Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [130]
Jurors immediately took a liking to Susan’s mother, Helen Bolling. Petite and high-spirited, Helen had the panel in hysterics with her humorous responses to Susan’s questions. Barely five feet tall, she almost disappeared in the witness chair beneath the judge. Clutching her daughter’s childhood writings, school assignments, and photos, Helen adjusted herself in the seat and waited for Susan to begin.
“You’ve only been married once?” her daughter asked, referring to Helen’s marriage to her father, Theodore Bolling.
“Oh yes, once was enough, it cured me,” Helen cracked, as the courtroom erupted into laughter. Susan’s seventy-three-year-old mother grinned as she told jurors that she was “almost a virgin” when she married Bolling. “You know what I mean,” she smiled.
During her testimony, Helen boasted of her daughter’s creativity and imagination. Her pale blue eyes sparkled with pride as she pulled out the awards, prize-winning writings, and photographs of Susan’s youth that she brought to court that day. Her props, and the homespun stories that accompanied them, provided jurors their first glimpse into the tender side of Susan Polk—a side that most had not witnessed in the courtroom.
“Did you see any signs that I was going to grow up like the D.A. says, a homicidal.”
Helen interrupted her daughter mid-sentence. “No.”
Helen did not hold back her dislike of her son-in-law, and in defense of Susan, told the story of her own life-and-death encounter. While she did not identify her attacker, who had throttled her violently, she described how she had to react in an instant to save her life. Helen “played dead” to thwart the attack, but her daughter had not been as fortunate. Susan had no choice but to resort to violence against Felix’s onslaught, she said.
“Boo-boo Susie” as she lovingly referred to her daughter, was not the violent type. Helen maintained that Susan didn’t have it in her to deliberately harm anyone. As far as she was concerned, it was her son-in-law who had provoked the assault.
She claimed Felix “had an exterior of being acceptable. Hidden under that, is all that shit. Excuse me, I beg the court’s forgiveness, that’s not proper language.”
Helen drew a deep breath before completing her thought. “Felix had a way of persuading you into thinking he was a good guy.”
She told jurors Susan had attempted suicide shortly after beginning therapy with Felix but provided few details.
When asked about the possibility that Susan could have been behind the allegations of the ritualistic sexual abuse of Adam and Gabriel, Helen balked. “That was from Felix. It didn’t come from my side of the family. When we hear about Satan, we run like hell.”
On cross-examination, Helen told Sequeira that her “falling out” with Susan happened over time. She denied accusations that she and her husband had abused their daughter during her childhood. “Absolutely not!” she replied. But Sequeira pressed the issue, wanting to know why Susan would make such claims during her police interrogation on the night of her arrest.
Helen sat poker-faced as the prosecutor played the videotape of that portion of the interrogation for jurors. “Maybe when she gets angry at people, she has a falling out with them, she makes up things about them. If she did it to you, she did it to Felix, too.”
Susan jumped up and objected. “Torture of my mom on the stand. It’s not right.” Her repeated protests were overruled by Brady.
Helen continued to defend her daughter, even after viewing the video clip in which Susan called her father a “pervert” and accused her mother of abusing her. She argued that Susan was a victim of Felix’s mind control and was just spitting back beliefs that he had drilled into her. Proof of this was the fact that now, almost four years after his death, Susan no longer believed her parents abused her during her childhood.
On redirect, Helen said she forgave Susan for “the lost years.”
“Of course, you’re my daughter. You’ll be my daughter until my last breath. Furthermore, I think people are