reading in the guest house next to the pool around 11:00. the tension that had been building for years reached its flash point. coming up, the night, the killing, the questions. i thought, he s going to kill me. i m going to die here. unless i do something right now. reporter: the war of the polks was approaching a horrifying climax. just the envt that bacteria likes to nestle into and they can cause the odor. your denture needs to be cleaned gently on a daily basis. i like to recommend polident, it kills the bacteria without causing any abrasion. when my patients follow my instructions, their dentures feel clean and fresh. they look forward to putting them in their mouth and smiling. really? 25 grams of protein. what do we have? all four of us, together? 24. he s low fat, too, and has 5 grams of sugars.
oranges. and she said oh, judge, that s your problem, this is a murder trial and you think it s about fruit. reporter: but sometimes says prosecutor sequeira she was a brilliant courtroom lawyer despite having no training in the law. there is cross-exam that she did that were unbelievable, that were as good as any veteran defense lawyer i ve ever seen. reporter: the prosecutor s case was simple. susan polk, he said, afraid she d lose her rights to the family estate and custody of her youngest son, gabriel, killed felix in a rage and then tried to cover up the crime. he presented gory crime scene photos, dozens of them. here, said the prosecutor, were pictures of a man brutally killed. compared to a police photo of a woman whose face was barely disturbed. and there were just small red marks around her eyes. reporter: then in sharp contrast to susan s claim that she only stabbed felix a handful of times, the coroner testified there were 27 wounds in all,
reporter: eventually, susan moved out of the family compound so that peace could prevail? sadly, no. in fact, the last dreadful act was about to begin. in the fall of 2002 a judge in the divorce case granted custody of the youngest son to felix. he also ruled that felix could keep the house and drastically cut her alimony. and then about a week before she was to return to the orinda house to remove her belongings barry morris says felix got a disturbing phone call from his wife. he said that susan had called him, said she was in montana, and that she bought a shotgun and she was coming back to kill him. i said have you called the police? he said i told susan i wouldn t. i said, felix, you want to live? yes. then you call the police. this is not a joke. reporter: felix did call the police, but by the time susan arrived late at night on october 13th the officers were long gone. susan says she did not have a gun when she encountered felix,
once musing aloud, whether to drug, drown or shoot felix. and friend barry morris says by now felix was genuinely worried, claiming susan was unhinged, dangerous. he told me she was walking around at night with a gun in the house and he was barricading himself in another room. so all the signs were there. reporter: police were called to intervene. on one occasion susan was arrested for hitting her husband in front of officers. felix calls me up to tell me what happened and wants to know if he should bail her out. i said, felix, this woman just hit you, do you think that s a good idea? i don t. then he calls me up a couple days later about not wanting to prosecute, and that was that. but that s a typical example of, you know, of sort of confusing his own self-interest with his clinical diagnosis of someone who is mentally unbalanced.
we can t ask felix, of course. but susan, sitting here in prison, claimed that what happened was more than just inappropriate, it became the dark heart of her life. what i recall is that my husband asked me if i would consent to be hypnotized. i would walk in, he d give me a cup of tea. next thing i d know i d look at the clock and the hour was gone and i couldn t remember what had happened. and for many years i just didn t think about it. this happened for years? yeah. i started seeing him when i was 15. i never stopped. reporter: he was her first, she says, and her only, who all the while controlled her, led her to what felt to a girl like love. and ten years later, when susan was 25, felix 50, he left his wife and kids and the two got married. according to susan, felix dominated from the beginning.