Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [129]
Rising to her feet, Susan shook her finger at the judge and shouted at her from the podium. “I move for a mistrial for judicial misconduct on your part! You’re putting time limits on me, you’re not allowing me to recall him [Adam]…”
“SIT DOWN MS. POLK!” Brady instructed, as jurors filing out of the courtroom looked on in stunned amazement. “Recess until 9 AM Monday.”
Susan continued her ranting even as deputies rushed to the defense table and shut off her microphone.
Chapter Twenty-six
DEFENDING HER LIFE
On Monday, April 24, Susan arrived at court ready to begin her case. A blue, long-sleeved T-shirt and chinos replaced her drab prison attire. She looked very thin and bony; reports were circulating that Susan now weighed less than 110 pounds. It was not clear who delivered the clothing to her at the detention center, although her former case assistant, Valerie Harris, was amid the journalists and spectators cramming the gallery that morning.
Susan’s trial had already filled thirty-four days when she informed Judge Brady that she had subpoenaed more than one hundred witnesses and anticipated her case would take another three weeks to present. On Susan’s extensive list were both her mother, Helen, and her son, Eli, who was still being held at the West County Detention Facility in Richmond on charges of misdemeanor battery and violating a restraining order. These charges stemmed from the incident with his girlfriend, but Eli also faced a probation violation for the high-speed chase that resulted in charges of evading a peace officer. Authorities had agreed to push back his trial date from May 2 to May 16 so that he could testify in his mother’s case. Also on the list were the doctor who examined her in January of 2001 after her failed suicide attempt at Yosemite National Park, a high-tech crime investigator, a psychic, and a forensic pathologist who would testify that Felix Polk died as a result of a heart attack—and not from the multiple stab wounds she had inflicted.
During her one-hour opening statement, Susan called Felix “Dr. Frankenstein” and told jurors that he drugged, molested, and manipulated her during their twenty-year marriage. She quoted from Thoreau and Dickens and referred to other literary works to illustrate that many narratives have surprise endings and that innocent people are sometimes wrongly accused of horrific acts.
In her speech, Susan maintained that she went to the guest cottage “just to talk” with her husband that fateful night and that Felix fell back and hit his head during the violent struggle.
“I was framed,” she said. “I did not stab my husband twenty-seven times, nor did I hit him. He fell.”
Susan promised a “nail biting, edge of your seat thriller” defense. “You may think you know all there is to know,” she told jurors. “But it’s my turn now.”
As her opening progressed, Susan insisted that she was a medium and claimed her husband had used her psychic talent to gain information that he reported back to his “handlers.” Though she warned Felix about her vision of the 9/11 terror attacks, he failed to report her prediction to authorities. Despite her unique abilities, Susan explained that hers was an ordinary situation, one that could have happened to anyone in an unhappy marriage.
“What happened to me could happen to any family,” Susan said. “The D.A. will have you believe that I was controlling…that I was a Lolita.”
This was a case of systematic spousal abuse that had gone on for far too long. To Susan, the events were clear: she had not killed Felix that night in the guest cottage; he had a heart attack. Further clouding his death was the conspiracy that she alluded to concerning her family members and law enforcement.
During the final minutes of her remarks, Susan revisited the parallels found in literature. Jurors had heard only one side of the story, but before they could truly pass judgment, before they could decide her fate, they had to hear her version of the twenty-four years. When that happens,