Susan Polk's Self-Employed Pathologist: "I Needed Time to Think." →[More:] The erstwhile self-employed pathologist who fled the stand in the Susan Polk murder trial returned yesterday on orders of the judge -- sans missing evidence that may or may not have been eaten by his dog.

Prosecutor Paul Sequeira grilled John Cooper on his decision not to return to the stand (of which the jury was unaware until yesterday) and accused Cooper of being afraid of the impending cross-examination.

Cooper, who initially claimed that he -- Oops! -- had other out-of-state obligations and would not be able to return to the trial before it ended, denied the prosecutor's charges.

"I needed time to think," he said.

The prosecutor also challenged Cooper's history as an expert witness, alleging that perhaps Cooper chooses money as a motivation over justice. (Polk objected, calling the line of questioning "snide and obnoxious.)

In this case, Cooper used photographs and the coroner's report to deduce that Felix Polk died from a "time-bomb" heart, not from 27 stab wounds.

Polk was also hired as a defense expert in the somewhat infamous case of Logan Marr, a five-year-old girl who died after her foster mother, Susan Schofield wrapped her head in duct tape.

During the Schofield trial, Cooper testified that Marr had a history of seizures and probably died from one -- not from suffocation due to duct tape. His support? A single report of Logan's eys rolling back in her head after vomiting; she was 6 months old and had the flu. No evidence of a seizure was ever found.

When prosecutors in the Schofield trial pushed Cooper on his motivations, he responded: "My point is, I really have to believe in a case in order to participate."

(Looks like maybe he's believing in this one a bit less these days.)

Cooper's testimony in the Schofield trial helped the defense skirt a murder conviction.

She was convicted of manslaughter instead.

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And in other trial news, Susan Polk yesterday called a piano tuner to testify that he had once seen her with "large red circles under her eyes."