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

by Bella Stumbo

  But Bets was still there, sitting in the courtroom, big and belligerent and only biding her time until she finally got her chance to confront Dan Broderick with six years of rising, blinding resentments.

  And, at last, it was her turn to cross-examine the witness.

  She began on a typically apologetic note.

  "I don't have any firsthand knowledge of any of these numbers that have been put before me, nor do I have at my disposal accountants, lawyers, paralegals, or secretaries. I have no exhibits to put in front of the court." She couldn't stop. "I don't type," she went on. "I don't own a typewriter. I have never worked in an office," she told the judge. "I don't know the law or really the rules of trial. But I will try to play the game as best I can," she finally finished, "if you will just tell me as I go along."

  Howatt didn't answer.

  Thus did Betty Broderick step, like Alice in Wonderland, through the looking glass and into the world of no-fault divorce. The tone of the next six days was set from the minute she opened her mouth to ask her former husband her first question.

  It would always be hard to know who to feel sorrier for: Dan, pinned into the witness stand like an impaled butterfly while his ex-wife stalked before him, spitting out questions built on six years of rising rage; or Betty, the needy, naive woman-child, now presiding so wantonly over her own destruction for no larger gain than the immediate satisfaction of interrogating the infidel at last.

  "Mr. Broderick, when did this case really start?"

  "February 28, 1985," he said.

  "Is that when you estimate this case started?" she challenged.

  "Well, the case actually started in October of 1985 when I filed the [divorce] action," he said.

  "When did this divorce actually start?" she persisted.

  "At our separation, if that's what you mean," said Dan, trying to satisfy her.

  "No, no," she lectured. "When did this divorce start?" He was tired of her interrogation already.

  "I guess April 12, 1969, to tell you the truth," he said. Their wedding day.

  It would be the single most hurtful remark he made in trial. Years later, she would still feel the sting of it. "How could the sonofabitch take away all the good memories, too?" she once asked from jail, on the verge of tears. "Just because he wanted to leave me for Linda Kolkena, why did he have to erase our whole life together? We had so many good times …"

  But that day, she stayed on track. "No ... All right. What I'm trying to get at," she told him, "is when did I first become aware of your affair with Linda Kolkena?"

  Barry objected. The question was irrelevant. Howatt agreed and delivered his first lecture to Betty about the nature of no-fault divorce proceedings.

  "In California," he told her, "as you may have become aware, the issue is not one of whose fault the divorce was, because it is no longer a fault proceeding. We do not have the issue of finding fault with one party as opposed to the other. We are only here to decide the questions of division of property, the assets of the community, your interest and his interest in those assets, and the determination of the appropriate parent for custody of the children."

  Betty argued it. "I understand those facts," she said. "But I [also] understand that my interest in the community was improperly manipulated for two and a half years purposely and with malice before this case was filed by an expert attorney. That's very important to my case!" Her questions were aimed at showing, she said, how Dan had begun to cut her out of their community assets from the time he began his affair with Linda.

  Okay, said Howatt. "Let's start … and see if there is anything that you can develop with regard to the assets. You have to relate to the assets, okay? And not to any alleged affair or liaison." He also told her to stop talking so fast and interrupting him and the witness. Betty agreed—and then resumed exactly where she had left off.

  "Do you remember what my reaction was when you hired this girl?" she asked next.

  "Your Honor," Barry protested, "I don't want to make it difficult on Ms. Broderick, but I don't see the relevance of the question."

  "Again," Howatt told Betty, "we are dealing with the area of fault."

  She vowed to move on to the matter of the houses.

  But Betty would never really move on until she felt like it. When she wanted, she could be dense as mud and tenacious as an army of cockroaches. "Do you remember me telling you to get rid of Linda Kolkena, meaning off your payroll, by October 1, or get out of my house?" she asked.

  He remembered.

  Barry objected. Sustained. Again Howatt lectured her. Lay off the alleged affair!

  Betty ignored them both. Instead she went into an interrogation about the events on his thirty-ninth birthday when she had gone to his office, found party remnants, and, that night, ordered him to move out of the house. Dan evidently looked to Barry for rescue.

  "Don't look at your attorney!" Betty snapped at him. "Answer the question!" She was clearly beginning to enjoy herself. At long last, she was in charge.

  Barry objected again. Why couldn't the judge make her stop? "Okay, okay," said Betty, waving Barry away. "Let's change the whole subject. Let's talk about the financial structure of our family. Would that make you happier?"

  "Yes, ma'am," said Gerald Barry.

  But she did not go directly to family finances or anything else. Instead, for the next three days, it was free-form. Whatever came to mind, she asked.

