No Ordinary Murder

The murder was so tragic, so unbelievable, that it took weeks before a memorial service could be organized. Gray-haired men and women in respectful navys, charcoals and tans, and buzz-cut young men in white-collared shirts too snug for their muscled necks, silently filed into the Northern California church. After the mourners spaced themselves along the wooden pews, a tape of Pink Floyd’s searing “Wish You Were Here” engulfed the sanctuary:

“So you think you can tell heaven from hell, blue skies from pain . . .”

They didn’t quite deify the once-robust Felix Polk, who died at age 70. But at this sweet, somber service in the autumn of 2002, fellow therapists spoke lovingly of the warm, wise and demanding man. Slide projectors beamed images on either side of the altar: Felix hunched over his cello next to his first wife, a classical pianist; virile Felix with red bandanna and dark blue undershirt cradling a baby from his first family; an older Felix, smiling, with a baby from his second family strapped to his back; and, finally, Felix in shirt and tie sending his second son off into the world.

There were no photos of his second wife, Susan Polk. Nor was her name mentioned. Although everyone in the church knew, no one said the obvious: Their marriage had been fraught with internal conflict from the start. Felix had been both her lover and her therapist. They had met when she was a troubled adolescent and he was the mature therapist. A year later, they were having sex. As his fellow therapists knew but kept to themselves, mixing personal relations with professional treatment can be perilous.

In mid-October, while Felix and Susan were enmeshed in a bitter divorce, prosecutors allege that she casually murdered him. She is in jail awaiting trial.

Helen Bolling is a tiny woman whose clear blue eyes turn upward naturally. She remembers that as a child, her daughter, Susan, read everything she could, from Jack London to Tolstoy, and that she had excelled as a writer. With pride, her mother retrieves an award given to Susan by the Mt. Diablo Unified School District for recognition in creative writing. It is dated Jan. 29, 1971.

By age 15, her mother says, Susan was becoming a beauty, with pale, creamy skin and dark eyes. When Bolling and her daughter walked down the street together, people’s “eyes would drop open as we passed.”

But she also was troubled. Bolling and her husband divorced, leaving a hole in Susan’s life. Bolling says she can’t remember the nature of the problem that prompted a counselor at Clayton Valley High School in Concord to recommend therapy for Susan--only that the counselor thought she should go to an expert in adolescent behavior, Felix Polk.

Taking that advice, Bolling now says, was the worst decision she ever made.

Felix was European by bearing and birth, with a gravelly voice and expressive face. Born into an intellectual, affluent Austrian family that owned department stores, his early years were spent in Vienna. His was an idyllic childhood, with a toy train set that had a real steam engine and was big enough for him to ride.

The family was full of prominent musicians and Jewish aristocrats. “It was the kind of family that if they didn’t know Freud, they should have,” says Danny Goldstine, chief psychologist at Berkeley Therapy Institute, who befriended Felix while the two were in graduate school together. All that ceased when, on the cusp of World War II, the Polks fled Austria. They went into hiding for a few years before escaping to the United States when Felix was 9, reestablishing themselves in Harrison, N.Y., where they opened a small department store. Yet Felix’s parents remained loyal to their home country, even continuing to purchase Austrian bonds.

Felix once told an old friend that he never saw his father without a jacket and tie. Years later, friends from his graduate school days at UC Berkeley recall Felix as having been somewhat formal even in the most informal of times. He’d been in the Navy during the Korean War, and sometimes in the 1960s he would appear at major occasions in his dress whites. When most of his friends joined the Free Speech Movement, Felix kept his distance. While others were enjoying the era of free love, he was married to a classical pianist. Together, they had a son and daughter.

“On the surface, he was the gentlest, nicest, most ethical person around. But from hearing about things he did, you realize there’s another person under the surface,” says a therapist who’d been close to him when they were young. As with several friends or associates interviewed for this article, the friend refused to speak if identified.

