by Bella Stumbo
D: Then how come you won't just shut your mouth so we can come over there? …
B: I care plenty about my family. I only worked twenty-four hours a day for seventeen years.
D: So then, well, fine. If it isn't your fault, then why don't you just mind your own business … [crying]
B: What do you mean, mind my own business?
D: And don't care who he's seeing. He could be seeing a totally different girl, and it wouldn't make a difference.
B: Well, I guess you're a real California kid. Congratulations, your brain is scrambled eggs. You've been living with him too long. You don't have any sense of values, right and wrong, up and down, in and out, black and white, truth or lie. If you stay living with him, your whole head will go scrambled.
D: Well, all you care about is the money … what else do you care about besides your money and your share of things to own?
B: ... I cared about my family bad enough to put up with him fucking Linda for two years …
D: It's not only Linda's fault. It's Dad's fault too, and it's your fault, Mom!
B: Why?
D: 'Cause you keep on saying bad words …
B: Listen, the first Christmas your father took you guys away from me and fucked Linda right in front of you at the ski place, we were married, and I wasn't calling anybody a cunt then.
D: What ski place?
B: In Utah. We were married when he did that.
D: No, you weren't … yeah, but you were still separated.
B: Well, what difference does that make? We were still married. And you are my four kids that he took away from me for Christmas and put you in an ugly apartment where he could fuck his secretary.
D: He didn't take us away—you gave us to him.
B: On Christmas?
D: No, on Easter. You sent me over there on Easter and a couple hours more, they [the other kids] were over here.
B: Uh-huh. And you've just been having a good time ever since, haven't you?
D: No! We haven't. We're having a horrible time! You keep on saying those bad words, and we're never going to be able to come over there, if you don't stop. And if you don't stop it, it just shows me that all you care about is your money, [crying]
B: Well, this house isn't as pretty as that house.
D: Yeah it is. It's a lot prettier.
B: Well, it's in a better spot. I don't like you in gay town with all the criminals and all the retards and the old folks and the drug deals …
D: ... If you don't stop saying bad words, we're never going to be able to see you again.
B: Yeah, well, as soon as I get a fair settlement from Daddy … then I'll discuss custody …
D: We aren't allowed to be around you, if you're saying bad words, Mom.
B: Well, and the cunt is allowed to be around you, who's been fucking him?
D: What's wrong with that? You guys are divorced, so Dad can be with anybody he wants to.
B: I didn't get a divorce. Daddy got the divorce. I'm still married.
D: I know … no … no, you aren't, cause if you get divorced, you both are separated, Mom. And, he, he likes somebody else now. He doesn't like you anymore, and if you … you gotta stop saying the bad words! [crying]
B: Why doesn't he like me anymore?
D: Because you've been … he's sick of you because you guys get in all these fights.
B: Why do we get in these fights?
D: I don't know.
B: Because he was fucking his secretary … He's scum, Danny. He's absolute scum. He's cheated and lied and fucked around …
D: You don't think being mad for two years is enough though, Mom?
B: No. It took me twenty years of goodness to get mad … Danny, I'm not selfish. I'm just fair.
D: You want everything. You want half, you want half, and half of everything Dad owns. You want all, all the kids, and you want Linda to go away, so that leaves Dad with nothing.
B: Well, excuse me. First off, you're wrong; I don't want everything …
D: What do you want? [crying]
B: Second off, what do I care if he's left with nothing? He walked out on his family. He doesn't deserve a family.
D: Oh, okay, what does he care that you're left with nothing? It's the same exact thing, Mom! How do you feel with no one living there. Not very good, huh? ...
B: Well, if you say that one more time, I'm going to tickle-torture you for twenty-five minutes when I see you. That is not true, but I want what's mine out of that fuckhead, who refuses to settle.
D: Yeah, well, you stop saying bad words and it will happen …
B: For two years since the separation, he could have settled this in the first week. In the first day he could have settled this.
D: No, he couldn't, 'cause you were so naughty you sent us over there.
B: No, from the separation, he could have settled it, and now I would know how much money I was getting to pay the bills and to buy things and stuff and fix up this house so you guys could come live here …
D: It's fixed perfectly fine for two of us to come live there. I don't know if the girls want to come, but if they do, I don't care, but all I care is that I want to come, and Rhett wants to come, and there's enough room there. There's one big room for both of us. [crying]
B: Danny, you're yelling at me. You don't even like me! You think I'm selfish and mean and everything else. What do you want to come for?
D: Because we both like you, and you're just being a real jerk because you don't want us to come over. All you want is your stupid money. And it's true, Mom. You don't care about us. You just want your money!
B: That's not true.
D: Then how come you won't stop saying bad words?
B: You're my little babies.
D: Yeah, I know, and if you stop saying bad words, you can have your little babies! [crying harder]
B: [laughs] My little baby's growing up. He's got quite a mouth on him. You're a smart kid, Danny. I love it. You're a smart kid. You're a very, very smart kid. You're going to be such a famous guy when you grow up. Whatever you do, you're going to be so successful because you're so smart. You take after your mother.
