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

by Bella Stumbo

  The messages now at issue included: the Hawaiian postcard, the June calls relating to Kim's passport, and Betty's July 20 letter to Dan containing her fading hopes that he would "snap out of it."

  And, at the end of the month, her motion for visitation rights with her children was removed from the calendar. No new court date was set.

  Her resentment toward Tricia Smith grew. In what Betty regarded as the largest betrayal yet, Smith, increasingly concerned over her unpaid fees, finally wrote directly to Dan, proposing that he send her the full $222,000 check for the recent sale of the Fairbanks Ranch lot; she would serve as the broker, she suggested, dividing the monies between Dan and Betty—after she subtracted her own fees from Betty's half. Dan initially hesitated. He didn't want to get involved in any spats between Betty and her attorneys, he told Smith. But eventually he agreed to a modified form of what Smith wanted. As he later said in divorce trial, he saw no reason why not. Smith told him that Betty had agreed, and, besides, the check couldn't be cashed without Betty's signature anyway.

  And Betty had of course signed. But that hardly counted to her. She was instead blinded by the principle of the thing. Once more, in her mind, attorneys had worked behind her back. She would never forgive Smith for it. "Why is my attorney writing letters to Dan Broderick?" she still demands. "And I was not even sent a copy of it? Tricia Smith was just like all the others—she wanted to fit in with the In Crowd, at my expense."

  Chapter 19

  In Limbo

  By now, Linda had become far more than an office frill for Dan Broderick, according to coworkers. She was instead an indispensable element of his flourishing law practice. Among her duties, she screened and interviewed all potential new clients, wrote reports, interrogatories, and orders. By the time she died, said Stormy Wetther, "she had an incredible grasp of the medical and legal issues. She knew the cases almost as well as Dan did."

  She was also Dan's biggest cheerleader. Wetther remembers one case in particular that Linda loved to talk about. It had been a "bad baby" case, wherein the doctor was accused of gross errors during the delivery, leading to a paraplegic child who was seven years old before the case went to court. Dan had asked the child to take off her shoes and socks before the jury. It took the little girl so long to perform this minor task that Dan won a settlement of more than $2 million. Linda cried when she talked about it, says Wetther. "Linda was always so sensitive. It was so easy to make her cry."

  Linda also had a fetal heart monitor strip framed on her wall—another "bad baby" case—that one, she told visitors, worth $3 million.

  Meantime, she was becoming more beautiful, more stylishly glamorous by the day. Her salary was supposedly around $37,000 to $40,000 annually—plus the assorted travel and entertainment perks that came from being Dan's woman. With her money she became, among other things, a clotheshorse, just like Dan and Betty.

  "She loved clothes," says Wetther. After her death, her friends divided up her clothing—"and she outfitted at least five women," says Wetther, who was, at that moment, wearing an impeccably tailored white two-piece linen suit that had belonged to Linda. Maggie later showed up for lunch in a green pants suit that had been Linda's—as well as her emerald and diamond wedding ring.

  Linda was also extremely generous to her family with her "increased income," says Maggie. She sent her parents to Holland on their first visit home in years, and once to Hawaii. She flew Maggie to San Diego every St. Patrick's Day for the festivities, and periodically brought Maggie's two children to San Diego for trips to the zoo and Sea World.

  Friends later recalled, too, that Linda—like Betty—never forgot a birthday, an anniversary or any other occasion for celebration. "I remember once waking up on my birthday to find the room literally filled with balloons and 'Happy Birthday' signs," says Wetther. Linda had worked on them all night. She was just really a sweet person."

  But not all was bliss with Dan and Linda personally. Betty was exacting a price in her downhill slide to hell. Like a contagion, her stress had long since infected the other household, too.

  Linda wanted to get married. She wanted to start a family. She had been waiting for five years, and now that Dan was finally divorced, she wanted her happy ending. But Dan was reluctant to rush to the altar again.

  Meanwhile, all four Broderick children rejected the notion of the girlfriend as the new wife, their stepmother. Kim once even extracted a promise from Dan, she later said, that he would never marry Linda.

