by Bella Stumbo
But if Dan was happy enough to have it both ways, Linda wasn't. She was unwilling to be the office bimbo, the Other Woman. Beyond her overriding desire to become the next Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III, friends say she was also haunted by the ghosts of her upbringing. Her father's square, sturdy face, his direct, honest eyes nagged at her daily. He would not approve of what she was doing and she knew it.
"She didn't even tell me that they were involved, not until way after," said her sister, Maggie. "And she was so ashamed. She asked me if I still loved her. Linda did not sleep around." Seats guesses that her sister had a total of three lovers in her life, period.
After her death, Linda's friends were equally disgusted at the endless innuendos that she was just another pretty gold digger who used sex to snare a rich husband. "It's a joke—Linda was the most old-fashioned woman I ever met. She was the type who wore panties under her panty hose—and not bikinis either," said attorney Kathy Cuffaro, an attractive, vibrant young woman in her own right. Nor was Dan apparently any red-hot stud, Cuffaro added with a bawdy grin. "Linda used to complain that she didn't get enough sex out of him, that he would sit in the bathroom at night with the lights on after she'd gone to bed, reading briefs."
"Sure, face it, Linda had it made, when she married Dan. He was major money," says her sister. "But there was a whole lot more to that relationship for Linda than money. She was head over heels in love with him. Dan made Linda laugh … they had fun together." Besides, Seats added, "Dan was brilliant. If Linda was just a bimbo, he wouldn't have been interested in her for a minute." It was just one more poignant, ironic footnote to Linda Kolkena's brief life story that nearly everyone, even her sister, consistently measured her worth based on Dan Broderick's standards—despite their perception that Dan had, for some reason, spent sixteen years married to a madwoman.
And even that small concession—that Linda was more than an airhead—came only grudgingly from some of Dan's male pals, according to Seats. "When their affair came out, Linda had to work very hard to win their approval. They were suspicious of her, that she wasn't worthy," says Seats For a long time, Dave Monahan, in particular, treated her with such condescension because she had so little formal education, says one girlfriend, "That it would make Linda cry. She was very sensitive about her lack of educational credentials—and, face it, Dan Broderick, with all his Ivy League degrees, was a hard act for anybody to follow. I bet even Betty probably felt inferior."
Even before 1984, Linda's closest friends had begun to counsel her to leave Dan if he wouldn't leave Betty. "That whole situation would have just killed my self-esteem," said Stormy Wetther. "I always told her to leave it behind." So did her sister, Maggie—"I begged her to run like the wind."
And finally Linda tried. She gave Dan an ultimatum: fish or cut bait. If he didn't divorce Betty, she was going to begin dating other men.
Dan Broderick was probably torn. But not enough to bend. He couldn't walk out on his family. He wouldn't. Instead, he told Linda to go ahead, to get on with her life. "Dan could be coldhearted, once he had made a decision," says Laurel Summers, Dave Monahan's closest female companion after his divorce from Patti.
But Dan didn't tell Linda to find a new job, too. Nor did she volunteer to quit. What for? they both asked friends. He needed her services, she loved her job. They could handle it. Whether they were hypocrites or just fools will always be an open question, though all evidence points to the former.
Enter Steve Kelley, one more casualty of the Broderick affair.
Kelley is a handsome, thirty-something editorial cartoonist for the San Diego Union and an aspiring comedian who has appeared on the Johnny Carson Show. A look-alike for actor Richard Chamberlain in his younger days, Kelley met Linda Kolkena at a realtor's office in the spring of 1983, while they were both shopping for condominiums. For Kelley, it was love at first sight: "I thought she was the perfect blend of independence and femininity. Very bright, self-assured. And she was so beautiful … my cup of tea."
