by Bella Stumbo
That she hated Betty Broderick was by now as understandable as it was sad. She was too young, too romantic, too selfish to take pause, to consider the older woman's side. Despite any guilt she may have felt over the adultery, she could not bring herself to show Betty compassion, much less apologize for the lies, to attempt a peace council. Instead, she only followed Dan's lead, until, finally, as the years wore on, and the invective mounted, she felt only loathing for Betty Broderick. Crazy Betty. A witch from hell, to be despised and feared, standing between her and happiness.
That Betty hated Linda was of course just as understandable—and not only because Betty remains convinced to this day that Linda Kolkena, in combination with white Zinfandel and middle age, ruined her "perfect marriage." There were all the extra insensitivities over the years, too, minor cruelties that added up: the notarized house deed, signed by Linda; the insurance cancelation letters, signed by Linda; Linda's voice on the answering machine, before Dan was even divorced. Never mind the wrinkle ads and the legal party picture that Betty alleges Linda sent. Linda Kolkena's documentable acts were needless, heedless, and deadly enough. And Linda wasn't done yet.
As the wedding approached, Betty Broderick's tenuous hold on composure began to disintegrate entirely. "At first, she seemed fine," says Helen Pickard. "But then the wedding began to eat at her. She was obsessed with every detail of it. It's all she could talk about. She would say, 'Can you imagine that Linda's going to wear a strapless dress?' But then she went shopping for new wedding clothes for the boys. She even talked about buying Dan and Linda a wedding present."
"Yes, I was going to get them this gorgeous standing-on-the-floor silver champagne bucket that I saw in a catalog," Betty said later from jail. "It was fancier than I like, but Dan loved fancy. So I was going to buy it and say it was from the kids, because I knew that, if it came from me, he would send it back." She never did buy the ice bucket.
Instead, one Saturday in mid-March, she burgled Dan's property.
As usual, the circumstances are in dispute. As Betty tells it, she went to Dan's house to pick up the boys and noticed a large envelope on the front steps. Dan's housekeeper later insisted that the envelope was on a hallway table inside the house.
Not that it matters where it was. Either way, Betty picked it up, snooped inside, and discovered that it was Dan and Linda's wedding list, ready for the printer—twenty-two pages, more than a hundred and fifty names, including about a dozen judges, among them Ashworth, presiding judge of family court. Also Dr. Steven Sparta. None of her other divorce court judges were on the list, but, even so, Betty saw it as more evidence of the San Diego legal conspiracy against her, proof of conflict of interest. Worse yet, dozens of their mutual old friends were invited. How could they go?
She stole the list. She didn't see anything wrong with the theft. "Why should I?" she asked later. "If you're stupid enough to leave it on the front door stoop, you get what you get. Anyone would have picked it up. It was just a lark, no big deal." But that wasn't all she stole.
Strolling through Dan's house, she also spied a pile of T-shirts lying on a table: "First Annual Cabo Chicks Bachelorettes Party," the logo said. How sweet, she thought. How trashy. How cuntlike. The kids had already told her Linda was planning a pre-wedding party for around fifteen girlfriends in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. She wondered how much that would cost Dan, to fly a whole fleet of bimbos to Mexico. She took one of the T-shirts too.
For Linda it was the final straw. The divorce was over. Why wouldn't this bitch leave them alone?
Never mind, said Dan. They would deal with it Monday. The right way. The legal way.
But Linda was fed up.
There are two versions of what happened next—Betty's and Linda's. One protects Betty, the other justifies Linda. In substance, neither adds up to more than just another tawdry episode in the Broderick matter.
According to Betty, she was at work at the preschool that Monday morning when she received several telephone calls—but the caller hung up each time. "So I knew something was wrong. I'd heard that thieves try to determine when you're not home, and very few people knew I even had that job." So she went home early, around one P.M., to check. There her housekeeper, Maria, told her that a pretty young blond woman had been in the house that morning, rummaging through her papers. The woman had told Maria she was a friend of Kim's, picking up something.
Betty knew instantly who had been inside her house. Linda Kolkena. Incredible.
