Until the Twelfth of Never - Should Betty Broderick ever be free?

by Bella Stumbo

  In another note to Wright on November 19, she wrote: "Poopsie, if you're ever sitting there wanting to talk to me and I'm unable to call, could you write to me? If I had a letter from you, I could read it over and over when I'm missing you and can't get to a phone—like now."

  She might have been Zsa Zsa, in for slapping a cop. Betty Broderick was an original prisoner from the very first—even before she discovered that she had become an overnight celebrity, too.

  Through no intent of her own, she had tapped a universal nerve. Sympathy mail poured in from unhappy wives and divorcées everywhere. The local media clamored for interviews. Soon, the national press discovered the Betty story, too. Television moguls, book publishers, screen writers, talk shows, magazines—all were interested in the woman scorned, in the world's messiest divorce, in the battered husband, in the battered wife. Everybody had a different angle, but everybody was fascinated with the "socialite" killer. Although she never really was one, Betty Broderick would forevermore be labeled by the press as the "La Jolla socialite."

  Her first defense attorney was so swamped by mail and media that within two weeks he hired a public relations firm to handle the traffic.

  She took to her new forum like a duck to water. Soon she discovered the pay telephone in the jailhouse yard. She seized upon it with gusto and began making collect calls to San Diego reporters, who, she quickly learned, were always transfixed enough to print her every word, not only because of the sensational nature of her crime but also because of the sheer force of her personality. She was not only smart, she was also a laugh-out-loud mistress of black humor and outrageously brazen commentary. She played the press with the instinctive ease of a natural performer. Her telephone voice was consistently perky, cheerful, and defiant. Betty never bored.

  "It makes me furious when people say Dan and Linda were the victims," she told the Los Angeles Times in one of her debut interviews, "because my children and I were the victims. There were two dead people but five victims … In my estimation, they never suffered for a minute, but he tortured me and my children for seven years." She also said that she had shot them "bang bang … no hesitation at all."

  That story appeared the next day under a banner headline that said: "Broderick Confesses."

  "Confesses?" she said later, fascinated at the media mentality. "What did I confess to? I didn't say anything that I haven't already told the police, my family, my friends, and anybody else who asks. Why would I even be in here if I hadn't confessed? These assholes don't have shit on me, other than what I told them. If I'd been planning this thing, I would've done a lot better job of it. I would've thrown away the gun in a dumpster, blamed it on some doctor—about a million of them hated his guts—and gone home to bed."

  Even so, she loved it. At last, Betty Broderick could command the audience she had so long been denied. To the disgust of the prosecution, she played her case in the press for months before she ever went to trial. To the hair-tearing dismay of her own defense team, she was seemingly incapable of shading her rage with remorse, of dulling her own razor-sharp edge for public consumption.

  She was obsessed with the unfairness of her situation. "It was like putting Muhammad Ali in the ring with a housewife," she said repeatedly. And now the same good ole boy network that had taken away her children in the first place to please Dan Broderick was refusing even to let her write or phone her minor sons from jail. "Dan Broderick is dead, and he's still torturing me and my children," she raged. And why was she denied bail? "If Marlon Brando's son is out on bail," she demanded, "then why not me?"

  She became more defiant by the day. Her remarks ranged from bitter to blasphemous. "What a fraud," she once snapped, thinking of the lavish burial services for Dan and Linda. "The sonofabitch hadn't stepped foot in a church in all the years he'd been in San Diego, and they bury him like he's the pope. Why is he being buried like a good Catholic father when he deserted his family? He should've been buried like the asshole he is." To this day, she still often speaks of Dan Broderick in the present tense.

  Other times, she was simply incredible. "My children are glad I did it. They hated him. They're glad he's dead," she said repeatedly.

  Once, six years earlier, upon first learning of her husband's affair, she had not only burned his clothes in a backyard bonfire, she then poured paint over the smoldering embers for good measure. Now she was doing the same thing again—going that one step further, adding insult to injury with a crazy glee.

