Final Analysis (25 page)

Susan’s tale of that night was not the only thing that she had in store for me that afternoon. With help from Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde, Susan had obtained a startling medical report from the U.S. Navy that detailed the psychological evaluations of Felix in the days after his suicide attempt in 1955. Sitting across from me and staring through an inch and a half of Plexiglas, I asked her: “Why was Felix hospitalized for a whole year after his suicide attempt?”

Susan paused, and looked directly at me before answering. Breathing in deeply, she began to explain how the naval records revealed that Felix had received treatment for a “schizophrenic reaction,” following his suicide attempt in the fall of 1955. This psychologist who had been treating patients over the course of more than twenty years had, in fact, been hospitalized himself for serious emotional troubles. Felix, who had accused Susan of being crazy for years, had his own set of psychological problems, problems that he never attempted to address.

“Well, what the naval records say is that he was unable to give a rational explanation for what he’d done.” She grew animated as she recounted her findings. First, she pointed to her own suicide attempt in January 2001. “I was asked by the psychiatrist, ‘Why’d you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, in this moment of despair, I thought my husband would do the things he was saying he was going to do: destroy my life, take my children away, all these things. And I just had this moment of complete despair, and I’m very glad I’m alive and realize that I have options.

“My husband was very different. The records show he was unable to give a rational explanation for what he did. He talked about supernatural forces having been at work. He talked about hearing an echo when he spoke. He couldn’t remember what had happened. He had amnesia. And his suicide note made it sound like he had other periods of amnesia.”

Susan said that Felix mentioned his suicide attempt during their early therapy sessions in Berkeley but claimed that he was in despair over the breakup of a relationship when he tried to take his life. As far as Susan knew, this was the reason that Felix was overly sensitive to being
abandoned. At least, that is what she says he told her each time she threatened to leave the marriage.

However, after closer inspection of his suicide attempt, Susan learned that Felix’s claim was untrue. Horowitz had located Felix’s old girlfriend and gleaned from their conversation that there had been no break up. Felix, it seemed, had lied to his wife about the circumstances surrounding his suicide attempt. Worse, he had failed to mention his serious medical diagnosis or that this suicide attempt was the result of a “schizophrenic reaction.”

“Psych records describe him as being hostile, as being in the lock-down ward.” Susan explained. “They describe when he got transported to the hospital he got bruises along the way because apparently he got restrained. That’s a picture of someone who was extremely disturbed, who was apparently almost mute. He didn’t talk, you know.”

Susan told me of the journals that Felix kept. And for a moment, she considered my request to turn them over to Court TV. But in the end, she shared little of their content. “He [Felix] described himself in words that he used to describe me and projected all of it because I wasn’t really like that. I didn’t feel that way.”

After our interview, I reviewed the naval records carefully. According to the reports, Felix was taken to a military hospital after his suicide attempt. He was “confused” and “depressed” and claimed “amnesia” for the events prior to his arrival, medical records stated. He grew “excited” upon awakening. In response to questions, he told doctors he had no recollection of his suicide attempt, or of writing the note that police found in a typewriter inside the family home.

Felix was transferred to the U.S. Naval Hospital at St. Alban’s, New York. Records show that he had to be restrained during the transport. Doctors at St. Albans diagnosed Felix’s condition as “Psychotic Depressive Reaction with Suicidal Tendencies.” Further studies revealed evidence of “a schizophrenic process with much philosophical, abstract preoccupation with his lack of accomplishment, his emotional distance from people, and some concomitant disturbance in the psycho-sexual area.”

Under observation at the hospital, Felix talked of feeling apart in “all relationships with others” and having the sensation that he was
“standing apart listening to an echo” when he spoke. “His speech was at all times coherent and relevant, and no actual delusions or hallucinations were elicited during his hospitalization at the naval hospital,” the records stated.

By all indications from the doctors there, Felix showed little sign of change or improvement during his lengthy stay at St. Alban’s, where he was confined to a locked ward because of his “depression” and “hostility.” In fact, he remained depressed and talked of his confusion for much of the time he was confined. While doctors noted that Felix was not experiencing hallucinations or delusions during his hospitalization, Felix described his thoughts as “abstract” and spoke of “dreams of glory.” He complained that he felt in a “daze” and did things “mechanically.”

On January 18, 1956, Felix was transferred to an open ward of the hospital on “restricted” status, the records stated. The change had no appreciable effect on his condition. Three months later, he was placed on the Temporary Disability Retired list by reason of “schizophrenic reaction,” and later released from the hospital with a diagnosis of “in remission.”