Their relationship lasted more than a year. But Linda never told him that she had been—or was still—having an affair with her boss. Instead, Kelley began to suspect it on his own. "I started to notice how much she seemed to admire [Broderick]. She talked about him constantly." Then there were the odd items: whenever Dan left town, he would leave his Corvette for Linda to drive. When she bought her modest condominium in a San Diego suburb, Dan cosigned for the loan. Not least, says Kelley, in the summer of 1984, while Dan was touring Europe with Betty—"trying to reconcile their marriage, I thought"—he sent Linda several birthday presents: "a dozen red roses, a color TV, and a piece of emerald jewelry."
But, like Betty, Kelley didn't fully absorb the real truth until he went to visit Linda at her office one day. He was stunned at the elegance of her quarters. "I thought, 'Hey, she's bright, but she doesn't even have any college—and she was his legal assistant?'."
When he finally confronted Linda with his suspicions, Kelley says, she at first denied it. Don't be silly, she told him—Dan Broderick is a married man with four children. Then she broke down and cried and admitted all. For months, she told Kelley, she and Dan had spent their lunch hour in her little apartment in Ocean Beach. "She sobbed and trembled when she talked about it," says Kelley. "She couldn't accept her own actions and she was sick over what her father would think." Like Linda's sister, Kelley insists that it was the adultery that tormented Linda even more than the unsatisfying end to her love affair with Dan Broderick.
But she told Kelley the affair was over.
That was enough for him. By now, he was in love. He wanted to marry Linda, and, if she loved working in a law office so well, send her to law school, too. He begged her to quit her job, "to get out of the picture, to let that marriage sink or swim on its own."
But Linda couldn't. She wouldn't.
A patient man, Kelley swallowed his pride and went to see Dan, hoping for a man-to-man talk, for some reassurance that Dan had in fact let Linda go. He told Linda he was going. She didn't try to stop him, he said—maybe because she wanted an answer, too.
Kelley remembers his encounter with Dan Broderick well. "I had hoped it would be a heart-to-heart," he says. "I made an appointment. I asked him if the relationship was over. He said yes. But he wasn't warm or engaging—he was cold. He had absolutely no compassion for what I was going through. He basically dismissed me."
Kelley remained in his relationship with Linda for several more months, never knowing if she was his, or theirs. Finally, he issued his own ultimatum. It was near Christmas of 1984, he says. Linda was planning to spend the weekend at Palm Desert with Dan, helping him on a case. She had to go, she told Kelley. It was her job. He told her either to commute daily or forget him. She chose to forget him, though they remained friends until her death.
Today, Kelley is remarkably sanguine about it all. His voice still softens when he speaks of Linda, but he shows no emotion at all toward Betty and only minor contempt for Dan. "Dan just cared too much about Dan," he says mildly. "Linda asked him to get dogs or a security system, but he said no. Where was his basic instinct to protect his wife? But his attitude was no dogs, no alarms, because Bets Broderick was not going to control Dan Broderick. Nobody was."
In retrospect, Kelley likes to think that Linda "was essentially in love with two people at once. Rationally, she knew I fit better in terms of age and everything else. But, in the end, he was her knight in shining armor. So he won. It's that simple." Obviously, he adds with a shrug, "She made the wrong call."
Every cliché was in place. The wife knew but was the last to actually be told. So Betty continued to persuade herself that it wasn't true. And Dan gave her plenty of help that year. He acted more like a husband than he had before. He came home earlier, even though he was now busier than ever, not only with his practice but with bar association activities, too. He didn't talk much, but then he never had. On the other hand, he talked about the things that mattered to Betty. When their daughter Kim, then
14, wanted a piano, he agreed to buy one, an $8,000 Bosendofer. He didn't object when Betty wanted to buy a family vacation unit at Warner Springs Ranch, a nearby mountain resort.
That summer, they even took a week-long vacation to London together. It was their first trip to Europe alone. They stayed at one of the most elegant, romantic hotels in the city—and Betty tried to act like a bride on a second honeymoon. "I did everything I could think of to make him happy," she bitterly remembered later. "It was, 'Anything you want, honey.' … I followed him around like a Japanese wife. I didn't ask to go anywhere or do anything. The guy never even wanted to visit a museum. So I just sat around the bars with him, smiling and trying to be pleasing."
