by Bella Stumbo
And, although Monaghan didn't think either Dan or Linda were being deliberately malicious, he also agreed that maybe Dan had been too tough on Betty. "He was determined to discipline her, control her, like you would an unruly child … It's a masculine sort of deal," he said, sipping an ale at Reidy's. "But you gotta take a stand!" In hindsight, Dan had obviously miscalculated, but, Monaghan added, shrugging, melancholy, "That's the Irish Catholic male for you. That's just how we Catholics do it. How long has it been—two thousand years? And we're still saying women can't be priests because they don't have peckers?"
Not until years after Dan left her did Betty develop any sympathy for a man with a hangover, when she finally got drunk herself—for the first time in her life, she says. She did it on a night out with girlfriends, on five glasses of Kir.
"And I went home and fell down on the bedroom floor, and I remember laying there giggling, because I had finally figured out why Dan Broderick was always doing the goddamn Turtle. That's the natural state of a drunk—on your back, giggling. And I felt like such utter shit the next morning. I said to myself, 'Now I understand why Dan Broderick was always laying out in the backyard on Saturday with his wine bottle snarling at all of us, giving us those 'Drop Dead Eat Shit' looks."
But, in those earlier years, money was always the central source of friction. No story better reflects the old saw that money can't buy happiness than the saga of Dan and Betty Broderick. Now that they finally had it in abundance, they bickered constantly over how best to spend it. Dan thought Betty was spending too much altogether. She thought he had one helluva nerve, bitching about her expenses, since she had worked just as hard for their success as he had. It was so insulting. How dare he treat her like a child on an allowance? Those nerves were still raw years later in their divorce trial, when Dan puckishly lectured her one final time:
"Until the late seventies or early eighties, you were responsible in the way you spent and managed money … you would adhere to a budget,” he told her. But after that, he testified, she had become "grossly irresponsible … you just wouldn't live within what I thought any reasonable person would consider reasonable expenditures."
Betty, in turn, was increasingly annoyed at Dan's spending patterns. In 1979, she had gotten a real estate license because "I thought it could be my sort of new home job. And I had a talent for real estate, an eye—I was going to help make us even richer." But Dan consistently ignored her advice. Instead, he invested steadily with his brother Larry in Colorado properties—often without consulting her, as he later admitted in divorce court. He simply didn't value her opinions.
The Brodericks couldn't even agree on which new house to buy. He wanted "a big mansion with an acre of lawn around it," says Betty. She wanted to live in La Jolla. But Dan was more interested in other parts of San Diego, such as Point Loma, with its spectacular sea cliffs, or the island of Coronado, miles away. They never would resolve the dispute. For the next five years, despite his escalating income, they remained at Coral Reef, gridlocked, literally until the day he walked out, each one still blaming the other for the impasse.
One good glimpse of life in the Broderick household in 1980 comes from their au pair, a young English girl, who wrote a series of letters home to her parents that summer.
Betty was very nice and considerate, but, the girl complained, she was always off to some school or charity event. Little Rhett, the girl wrote, "cries whenever she leaves the room, because she is not there enough." She also complained that the family never had a sit-down meal together because Mr. Broderick was always working late. Too often, she told her parents, Mrs. Broderick would simply order in pizza or Chinese before departing to some social function.
The girl disliked Dan intensely. He was "so cold and unfriendly," she said—except for one night when he had found her alone in the Jacuzzi. Then, she said, he had been too friendly, suggesting they go horseback riding the next day, "and he would tell everyone he had left his old lady." Also, she wrote in youthful disapproval, he made Betty cry because he was "always out tippling with the lads."
In another letter, she remarked that Betty seemed intimidated and afraid around Dan. Hers was an observation that others would later echo. "At about three o'clock every afternoon," recalls a former neighbor, Wilma Engel, "Betty would just change completely. She would stop laughing and panic and run around the house, picking up all the children's stuff because she said Dan hated to have it underfoot. When he was around, she was completely a different person, so much more quiet and subdued. She seemed afraid of him."