According to the naval records, Felix reported to the Naval Command at St. Alban’s Hospital on July 25, 1957 for a “trial visit” from the Montrose Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Based on the visit, a three-man counsel listed its findings as a schizophrenic reaction. “In remission.” The Clinical Board’s findings noted that Felix was “unfit to perform the duties of his rank—schizophrenic reaction.”

It was decided that the physical disability “was not due to misconduct or willful neglect,” and that it was the proximate result of “dementia, mixed type, in partial remission, slight impairment of social and industrial adaptability.”

At my request, several well-known psychiatrists reviewed the U.S. Naval records and medical reports on Felix Polk. They reported back that if Felix had presented with the symptoms described in the reports today he would not be considered schizophrenic, but more likely a man who suffered from severe depression.

Nevertheless, this intimate look at his fragile emotional state was a key revelation, one that, if true, had dramatic implications—as a judge and a jury would eventually be examining his psychological state as well
as Susan’s. For years, Felix had openly questioned his wife’s mental status, while shying away from his own problems. This report was yet another example of the psychological double standard that he employed. To Felix, his own mental issues were never significant enough to interfere with his ability to parent his sons; only Susan’s problems were severe enough for that. In truth his psychological conflicts ran as deep as hers, and yet he refused to take the steps necessary to heal his wounds.

D
uring another interview with Susan, she described for me the sexual abuse she allegedly suffered as Felix’s teenage patient. “What I remember is that he became extremely interested in me.”

Susan claimed that Felix made it clear right from the start that he was “violating some sort of protocol” by seeing her as a patient. “I think he was referring to a sexual interest in me and I think I was just blocking out as much of that as I could.

“What happened was he started giving me a cup of tea when I came in. I’m sure there was a drug in it because what I recall next is counting backward and then no memory of what took place, but just looking at the clock, and the times, and saying ‘What happened? What did we talk about?’

“And this feeling, this sense of loss. This gap. It was a very, very disturbing experience, to not be able to recall what had happened.”

I asked Susan if she’d ever raised the issue with Felix.

“I brought it up, and he looked nervous,” she said.

Susan’s recollections of her early sessions with Dr. Polk seemed fuzzy at best; her words often became twisted when I asked her to clarify the abuse she allegedly suffered as a patient, and she failed to answer my question as to whether there was physical evidence to confirm her fears. After all, if she were a virgin when she first went to see Felix, then she would have most likely noticed some blood in her undergarments that first time.

“I recall the content of some of those hypnotic sessions, bits and pieces,” Susan answered in a soft voice. “And I recall being told not to look.

“I guess at that time I didn’t really think it was great that he basically had sex with me. And put me down…it just made me, you know, I was doing what I was told, but he was so overwhelming. So just, physical. It was just awful. And I really didn’t remember that for years.”

Susan claimed that she completely blocked out the sessions in which she was “raped” by Felix until she was in her forties. She described their sexual relationship as husband and wife as “unpleasant” and alluded to years of “rough” sex during their marriage. She said Felix enjoyed physically restraining her during intercourse, even as she lay crying.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He essentially, what he told me was that if I ever left him he would kill himself, or he would kill me.”

“So even when you were seventeen he was telling you this?”

Susan could not really answer my question. In many ways, her responses were childlike, and she appeared at times to be no more than a teenage girl trapped in a woman’s body.

“Felix wanted someone to dominate,” Susan maintained. “He wanted a doll. There was no individuality left, there was none of me.”

From all the evidence that I had seen and what she told me in this conversation, I had little doubt that Susan was abused during the marriage, at least emotionally. Felix had misused his power and position as a therapist to wield control over his vulnerable patient. His selfish decision to begin a relationship with the teen had probably prevented Susan from getting the help she so desperately needed.

“My husband was a professional,” Susan explained. “He was, I think, careful about what he did.…I think it is hard for someone who hasn’t been in a coercive relationship to understand how it is that a person stays in it.

“Because I kept hoping that it wasn’t as bad as I thought. That he wasn’t really as crazy as maybe he seemed to be. That when he said, ‘I’ll kill you’ with a smile, he didn’t really mean it. And that’s a huge hurdle to overcome…explaining to the jury that even though he didn’t beat me with a crowbar, it was enough to scare me to death, that I was afraid for my life, but I was also afraid to leave.”

