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

by Bella Stumbo

  During the first murder trial, Betty's sister-in-law and former college classmate, Maggie Bisceglia, summed up her view of the case in a single, tight-lipped line: "She killed him for the infidelity, period."

  She passed that Christmas season alone, wild as an animal with its foot in a trap. She went over to the Coral Reef house, thinking for the first time that she might take a few pieces of furniture home to her empty house. Her mind was trying to make the leap, although it never would, to some new life. She would go on. She had to. She was smart, she was still not so old, she was still pretty. Other men would want her. Yes.

  She stared at Dan's Christmas tree, with its bright packages beneath. She leaned over. "To Linda," said one. It was a big box, the kind department stores provide. Some item of clothing. A sweater? Or a nightgown? Her eyes went blind as she ripped it apart. She tore several other packages to shreds, too, then stood up and threw something, she can't remember what, through a wall mirror. And then she left, sobbing, and drove back to her empty home, where she sat for several hours alone in front of her Christmas tree before she fell asleep. She didn't even have the dogs for company anymore. They were at Dan's house, too.

  Surveying the damage upon his return home, Dan filed his third OSC.

  * * *

  That was Christmas 1985. The finale came in a skirmish over a bunch of pine boughs worth $28.51. At issue was who owed a bill from Adelaide's Florist in La Jolla. It had been sent to Dan, but he promptly forwarded it to Betty. She barely glanced at it before concluding that the sonofabitch had billed her for the flowers he sent her for Christmas. She instantly mailed it back to him. "I do not want to pay for these ugly flowers you sent me before you went off with your cunt," she scrawled at the bottom.

  With typical, cold determination, he sent it right back to her with a short, typed note: "Dear Bets: I am returning the statement you sent me from Adelaide's. ... I checked with Adelaide's bookkeeper and she has informed me that the December 14 charge was actually for two pine cone/evergreen arrangements with horns attached and that they were delivered to your address. No doubt these are the arrangements you bought to hang on either side of your front gate. In light of this clarification, I assume you will want to pay the bill. Sincerely yours, Dan."

  She paid the bill.

  In about the only note of warmth in her 1985 holiday season, Betty received a card from the young fencing contractor she had met. It was touching in its innocent simplicity.

  "Dear Bets … Have ever so enjoyed you and all your gooniness … I'm very happy we've been able to do all we've done and look forward to much more in 'eighty-six. Please don't hesitate to ask me to help you whenever I can. Keep your cute little imagination going … you can be so good with so little effort. Best wishes for the happiest new year you've ever had. Love, Brad."

  Chapter 12

  Good Day Lady Bets

  The house Dan bought for himself was about as far from the vanilla serenity of La Jolla as he could get. A large red-brick colonial with green shutters and regal white columns flanking the front door, it sat back from the street, framed by two great eucalyptus trees, with a circular driveway in front, ringed by tidy beds of flowers. It was in a racially mixed downtown neighborhood on the edge of Balboa Park, bordering a thriving homosexual district. Although his house was one of four large, aging mansions in a cul de sac, the neighborhood itself was mainly small, unpretentious Spanish and frame bungalows with old cars parked in front, untrimmed lawns, and occasional graffiti. In Dan's new community, perfection was the last thing on anybody's mind. From his backyard, he had a view of the lovely wildness of the arroyo fronting the park.

  Betty was horrified, both by the house and the neighborhood. Ironically, in better days Dan had once tried to interest her in the same house, but "I refused to even go inside. It was not a house for children … It had no family room, it didn't even have a swimming pool, and it was miles from the kids' schools."

  And so, now, at the eleventh hour, she balked at selling Coral Reef. She waffled, she evaded, she said the price ($325,000) wasn't right. She complained that Dan's new decor had undermined the house's real value. She gave every reason under the sun but the real one: to sell Coral Reef was to concede that her marriage was over. Coral Reef, the family home, was the last tie she had left to earlier, saner times when she knew who she was. Without Dan, without her family, Betty had no identity at all. She was literally incapable of severing that bond. But neither could she just say no.

