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

by Bella Stumbo

  Then she fired Tricia Smith, too—although to this day, Betty insists, waffling, that she and Smith just "drifted apart by mutual agreement … Tricia was tired of the uphill battle against Dan Broderick. And the divorce was never moving forward."

  But, before Smith bailed out, she went to court with Betty one last time to argue against eight pending contempts.

  She begged the judge not to put Betty back in jail. She argued once again, and with eloquence, the triviality of Betty's offenses, the absurdity of two educated adults engaging in this kind of time-consuming warfare at the expense of taxpayers.

  She lost.

  Joseph found Betty guilty of all eight counts of contempt and imposed another eleven-day jail sentence. But he suspended it. This time, he had no intention of throwing Betty back into jail, since that approach clearly was not working. Instead, he fined her $8,000 and authorized Dan to deduct $1,000 per month from her $16,000 support check in payments to the city of San Diego until her debt to society was met.

  In Smith's only victory, she finally got Linda's voice off the answering machine. "I believe Linda Kolkena and her sexuality is the reason for the failure of my marriage," Betty said in her declaration. "I become enraged and emotional when I hear her voice. My inner feelings come out in expressive language."

  Betty explained that she usually talked to each of her children three to four times a day. "It is not unusual for more than ten or fifteen phone calls to go back and forth ... I believe Mr. Broderick unplugs the phone or puts Ms. Kolkena's voice on the phone purposely to harass and enrage me. He has been requested not to do so many times by my attorney ... At the last contempt trial, the court even requested that he voluntarily, without court orders, take Ms. Kolkena's voice off the machine. Despite these requests, he has refused to do so."

  Joseph ordered Dan to get Linda's voice off the answering machine. "From this day on, there is no need for Linda's voice to go on any telephone answering machine that is available to Mr. Broderick," he said. "Anyone else in the household can record that message, including Mr. Broderick …"

  At the end of the hearing, Tricia Smith formally notified the court that, henceforth, she was off the Broderick case "at Mrs. Broderick's request."

  Chapter 21

  The Beat Goes On, Harder

  Dan and Linda spent most of February traveling, first on a ski vacation to Colorado with the children, then to Switzerland by themselves. In the months before they died, they traveled often, to Hawaii, Greece, the Caribbean, San Francisco, New York, New England. By now, they were also one of downtown San Diego's most attractive, enviable new couples, regulars on the legal social scene, familiar faces in the evenings at Dobson's and other downtown bars.

  Linda was spending most of her time at Dan's house—although friends say she usually skipped dinners there, in order not to upset the boys, arriving instead at nine or ten in the evening after they were busy at their schoolwork or in bed.

  Linda's friends were delighted, because the day seemed to be soon at hand when Dan would cease dithering and marry the young woman who had put up with so much for so long to remain at his side.

  Betty, meantime, sat at home, marking each of their trips into her diaries and remembering how much she herself had always wanted to travel the world. She had had so many plans, once upon a time. She had made it to Europe three times—but none had been the romantic, glamorous adventure of her girlhood dreams.

  Every time she went over to Dan's to pick up the children, resentment gnawed at her—not only over the huge amount of money he was spending to refurbish his home, but also the style in which he was doing it. His taste was her taste.

  If he wasn't home, she would walk out back and stare at his new swimming pool with hate. It was the same Bill Blass pool she had saved clippings about for so many years. The only difference was Dan had done his in green tile, instead of navy blue.

  Sometimes, too, she would stroll through the house, appraising the value and nature of his furnishings. Occasionally she even took her camera and photographed the elegant rooms for her future divorce trial. While she was struggling on a budget, he was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on his own home. Not fair.

  "It was an Ethan Allen showroom, all the right pieces, but no warmth. He thought he was King Edward! And he did his whole goddamn house in my colors! My favorite colors were blue, Williamsburg blue, and cranberry ... I always thought, why can't they get their own taste? Why can't they get their own life?"

