Authors: Catherine Crier
“Did you love your dad?” Susan asked her son.
“Yeah, he was just a damaged person…. Looking back, he was a really unstable person,” Eli described his father.
For the remainder of the afternoon, Eli confirmed Susan’s claims regarding Felix’s tyrannical behavior, his purported links to the Jewish mafia, and accusations that his brothers had turned on Susan out of greed.
“He tried to get you on medication,” Eli said. “He talked to the kids about how to handle you. His whole thing was ‘you were crazy’ and ‘you imagined things.’”
Eli insisted his mother had every reason to believe that Felix was linked to the Mossad. “We’d be at dinner and he’d talk about his patients,” Eli recalled. “He said he had a patient in the FBI who was an assassin. He said he saw numerous people involved in the FBI and the CIA.”
Eli also contended that two of Felix’s friends regularly spoke of their ties to Israeli Intelligence and the Mossad.
On Wednesday, Eli’s testimony was again interrupted when a surprise witness was wheeled into the courtroom and announced her need to speak out on Susan’s behalf.
Seemingly out of breath, seventy-seven-year-old Elizabeth Bradley’s appearance momentarily created what could only be described as a “Perry Mason moment.”
“Oh my God!” Susan gasped. “Eli, do you remember who this is?”
Eli did not recall the Polks’ former neighbor from Berkeley, but he sat quietly as Mrs. Bradley addressed the court from her wheelchair.
“I didn’t know when I should come,” she said, speaking to Susan at the podium. “But I arranged for a taxi and my son to get off from work, and my cardiologist arranged for some extra medications in case I had a heart attack or stroke, so I came without notice and here I am.”
Her shoulders wrapped in a shawl, Bradley guided her motorized wheelchair to the front of the courtroom. Her son, Edwin, trailed behind and held a microphone to her lips when she stopped in front of the clerk’s desk and addressed the court. “I’m obliged to come to the aid of a very special person.”
Initially, Sequeira objected to the surprise witness, saying that her name was not on the required list. In response, Susan told the court that she was unaware that Mrs. Bradley was planning to attend the trial. Her
former Elmwood Avenue neighbor had written to her in jail, upset over the way she was being portrayed in the news. Producing Bradley’s letter for the prosecutor, Susan said that they had spoken about her coming to court but nothing had ever been firmed up.
“Elizabeth, did we discuss your testimony at all?” Susan asked the elderly woman, whose frail body shook intermittently from palsy.
“No.”
“Today is a very special day, isn’t it?” Susan said, addressing her neighbor.
“Yes, April 26 is my seventy-seventh birthday. And I have to apologize for my difficulty speaking, because I’m in the middle of some major oral surgery. If you can’t understand me, let me know and I will try harder.”
During thirty minutes of testimony, Bradley explained that she had been moved to act because the news media “was demonizing Susan in such a way, I was shocked. There was no comparison to the Susan I knew.
“She was an outstanding citizen of the neighborhood and we loved her,” Bradley tearfully recalled.
Elizabeth Bradley said that she was a single mother raising two children when Susan and Felix moved into the neighborhood with their three sons nearly twenty years ago. “We were neighbors and friends. I babysat when Susan had to go shopping. I was like an aunt to the children. They were so adorable. I loved being around them and Susan.”
“You’re being too kind, Elizabeth,” Susan said in between sobs.
“I saw no meanness in the children, except that Eli took a terrible amount of sibling abuse from his older brother, Adam. And his older brother was the apple of his father’s eye.”
Bradley charged that it was not Susan, but Felix, who was emotionally agitated. She recalled one day that she was visiting the Polk house when Felix unleashed his rage on one of his sons. She was not sure which boy it was but said the beating sounded brutal.
“[T]his little boy was screaming something awful. I wanted to cry out but I couldn’t say anything. But the beating was cruel.”
While Bradley disapproved of the physical handling of the boy, she did not interfere, believing that Felix was a therapist and “must know what he is doing.”
“I spent a lot of time around that family and one thing I can tell you, in my lifetime, I never met a more diligent mother, housewife, and assistant to her husband.”
“Thank you for your courage and integrity in coming today,” Susan said.
