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

by Bella Stumbo

  Then came Kim. She was nervous, too. Her first words came in a disjointed, confused tangle. But in the end, she turned out to be a better witness for her father than her mother, much less her little brothers.

  "I think personally that my brothers should be able to live with my mom," she began. "That is what they wanted me to come and give my opinion on, because they don't like my dad's girlfriend, and my mom is kind of a little crazy. She does irrational things and has a very bad temper, but I don't know, maybe that will stop after the divorce is settled. But I don't think that they should have to live with my dad and Linda if they are really going to be miserable, and, from me talking to them, that is how they sound they are. But," she added, switching again, "they have also been brainwashed by [her mother]. So I don't know."

  And how did she feel about Linda? "Well, she is nice to me, but I just think it is really fake," she said. Kim Broderick's frustrations, her divided attitudes, leap off the page.

  For her own part, she would not want to live with Betty, she said. She recalled bitterly how her mother had "kicked us all out …" Then, "When she realized it wasn't that hard for him and he was doing fine," she wanted them back—in Kim's opinion, just to hurt Dan. "As soon as we were adjusted and enjoyed it, she said, ‘I want you back'."

  Even now, when the kids were at her house, Betty felt like Dan was "getting away scot-free ... If she gets mad at them, she will throw them back there [to Dan's house] … She can't deal with little kids, and she has no stability whatsoever … She's wishy-washy."

  Her father, she said, was "very strict, but he is not that unreasonable." She liked him and got along with him well, she told Howatt, and thought he was trying hard to be a good parent, although "he is not very emotional or sensitive ... I mean, I can't go to him and sit and cry [over] little problems … boys, or something like that. But if it's something big, I can talk to him. He's not always understanding at first, but, after, he is fine. He gets mad and yells, but he is nice …"

  As for Lee, she thought Dan "was being way too hard on her." On the other hand, she said, equivocating again, Lee "has gone way overboard. She has thrown things. You can't throw glass bottles at people's cars when you're mad at them." And, she added, Lee was "into bad things … She is stoned all the time. She is always smoking pot …" But she liked her sister, she said. "She is just different than me." She also thought, firmly, that "someone should be giving her [an] allowance" so she didn't have to work so hard. "And my dad doesn't give her any money …"

  Midway through the interview, Kim changed her mind about the boys living permanently with Betty. "They would be happiest at my mom's for short-term, but long-term they wouldn't." Contradicting her earlier statement, now she told Howatt the boys were happy at Dan's. They only told Betty that they hated him to get her attention. Her next statement was even more damaging: "He makes them go to school, and he makes them do their homework. At Mom's house there is none of that … they just have to cough a little and she will say, 'Okay, you are sick.' She doesn't like following rules and stuff like that."

  She also said that she was no longer having quarrels with Dan over her college expenses because, just three days earlier, he had raised her allowance from $200 to $300. She didn't know why.

  Did she think Betty's animosities toward Dan were over money, or the girlfriend? asked Howatt.

  Both. But mostly money, Kim thought. Money was all Betty talked about. "Everyone that calls on the phone … 'Hi, well, la, la, la ... I don't have enough money for this, and I am $40,000 in debt.' I mean, she is always talking about money, and it's disgusting. It really annoys me, because ... it seems like she gets a lot. She spent a lot of it on me. She took me to San Francisco … She just doesn't think … She is very impulsive."

  She then changed her mind one last time about custody of the boys.

  Now, she told Howatt, she thought the boys should go to Betty only "if my dad gets married" to Linda. Otherwise, they should stay with Dan. "He is stable. He has them on a routine. They go to bed at a certain time, eat at a certain time ... At my mom's house, it's chaotic … It's fun at my mom's … you can go any time or blast music. You don't do that stuff at Dad's. You don't make a mess. You sit in the living room. At my mom's, you jump on the furniture and do whatever you want."