  The Broderick children were always the chief barrier between Linda and Dan. Linda told everyone how mean they were to her. "She tried so hard to make them accept her," said Brian Monaghan, "but those kids would come back from a weekend at Betty's just loaded with hate."

  "If Danny or Rhett even smiled at her, she would tell us all about it, it made her so happy," said Sharon Blanchet. "She saw the slightest trace of warmth as some sign that maybe they would eventually accept her … She even referred to them as 'our kids'."

  But they weren't "our kids," and they never would be. Even Kim, who got along with Linda best, criticized her later to the divorce court judge as a "phoney friend." And Kim definitely didn't think Dan should marry Linda, because "she never went to college. I don't know if she even graduated from high school. Personally I don't think she is right for my Dad." But she had a clear view of why Linda so appealed to her father. "Linda absolutely adored him," she said later. He could make the dumbest jokes, and she'd laugh and wonder why we didn't think it was funny, too."

  But she modified her views. After the killings, she told reporters that Linda had been her good friend. "The truth is, I liked Linda, She was always nice to me," she said one evening after her mother's trials were over. "I just didn't want Dad to marry her—I didn't want him to get married to anybody. We were so close, and I didn't want it to be spoiled."

  Linda's friends, meanwhile, continued pressuring her to walk away from Dan Broderick. This thing had been going on without resolution for too long.

  "Linda was so stressed out," says Maggie. "She lost weight … She used to carry Maalox and Gelusil in her purse—at twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She said Betty was driving them crazy… And she couldn't do anything to please those kids … The emotional battery in this case was never against Betty, it was against them."

  Maggie worried about her little sister increasingly. "But she was so young, Linda thought she could fix it all, once they got Betty out of their lives," says Maggie. "All she wanted was to be Dan Broderick's wife and the mother of his children. She would do literally anything to please him. She even gave up garlic, which everybody in our family loves, because Dan disapproved."

  At the same time, Linda's loathing of Betty Broderick only grew. Apart from feeling sabotaged by Betty with the kids, Linda never had a whit of sympathy for a woman who was getting $16,000 a month. Never once did it apparently occur to her to actually approach the woman she was displacing simply to say, "I'm sorry." Instead, like most of Dan's friends, she only saw Betty as a greedy, wicked witch. "Linda couldn't understand what else she wanted—none of us could," recalls Wetther.

  But, unlike Dan, who tried to keep his private life private, Linda told everyone what a crazy bitch Betty was, what bizarre things she was doing and saying. She mimicked Betty so well, Laurel Summers once said, "that you'd think Betty was there." Nor was Linda shy about using Betty's exact, graphic language. "Dan would never repeat Betty's messages," says Mike Reidy, "but Linda would deliver them verbatim."

  Linda also complained constantly, says Sharon Blanchet, that Dan was being too soft on Betty, too lenient. She wanted him to file more contempts, seek more jail time. Blanchet, Wetther, Summers, and Cuffaro all agreed with her. Women were always hardest on Betty whether they were friends of Dan and Linda, or her own closest friends, most of whom either testified against her, or fled altogether during her trials.

  Linda's open advertising of the ex-wife's sins apparently led to periodic frictio
n with Dan—and their quarrels evidently began to surface publicly. A secretary in Dan's office building, for example, swears that she once saw Dan pour a pitcher of beer on Linda in a crowded local bar, with the angry remark, "You need to cool off." Dan's friends heatedly deny that he would have ever done such a thing.

  But, according to housekeeper Sylvia Cavins, Linda and Dan were in increasing harmony on one point: both began calling Betty hateful names, albeit not obscene ones, in the privacy of their home. "The Large One" was a favorite—and, Cavins said, Dan started it, not Linda. They also joked that "Betty had some kind of disease," said Cavins. "I can't remember what you call it—there's a name for it, when you're round-faced, wide-eyed …" Nor did Cavins think Linda was particularly upset by Betty's vitriol. "Betty used to call [Linda] a seventeen-year-old Polack. Linda just thought it was funny."