D: Why don't you just … no … you're not very smart, Mom, because you aren't doing anything that you should be doing. You should not, not be so mad after two years. And you should ... if you like us, if you think we're such your little babies, then why don't you want us to come over here? Why don't you stop saying bad words? [crying]
B: [laughs] …
D: ... Why don't you just stop saying bad words? This whole thing could be settled a lot, lot quicker ... if you keep on saying bad words, it will never be settled, Mom.
B: Well, you tell Daddy to settle quick, and it can be settled before lunchtime tomorrow … He's got all the money. He's got every single cent the two of us own. When he gives me my half, then we'll discuss …
D: He gives you money every … I don't know, but he gives you a lot of money.
B: Yeah, well. It's not enough … It's not what the law says I own.
D: Yeah. Well, how much do you own?
B: Half.
D: Okay, well, you'd get your stupid half of your money if you'd just stop saying bad words! … How come you just won't stop saying bad words? …
B: Because I'm mad.
D: Yeah, well you can't be mad for two years. You're just going to get worse and worse and worse until you get your stupid share of money, and you're never going to get your stupid share of money unless you stop saying bad words! [crying] There's nothing funny about it, Mom!
B: Where's Daddy, while you're yelling at me like this?
D: I don't know.
B: He's probably listening on the other phone.
D: No, he isn't, because I see him walking through this room every once in a while to fix some light bulbs.
B: Where's the cunt?
D: I don't know where, Mom. I don't know.
B: Well, it's not time to come over and screw him yet, h
uh?
D: No. She's with her family.
B: ... I wonder what her family thinks of her fucking her boss who's married with four kids.
D: Not any more.
B: Well, what did they think of her when she was fucking him when he was married with four kids?
D: Well, fine, you can say what you want, but you're just being a real jerk to all your family. Nobody is going to like you anymore.
B: … Well, I didn't do any of this, Danny. I was the best mother and the best wife in the whole world … Daddy fucked all of us. He fucked your whole life and my whole life.
D: Well, you're doing the same thing right now, Mom.
B: Saying bad words has nothing to do with fucking your whole family …
D: … You're making everything ten times worse, and it's just going to get worse and worse until you stop saying those bad words. Why won't you stop? [silence] Huh? … And you always say that you're not doing anything, but you are, Mom! … Why won't you just listen, Mom? You could make life a lot easier for everybody in this family if you'd just stop saying bad words. You're going to get your stupid share if you stop saying bad words. You're going to get us, the kids that want to come over to your house, and forever, if you would just stop saying those stupid bad words! Why won't you just stop? [crying]
B: [long pause] Because I hate Daddy … He has robbed me of everything I have on earth, including the kids [crying] …
D: Yeah, but you ... he didn't rob you—you gave us to him!
B: … he's handled this like a fucking slug, throwing me in jail and stealing my house out from underneath me!
D: Oh, yeah, do you know why he threw you in jail? Because you came and rammed through his house.
B: After he stole my house from me … I wish he'd just die. I wish he would get drunk and drive his fucking car …
D: What's going to make the difference, Mom?
B: Because then he'll be gone off the earth …
D: You've been mad long enough …
B: No, I haven't.
D: Oh, yeah. So you want to be mad another two years, and after that another four years, and after that maybe another six years?"
Whereupon the recording ended. Dan apparently ran out of tape. Betty never would apologize or excuse herself for that conversation. "He wanted to drive me crazy, and he did," she says. "I couldn't tell you today what I was thinking—except that every word I said was true."
April, 1987, was another legal firestorm. The month began in court, where Betty was convicted on one count of contempt and given a five-day suspended jail sentence by Judge Joseph.
That was also the month Dan filed his appeal of her temporary support on grounds that it was "a civil form of double jeopardy" for the court to have corrected itself by adding Betty's taxes to the original award.
Her diaries had, meantime, become her best friend, her most faithful listener. She unloaded into them increasingly in the lonely hours of her nights.
"Rhett called at 2:40 A.M., dreaming about lice," she wrote. Lee had arrived at her house at 6:40 A.M. and "scared me to death. Made eggs and bacon." Three years later, Betty would say that one reason she bought a gun was due to her fear, as a single woman living alone, of intruders.
Adding to her April annoyances, she heard from the children that Linda took several friends to Mexico for Secretary's Week. "Cunt week," Betty wrote in her diary, along with an angry note insisting that Linda paid for it with "MY money!" Linda Kolkena was spending her community property funds. It was intolerable. She was paying for the slut's car, her clothes, her facials, and probably even her birth control pills.
During the same period, Danny was bumped by a car as he walked his bicycle across an intersection near Dan's home. He wasn't injured, but he was scared, and no one was home at the time. Dan was gone to a wedding reception, and the housekeepers did not work on weekends.
That was the first time Betty called the Child Abuse Hotline. Apart from embarrassing Dan, however, it was a futile gesture. "They sent somebody out who talked to Mr. Fancy Pants in his big multimillion-dollar house, and apologized for the disturbance, and left," she says.
