by Bella Stumbo
But, this time, she only had her face peeled. Studying herself afterward she could still see all the same fine lines—"They just looked pinker. It hurt like hell, and I didn't look a goddamn bit younger," she says. Along with millions of women everywhere, and in common with dozens of her La Jolla acquaintances, Betty Broderick had joined in the familiar, costly war on time in a bid to keep her man.
During these months, too, she began to sound the alarm to her friends. She was everywhere, at school functions, in the La Jolla boutiques, in the supermarkets, telling them all of her suspicions that Dan was having affair.
In the beginning, her married friends invariably reassured her that couldn't be true—just look at her, she was gorgeous, slender, smart, and young, still young. Besides, they counseled her, even if it was true, it would pass. In La Jolla, as elsewhere in the world where career wives are threatened, the common answer is to look the other way. Do not panic. The husband won't risk the cost, embarrassment, and inconvenience of leaving the home. Many of them had been through it themselves. One of Betty's friends, for example, another attorney's wife, had endured her own husband's semi-public affair with an office girl. But that story ended neatly, when one of the other wives in the partnership marched into the men's lavish legal suite and ordered the boys to clean up the mess at once—in other words, get rid of the girl. The wayward husband wasn't about to buck the pressure. He followed orders. The young woman was reportedly paid to disappear. Years later, from jail, Betty would still recall that as the ideal solution to a bad situation. Why couldn't Dan have been as sensible? The other long-suffering wife had even been rewarded by her philandering husband with a new Porsche. "Because he knew he owed her," says Betty.
But, in the fall of 1983, she was not yet so cynical. She was only terrified. She looked around her, at the divorcées she knew, such a sad, failed lot, attending their singles clubs, sitting at singles tables at the Jewel Ball, women without men. She looked at her old friend Patti Monahan, now limited to $2,700 per month support after twenty-two years of marriage—a pretty, aging woman with bleached hair, wearing miniskirts and too much makeup, now forced back into the dating game of her youth in pursuit of a new relationship to replace the one she had lost. Betty shuddered. It was cheap, it was degrading. No, this could not be her. This nightmare was not happening. How could it be? "I was the perfect wife and the perfect mother," she said over and over, years later, still bewildered. "I did everything right."
That autumn Dan's parents visited them in La Jolla. His mother wanted to see her son in action, so she and Betty went to court one day. Remarkably, it was the first time Betty had ever watched her husband argue a case. "Dan always said it was tacky when families were there— and I agreed," she says.
But now, finally, nearly fifteen years after their marriage, here sat the wife in court, watching the husband do his money-making thing—when who does she suddenly spot, sitting across the room, but Linda Bernadette Kolkena, watching her husband, too, with wide, admiring eyes. "She was wearing this shitty little navy chino suit from JC Penny's, and she had on these little spaghetti-strap heels. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, whenever she walked."
She pointed Linda out to her mother-in-law. "See that girl, Yo?" she said to the older woman. "She's trouble."
"Oh, nonsense, Bets," Yo replied, surprised. "You know Dan would never cheat on you and your wonderful children." Years later, Betty Broderick would still be repeating her mother-in-law's reassuring remark verbatim, as if it might somehow still come true.
Later, too, Betty would rail not only at her own family for letting her down as her marriage was collapsing, for refusing to support her, but also at Dan's. They were always tacky, rowdy Irish drunks, she would say, without any regard for women. She would talk about how "they had no class—his mother would come to La Jolla and embarrass me by shopping for clothes in the aisles of Von's [a supermarket]!" She would especially denounce brother Larry as a "drunken, sexist pig."
She doesn't mean it, of course—or at least she didn't, once upon a time. In truth, one of Betty Broderick's deepest hurts is the way Dan's family abandoned her, the minute that he did. Larry knew about Dan's affair with Linda Kolkena long before Betty did, but he didn't tell her. And she had trusted him. She had trusted all of them. They were her "extended family." After 16 years, she had not thought of herself as a disposable. How could they just throw her away when they had once liked her so much? And they had all liked her. Years after she was in jail, she would still be grappling with the betrayal, still reciting anecdotes to prove that she had been loved by the Brodericks.