The truth was, of course, always in the eye of the beholder. "Dan was a different person around Betty," said his friend Laurel Summers. "She was always so critical, nagging. He seemed to have a hard time even smiling when she was around. After he met Linda, he was so much looser, warmer. That's when I realized I just hadn't ever seen Dan happy before."
Betty continued to threaten him with divorce, although she says today that she never meant it. "Sure, I said stuff like that all the time," she said later, wearily. "Sometimes I even thought of actually doing it. But it was never more than a passing fantasy. Where was I going to go with four children?" By then, too, she had seen her first divorce up close. Dave Monahan had left Patti—and the sight of this lonely, aging woman cast adrift gave Betty Broderick the shivers. It would never happen to her. Never.
For his own part, Dan Broderick apparently took Betty's threats more seriously—or so he said years later, after he had left her. "There were periods of time she was [happy with me]," he once told a reporter. "But there were demands for divorce hundreds of times … She tells our children that we had a happy, healthy, blissful marriage until I went crazy when I turned forty … [T]hat's just pure fiction … When we'd been married a year or so, told me she had gone to a lawyer. I was in my first year at Harvard Law School. It was 1970 … It may have been an attention-getting device, and it may not have been. I honestly don't know to this day."
During the next years, Dan only became more prominent, more successful in his world, and so did Betty, in hers.
He grew ever more handsome as time passed. Gone was the nerd of their student years, the skinny young man with the bobbing Adam's apple. He took speech lessons, and had some minor surgery on his nose. Now with his blow-dried hair, his new contact lenses, his wonderful smile, his fuller face, Dan Broderick was a man any woman would look twice at—even if he hadn't been a respected millionaire.
Betty, meantime, was at home doing what affluent young wives of prominent men in charming little communities like La Jolla usually do—which is to say, virtually nothing to incorporate herself info the large world beyond La Jolla's sunny shores. Always a voracious reader, her den was a clutter of books, magazines, and journals, ranging from the Reader's Digest to American Scholar. But they served mainly to make her the most interesting dinner conversationalist at any gathering. Otherwise, she spent her days fussing over the children's music lessons and soccer games, planning menus and centerpieces for her "gorgeous" weekly dinner parties and her "fabulous" Christmas parties, and issuing daily orders to the gardeners and the maid, while she thumbed through fashion catalogs over coffee. An early riser, she sometimes began placing mail-order calls to the East Coast at six A.M. for everything from crystal trinkets to clothes and candy.
By now, both Brodericks had become serious shoppers. She developed a taste for designer clothes, and so did he. The main difference between them in those days was his affection for larger objects—houses, cars, real estate. He became a serious collector of sports cars and Colorado properties. She, meantime, enjoyed buying smaller items for her home, the children, or herself. For years Betty had been saving clippings of items she would one day buy. For instance, "Long before I ever had a house, I saved a clipping from Architectural Digest on Bill Blass's personal swimming pool. I thought it was so beautiful—navy blue tile with brass lions' heads. I always thought if I ever had a pool, I wanted one just like that."
Now, the Bill Blass cli
pping was on the top of her files, not the bottom. Dansk flatware was another thing she had coveted since college. Soon now.
But, as she had done since their college days, she continued to turn all money matters over to Dan. He paid the bills, balanced the family and corporate budgets. "I didn't do bills," she once remarked from jail with a lingering pride. "I didn't have any interest in money, beyond spending it. I never had any idea of what we even owned." At times, toward the end before he left her, after the hard times had ended and the good times began to roll, Betty felt positively royal.
And so there she sat, in those years, as so many wives of tenure do, blindly pursuing her own course toward disaster. While Dan was out in the world, wheeling and dealing, Betty was just one more smart woman whose library led with Neiman Marcus catalogues and hundreds of children's books.