  She wasn't supposed to go into the house at all, of course. "Dan told us to dial 911 for the police whenever she came inside," said Sylvia Cavins, a pleasant, earthy woman in her fifties, who alternated with her daughter, Linda David, as Dan's housekeeper for two years, until the killings. "But I just hated to call the police on her," says Cavins. "So we didn't do it. Still, we'd always watch to make sure she didn't damage anything and get us in trouble with Dan."

  Dan was, both women agree, a stern taskmaster, an impersonal householder with an unrelentingly businesslike manner who would usually leave them memos on what he wanted done, rather than discuss matters in person—and when he did, it was always a formal encounter in his den, with him behind his desk, the housekeeper sitting in the chair before him, wondering what, if anything, she had done wrong. They called him Mr. Broderick. And they were nervous every time Betty was in the house, since, like Betty herself, they were violating his rules.

  Yet it might have gone on, the ex-wife sneaking around in the house, checking everything out—except one day Betty betrayed their trust. When Linda David, on duty that day, turned her back, Betty crept into a hallway and found a letter on a table written by Linda Kolkena to Dan's parents.

  "She opened it, and she read it," says Linda David, angry still, "and so I called her later, and I told her I didn't appreciate the position she was putting me in, and that she couldn't come inside anymore."

  Betty denies reading the letter—lamely. (It is just another curious detail of her personality that, while she will admit to so much, periodically some small, embarrassing detail will arise that causes her, if not to lie outright, then to selectively forget.)

  In return, Betty often took her anger at Dan out on his housekeepers. Nowhere does her class consciousness show more unattractively than in her remarks about these various women who were hired to feed, clean, and chauffeur her four children, as well as run Dan Broderick's household. They were, variously, "losers," "drunks," and "sluts." One was "that big fat girl with the foreign name." None of them "were the sort of people I wanted my children exposed to. My children had a mother!"

  But, the housekeepers would later get even for Betty's condescension. Four became prosecution witnesses at her trial. Some were credible, others were not—but it was all part of the courtroom soap opera to come. (One would tell in detail about the Boston cream pie episode in 1985. Another would say that Betty threatened to shoot her in 1987. Another would tell how somebody, presumably Betty, had furiously crossed Dan's face out of a family photograph hanging in a hallway. And two of them, including Cavins, would testify that Betty frequently threatened to kill them both.)

  By now, divorce activists were Betty's closest companions. Ronnie Brown, and later on another friend, Dian Black, wanted to form an organization that, unlike HALT, would focus strictly on divorce law reform. Both were committed to the notion that no-fault divorce laws were the single worst disaster ever to befall mothers and children. And they wanted Betty Broderick to join them, to lend her name and her story to their organizing efforts.

  And, despite herself, Betty was becoming something of an activist. Experience had educated her—perhaps for the first time in her life—to issues larger than herself. She had glided through nearly sixteen years of marriage without ever hearing the term no-fault, much less bifurcation. Like most women, she had simply assumed that divorce meant "you split everything down the middle on the day of the divorce, and that's it."

  But now, she had a divorce and no settlement. Dan had bo
th his freedom and full control of all their assets. "Yet it was his fault our family was destroyed!"

  Finally, she decided to write her story for publication, as a call to arms to other women. While Dan and Linda were enjoying Europe, she went to Deer Valley in February with the children and spent a week working on her memoirs. What resulted was a ninety-page manuscript, which she titled "What's a Nice Girl to Do? A Story of White-Collar Domestic Violence in America."

  After the title page, she wrote:

  "Don't get in the mud and fight with the pigs.

  You only dirty yourself and the pigs like it!"

  In her introduction, she promised that hers would be "the story of how one man had the power to break all the rules."

  What resulted instead was such a furious, personalized account of a "wonderful wife and mother," wronged in every respect by a "foaming-at-the-mouth mad-dog attorney," that it had scant relevance to the average woman in divorce. Dan came out as something lower than a barnyard pig, yet more powerful than God. Betty herself verged on saintly. Not until her postscript did she even get around to addressing no-fault divorce laws, which "leave the door open for this kind of emotional terrorism, without any threat of repercussions to the oppressor."