But she didn't have time to think about it, because, at the same time, she says, she found a message on her telephone machine, saying that she was summoned to appear before Judge Howatt at 1:30, on a complaint over the stolen wedding list. Another four-hour notice, just like the house sale. Well, they wouldn't do it without her this time.
She scrambled and made it to court just in time—for Howatt to order her either to return the wedding list by the next day, or forfeit her $16,000 monthly support payment until she did. He also ordered her not to call anyone on the wedding list or reveal their names.
Her head throbbed with frustrated rage. Why had Dan made such a fuss over a stupid prank? Would his controlling gestures never end? "Just six weeks after I thought I had a final divorce settlement, they're suddenly telling me that if I do anything to piss off Dan Broderick, the whole deal's off. No money. Behave or starve, bitch—that was the message. After all those years, absolutely nothing had changed."
But, she insists, vaguely, she returned the list on time, as ordered. She can't remember who she gave it to, however—just "some court clerk."
Linda's friend, Sharon Blanchet, tells an entirely different story. According to Blanchet, Betty never returned the wedding list. And, says Blanchet, it was not until two days after the court deadline passed and Betty still hadn't complied that Linda finally decided to raid Betty's house and take it back herself. Friends who knew what Linda planned to do tried to talk her out of it. "I told her it was stupid, that she was just giving Betty ammunition," says Blanchet. But Linda was too frustrated to be stopped.
The next day, she drove to Calle del Cielo—alone, according to Blanchet. She was nervous as she pulled up in front of Betty's house. Linda Kolkena had never even had a conversation with Betty Broderick, beyond one brief exchange in passing at the door of Dan's house years ago. Otherwise, she had only heard the voice reviling her on Dan's answering machine. Betty both repulsed and scared her.
But it was early morning. Betty was at work. She had called the school to make sure. Nobody would be home. The front door was unlocked. She entered the house and paused, momentarily taken aback at the spectacular ocean view through the wide sliding-glass doors. She looked around at the living room. It was larger than the entire house Linda Kolkena had grown up in. What in God's name was this woman complaining about? But, as she moved through the house, she was even more fascinated by the disorder. It was March, but Christmas wrappings still lay in wadded heaps on the floors, she later told friends. She walked past a dressing room. Clothes hanging on chairs, on doorknobs, clothes everywhere, many with the price tags still on them. Clothes never worn—many in sizes so small that Betty couldn't have fit into them in years. And throughout the house—on the coffee tables, on the mantles—she saw pictures of Dan. Betty's pretty white wedding album from 1969, when Linda was only seven, still lay on the coffee table. Chilled, she glanced over her shoulder. But, no. She was here alone.
She found the kitchen nook, which she knew from conversations with Kim served as Betty's office. Entering, she was amazed yet again. Boxes and boxes of legal documents, piles of papers everywhere, magazine and newspaper clippings stuffed into folders, lying on the floors, stacked on counters. It was chaos. She was never going to find her wedding list in this clutter.
But, lying atop a pile of documents, she did find Betty's 1988 autobiography: "What's a Nice Girl to Do?" She flipped to the last page and read the final sentence: "If this is the way domestic disputes are settled in the courts, is there any wonder th
ere are so many murders? I am desperate …" Ninety pages of pure hate. Dan should see this. So she stole it.
But, as she was leaving, she got caught. Suddenly, standing in the doorway was a small, stout, dark Mexican woman with a long black braid down her back. Maria Montez glared. Who, Montez demanded, was she? Linda smiled weakly and lied: a friend of Kim's, she said. Then she fled. With Betty's manuscript.
But when she showed it to Dan, Blanchet said later, he was less interested in its contents than in his fiancée's outrageous behavior. What in hell was Linda doing, breaking, entering and stealing? He ordered her to return Betty's property at once. And, as docilely as Betty had been in the years before her, Linda obeyed.
Despite the risk posed to her own license as a practicing attorney, Blanchet accompanied Linda on her return trip, "to stand lookout outside," she says, while Linda entered Betty's house a second time to replace the stolen manuscript. Again, Linda knew Betty wasn't at home because she had called the school to make sure that Betty was tending to infants that morning—and not at Calle del Crelo, waiting for her.