  But, she added before she left Howatt's chambers, in a lasting note of wisdom, she thought both of her parents were "too traumatic about the whole thing, and both of them should have tried to leave all of us kids out of it a lot more, rather than make this a six-person divorce. They wanted all of us in it the whole time … and, you know, if they had just talked to themselves, they could have ended this a lot earlier and not had so much hurt feelings and disaster."

  Time was running out, and Betty knew it. She became a beggar woman in court, rifling through trash heaps of domestic minutiae, hunting for the last scraps of neglect on Dan's part or excellence on hers that she could either remember or imagine. The trial transcripts became increasingly poignant as the end grew near.

  She wanted to discuss that Saturday morning, years ago, when she had gone to pick up Rhett for his soccer game, only to discover that Dan had taken him away, so enraging her that she had broken a window at Coral Reef. But Barry objected. Irrelevant. Sustained.

  "I am just trying to point out the many instances that he forcibly manipulated the kids away from me," she protested.

  It didn't matter, said Howatt, since Dan had already "admitted, point-blank, that he purposely, decidedly, and with complete intention, precluded the children from visiting with you or on occasion spirited them away and sequestered them from you."

  "So I don't go incident by incident?" she asked.

  No, said Howatt. "He admitted that is what he did, and he has given us a reason for it."

  "It is not important, the magnitude and the amount of times he did it?" Betty persisted, incredulous.

  No. The court didn't care how many times he did it. To the court, one incident was the same as a thousand. Betty Broderick wasn't going to build a painstaking picture of her rising rage for this judge. Not until she finally got to criminal court on murder charges would she at last be allowed to do that.

  Gerald Barry's redirect of his client was short and sweet. It focused on Dan's integrity, and his trust in his brother Larry.

  "Did you make any of those investments with the feeling that you would be divorcing your wife?" Barry asked.

  Whereupon, Dan delivered a final grand slam: "The honest answer to that is this: since very early in our marriage, very early, I have felt that our marriage was going to end in divorce, and that is a fact that Bets and I have talked about since very early in our marriage. And so, certainly, during these years when I made these investments ... I anticipated that one day this marriage of ours was going to fall apart. [But] I did not make any of these investments with a view toward that."

  Barry then hauled out his heaviest artillery—Betty's vulgar taped messages and conversations with the boys. He wanted to play a few of them.

  Howatt asked if Betty had any objection.

  "Yes, I always object to these tapes," said Betty, who had already heard them so many times before in various court proceedings that they were like a Greek chorus in her head by now, unending harpies. Herself.

  "What would be the basis of your objection?" he asked.

  "What is my multiple choice?" Betty retorted sarcastically. Her temper was apparently wearing thin.

  "I'm sorry," said Howatt. "I can't give you a multiple choice."

  The tapes played.

  The language was the same that Betty had been using for years now, but, although Dan' had heard the words many times before, his shock appeared undimmed by time. "She will call me 'cuntsucker,' 'fuckhead,' 'asshole,'" he said. "I mean … words that I never even heard about."

  Barry rested his case.

  But before Betty could begin her final questioning of Dan, the media arrived, in the person of Reader reporter Paul Krueger, who demanded admission t
o the courtroom. Why, Krueger wanted to know, was the Broderick divorce trial closed to the press and public?

  Howatt didn't have a ready answer. "Unless you can give me something on which, so to speak, to hang my hat," he told Barry, "I am going to have to open up the hearing." Barry didn't have a ready reply either. This was a surprise. He needed time to define his arguments, he told Howatt. He also accused Betty of contacting the press.

  She denied it—but she was glad that somebody had. She assumed her friends in HALT had done it, she told Howatt, because "They, as well as I, feel that my basic rights have been denied from the very beginning—that this is a sealed proceeding that nobody can witness. They feel it is really unfair to me, and so do I. Because when these proceedings are over, no matter what the outcome, Dan tells everyone I am crazy, and being that I have lost every one so far, I am real unhappy what has gone on in this system … Whenever I say anything to anybody, his pat answer is, 'She is wacko'."