  She got a lot off her chest by writing it, but, beyond that, Betty's book, like her diaries, served the interests of no one, except the prosecutor, who later seized on the manuscript as further evidence that Betty Broderick had been premeditating cold-blooded murder for nearly two years before she finally got around to doing it.

  Of special interest to the district attorney was the last paragraph of Betty's tome: "I wish I could finish this tale of woe," she wrote. "I tried to finish it five years ago, when I burnt his clothes and threw him out. As things are today, I have ulcers, insomnia, a chronic bad back from the incredible stress, and have gained sixty pounds. The home I'm living in is still a mess, even though I've spent a lot of my own money on it. It's still in a beautiful spot, but it still has Dan Broderick's name on the deed. I am facing the crooked judge and jail again—I am without an effectual attorney, but have thousands in outstanding attorney fees ... At this point, February 20, 1988, I have nowhere to turn—if this is the way domestic disputes are settled in the courts, is there any wonder there are so many murders? I am desperate. What is a nice girl to do?"

  Nothing ever came of Betty's book. Later, in fact, she would deny that she ever intended it to be more than "a diary for my children, so they would know what happened." She would never see herself as symbolic in any way of other women.

  Not until three years later, long after Betty had been jailed for murder, finally Ronnie Brown did organize a local group, the Alliance for Marriage and Divorce Reform, which is reportedly thriving—and which never mentions Betty Broderick.

  In March, only weeks after the court levied its fines, the Brodericks clashed once again over how best to educate their children.

  Danny was already enrolled at Francis Parker, one of the best San Diego private schools, but Betty wanted him in the even more elite Bishops School in La Jolla. Dan resisted, arguing that Danny was happy at Francis Parker and that there was no reason to uproot him.

  Ignoring him, Betty managed to get Danny on the highly competitive list of youngsters accepted for the Bishops entrance exam.

  But, on the morning of the exam, March 12, Danny didn't show up. Instead, Dan had taken both boys with him to ride in the St. Patrick's Day parade.

  The result was guaranteed. Betty was about as livid as she had ever been:

  "Listen, you fucking, insane asshole," she screamed into his answering machine. "This is Saturday now at about 1:30 or something. I've been calling for days to get this weekend straightened out. You fucked your son over by having missed the Bishops exam. I am not accepting Rhett by cab, which is unsafe, so that I can be your maid and baby-sit while you continue your drunken afternoon with your office cunt. You are so insane. Will you please go get help. You're sick."

  Worse, in another measure of just how stunningly irrational she had become, she also sat down and wrote a rambling, twenty-page letter of outrage, studded with profanities, to the one person in town—not counting Dan Broderick himself—who was least likely to sympathize with her: Dan's attorney, Gerald Barry:

  "Dear Mr. Barry—Your fucking asshole client is at it AGAIN—déjà vu," she began. "He has been using the routine restraining orders as SOLE CUSTODY orders since fall of '85 when he had no custody order at all. As with the delay tactics, you would think that after THREE YEARS of being treated like mindless, worthless shit, I'd get used to it, but somehow I just can't."

  From there, she raved on about random offenses committed by Dan, including his refusal to let Rhett come to soccer practice or games when she was a volunteer coach.

  She finished her letter by telling Barry that, as she wrote, she was drinking from a coffee cup with the word STRESS printed on it, along with a definition. In typically ribald Betty Broderick style, she quoted from the cup:

  "STRESS: the confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately deserves it."

  She wrote Barry several more letters over the next two months.

  In one, she ventilated her anger at the legal system, which "bludgeoned, attacked, and generally fucked over" its victims, especially her. She blamed it, as usual, on Dan's stature in town: "The Emperor has no clothes, and all your courtesans are applauding and protecting a naked man."

