by Bella Stumbo
And, by the end of June, Betty was back at it again.
"Hey, girls, get the cunt off the machine," she commanded on June 28. "… she is a joke. You must be home. Hmmm. Anyway, I'm checking on the [chicken pox] spots, especially Lee and Kim, and wondering if Danny got them yet. Kim, be careful with yours. Don't ruin your pretty face. And get the cunt off the machine. She has no business being on this machine. Such trash."
Later the same day, with rising frustration:
"Kim … you just called me two minutes ago. I know you're home … why don't you, instead of crying, talk to Daddy like a human being and ask him what the hell's wrong with him? Why he's such a prick all the time? If he gets his cheap jollies out of being such a prick? … Kim, instead of getting all crying upset, just try to deal with Daddy. I know it's impossible, I know it's hard. Try to deal with him like a human being. Maybe one of these days he'll turn into one by mistake …"
Whatever else may be said about Betty Broderick, she was not one to compromise her ideas. Years later, while awaiting her second trial, she attempted in one of her more thoughtful letters from jail to explain her own personality, her refusal to abandon her anger, and her sense of fair play, even when it would have served her better to back down, shut up, and take whatever Dan was willing to give her.
"Compliance leads to self-hate. Defiance saves self-respect," she wrote. "And '87 was the first time I was fighting back since I banged the car into his door, and then he puts me in jail for calling him names! Well, when I was at least trying to fight back, I felt better able to cope. I wouldn't have stood in line to go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz either. If you're so overpowered you're going to die anyway, I'd a hell of a lot rather die protesting. Besides, I had every right in the world to be angry! I was gang raped, and they want me to LIKE them? Ha! Ridiculous! Taking it in the chops time after time and doing nothing in self-defense—you only turn your anger, frustration, despair, hate inwards and hurt yourself even MORE. Nice girls don't get angry—they go slit their wrists OVER THE SINK so they don't leave a mess. Well, I just decided I didn't want to be a nice girl anymore. I wanted the life I built, I deserved, I earned. MY LIFE was worth fighting for!"
And so she fought on, with Tricia Smith helping her. During those long, hot summer months of 1987, Smith seemed at times almost valiant in her uphill effort to save Betty, not just from Dan, but from Betty herself.
In another victory, Smith won an amended support order from the courts, making Betty's temporary $16,000 spousal support retroactive to December 1, 1986. Amid the continuing, distracting contempt filings by Dan, Smith was also still trying to move the case toward what should have been its only object from the beginning—a divorce trial to resolve property, support, and custody issues. But, for reasons each side would later blame on the other, that goal seemed constantly to slip from focus.
In June, Barry asked for a sixty-day trial delay, and Dan's deposition was postponed again. Smith, meantime, began in the summer of 1987 to threaten Dan with contempt actions of her own. On June 8, she dispatched four separate letters of protest to attorney Barry, making clear her suspicion that Barry and Dan were deliberately delaying trial proceedings in order eventually to dilute Betty's share of the Broderick community property, either by accruing undue debts, or, perhaps, even by hiding assets.
First, she complained that Dan was purposely creating future financial confusion by paying Betty's June support with various community property checks. "With Mr. Broderick's sophistication, it appears that his only motivation for doing this would be to confuse the issues," she wrote. "I find this surprising, after you have assured me on countless occasions that Mr. Broderick wishes only to equally divide the property and get on with his life as quickly as possible."
Second, Smith complained that Dan's $37,000 Corvette had been sold in violation of the court order preventing either party from disposing of community property without the consent of the other. She requested immediately one half of the proceeds of the sale.
Third, she protested that, contrary to court order, which authorized Dan only to deduct Betty's house payment, he was still also deducting payments for property taxes, the lease on the Suburban, and auto insurance. Betty resented this gratuitous control over her finances, and wanted it to stop. If it didn't, Smith said, "Mrs. Broderick has instructed me to file a contempt of court pleading against Mr. Broderick."
