Final Analysis (6 page)

A
s fifteen-year-old Gabriel Polk talked with the officers, his mother was in an adjacent interrogation room, giving a completely different account of the past forty-eight hours to sheriff ’s investigators. Contra Costa Sheriff ’s officer Kenneth Hansen had taken Susan into custody as soon as she answered the front door that night. He had been alerted over the police radio that she had long suffered from mental illness and could be in possession of a weapon. Not about to take any chances, he watched her cross the living room through the home’s expansive windows as he ascended the stone steps to the front of the house with his gun at the ready.

By the time Officer Hansen reached the landing, Susan was already standing in the doorway. Pulling a pair of handcuffs from his belt, he immediately closed them around her thin wrists and sat her down on a small wood bench just outside the front door. Directing his partner, Shannon Kelly, to keep a watch on the suspect while he inspected the property, Hansen left to locate and secure the pool house, where the victim was supposed to be. Flashlight in hand, he climbed the brick steps to the pool and adjacent cottage. After only a few minutes, he returned and apologetically advised Susan that her husband was dead, apparently from “unnatural causes.” He didn’t elaborate or reveal that he had just observed Felix Polk covered in blood on the floor of the pool house. Most of the blood appeared to be dry, an indication that he’d been dead for some time.

He noticed that Susan did not react to his pronouncement. She sat on the bench and said nothing. At one point, he removed her handcuffs and asked that she sign a consent form to search all four buildings on the property, which she did without hesitation.

It was after 11
PM
when Officer Kelly escorted Susan Polk to the Field Operations Bureau in Martinez.

“Where is my son?” Susan asked repeatedly during the twenty-minute ride to Martinez. “Is he okay?”

Officer Kelly did not know the answer.

“Are you sure it’s my husband?” Susan prodded. “Did my son identify the body? Because his car isn’t here,” referring to Felix’s 1999 Saab.

Officers securing the Miner Road house had located four cars during their initial search of the property, but the Saab was not among them.

“Are you comfortable?” Officer Kelly inquired, thinking about the patrol car’s temperature, not the handcuffs around Susan’s wrists.

“I’m not too comfortable being in the back of a police car,” Susan responded. “My husband was killed, and I didn’t do anything.”

“E
xcuse me, do you have a blanket, or a jacket or something?” Susan asked Detective Mike Costa as he entered the sterile interrogation room some time after midnight on October 15. Dressed in shorts and a polo shirt, Susan felt chilled in the small, air-conditioned room, and Costa offered her an official police jacket.

The stocky, mustached detective had introduced himself to Susan earlier in the night at the crime scene, where he had been assigned lead investigator status. He had been on the force for twenty-six years and had responded to more than a hundred homicides since joining the Criminal Investigations Division. Now, having been briefed about Susan’s arrest and her statements to police while in route to the field operations office, he was prepared to question her.

“Okay. Like I said at the house, Susan, my name is Mike,” the investigator began, taking a seat at the room’s small round table. “I’m a detective with the Sheriff ’s Office, okay? We are going to be looking at what hap
pened to your husband tonight. I assume it’s your husband in the…what you guys call the pool house out there.”

“The guesthouse,” Susan corrected, wrapping the jacket with the official police emblem around her shoulders. “I didn’t hear any shots. I don’t own a firearm right now.”

“Okay, because you’re in custody here, and you’re not under arrest. I want you to understand that. But you’re not free to leave, okay. The law says I have to admonish you of your rights, okay.”

“Uh, huh.”

“Do you want to talk to me about what happened?”

“I do, and I am very, very tired,” Susan told the detective, unaware that she was being secretly recorded by a camera hidden in the ceiling.

“So am I. I haven’t been to bed all day either, but we have to do this.”

Susan looked directly at the officer. “What did happen?”

“Well, that’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”

“I did not hear any gunshots, and I do not own a firearm.”

“Okay, you’ve been occupying the main house.”

“I didn’t see him all day today, so I don’t know.”

“Okay, what time did you wake up today?” the detective inquired.

“I woke up at around seven.”

“Seven
AM
, this morning?”

“Uh, huh. I took my son to school.”

