by Bella Stumbo
Finally, late one night, she wrote Smith a blazing note, firing her. Naturally, she didn't have the courage to mail it.
At the same time, she was increasingly preoccupied with her health. If her mother took to her bed with "the vapors," when she was upset, Betty was equally subject to blending mental with physical maladies. "Can't sleep," she complained again in her diaries. "Back problems. Grinding my teeth. Headaches. Depressed. Anxiety!!!" And her weight was ballooning.
But beyond all else, these spring months were dominated by her escalating obsession with her children. She took note of their every crisis, real or imagined.
Among her spring diary entries:
Kim got another F. Rhett was caught with $124 at school. She worried about Lee and drugs. Lee was "hysterical and wants to run away" because Linda didn't get out of bed to drive her to school, so she had to take her moped in the rain, then ran out of gas, and was late for a final exam.
On May 7, Francis Parker school officials called Betty to say that Rhett was so ill in class he had been isolated from the other children. "Rhett separated from other kids as contagious," she wrote in furious script. According to her diary, she then made her second, futile call to the Child Abuse Hotline.
Next, at a school charity auction, she impulsively bought a one-person package trip to Hawaii for July. But even then she expected Dan to pay the extra money so she could also take the children along, too.
No way, he told her. He and Linda were also planning a summer vacation to Hawaii, and they intended to take the children with them. If Betty wanted to take them on her trip, she could pay for it herself.
May 16: "Rhett sets fire in a neighbor's yard; Kim out of gas on the boat in dark last night ... No adult supervision!" Rhett, meantime, complaining that there was no "fun" food in Dan's house. No snacks.
Dan was starving her children, she now concluded. Everything wrong was his fault. His treatment of her children became, in her eyes, evidence of his unfitness as a parent—just as, for him, Betty's telephone messages were ample proof of hers. Just as he sat at home in the evenings, coldly harvesting his latest nasty answering machine tapes, she sat in her kitchen, scribbling furious notes about his sins into her diaries. But the results were identical: both Brodericks had become obsessive in their determination to collect evidence of the low character of the other.
But, while Dan's vision was still precise, Betty's had faded from clarity to dimness, with total blindness not far away. Now, she could see nothing beyond her own victimization. She was blameless. He was a monster. It was that simple. And it was still only 1987.
Also, amid her May diary pages were firm, large notes about her social schedule. She was still literally leading a double life, trying by day, despite her awful nights, to carry on as a respectable, proper La Jolla lady. On the weekend of May 9, she discussed plans to attend a Theta lunch, a charity rummage sale, and the Spring Faire, where she was supposed to run the ticket booth. She also noted wistfully that the McGuires had built a splendid new house in Rancho Santa Fe, and that the Bartollottas were in Europe. Both couples were formerly part of the social circle she and Dan moved in—two more bright young attorneys, with wives Betty once listed among her closest friends. Until she killed. Then neither woman would ever utter a single public word in her defense.
But May was mainly the month of Kim.
It began on the Saturday morning of May 2, when the eldest Broderick daughter was scheduled to take her Scholastic Aptitude Test for college. But when she got to the test center, Kim called Betty in a panic because she had just discovered that she had to establish her place of birth, or the test results wouldn't count. Since she didn't have a driver's license, she needed her passport in a hurry. And she didn't know where it was. She thought it might be in her desk drawer at Dan's house—but she couldn't reach Dan at home, she told Betty.
Panic time. Like her daughter, Betty could always switch quickly into frantic mode. What resulted was another round of telephone calls from the furious, accusatory mother in behalf of the frivolous, thoughtless child—all paving the way, needless to say, to more contempts down the road.
"You outrageous fucker! There is a total emergency happening, and your daughter can't get hold of you. Typical! Asshole!" she screamed into Dan's answering machine. Her frustration was doubled because she couldn't even call his private line—he had always refused to give her the number.
