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

by Bella Stumbo

  And what about the children? Walter Maund was getting nowhere. More delays. More legalese. She couldn't even remember what his hourly rate was—$100? $200?

  She made another pot of coffee. Gourmet almond mocha. Her skin was turning yellow from all the coffee. Why couldn't she be like so many other women—knock off a bottle of brandy every night, or pop half a dozen Valium a day? It would be so much easier. Instead, she was stuck with coffee and the refrigerator. There was always so much food there it was hard to choose. A roast beef sandwich now? At three A.M.? Ice cream? Or a slice of chocolate mousse pie? Or all three? Then she could sleep.

  She also read constantly in those lonely hours of the night—but not for simple pleasure or enlightenment. That Betty was long gone. Now she read only for validation, explanation of her collapsing life, justification of her own extreme behavior. Her library became an eclectic collection of clippings on cheating lawyers, midlife crisis, and victimized wives. Boxes of legal documents, personal files, and books were stacked high by the summer of 1989. Filed articles ranged from "The Confused American Housewife" (Psychology Today, 1976) and "Extramarital Relations: Gaining Greater Awareness" (Personnel and Guidance Journal, 1982) to "Gender Roles and Coping" (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1984) and "A Fear of Lawyers," (New York Times, 1987). Also "Scared to Death" (Hippocrates, 1989), "When He's Unfaithful: How Some Women Cope" (McCall's, 1989), "Gender Bias in the Courts" (Creighton Law Review, 1989), and "Divorce: Be Prepared" (San Diego Woman, 1989).

  Atop the pile lay a copy of Phyllis Chesler's book, ‘Women and Madness’, personally autographed to "Dear Betty, With love in sisterhood. Phyllis Chesler."

  She had also saved a package of cocktail napkins reading, "It's Better to Divorce than to Murder."

  Notably absent from her reading materials by then were any letters or leaflets indicating a job search of any sort. She had given up on that. Now she had decided she would become a bon vivant instead. A jet-setter. She could afford it if she sold the house and had no children.

  Then came July—Betty's first court-ordered summer with her sons in five years. "That was the happiest I had been through all of this ... I was actually able to make advance plans with those kids for the first time." Nor did she balk over money. Betty paid full costs without a peep.

  They went camping in Canada. For once, there was no stress, no six P.M. Sunday deadlines to be back at Dan's, nobody's expectations to meet except their own. They ate hearty breakfasts in clean air, they fed blue jays, they took river trips, they went fishing, they hiked down quiet mountain trails. They talked to each other, they laughed. They did simple things. Betty didn't talk about Dan or Linda or money or the custody fight. She just enjoyed watching her children laugh and love her.

  She felt good. She hoped that the exercise would work off some of her weight. And she began to think about the fall. Who was she fooling? She didn't want to be a lonely, sad divorcee pretending to gaiety in St. Tropez or Acapulco. She wanted her children back. And, surely, Walter Maund could get her them for her by the coming school semester. She would carve Halloween pumpkins again, and help with homework, and go back to coaching soccer and attending PTA meetings. Yes.

  For once, money was not first on her mind. She wanted to be a mother. And, yes, even still, a wife. His wife.

  Before they returned to San Diego, she found a shop that sold polo shirts from New Zealand. She bought one for each of the two boys—and one for Dan. "I never hated Dan, you know. I hated what he was doing, but not him," she later said from jail, quietly "… and I knew he would like that shirt. They're pretty hard to find, and it was real good quality."

  After all these years, was she still thinking that he might yet come home?

  "Oh, I had no ... I don't know," she said, flustered at the sad, bald question. Then, tiredly, all fire temporarily gone, "Yeah, I guess I still entertained the hope that maybe, even when he was fifty or sixty, he would finally wake up one day and see the reality for what it was." That's as close to honesty as Betty Broderick has ever publicly come to her real feelings. "But what are you going to do? I can't make him do that," she finished. Using the present tense again, a year after he was dead.

  Then she and her sons were back in La Jolla, land of plenty and gimme more. Back to weekend schedules, and 6 P.M. deadlines, and, worst of all, to the news that Walter Maund, a mild, polite man, had not made any progress in custody negotiations with Dan. Betty went into an instant rage. One more time, she had paid lawyers and gotten nowhere. She blamed Maund. She blamed Dan. She blamed, period.

  Inflaming her nearly as much, the minute she returned with the boys, Dan flew them to Hawaii for a vacation with him and Linda. They didn't even have time to savor their month with Mom before Dad was dazzling them with volcanoes and hula dancers—and, forcing them to spend time with his new wife.

  Betty reverted to her madcap ways with a vengeance. Colleen Stuart remembers inviting her to attend a black-tie concert at the Four Seasons Hotel that month. "But she was so ashamed to be part of a female couple that she showed up in a pair of sweats with a black tie and her camera. Her only way of attending was to make a joke of it. I was so embarrassed for her. It was almost like she had decided she was such a loser she might as well act like a clown."