Going on to explain how she managed the finances for both the family and Felix’s practice, Susan brought up Felix’s questionable relationships. She tried to ignore her husband’s inappropriate friendships with female patients over the years, but she detailed one incident specifically. “I just chose to interpret them as not affairs, but as just friendships…. But, in time, I guess the veil kind of fell from my eyes around when I turned forty, which is kind of a seminal period in a woman’s life, anyway, right?

“It’s like all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is what’s really going on, you know, I really actually turned forty and I said to myself, ‘Now, I should be prepared to face reality.’” Susan laughed aloud. “I just started to not lie to myself about certain things, including the relationship with one of his clients, another psychologist,” Susan said in reference to the woman whom Susan had seen her husband romantically embrace five years before his death.

Talking to her about Felix’s alleged indiscretions, I couldn’t help but wonder if this could have been the motive when she killed him. Whether or not Felix actually did cheat, it was clear that he had maintained relationships with some of his patients that were eerily reminiscent of his inappropriate relationship with Susan. In Susan’s situation, a revelation of infidelity might have pushed her over the edge, as this replayed her father’s betrayal of her mother. This possible motive deserved some serious attention, as adultery touched at the very root of Susan’s psychological issues.

Susan claimed that once she announced her intention to leave the marriage, Felix made all sorts of threats.

“‘I’ll drive you crazy.’ ‘I’ll kill you if you leave me.’ ‘I’ll destroy you.’ ‘I’ll throttle you.’ ‘Pull you down the drain.’ ‘You’ll wind up in an institution.’ ‘You are a bad mother.’ ‘You are so ugly.’…

“I think he was very crazy, a little more than I realized…. He was very, very split, you know, it was like night and day, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There were two sides to his personality. And he was extremely impulsive and malicious….

“It takes a certain kind of person to kill somebody’s dogs or to threaten their children…he would sabotage their progress in school. He was just a very dangerous, damaged person.”

D
ressed conservatively in a gray suit, her short hair overgrown and brushed off her face, Susan unceremoniously entered the courtroom of the Contra Costa County Courthouse on October 11, 2005, for the opening remarks in her murder trial.

Onlookers watched from the gallery as Susan slid into a chair at the defense table between her lawyers, Dan Horowitz and Ivan Golde. Next to the tanned Horowitz, she looked pale and fragile, having lost a considerable amount of weight since her incarceration.

In the days leading up to the trial, her lawyers publicly proclaimed they would prove Susan acted in self-defense when she stabbed Felix in the guest cottage on October 13, 2002. They asserted that responding officers contaminated the crime scene that night by moving the body from its original position on the floor of the living room.

Pointing to police crime scene photos, Horowitz claimed that documented blood smears around the body and on the floor nearby indicated that Felix had been turned over by investigators, thus destroying potential evidence of Susan’s innocence.

Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady had replaced Judge Mary Ann O’Malley on the bench after Susan complained bitterly of O’Malley’s bias. Judge Brady, a square-shouldered woman with graying hair and a conservative manner, had been appointed to the bench in 1996 by then-Governor Pete Wilson. Susan was unhappy with her assignment as well. Brady had served as a prosecutor with both the Contra Costa and Solano
County District Attorneys Offices, and had presided over numerous murder trials. She was married to Larry Brady, a longtime member of the Richmond Police Department who had recently retired after twenty-six years on the job. Using her preemptory challenge, Susan had asked that Judge Brady also recuse herself, but the court denied her request, ruling that Susan had filed it too late.

The trial had already been delayed two times by Judge Brady, who cited her “extensive calendar” as the reason for the postponements. In addition, Susan’s constant bickering with the judge, when she was acting as her own attorney, had nearly doubled the length of the hearings. Prosecutor Tom O’Connor had exhibited great restraint, despite the repeated delays. During his eleven years with the district attorney’s office, O’Connor had won several convictions on charges of first-degree murder and he appeared confident he would secure another in the Polk case.

After eleven days of jury selection, the trial finally got underway that Tuesday with O’Connor’s blow-by-blow recounting of the night that Gabriel Polk discovered his father’s “motionless body” covered in blood and lying on the floor of the family’s guest cottage.

A commanding figure at well over six feet, O’Connor grabbed the courtroom’s attention when he stood to address the jurors. In his opening remarks, he told the panel of six women and six men that the Polks were in the middle of a “heated divorce” when Susan confronted Felix that October night. According to O’Connor, Susan was furious after learning that a judge had awarded Felix custody of their minor son and given him sole occupancy of the house while she was out of town. Even worse, Felix had managed to have her monthly support payments slashed from six thousand eight hundred dollars to one thousand seven hundred dollars.

