Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [17]
As the interview progressed, Gabriel displayed signs of stress. He had difficulty sitting still in his chair and avoided direct eye contact with the officers. At times, he seemed close to tears, and other moments he appeared detached and spoke in a monotone.
“Did she talk about killing him while she was in Montana?” Officer Moule inquired.
Cupping his forehead with his hands, Gabe paused for a moment as if to think. “I’m not sure,” he uttered. “She said she was taking care of business. It sounded like it was about dad. She wanted to handle dad, I don’t know how…. To get money and stuff.”
Gabriel went on to say that his mother had actually spoken of killing his father.
“Did she say how she would kill him?” the detective asked.
The teen sat back in his chair. “Drugging him, and drowning him in the pool,” he replied. “Maybe run him over, or tampering with his car.”
“Why was she telling you all this?”
“I don’t know. She thought that, like, I agreed with her or whatever, when I was going along with what she was saying, or that, I don’t really know why she told me. She just trusted me, trusted me.”
“Did you kind of agree with her?” Officer Moule asked.
“No.”
“Did you and your dad get along all right?”
Gabriel paused. “Fairly well.”
Gabriel claimed his mother had been talking about murdering his father on and off for weeks, most recently when he was eavesdropping on the October 7 phone conversation between them during his mother’s return trip from Montana. “When she was coming back from Montana, she actually called my dad and told him what she was going to do. She threatened to shoot him with a shotgun.”
“So how did she phrase, what did she say?”
“She just said that, oh yeah, that if he didn’t let her stay in the house with me—she wanted him to be out in the cottage, and if he didn’t let that happen, let her in the house, she would kill him.”
The teen’s eyes grew wet as he recounted his father’s fear. Gabriel said his father had been so frightened by the conversation with Susan that he arranged to have police waiting at Miner Road in anticipation of her return, but after several hours, it grew too late in the evening and the officers left the property. When his mother finally arrived, “She walked right in the house. They had a nice talk. Not a nice talk, but they were calm. I was there for the whole thing,” he said.
“What were they talking about?”
“Money. And that she thought it was not fair that they had a court hearing without her.”
“And what did your dad say to that?”
“I don’t know, but it was calm. Then my dad was just trying to deal with her.”
Two days later, however, it was a different story. It was then, after Susan had Gabriel move all of Felix’s belongings to the guesthouse, that she threatened to kill him.
“What did she say? How did she phrase that?”
“She whispered something in his ear. I didn’t hear it, but…my dad got excited and called the police.”
“How do you know that she threatened to kill him?”
“Because my dad isn’t alive.”
Chapter Five
SUSAN’S DENIAL
As fifteen-year-old Gabriel Polk talked with the officers, his mother was in an adjacent interrogation room, giving a completely different account of the past forty-eight hours to sheriff ’s investigators. Contra Costa Sheriff ’s officer Kenneth Hansen had taken Susan into custody as soon as she answered the front door that night. He had been alerted over the police radio that she had long suffered from mental illness and could be in possession of a weapon. Not about to take any chances, he watched her cross the living room through the home’s expansive windows as he ascended the stone steps to the front of the house with his gun at the ready.
By the time Officer Hansen reached the landing, Susan was already standing in the doorway. Pulling a pair of handcuffs from his belt, he immediately closed them around her thin wrists and sat her down on a small wood bench just outside the front door. Directing his partner, Shannon Kelly, to keep a watch on the suspect while