It didn't work. "He was so cold the whole time. I remember walking down a street one morning at dawn by myself, crying and thinking, 'What am I doing here? What am I doing wrong? What can I do that's right?’."
Linda. Linda never left her mind. Linda would never leave Betty's mind, not as long as she was still working with Dan. Every time Dan frowned at Betty's jokes and pranks, which he had once so enjoyed, each time he turned away from her touch, images of Linda blinded her. And, in her heart, she knew she wasn't crazy at all.
Or was she? After all, Dan was there, in London, with her. Maybe she was being paranoid. Let it go. Don't push, don't be a shrew … Even if he was still dallying with the office girl, it would blow over. And Betty was willing to settle for that. The infidelity no longer scorched her mind. That part of her pride had long since died. Now, all she wanted was to remain Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III.
Dan, meantime, was sending Linda flowers and jewelry, while she drove his Corvette around town.
* * *
Back in San Diego, Betty was more active than ever with the children, their schools, soccer clubs, and charity work. Every day she rose early and worked on herself. She got facials, haircuts, manicures. She dressed like a dream. She was more beautiful than she had ever been. Everyone said. Everyone but Dan.
Why couldn't he even smile at her anymore? Every time he walked through the door, he looked ten years older, the frown lines were so frozen. He couldn't even talk to the kids without looking distracted. His eyes, always so intense, seemed to her to be perpetually burning with some inner anger.
Linda. But, my God, she thought to herself—if he seriously wanted Linda Kolkena, surely he would have made his choice by now? Would he? Why did he keep denying it? Was she crazy after all? The madness continued.
By now, too, either Betty had begun to hallucinate severely from suspicion and fear, or Dan Broderick had turned into a man capable of genuine mental cruelty. One morning, for example, as he lay in bed with his eyes shut, seemingly asleep, she says that he began murmuring "Linda, Linda." She stared at him, aghast. He wasn't asleep. She could tell. She knew it. He was deliberately trying to hurt her. She knew it. She still knows it, to this day. But why? Why?
Another night, he came home late and, she swears still, deliberately laid his hand on the pillow near her face— "and it smelled of vagina! I was so grossed out! I lay there on my back, looking into the dark, with tears running down my face, and I thought, how can he do this to me?"
Recalling the incident later from jail, she began to sob. It was the first time in the year since she had killed him that Betty Broderick broke down entirely while talking about Dan. "And the worst part," she said through her tears, "was that he made me think I was crazy—just like you are thinking now—because then he got on top of me, and he kissed me, and told me he'd never slept with anyone else but me!"
Not until years later would Betty finally decide that Dan had been purposely flaunting his affair with Linda, at the same time he denied it, in an effort to drive her to divorce him. "He was trying to make me hate him. He wanted out, he wanted a divorce—but he didn't want to be the guy. He wanted me to file." Later she concluded, too, that he had literally been trying to drive her crazy so that nobody could blame him for leaving her. "Instead, people would just say 'Oh, poor Dan. See what a raving lunatic he's been putting up with all this time.' Which of course is exactly what happened," she added with a manic little laugh.
* * *
By late 1984, Betty Broderick was so riddled with self-doubt, so battered by conflicting signals, that she could no longer keep a single thought alive for more than a few days. Again, Dan wasn't coming home until after midnight. He said he was working. She knew he wasn't. He told her she was crazy. She knew she wasn't. Why wouldn't he just tell her the truth? The cruel mind games continued. On and on and on. Her mind turned into a yo-yo, flying back and forth from angry suspicion to childlike hope. And nothing gave her more hope that everything would be fine than the day she finally approached her husband, in yet another desperate bid to please, and offered the last concession she had: she volunteered to have her body surgically restored, if possible, to its original child-bearing condition. Maybe they should have more children after all.
And Dan agreed. He even went to see a gynecologist with her to discuss the possibility of having her tubal ligation reversed.