It was enough to kill for, according to O’Connor. Felix’s injuries were “of a man fighting for his life,” he continued. “In contrast, the defendant had almost nothing. Clearly, it was a one-sided battle.”

The prosecutor pointed out that Felix had been stabbed numerous times; sustaining six incise wounds and defensive-type wounds on his hands, forearms, and the soles of his feet. Police observed redness around Susan’s eye and small cuts on her hand. It was most telling, though, that
she publicly denied any involvement in her husband’s death for some time, although she claimed to have privately admitted her role to family members and her attorneys soon after her arrest in October 2002.

“Now she claims she killed him in self-defense,” O’Connor said, resting his gaze on the jurors. “The defendant is nothing but a cold, callous, calculating murderer. She got wind of what was happening in the divorce proceeding. She became angry…and came home [from Montana] to take care of business.”

Rising from his seat at the defense table, Dan Horowitz disputed the prosecutor’s allegations. “My client defended her life against an attack by a rage-filled, brutal, aggressive man who was also her husband,” Horowitz began in a soft voice.

Promising to dispel the prosecution’s claim that his client killed her husband for financial gain, he said, “This concept of the financial divorce is wildly unsupported.”

Susan wore a blank expression as her lawyer pointed out that she was the one who kept the family finances and was aware that once the court-appointed accountant reviewed the couple’s financial background it would become clear that the information Felix had provided to the court was inaccurate.

“Susan Polk was going to get her money back retroactively,” Horowitz insisted.

The defense attorney used his opening remarks as an opportunity to relate details of Susan’s childhood and to tell jurors of her early sessions with Felix Polk as a fifteen-year-old patient. He described the therapist as a delusional narcissist who “hyper-controlled” his wife and children and proclaimed that Susan and her family members would take the stand to testify as much.

At one point, he even drew a parallel between Felix Polk and fanatical cult leader James Warren “Jim” Jones, the American founder of the Peoples Temple Church in San Francisco and later Jonestown in Guyana. It was Jones who organized the mass suicide of 914 of his followers, including nearly three hundred children, and convinced them to collectively drink a Kool-Aid cocktail laced with poison in November 1978.

Horowitz insisted that just as Jones gained control over his disciples, Felix won psychological control over Susan by molesting her under hypnosis at the tender age of sixteen, and then continuing the abuse with threats and beatings over the course of their marriage.

From the front row of the gallery, Horowitz’s wife, Pamela Vitale, listened intently as her husband next introduced Felix’s little-known secret: that he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a “schizophrenic reaction” in the mid-fifties while serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. It was news to many in the courtroom that Dr. Polk had spent nearly one year in a locked ward of a U.S. Naval Hospital. Horowitz promised more on Felix’s hospitalization through testimony from a defense expert who would explain how Felix’s mental condition made him prone to “outbursts of rage, violence, and anger.”

“Susan Polk defended her life against an attack by a vengeful, rageful, aggressive man,” Horowitz insisted. “She was on her back. She fought him off and lived.”

In spite of Horowitz’s strong opening, the trial did not get off to a good start. Jurors seemed skeptical of the defense’s claim that police had mishandled evidence. In addition, Horowitz’s explanation for Susan’s initial denial and subsequent cover-up of the crime did not appear to ring true with the twelve jurors—especially after they heard the prosecutor describe her elaborate efforts to cover up the crime during his opening remarks. O’Connor pointed out that Susan cleaned and hid the knife used in the attack, got rid of her bloody clothing, and placed her husband’s car at the train station in an effort to cover her tracks. Those were hardly the actions of an innocent woman, he insisted.

The following morning, jurors boarded a bus for the Polk’s hillside residence to get their first look at the Miner Road crime scene. The group spent several hours viewing the pool area and the guesthouse where Gabriel found his father’s bloodied body.

That Wednesday, the jury heard from prosecution witnesses, among them the 911 operator who took Felix Polk’s call on October 6, exactly one week before the murder, to report that his wife had threatened his life.

“I remember the caller saying, ‘My wife threatened to kill me,’” police dispatcher Randee Johnson testified.