  At about the same time, Betty was hit by that most devastating of all rumors: Stuart told her that, as local gossip had it, the Broderick divorce trial had been sealed for years because Betty was a child molester.

  By late summer, she was carrying her gun in her robe pocket when Dan came to pick up the boys.

  It's a sick picture: there was Dan Broderick, unaware, parked in front of Betty's house, waiting for his young sons, or standing casually on the curb—and, at least once that summer, even walking inside the house—where his fat, disheveled former wife waited, filled with hate and pain, pacing about in her robe, with her hand in the pocket caressing her gun. Sadder still, both boys knew she had it.

  "Once I was over there when Dan came to pick them up," recalls Helen Pickard. "And Danny was standing on the porch with his arms around Betty's waist, real tight. At the time, I thought it was sweet. Later on, after I heard about the gun, I realized that maybe he was trying to keep her from doing anything."

  But this particular vision of Crazy Betty came out only later, in trial. Then Betty admitted it. Yes, she testified, "The last several times I saw Dan—two or three times, I had the gun in my pocket." The reason, she explained, was because "I was deathly afraid of Dan Broderick. I was afraid of him attacking me, maligning me, threatening me ... to take the children, to lose the house, and that I would never see another red cent from him, threatening me in writing for years ... He was inside my house … and I was in my robe … and I had the gun in the pocket. It was for protection."

  But, later, from the jailhouse telephone, she had a different, more bizarre explanation: "Danny was always asking me if I was going to kill Dan," she said blithely. "So I put the gun in my robe just to prove to him that Dan could come and I wouldn't kill him. It was like saying, 'Now see, silly. I'm not going to shoot Dan. I had the gun, and I didn't do it.'"

  That's how insane life in Betty Broderick's household had become by the summer of 1989. But she could not see it, not then, not now. From jail, a year after the killings, she was still less interested in the gun than the robe she carried it in—"a pink satin A-line Princess with a zipper down the front, and I loved it, because I could gain all the weight I wanted."

  At the end of August, Betty had what she calls her "first legitimate date." She had decided, she says, that "since the divorce was finally over, it was okay, in my mind, finally to go out, publicly. I was trying to force myself to get a life. I wanted the word to get around that I was dating." To Betty, Brad Wright would never really count.

  Her "first date" was a local surgeon and widower she had known for years, who took her to a symphony. Like a teenager, she spent the day shopping for something new to wear. But now she couldn't buy in any of her usual depart
ment store designer boutiques because their sizes stopped at twelve. She ended up wearing an orange and turquoise silk ensemble from the Mother of the Bride department at Bullock's, and "I looked like hell … you can't look good in any of that stuff. I just felt so bad about myself."

  Even so, she was ashamed to be seen with the plump, balding, aging man who was her escort. He was simply not handsome enough for this 180-pound bottle blonde with a jail record, a ruined reputation, and a dead-end ahead. "He was real nice," she says. "But I've never gone out with anyone ugly before. I've always been half of a good-looking couple."

  Thus was one more avenue of relief closed to Betty Broderick by her own inability to let go of the past and reckon with the present. She and the doctor never dated again.

  Before the month was out, she provoked Dan into dragging her back into court again, this time in a fight over Rhett. According to Dan's later contempt declaration, he had taken Rhett to Betty's house on a Wednesday, out of sequence in the visitation plan, because Rhett wanted to go to Sea World the next day with the children of some friends who were visiting Betty. The plan was that Betty would return Rhett on Friday, in time for a weekend boating trip Dan had planned to Catalina Island. What followed was the classic cat-and-mouse, up-yours game so many divorced couples play, with their children in the middle.

  When Dan's housekeeper went to fetch Rhett, he wasn't there. Betty's maid said everyone had gone to Tijuana for the day. Steaming, Dan waited until Saturday morning to call Betty. When he did, according to his subsequent contempt filing, he had been treated without courtesy. "When Respondent answered the phone, I said, 'Is Rhett there?' She said: 'Don't you even say hello? How rude! I'm not one of your employees,' and hung up."

  He didn't call back until Monday, when Rhett still hadn't been returned. This time, he later complained to the court, when Betty answered the phone Dan had said, "Hello. Is Rhett there?' Respondent replied: 'No, he's not.' She then made an offensive noise into the receiver and hung up."

  Betty was ordered to return Rhett immediately or be held in contempt. But Rhett was no longer even in California. That weekend, Betty had put him aboard a plane to New York to visit with her parents for a week. As she later explained it, Rhett didn't want to go home because his siblings were gone elsewhere for the summer, and he would have been home alone with the housekeeper.

  Dan was furious, but, according to his associate, Kathy Cuffaro, he refused to crack down harder on Betty "because he didn't want to stir her up anymore. He just wanted peace in his life." Instead, he settled for a court order forbidding Betty from approaching the airport the day Rhett returned to San Diego from his visit with Frank and Marita Bisceglia. It was just one more dangerous aggravation, in the mind of Betty Broderick, to now be forbidden from even approaching a public place.

