrous to imagine Felix lying down there on the stone floor in a pool of his own blood. It was simply unimaginable.

Towards the evening Gabriel Polk started to get agitated. That night his father had promised to take him to a San Francisco Giants baseball game but hadn’t shown up. Susan had already moved Felix’s Saab to the train station so that Gabriel wouldn’t suspect anything and the boy was used to his father being out during the day but it was still unlike him to have forgotten something like this.

‘Have you seen Dad?’ he asked Susan.