Another witness, Deputy Sheriff Shannon Kelly, one of the first officers on the scene, testified that Susan denied having done anything wrong during the ride to police headquarters on the night of October 14,2002. Although his role in the criminal investigation was limited, Kelly endured two hours of cross-examination by Horowitz, who was trying to cast doubt on police competence at the crime scene. This strategy proved lost on jurors, two of whom were overheard in the men’s room trying to figure out why Horowitz had spent so much time with Kelly. Apparently the men were unaware that defense lawyer, Ivan Golde, was also in the bathroom at the time.

“They didn’t see me,” Golde later complained to Judge Brady. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

The judge denied Horowitz’s request to have the two jurors removed from the case, but warned the men to refrain from further discussion of the case. “I know this is not like what you see on TV, but it is important,” Judge Brady told the jurors.

O’Connor closed the first week of testimony with a victory, as the judge accepted into evidence the letter Susan wrote describing Felix’s alleged involvement with the Mossad. The defense was successful in convincing Judge Brady to admit a second letter that Susan wrote to her children in which she detailed the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of Felix.

But the trial would take an unexpected turn when, four days into the case, Daniel Horowitz made a grisly discovery.

I
t was just before 6
PM
on Saturday, October 15, when the lawyer punched in the security code for the locked gates barring entrance to his home at 1901 Hunsaker Canyon Road. He steered his red Honda S2000 up the winding dirt driveway. At the top of the remote hill was an expansive construction site, where Horowitz and his wife, Pamela Vitale, were building a lavish, seven-thousand-square-foot Italian-style mansion. Off to one side was a rundown trailer where the couple had been living with their dogs for nearly a decade while they oversaw the construction of their dream house.

The temporary home was cramped and without amenities. The couple had been pumping their water from a well on the property, where Dan intended to start a winery once construction was complete. It was no secret that Horowitz was wealthy, although it was unclear exactly how he had made his fortune.

Dan first met Pamela, a single mother of two, in 1994 when she moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles County, according to a website maintained by Pamela’s family. At forty-one, she was a striking brunette, two years Dan’s senior and nearly three inches taller than the lawyer.

The couple was introduced by Pamela’s sister, who arranged for Pam, an independent film producer, to read a script that Dan had written about one of his cases. Bright, ambitious, and sophisticated, Pamela was employed full time as a software-marketing executive and was raising a sixteen-year-old daughter and nineteen-year-old son. Later, she would apply her computer savvy smarts to Dan’s law firm, maintaining databases and supervising the construction of their twelve-acre mountaintop estate.

Horowitz knew something was wrong the minute he spotted his wife’s car in the driveway. She was supposed to be going to the Kirov Ballet in Berkeley that night. His suspicions increased when he found the front door of the trailer unlocked. Stepping inside, he gasped at the sight of his wife lying on her right side in a pool of blood, her body pushed up against the couple’s sixty-five-inch television set. She was dressed in a T-shirt and panties, and there was a giant gash on her head. The carpet beneath her was red with blood, and the living room furniture had been moved about. The giant TV had been shoved nearly two and a half feet from its usual spot.

Hysterical, the lawyer called 911.

“Help me, she’s dead!” he yelled into the receiver and then knelt down beside his wife’s body. Cradling her in his arms, he tried to absorb the sight of her beaten and mutilated face.

“Who could have done this?” he raged.

The sound of a police car roaring up the driveway startled him to his feet. Racing outside, he shouted to the responding officers from the
Lafayette Police Department. Almost immediately, they pushed him into the police car and ordered him to wait while a team from the Contra Costa Sheriff ’s Department inspected the crime scene.

That night, sheriff ’s officers took Horowitz to department headquarters, where he was escorted to a room normally used to interview child victims. Over several hours, investigators fired a series of questions at him, first trying to determine if he was suicidal. Next, they handed him a pen and paper and directed him to reconstruct his movements; they wanted a detailed accounting of his whereabouts that day.

Horowitz told officers he hadn’t heard from his wife all day. He left home early that morning, around 7:30
AM
, to meet a friend for breakfast. Upon arriving at his Oakland law office around 9:30, he tried to reach Pamela on her cell phone. She didn’t answer. He met with a private investigator at 10:45 and finished up some work on the Polk case.

It was 2
PM
when he dialed Pamela for a second time with no success. Though he found it strange that she was not answering her phone, he wasn’t alarmed. His wife was a former high-tech executive who had traveled extensively, both domestically and internationally. At 5
9
and 178 pounds, she was no pushover. He assumed she was probably just busy with things at the house.