MARTINEZ, Calif. — Eli Polk returned to the stand in his mother Susan Polk's murder trial Tuesday and listened to an emotional tape recording of the moment he learned his father, Felix Polk, had been killed.

"We're investigating the circumstances of what happened at your house last night," a sheriff's investigator is heard telling Eli on the tape. "Your father was found deceased."

Eli's sobs were faintly audible on the tape, as he grappled with the news and the investigators' immediate questions about his mother, their prime suspect.

Eli was 17 at the time, and serving nine months in a juvenile detention center "for a fistfight," he testified, when sheriff's investigators visited him in October 2002 to announce that his father's dead body was found the night before in the poolside cottage of his parents' Orinda, Calif., home and that his mother was the likely killer.

"She wouldn't do it. It's definitely not my mom. She would just never do it," Eli tells the two investigators on the tape. "That's a fact."

Story continues

Susan Polk, in fact, later admitted that she was the one who stabbed her 70-year-old psychologist husband that evening, but she claims it was in self-defense and that she suffered years of emotional and physical abuse in her husband's control.

"I don't feel like answering any more questions. I would never do anything to put my mom in jail," Eli was heard telling the investigators when their questioning became more pointed. "I think it's rude and extremely stressful," he said as he walked out of the interview and the recorder was shut off.

Eli, now 20, is currently in custody and awaiting trial May 2 on a domestic violence charge. He denies the charges. He and his mother both believe Eli has been maliciously prosecuted due to his decision to testify in his mother's defense.

Polk, 48, appeared to be playing the tape for jurors to demonstrate how he was treated upon learning his father's death.

Eli told jurors Tuesday that his father was violent and controlling.

He said Felix Polk tried to convince the children that their mother was crazy, when in fact she was a devoted and loving stay-at-home mom, who never drank, did drugs, or carried on affairs — sins that Susan has assigned to her husband.

"Did you love your dad?" Polk asked Eli.

"Yeah," he said. "He was just a damaged person."

Underworld connections

Eli's two bothers, Adam, 23 and Gabriel, 19, have defended their dead father, whom they say was never abusive or violent with their mother. Both men testified during the prosecution's case that their mother willfully killed their father.

Polk, they say, suffers from delusions, including the belief that her own parents molested her and that Felix was a secret agent in the Israeli Mossad.

Eli told jurors Tuesday that Polk had good reason to believe his father was connected to "the Jewish Mafia."

"We'd be eating dinner and he'd talk about his patients," Eli said. "He said he had a patient in the FBI who was an assassin. He said he saw numerous people involved in the FBI and CIA."

Two of Felix's friends, the mother and son both claim, talked about the Mossad and their connections to Israeli Intelligence.

If Susan ever left Felix, Eli told jurors, "Dad said that he'd have people come after you."

Eli said his mother always feared Felix would kill her, and he confirmed that a letter she wrote before Felix's death was an authentic attempt to document Felix's abusive behavior.

He also read to jurors from his own declaration to a divorce court in April 2002, when he was 16.

"Not only is my dad a bad person," Eli wrote, "but he is a bad husband and parent."

Felix also tried to convince the three boys, Eli testified, that their mother was crazy.

"He tried to get you on medication," Eli said. "He talked to the kids about how to handle you. His whole thing was you were crazy and you imagined all these things."

Eli said his father once made him lie to police and accuse his mother of kicking his dad in order to get her arrested.

"Looking back, he was a really unstable person," he said.

He described an incident in Mexico City in 1997, when his father "just snapped," and hit him across the head without provocation.

Another time, he said he had been rewarded for his own violence toward his mother.

"Did you punch me once?" Polk asked her son.

"Yeah," Eli said, a wounded expression on his face. "It was one of the worst times of my life."

He said it began during one of a series of fights about Polk's desire to get a divorce, when Felix allegedly dragged her up the stairs by her hair to a bedroom. Eli said he walked in to find his mother crying on the bed, and his father saying, "I'll kill you, I could just kill you, Susan."

"It just popped in my head. Next thing I knew, I was throwing a punch," Eli said. "I split your lip."

His mother immediately forgave him, Eli said, while his father took him to dinner at Eli's favorite Japanese restaurant, and told his son, "It's not your fault. It's her fault."

'Isolated' in the family

A psychiatrist who briefly examined Polk after her suicide attempt in 2001 also testified Tuesday that he did not find her to be delusional at the time, but was suffering from apprehensions about her marriage and fear of Eli.

Dr. Alan Peters said he met Polk on Jan 20, 2001, a day after she had been brought by ambulance to Columbia General Hospital in Sonora, Calif., and transferred to the psychiatric unit after an overdose of aspirin, Vicodin and alcohol: "I believe it was scotch," Peters said.

His single page of typewritten notes indicated, Peters said, that Polk was articulate, cooperative and wholly aware of what was real and not real. She was suffering from overwhelming distress, he said, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, both about her marriage to Felix and her relationship with Eli, after the punching incident.

"You were isolated off within your family as being the quote-unquote crazy one," Peters said.

He diagnosed her at the time as suffering "a disturbance of mood and conduct," and secondly as having "post-traumatic stress disorder."

"You were able to come to all these conclusions and get all this in just a little over an hour?" the prosecutor asked the doctor.

"Yes," he said.

Peters conceded on cross-examination that Polk also described having emerging memories of being sexually abused by her own parents, an accusation she now appears to have recanted since her mother, Helen Bolling, has reentered her life and testified in her defense.

Peters also agreed that there was a notation in the record that Felix had wanted to have his wife "committed" to the psychiatric hospital, yet he made no mention of it to Peters, and in fact seemed mostly concerned with his wife's health and getting her back home.

Eli Polk will return to the stand on Wednesday.