Larry, for example: she remembered how, so many years ago, he had been "the only person on planet earth who remembered my college graduation, who gave me a present—it was a little wooden music box with Hummels on the top … I still have it." Another time he brought her a Steiff teddy bear from a trip to Europe for her collection.
And Dan's sister Patti, who had a child born with Down's syndrome. "Everybody acted like it was the end of the world," says Betty. "But I told her, ‘It's no big deal, it's still your little person, who needs love,' and she was so grateful that somebody gave her support. I still have the letter she sent me, telling me how much she loved me."
But she also still has a second letter Patti wrote to her, after the divorce was under way. "She accused me of defaming her brother! She sounded like she hated me … that it all was my fault!"
After that, she got no other mail at all from the Brodericks. "It was as if I had never even existed!" It was one of the few times in the wake of the killings that she sounded close to tears.
As autumn turned to winter, she began to forfeit still more pieces of her pride.
One afternoon, she called a secretary she knew in Dan's office to ask "What's going on?" And she started to cry. Embarrassed, the secretary had murmured whatever comforting remarks she could think of, until Betty finally hung up.
But the secretary knew full well what was going on. By late 1983, she later told defense investigators, the affair between Dan and Linda was common knowledge in downtown legal circles. The pair took long lunches together and sometimes didn't return to the office in the afternoons at all. They drank together after work at the downtown pubs, they attended legal functions together. Linda was especially indiscreet, talking openly to other women in the office about her latest plans with Dan, said the secretary.
Dan Broderick's notorious workaholic ways had also dramatically relaxed, she said. Formerly he had been so meticulous, she said, that he would insist a letter be retyped entirely if it contained a single error, or if the corner of the stationery had been creased in filing. But now he was a changed man. He was no longer "cranking out the work," and, some days, she would arrive to find his office a clutter of food wrappers and empty wine bottles.
Finally, the secretary decided to tell Dan what she thought about the openness of his affair with Linda Kolkena. She had worked with him long enough that she felt comfortable, she said, in voicing a friendly opinion. And so at lunch one day, she advised him either to tell his wife about Linda or cut it out. Dan had been pleasant, she recalled—but he had also been firm. It was none of her business. "I’m doing it the way I want to do it … My wife has made my life miserable for years," he told her. He didn't elaborate, she recalled, saying only that he didn't want to "rag" about his wife.
The secretary tried to ignore the situation thereafter. But, just a month later, days before Christmas, Dan fired her without explanation—and without severance pay. The year before, she said, he had given her a $10,000 Christmas bonus—but this year, he only reached under the office Christmas tree and handed her a cheap bottle of champagne.
"It was the feeling of such helplessness," Betty said later. "I couldn't make him get rid of her, I couldn't make him tell me the truth, and I couldn't fix it!"
And so, she was finally reduced to an act that still shames her more than most of the extreme steps she later took in her frantic attempts to bring Dan Broderic
k back home. It was the night of November 7. Her birthday. She was home with the children. "He didn't come home, he didn't give me a gift, he didn't take me out to dinner. I was just so depressed. I just felt so old and tired and failed. I really didn't want to live."
And so, "I tried to commit suicide. I slashed my wrists and took every pill in the house," she says. Later, in her first trial, she even showed the jury the scars on her wrist, apologizing to them that the wounds were so faint that the defense had to call a cosmetic surgeon to testify that they were actually there.
In reality, of course, it is unlikely that Betty seriously intended suicide. She was only trying to get her husband's attention in a pathetically immature way. And she knows it. Even today, the subject embarrasses her. "Well, no ... I didn't have to go to the hospital ... we really didn't have many pills in the house, just a few. I don't know what they were …" As for her wrist wounds, "They weren't deep … but they did hurt like hell." When Dan, the doctor, came home, he bound up her wrists, she says. He also reassured her again that "I was imagining everything, that there was absolutely nothing going on with Linda. What he didn't offer was the only thing she really wanted to hear: that he would dismiss Linda Kolkena the next morning, since it seemed to upset her so much.