  Howatt wasn't interested in her complaints, only the bottom line: "Well, are you against closing the hearing to the media? Yes or No?"

  "I am for opening the courtroom to whoever wants to come," Betty told him firmly.

  Howatt pressured her to reconsider. "Do you want the press to be able to come in and report the intimate details of these proceedings?" His "basic concern," he said, "is the best interest of the parties—and that includes the children." Also, he pointed out, the proceeding had obviously not been totally closed, since her friend Ronnie Brown had been allowed to remain "so you had somebody you could hold on to for support, so to speak …"

  A lifetime of insecurity surfaced in the next word Betty Broderick spoke. "Well …" And her voice trailed off.

  Howatt, who had so far been loath to advise Betty Broderick on nearly anything else, wasn't finished. He asked if she wanted to see "your whole life and times [printed] in what amounts to a tabloid … Maybe that is an unfair characterization," he qualified, "but [the Reader] is certainly a newspaper of some circulation in the community … and to make this kind of information available not only to the children through that medium, but ... to their friends and associates, either through their parents or through their own reading of the paper … it's up to you ... If you consent to having the hearing closed, it will remain closed," Howatt told her. "If you feel that it is not in your best interest to have it closed ... I will force Mr. Barry to prove to me the authority on which to close it."

  Betty hung in. "I would like Mr. Barry to prove the authority," she said.

  Barry brought out the same letters from the children's psychologists that Dan had used with such success to block the Reader story Krueger and De Wyze had tried earlier to write. The only difference was that, now, Dan could not also threaten to sue for invasion of privacy. This was now a First Amendment issue.

  "Your position is unchanged?" Howatt asked Betty again. It would have taken a stronger woman than Betty Broderick to withstand much more of this pressure.

  Still, amazingly, she persisted. "If I am such the guilty, horrible, awful person in these whole proceedings that Dan paints me to be," she demanded, "why is he so afraid of anybody knowing the truth?"

  Howatt defended Dan. "Certainly, as an adult, he can live with the choice that he has made, making a new relationship and dissolving an old one," said the judge. "The difficulty is not with him but rather the children."

  Howatt then sympathized briefly with Betty's plight. "The system has failed you," he conceded, "because it has not afforded you the means or the opportunity to resolve the conflict in a reasonable and timely fashion." Even so, he promptly added, he didn't think that was any excuse opening such sensitive proceedings to the press.

  Betty countered that there was no reason for anyone to construe her position as "in any way persecuting or endangering the children" because her children already knew "everything about everything."

  She was not bending. It was astonishing.

  Howatt asked her again the same question she had already answered several times: Did she want the proceedings sealed or open?

  "In fairness to me," she said again, clearly, "I would like them open.'

  "Okay," said Howatt. "I will abide by your decision then." At which time he recessed court in order to interview Danny and Rhett in his chambers. Assuming, he asked her in a remarkably snide aside, that she still wanted the children's interviews to be held in private?

  "Yes, sir," she said meekly.

  If Betty Broderick wasn't worried before about aggravating the judge who would dictate her financial future and decide whether she could have her children back, she surely was by now. For one of the first times in her life, she had stood up for herself before an authority figure, and taken a decidedly unpopular position. She had not been nice.

  Danny Broderick, then a twelve-year-old seventh-grader at Francis Parker, was a very bright, thoughtful little boy, and, when he walked into Howatt's office, his mind was made up, his opinions were firm: he had nothing bad to say about his dad—but he wanted to live with his mom and visit Dad on weekends "because that is when he is there. He is never there the other times, he is always at work."

  What was it like, living with Mom? Howatt asked.