“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. It breaks my heart. You deserve a better life.”
“I have a brave son like you do, Elizabeth. I have a good life.”
“No further questions.”
Bradley looked to the prosecutor. Sequeira had no questions for the elderly woman. He simply rose and thanked her for coming to court.
Jurors wiped away tears as Susan’s old neighbor rolled her wheelchair out of the courtroom, waving to Susan. “Bye, bye, honey. God bless you.”
Bradley failed to add anything new to the case at hand, but the theatrics meshed brilliantly with Susan’s showmanship. Susan maintained that she had no idea Bradley would come, but she adapted amazingly well to the moment, presenting a surprise witness who had nothing good to say about Felix and nothing bad to say about Susan.
Once back on the stand, Eli continued to bolster his mother’s claims of spousal abuse and her belief that a conspiracy was at work to wrongly convict her of murder.
“He admitted to striking Andy, his son [from his first marriage], and said that’s just the way he was raised,” Eli testified. “He told me his first wife [Sharon Mann] was crazy and delusional, and that’s why they got a divorce.”
The following day, Susan ended her examination and turned the witness over to the prosecutor, but by Friday morning she was demanding a mistrial. Furious at the way Sequeira was cross-examining Eli, she accused the prosecutor of being in cahoots with the judge to discredit the only one of her children to testify on her behalf.
“This is unfair treatment!” Susan said, jumping up at one point to object to Sequeira’s questions about Eli’s criminal past.
“Shame on both of you!” she ranted, directing her anger at both the prosecutor and the judge for their “tricky, nefarious, and devious” actions.
“I fully recognize that watching your son be cross-examined has got to be extremely difficult,” Judge Brady said, adding that the prosecutor’s questions were permissible.
During two days of cross-examination, Sequeira questioned Eli about his run-ins with the police and his on-again off-again relationship with his mother. He intended to poke holes in Eli’s claims that his mother was a victim of abuse, and not a coldhearted killer who stabbed his father in a premeditated rage. Using excerpts from Susan’s diary, Eli’s letters, and his disastrous trip to Paris with Susan when he was a teen, Sequeira stressed the often rocky relationship between mother and son.
Susan’s middle child did little to hide his disdain for the assistant district attorney and the court in which his mother was being tried. His responses to Sequeira’s questions were peppered with sarcasm and he accentuated the word “sir” when he replied to the queries.
With regard to the argument between his parents that had prompted him to strike his mother in the face, Sequeira asked, “Why didn’t you hit the abuser?”
“I don’t know.” Eli replied. He maintained that it was the first time he was ever violent with his mother.
Susan, meanwhile, raised objections when the prosecutor handed her son a copy of the police report that documented another instance of aggression toward his mother. She accused Sequeira of violating the rules of discovery, alleging that he had not provided her with a copy of the report he had just handed Eli. The judge overruled her objection, clearing the way for Sequeira to question Eli about the incident.
The report documented a call to police from Susan after another argument with Eli that turned violent. According to the report, she told police that her son had shoved her out of the house, locked the door, and then took her car without permission.
Eli claimed he couldn’t recall the incident.
Grinning, Sequeira moved on. He next inquired about the fight he had with a fellow teen in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant that resulted in a felony assault charge. Though Eli insisted it was just a
“fistfight,” the prosecutor noted that witnesses told police that Eli struck the victim with a flashlight—a claim Eli denied.
“I hit him four or five times,” Eli said.
“You broke his nose and cut his face up pretty good, didn’t you?” Sequeira noted.
“I object!” Susan jumped up yet again. “He’s attempting to interject hearsay information that hasn’t been established.”
“Would you like to see the medical records?” Sequeira smiled, rummaging through the papers on his table.
“He doesn’t even have them!” Susan shot back, watching as the prosecutor fumbled to retrieve the document.
“He’s attempting to confuse and mislead the jury,” Susan complained to Judge Brady out of earshot of jurors, “when the most important part of this young man’s testimony is that his father was violent, and that his father threatened to kill me.”
But Sequeira wasn’t finished with Eli’s rap sheet. There was the October 2003 incident in which he shot a passing motorist with a pellet gun. The bullet lodged inches from the man’s spine.
