Authors: Catherine Crier
Following Helen’s incident with her father, a subsequent investigation determined that the Avanzato home was not a suitable environment
for young Helen. At first, she was placed in the care of her older half siblings, but ultimately she was sent to live in an orphanage. Life there was unbearable, and at the age of fourteen, with $100 in her pocket, Helen ran away to Chicago, Illinois.
A friend’s mother suggested she go there and loaned Helen money to get on her feet. Fearful that the authorities were on her trail, Helen changed her name to Lois Stokes and set off for the windy city, where she found work as a packer in a warehouse and a room to rent in a good neighborhood. Her first disappointment came at Christmas time when she lost her job at the warehouse. Though she quickly found a new job as a file clerk for an insurance company, she soon grew to dislike it. With little keeping her in Chicago, she agreed to follow a friend to Hollywood, California, shortly after she turned sixteen. The idea of living amid movie stars was appealing, and Helen readily traveled to the West Coast, where she continued to work odd jobs, mostly receptionist positions, to pay the bills.
But this was not the life that she wanted for her daughter. After learning of Susan’s affair, Helen telephoned Felix’s office, and the two had a discussion. She insisted the therapist “be kind” to her daughter when he ended their relationship. While Felix did not directly admit to a romance with Susan, neither did he deny that one was taking place, Helen later recalled. He simply promised to do as she asked.
O
n November 25, 1975, three years after her therapy sessions with Dr. Polk began, Susan celebrated her eighteenth birthday. Turning eighteen was emancipating. Susan was finally “of age.” In her mind, she was now an adult and no longer needed to hide her affair. She believed she was in love with the well-respected therapist who was old enough to be her father. It was cool to be his girlfriend, and she wanted everyone to know about the relationship.
One afternoon while participating in a group therapy session led by Felix, Susan stood up and playfully placed her arms around Felix’s shoulders.
“Felix and I are lovers,” she smiled.
Members of the group sat in stunned disbelief before quietly dispersing.
Susan recalled that Felix was mortified and then furious. His secret was out.
Yet, as Felix worried about how to handle the group, he learned that Susan had also confided their affair to a female therapist, who also worked in Berkeley. When Susan disclosed her romance to that therapist, she never imagined that the woman would promptly report the affair—not to authorities, but to Felix’s wife. Sharon Mann Polk was incensed, and according to Susan, both she and the therapist lashed out at
her
for “spilling the beans.” Susan was surprised that the two women were angry with her—and not at Felix. After all, he was the adult and the one clearly out of line for being romantically involved with a patient, not to mention a girl half his age. Sharon Mann has repeatedly denied requests for an interview.
“They were mad at me!” Susan later recalled. “Yes, tell the wife, but don’t tell the medical board.”
Susan later claimed that she made the pronouncement hoping that it would anger Felix to the point of breaking off the romance with her, but that did not happen. Felix claimed that even though Sharon wanted to stay in the marriage, he wanted to be with Susan. Susan found his proclamation unbelievable. Sharon was beautiful, articulate, intelligent, and successful. For Susan, it was flattering to hear that Felix would choose her over his more accomplished wife.
Maybe Felix just wasn’t attracted to his wife anymore. Or perhaps he wanted to mold Susan into his dream girlfriend, she thought. According to Susan, Felix had gone to see a lawyer and was advised to leave Sharon and “marry her.” Marriage, the lawyer reportedly said, was the best legal solution for Felix, but that may or may not have been the case. According to experts, there may have been other factors at play.
Regardless of his marriage, the reality was that Felix had fallen in love with a woman who at fifteen was already very sick. Then the two began a very complicated social dance. It was not like the failed relationships with his older sister and his mother, women who were always
in control. This time, it was Felix who was in control, and Susan was the patient he could help.
However, in this attempt to save Susan, he unwittingly became the focus of her many internal conflicts, a process called transference. In psychological terms, transference occurs when a patient shifts feelings of anger, rage, disappointment, or love onto their therapist. In Susan’s case, Felix became her father. Complicating matters was the fact that the transference was not limited to Susan. Felix, too, struggled to reconcile his vision of Susan to reality, as Susan may have became Felix’s fifteen-year-old sister whom he had fantasized about as a teen.
