MARTINEZ, Calif. — Susan Polk cried Wednesday morning while watching her youngest son testify against her in her first-degree murder trial.

But she was stern by afternoon when, serving as her own lawyer, she cross-examined her son about his memory of her stormy relationship with his father in the years before Polk stabbed him to death with a paring knife.

Gabriel Polk, 19, told jurors during direct examination that, despite his mother's claims that she killed her husband, Felix Polk, in self-defense, she had discussed murdering his father for years.

"She talked about drugging him and drowning him in the pool, hitting him over the head and drowning him in the pool, running over him with a car or tampering with his car," an emotionless Gabriel Polk said.

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Felix Polk, 70, was stabbed numerous times in a cottage on the couple's $2 million property in October 2002, where he had been staying during a contentious divorce battle.

Gabriel said that just days before the attack, his mother told him, "I'm going to put your father in a chair, put him on the computer or a phone and tell him to wire $20 million into my account or I'm going to shoot him."

Susan Polk believed her husband was a secret agent with the Israeli Mossad and that he had millions of dollars hidden in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Gabriel said.

Gabriel Polk had been hearing his mother's murderous talk for so long, he said, that "after a certain amount of time, you grow used to it."

Still, this time, he said, he feared for his father and began to perceive that his mother had been brainwashing him against his dad for most of his life.

When he found his father's bloodied body, he told jurors Wednesday, he instantly knew his mother was the killer.

Susan Polk admits she stabbed her husband on Oct. 13, but she does not admit to murder. She says she was trying to defend her own life in a pitched battle for the blade. She claims that, in the heat of the struggle, she was certain her husband would make good on his allegedly repeated promise during their 20-year marriage to kill her if she ever deserted him.

Polk, 48, claims she was in constant fear of her husband, a man who was her therapist as a teenager, her lover soon after, and her husband by the time she turned 25 and he was 50.

She claims that Felix Polk emotionally and physically abused her and their children for years, even threatening to kill the family dog if she left him.

Mother turned inquisitor

Murder defendants don't typically question their accusers before a jury, but Susan Polk is no typical defendant. Polk is representing herself after firing four attorneys and enduring one mistrial. Her slow and meticulous cross-examination of her son Wednesday often took the tone of a suspicious mother questioning a misbehaving child.

"Was Dad a rich man? Did I marry him for his money?" Polk asked.

"No," Gabriel responded.

"Was I a big spender when you were a young man?" she continued.

"No."

Polk appeared to be rehabilitating herself, refuting her son's accusations that she was a bad mother and a henpecking greedy wife who even badgered her husband about his sexual prowess.

Yet Gabriel maintained that, while his mother may have been the one who went to Cub Scout meetings, championed his school projects, and hosted his birthday parties, she was a delusional and angry woman who he believed made a conscious decision to murder his father.

"I saw your delusions myself," he told his mother.

Susan Polk did not appear to flinch at the cold exchanges.

Observers in the standing-room-only gallery appeared riveted, and had to be warned by the judge to refrain from discussing the case in the hallway where jurors could overhear.

Satanic rituals at day care

Gabriel's brother, Eli, 20, is expected to testify in Polk's defense when she begins her defense case. His decision to stand by his mother has caused a rift among the siblings.

The eldest brother, Adam, 23, will be the prosecution's next witness and is expected to concur with his brother's testimony that contrary to their mother's accusations, their father was not physically abusive.

"There was never any physical abuse," Gabriel testified. "The most I've ever seen my dad do to my mother was to slap her once."

He added that he had seen his mother slap his father once during a domestic dispute in which the police were called to the home and she was arrested.

Gabriel, a handsome 19-year-old with an angular jaw, shaved head and dark eyes, gave strong testimony and did not waver or show weakness. He wore a dark suit and tie.

Susan Polk, in chinos and a tan sweater, took careful notes as her son spoke. She consulted a legal reference book that was filled with yellow sticky notes, she pulled up her son's school records to point out inconsistencies in his testimony, and she made objections to inadmissible hearsay testimony.

But she had a pained look in her eyes as Gabriel recounted bizarre stories of victimization she had allegedly told her three sons while they were growing up.

Gabriel said his mother encouraged him to stay home from school as a child and that she believed the faculty had a vendetta against him.

When he was 9 or 10, about five years before Felix's death, "things began to get worse," he said.

During a family trip to Disneyland, the "Happiest Place on Earth," Polk's sadness was overwhelming. She constantly cried uncontrollably, Gabriel said he later learned, because she was experiencing repressed memories of allegedly being molested by her father, mother and brother as a girl.

He also claimed that his mother manipulated his brothers and his father into believing that the boys had been the victims of molestation and ritualistic satanic acts as toddlers at day care.

"What makes you think it was all my idea?" Polk asked.

The defendant claims that her psychologist husband advertised himself as an expert on ritualistic satanic abuse after the couple made accusations that their son Adam had been molested at day care. No charges were ever brought against the day care and no evidence of abuse was substantiated.

Polk played a tape aloud in court of her deceased husband giving a speech to an unidentified audience about the things he believed his son had seen and suffered.

"The children were raped on stage, raped in every form imaginable," Felix Polk's voice boomed through a speaker in the courtroom. "[Adam's] description of a baby put in a plastic bag and hammered to death ... He remembers the blood."

Felix Polk described on the tape what he believed was the ritualistic eating of flesh, vomit and blood in front of the children.

"My rage is omnipresent ... my fantasy of course is to kill them. And I'm a rather moral person. I want to kill them," the tape ended.

"Did you recognize your father's voice?" Polk asked her son.

Gabriel said he did, but he maintained that he had no memories of being molested as a child, nor did his brother Adam, and that he had come to believe it was his mother who fed her husband lies about the children being molested, and that the story escalated from there.

"Did it ever occur to you that he might be making it all up?" Polk asked.

"I don't know," Gabriel said.

Polk's cross-examination of her son will continue Thursday morning. She faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.