Eli insisted he struck the man by accident. He wasn’t aiming at anything in particular when he fired the weapon toward the road. “I was sorry. Accidents do happen. That was a terrible one.”
Sequeira also cited the high-speed car chase in which Eli attempted to elude officers, reaching speeds of 130 mph in his attempt to ditch the bag of marijuana he had in his Camaro.
“And then I pulled over,” Eli insisted of the October 2003 incident.
“You had a flat tire.” Sequeira pointed out.
“I was between homes,” Eli protested. “Things were going very badly. I made some mistakes.”
Sequeira also called the jury’s attention to Eli’s troubles in school, noting that he had been suspended from Miramonte High for making racist and homophobic remarks. It was a calculated strategy to portray Susan’s ally as the bad seed. Using Eli’s record against him, Sequeira cast sufficient doubt on his credibility, demonstrating the witness to be an unreliable person whose words were equally unreliable.
Continuing on, Sequeira raised questions about Eli’s allegiance to Susan, pointing out that he seemed to side with his mother when it was convenient. Supporting Sequeira’s claim was Eli’s aborted trip to Paris with his mother, as well as the March 2001 police report in which Eli sided with Felix, telling officers that he witnessed Susan kick his dad during an argument.
“I did what my father told me to do,” Eli defended. He now related that day’s events differently, saying that his father had attacked his mother, shoved her up against the Sub-Zero refrigerator and ordered him to tell police that she had instigated the fight.
Sequeira paused to let jurors digest the information. “And sometimes you do what your mother tells you to do?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you told a third version, too, didn’t you?”
Tossing his hands in the air, Eli blurted out, “I don’t know. I’m lost.”
Striding to the witness box, Sequeira presented the young man with a transcript from a July 2003 conversation with his mother’s former defense investigator in which he claimed that it was his father who kicked his mother that day.
“It seems like there’s been a mistake, a miscommunication,” Eli announced after reading the notes from Susan’s former lawyer, Elizabeth Grossman. Eli argued that Grossman was not really working for his mother. He then provided the prosecutor with a rambling explanation that made little sense to those in the courtroom. “It had to do with a conspiracy, a civil conspiracy, as well as the conspiracy to have my mother convicted.”
Sequeira froze in front of the witness box. “Are you telling this jury that Liz Grossman…is part of a large conspiracy to get your mother convicted and to steal from the estate?”
Eli looked directly at Sequeira. “I never said large. It takes two people to conspire.”
“You’re right,” the prosecutor said in a raised voice. “It takes two!” Pacing before the jury, Sequeira directed Eli to identify the members of the alleged conspiracy for the court.
Dumbfounded, Eli looked to his mother, who was at the podium demanding the questioning of her son be halted immediately.
Judge Brady cut Susan off mid-sentence and directed Eli to answer the question.
Repositioning himself in the chair, Eli listed the alleged participants. There was his Uncle John Polk, John’s lawyer, Bud MacKenzie, the Briners, and his dad’s friend, Barry Morris. “They’ve used their connections in this court and others to control things the best that they can.”
“Am I, me, Paul Sequeira, just some guy who works for the D.A.’s office, am I working for this big conspiracy?”
“I have not seen documentation, proof…no one has said anything to lead me to believe that,” Eli said. He also declined to speculate as to whether members of law enforcement were also involved, or that they had “staged” the crime scene, as his mother alleged.
All eyes in the courtroom turned to Susan, who was now chuckling. Addressing the prosecutor, she insisted that she never accused him of being a party to the conspiracy. “But, I’ve had my doubts,” Susan giggled. “You, too, your honor.”
“Ms. Polk, I do not find anything amusing about this,” Judge Brady reprimanded. “And I don’t think the giggling is appropriate. Stop it!”
Friday’s court session adjourned when the prosecutor announced that he had no further questions.
T
he following Monday, court resumed with Susan’s redirect examination of Eli. She would keep her son on the stand until Thursday afternoon when Judge Brady announced she had heard enough and halted the questioning. During those four days, Susan trotted out numerous e-mails that her sons exchanged after their father’s death and instructed Eli to read them aloud. “I hope you do join the team and then I can see you soon,” Gabe wrote to Eli in January of 2004.