“Which son?”

“Gabe.” Susan said, as she began retracing her steps during the day. She busied herself with housework and cooking after picking Gabe up from school on Monday afternoon. Around 8:30 that night, she took a bath.

“And during this time, didn’t you wonder where Felix was?”

“Yeah, I did wonder,” she replied dryly. “In fact, Gabe and I talked about it in the morning. Gabe thought they were going to a game together.”

Susan repeated that she hadn’t seen her husband at all that day. “And I didn’t see his car this morning.”

“Does he park it in the garage?”

“He parks it in the lower driveway.”

Detective Costa jotted something on a notepad. “How long have you guys been married?”

“It would be twenty-one years in December.”

“How long has the marriage not been going well?”

“Well, there have been times off and on throughout the marriage when I’ve brought up getting a divorce. And particularly five years ago, I said that I couldn’t see living with him any longer.”

“That was five years ago.” The detective pointed out that the couple was still together and had moved to a new house in Orinda just eighteen months earlier.

“Well, he said, you know, that he would never let me go and that kind of thing…. And he was really, it was just very difficult. I don’t have a job, and you know he is my source of income.

“And we do have some apartments, and we get income from those, too. But I just, you know, couldn’t, and I was very attached to him, too…. So, I mean it was like, you know, yeah, I wanted a divorce but then he would say things, and then it would be hard to go through with it.”

“So the past five years, it’s been particularly bad? Is that what you are saying?”

“Five years ago, it was very, very clear that I wanted a divorce.…And I backed off of it…pretty quickly.”

“Where is this marriage, as far as from a legal standpoint right now? The officers out there told me that you both have attorneys.”

“I fired my attorney, I don’t have an attorney right now.”

“How long ago?”

“Just a few days ago…. I had the house, I was given exclusive use of the house and custody of Gabriel…but then there were proceedings in juvenile court,” Susan explained. She claimed that initially she had been granted custody of Gabe and the Miner Road residence. But she said that difficulties arose that past winter when the judge wanted to grant Felix custody of the couple’s middle child, Eli.

Eli had been in trouble with the law. He was arrested in February 2002 for possession of marijuana and for assaulting a fellow student with a weapon. Further complicating matters, Susan had encouraged her son to remove the ankle monitor he wore as part of his sentence, leave his father’s home against court orders, and join her and Gabriel in Montana for an extended holiday that summer.

Even though Susan took full responsibility for her son’s violation, the judge had sentenced Eli earlier in the month to time at the sixty-acre juvenile camp, Byron Boys’ Ranch.

“And it was just really upsetting for me,” Susan continued. “It was just, you know, I couldn’t see living around here anymore. Gabe and I and Eli had lived in Montana for a few months last year in the fall of 2001. And it was just really great. So I decided I would head for Montana and find a place to live.”

Launching into the story of the court order and the reduction of her spousal support payments, Susan made no attempt to hide her dissatisfaction with the court decisions that had been made in her absence, eventually telling her side of the events that had occurred that past Wednesday, which resulted in Felix’s call to 911. Informing Costa of how her trip to Montana had impacted her relationship with Gabriel, Susan tried to demonstrate her son’s bias, telling Costa that Gabriel had “turned loyal to his dad” without her around.

While she was trying her best to appear sympathetic to the officer, Susan was doing little for her case. Her tale was winding and disjointed, laden with tangential stories. On one hand she managed to control her anger when she discussed Felix, but on the other, she did not appear convincingly affected by her husband’s death. As she answered questions, she opened herself to increasing scrutiny, showing the investigators that she had both the motive and opportunity to kill her husband.

The detective continued to take notes, and at some point tried to steer the interview back to the events preceding the murder. “So getting back to this morning, you said you woke up at 7
AM
. Never saw Felix the whole day?”

“No. But I mean it was unusual because it’s a holiday, and Gabe said he was going to be around. And usually he makes an appearance at the house. But since I’ve been back in the house, I’ve said not to just walk into the house. To knock at the door.”

“Didn’t you see him yesterday?”

