by Bella Stumbo
She was enraged in those dark hours of the night, too, about the lack of progress in her case. Dan had yet to personally submit himself to lengthy, legal interrogation by her lawyer. "Two and one half years," she scrawled, "AND NOT ONE DEPOSITION!"
She was also increasingly obsessed with her future.
What job could she do? Where could she go? She had to find something to do with the rest of her life, now that she would no longer be Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III. But in her mind, all routes were blocked. "Applied for child-care job in Jackson Hole. Kids five, three, and one," she wrote on February 5. "But how do I explain not having mine???"
Then, midsentence, her financial fears would override all else. "Bought medical insurance. $78 per month!" And, on March 5: "Still no money!" His check was late again; it would often be several days late. Her handwriting grew larger and wilder. One day, she called Western Law School—but her main concern was tuition costs, not classes, according to her diary notes.
She couldn't balance her bills, she didn't know what she could afford anymore, and so she hired an accountant to help her. "Mimi here today." Mimi the accountant came once a month to go through bills. Could she afford to keep the gardener? Would she have to sell the house?
Her diaries became ledgers of numbers, columns of figures that never added up.
Something would have to give. In her life-style, of course. Never his. Oh, no.
She became consumed with Dan's expenses, his lavish life-style, versus her deprivations. Her 1987 diaries were filled with notes on every new piece of furniture he bought, the brand name of every fabric, every dish, every rug. His new pool, the new circular driveway, the landscaping. He was a grand gentleman. But she was no longer a lady of means. Linda Kolkena was.
Not least, she burned with anguish over her wrecked reputation. She could see the curious, embarrassed expressions in the eyes of people she hardly knew. She dreamed of revenge, of vindication. She fantasized about how glorious it would be to win a forum that would expose him, not only in San Diego, but to the entire nation. And so, in early 1987, she began to write to her two favorite talk show hostesses, Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessy Raphael. Her diaries are filled with drafts of long letters she wrote that spring, telling them her story.
"I feel I would be a good person for you to have on your show because women are totally unaware that they are so vulnerable in this legal system," she said in one. "They need to be informed, they need to be scared—they need to force action so we, ourselves and our children, can be protected!"
She later claimed she never mailed the letters.
The diaries went on. On February 10, according to her notes, Kim was expelled from Francis Parker. Next day, "Lee out of school. School calling!"
—Two weeks later: Danny's eleventh birthday. "No visitation."
—On March 4: Went to see K. Hoyt at Bishops about Kim getting kicked out of school.
—The boys told her she couldn't drive them home because they were afraid Dan will have her "put in jail."
—"Kim alone in the house with boys after school … construction worker …"
Nor was Betty getting along with Dan's latest housekeeper, a young woman named Robin Tu'ua: "The fat baby-sitter ... a total snot with me."
Not least, she had discovered that "Rhett has lice! Head lice! My son!"
Meantime, her phone messages continued, perpetual fodder for more OSCs.
"Dan Broderick, fuckhead, you'd better get on top of your daughter Lee," she said in one. "She's wild, out of control, drunk, street walker, ugly. Being that you've got sole custody, better do something about it before you have to go to jail for her, okay?" Then, minutes later: "Amend that—jail or the morgue."
At the same time, both her attorney and Dr. Nelson were trying to persuade Betty to aggressively seek full custody of her children. Although Nelson had not yet met the Broderick youngsters, he was convinced that Dan was unable to provide them with a suitable home environment.
In a letter to Betty that spring, he begged her to forget her obsession with winning a financial settlement first: "… The number of bedrooms, the state of your home, and your furniture, is, in my professional opinion, unimportant. The children are surrounded with a luxurious setting, and they are suffering significant psychological and emotional trauma. I urge you … get your children home."
It would never happen. She would not put aside her anger long enough to focus on the children, although she probably needed them far more at that point than they needed her.
Instead, she continued to demand only that she be allowed freedom "to visit and speak with my kids." Visitation was all she wanted. She remained torn, until the end of this story, between genuine concern for her children and glee that Dan was failing in his mission to replace her.
"Kids home alone," she wrote repeatedly in her diaries. She found Kim's newest boyfriend, a construction worker, especially unsavory.
And, always ongoing were jottings about her latest legal notices—two new OSC filings came on March 13; the divorce trial date had been postponed again; Dan's deposition had been delayed one more time.
By March 26, her nights had become a living hell. "Called Tricia at one A.M.," she wrote, "feeling out of control" because Smith had all her files and wouldn't return her calls. "Up all night worrying."
And then the miscellany:
"Cunt hosting party on MY boat," she wrote on March 15. It was not a grand boat, only a small ski boat. But Dan wouldn't let her use it, she said. It gnawed at her. "Fuckhead, I have the day off, and I would really like to use the boat, my boat," she said in another phone message that would wind up as an OSC. "How do I get the keys? Where are the keys? Will you make another set and deliver them over here so that when I want to use the boat I can use it. Thanks, sweetie. Asshole."
She also noted tersely in her diary that April 12 was their eighteenth anniversary. "Went to LPGA [golf] tournament."
To top it all off, among the various legal documents in her March mail, she learned that Hargreaves was suing her for unpaid fees.
