Seduced by Madness
The True Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case
Chapter One
"Aren't you happy he's gone?"
In October, soil in the Bay Area is parched from months of no rain.
A snap fire could wipe out communities overnight. Wooden signs warn residents that the fire hazard is "extreme." As the autumn air begins to cool, locals talk about earthquake weather, even though everyone knows cumulus clouds have nothing to do with the shifting of tectonic plates deep inside the earth. But there's this: the Loma Prieta earthquake, which registered 7.1 on the Richter scale, occurred on October 17, 1989. The Berkeley-Oakland firestorm, which killed twenty-five and destroyed 2,886 homes, occurred on October 20, 1991. Many Bay Area residents find the month of October unsettling.
Fifteen-year-old Gabriel Polk, the youngest of the three ruggedly handsome Polk boys, was not thinking about those historical markers on the afternoon of October 14, 2002. He was apprehensively waiting for his father, Dr. Felix Polk, a popular and respected psychotherapist, to drive up to their $1.8 million hom ... read full excerpt from Seduced by Madness ebook