“I’m disappointed in you,” Gabe wrote in another correspondence. “Get your shit together. You’re siding with a person who murdered our dad.”
Gabriel was not the only brother sending e-mails to Eli. In January 2005, Adam sent one saying he would entertain his mother’s request to write a letter to the court, pronouncing, “I don’t believe my mother killed my father in cold blood, but in self-defense.”
In response to questions from Susan, Eli maintained that his elder brother had threatened to disinherit him if he did not join the wrongful death civil suit that Adam and Gabe filed against their mother.
“If I could just apologize for my language beforehand,” Eli asked jurors before reading Gabriel’s final e-mail correspondence aloud. “Eli, if you believe all that shit, you’re a fucking psycho, and I never want to see you again,” Eli read from the page his mother handed him. “I really should start calling you Susan. Grow the fuck up!”
Looking up from the paper, Eli accused Sequeira of “smiling at him.”
The accusation caught the judge off guard. Straightening herself in her chair, Brady glanced at the prosecutor. For the record, she noted that he was sitting at his table, resting his cheek and chin in his hand and gazing away from the witness box.
“I object!” Susan barked. “The district attorney is making faces at my son.”
Brady drew a breath and instructed Susan to move on with her questions.
“Was it like a smiling face?” Susan asked Eli with regard to Sequeira’s supposed grin.
“Mrs. Polk,” the judge interrupted, warning Susan to move on.
“It was like a smirk,” Eli replied.
Brady instructed Eli not to respond after she had ruled.
“I object!” Susan yelled out.
“Is there any way to take this show on the road?” Sequeira interjected, shaking his head in frustration.
“It is a show,” Eli agreed.
Banging her hand on the desk, Brady terminated the proceedings. “All right! We’re done for the day!”
Humorous though it was, the episode reflected Brady’s growing frustration. Whereas once the judge had been willing to tolerate Susan’s behavior, she was becoming much less lenient. Furthermore, Susan continued to bait Sequeira, and her efforts were clearly taking a toll on everyone involved.
On Tuesday, Susan directed her middle son to read letters he had written to her in jail. She was anxious to point out the sections in which Eli referred to his willingness to take the stand and “tell the truth” about Dad, but she didn’t anticipate the unsettling impact that many of the letters would have on the courtroom. As Eli spoke about his mother’s innocence, his voice sounded less and less like a son, and more like a lover. The impact was palpable, as the jurors shifted in their seats.
“I miss you so much it is driving me crazy,” Eli read aloud from one. “You are everything to me…. The truth about Dad needs to come out.”
“P.S. I wake up and see your face,” the note continued. “I love you enough to burn all I am and meet you in the afterlife.”
Susan cried aloud as her son recited the words to jurors. He had already told the court about the framed photo of his mother that he kept in his locker at Byron Boys’ Ranch. He had made the frame in wood shop and hung it in the locker so he could see her face every day.
The testimony that day was disquieting, and Sequeira recognized that Susan may have alienated the jurors with her son’s writings. Once again the prosecutor had uncovered a weak spot to probe, and the following morning he did just that, announcing his intent to introduce short stories that had allegedly been written by Susan about a wife who murders her husband and a mother who has a sexual relationship with her son.
According to Sequeira, he learned of the stories six weeks earlier during a phone call from Susan’s landlord in Montana, former Congressman Chris Harris, who claimed he and his wife came upon the writings while cleaning the cabin. Harris said the writings were tucked under a mattress in the cabin that Susan had rented from him in the fall of 2001, but he was unsure if his wife had kept them. From the handwriting, Harris’s wife had determined that a woman had written the stories.
Susan argued there was no basis to introduce the material into evidence, as the landlord did not even have them in his possession. “There’s speculation that I wrote the dirty story and that I wrote the murder story,” Susan barked. “That’s totally slander. He [Paul Sequeira] should be ashamed of himself! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t say or do to de-fame me!”
Judge Brady postponed a ruling on their admissibility, saying there were “some issues” that needed to be considered.