But, according to the rules that these two had laid down, she was certainly holding her own. She looked great, she dressed exquisitely, she was a perfect hostess, and she was the most active mother anybody had ever seen—she had transferred her child psychology training, and her schoolteacher aspirations, not only to her own children but to all their classmates as well. Children were her career.
And, like her own parents, she was always absorbed in education. She dreamed of what fine colleges her children would one day attend. Meantime, she made sure they were enrolled at Francis Parker or Bishops, two of the most exclusive private schools in San Diego. There was no lesson, no opportunity, no experience they weren't offered. Violin classes, summer camps, dance lessons, karate. She was room mother at school; she spent hours working on class projects. She staged Christmas parties for children at her home that became almost legendary. Her decorations, games, and food were close to art. She had Santa Clauses, mimes, music troupes, puppet shows. She thought like children do at Christmastime. Her parties were magic.
Most of her adult dinner parties also included children. And she always took special care to make sure that the evening was as easy as possible for the mothers. She often served shish kebabs, which she would grill and then pull off the sticks to pile info large bowls. "That way, if the kids didn't like vegetables, they could pick around them, and the meat was already all cut up, so Mom didn't have to spend half the dinner cutting up the kids’ meat. I had this down to a science." At the same time, she had begun extending her social skills to include elegant little omelette brunches just for the mothers. She hired chefs and sometimes string quartets, her backyard tables were graced with fresh flowers, she served the finest champagne, and her invitations were always dispatched on the most expensive engraved Tiffany stationery. Just like her mother taught her.
She also began to escalate her charity activities. Years later, amid the hundreds of clippings she had saved over the years, were pictures of Betty from the society pages, with and without Dan. At about the same time, she changed churches, switching from the tiny Catholic Church in La Jolla, Mary Star by the Sea, to the larger, popular La Jolla Presbyterian Church She did it, she said later, because the Presbyterians had more programs for children. But, too, she remarked, "It's amazing that in a community as cosmopolitan, as sophisticated, as La Jolla, at least half the people who attend the Catholic church are the Mexican maids!" One more time, Betty had done the socially correct thing. By then, Dan was so removed from the church that he didn't care one way or the other.
By late 1982, the Brodericks were united, if in little else, in their ongoing house hunt. By 1983, they were also bound by their tax returns, for, in that year, at least in the eyes of the IRS, Dan and Betty Broderick had become bona fide millionaires.
That was also the year her world began to fall apart, and her descent began. She was thirty-six.
Part Three
Betty, Dan and Linda
Chapter 7
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
In later years, she would remember exactly the first words she ever heard him utter about Linda Kolkena. She thinks it was sometime in early 1983. They were at a party, when Betty overheard Dan remark to a friend, "Isn't she beautiful?"
No big deal, maybe, coming from a different man. But "Dan Broderick never said things like that about women," says Betty. "He was never a womanizer, he had no sense of himself as sexual at all."
And so, her antennae went up. With those three words, Dan Broderick had innocently tapped that reservoir of instinct, of danger alert that all women understand. "It set off a bell in my head. It was like everyone else in the room got quiet, and Dan was booming. All I remember is it was so shocking to my brain."
That night she asked him "as casually as I could" whom he had been talking about. He blinked at her, at first uncomprehending, she recalls, then remembered. Oh, he said, just some new girl at the office. A receptionist. He went back to his reading, and she put it on the back burner of her mind.
But she didn't forget—because she also remembers vividly the first time she ever saw Linda Kolkena at a social function. "I was shocked that this was the girl he thought was so beautiful. She was just another skinny little bimbo with a gap between her front teeth. She had all this hair, all pouffed up like Bridgitte Bardot, bobby pins and the whole bit, not a streak of blond in it. I was, to say the least, underwhelmed." It never occurred to her to speak to Kolkena. "Why should I lower myself?" she asks. "She was obviously just another nineteen-year-old airhead looking for a rich husband. She couldn't hold a candle to me. I was prettier, I was smarter, I was classier. It never occurred to me that Dan would be stupid enough to throw his family away for his office girl. It was just too much of a cliché to believe."