  As for the killings—which she persistently referred to as either "the incident" or "the accident"—little annoyed her more than the "woman scorned" scenario advanced by much of the media. If she had been motivated by mere jealousy and revenge, she told a Los Angeles Times reporter, "I'd tie them up where they couldn't move, and I'd torture them every single day and single night for six years. I'd leave them where no one could hear them screaming, come back and give them cigarette burns and kick them like torturers do, because that's what it felt like they were doing to me."

  At times, she seemed cynically amused by her own anger. Jail psychologists in particular made her laugh. "They all keep saying to me that I'm still angry," she said sarcastically. "Like that's a fault? You bet, boys—my frustration and anger is off the graphs! Totally. How many times can you bend over and get fucked and not get mad? What man wouldn't have been angry? Angrier sooner. But women aren't allowed to get angry, because that's an unfeminine trait, you know … It's always, 'Oh, well, of course she's crazy, she uses naughty words, and she's in contempt of court, so we better arrest her.' But, see, that's because the men write the rules. And the rules are that you're allowed to defend yourself—if you're a man. You're allowed to defend your home and your family and your property from thievery or people—if you're a man. But if you're a woman, you're supposed to go in the corner and cry and get fat and take pills and kill yourself."

  The woman beyond the fury was almost impossible to find. She recoiled from all questions about earlier, better days. Her mangled emotions had withdrawn behind a wall too strong to breach. Despite her intellectual agility, what she had once felt was no longer an available memory. "Yes, yes, of course, I loved him, I admired him," she would snap impatiently, remotely, rushing past the point. "But he let us down, me and my children, he broke our hearts …"

  She held San Diego in thrall. During her first trial, a local TV station would even interrupt its soap operas to broadcast her testimony live. In an extraordinary scene not long after the "incident," she put on lipstick and eye-shadow and posed for a Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine photographer. Then, came the national media, starting with the TV tabloid Hard Copy, followed by the Ladies' Home Journal. And that was only the beginning. Within the next two years, she became one of the most publicized killers in San Diego history. Her second trial was televised live by the national channel Courtroom TV; she was featured on Oprah Winfrey in the talk show's second-highest-rated program ever (next to Oprah's diet tell-all). Her story became a two-part TV movie of the week, starring Meredith Baxter ("Thank God," quipped Betty. "I was afraid they'd pick Roseanne Arnold"). She even got thirty minutes in an episode of ABC's news program 20/20, hosted by Barbara Walters. By which time she was so spoiled that she could only complain, barely joking, "Where's Mike Wallace? I want 60 Minutes!"

  Her sympathy mail came first from the San Diego area but, as the press stepped up its pace, from all over the United States and the world. Most of it was from educated, white-collar wives, women who had also been married to successful professionals, especially attorneys. But the Betty Broderick story crossed all social and economic lines in its appeal to women. From shy, polite librarians writing in careful script on pink stationery, to militant feminists typing on corporate letterheads, hundreds of women wrote to extend their sympathy, understanding, and prayers. They related their own stories as wives and mothers, left in middle age by their husbands for younger women; they told of their unfair experiences in white, male-dominated divorce courts; some confided their
own urges to kill; others hoped that, thanks to her example, something positive might result, that divorce court laws might be changed, justice finally done. It didn't matter that the details of Betty Broderick's case were then unknown to any of these women—they knew enough to believe that if a woman says she got a raw deal in divorce court, she probably did.

  "Dear Mrs. Broderick … you have my understanding and sympathy … I can relate to the inability of finding proper representation if the spouse is prominent," wrote one typical woman, who said her wealthy former husband, a physician, was paying her $95 per week in support, after 20 years of marriage. "If your ex-husband had been more fair, you wouldn't have been pushed over the edge."