The next day, she was awash with shame. For the first time, too, she began to doubt her own sanity. Maybe Dan was right—maybe she was going nuts. And so, that week, Betty Broderick took a timid step toward curing herself of her gnawing fears. She went to see a psychologist she had met earlier at a church seminar on self-esteem. "I figured if I was gonna do that kind of stuff, then I'd better get to see somebody fast, that Dan was right—I needed help."
Notes from that session echo her Marriage Encounter letters, except now the lonely, needy young woman was seven years older, seven years unhappier, driven less by hope than fear. She told the counselor that her worst fear was of growing old alone and being poor, like all the sad old ladies she saw in the streets.
But after four sessions, Betty quit therapy. Although in later years the judge would order her to seek therapy if she wanted even visitation rights with her children, that was the first and last time Betty would voluntarily visit any therapist, free of the angry defiance of a woman obliged. As one doctor friendly to her later remarked during her divorce trial, Betty only "plays at therapy."
"Fucking right," says the Betty who sits in jail today, permanently altered. "Because I wasn't the crazy one. He was!"
But, back then, in 1983, her fury was hardly so crystallized. In lieu of professional counseling, she resorted to the commonsense advice supplied by her girlfriends.
November 22 was Dan's thirty-ninth birthday, and one of her most loyal friends, Vicki Currie, sat her down and talked to her hard. "Vicki told me to fight back," says Betty. "She told me to do what wives are supposed to do—be confident, romantic. She persuaded me to get all dressed up that day and go down to Dan's office with a bottle of champagne for a birthday surprise."
Her hair was long then, and her face was mostly healed from the acid peel. She put on one of her most festive Diane Fries dresses, a flowery Gypsy frock with ruffles and swirling skirt. She wore matching colored pumps. She looked good. She took a dozen roses and a bottle of Dom Perignon, along with "a gag gift"—a 24-karat-gold tire pressure gauge to go with Dan's red Corvette. She planned her visit so that she would be at her husband's office in time for them to watch the sunset together.
It was a new office. Dan had so prospered since he first went into private practice five years earlier that he had moved to larger quarters in a more prestigious high-rise building. It was just one more measure of the distance between their daily working worlds that Betty had never been there before.
Now, driving into the parking lot, approaching her husband's sanctum, the place he shared with Linda Kolkena, she felt nervous, uncertain.
Nonsense. He was her husband. This was half her business, for heaven's sake.
She took the elevator up.
The secretary, a woman she had never seen before, eyed her quizzically.
"Hi, where's the birthday boy?" Betty chirped brightly. "It's a surprise!"
Mr. Broderick was not there, the woman told her. Nor was his assistant, Ms. Kolkena. They had been gone, said the new secretary, since lunch. Betty had to identify herself as the Wife. She would wait, she said.
She remembers still her sick stomach, the tears rushing to her eyes as she strolled around Dan's new office suite.
"LINDA KOLKENA" said a brass plaque on Linda's office door. She opened it. It was magnificent. A window office with one of the most gorgeous downtown views of the bay that San Diego affords. Her eyes roamed the room. Expensive imported furniture, damask coverings, designer wallpaper. Her eyes stopped. Over Linda's desk was "a picture of Dan on a white horse, taken before we were even married!"
She went into Dan's office. Crumbs of chocolate mousse cake covered his desk, still in cake papers. Empty wine bottles. Balloons. She sat down and cried. "It was the worst pain I've ever felt," she said later. "I didn't want to believe it. I believed it."
She waited in Dan's office for a while, she can't remember how long. He never returned. She drove home, marched to the closet, and began ripping out all his expensive, tailor-made clothes. This time, it wasn't herself she wanted to damage. It was him. Trip after trip she made to the backyard, her children watched, wide-eyed. By now, her friend Vicki had arrived and begged her to stop.
But Betty kept marching with armfuls of clothes, tears streaming. When the pile was high, she poured gasoline on it and lit the match.