  In fact, said Cavins, Dan always recoiled from Betty more than Linda did. She recalled one particular St. Patrick's Day—always Dan's favorite holiday, she said, "and he went to every pub in town." But that night, she remembered, he walked into the house with "weeds all over his beautiful clothes." When Cavins asked him why he was so messy, "He told me he had come home in a taxi and thought he saw Betty out front, and, he said, “I just couldn't face her, so I rolled down a gully."

  By the autumn of 1987, Betty was writing pages like this in her diaries:

  —Trapped by fear! AS USUAL

  —Afraid to send settlement offer because he will make it backfire

  —Afraid of T. Smith

  —Afraid to go see kids

  —Afraid of Judge Joseph and jail

  —Afraid to call media."

  She was afraid of everything.

  She had never been idle, she was never the type to curl up in a ball at home with a bottle of wine or a bag of hamburgers and withdraw. But, always the extrovert, always active, she was now staying in bed later and later after too many nights walking the floors. Her muscles hurt, her jaws hurt, her stomach hurt, her back hurt, and she cried too much. The malady of the divorce had moved beyond her head and into her body.

  Finally, like an alcoholic who has at last hit bottom, she went in search of others in the same boat. Her accountant had come by the house that day with a leaflet she thought might interest Betty, advertising an organization called HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny).

  At first glance, she recoiled. It smacked of radicalism, by its very name. At the same time, the literature told her, HALT was a national public-interest consumer organization with a membership of more than 150,000, dedicated to helping reform the legal system to better serve the average citizen in a quicker, cheaper way. HALT was mad at lawyers.

  And so she dialed the telephone number. She learned that, by coincidence, the monthly HALT meeting was that very night in neighboring Del Mar. A nice, clean, respectable neighborhood. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe they weren't just a bunch of militant crazies. So she went "just to investigate what they were all about."

  She walked into a room of twenty to thirty ordinary-looking people with friendly smiles. Both women and men. Her heart was pounding. She was afraid of them.

  "I was scared and I cried. But I stood up and told them that my case was exactly why they existed," she said later. "I told them about the sealed courtroom, and it sent them to the moon; I told them about no visitation, I told them about the fines … and for the first time ever, nobody said, 'Oh, well, dear, you just have to get on with it.' Instead they paid attention, they knew exactly what I was talking about!"

  The day after her first meeting, half a dozen HALT members went to court with her. She had told Tricia Smith not to come. By now Betty had decided it was a waste of money to pay Smith to represent her in the contempts when "I might as well lose for free."

  Judge Joseph didn't send her to jail that day. Instead, the hearing was postponed. Dan didn't even show up. But this time, she at least had friends with her, willing to challenge the sealed proceedings. And, for a long time, HALT stood by her—especially Ronnie Brown. A quiet, serious woman several years older than Betty and a former military wife, Brown lived nearby, and so the two women got into the habit of taking sunrise walks together on the beach. Ronnie was always a terrific listener, Betty said later, long after most of her old La Jolla pals wouldn't even return her phone calls.

  Thanks to her new friends in HALT, Betty seemed temporarily to become more focused on the task at hand—getting the divorce settlement she wanted. Her offensive calls to Dan dropped off. She was not hurting herself so deliberately anymore. At last, it seemed, Betty was moving with her mind instead of her mouth. By mid-September, she was calm enough to permit Tricia Smith to submit her first divorce settlement offer to Dan; Smith also filed a motion to keep Linda's voice off the answering machine and prevent Dan from unplugging the children's telephone. It was Betty's first seriously aggressive counter-attack.

  The divorce settlement Smith proposed was a straightforward one-and-a-half-page document:

  Betty wanted a cash amount of $1 million, nontaxable, plus $25,000 per month for ten years, whether she remarried or not. She wanted title to her house and her car. She wanted the household furniture in her possession, plus all funds she had already received from Dan from their various community property assets. She wanted him to buy a $1 million life insurance policy, with her as beneficiary, until his spousal support obligation was fulfilled.