And, fourth, Smith was aggravated that, contrary to court orders, Dan still had not paid her $12,000 in legal fees. If she didn't get her money in ten days, she would file a contempt action herself, she threatened.
Barry's return letter was cold and blunt: Smith would get her fee only when a court order had been drafted to suit his language requirements— which had not yet been done, he wrote.
Secondly, Dan was making the various insurance and car payments at the request of Betty's prior attorney, Hargreaves, who had sought those deductions in 1986, Barry said. He challenged Smith to file a contempt action. Since Dan's name was on both the car and house, he said, Dan had every reason, for purposes of his own liability, to see that the bills were paid—the implication of course being that Betty couldn't be trusted to do the responsible thing.
Regarding the support/community property checks, there was no intent to confuse or delay, said Barry. Even so, in his only concession, he agreed to see that the practice was discontinued.
And, concerning the Corvette:
"I am advised that the Corvette automobile is an asset of the corporation, and as such no restraining order has been violated," said Barry. Betty's share of the Corvette should properly be adjudicated, said Barry, during the divorce trial—by which time, of course, Corvettes would be the last thing on Betty's mind.
She couldn't even keep her eye on the target through the summer. By the end of June, her diary entries were chillingly disconnected. At one minute she was worrying about her children, in the next she was obsessed with Hargreaves, who was still pressing his case through the local legal arbitration panel—which Betty had decided to address herself, despite the fact that one of the three panelists, Ned Huntington, was a close friend of Dan's. It was the first but by no means the last time she would decide that she could argue her own case better than any attorney could, and for free. She spent hours preparing her defense. She was becoming a Sears Roebuck lawyer. But she could not remain fixed on any one thought. Too much else was on her mind. Linda.
Always, at the heart of it all was Linda. Betty would never come to terms with the visions in her head of the lithe, lovely young woman tripping around the house in her shorts or her nighties, sitting down to breakfast, flushed and radiant from the night before, with Betty's teenaged daughters and young sons. But she could never admit it.
"Cunt eating off the wedding china," she wrote in her June diary instead.
But, now, it wasn't only her wedding china that she wanted back. She wanted everything she had left at Coral Reef before, in the days when she thought her marriage would not end. She wanted her demitasse collection. She wanted her old forty-five record collection. She did not want the cunt listening to a single one of her Lettermen records. She brooded. She simmered. She found no release.
But at least little Rhett was pleasing her. Only recently, he had run away from a school field trip near her home, and come to her. Such a sweet little boy. He ran into her arms, in the middle of the day. Later, when the frantic teacher discovered where he had gone, and that Betty hadn't even bothered to turn him in, she was furious. But Betty wasn't apologizing.
"He just wanted to see his mother," she later said blandly in defense of Rhett, and herself. "His father won't let him see me. He had to run away." Poor little boy, with his runny nose, his allergies, always crying. That night, as always, he wanted to sleep with her; and they curled up together, and for just a little while, she felt all right. She didn't even write in her diaries that evening. Her eight-year-old calmed her.
June 26 was Linda's birthday. She was twenty-six. Danny told his m
other he couldn't come to her house for the weekend because it was Linda's birthday, Betty wrote in her diaries, digging her pen so deep into the paper that it left tracks many pages below.
The loneliness grew. Outside her house at night, she could hear La Jolla teenagers laughing, the tires of their BMWs and Mercedes convertibles squealing as they sped toward the beach. She couldn't sleep anymore. Now her diaries talked constantly of her nocturnal ways. She was always up, wandering around her empty house, walking onto her pretty balcony with its blue awnings, its patio tables waiting for the carefree luncheons, the omelette brunches, the ladies' teas that she never hosted anymore. Nobody wanted to come. She didn't have the energy anyway. She watched the moonlight on the sea. Such a perfect location she had found for their new dream home … She wanted to kill him.