  Dan's interest in selling Coral Reef as soon as possible was of course both obvious and reasonable: he was now paying the monthly mortgage on three houses—hers, his, and theirs, which was sitting empty. Plus, as Kim later said in trial, "Dad thought that if he moved into his own house, maybe Mom wouldn't keep coming back and destroying things, because she wouldn't have such an emotional interest."

  What followed was part comedy, part tragedy.

  Once, when they had their first buyer lined up, she simply refused to sign the papers properly. The buyer walked out in impatience. Not until the end of January did a second buyer surface—and the same run-around began again.

  The man caught in the middle of all this was attorney Dan Jaffe, who was representing Betty in the negotiations—or trying to. In a final, absurd episode, after the second buyer had been found, Jaffe flew to San Diego and drove Betty to the office of Dan's attorney, Thomas Ashworth, to finalize the paperwork. By now, Jaffe had extracted an agreement that Dan would not only pay Betty half of the selling price, but $18,000 extra—an amount she demanded to make repairs on her own new home. Jaffe's fee was also supposed to come out of the proceeds.

  But upon arriving at Ashworth's office, Jaffe later testified, Betty refused to get out of the car. Instead, Jaffe was obliged to conduct what he called "shuttle diplomacy." He went upstairs, talked to Dan and Ashworth, finalized the papers, then brought them back down to the car for his client to sign. And, finally cornered, Betty refused: she had to "think about it," she said. Jaffe flew back to Los Angeles, undoubtedly as exasperated as he had ever been.

  On the following Monday, Dan Broderick got a court order to sell the house without Betty's consent. He used what is called a four-hour notice, which means that he was able to make his case to the judge whether she was present or not—and she was not. Once the judge was persuaded that Betty was being unreasonable, a court-appointed official (or elisor) was assigned to serve in her stead, signing the required house sale documents.

  Dan Jaffe would later testify that he had warned Betty such a tactic was not only standard but probable in cases where one spouse in a divorce was holding up a house sale. She denies to this day that Jaffe ever told her any such thing. "What is an elisor? I still don't know." Again, Betty apparently hadn't been able to hear.

  She was in her kitchen cooking "a gorgeous pot roast and mashed potatoes dinner" when Jaffe called from Beverly Hills to tell her that Coral Reef had been sold that day. The boys were there and her parents were visiting from New York; she also had a summer houseguest from Canada, Brian Burchell (strictly platonic, she stresses).

  She hung up the telephone and didn't even pause. This time, she knew in advance that she was going to make a major, major scene. She felt almost sick, she was so enraged.

  Carefully, habitually, she turned the heat down on her roast, and brushed past her parents, sitting in the living room. "Be right back," she told them cheerfully. As she got into her car, she was trembling with anger. This couldn't have happened. Yet it had happened. Her husband, her hotshot, legal beagle husband, this arrogant asshole, had sold her house without her consent!

  She wove in and out of traffic and squealed to a stop in front of his house. She almost ran to the front door, banged on it, waited, banged again, rang the doorbell.

  He wasn't home, but her two daughters were. They took one look at Mom and knew that, whatever it was, it was going to be bad.

  By now, Betty was afraid to walk into his house without permission, so she sat down on the fro
nt steps and waited.

  All she wanted in the world, at that blind moment, was for him to tell her, How did he dare? It was her house, too. It was her life, her investment. How did these people just do these things? How could judges and courts and lawyers simply ignore her? How could they just sell her house without even her signature?

  In less than an hour, Dan pulled into the driveway. He approached, tight-lipped. Where, she demanded, almost panting, was her house? Where was her half of the money? And how dare he sell her house?

  Dan Broderick eyed her carefully. She was, he could see, in no mood for calm discussion. And he was in no mood to conciliate. He was sick of her temper fits. So he did what he always did: he ordered her off his property. She was in violation of court orders. And he slammed the door in her face. Dan Broderick's coldness sometimes verged on the breathtaking. Years later, even Betty's defense attorney would privately marvel, in all sincerity, at the way Dan had treated his ex-wife: "He was either extremely stupid or cruel, or he had a real death wish."