One of the first creases in Felix’s otherwise ironed image occurred in the ‘70s, when “distinguished therapists” were invited to weekend sessions to learn about est, a New Age self-improvement movement founded by Werner Erhard. Felix said afterward that he’d “learned more in one weekend than in all four years of graduate school.”

Felix began treating Susan in 1972. Shortly afterward, Bolling says her daughter told her that she sat on Felix’s lap. “She was a very fragile child,” her mother says. “He was supposed to do no harm.” In an essay about her life, typed a few years ago and scooped up by police, Susan wrote that she and Felix were having sex by the time she was 16. He was then 42, and still married.

When Bolling finally learned about the affair, she says she confronted the doctor. By then, Susan was 17 or 18 and the relationship was in full flower. “He was sheepish,” Bolling says. Certain that the affair would wither, Bolling says she told him: “When this is over, I hope you will be kind to her. Wean the child away from you.”

Susan went to Mills College, an all-girls’ school nestled in the Oakland hills, before moving to San Francisco State University. She stopped seeing Felix as a therapist, but the personal relationship continued. Her mother, still concerned, took Susan to Santa Barbara on vacation, hoping to have her meet men her own age. Susan wasn’t interested. She never went out with anyone but Felix.

“He had an aura about him,” Bolling says. “He was rational, reasonable and the perfect father figure.” And her daughter, she says, “had been glued in. She is a victim, a long-term victim.” Susan “never had a young womanhood.”

Felix’s marriage to Sharon Mann, a well-known pianist and teacher who is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, ended in divorce after he met Susan. Mann declined requests to talk about her late ex-husband, but his friends believe he fell for Susan because the young woman needed help. His wife, by comparison, was accomplished and his intellectual equal, if not more.

That Susan would fall in love with her therapist is not unusual. When vulnerable patients share intimate details with their doctor, a therapeutic alliance evolves. As a patient transfers to her therapist her conscious and subconscious feelings about her parents and significant people in her life, she unknowingly can fall in love.

Therapists are supposed to anticipate these feelings of transference and guard against them, as well as against their own susceptibility to fantasize about their patients, known as counter-transference. “You don’t have a dual relationship,” explains Margaret Singer, a UC Berkeley psychology professor who knew Felix on campus and who worked as a court-appointed psychologist on the cases of Charles Manson, Patty Hearst and Angelo Buono Jr., the Hillside Strangler. “The therapist doesn’t become the landlord or the lover because a person puts onto therapy all the most positive hopes they can gather,” Singer says. “Then when the therapist lets the patient down or violates them, it’s terrible. It’s worse than a brother stealing money out of your purse.”

Our society has not always considered sexual contact between doctor and patient a taboo. Until the 1920s, medical textbooks advised that to cure female hysteria or to make women feel better, doctors should stimulate a woman’s clitoris until she reached orgasm. While such beliefs have been discounted, intimate relations between therapists and patients persist.

When William Masters and Virginia Johnson conducted their landmark study on human sexual behavior in 1966, they were surprised by the number of women who reported having had sex with their therapists. The researchers said the harm caused to women could be compared to rape. Insurance companies today are loath to cover a therapist’s sexual acts, explains Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Thomas Gutheil. But occasionally judges have ruled that insurance companies must pay compensation because sex with a patient is simply an occupational hazard.

California now criminalizes sexual contact between a therapist and patient, which can be punished by six months in jail. The law, however, states that if two years have elapsed following the end of therapy, a therapist and a patient can have sexual relations legally. The caveat is based on the concept that in two years, transference will have worn off.

Gutheil, who has handled more than 250 such cases, dismisses that theory. Transference, he says, is timeless.

The rules of therapist-patient relations were not so well defined when Felix met Susan. The ‘60s and ‘70s were a time of “dethroning of power,” says Goldstine, the Berkeley psychologist. “Medical doctors married their patients, teachers their students, lawyers their clients.” Nevertheless, Goldstine and his wife Hilary, also a therapist, believe that behavior for therapists is “totally wrong under any standards, any time, no matter what.”