In the most explosive of the month's events, Dan canceled prior plans for the children to spend Easter vacation with Betty. He based his decision on the advice of Dr. Roth, who, he said in a later contempt filing, had called him at home on the evening of April 9 to say that, because of a conversation with Betty a few hours earlier, she no longer thought it "advisable" for Danny to see Betty over Easter—although the plans had been made only two days earlier with Roth's approval.
Betty was supposed to pick both boys up at school on Friday afternoon for the weekend. But Dan didn't call her directly to tell her the weekend was off. Instead, he directed his attorney on Friday morning to inform Betty's attorney that plans had been canceled. This was obviously cutting it close in terms of timing, which both Dan and Roth knew. They both knew, too, that Betty would not react to their last-minute decision kindly. In fact, according to Dan's declaration, Roth advised him to pick the boys up early that day to "avoid any confrontation if Respondent came to get them too." So he did.
What resulted was a small, absurd scene out of a bad sit-com.
Picture it. Here comes Dan, not in his red Corvette today but in his green MG Midget convertible, roaring up to the school twenty minutes early to whisk his sons away before their mother got there. But Danny was on a field trip elsewhere. So he snatched up Rhett and set out to find Danny.
But, sure enough, here comes Betty—having received the enraging news from her attorney less than an hour earlier—screeching up to the school just in time to spot the familiar little MG soaring away with her ex and her youngest son in it.
She gritted her teeth and gunned her motor. When would this insufferable sonofabitch and his hired flunkies leave her and her kids alone? How dare they?
Within a few blocks, she had overtaken Dan's car.
According to Dan's later contempt motion, she forced him off the road. "She had me wedged into the curb. She rolled down the passenger window and started screaming."
What happened next, according to Dan's account, sounds like an escalated hair-raising escape worthy of an old Steve McQueen movie. "After three or four minutes of this," he said, "I put my car in reverse, hit the accelerator, and backed up at a high rate of speed into the nearest side street. I made a quick U-turn and drove to Presidio Park [where Danny was] as fast as I could … and was able to get [Danny] into my car and then to my office without further contact with Respondent."
"Yeah. Riiiite, Dan," Betty said later, sarcastically. "What bullshit! I wouldn't hurt my own son. I simply forced him to pull over and explain to me what I had just learned from an attorney thirty minutes earlier! I'd been planning on that week for a month! Poor little Rhett was crying, but Dan wouldn't let him out of the car. I wanted to kill the sonofabitch."
The month never got any better. There was no legal cease-fire. Betty was next served with a new OSC for the car incident, as well as half a dozen answering machine offenses. That hearing was set for late May. Two days later, she was scheduled to appear in court to answer for two contempts from March.
"OPEN the court! He's mentally ill!" she screamed into her diaries on the night of April 22.
Amazingly, at the same time, Betty Broderick was also applying for foster children. "I was looking for some kind of direction," she said later from jail. "And I'd been doing some work with the Children's Home Society, so I asked for kids—I just wanted newborns until they were placed. I love babies, so it would've been great for me, and them. But they [authorities] said no because I had an unfenced swimming pool."
May's mailbox was no better than April's. It was filled with more OSC notices and assorted legal papers—including word that Dan's deposition had been delayed for another month, and the divorce trial itself had been postponed again, until July.
Meantime, her legal bills were steadily mounting, along with her anxieties. In the next months,
her diaries were filled with her escalating fears of being left destitute, thrown onto the streets. She was fixated with the idea that Dan might decide to sell the del Cielo house out from under her on a four-hour notice, just as he had sold Coral Reef. "What was to stop him?" she asked later. "His name was on the title of del Cielo, too. He could do anything he wanted—I understood that much by then."
Compounding her insecurities, her attorney, Tricia Smith, was clearly determined not to meet the same fate in unpaid fees as Betty's former lawyers. First, Smith negotiated with Glucksman to retrieve Betty's diamond necklace, which he was still holding hostage for his own unpaid bills. When Betty finally paid Glucksman, he forwarded the necklace to Smith, who did not return it to Betty until she accepted a lien on her house as collateral on Smith's legal fees. By May, Betty was so worried about losing her house that she was writing frantic midnight notes to Smith in her diaries, wanting to know if Smith would please release the trust deed on her house "if I can get $12,000 from Dan to pay you."
As Betty would later say from jail, in a moment of introspection, her obsession with financial security was probably the direct result of her own privileged background. She feared failure, she thought, perhaps even more than a person who grew up in poverty and had nowhere to go in life but up. Her three brothers were all successful businessmen, her older sister was a budget official for the state of Maryland, and her younger sister was a successful entertainment executive in Hollywood. "They're all wealthy, successful people with beautiful families. Everybody lives in big houses and travels, and their kids are all in private schools." Only her sister Clare never married—"But she's got a ten-page resume to make up for it." So, she added matter-of-factly, "Even before this incident [the homicides], I was the only family failure. I didn't have a marriage or a resume. I had nothing but a jail record."
During the spring of 1987, her resentment of everybody and everything only grew. As usual, she focused first on her attorney. She castigated Smith in the pages of her diaries, day after day. Once again, she was being taken advantage of by an attorney—"$45,000 in fees so far," she wrote. All for nothing …"