In March, Betty began court-ordered visits to marriage and family therapist Dr. Ruth Roth—where, not surprisingly, she said all the wrong things. She was so indignant to be forced to see Roth for psychiatric evaluation, when Dan was not, that she refused to take Roth seriously. It was a doomed enterprise from the outset. She flounced into Roth's office, dressed to impress in a designer suit and her power pumps, determined not to display a trace of the frightened, passive woman inside. She did a great job.
During her three sessions with Roth, she went out of her way to shock, overwhelm, and defy any reasonable conversation. It would only be the latest among Betty's many miscalculations.
Ruth Roth is not a woman whose ego you want to tamper with. A small, attractive therapist in her sixties with short-cropped hair dyed auburn and a lingering New York accent, Roth is a bristling, no-nonsense type clearly accustomed to being in control. She has been mediating divorce and custody disputes for the San Diego courts since 1976, first in the county conciliation courts then in private practice. She has, she boasts, mediated over five thousand cases in her career—"and 90 percent of them were successful." People who can afford her fees seek her out, rather than opt for public services, she says, for the same reason that "you don't buy a Datsun if you can afford a Cadillac." She is a familiar, well-regarded "expert" in the San Diego family courts. What she says usually goes.
"She just went off on her own agenda," Roth later testified in Betty's murder trials, describing their few meetings. "I tried to maintain control, but I couldn't."
As usual, the best measure of Betty's angry attitude rested in her language. Like anyone else, Betty can clean up her mouth when she tries; she does not, for example, say "fuck" in court. But she apparently had so little respect for Roth that she buried the woman in obscenities.
She told Roth what was by now becoming the standard outline of "the story." How Dan was, from 1983 on, "screwing" Linda while Betty was left i
n a rental house with rats. How she had "worked my ass off to get us where we were going" only to be left. "Now he has everything and the cunt." She told Roth that he had a violent temper, that he kicked small dogs, beat the boys. Once, she said, he had even beaten Kim, when she was only ten months old. And she talked about the third dead child.
Roth tried to move the conversation on to present realities. But, Roth testified, Betty would not be led. She was "unusual … very intelligent. I thought she was angry but not psychotic." In fact, Roth said, she thought Betty Broderick was the angriest client she had ever seen.
Even so, she at first thought Betty could still be a good mother if she focused on the children, not her anger. She tried to guide Betty's mind in that direction.
But Betty ignored her. According to Roth's testimony, Betty said she had taken the kids to Dan in early 1985 to "let him see what four kids is about besides fucking!" But, Betty continued, "You know what that cocksucker fucker did? He kept them!!!" Roth blushed primly as she recited these quotes from her notes. Nor did Betty spare Roth her anger toward "Linda the Cunt Kolkena." She had in fact been so intensely explicit in her remarks that Roth later wrote in her report that "She is sex obsessed."
During their first visit, Roth said Betty also threatened to kill Dan. The context was this: Roth had been trying to persuade Betty that the best course of action was to regain custody of her children. But, said Roth, Betty angrily resisted: "I'm not going to be the single parent of four kids. He'll die first. . . . The less I see of them, the better. No kids, no bother . . . you'll see. . . . He's a cuntfucker."
And that was the end of Dr. Ruth Roth's first session with Betty Broderick. Roth promptly called Dan Broderick, she said, to warn him that "I have every reason to believe you may be in danger, that Elisabeth wants to do great bodily harm to you."
In California, this extraordinary breach of doctor-patient confidentiality —called a Tarasoff warning—is not only ethically permissible but also legally advisable in instances where the doctor might later be held liable for a preventable crime. The warning is named after the victim of a psychotic killer whose therapist was later successfully sued for negligence in failing to alert the victim or her family to the potential danger.
But before Betty knew that Roth was confiding in Dan, she returned for a second session—and repeated the same threat almost verbatim, according to Roth.
"I'm not going to be the single parent of four children. He'll die first ... I told you that," Betty told Roth, in apparent exasperation at her denseness. "I'm not letting go of him that easy. The little fucker was mine, and he'll stay mine."
Are you threatening him? Roth asked.
"I threaten the little cocksucker all the time!" Betty told her, laughing. In conclusion, Roth asked Betty what Linda's real name was. "Cunt," said Betty. End of session two.
Roth issued her second Tarasoff warning to Dan that week. But, she said, Dan didn't seem to take it seriously. "He just shined it on," said Roth—who was, by now, having regular telephone conversations with Dan, discussing ways to best handle Betty and protect the children from her.
Later, Betty only laughed at Roth and her Tarasoff warnings. Her talk of killing Dan was just a figure of speech. "I was not sitting there telling Roth that I was premeditating murder. I was pissed off, but I am not stupid, for Chrissake!"
That, of course, was always Betty Broderick's exact problem. No professional therapist who ever interviewed her concluded for a single minute that she was either stupid or crazy.
On her third meeting with Roth, Betty quit.
"She said, 'I'm not coming back, because you're too good,'" Roth testified. "She said, 'You make me forget how much I hate him'."