  In a delirium of anger, she left, and drove over to Coral Reef, where she rummaged through the garage and found a can of gas. She poured it around the house and started a fire. But before it did more than singe a small spot on the rug, she came to her senses. Why was she burning down her own house?

  She stopped, mashed out the coughing matches, and drove back to his house. But this time, she did not park at the curb. Instead, she pulled into the circular driveway, then veered sharply to the left and onto the lawn. She backed up the van and pulled forward, until it was aimed directly at his front door, flanked by its white columns.

  She gunned the engine, calculating her attack exactly. As she later said, "I didn't want to hit the place hard enough to knock it down, and I didn't want to hurt my car—because I knew the fucker wouldn't pay for the repairs."

  Besides that, she didn't have enough distance to gain any real speed. But her heart was in it. Slowly, deliberately, and with enough rage to raze the Brooklyn Bridge, Betty Broderick roared across the manicured grass, across the driveway, onto the porch, and with a vicious crunch, smashed her two-ton Suburban into his pretty white door.

  Inside the house, Dan Broderick, who was in the kitchen preparing for dinner with his daughters, froze. "Wow, it sounded like an explosion or something," said daughter Lee later. Kim thought it sounded like "a chainsaw."

  Dan ran to the front of his house and stared at his living room door. Contrary to later gossip, it was not lying in splinters on his floor—it was only dangling awry from its hinges. He stepped through it and onto his porch and stared in amazement at his wife, behind the wheel of her Suburban. For once, his rage was fully equal to hers, and just as spontaneous.

  He reached in, jerked her out of the van, and slammed her in the chest with his fist, knocking her to the ground. Lee tried to fling herself between her two grappling parents, "but they squished me." According to Betty, that was the only time Dan ever deliberately hit her.

  Later, much would be made of the fact that Betty also had a butcher knife on the front seat of her car. According to her, it was pure coincidence—she had bought it just that afternoon, she said, along with a new trash can, also in the car. Not that it really mattered. At that point, butcher knife or none, it's unlikely that Betty Broderick intended to kill her husband, since she had not yet even accepted the end of their marriage. She was simply making an angry statement.

  And now, Dan would make his.

  He called the police—who arrived, took one look at the hysterical, weeping woman on the premises, put her in a strait-jacket, and drove her directly, not to jail, but to a local mental hospital for observation. They made that decision based on Dan's recommendation, as well as their own view that Betty was a threat to herself and others. As the police drove Betty away, Kim said, "Mom stuck her tongue out at me."

  According to the defense later, Dan also identified himself on hospital admissions records that night, not as an attorney, but as Dr. Daniel T. Broderick III. "It was much easier for Dan Broderick to have his wife committed if he identified himself as a doctor, than as a lawyer who prosecuted doctors," Betty's attorney told the jury. The deputy district attorney countered, somewhat lamely, that maybe it had been Betty, not Dan, who had misidentified him. But it was unlikely that Betty Broderick had been coherent enough at that point to remember much more than her own name. She was slipping over the edge so fast now. And no one was there anymore to lend her a helping hand, to catch her fall.

  Her parents left town the next morning without even visiting her at the hospital. They were angry, they were shamed, and her mother immediately felt ill. "All they said was, 'How could she do this to us?'" recalled Betty's houseguest, Brian Burchell. "It was real cold."

  Betty remained incarcerated at the hospital under mental observation for seventy-two hours, during which time she was mostly uncooperative with hospital personnel. She told doctors the same thing she had been saying to everyone else for more than a year: "I'm not crazy—he is."

  While she was there, Dan called, not to sympathize, but to ask her exactly what it was that she wanted? What would stop her maniac attacks on his property? By then, she was clear-headed enough to reply: she wanted $40,000 extra on the house sale to compensate for the bastard's damage to her house, her head, and her life. He promptly agreed, knowing of course that he would later collect back every cent of his cash advances in the community property division.

