Catherine Crier: Final Analysis

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.”

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 he inspected the property, Hansen left to locate and secure the pool house, where the victim was supposed to be. Flashlight in hand, he climbed the brick steps to the pool and adjacent cottage. After only a few minutes, he returned and apologetically advised Susan that her husband was dead, apparently from “unnatural causes.” He didn’t elaborate or reveal that he had just observed Felix Polk covered in blood on the floor of the pool house. Most of the blood appeared to be dry, an indication that he’d been dead for some time.

He noticed that Susan did not react to his pronouncement. She sat on the bench and said nothing. At one point, he removed her handcuffs and asked that she sign a consent form to search all four buildings on the property, which she did without hesitation.

It was after 11 PM when Officer Kelly escorted Susan Polk to the Field Operations Bureau in Martinez.

“Where is my son?” Susan asked repeatedly during the twenty-minute ride to Martinez. “Is he okay?”

Officer Kelly did not know the answer.

“Are you sure it’s my husband?” Susan prodded. “Did my son identify the body? Because his car isn’t here,” referring to Felix’s 1999 Saab.

Officers securing the Miner Road house had located four cars during their initial search of the property, but the Saab was not among them.

“Are you comfortable?” Officer Kelly inquired, thinking about the patrol car’s temperature, not the handcuffs around Susan’s wrists.

“I’m not too comfortable being in the back of a police car,” Susan responded. “My husband was killed, and I didn’t do anything.”

“Excuse me, do you have a blanket, or a jacket or something?” Susan asked Detective Mike Costa as he entered the sterile interrogation room some time after midnight on October 15. Dressed in shorts and a polo shirt, Susan felt chilled in the small, air-conditioned room, and Costa offered her an official police jacket.

The stocky, mustached detective had introduced himself to Susan earlier in the night at the crime scene, where he had been assigned lead investigator status. He had been on the force for twenty-six years and had responded to more than a hundred homicides since joining the Criminal Investigations Division. Now, having been briefed about Susan’s arrest and her statements to police while in route to the field operations office, he was prepared to question her.

“Okay. Like I said at the house, Susan, my name is Mike,” the investigator began, taking a seat at the room’s small round table. “I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office, okay? We are going to be looking at what happened to your husband tonight. I assume it’s your husband in the…what you guys call the pool house out there.”

“The guesthouse,” Susan corrected, wrapping the jacket with the official police emblem around her shoulders. “I didn’t hear any shots. I don’t own a firearm right now.”

“Okay, because you’re in custody here, and you’re not under arrest. I want you to understand that. But you’re not free to leave, okay. The law says I have to admonish you of your rights, okay.”

“Uh, huh.”

“Do you want to talk to me about what happened?”

“I do, and I am very, very tired,” Susan told the detective, unaware that she was being secretly recorded by a camera hidden in the ceiling.

“So am I. I haven’t been to bed all day either, but we have to do this.”

Susan looked directly at the officer. “What did happen?”

“Well, that’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”

“I did not hear any gunshots, and I do not own a firearm.”

“Okay, you’ve been occupying the main house.”

“I didn’t see him all day today, so I don’t know.”

“Okay, what time did you wake up today?” the detective inquired.

“I woke up at around seven.”

“Seven AM, this morning?”

“Uh, huh. I took my son to school.”

“Which son?”

“Gabe.” Susan said, as she began retracing her steps during the day. She busied herself with housework and cooking after picking Gabe up from school on Monday afternoon. Around 8:30 that night, she took a bath.