Seduced by Madness

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. To a crowded courtroom Susan Polk presented her defensea bizarre story of unethical therapies abuse repressed memories and satanic ritualsand in doing so exposed her madness. Carol Pogash was there. Seduced by Madness 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. It is a spellbinding re-creation of a troubled life a marriage a murder and a terrifying inexorable descent into madness.