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 ORINDA, Calif. (AP) - In the midst of a bitter divorce, Susan Polk says, she split for Montana, determined to get away from her abusive husband. "I didn't plan on coming back and killing him," she explains from behind a window in the county jail. But kill him she did — stabbing a paring knife repeatedly into his body in a rage.
She claims she acted in self defense after he tried to stab her with the knife. Prosecutors call it the premeditated action of a violent, delusional woman. Polk, 47, has fired three attorneys and now plans to represent herself in her first-degree murder trial, set to begin Monday. One son is the prosecution's star witness, another her main defender.
She began seeing therapist Felix Polk when she was a teenager troubled by the stresses of youth and her parents' divorce. He was 42 then, a revered — and married — Berkeley psychologist. She says they started having sex when she was 16.
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