Angered at the judge’s response, Susan launched into an attack on Sequeira, at one point blurting out, “The man needs a spanking and the judge should give it to him.” Judge Brady did not respond. Instead, she instructed the deputies to return Eli to the courtroom to resume testimony. Eventually she would rule the stories inadmissible.
In response to questions, Eli portrayed himself as the only one of Susan’s three sons to come to court and “tell the truth,” claiming that his father had hypnotized all three boys during twice weekly therapy sessions at the house. He contended that Felix served them tea and put them in a trance. “I remember not remembering what had happened.” He also believed that Felix was behind the accusations regarding Adam’s sexual abuse by a satanic cult. “It seemed like it was definitely dad’s thing.” And he agreed with his mother that his two brothers were part of a conspiracy to “loot” the Polk estate.
During his final moments on the stand, Eli told jurors that he believed his father’s death could have been prevented if someone had simply reported his abuse to authorities.
“Isn’t it true your dad did try to prevent it and now he’s dead?” Sequeira asked. He reminded Eli that Felix had called authorities several times in the days before his death, saying he was afraid for his life.
“First of all, I believed
he
attacked her that night, and she defended herself,” Eli argued. It was his contention that Felix was simply trying to set his mother up; that he had “every opportunity” to fix his marriage and had failed miserably.
“Your father’s dead, isn’t he?” Sequeira asked.
“I’m not going to answer that question.”
By late afternoon, Judge Brady had had enough. Susan’s repeated objections and requests to interrupt her son’s testimony with other defense witnesses now seemed like an attempt to keep Eli on the stand—and out of jail—for as long as possible. Brady called an end to Susan’s examination just before 4:30 that Wednesday, directing her to pick up her case in the morning with testimony from Montana real estate agent, Janna Kuntz, and retired forensic pathologist, Dr. John Cooper.
The following morning, Susan’s first witness, Janna Kuntz, testified about conversations she had with Susan in September 2002 while the two were out viewing properties.
“It was not a good marriage,” Kuntz responded to a question from Susan. “You were very unhappy and you wanted to move away, get away.”
The realtor told the court that she was under the impression that Susan’s husband was “a very emotionally abusive human being.”
“Did I express rage?” she asked the realtor, referring to the day she learned Felix had won custody of their Orinda home and their minor son, as well as a significant cut in her support payments.
“I wouldn’t describe it as ‘rage.’ It was more like, ‘Can you believe this? He’s gone and done something again.’”
Under cross-examination, Kuntz agreed that her feelings about the Polks’ marriage were based solely on Susan’s statements. She had never met Felix Polk and could not speak to his character from personal experience. In spite of the one-sided nature of Kuntz’s testimony, her appearance was a relief, as she brought a sense of normalcy to the otherwise chaotic proceedings.
The harmony was short-lived. For her next witness, Susan called Dr. Cooper, a self-employed forensic pathologist from Austin, Texas. Dr. Cooper had reviewed the autopsy report and was in court to dispute the medical examiner’s claims that Felix Polk died as a result of blunt force trauma and bleeding from his extensive injuries. Susan’s former defense attorney, Dan Horowitz, had considered hiring Dr. Cooper when he was in charge of the case, but he opted not to after deciding that the expert witness was a bit of a “kook.”
Susan seemed infatuated by her expert witness, smiling and batting her eyes at the fortyish Texan with the round cheeks, dark hair, and lispy Southern drawl as she stood at the podium. The doctor told jurors that he was an independent forensic expert who was often retained by prosecutors to provide expert testimony at trial. Though he claimed that defense attorneys with “wild theories” often contacted him, he said he usually denied the jobs because “I don’t want to look foolish.” During his career, he performed nearly two thousand autopsies and said he hoped to retire soon to pursue his interest in the medical practices of indigenous cultures.
Dr. Cooper contended that Felix’s heart problems were a “time bomb” and that heart disease, not multiple stab wounds, caused his death. He reached this conclusion after spending more than fifty hours reviewing materials related to the case, including the autopsy conducted by Dr. Brian Peterson, police crime scene photos, grand jury testimony, and letters from Susan that detailed her version of events the night Felix died.
“I believe Dr. Polk died of a coronary event while assaulting his wife,” he testified, noting that the autopsy found that two of Felix’s arteries were 75 percent blocked and his heart was swollen at the time of death.