"She was expansive, upbeat, inquisitive," the doctor later testified at her murder trial. And Mr. Broderick had seemed "quite interested." Until the doctor recommended artificial insemination as a more feasible solution than surgery. Then, says Betty, Dan lost all interest. He said it was unnatural. Why he went with her in the first place is just one more unanswered question that Dan Broderick took with him to the grave.
Even so, Betty was encouraged. Surely his fling had passed. Her confidence grew.
That November, she threw herself into the grandest party she had ever planned—a five-day celebration of Dan's fortieth birthday. For weeks she immersed herself in the details, marching around La Jolla with her clipboard, ordering meals, hotels, flowers, gifts, stationery. When the sprawling Broderick clan converged, all was in perfect order. Betty had arranged for everything from baby-sitters to hourly entertainment—picnics, trips to Sea World, Mexican lunches, French dinners, a bus trip to the USC-Notre Dame game in Los Angeles, all culminating in a grand dinner on the night of his birthday. She even handed out mimeographed activity schedules. Later, the Broderick family applauded the success of her efforts—and nothing ever soothed Betty Broderick more than the warm bath of family approval. She relaxed even more. Dan's family loved her. Nothing had changed in fifteen years. She belonged.
By December, Dan and Betty Broderick seemed to be a closer family unit than ever, thanks mainly to housing matters. First, they were obliged to move from their Coral Reef home into a temporary rental because Coral Reef had a crack in its foundation that would take months to repair. Together, they located and leased a lovely new home on La Jolla Shores—seven bedrooms and an ocean view. The whole family loved it so much that Betty escalated her search for their new house. Now that they were out of Coral Reef, why should they ever move back there? Dan agreed. That very month, in fact, they made a losing $750,000 bid on another ocean-view home on the island of Coronado. By now, Betty had given up her demand that they remain in La Jolla. Whatever Dan wanted was fine. They could always move back to La Jolla later, after he recovered from his midlife crisis.
By Christmas, she was so certain that the affair had run its course that she grew positively cocky. "I thought we had weathered the storm. I thought we would go on, with our scars—but we would go on … until I got his shitty Christmas present."
By now, Betty had put up with two years of his infidelity and lies, and she attached a big price to her forgiveness. What she expected that Christmas, in recompense for her patience, was a lavish expression of apology—something on the order of the new Porsche her girlfriend had gotten from her own philandering husband the year before. What Dan gave her for Christmas instead was "a rinky-dinky little ring that wasn't even big enough for my daughter!" She "threw it back into his face," she wrote later in an essay to herself. "I told him it wasn't even worth the gas it would take to return it."
It was an ugly Christmas morning scene, with
the children looking on. "He owed me big for the two years of hell he had put me through," she said later. "My life had been the worst shit! And so, I wanted this humongous ring, a tsavorite ... I didn't need a ring! I had a ring! I wanted the ring! And the ring I wanted was in the thousands—I can't remember how many. $10,000? $30,000? But it was a major ring. I was looking for my reward. But instead, he had the nerve to give me this little piece of shit in the low hundreds!"
Even today, Betty isn't ashamed of her own naked greed, her ugly priorities that Christmas. Just as Dan would never assume responsibility for his own failings, neither would she. Both would always shift the blame totally to the other.
Either way, it was the best Christmas present Betty Broderick could have possibly given Linda Kolkena.
Two months later, on the night of February 28, Dan came home and told her, "I'm leaving."
He then went to his closet and began packing. She asked him why he was leaving. He told her "he needed some space for a little while, to think things through," she says. She accused him again of having an affair, and, she says, again he denied it. "He said Linda had nothing to do with it … he said he just needed some time by himself. And then he asked me, 'Do you want me to leave now or tomorrow?'."
If she hadn't been convinced before that Dan was determined to make her the culprit in their split, she was convinced then. In her mind, even at the eleventh hour, he was trying to force her into ordering him out of the family home. "I told him, ‘I've been married to a lawyer too long to fall for that one. You leave whenever you want to.'"