But, inside, she was believing.
That summer she took the children on a five-week camping trip throughout the Northwest. Dan flew up to visit them one weekend—and, Betty says, he was colder and more detached than ever. They argued. Steaming, she drove him back to the airport and told him to get lost.
When she returned to La Jolla several weeks later, in time to attend a wedding in Newport Beach, it was to find an altogether different Dan Broderick awaiting her. This one was not silent, withdrawn, and unreadable. Instead, this new Dan was hostile, critical, and stunningly blunt.
"On the drive to Newport, he told me that he was bored with his life, bored with me, that he didn't love me anymore. He said I was old, fat, ugly, and boring," she says. That is probably an exaggeration, although she would later repeat it in court, and cry on the witness stand as she did. Either way, it was Betty Broderick's clear impression of where her marriage now stood. Her husband was either having an affair, or thinking about it, with the office bimbo. She says she asked him directly if another woman was involved. But he denied it. She didn't believe him, even then. But she was happy with the lie. Never mind, she told herself. It's just a midlife crisis. It would pass. Long after she had shot Linda Kolkena dead, Betty would still be referring to her as "a nineteen-year-old bimbo without even a high school education—but, I have to give her credit, she pulled off every sleaze girl's dream."
Linda Bernadette Kolkena was, in fact, a high school graduate, and when she first met Dan Broderick she was not nineteen years old but twenty-one. She was twenty-seven when he married her, and twenty-eight when she died six months later.
Unlike Betty or Dan, she did not come from a background of ease or high expectations. She was the youngest of four children born to Arnoldus Johanes and Everdina Bernadetta Kolkena, Dutch immigrants who came to the United States in the fifties and settled in Salt Lake City. Her father, now retired, worked for thirty years as a freight handler for a trucking company until one of his lungs collapsed. Throughout most of his working life, A.J. Kolkena was lucky to earn $16,000 in a year, says Linda's older sister, Margaret (Maggie) Seats, thirty-six, a personnel counselor, house-wife, and mother in Portland, Oregon.
Theirs was a small, clean home filled with love, says Seats, but no luxuries. The children got fifty-cent allowances a week. It was a big occasion when a freight box broke, yielding such goodies as rock candy which her father
was then allowed to bring home to his family. That is a how they often got their Christmas trees, too—from the broken debris of whatever was left upon the loading docks. Family vacations were car camping trips to parks a few hours from Salt Lake. Family recreation after meals often centered around a globe her mother kept on the kitchen table. "We'd test each other on world capitals," says Maggie, who remembers her mother as a gentle, intelligent woman—and the only female in her patriarchal Dutch family who was allowed to complete high school.
Her parents, both devout Roman Catholics, were so determined to send their children to church schools that A.J. Kolkena worked for years as a part-time janitor at St. Vincent de Paul's parish school to help defray tuition. For a while, the Kolkena family even lived over the bishop's office, rent-free in exchange for her father's handyman labors. But, by the time Linda was in third grade, Kolkena could no longer afford even reduced fees, so all his children turned in their brown-and-white checkered school uniforms and switched to public schools. They cried at the dinner table that night, Maggie remembers, and so did her father.
Meantime, it remained a far more rigidly religious household than that of either the Brodericks or Bisceglia clans. Four prayers were recited at every meal, says Maggie, and Christmas was observed as a strictly religious holiday, not a festivity. The Kolkena youngsters were never taught to even believe in such fancies as Santa Claus. Instead, Christmas meant midnight Mass, followed by a traditional candlelight Dutch breakfast of cold cuts, cheese, and bread, where her father would sit at the head of the table and read aloud to his family from the Bible. Gifts were given, but they were always modest. A.J. Kolkena apparently also practiced what he preached about Christian charity: His first remark, upon hearing that his youngest child had been shot to death, says Maggie Seats, was, "That poor woman [Betty] needs help."