It was a deadly mix of transference and countertransference, one that would have explosive consequences.
F
elix and Sharon Polk legally separated on October 10, 1978—one month after the couple celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. Ironically, Felix had marked the occasion with a $600 gift of silver purchased at Gump’s, the famous San Francisco retail store. Then, he asked for a divorce.
That fall, his teenage girlfriend sat for the Standardized Achievement Tests (SATs). Susan scored a 740 out of 800 in English and a 530 in Math, without taking any substantive math courses in high school. She was ranked in the 98th percentile in English and the 80th in Math. Soon after, she was awarded her GED.
The following year, Susan moved out of her mother’s house and in with Felix. By this time, Felix was no longer her therapist; now he was simply her boyfriend. When she demonstrated an interest in college, he chose Mills College, an all-girls school in the foothills of Oakland, and there is evidence that he was footing the bill for her education.
Compliant, and anxious to please Felix, Susan attended Mills for two years. But then she decided to take a semester off, and soon it became clear that her days at Mills were over.
Not long afterward, she began to feel suffocated by her relationship with Felix. It was okay when she still had all of her high school issues, and Felix was there to save her, but now that they were living together, she was
feeling more like a nineteen-year-old hostage than a girlfriend. She couldn’t make one decision without his approval. He was exacting and became edgy when things didn’t go his way. Finally it reached a point where Susan was afraid to say anything that might upset him.
To avoid confrontation, she often listened and agreed, rather than stir controversy. She began to think back to other points in the past where she had been afraid to disagree with him. During their sessions as therapist and patient, he would set out a number of provocative theories. For instance, he told Susan that all girls had fantasies about having sex with their fathers and that their fathers wanted to sleep with them as well. He also implied that most girls had fantasies of rape. When he asked a teenage Susan if she shared those fantasies, she grew embarrassed and told him “no.” Felix insisted that these thoughts were natural, and Susan had no reason to question him. Now as she looked back, she began to see the larger impact of those statements, statements that affected her ability to have relationships of any kind.
By 1979, however, she was no longer a naive teenager. For the first time, she felt capable of making decisions on her own. At times, she didn’t want to be with Felix anymore but didn’t know how to untangle herself from his web. That fall, she enrolled at San Francisco State University and moved on campus. Having a roommate and living on her own in the center of the city made her realize that being around other people was different than being around Felix. She was less anxious and no longer afraid to speak or have an opinion. It felt good.
At one point, she even mustered up the courage to tell Felix that she wanted to “break it off.”
Her pronouncement was met by a terrifying threat: Felix warned that he would take his own life if she left him. He had left his family for her and now he was going to kill himself. Worse, he began to cry and accuse her of violating his trust, saying that he had a problem with abandonment and deceitfully claiming that he tried to commit suicide after a girlfriend left him.
Felix’s psychological dysfunction seemed to pour from him as he told Susan of his secret troubles. He spoke of his difficult childhood as a survivor of the Holocaust and of his stay in a mental hospital after a suicide
attempt. He alluded to a problem with anxiety and panic attacks. He admitted to being jealous and confided that he had issues with “potency” in his first marriage.
Susan somehow felt responsible. As much as she wanted to be free of Felix, her guilt would not permit it. Besides, he was paying her college tuition and expenses. With this in mind, she resolved to stay in the relationship, despite her reservations.
In May of 1981, Susan graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State with a B.A. in English. That November, she celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday. One month later, she married her forty-nine-year-old therapist. The wedding took place just two weeks after Felix’s divorce from Sharon Mann was finalized. “Irreconcilable differences” were cited in the couple’s uncontested divorce, which was filed with the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda, on December 8, 1981.
After three years of heated negotiations with his wife of twenty years, Felix finally agreed to the terms of the marital settlement agreement, which provided Sharon with $2,500 a month and ownership of the couple’s Berkeley home. Felix also agreed to pay the college tuition for his son, Andrew, who was a sophomore at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and to share custody of the couple’s then sixteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer.