Susan’s lead defense attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, objects to calling the bond between Felix and her client a relationship. “That’s not a relationship,” Grossman says. “With a teenage patient, that’s molestation.”

Susan’s attraction to Felix was “clearly an idolatrous relationship,” says Felix’s old therapist friend. “He was her lifeline. She was clearly a little child under the wings of her protector.”

It’s not uncommon for certain young patients to experience a “golden fantasy,” explains Gutheil, in which patients believe the therapist is not only going to meet all of their therapeutic needs, but also all of their life needs.

No one claims that Felix was having sex with his other patients, but those who knew him say he was unorthodox in his practice, regularly violating the boundaries between therapist and patient. As Grossman says, “If he had a piano teacher for a patient, that’s who would teach his kids piano.”

In Susan’s case, his associates say, the mixing of roles may have led him to a major misdiagnosis. They suspect he failed to realize that his young patient with a fragile sense of self probably was a borderline personality, which often means a life of depression, anger and hostility. Perhaps, they say, Felix believed his affection for her could make her better.

“Instead of developing coping mechanisms” to deal with problems, women who start relationships with their therapists become more dependent on them, says San Francisco attorney John Winer, who has handled five civil cases involving women who married their therapists.

Susan and Felix married in 1982. She was 25 and he was 50. At the time, in addition to his private practice, Felix taught adolescent psychology at the American Schools of Professional Psychology, now Argosy University in Point Richmond, north of Berkeley. (The school deleted his name from its Web site after his death and has refused to take calls about him.) He also had worked occasionally as a consultant for the Alameda County Probation Department, the Family Therapy Institute in Marin County and the Catholic Church, where he counseled priests and nuns.

To outsiders, the Polks seemed to be a pairing of opposites. Felix had a warm face, full of curves and rounded grooves, and a therapist’s empathetic eyes. He smiled frequently. Susan, the innocent wife, was lean with angled features that lent beauty to an elegant face--even if, friends noted, her eyes were distant and she rarely showed emotion.

Susan has told police that the marriage was troubled from the start. She said she always considered her husband a father figure and that she debated getting a divorce after the first year. She wanted to seek psychotherapy, but, she said, her husband opposed it because he didn’t want her to disclose how they had met.

Her attorney now says that Felix used the information he’d gleaned as a therapist to control his wife. She was virtually incarcerated in her own home, Grossman says. “As the facts develop, it will become clear that Dr. Polk misrepresented what was going on in his own home--to the police, to his friends and to his colleagues.”

Susan stayed home to raise their three smart, rambunctious sons. Around her children Susan seemed “oddly overprotective,” says a woman whose children played with the Polks’ boys. Her love for them was palpable.

Bolling says her daughter kept her distance after the marriage, a choice that Bolling believes Felix engineered. Susan, with the support of her husband, claimed that her attorney father, Theodore Bolling, had molested her as a child, an allegation denied by both parents and Susan’s brother.

Bolling says she watched her daughter’s mental state deteriorate throughout the marriage and that she encouraged her to seek therapy. But Susan told her mother she didn’t believe a therapist could help.

She also began to believe that her husband was trying to control her through prescription drugs, according to an essay she wrote that was retrieved by the Sheriff’s Department. She stopped using medications and began having delusions. She told deputies after the murder that she thought her husband had been a member of Mossad, the Israeli secret police, and that he had hidden millions of dollars in secret bank accounts.

Two years ago, the family purchased a $1.85-million house in affluent Orinda, a stone’s throw from Berkeley and San Francisco. With an old oak tree gracefully climbing through an opening in the deck, Mission-style lighting, exposed wood and Arts and Crafts furniture, the house is peaceful and beautiful.

By the time they moved in, however, the Polks could ill afford the house or appreciate its tranquillity. The couple filed for divorce but continued to share the house, even after Susan asked Felix to move out.