"Fuckhead, I'm standing here trying to think of your friends that may know your unlisted number. Guess what. You don't have any friends, [laughter] ... I am previously engaged to be at a beautiful First Communion in the lovely community of La Jolla for my godchild, [sigh] I hate driving over to the slums to get this thing for Kim. Answer the phone, you dumb fucker! You've already ruined the last two years of her life, don't ruin it any further …"
She next tried to call several of Dan's friends, but only got answering machines. Then, in what would be her first and only effort to contact Linda Kolkena directly, she called Linda's condo. Where she also got an answering machine.
"Oh course you're not home, you're off fucking your boss. We're having a family emergency, and I need the number of your employer. Cunt."
Although there was no restraining order preventing Betty from approaching Linda Kolkena, Dan would nevertheless include this call in his next list of phone offenses, filed in a May contempt action.
Finally, she reached Brian Monaghan, who then called Dan on his private line—and, somehow, the Brodericks managed to resolve the crisis in time for Kim to take her test.
Then, in late May came the matter of Kim and her prom dress. Betty was home alone, reading, she says, when her daughter came running into her house, "hysterical" because Dan had given her only $150 to buy a new dress and shoes for her junior ball.
Betty moved with the speed of a lioness to protect and provide for her child. She screeched up to one of her favorite La Jolla boutiques, Kim in tow, just as the store was closing—and, half an hour later, emerged in possession of an $800 peach satin, beaded party dress and matching slippers. It was, as Betty puts it, "a dress to die for—long sleeves, V-neck, very appropriate for a young girl. She looked like a princess." She paid for it, of course, on a credit card, despite her worries about her $78 monthly health insurance payment.
More than once, in fact, Kim scored new clothes from Betty, simply by crying about how low she had fallen in life, thanks to her chintzy father and his new girlfriend. Money always being the measure in the Broderick marital war, it became a weapon that Kim learned to exploit—which she later admitted in court, as the prosecution's star witness. But she downplayed it all.
"I was always hysterical," she said, looking embarrassed. "And Mom would always buy me wonderful things." But, she added, she always "felt guilty" about Betty's expenditures on her, because "then she would say she didn't have enough money to pay her bills." As for Dan's $150 prom dress allocation, "It was no big deal, really …" Sure she was upset, she said; but, first, she was an emotional person, and, second, the year before, "Mom had bought me the most fantastic dress. I looked like Cinderella! Dad just wanted me to be … regular."
At the end of the month, Dan filed another contempt motion over Betty's telephone messages about Kim's passport. The next day, a different OSC was continued to May 28. Altogether, throughout April and May, nine different counts of contempt against Betty were in the system.
Linda had also gotten into the act, filing a statement of her own to support one of Dan's contempt motions. Describing her only direct phone encounter with Betty, she wrote: "At approximately 8:10 P.M., the telephone rang. I answered it as I always do: 'Mr. Broderick's office.' Respondent, whose voice is well known to me and easily recognizable, said, 'The cunt's working late tonight! Put me through to Dan.' I immediately hung up, called Mr. Broderick at home to tell him what had happened, and quit working for the evening."
Betty hadn't been making any friends among Dan's recent housekeepers, either. According to one of them, Robin
Tu'ua, in later testimony, after one upsetting conversation with Betty, Rhett had locked himself in the bathroom and emerged with "big clumps" of his hair cut out. Only after that, she said, did Dan unplug the telephones.
Tu'ua also said that Betty had threatened to kill her during that period, after Tu'ua had snapped at Betty for picking Rhett up at school, contrary to court orders. According to Tu'ua, Betty, who was then sitting in her car in front of the house with Rhett, had warned her to mind her own blankety-blank business or else. "She told me she had a gun in her glove compartment ..." Betty had then squealed away, said Tu'ua, who then called the police. They took a report, but nothing came of it. Betty denies the whole scenario. She never even owned a gun, she says, until 1989.
On May 28, Betty went to court to answer for five counts of contempt.
Tricia Smith did her best. She asked for a jury trial, but was denied. She also argued that Betty was not in contempt of any restraining order because none existed—the temporary order issued in November, 1985, she pointed out, had never been made permanent. Judge Joseph discounted that, too, declaring in effect that by virtue of his own acknowledgment of the expired order, he had renewed it.