Susan and Felix exchanged vows at the Berkeley City Club on Channing Street on December 26, 1981. The elegant, buttercup-yellow mansion had vaulted ceilings, ornate moldings, and sweeping views of the university. It had recently been granted landmark status. While architect Julia Morgan, designer of the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, had built the elegant structure in 1929 for the Berkeley City Women’s Club, in recent years it was used as a catering hall.
Family members from both sides waited in the expansive dining room, with its limestone walls and palladium windows. Though several of Felix’s colleagues were in attendance, Susan had invited just one guest, Brenda, her roommate from San Francisco State. Brenda had never frowned upon the relationship with Felix, not even when Susan felt embarrassed by his age.
Susan liked that Brenda never passed judgment on her, but as she pulled on her wedding dress, a simple, short-sleeved gown, a terrifying thought came to her. She didn’t want to get married—at least not to Felix.
Suddenly, she felt lightheaded.
Susan had given her word to the waiting groom, who was downstairs dressed in a cocoa-colored suit and tie and surrounded by guests. She couldn’t go back on it now. That is not how she was raised; honoring a promise was the proper thing to do. As much as she wanted to disappear, Susan didn’t have the courage to become a runaway bride.
That evening, as she stood compliantly next to Felix, delicate and waif-like in a lacey, white dress, a wreath of baby’s breath in her hair, Susan consoled herself.
I’m young enough, she thought. I’ve got plenty of years left.
F
rom the start, trouble was brewing in the Polk household. Soon after their three-week honeymoon in Europe, Felix promptly laid down the law about “his” household.
They were home only a few days when he stormed into the room and began berating his new bride, calling her a “pig” and a “slob.”
“Let me tell you how I expect my house to be kept,” he yelled until he was red-faced, before firing off a list of things he wanted done.
Susan was stunned at how her new husband was “so transformed and abrupt.” Horrified by how he was treating her, her first reaction was to leave. But as Susan went for the door, Felix stopped her, grabbing her roughly and throwing her to the floor.
According to Susan, he raped her that day.
As she sat on the floor trembling, she thought again about leaving him, but the harsh reality of her situation hit home: she could never try to leave again. With a single act, he had crushed her spirit, which had just begun to blossom. After years of wrestling with her father’s abandonment and mother’s criticism, now Susan had an entirely new trauma to contend with—her husband. The rape that day set the tone for their marriage. The power and control that Felix wielded would only increase, and his role as the dominant force in her life would shape her character for many years.
In the weeks and months that followed, Susan recalled waking in the middle of the night, petrified with fear. Her terror was palpable, yet she
couldn’t put her finger on what exactly made her so scared. It wasn’t until her husband started to lecture out of town and travel unaccompanied to the East Coast to visit family that she noticed how her feelings changed in his absence. During these times, the weight she felt in her chest abruptly disappeared, only to return quickly when Felix came home. He was completely controlling about everything, from how she did the dishes to what time the meals would be served. Every time Susan endeavored to do anything as an individual, Felix would squash her efforts.
Part of the problem was that when he wasn’t traveling, Felix was always around. While he worked most days from seven in the morning until ten in the evening, he would come out between patients to see what his new wife was doing or where she was going. To conserve money, he moved his office into the couple’s home shortly after their wedding. Although he worked seventy hours a week for $50 an hour, Felix was $40,000 in debt. According to court documents, he and Susan borrowed $60,000 from Susan’s mother, Helen, for a down payment on their new Berkeley residence, but used some of the loan to fund their lengthy European trip.
News of the extended honeymoon infuriated Felix’s first wife, Sharon Mann. That Felix would embark on such an extravagant vacation, and then return home and claim he had no money to pay her, was stunning. Barely four months had passed since he signed the divorce agreement, but he was already incapable of maintaining his parental duties. Sharon’s outrage continued to fester when she received a handwritten letter from Felix in April of 1982 outlining his financial burden and insisting they renegotiate the terms of the divorce signed in December of 1981.