"I said that because, typically, I was trying to be nice, I didn't have the guts to just tell her the truth," says Betty, "and the truth was I couldn't stand her. She was pushy and arrogant, and she spent forty of her fifty-minute periods talking about herself, telling me how wonderful she was."
She is embarrassed, however, at her failure to clean up her language for Roth. "I was just a mess ... I had simply lost it all, by then."
The only part of Betty's experience with Roth that even remotely pleased her was the fact that the judge had clearly ordered Dan to pay Roth's full fees. But even that turned to ashes because Dan later refused flatly to pay more than half, based on his prior reasoning—if Betty didn't have a financial stake, she wouldn't proceed in "good faith." And so, like Hargreaves, Roth sued Betty for the balance—around $800. The outcome of that little side skirmish in the Broderick divorce war wouldn't be determined for more than a year. But, atop her other pressures, Betty was also fast becoming a familiar face in small-claims court: At about the same time, a La Jolla children's shop also sued her for an unpaid bill for clothing she had bought the boys and billed to Dan—who refused to pay.
After mediation broke down, Dan hired Roth to counsel Danny through most of 1987. Danny, then eleven, was depressed. He wanted to live with his mother. But, he told people, his mother wanted him to hurt Linda—for example, "to pour boiling water on her cunt," making it look like an accident—and when he wouldn't, she was angry with him.
During the later divorce trial, Dan also recalled an incident just before Mother's Day in 1987 when Danny threatened to jump from a second-floor window, after Betty told him on the telephone that he couldn't come see her that day—that he should stay home instead and "have Linda's Day at your Dad's house."
Danny "was in a lot of pain, frustrated …" said Dan, and so he had taken the boy to the neighborhood ice cream parlor, where he spent an hour talking to him, trying to explain "what was going on with his mom. Why she is acting like this. Why she can't stop it. The thrust of my comments to him was, 'Dan, your mom doesn't have impulse control. She cannot control herself. Some people are like that. She is like a little girl who for some reason wouldn't or can't control her frustration. She is like a little child who can't get her way, so she rolls around on the ground and kicks and screams. She has never been able to do that [control herself].' And," Dan finished, "I think, intellectually, he understood that." He evidently neither mentioned his own role in helping create Betty's anger, nor did he explain to the boy why, if Betty was so naturally uncontrollable, he kept taking her to court anyway.
Betty claims not to remember many of her angry outbursts. What she does remember about that period is being pulled in a dozen different directions by all the stresses imposed on her from every side—from Dan, the courts, the therapists, her friends, her creditors, her family, and her body. She remembers sensations of anger, fear, loneliness and, sometimes, wondering if she was in fact going mad, just as he said.
And she remembers her own white lightning sense of outrage at the unfairness of it all. "All I know is I just never ever had any doubt that none of this was just. All my life, I literally hated it when I would see old ladies with their bags, counting out their pennies at the post office for stamps. I always thought, 'Where are their children, where are their husbands and brothers?' Somebody owed them more ..."
She also remembers small things better than the larger ones—the kids' homework, for instance. They would call her for help, and over the telephone she would try to answer their questions. But both sets of family encyclopedias were then at Dan's house. "Now, you try to do fifth-grade geography, you know—what two rivers come together in the middle of Africa—without books!" So she went out and bought a new $1,000 set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. "But even that didn't help because sometimes they just needed help with lessons out of their schoolbooks." But she couldn't see the book. "So there I am, trying to do algebra and crap long-distance, that I haven't done since we've all done it. … So I'd say, 'Okay I'll come over, and we'll sit out in my car, because if I have the book I can do this much faster. But they'd always say 'No no no, Mom. If you come around here Daddy will have you arrested'."
Chapter 17
Mothers and Sons
Children are always the biggest losers in d
ivorces, but the Broderick youngsters suffered more than most, even before they lost both parents altogether.
Perhaps the single most glaring example of adult irresponsibility, amid the heat and hate of divorce, is contained in a taped, thirty-minute conversation between Betty and her son Danny in late March, 1987. During the murder trials, the prosecutor played this tape with satisfaction, knowing full well that few jurors could withstand the gut-level disgust it evokes.
On the other hand, the defense countered that the only reason the tape existed in the first place was because Dan Broderick was more interested in collecting evidence against his ex-wife than in protecting his little boy's peace of mind. Otherwise, he would have ended the conversation as soon as he heard the child crying and yelling into the phone. Throughout the conversation, the boy was sobbing, almost hysterical. According to daughter Kim in trial, "Danny never got that upset." Dan listened from the next room. It was the first time he had taped an actual conversation between Betty and one of her children for use in their divorce war.
Both defense and prosecution of course were correct. The "Danny Tape," as it became known, represents the worst impulses of both Brodericks at the expense of their children.
Here it is, excerpted in part:
B: "… He's so stupid he doesn't care … but that money is mine. I earned it. I earned it for twenty years of hard work and total shit from that asshole.
D: Yeah, but you're never going to see us again if … don't you even care about your family, besides the stupid money? [crying]
B: I care perfectly about my family. I took absolutely perfect care of my family. I was the best mommy in the whole world and the best wife in the whole world. It's not my fault your father is such a fuckhead …