Whichever story you believe, this much is clear: Betty Broderick left court on that Monday with a swimming head. Why? "By 1989 they had everything," she said later. "They had the money, the kids, they're getting married. They have killed me already. Yet they're still coming at me! Why?"
Driving home, she settled it once and for all in her mind: because they wanted her dead—that was why. They wanted to drive her so crazy she would kill herself and not be around anymore to mar their perfect images.
That's what she was thinking as she left court that day. God, how many trips had she made to this building? Twenty? Fifty? Her brain felt like the heart of a tornado. She was the victim again.
"I'm being assaulted on my answering machine, at my home, at the job where I was just trying to get on my two feet and go forward with my life again," she said later, thinking back. "And they were literally destroying my reputation. For years, I lived with gossip, about how I had bullets and bombs, how I was sneaking into their bedroom at night and stealing things and threatening to kill them. Linda Kolkena had been telling that stuff to everybody … my own kids told me. She was even spreading bullshit around about me threatening to bloody her wedding dress. It was so humiliating! The little bitch had been watching too many soap operas."
Besides, "I'm living alone in this big house with sliding doors, and anybody could get in, and I had been robbed a couple of other times. And I just said, I'm not living like this anymore."
And so, midway between downtown and La Jolla, she pulled off the freeway at one of San Diego's largest gun shops, went inside and placed her order for a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun. Amazing how easy it was. Her past record of misdemeanors didn't even matter. It cost her $357.33. She fired it once in the indoor range. She liked the way it felt in her hand. She knew guns from her childhood. She enjoyed the kick. She was pleased that she hadn't lost her eye after all these years. She filled out the permit forms. It didn't matter that she had been convicted four times for contempt of court and spent a week in jail. In California, only convicted felons are denied guns. The friendly salesman told her she could pick up her gun in a couple of weeks.
She finished the drive home with a lighter heart. Self-defense. That's what this was. She had taken control.
Whether Betty returned the list or not, Dan sent her a full support check that month. But the Brodericks finished out March in court again, where custody of Lee was returned to Dan. Betty didn't contest Dan's declaration that she had thrown her daughter out of the house.
Chapter 27
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III
She picked up her new gun at the end of the month. At the same time she bought three boxes of bullets, ranging from cheap target ammunition to hollow points, which are designed to expand on contact and create maximum damage. They are widely favored by police officers in the field. But Betty said she didn't know the difference. "You know me—I just asked for whatever was top of the line." The gun was loaded at the store, she says, and never fired again, until November 5.
She made no secret of her purchase. To the contrary, like a boastful child with a new toy, she practically advertised it. She immediately showed it to her sons in what she says was an educational effort to keep them from ever touching it. She even took them to the shooting range and let them fire guns so they would understand their lethal power. She also told both Kim and Lee she had it, and showed it to Maria, warning her, too, never to touch it.
In the beginning, she kept the gun in its case, hanging in a closet. Later she moved it to a lingerie drawer near her bed—all in an effort, she says, to keep it from her sons.
"But, of course, the boys didn't listen to me. They were fascinated with that gun. It was like hide-and-seek." One day, she found them out in the yard with it. And so after that, she says, "I started carrying it in my purse all the time, to keep it away from them."
During her trials, the prosecutor would argue that the boys were not "fascinated" with the gun at all, but, instead, so afraid that Betty intended to shoot Dan with it that they were trying to hide it from her the day she caught them with it in the yard. Either way, the children all told Dan that Mom now owned a gun.
But even then, despite the gravity of his earlier comments during the divorce trial, Dan didn't seem to take Betty's threats to kill him any more seriously than he had done two years before, when Ruth Roth issued her Tarasoff warnings. That was just Bets talking—she would never "kill the golden goose," he told friends.
Linda was not so sanguine. She had long begged Dan either to install an alarm system or get guard dogs, friends said. But Dan would not run scared from Betty Broderick. In his only concession—and with an apparent eye to protecting his front door from another assault—he had occasionally hired security guards for a few hours at a time in the past when, according to the children, "something had happened in court that he thought might upset Mom." According to later testimony, he also had the locks on his front door changed four times. But that's as far as he would go.