Dr. Cooper characterized Felix’s stab wounds as “relatively trivial” and claimed they did not cause his death because the “severity of the injuries was really not that great.”
“In your opinion, was my husband killed?” Susan asked, reading from a list of prepared questions she had in front of her on the podium.
“No,” Dr. Cooper affirmed. “I came to the conclusion that the manner of death should be categorized as ‘natural.’
“The stab wounds were not enough for death without the coronary disease. He could have gotten medical attention and survived these injuries,” he concluded.
Rising from his seat in the witness box, the forensic expert strode to the front of the courtroom, his cowboy boots peeking out from beneath dark-colored slacks, and fell to his knees. He was about to provide jurors with a live reenactment of the events of October 13, 2002, as he believed they occurred based on his review of the evidence, and his interpretation was vastly different from that of Dr. Peterson.
Kneeling before the panel, he explained that in order to inflict wounds to Felix’s stomach in the direction they were made, Susan would have to be beneath him, and not standing, when she plunged the knife into his abdomen. Furthermore, Dr. Cooper was critical of Peterson’s findings, particularly his decision to list the exact number of injuries—twenty-seven stab wounds—found on Polk’s body on the autopsy report. It was his contention that Peterson was anxious to dramatize the findings in light of the media attention the Polk case was receiving.
“I would have just said ‘multiple stab wounds,’ because when we fill out these reports we know we’re going to be quoted…. I’ve read the stories in the press.”
“Objection!” Sequeira cut the witness off mid-sentence.
“I’ve read them!” Dr. Cooper shot back, to which the judge issued an admonishment.
Dr. Cooper testified that he found no evidence to support the prosecutor’s claim that Felix was rendered incapacitated early in the struggle
by a blow to the head. Holding up a photo of Felix’s head injury, he showed jurors that there was no indication that blood had flowed from the injury to areas of Felix’s neck and back. Blood droplets would be present if Felix had stood up after he sustained the blow, he maintained.
“He hit his head on the tile floor after he fell back from his cardiac arrest,” he concluded.
He testified that Felix’s death was the result of coronary deficiency and that the stab wounds were a contributing factor. This, he asserted, was a clear example of self-defense. Sequeira immediately objected that the witness was not qualified to make a legal assessment. It was one of many objections made by the prosecutor that morning, but his objections never stopped Dr. Cooper from testifying. Ordinarily, a witness stops speaking when a lawyer interrupts; in this case, Dr. Cooper just kept talking. This odd behavior proved quite frustrating for both Sequeira and Judge Brady, who finally called for an early recess.
“I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Brady told the witness out of earshot of jurors. “I’ve never had an expert witness respond to either party during an objection. Whether you agree with the objection or not, it is for me to deal with.”
“I’m sorry,” Cooper replied.
But Susan could not let the matter rest. Once again, she charged that Brady and Sequeira were conspiring, this time to “intimidate” her witness.
“I’m outta here,” the prosecutor announced, throwing his arms in the air.
“He’s playing chicken,” Susan accused.
“She’s right!” her mother, Helen Bolling, shouted from the gallery, an outburst that prompted a court bailiff to expel the elder woman from the courtroom. Once in the hallway, Bolling told reporters that she viewed her daughter’s murder trial as “unfair,” labeling it a “phony trial.”
That afternoon, Dr. Cooper continued his testimony, listing seven reasons why he believed that Dr. Peterson’s autopsy was not “objective.” There was the “physical improbability factor” with Felix standing five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than his wife and “direct evidence” such as the injury on Susan’s face and strands of her hair in Felix’s death grip. According to Dr. Cooper, the “defensive wounds” on Felix’s body
supported the theory that he was attacking Susan with his right hand while blocking the knife with his left. He noted that the wounds had a leftward slant and clumps of Susan’s hair were found in his right hand. Cooper insisted that the data indicated that Felix “didn’t turn and run.” The fact that Felix ripped out strands of his wife’s hair, punched her in the face, and bit her on the hand was proof that he was the party responsible for the assault, the expert argued. “To me, he did not try to avoid violence, he was trying to perpetuate it,” he said.