The never-before published letter, dated April 20, 1982, became part of their official divorce record:
Dear Sharon,
It is hard for me to write this letter to you but there is no choice left for me…. I can no longer afford to send you the monthly amounts that I have given you…our divorce agreement needs to be altered….
The divorce degree [sic] was held up so long and was issued so close to my wedding date that I signed it with great relief and without really reading all the fine print….
The reasons…are as follows:
I am aware that I have kept these things from you for a long time…. I did want you to be able to complete your training at Northwestern without feeling under stress…. I need to take care of myself first so that I can take care of all those, including you, who depend on me….
Felix
It is possible Felix was passively retaliating for what he later termed Sharon’s “manipulative” behavior throughout their relationship. “I promised myself many years ago that I would never allow myself to be ‘had’ by her as was true in the past, and I intend to keep that promise,” he once wrote of Sharon Mann in a letter to his daughter, Jennifer. Quite possibly,
it was Sharon’s controlling behavior that had first attracted Felix to the pretty brunette. Perhaps he needed someone to take control, or perhaps, her strong personality was familiar to him. After all, his mother had ruled the household and protected her children during wartime.
Despite Felix’s disdain for his ex-wife, Sharon was not about to agree to a reduction in her support payments—not after she’d spent three long years fighting over the terms of the divorce. She had enjoyed a certain financial status during their marriage; she had worked to put Felix through graduate school and had raised their two children. As far as Sharon was concerned, there was no reason to agree to his demands.
On May 25, 1982, Sharon filed a complaint with the Superior Court of the State of California, detailing Felix’s failure to fulfill their financial agreement and disclosing the contents of his letter in which he insisted the settlement needed to be altered. The complaint would be the first of many that Sharon would file. Nevertheless Sharon’s repeated requests to the court for assistance were ignored. In a personal statement to the court, written in April of 1983, she detailed how Felix’s pleas of poverty, and the court’s indulgence, had drastically affected her lifestyle.
“When my 23-year-marriage ended, I sought legal counsel and came away with certain assumptions: after a lengthy marriage in a comfortable financial bracket, it was assumed I would retain my station; I would be awarded the family home and have adequate support and protection into my old age; I would have enough financial peace of mind to pursue a doctorate and reconstruct an interrupted professional life,” Sharon wrote. “Within 16 months, support would be reduced three times, I would be living at an income level 18% of my former life, forced to sell my settlement property and a court of law would rule that a portion of the proceeds of that house sale be consigned to generate income.
“In the first of four court appearances, I was awarded the family home as settlement in the division of assets and a monthly income of $2500. Support was reduced within 6 months to $2150 and I was unable to keep up the house payments of $1425.
“I was forced to sell the family home….
“I considered buying another house, a small one, and paying for it in full. But my situation seemed too perilous to put all my assets into the
comfort of walls. I began to consider it of utmost importance to provide for myself after age 65,” she concluded.
For nearly two decades, Sharon Mann had enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. Now, in her mid-forties, Sharon was almost destitute and worrying about a future she once believed was secure.
Meanwhile, her fifty-year-old ex-husband was starting a whole new life with a woman half his age.
S
usan and Felix had been married for two years when their first child, Adam Eric Polk, was born on January 3, 1983. The delivery was difficult for Susan.
In a letter to Adam in June of 2002, Susan explained that she had planned to experience natural childbirth, going so far as to read books, attend classes, and hire a midwife in preparation for his arrival. Everything was moving along smoothly until the last month of the pregnancy when she was told the baby was in the breach position. Things worsened when her water broke three weeks before her due date. She was having no contractions, and doctors were facing the prospect of a risky, dry breach birth.
According to Susan, the doctors decided to proceed with the delivery. All they needed was her signature on a consent form. “I asked a few questions, creating complications,” Susan wrote in the letter:
They were eager to try out this natural delivery. I was being a problem. Then something welled up inside of me, it was a colossal no. I said, “Why am I not having a C-section? Why am I not having it now? The longer we wait, the greater the danger of infection to my baby, right? Didn’t you just tell me that? What are we waiting for? I want a C-section, and I want it now!”…Afterwards the doctors were angry at me. They were annoyed by my willfulness. I was there for a few days. The nurses were running off with you against my instructions to the incubators where they stuck enormous needles, IVs, in your little hand. I hobbled after you with my cart containing my IVs, ticking off the nurses. You developed asthma in the incubators, possibly a drug reaction.