  In a hospital report later introduced in her murder trial, Betty was described thusly: "... habitual maladaptive problems … exploitation, glib social style, shallow, indifferent to the feelings of others … histrionic and immature demands for attention." She denied being suicidal, the report said, but admitted to homicidal thoughts about Dan and Linda. The doctor's final diagnosis was that she was a "borderline personality … histrionic and narcissistic."

  When she was released, it was Burchell who came to drive her home, to comfort her as best he could. But nobody could touch the depths of her new humiliation. Whatever reputation she had left was now in shreds. The word was now out all over La Jolla—Betty Broderick truly was Crazy Betty.

  Adding insult to injury, Dan even sent her the hospital bills. He would teach her responsibility for her actions, by God, or die trying.

  But her resilience was always awesome to behold. In the next weeks, she ignored the whispers, the blushes, the awkward pauses whenever she ran into old friends on Prospect. Throughout the spring of 1986, she dashed about La Jolla, livelier, brighter, more defiant than ever. She told everyone precisely why she had rammed her car into his front door: the bastard had sold her house out from under her—and the courts had let him. A woman being divorced had no rights whatsoever, she raged. Compounding their discomfort, she also lectured her friends: if it could happen to her, then it could happen to them, too.

  She "wanted to kill him," she would say, or "wring his neck." And the judges', too. But Betty said these things so often, so spontaneously, that nobody paid any attention—they were just figures of speech, Betty's way of talking. But why couldn't she be quiet? Why couldn't she hide out at home and mourn her losses in private? Instead, she was shameless. She wanted the world to know that Dan Broderick had thrown the mother of his children into a looney bin. Nobody took her seriously anymore. She was fast becoming only pitiful.

  Evidently, even Dan temporarily thought so, too, because only a week after her release from the mental hospital, he turned his children over to their mother for a week-long ski trip to Keystone. What's more, he agreed to pay for it in full. The same man who had only weeks earlier refused to pay his wife's $28.51 Christmas floral bill now promised, without a murmur of complaint, that whatever the cost, he would pay it. She would not be billed for it later.

  Maybe he was feeling guilty, or maybe he was hoping to reverse a bad situation—his friends say even Dan was shocked by her parents' abrupt departure while she was still in the mental hospital. Either way, although she accepted, his gesture only further
enraged and insulted her. One more time, the Count DuMoney was demonstrating his largesse—at his own pleasure. Where was her fair share? Where was her parity in this divorce?

  While she was in Keystone with the children, Dan dictated a will, notarized by Linda Kolkena, leaving all his worldly goods to his four children. Later on, his friends would insist that he had always known Betty was homicidal. It is an assertion that hardly bears inspection, given his approach to the Betty Problem over the next four years. Frightened people don't poke sticks into a tiger's cage.

  In making his decisions on which trips he would pay for, Dan later testified, he had been guided by Betty's "tone" during the spring of 1986. He agreed to pay for the Keystone week, for example, because her tone then had been suitable. But, six weeks later, he refused to pay a lesser amount for her to take the children on Easter week to Warner's ranch because, then, he said, her tone had been unsuitable: "She called me at the last minute and asked if I was going to pay for it … and believe me," he told the judge, "if she had asked me, 'Dan, look I need the money,' or ‘I wish you would pay for it,' or anything in that tone, I would have. Staying at Warner's is very inexpensive ... it wasn't the money. It was the tone. The names that were used at me. So, I said, 'There is no way I am going to pay for it.'"

  So the Broderick children spent their Easter vacation confused and upset, again shuffling between his house and hers, because Dad was mad at Mom.

  Dan Broderick was also apparently exceedingly touchy about community criticism after he left his wife. That spring, for example, he wrote a sharp letter to Wilma Engel, a friend of Betty's from her Coral Reef baby-sitting days. Engel, a striking, dynamic stockbroker—and a woman whose personality was just as strong as Dan Broderick's—was never shy about publicly saying what she thought of Dan's squalid treatment of his wife—and word soon got back to him.