  In exchange, she would pay half the children's college expenses. She would forfeit any claims on his law practice, or any other property mutually owned, including his pension fund, his residence, the boat, the ski condominium, the limited partnerships with his brother, and so on.

  Both parties would waive any rights either might have to Epstein credits. Lastly, Dan would pay all of her legal fees, past and present.

  She was, in short, proposing a $4 million package deal to end the war.

  But the hook was—Dan would keep the children. Betty, the one-time perfect mother, wasn't even seeking custody. Dan and Linda could have them. She wanted only guaranteed visitation. Betty had decided, she told friends, to travel, find a career, to enjoy life without the stresses of being a single parent. Translated, she had opted for the final revenge, although she would never admit it.

  "I loved my kids enough that I just wanted to deal with them well, to give them quality attention when I could," she protested years later from jail, "and I was so completely without self-confidence at that point, I wasn't fit to mother them full-time. I needed to heal myself."

  Gerald Barry's reply—and Dan's—was swift and sure.

  "The offer contained in your letter of September 21, 1987, is rejected," Barry wrote to Tricia Smith. That was it. The one sentence was all he wrote.

  To this day, some of Betty's old La Jolla friends still believe that it was the insidious influence of HALT that created the monster who eventually killed. She might as well have joined forces with the Daughters of Bilitis or the PLO. In reality, the exact opposite was probably true. Without the support of people who didn't think she was crazy, she might have snapped even sooner.

  But Betty's HALT friends were never able to touch, much less allay, the source of her rage. She always felt too unique to really relate to them. "I just wasn't like them," she would say later. "Nobody went through what I did. I was up against the most brilliant, powerful lawyer in San Diego. I agree with all the reforms HALT favors—lawyers are destroying our society with their escalating fees. But that just wasn't relevant to what was happening to me."

  That September Betty made her first bid to be heard in the San Diego press. She was reading her morning Union on September 8, when her eyes fell upon a quote from the president of the San Diego Bar, advancing a "fast track" plan to unclog the local court system. A chief feature of the reform was to use arbitration and mediation counselors in place of judges whenever possible. "There is nothing worse than a courtroom tied up for six months with a complicated case involving the dueling rich," Daniel Broderick told reporters. Betty pic
ked up her pad and pen and wrote a letter to the editor. Given her mood, the letter was surprisingly restrained. She had read the article with "great interest," she said. However, "I was sickened by the hypocrisy of the statement made by Daniel T. Broderick III, San Diego County Bar President … Mr. Broderick himself has gone to great lengths to stymie the courts and the wheels of justice for the past TWO YEARS by resorting to every trick in the book, and some that haven't even been printed yet, to complicate what could have been a quick and simple divorce settlement and turn it into a legal nightmare. By virtue of our jointly owned assets, this could have been a case of the 'dueling rich,' but I have amassed legal fees of over $60,000 so far with no end in sight and it is rapidly ceasing to be so. Disgusted and discouraged, (Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III) Betty Broderick. La Jolla."

  It is unclear how Dan learned of Betty's letter, but he did. His response was instant and intense. Given his past insistence on sealed court proceedings to protect the children, the two-page, typed letter he wrote to the editor of the Union—marked personal and confidential—was startlingly personal, filled with the most intimate, tedious details of his marital problems. He even enclosed four of her nastiest phone messages.

  "I have not tried to put off the resolution of our divorce proceeding in any way," he wrote. It was "Mrs. Broderick, not I" who had chosen to proceed in court instead of mediation. He then told how Betty had been committed to a psychiatric hospital for running her van into his front door. He told of her several contempt convictions for obscene telephone calls to his home.

  "She has vowed on countless occasions to do everything within her power to ruin my reputation," Dan wrote. He concluded by asking the Union not to publish Betty's letter because "it is a gross distortion of what has occurred ... its sole purpose is to embarrass me and the Bar Association. If it appears in print, it will do both without justification."