  "I had totally supported my husband and children financially while he spent more than twelve years in universities," wrote a San Francisco divorcée who had given her savings to her husband to help him develop two law practices. But then, when he left her, "I could not get a lawyer to represent me … [and] he of course had been advised to postpone a settlement because of a change in the divorce laws … the infamous no fault or Casanova's Charter … I was a sitting duck and did not know it." She felt that the 'good ole boy' network had cheated her, as it had Betty. "There but for the grace of God, go all of us who have been stripped, raped, and pillaged by the court system, of our very life as we knew it or thought it to be, just because of the very success of the husbands, which we contributed to, or accomplished for them …

  "Your case will bring to light the inequities and prejudices in our court system where it pertains to women … There are many people who do not consider that you are 'crazy’ but who understand the possibility of being driven temporarily off-balance, given the proper circumstances and degree of fear and stress and emotional abuse. Have faith."

  Other letters came from the radical fringes:

  "Betty—-We love you. We admire you. We are with you. We will not abandon you … We will never let them defeat you," read one, signed by sixteen women in Washington, D.C. "We think you were somehow chosen to say that it is NOT OK … to hurt a woman because she cries. It is not OK to hurt a women because she doesn't cry … It is not OK to take a mother's children away … It is not OK to steal from the earth and from the Goddess that is Motherkind, or to cook a lamb in its mother's milk … One woman will say NO, and all Motherkind will echo, NO … You are at this moment ONE WOMAN AGAINST ALL PATRIARCHY. But all Motherkind is at this same moment standing up behind you."

  And then there was the mail from her old La Jolla friends. Having only a few days earlier regarded Betty Broderick as an unpleasantry to be avoided, many of the ladies of La Jolla now hauled out their most gracious stationery and wrote letters that registered, more than anything else, an almost complete inability to comprehend her ugly act as a factual reality.

  Less than two weeks after the killings, for example, she received a handwritten note on fragile stationery (complete with the same happy faces Betty so favored), from the president of the Coast Charter Investment Club, a small group of La Jolla women who dabbled in stocks. Betty had once been the club president.

  "Dear Betty, In behalf of all us in Coast Charter Investment Club, we missed you at the meeting Monday at Maureen Brown's home," wrote president Diane McNary. "We had an interesting meeting. We voted the purchase of Europ-Disney SCA found on the foreign market … This stock is associated with the Disney World being built in France and is valued about $15 a share … Lucy Smith paid your $30 on Monday and plans to do the same in December. The December meeting, as tradition holds, will be at Bev Fipp's house. Thought you would like to know the current state of our little investment club. Will keep you posted."

  And, from her hairdresser at Salon La Jolla: "Dearest Betty, Just to let you know everyone here at the salon is thinking of you, and we all send our very best … I wanted to offer to do your hair for your trial. If you would like that, I would come and make you look and feel a little better with color and a blow dry … Naturally there would be no charge, it would be my pleasure. Let me know … We're all rooting for you. Best wishes, Danielle."

  Others wrote chitchat: "Dear Betty … Life must not be fantastic for you now, and I hope you have chosen a good lawyer and that you have a good rapport with him or her. My life is just the same, days full of a few classes and a bit of working at the Nutmeg Tree … I send my love and support Judy."

  With the perfect, trained grace of the La Jolla matron she had been, Betty issued prompt thank-you notes, written on her yellow legal pads, studded with little penciled happy faces. In the beginning, she frequently apologized for the inelegant stationery.

  "Diane, You dear, sweet thing!" she wrote one woman. "I, too, always wished we had shared more time. No one out there has any idea of the extent of what I was forced to endure. It was a very private grief. I don't know if I’ll ever be able to return to the person I once was, or even close Thank you for your kindness and caring. I really appreciate it. Love, Betty P.S., If I'm ever out—it's tea at Harry's for sure."

  And, to another: "Dear Vivian, Thank you for your sweet, loving note Seems I have lots of people out there who sympathize with me! This is more of a story than just the usual husband dumps wife for younger woman. This is a story of legal terrorism and corruption, of using 'the system' to batter, abuse, terrify, and ruin your wife AND four innocent lovely children over a prolonged and never-ending time. Please keep in touch. Send me things to read and pray that we survive this. Sincerely Betty Broderick."