Finally, Linda acted on her own. She called Scott Presley, a professional bodyguard, and hired him to stand guard full-time for three days prior to the wedding. Presley and his partner set up surveillance in a van in front of the Broderick house—but, says Presley, angry still, neither Dan nor Linda ever alerted him that Betty Broderick was an armed woman. In fact, he says, Dan specifically ordered him not to bring a gun to the stakeout. "So we figured she was just another La Jolla bon-bon we could take out physically if she showed up to make some kind of scene. Dan Broderick risked our lives. Linda had street smarts, she was a working-class girl with enough sense of danger to at least call us. But Dan was just another cool dude in a sports car. If he was scared of his ex-wife, it sure as hell didn't show," says Presley. "He paid us to sit there for three days—but he didn't even provide us with a picture of her. So one night at some party, we approached a big blonde who turned out to be some fancy lawyer's wife. It was a crazy assignment."
To this day, Presley regrets that he didn't at least urge Linda to go out and buy a cheap alarm herself. "For five dollars, they could both be alive today."
Meantime, gallows humor was rampant among Dan and Linda's wedding guests. Linda had told everyone about the bodyguards and Betty's alleged threats to shoot her and Dan at the wedding. People nervously joked that, if a car backfired on the day of the ceremony, guests would be hitting the ground, ruining their finest party clothes. A handful, however, didn't think it so funny—Gerald Barry among them. He didn't attend the wedding out of fear, so the story goes, that if Betty did go on a rampage, he would surely be among her first targets.
"It was crazy," recalls Blanchet. "We talked about it, but most of us never really believed it. How can normal people take something like that seriously?"
Betty, meanwhile, was sinking fast in the springtime of her husband's second marriage. On April 4, she quit her job at the nursery school. "I love the job,
the teachers, the kids, and the location," she said, in a handwritten resignation note with an unhappy face at the top. "But the pay is ridiculous ... I need something I can really devote myself to, and L.J. Pre-School Academy isn't it."
And Dan, virtually up to the day he walked down the aisle with Linda, was still exercising his legal clout. On April 7, he went to court again to win a switch in the visitation schedule, so that the boys would be at his house on the weekend of his wedding, not at Betty's as scheduled. As usual, he didn't call to discuss it with her. The change in visitation was simply presented to her after the fact. Fait accompli.
On the weekend of April 8, Linda took her girlfriends to Cabo San Lucas for her bachelorette party, while Dan and several of his friends went to Denver for a bachelor party at brother Larry's house.
Betty stayed home with the children and tried to ignore the calendar. Then it was April 12. Her twentieth wedding anniversary. Her marriage for fifty years. Until the Twelfth of Never.
Somewhere around that time, too, she ran over a light alongside Dan's driveway as she was dropping the boys off. He naturally photographed the damage. According to his photographs, she had also driven onto his lawn that night, aiming her car directly at his door. Evidently, she was thinking of smashing into it again, but reconsidered. Not that it mattered—within weeks, she would be answering for it in court. Betty no longer got any breaks from Dan for rational second thoughts. Dan, the lawn lover, was as angry about his mashed grass as he had been years earlier over his splintered front door.
Kay Wright, Brad's mother, also died that month. A few weeks before, she announced that she wanted her death to be a celebration of life for her friends. In preparation for the final party, recalls Dian Black, Betty spent days traipsing around La Jolla, buying up old records with Kay's favorite songs, which Betty then spliced onto a single, long-playing tape. ‘Forever Young’ led the selection. "I'll never forget it," says Black. "One night I was at Betty's house and she was playing the record, and suddenly she wanted to dance. I had never seen Betty relaxed enough to dance anywhere, much less with another woman. She was always so inhibited about everything, but that night she wanted to dance, and so we did. Just me and her in her house, dancing to 'Forever Young.' She was so sad about Kay. But she didn't cry. She just said, 'Kay's going out in style.'"