  Then, her mind snapped back to her gnawing resentments over the present: "Dan is living like a king. Spending money like he won the lottery. The disparity between our two living arrangements is TOO GREAT. I want it resolved. Betty Broderick."

  Her lunatic letters to Barry continued through May. Now Gerald Barry had every reason to see, with his own eyes, that this was obviously no longer a steady, rational woman. But not since Dan Jaffe had urged two years earlier that a guardian be appointed to protect Betty from herself had anyone in the legal system come forward to suggest that this deck was shamelessly stacked.

  She grew unsteadier by the day. She continued her erratic, credit card shopping sprees. On one day in March alone, she spent $1,000 at Custom Shirts of La Jolla. She walked into department stores and boutiques and bought armfuls of clothing for herself and the children. But, by now, shopping for herself was no fun because she had to visit the large-sized salons of her favorite stores. "The clothes were just so ugly," she says. "And I looked like shit in them."

  Nothing in her life provided relief anymore.

  The children were a growing aggravation. Lee was now living mostly with Betty. "Out all night!" cried Betty into her diary. Once when Lee took her car without asking, Betty called the police and reported it stolen.

  At the same time, she was even angrier at Dan for not providing both girls with cars. "Lee was riding this piece-a-shit moped all over town," she later said. "It was unsafe. And it looked like hell. My girls weren't cut out for that kind of image!" She ended up leasing cars for both girls herself.

  Then she made plans to go to New York to visit her family again.

  "Felt like I was dying," she wrote in her diary that week. "So unhappy, so lonesome. Kim and Lee partying, wrecking my house … won't clean up house or return missing things." In a striking indication of her growing obsessiveness, she even listed the "missing things" in a neat column: They ranged from "fire extinguisher, spotlighter, and bathing suit" to "champagne (Tattinger), Godiva chocolates, and Girl Scout cookies."

  Her diaries make no mention of how her week in New York went—and today she says even she can't remember.

  At about the same time, a small-claims court judge ruled that Ruth Roth should take her bill back to Dan Broderick for payment, as per the original court order. It had taken Betty months in time and effort to score this small victory. "It was pure harassment," she said later. "Dan knew that bill was his. But it cost me a lot of hassle, just going down to small claims court to prove i
t—and that's what he wanted. He was deliberately trying to drive me crazy!"

  And, certainly, she was beginning to sound crazier by the day.

  On March 23, she wrote a curious, testy letter to Tricia Smith, pretending that she hadn't fired her after all:

  "Dear Tricia—I was sorry to hear … that you will not be helping me clean up the pile of vomit called my life. I wish you had had the courtesy to call or write me yourself. I know you're very busy, but it would only have taken a minute. Thank you for the help and support you gave for the last year. Too bad we didn't get anywhere."

  Then, according to her diary, Oprah Winfrey's show called, wanting her to appear on a program about messy divorces. She refused because, "I didn't want to be part of a circus."

  Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet month. Dan filed only two OSCs—one accusing Betty of throwing rocks at his car.

  April is one of the reasons that La Jollans like to call their little community surrounding the beautiful cove "the Jewel," after the Spanish la joya, although most historians think the name derives from the early Como Yei Indian word hoy a, meaning cave.

  It is, at that mild time of year, one of the prettiest places on earth. The air is clean, the lushness of orange, purple, and pink flowers cascading down the hillsides clash gloriously against the brilliant blue sea and cloudless sky. Lovers and old people sit for hours in the sunlight, watching the waves beat their timeless songs upon the great, eerie, ragged rock formations rising from the sea along the shoreline. Gardeners smile, Mexican maids beat rugs in the ritual of spring cleaning, and the ladies of La Jolla whisk about with new energy, working out at Personalized Fitness and getting new spring hair colors and faces at the local beauty factories. Parties get planned, Jonathan's worries about the quality of the incoming caviar and strawberries, Las Patronas matrons worry that only five months remain to ready the Jewel Ball. April in La Jolla is when all the juices are flowing, in lords and retainers alike.