  And, to the hairdresser: "Dear Danielle, Thank you for your sweet, kind and generous offer. I do have a court order that I can get my hair professionally cut and colored once a month—which is a hell of a lot more often than I ever did at home! [happy face] Let me know which day of the week would be best for you and you will be paid WELL for your time. Too bad things had to come to this. Love, Betty."

  As most high-profile killers usually do, she also began receiving warm letters from fascinated men. Most were full of hurt-me-again sexual innuendo; but a few came from earnest men touched by her story, wanting to apologize for the cruelties sometimes inflicted on women by the male sex. But Betty couldn't distinguish. Flattered as an undiscerning fifteen-year-old, she answered them all. Among her favorite male correspondents was a prominent La Jolla architect with a high-profile socialite wife, who was open in his defense of, and fascination with, Betty Broderick. First he sent her cards of encouragement, then advanced to sending her pictures of his boat, and finally even visited her in jail. "He gave me a kiss through the glass," Betty reported, blushing. It was one of the most delicious luncheon morsels to hit the Valencia patio in months.

  So, no more Crazy Betty. Now she was, at least in some circles, a heroine. The sympathy she had wanted, the understanding that had eluded her for so many years, was now hers at last. She flourished.

  She even started to look better. She was still fat, with double chins crowding her features, but she began to lose weight. Her blue eyes lost their dull glaze and began to sparkle at visitors through the Plexiglas; her complexion lost its pasty flavor. She began grooming her hair and wearing makeup—navy blue mascara, dun-colored eyeshadow, and shell pink lipstick. In time, she even stopped biting her fingernails. She laughed easily and often. For the first time, it was easy for an outsider, who had never known her until the homicides, to catch glimpses of the strikingly beautiful woman Betty Broderick had once been.

  But she did not mellow. As the weeks and months passed, as the mail arrived by the armsful and the media spotlight grew ever brighter, she became ever more the victim, ever more confident of the righteousness of her actions, ever more flamboyant. In time, Betty would refer to her story with the possessiveness of a star. She joked that she wanted Bette Midler to play her part in a feature film. Not that she had anything against Meredith Baxter—but she could never understand why the actress didn't come to visit her in jail before making two movies about her.

  "Wish you'd have called me!" she wrote Baxter cheerfully, after the first TV movie
, which was decidedly unsympathetic to her. "Movie would have been a LOT better if you'd had a better understanding of exactly what it was that I couldn't 'cope with," she wrote in part. "Come see me—call or write—even though it's now a little late. I AM interesting [happy face]."

  On the Oprah show, taped live by remote control from Colinas, she presented herself as a symbol "for all women who need to be scared … who have been debased by the system."

  But she didn't mean it. Despite her public pronouncements, Betty never really saw herself as a symbol of any other woman's plight. "Nobody has been through what I’ve been through," she said repeatedly from Colinas. In her mind, her case was always unique, larger than life. More money, more power lined up against her. More abuse than any average woman could know—because nobody else had been up against Dan Broderick. Nobody else faced an enemy so ruthless, so brilliant.

  "The whole legal system is based on who can lie faster, sooner, quicker, bigger … on who's cheating who better," she once remarked. "Lawyers are professional fighters—it's the acceptable social arena to beat the living shit out of the other side—and nobody was better at it than Dan Broderick. He could convince a jury that black was white. I was up against a master, and once he left me, I was just another case to him, another opponent for him to destroy." At bottom, it was always there—Betty Broderick's undying personal pride in the legal genius of the man she had married and killed.

  She was obsessed, past the point of being able to sort it out in any logical way. Over and over again, the same reels rolled, pictures of all the lies, infidelity, and betrayal. She could not escape them, not anymore. The full truth, whatever it was, was now locked in her head, a stormy, mangled place. Sometimes, intellectually at least, even she seemed to know it. "You know, the Betty Broderick you see today isn't the same one that I was in 1983 before all this began," she once said, in a moment of quiet. "That Betty was a beautiful person to be around. I was a nice, loving, happy, centered person, and I was fun. Everybody liked me. And I know that Dan Broderick was proud of me, too—even if the fucking asshole went to his grave denying it."