"But don't ever take 'I'll kill him' out of context," she said years later, from jail. "Don't ever leave out the ever-present prelude. If he doesn't stop attacking me ... I was frantic, frightened, cornered, helpless ... I always said, 'If he doesn't cut this out, I'm gonna kill him. If he doesn't cut this out ... If he doesn't stop this ... if, if, if... I was literally screaming inside and out. It was my cry for help, that kind of talk. I just needed him to stop."
Throughout the summertime, Ruth Roth continued to be a part of her life. Despite Betty's objections, Roth and Dan had decided that Lee could drop out of Bishops and attend La Jolla High in the fall. "So my daughter left one of the best private schools in the city to attend a public high school," she wrote in her diary.
Then, as always, back to her financial fears. "No money!" she wrote on Friday, July 3, after a trip to another empty mailbox. Now she would have to wait until Monday for her check. The bastard never sent it on the first. She couldn't even schedule a regular day to pay her bills.
Now, too, she was having to rent a car while the Suburban was in the shop for repairs. "Owe $420 on rental," she worried into her notebook.
Her July check didn't arrive until the seventh. Just another way of letting her know who was in control. Her credit rating depended on his largesse. She couldn't sleep. "Up all night with anxiety attacks." Tricia was gone on vacation. "Shit!"
She spent July 4 at home alone. It was a bleak day. She devoted part of it to work on the Hargreaves arbitration. She "read a book" but didn't even bother to list its title. Then, out of habit, or perhaps just to be among people, she went to a shopping mall. She cruised Nordstrom's, but didn't find anything she wanted to buy. On the way home, she paused briefly to watch a fireworks display at the local park. But the sight of all the picnicking families depressed her too much to stay.
Her diaries were now the work of a woman who could no longer find anything positive about life to jot, even in passing. Her remarks were often flat, flavorless; even her handwriting had gone lame, lacking its usual exclamations and underlined words. She no longer recorded her club meetings, her charity lunches. Only once that summer was there one small note that harked back to her earlier, happier life:
"Rhett in play. The Crybaby Princess."
Everything else related to her misery. "Jail is definitely preferable to being here all alone without anyone to talk to," she wrote.
* * *
But, one night in July, her rage returned in full force. In wild, furious script, with many underlined words and others scribbled out, she wrote a letter to her former husband. Although it was mid-1987, her mind was still in 1986:
"Dear Fuckface,
"Due to your manipulations, I am once again without a car. The only reason you put me in a leased car and leased house was so that when you walked out on your family I was not left with one cent of equity or ownership in anything ... I hope you are very proud of your crafty manipulations, but I certainly hope you don't think you're fooling anybody. . . .
"I wrote a check for $945 to start a lease on a new car. I could not BUY a car because thanks to you I had NO MONEY, NO INCOME, NO JOB, NO CREDIT RATING, ETC. After the deal was done, the check written by me, and the car delivered, you had the nerve to once again add your name to the lease. Our divorce had been final for four months, we had been separated for a year and a half. What was the point of that? You are a grossly sick person. I hope to God someday you seek help with your inferiority complex and your neurotic need to CONTROL everyone around you. Now that I have court-ordered support with an allowance in it for a car payment and an insurance payment, I will go out and get a car with my name on it and insurance with my name on it so I don't have to pay high rates for your many drunk driving arrests …
"For a while, I had hopes you would snap out of your craziness, but you seem only to get worse. Where will all this end? You will never get rid of me until you settle fairly, and you don't want to settle because you'll be relinquishing CONTROL of me … You wanted out—so please get out. Go away, etc., but you cannot take all that's mine with you!"
No signature, just a happy face, in parentheses, and this line: "If I cared about you I'd rewrite and correct this—but I don't."
Dan simply popped this letter into the same "out" basket where he kept all the other future contempts.
On July 15, he filed two more contempts for her calls in June and July.
On the same day, according to her diaries, Betty called the ACLU "in total desperation." But they told her divorces weren't their thing.