  Eventually, she would wear down every man in this courtroom. Gerald Barry's objections, which were constant at first, became increasingly sporadic, arbitrary, and listless. Sometimes he would protest, but other times—even when Betty was interrogating Dan about his alleged drug and sex habits—he would just let it go. Let her get it off her chest, let her mouth run its course; in the end, she would pay. And, unless Barry objected, Howatt usually let her follow whatever meandering path she chose. Not that his efforts to control her made any difference anyway. During the course of the trial Howatt probably lectured her fifty times about no-fault laws, all in vain. By the end, his black robes of authority were as tattered as a beggar's rags, his grave preachments reduced to the comic rat-a-tat chorus of a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

  In the next days, the Brodericks bickered over nearly everything from wallpaper to investments. But the personal attacks were the nastiest. She called him an irresponsible drunk who engaged in immoral sexual conduct in front of his children; he said she was so consumed with hate that he had told the children their mother was mentally unbalanced.

  As it now stood, he said, when the children asked to visit her, "I have to say, I don't know when you will be able to see her. It depends when she gets over this thing.'"

  And just when had he begun accusing her of being mentally ill? she demanded. Hadn't that begun in 1983—only after he met Linda? His reply was hard.

  "I don't know when I first came to the conclusion that you had an emotional problem," he said. "It might have been '83, it might have been '69. It's been a long time, Bets."

  She ignored that. And just what was "this thing?" she asked.

  "This 'thing' is really the whole heart and soul of the case," he shot back. "It is the antipathy you feel toward me—and I understand that, I might say. I understand your anger. I understand your hatred. I understand. The thing is, you're using it against them [the children]. You are venting it in front of them and directly to them … When you can come to grips with this hatred and hostility you have for me and direct it in other ways and not around them, then we will be at peace—and until that happens, this is never going to end."

  She argued with him. "This thing," in her opinion, was the fact that he had legally bludgeoned her for years.

  "No, ma'am … When this court makes its decision," he retorted, "that will not end this problem that you have. There will be hundreds of other incidents that will trigger hostility on your part … unless or until you get the kind of help you need to channel your anger in other ways … Honestly, I don't think, Bets, that you h
ave a legitimate basis with being unhappy ... I don't think there is any amount of money in this world that is going to be sufficient for you. You want me, you want my money, you want my death or my ruination in this community. You want me destroyed, and over and done with, and unless and until that happens, you are not going to be happy."

  She acted as if she had not heard him.

  She returned instead to the subject ever-present on her mind. Linda.

  Hadn't he said in the past that the children never saw him do any more than kiss Linda Kolkena on the cheek?

  "I said … put my arm around her and kiss her on the cheek, that is all they have ever seen," Dan replied.

  "You're totally unaware," she asked, "of Danny and Rhett looking in the door at Linda and you in bed together with her legs up in the air many times?"

  "That has not happened," he said. For some reason, Barry didn't object. The bizarre exchange continued.

  "Are you unaware of their reports to me that they have done such?"

  "The door to my room is locked, my bedroom, if that is what you are referring to. I don't know what the boys have told you. They tell you what they think you want to hear." Which was probably true. It was Betty whose mind and eyes were so painfully locked on his bedroom, not the children's.

  "And are you aware of the reports from the older girls of Linda parading around the house in see-through nightgowns?"

  "Linda does not and never has done that, and I can't imagine the girls would tell you otherwise," he said.

  But their friends also said so, she countered, taunting.

  "This is an outrage!" he finally exploded. "That does not happen."

  It was ugly, it was silly, it was sad, and it was sometimes even laughable—except, even in January of 1989, there was always the cast of death overhanging it all, in remarks by both him and her, and even two of the later witnesses. In hindsight, it seems eerily obvious that both Dan and Betty Broderick knew, at least on some instinctive level, that they truly were wed until death did them part.

  Betty Broderick's interrogation of her former husband had not begun so harshly. For the first couple of hours of her cross-examination, she had in fact dwelt only on the early years, on their mutual dreams, their plans for a glorious future together. She was trying to call him home from across a courtroom.

  Her initial questions were at times pitiful in their pleading nature. It was "Dan" throughout. Didn't Dan remember how they had lived, during that first year of marriage? On her salary, driving her car—that they had even spent her small savings?

  No, he didn't remember. It was like pulling teeth from a chicken to get Dan Broderick to admit that he and his young family had suffered any hardship at all during his student days. He simply didn't recall those years as being all that tough. He didn't remember that Kim had no crib. Only reluctantly did he even finally remember that, yes, "We got food stamps once or twice." He also remembered her various odd jobs—including one department store sales stint she did at nights during Christmas season. But he saw it as no hardship. He had, in fact, been carefully reviewing their taxes since 1970 for this trial. "I reviewed your W-2 on that," he said. "Your total income from [the sales job at] Lord and Taylor was $187."

  Betty finally gave up. Dan would never recall their early years with gratitude, sentimentality, or generosity.

  He also freely admitted that he often did not consult his wife when he made investments with his brother. Betty tried to pursue that line of questioning, but Howatt wouldn't let her. She argued in vain that it was critical, that she shouldn't be held accountable for any of their Colorado losses, because "If I had had any control, I would have sold them!" Forget it, the judge told her. That's not how divorce court works. What's done is done.

  She next tried to develop, in vain, her theory that Larry and Dan had been deliberately shuffling, hiding, and manipulating assets to ultimately cheat her, ever since Dan began his affair with Linda in 1983.

