Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [100]
“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.”
PART III
THE TRIAL
Chapter Twenty-two
A MACABRE TWIST
Dressed 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