As the smoke billowed, as thousands of dollars of Dan Broderick’s expensive clothes went up in flames, her children cried and screamed
When the embers cooled, Betty poured brown paint on them.
"I wanted to finish the job," she explained years later from jail. "And it was fun. When I put the gas on—I used lawnmower gas—it went 'Poof. Poof, you sonofabitch'!"
Dan came home several hours later. She met him at the front door, she says, "and I handed him his checkbook and told him, 'You won't move out, so I've moved you out. You're out of here'."
He ignored her, came in, and went to their bedroom, where the Brodericks had most of their quarrels. But there was no fight in the Broderick household that night. Dan didn't react at all, his daughter Kim said later. "He didn't act mad. He was real quiet."
Behind closed doors, Betty says, Dan only repeated his past speech. "He told me I was imagining it, there was nothing going on with Linda. He said the party was innocent, that they had gone to lunch, then Linda had gone shopping, and he had been at a deposition."
She was so pathetically willing to be deceived, to believe. She was in fact so embarrassed about burning his clothes that, according to later trial testimony, she even lied about it the next day to Maria, her faithful maid, telling her that Dan came home at two A.M., "stinking drunk" and burned his own clothes.
It took her months more to ask herself the obvious questions: 1) If Dan had been as innocent as he claimed, then why hadn't he been infuriated that she had burned a blameless man's clothes? And 2) If he had any compassion for her agony, whether real or imagined, why hadn't he agreed to let Linda go, in the face of this latest piece of high theater?
The answer, of course, was that Dan Broderick was neither blameless nor compassionate nor, apparently, willing to take responsibility for his own actions. Instead, he let the transparent deception drag on for another two years. He watched while his wife cried, whined, and tried to win him back. He watched the uncertainty grow in her eyes while at the same time he permitted her to play all her coy, humiliating games aimed at seducing him; and when she periodically snapped in angry frustration, he only looked away, vindicated again. Dan Broderick was like a cat caught by highway headlights, frozen by indecision, or a dog in heat, unable to turn any suitor away. Either way, he hardly acted in his own best interests, much less Betty's.
Not surprisingly, by the time the ful
l truth about his affair finally emerged, in 1985, it was not Dan whom Betty most loathed, but herself for her own gullibility. Her self-hatred only grew, her sense of self steadily eroded. "What a dumbshit I was! In retrospect, if he hadn't been guilty, he would've had me put in jail then for burning his precious clothes." Worse, she adds with withering self-disgust, "I was such a wimp that I didn't even burn all of them. I saved his favorite things—like his damned silk top hat and that cape that hung to the floor, like a magician's, and a ridiculous straw bowler that he loved."
In any case, that bonfire was Betty Broderick's first act of direct violence against her husband—a full six years before she finally shot him to death.
Chapter 8
Triangle Plus One
That Dan and Betty Broderick survived 1984 together is a measure of human capacity for self-inflicted pain and deception. He deceived, she endured.
Periodically, she saw pictures of Dan and his pretty "legal assistant" in local legal publications. But she ignored them. Her La Jolla friends began to sigh with relief. Maybe the thunderclouds had passed over yet another of them. Betty was even beginning to seem like her old self again. Not that she didn't talk about her suspicions. But she didn't talk so much. The obsession seemed to have lifted; the naked panic had vanished.
But, downtown, Dan and Linda's friends looked on with increasing concern. Dan seemed more strained each day, and Linda was now crying openly over his refusal to leave Betty.
According to her friends, Linda had begun to ask the obvious questions: If the marriage was over, as Dan had said, if he was in love with her as he said, then why wasn't this drama coming to a speedy, logical conclusion? Why wasn't he divorcing Betty and marrying her?
The answer was old as the hills: however discontented Dan Broderick may have been at home, and however thrilled he was by his afternoon and evening trysts with this beautiful young woman who so adored him, he was not yet anywhere close to committing the unthinkable act of walking out on his wife and children, of scandalizing his family, of sinning in the eyes of the Church, no matter how "uncool" he thought that church was. What's more, a divorce, he knew, would cost him a fortune.
