Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [145]
Moving on from her abuse, Susan recalled her January 2001 suicide attempt and her decision to move out of the Orinda house and rent a cottage in Stinson Beach. During that trip, Susan decided not to return home but experienced a change of heart when Eli and Gabriel begged her to come back. It was while she was living in Stinson Beach that she began her diary, vowing to look at life with more humor. Normally, Susan said, she would run from the room crying when Felix would bully her. Now, she would not let herself become unglued; she would adopt a more sarcastic attitude when he tried to intimidate her. But according to Susan, her new approach only succeeded in further enraging her husband.
“I finally made up my mind,” she said. “I wasn’t going to behave like a caged bird. I would live my life. I could go shopping if I wanted to.”
Upon her return to Orinda, Susan observed that her three boys had changed. They were growing increasingly chauvinistic, more like Felix. To remedy the situation, Susan arranged to travel with her sons to show them the proper way to act around a woman, taking Gabe to Thailand and Hawaii, and Eli to Paris.
At lunchtime, jurors filed out of the courtroom, notebooks and pens in hand, but they were pretty much the only people who were guaranteed seats upon their return. Interest in Susan’s testimony was so great that court officers returned from the lunch break that afternoon to find a line that stretched from the second-floor courtroom across the hall to the public bathrooms. In a rush for one of fifty seats in the gallery, Susan’s own mother, Helen Bolling, was pushed to a spot in the back of the courtroom to hear the remainder of her daughter’s testimony that day.
While listeners had been riveted by Susan’s testimony in the morning, their interest would wane before she was finished for the day. What had begun as a poignant story of a flawed relationship between a fragile teen and her much-older therapist would soon degenerate into an outlandish tale of brutality, and spies and conspiracy theories. After the lunch break, Susan described how she had been repeatedly raped and drugged by her therapist husband who used her as a “project” to further his studies of hypnosis and ESP. Susan maintained that as a teenage patient, Felix spiked her tea with drugs, lulled her into a trance, and coerced her into sex. He later demanded that she make predictions on world events that he could pass along to his Israeli operatives.
“I wanted a normal life. I didn’t want to be a medium. I didn’t want to live like that,” Susan said, claiming to have predicted both attacks on the World Trade Center and to have thwarted the assassination of Pope John Paul II.
“Looking back over my life, I became convinced that he was actually poisoning me,” Susan told jurors, recalling that at one point she started experiencing numbness and tingling in her extremities. “Felix smiled and said it was MS,” she said. But when a doctor discounted that diagnosis, Susan surmised that her husband likely was poisoning her. To be sure, she stopped accepting food and beverages from him, a tactic that put an end to her symptoms.
It was soon after her surprise fortieth birthday party that Susan realized she could no longer stay married to Felix. “I looked around that room and saw mostly patients, patients who were his friends,” she recounted. “I thought,