  "It's a lot of fun, and we do a lot of things, and we just know how to have fun with her, and she knows how to have fun, too … And she makes good meals, and she knows what we like … Our dogs are over there … that is about it. And we have a swimming pool there, just like at my dad's house. We have a trampoline. We have a little pool room down by the pool and basketball hoop, like my dad's house … and a volleyball kind of thing. And it is right by the beach, too, so I like that a lot better …"

  And what kind of fun things did he do with his dad?

  "We see movies and go out to dinner once in awhile, and I play basketball with him every so often after work, and we play catch with the football … and do basically what you would think a working parent would do—a hardworking, long-working parent," he added. He sounded so grown-up. Danny Broderick had thought it through, what he was going to say to this judge, what he would stress. His biggest complaint was that his father wasn't home enough during the week. Dan was usually there when the boys left for school in the morning, and he usually got home around 6:00 or 6:30. But then, after dinner, he worked in his den. "The thing that we mostly do together is homework, and that is not even every day." His conclusion was that it was "boring," living at his father's house.

  Howatt wanted to know if his mother ever got angry with him.

  Yes, said Danny. But "she has never slapped me or anything." By contrast, he said, his father "gets angry a lot, and he usually spanks us … hitting me in the behind."

  "Do you like your mother better than your father?" Howatt asked.

  "I wouldn't say better," the little boy responded, "but I think she has better qualities."

  As for Linda, he said that she was okay, but he really didn't like her very much.

  Was there anything else he wanted to tell Howatt? Nope, said Danny. "Just basically that I want to live with my mom … Every day I think about living with her, so that is all."

  All the Broderick children had been sworn before they testified to Howatt. Now, looking at Rhett, the nine-year-old, fourth-grade baby of the family, Howatt asked if he knew the difference between truth and lies. Sure, said Rhett.

  "Have you ever told a lie?" the judge asked.

  "A whole bunch of times," said Rhett. "But not to my parents. To my brother."

  Like Danny, he knew exactly what he wanted to say: "I think my mom should get me, she has more experience with kids." And his dad was "mostly at work." He loved it at his mother's house. "We go to places like Warner Springs, and we just read stories, rent movies, and she makes me and my brother's favorite food." At his dad's house, he watched TV, played video games, and played with his toys.

  He fought with his brother a lot, too, he said. Danny kicked him, he announced, on "an average" of seven times a day.

  And did th
ey fight at his mother's house, too? Howatt asked.

  No. "My mom keeps him distracted too much … She invites over friends that he likes, and she makes them his favorite food, and she rents his favorite movies." Mostly, he said, they only got to watch PG and cartoons, although "every once in awhile we can trick my dad and my mom into getting us an R movie. My mom says no R movies if there's any violence." Just recently, he said, his mom had turned off ‘Action Jackson’ because "she said it was too violent." Otherwise, he said, at Mom's, it was mostly "cartoons and movies like ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, with real actors and stuff … ‘Cinderella’."

  His routine during school days, the little boy said with comic precision, consisted of getting up "at 6:18" to his alarm clock, getting dressed, and going to school. He didn't have breakfast, except "every once in a while I have cereal, and usually there is a chance I will drink some Sundance"—fruit juice mixed with sparkling water.

  He never took his own lunch to school, he said. "Usually there is nothing in the house that is good except meat that has to be cooked, and junk, too, that my dad wouldn't allow me to eat for lunch."

  After school he watched TV, did his homework, and watched more TV.

  "Is there something special that you do at your mom's that makes it a nice place to be?" asked Howatt. "Yeah. You don't need TV to have fun." He didn't have any friends in Dan's neighborhood either. They all lived in La Jolla.

  What did he get in trouble with his mother for?

  "She only yells at me when I cuss, because I don't really do anything real bad, except every once in a while my brother kicks me and I call him a bad word." His mother never spanked him. "She just slaps me on the face a little hard." His dad spanked him on the rear. Dan only got angry, he said, when he and Danny fought, and once when he climbed down the laundry chute.

  Why did he want to live with his mother instead of his dad? "Because Mom is there when I need her." And what about Linda?