Susan’s life was spinning out of control. Their youngest son, 15, later told deputies that she talked openly of killing his father, debating the merits of drugging, drowning, poisoning and shooting. After one especially bitter dispute, Felix ordered Susan out of the house; she drove to Yosemite National Park, where, according to her written statement, she attempted suicide.

Later, Susan took off with one son or another for Paris, Hawaii, Thailand and Big Sky, Mont., where she knew no one but decided she might settle. Living on $6,500 a month from her husband, she racked up additional credit card expenses. They could no longer afford to pay for the big family house, the two Volvo station wagons, the Saab, the Dodge Ram truck and Susan’s travels.

In April 2002, Felix’s lawyer filed a declaration in the divorce saying that Susan, then 44, was “healthy and well educated [and that] there is absolutely no reason she cannot work.”

In September, Susan put the house on the market, although at such an inflated price that Felix complained it would never sell.

As the marriage disintegrated, police responded to a number of domestic violence calls from the house, some from Felix, others from Susan. Refusing to leave the property, Felix retreated to the cabana cottage by the pool. In early October 2002, Susan left for Montana, telling real estate agents trying to sell the house that she was “working on a travel log of my adventures.”

On Sunday Oct. 6, while she was away, Felix phoned a criminal lawyer, friend Barry Morris, to say he feared for his life. Felix told him he was embarrassed that his wife of 20 years, the mother of his three youngest sons, wanted to kill him, and he, a therapist, was incapable of stopping her. Morris urged him to ask for police protection.

Susan returned home Thursday Oct. 10. Felix moved to a hotel. The next day, he obtained a court order giving him possession of the house and custody of the children. His monthly payment to Susan was reduced to $1,700.

Recognizing how incendiary his action was, Felix called his grown son and daughter from his first marriage to say he was afraid that his wife was going to shoot him. Sheriff’s investigators said the daughter told them her father had left a voice mail message that Friday saying “things were getting critical and that Susan had threatened to kill him. She said she never got back to her father and then learned of his death.”

Felix moved back into the cottage over the weekend. On Monday, while the mothers of high school students were painting terra-cotta pots for the upcoming holiday bazaar, Susan picked up her youngest son from school, lunched at Baja Fresh, stopped at Blockbuster to rent “Scooby-Doo” and, she claimed, walked around the wooded neighborhood looking for Dusty, their missing yellow Lab.

Police say Felix was alone in the cottage, wearing only black briefs and reading a book when he was hit on the head and back with something that in the starchy terms of a police report caused “blunt force trauma injuries.” He was stabbed 27 times in the chest, sides, arms, legs and feet. Their sprawling home, two homes, really, was set apart in a canyon. If there were screams, neighbors would not have heard them.

Felix was supposed to have taken his youngest son to a San Francisco Giants game that night. When his father didn’t show up, he asked his mother if she knew where he was. The boy told investigators she fluttered her eyelids, the way he says she did when she was lying, and claimed she didn’t know. He then went to the cottage with a flashlight and found his father’s body.

Police say Susan agreed to let them search the house, though knowing her history of mental troubles, they obtained a search warrant. She insisted that she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. Informed that he was dead, she remained expressionless until told that her youngest son had found the body. “Oh my God,” she blurted out, according to the deputy sheriff’s report. At the end of a long interview, authorities say, she said that if she was being sent to jail, she wanted them to “hurry up and do that because she was tired and wanted to get some sleep.”

By the time mourners filed into the church for her husband’s funeral, Susan Polk was residing at the Martinez Detention Facility. If any of them thought that Felix had overstepped his boundaries when he became involved with his second wife, or if they saw it as the therapeutic community’s tattered laundry, they kept it to themselves, as they had for three decades.

Susan’s preliminary hearing is expected in July. Grossman says her defense will not be insanity because Susan Polk is not insane.