Tricia Smith was meanwhile girding herself for a big day. After several delays, Dan's deposition was finally scheduled—firmly, it seemed—for July 20. But Smith had still not received the full financial documentation she had first requested in January—and needed to conduct a thorough interrogation. In legalese, this is called "discovery." On July 15, she wrote Barry yet another letter, again itemizing the information she wanted—everything from a listing of Dan's property titles, partnerships, stocks and securities, bank accounts, and expenses (both personal and corporate), to data on his cars and household furnishings. She did not get it all for another six months.
Compounding Smith's problems, when the day of deposition arrived, Betty was nowhere to be found. She had instead left the day before for her preplanned vacation in Hawaii. And so, after all these months, there, finally, sat Dan, Gerald Barry, and Tricia Smith in Smith's office, waiting for Betty, who apparently hadn't even told Smith she was leaving town.
Betty, of course, shifted the blame to Smith and Dan. Smith hadn't notified her of the scheduled deposition, she later insisted—plus, Dan knew she had a trip scheduled for that week. Besides, she added lamely, "Dan had canceled three times already, so I didn't have any reason to believe it was really going to happen. And, if I had canceled that trip, that I'd already paid for, he wouldn't have shown up."
Betty hadn't advanced an inch in her thinking since 1985. Then she thought that Dan couldn't leave her if she gave him the children. In 1986, she thought he couldn't sell the family home without her signature, or get a divorce if she refused to appear in court. Now, one more time, she had run away, rather than face yet another step toward the Broderick family's final dissolution.
And so there she lay, that July week, alone upon the beaches of Waikiki, this overweight bleached blonde with a too-bright smile and sad blue eyes, self-consciously covering her flab in a color-coordinated swim wrap, as she watched strangers pass: young lovers entwined in passionate embrace on their beach towels; laughing children romping in the surf; and, worse, handsome, tanned, middle-aged couples with gray streaking their hair, glancing at each other with the affectionate ease she had always dreamed of for herself and Dan someday.
So much had changed since her trip to Canada two years before. Then she had been Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III, mother of four—beautiful, rich, and self-confident, waiting for a tempest in the teacup to pass. Now who was she? She was fat, divorced, without children, with a jail record, traveling on credit cards, and worrying about bills. She wasn't a home-maker, a school-teacher, or even a daughter in good standing anymore.
"It was a horrible trip. I was so out of place, wherever I
went. I never knew how to introduce myself to strangers," she said. "I had kids, but I didn't have them. I had a divorce, but I didn't have a settlement. I wasn't Mrs. Anybody anymore. I was Betty Nobody. And strangers look at you funny if you just tell them that." So she spent the trip isolated, hiding out in her motel rooms, burying her face in books in public places.
Throughout, she took meticulous notes on everything she did, saw, ate, and bought—right down to the hour she had dinner, what entree she ordered, and what it had cost. But nowhere did she ever write about her impressions of anything. It was a diary, pathetically dead, of motion without emotion. No person was present in it. By now, her compulsion to record her every move was, in itself, verging on a sickness. She seemed to be verifying her presence on earth only through mindless chronology. "Walked on the beach. Rented a car. Drove around island. Had lunch."
But her rage had not abated. Before she returned from Hawaii, she sent Dan a postcard: "Aloha. Here's the great beach [happy face] warm water, great events, lovely people, all families. Not a single forty-plus man with his office cunt. All NORMAL HAPPY FAMILIES!"
He promptly filed another contempt.
The rest of the summer was more of the same. Smith left town again in August. Dr. Sparta filed a damning report with Child Protective Services on the detrimental effects of Betty's behavior on the children.
And the parade of Dan's contempt motions continued. On August 4, in another contempt filing, Dan asked that the suspended jail sentence be reimposed. On August 12, two contempts for messages from June 28 and July 10 were set for an October hearing. On August 25, those two messages, plus two new ones, were combined for a new hearing, rescheduled for September.