The doctors blamed it on your premature birth.
It is clear from Susan’s writing that she felt a need to control her world—a symptom often seen in people whose lives are out of control. This was her child, and she wanted to make sure that he was okay.
More than two years later on June 2, 1985, Susan gave birth to Eli, while Gabriel arrived on January 10, 1987. Though Susan was a stay-at-home mom who felt comfortable with her boys, she and Felix enrolled Adam in day care shortly after Gabriel was born. It seemed the right time for Adam to get out and enjoy the company of children his age, so the couple placed him in a private day care program in the home of an upper-middle-class family. There was only one other child in the program, the caretaker’s own child, who was anxious for a companion.
After a diligent check of references, Adam attended the program about eighteen hours per week, in six-hour intervals. One morning, while standing in the kitchen getting ready for breakfast, Adam told his mother he didn’t want to go to “school” that day.
“Why don’t you want to go to school today?” Susan reportedly asked him.
“I don’t know, I’m tired,” Adam told her, playfully pulling open a drawer in the kitchen.
Adam said that his mother asked if anybody at the preschool had “touched” him.
He simply said, “Yeah, that’s it.”
Then only four and still in diapers, he later claimed he was not even aware of what it was she was asking him. But his response set off a chain reaction that landed Adam in therapy. According to Adam’s sworn testimony, his desire to stay home from day care that morning led to his mother’s belief that he had been sexually abused there. The Polks took Adam to see a therapist who reportedly confirmed that the youngster had been the victim of ritualistic sexual abuse during his four months at the day care program.
The unfortunate reality was that the fears that the Polks were experiencing were nothing new. At that time, allegations of ritualistic sexual abuse of children were making headlines. Newspapers in California were reporting charges of sexual abuse at a preschool in Manhattan Beach. The mother of a male student there had complained to police that a part-
time aide at the McMartin Preschool had molested her son. Police found no physical evidence to support the claim, and the district attorney declined to prosecute. However, the allegations sparked a panic in the community when the chief of the Manhattan Beach Police Department circulated a confidential letter to parents whose children had attended the preschool. The letter speculated that the part-time aide, the son of the school’s owner, might have forced students “to engage in oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttocks or chest area and sodomy,” and it urged parents to question their children. The letter included no proper way to do this, and interviewing techniques employed by parents and local therapists led to hundreds of false complaints.
A local TV station took the story one step further, proposing that the preschool might be linked to child porn rings in nearby Los Angeles. Only later did it surface that the mother of the alleged victim was an alleged alcoholic and had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
During that same period, allegations of ritualistic abuse were lodged against employees of the Presidio Child Development Center, a day care center run by the U.S. Army in San Francisco. Parents charged that a satanic cult was operating out of the center and systematically victimizing the young student body. Reports that children had been transported to private homes, where they were forced to engage in satanic and sadistic sexual acts, led to a police investigation.
With these allegations rampant, Susan and Felix began to subscribe to the hysteria, believing the worst about the people who cared for Adam. Felix, perhaps because of his personal and professional backgrounds, was acutely vulnerable to the spreading paranoia. Taking matters into his own hands, Felix authored a report entitled
Reflections on Psychology,
describing these cults as “very sophisticated” and claiming that “some were set up by the CIA as a way to learn/teach mind control.” In Adam’s case, Felix alleged that the perpetrators were “homosexual cultists” who had “sodomized and filmed” the boy during his hours in day care.
Using the paper as a catalyst, he took his views to the Fourth Annual Two-Day Conference of the California Consortium of Child Abuse Counsels in Berkeley in 1988, where he outlined the alleged abuse. Felix
was one of two speakers to address the audience that day. The first was a woman who claimed to have been a survivor of ritualistic child abuse at the hands of cultists, some of whom she described as family members. Interestingly, she was also a patient of Dr. Polk’s who was treating her for the trauma.