Lastly, Smith argued that no restraining order could preclude a mother from calling her own children. Such an order, said Smith, would be so "overbroad" in its reach as to be unconstitutional.
But Joseph was fed up with Betty Broderick. He rejected Smith's arguments and imposed a twenty-five-day jail sentence. However, he said, he might suspend some of the sentence if Betty apologized to the court for her disrespectful behavior. Smith begged for a stay of the sentence, long enough to let Betty go home and get her affairs in order. Joseph refused. And so Betty Broderick was handcuffed and hauled directly from court to jail.
And this time, it was for real. Not just a few hours. This time, she was issued a uniform at Las Colinas and slapped into a cell with two other women, both fascinated with this big, hyper blonde with the great makeup and manicure suddenly pitched into their midst. One of them, Betty remembers, was "this old lady who was a heroin addict in for welfare fraud. The other was a young Spanish girl who was pregnant and had been doing drugs since she was eleven years old. I said to her, 'Do you realize how much money you've spent on drugs? It's much better to go to Nordstrom's!' And they laughed." She now laughs fondly at that old memory, too. She was so innocent then.
At first, she was "absolutely petrified in jail," but she soon learned that she had nothing to fear, she says now. "All these big black girls were so protective of me. I got along fine with my room-mates because I cater to everybody—they can have my clothes, my candy, my last bar of soap. I don't allow myself any rights ... I always feel obliged to make conversation, play cards, sleep when they sleep, eat when they eat, all in the name of getting along. I am such a fucking wimp."
She was in jail for six days.
Joseph suspended the remaining nineteen days—but only after Tricia Smith made an eloquent appeal for mercy. She also enclosed the best letter she could extract from Betty, promising not to make any more offensive phone calls:
"Judge Joseph," Betty wrote on June 1 on single-lined prison stationery. "As per your request, I promise to change my ways. I will never again call my children as long as they are living with their amoral, alcoholic, abusive father. This whole thing has been excruciatingly painful for the children and me. They come to me, as they should, with all their heartbreak and troubles. I thought it was my duty, and I know it is my right as their mother, to be there for them ALWAYS. But I will let the self-important Harvard lawyer, president of the bar, beat us all. He obviously loves BEATING women and children. I will do anything to escape this escalating madness."
From there, Betty recited her whole litany of Dan's sins against her and the children. "It makes me sick that you are unable to see through this and do anything to help defend the kids … Divorce is the 'Great American Tragedy.' … The lives of women and children are DERAILED by divorce."
She finished with a promise, of sorts, to reform if he would release her from jail. "I understand what you don't want me to do. This has been an enlightening experience which I do not care to repeat. I won't waste my time or anyone else's with these diversionary tactics."
But Betty had barely cleared the jailhouse door before she was retracting every cynical word of the letter she had written.
"The statement you referred to [in court] is no statement of mine," she wrote Joseph in a letter copied into her diaries. "It was dictated by my attorney." Her actual views, she wrote, were these:
"I stand aghast at the gross miscarriage of justice put forth in your courtroom. It is a shame you are so 'honored' by the presence of Dan Broderick that you lost all sense of truth, justice, right, and wrong … How you could have construed phone calls made to my children at their own separate phone number during times Dan could not possibly have been home as harassing Dan Broderick is a pathetic joke … Just because Dan is fucking his receptionist, I WILL NOT BE TREATED AS AN INSANE CRIMINAL. I AM GUILTY OF NEITHER."
Her verbal rampage continued for pages. She complained that she had been denied her basic civil rights, including freedom of speech, and she protested the sealed courtrooms as un-American. She had always trusted judges, she added. But Joseph had failed her. "I absolutely refuse to be the victim of your biased and unfair judgment again. Somehow we will have to find UNBIASED judgment in this town or elsewhere. B. Broderick."
She also enclosed a list of seven attachments, ranging from the Webster's dictionary definition of cunt and prostitute, to various clippings from Time magazine and the New York Times dealing with custody issues and lawyers.
