Paperback: She was fifteen when she visited the therapist; still a teen when they first had sex. She was twenty-five when she married him and forty-four when she killed him.
In October 2002, Susan Polk, the soft-spoken mother of three teenage boys, was arrested for stabbing her husband and former therapist, Dr Felix Polk, to death.
Three years later she was tried for first degree murder, choosing to act as her own attorney in a trial that rapidly devolved into one of the most outrageous media circuses in modern history.
The author, Carol Pogash, was there.
Here, Pogash provides a first-hand account of the wild, media-circus trial in which Susan defended herself and cross-examined two of her sons. Illustrating how the prosecution and the court responded to Susan's volatile behavior, Pogash takes you inside the deliberation room and uncovers how jurors reached their surprising verdict.
To a crowded courtroom, Susan Polk presented her defense - a bizarre story of unethical therapies, abuse, repressed memories, and satanic rituals - and, in doing so, exposed her madness.
Seduced by Madness (2007) is the remarkably compelling, profoundly disturbing true story of the severe dysfunction of an affluent American family, as told by the leading journalist who worked the case. With lyrical prose, Pogash skillfully traces the Polks' story - from their early yearnings for one another through their flawed marriage, which produced three highly intelligent but emotionally divided sons.
Weaving a complex narrative of a family who lived in multimillion dollar homes but lingered in the shadow of dysfunction, Pogash reassembles their life in the years and months before Felix's death, intimately describing what led this soft-spoken wife to murder.
It is a spellbinding recreation of a troubled life, a marriage, a murder, and a terrifying, inexorable descent into madness.
Currently, Susan Polk is incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW), a dorm-like prison, in Corona (near Chino), CA.
She will be eligible for parole in 2017.
About the author: Carol Pogash is an all-utility writer. She has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine writer and editor, TV reporter, internet editor and writer, radio essayist and author. The program 60 Minutes hired her as a consultant. She was the anchor interview on NBC Dateline and other TV news magazines.
Her stories are published in The New York Times on the front page and in National, Arts & Leisure, Business, Science, Style, Sports and the Op Ed sections. She has covered AIDS, homelessness, a Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier and the country’s first cat cafe. Pogash tweets (@cpogash) but has yet to figure out how to earn a living doing it.
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