“Oh, yeah, I did. Yesterday was Sunday. He and Adam got up around five to leave for UCLA with Gabe. And he was marching around the
house, so I went down and said, ‘You know, you’re not supposed to be in the house.’”

“So, at some point, Adam came back from UCLA?” the detective asked.

“Yeah, Adam flew back on Friday.”

“This past Friday?”

“Uh, huh.”

“And Sunday you’re saying they all left to go back to UCLA?”

“Right. To drive Adam with the dog, ’cause Adam wanted his dog at UCLA.”

“And when did they get back, Gabe and your husband?”

Susan paused. “I’m not sure, I think Gabe walked in around nine or ten or something.”

“So they went down and back in one day?”

“Yeah, pretty miserable, but yeah.”

“Well okay, let me ask you this? When is the last time you saw your husband?”

“Sunday morning around five or five thirty when I came downstairs and chewed him out for just roaming around the house.”

“And then Gabe and your husband came back that night, Sunday night.”

“Yeah, Gabe walked in around ten probably and said, ‘Hi, Mom.’ I was in my bed.”

“Okay. Do you own any firearms?”

“Well, a number of years ago, probably sixteen, seventeen years…my husband had a patient who was an ATF agent and he took me out and helped me purchase a revolver…. I don’t remember, I think it’s like Smith and Wesson, something revolver.”

“Okay, so you bought a revolver?”

“Yes…. But I have not had that gun for a long time. He has had it. Since we separated, at least.”

“Where is the gun now?”

“He took it to his office, I don’t know.”

“Your husband took it?”

“Yeah.”

“How long ago did he take it?”

“A few years…maybe two years. I said I didn’t want to have a gun around the house.”

“So what’s all this about a shotgun that I heard about?” Detective Costa asked. “You supposedly said you were gonna get a shotgun.”

“No,” Susan replied, closing the shiny black police jacket tightly around her.

“You never had a shotgun?” the officer asked emphatically.

While Susan’s son, Gabriel, was in the adjacent room telling officers that he was certain his mother had a shotgun, and had used it to kill his father, Susan was insisting that it was Gabriel who had inquired about obtaining a gun.

“In fact, my son was talking to me today about how he wanted to have…have some gun that he had his heart set on,” Susan claimed. “And I was like, no, because it’s just not a good idea. And he was asking me what the gun laws were, and whether he could….

“So I said, ‘If you want a gun, go into the military and then you can, you know, get into all of that,’” Susan rambled on. “But no, you know, I don’t think you should.”

“Did he indicate that he already had one?” Detective Costa asked.

“Oh, God, no…. He’s a good boy. He’s going to continuation school, not because he’s been in, you know, trouble or anything. It’s mainly the divorce, divorce issues.”

It was then that Costa returned his attention to Susan’s actions after Gabriel found the body, asking Susan to recount the sequence of events once Gabriel made his gruesome discovery. Telling the detective of Gabriel’s assertion that she had murdered his father, Susan did not appear the least bit distraught that her son would make such a painful accusation. As she walked him through her activities leading up to the police officers’ arrival, Susan finished by telling him about how the officer that handcuffed her was the one to tell her that it appeared her husband had been killed.

“And what did you say to that?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Okay, I mean if somebody gets told her husband was killed, I would expect some reaction, some sort of response.”

For nearly an hour, he had listened as the forty-four-year-old housewife rambled on about her life, her financial arrangements, and the details of her crumbling marriage. Her husband was dead, and yet she had not exhibited one iota of grief. How could she remain so stoic, or was she just cold? The detective was incredulous.

Trying to better understand the situation, Costa dug into Felix’s personal life, soliciting answers about whether Felix engaged in extra marital affairs or gambling that might generate enemies. While she said that Felix had had affairs in the past, he was not a man to owe money to loan sharks, and both of these questions led nowhere.

Costa began to explore the nature of the family dynamic, questioning Susan about Felix’s deceased parents and the whereabouts of Felix’s twin brother and his sister who both lived on the East Coast. Probing the relationship with her own parents, Costa found Susan unhelpful as she repeatedly described her father as a “pedophile” and her mother as “perverted,” while informing Costa that neither had any contact with the family in years.