  "Did Larry know about your affair with Linda since the beginning?" she asked Dan.

  Objection. Sustained. No-fault again.

  "It's not relevant? With the manipulation of these huge sums of money?" Betty asked, shocked.

  "Not his affair, if there were one … Whether there was or wasn't is of no concern to me at all," said Howatt.

  "It is plenty of concern to me!"

  "I am sure that it was," Howatt agreed.

  No, no. Never mind that he was seeing another woman and lying about it, Betty told Howatt. She was now talking dollars and cents. All these delays, all these debts, all these Epsteins were, in her opinion, deliberately contrived by the two brothers to guarantee that, by the time a property settlement was finally reached, Dan would owe her virtually nothing.

  No, Howett told her—she could not pursue the Linda-Larry connection any further, not without hard evidence.

  Betty Broderick's frustration was understandable. But so was Howatt's. Even had he been so inclined, he could not, by law, allow her accusations. Such are the glories of no-fault divorce laws. Betty Broderick wasn't permitted to make a case for serious financial deception because it was too closely related to sexual deception. And she didn't have the legal skills to slip around the barriers.

  "I'm trying to illustrate the manipulations of saying one thing and doing another!" she protested.

  "No," said Howatt, again.

  In an ideal world, the entire proceeding would have been halted and Betty Broderick ordered to go hire herself some help, since she was clearly not competent to be representing herself. But that was always Betty's catch-22, even in her later murder trials: the same system that had challenged her mental stability ever since 1986, to the extent of even stripping her of visitation rights with her own children, still found her competent to look after her best interests, alone, in divorce court—and, later, to testify in her own behalf for shooting two people. Her much-alleged mental instability was used consistently as a club against her, but never as a factor in her favor.

  And nobody saw the contradiction with more bitter irony than Betty herself. "When it serves their purpose, you go from totally sane to totally crazy, one way or the other," she said years later from prison. "And then, just when it might be to your benefit to be insane, it's 'Oh! she got cured. As fast as she was declared nutty, we declare her sane again.' All those years, they were all calling me crazy, crazy, crazy. Now they are all saying, 'Oh, no. She's not crazy,' because they wouldn't want me to get off because I was crazy, even though they drove me crazy. God, I love lawyers."

  Nearly two years before, Tricia Smith had argued eloquently in temporary support hearings that Betty Broderick was entitled to enough money to maintain the life-style "to which she had grown accustomed." Granted, the sums involved were huge, atypical, beyond the grasp of the average person, Smith had said—but it was all relative. This case wasn't about dollars, it was about percentages—and her client was entitled to a fair percentage of Dan Broderick's $1 million-plus income. It was unfair, she argued, for a wife of sixteen years to suffer a diminished standard of living simply because her husband had chosen to dissolve the partnership.

  Never had Betty Broderick needed Tricia Smith more than now. She was trying to make the same points, but her methods ranged from inept to embarrassing.

  She asked Dan to recite the "major gifts" that he had given her. When he hesitated, she prompted him: "such as the lynx coat, the diamond necklace, the bracelet, the pearls." Yeah, he said—but they were Christmas presents mostly—his point being, he had not lavished her with gifts at random.

  "Do you think that the two of us are well-known for our clothes?"

  "I don't know about that."

  "Yes, you do."

  Don't argue, Howatt said.

  "Is it true that I'm well-known for my clothes?" He didn't know.

  "You don't have a recollection of mention in the newspaper of the different clothes that I would wear certain places … Do you remember [Union society writer] Burl Stiff being sweet on your
plaid jacket?"

  No. He didn't remember that.

  She would not be stopped. For the next half hour she tried to force Dan Broderick to admit that she had, through her social activities, advanced his career, via the society pages in San Diego.

  "When your name and picture appeared in the newspaper, didn't you receive a lot of comments about it … Didn't you become more well-known all over the city because of the publicity?" she demanded. "You don't think a lot of your cases came to you from social contacts around La Jolla?"

  No, he didn't. "When my name appeared in the paper in connection with a case that I was involved in, or as a result I had achieved," he told her testily, "I think that did have a significant impact …" Otherwise, he thought her La Jolla social functions were irrelevant. "Ninety-nine percent of my work comes from other lawyers."

  She switched subjects to his chintzy ways after the separation. The country clubs. Even more galling to her than his arbitrary cancelation of their Fairbanks membership was the humiliating way he had dealt with her club expenses while she still had privileges, before this divorce trial finally occurred to legally divide their supposedly communal money.

  Wasn't it true, she asked, that each time she had used club dining facilities, Dan had docked her support check for the amount she spent—despite the fact that he had to pay a $300 monthly minimum even if nobody used the club?

  Yes, he agreed. He had charged her for every lunch or dinner she had, although, it was true, she never came close to surpassing the $300 monthly minimum he had to pay anyway. But, whatever her bill, "I deducted it from your monthly support payment." "When I used the club, I always had the kids with me. … You would rather pay the minimum than allow me to use that minimum for free?" That's what it amounted to, he said.