In short, Joseph could take her earlier, coerced promise to reform and shove it.
It was Tuesday, June 2, when she got out of jail—and back to her mailbox. There, incredibly, she found another contempt service from Dan awaiting her. Also, amid the wad of legal papers, she learned that: a June 1 contempt hearing, postponed since she was already in jail, had been rescheduled for Thursday, June 4—but then continued to June 8, at Dan's request, at which time she would have to answer for five more counts of contempt dating back two months. But, on June 8, those five counts would be delayed yet again until September 21. Meantime, on June 22, she was back in court, where another contempt was dismissed "with prejudice."
It had now been two and a half years since he left her, and one year since he divorced her. But in the summer of 1987, Dan Broderick still refused to give his former wife, now a jailbird and entirely disgraced in the eyes of her La Jolla peers, even a week's space to breathe or think over her shocking new experience. "I don't know why she didn't kill him then," one of her friends later remarked.
Meantime, Tricia Smith filed an appeal, asking that Dan Broderick be ordered to cease harassing his former wife. It was denied.
Chapter 18
Battered in La Jolla
But the worse it got, the more brittlely nonchalant Betty appeared, the more the old, sweetly appeasing Betty vanished within herself.
"She acted like jail wasn't any big deal at all," recalled Candy Westbrook. "I said, 'Oh, that must have been terrible.' But she just laughed about it. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'Actually, it was kind of interesting. I made some new friends.'" Westbrook mimics her friend perfectly. "It was like, Oh, yeah, I went to jail. Bip bop! Wanna go to lunch?' That's the way Betty would talk. She just wasn't rational anymore."
"It was terrible," Gail Forbes later said. "She was just never the same again. Her language was worse, her attitude toward the kids, life, her appearance … after that jail sentence, she just seemed to lose interest in everything except what Dan and Linda were doing to her … She wasn't even as careful about the children as she always had been … She'd let them play on a big trampoline in her front yard without any supervision. Finally, I stopped letting my kids go over there."
Privately, all over La Jolla, women were trying to make sense of it. Why couldn't this woman just let go and get on with her life
? Why was she going, for heaven's sake, to jail?
"Most people simply didn't believe her story. Everyone thought she must be doing something to deserve this, something worse than just saying ugly words," one of Betty's old friends, Judy Courtemanche, later remarked. By then, too, says Courtemanche, herself a divorcee of independent wealth, Betty's conversation had turned to disjointed babble. "There were so many details and accusations, so much she was trying to say about visitation, fines, appeals. The words just tumbled out of her mouth. She didn't make a lot of sense anymore. I felt so sorry for her."
Ann Dick, prominent in La Jolla social circles and also married to a successful San Diego attorney, had known Betty since the seventies, when Betty used to baby-sit her children. "At first, I wanted to doubt her. I had problems with Betty's story. I thought, 'Can she be being manipulated by the very system in which my own husband makes his living?'." But Dick, later a defense witness, decided that, "Yes, she was. If she'd had a Gerry Barry, or if Dan hadn't been one of the most feared, powerful attorneys in this town, none of this would ever have happened."
Cinching Dick's suspicions that something very wrong was afoot, she tried to contact Betty on the weekend she was jailed, she says, "to see if there was anything I could do. But they had no record that she was even there on their computer." Dick remains convinced to this day that Dan used his influence to have Betty's name removed so no one would know he had his wife jailed.
After Betty's release from jail, Dick, Gail Forbes, and a few others realized at last that their friend was in deeper trouble than they had thought. "We realized that she just wasn't capable of thinking rationally anymore," says Dick. So several women toyed briefly with the idea of taking charge of Betty's affairs—particularly her unpaid attorney fees. But Betty showed little interest, says Dick. And so the women eventually abandoned their good intentions. "It finally just became clear to us all that what Betty needed was thirty days of in-patient evaluation, not amateur psychiatrists," says Dick sadly. "We decided that if we wanted to really help her, it would be an eight-hour-a-day job—-and none of us had the time. So we just let go."