  Poor Walter Maund, meantime, was struggling uphill in his custody negotiations. Compounding his headaches, Betty was still leaving an occasional nasty blast on the Broderick family answering machine. And she had stopped visiting either the new doctor, or her old friend Dr. Nelson. What for? she asked. She wasn't the crazy one—Dan was.

  Even so, Dan's friends say he was seriously thinking of returning custody of the boys to Betty, with conditions. But Linda objected. "Although it would have been so much easier on her to let them go, Linda said to Dan, 'It will destroy the kids if we let them go live with her.' She was convinced Betty was sick," says Blanchet.

  As a result of all the bickering, the custody hearing was again postponed, until October—after yet another school term had begun.

  Betty finished out the month of August adding to her clip file. Most notably, in light of later events, she saved a Time Magazine issue featuring "Death by Handgun" on the cover. Instead of clipping it, she stashed the entire magazine. It was as if Betty Broderick was literally watching herself happen, defining her mind and mapping her future course through selective readings. She sought what soothed. She no longer even bothered to keep up her voluminous fashion and interior design files. Now, her mind, like her conversation, was drawn strictly to legal injustice, wronged women, cheating husbands, crooked lawyers, weapons, death, and very little else.

  School season again. September. Maund had failed her. Her fifth fall without her children. The boys were back at Francis Parker, not Bishops. Kim was back in Arizona, complaining again about the puny budget Dan had put her on. And Lee, Dan's banished child, was working as a hostess in a steak house in the heart of La Jolla Village—a common servant, now seating her former classmates at lunch every day. Betty was humiliated for her child, for herself, for her ruined family.

  Meantime, the kids told her that Dan was planning another one of his all-expenses-paid extravaganzas. Count Du Money. This time he was footing the bill to Greece for his two office associates, attorneys, Cuffaro and Bob Vaage, and their mates. Plus, of course, the new Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III.

  At the same time, Betty had finally put her del Cielo home up for sale. Realtors trooped through her pretty house. She showed them all the improvements she had made over the last five years—the new pool house, the new kitchen and bathroom, the beautiful pool, the Jacuzzi, her gorgeous landscaping, her rose gardens. She walked them along the back patio with its blue-and-white awnings, its spectacular ocean view. Inside, warm lamps glowed, soft music played, fresh flowers were on every table. The towels were fluffed in the bathroom, the air was fragrant. It was a model home. After all these years of bitching about what a "tear-down" Calle del Cielo was, Betty now walked through the rooms like a woman in mourning, admiring the corpse she had so beautifully dressed for the funeral.

  She wanted $1.5 million. The house was worth that for the ocean view and sunsets alone, she thought.

  From there, she took one of the most depressing drives of her life. She knew where she was going. Down the hillside, with the Pacific spread before her, past the quaint little La Jolla Shores shopping district nestled among the palms, within the sounds of the surf. Smaller than La Jolla Village, half a mile away, but so much cozier, quieter, with its little groceries, delis, gourmet markets, and patio cafes. How many mornings, she wondered, had she walked down there to sip her chocolate coffee and walk on the beach at sunrise, calmed by the perfection all about her? Classy. That's what this little neighborhood was. She was born to be here. With a rich, handsome husband and four perfect children.

  At the corner, she took a hard right and drove north, leaving all perfection behind her. Now she was winding inland, heading toward the UCSD campus, toward the sprawling shopping centers, high-rise office buildings, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations on the northern edge of La Jolla, abutting the noisy, steaming, ugly freeway to LA.

  She pulled up in front of a large condominium complex across from a shopping center on a street called Morning Way. Years before, she had tried to persuade Dan to invest in this complex. It was a complete winner, she had argued at the time—a steady source of rental income from visiting professors, students, and other transients. But now, she, Betty Broderick, was going to live there herself. Amid the transients. Amid the displaced.

  Now, each day when she left her driveway, she would face not the vast Pacific, but a cinema complex, a pizza parlor, a drugstore—a concrete jungle of smog, noise, and swarming people with pressured faces, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  From within the condominium grounds, the neat, dun-colored buildings were arranged in a horseshoe around a small, well-manicured courtyard, typical of hundreds of others in Southern California. Now, from her front-room window, she would look out each day onto another apartment exactly like her own. No sun would ever shine directly into any of her rooms. She could have a two-bedroom unit for around $200,000.

  She wanted to cry. No more lovely luncheons, living here. No more Christmas parties. There was hardly room for ten in the living room, and no yard at all. "It was the biggest comedown of my life," she said later from jail. "It was even smaller than most of the places Dan and I lived in when we were first married."r />
  The mystery, of course, was why she was now moving into such a small condo when her custody war had not yet been conclusively lost. If she had won the children, Dan would have been obliged to pay her more money in support. She might have made ends meet after all. But, by then, she was too depressed, confused, and angry to think anything through. "Yeah, it would have been a problem," she said later, vaguely. "When the kids came over on weekends, they'd have to sleep on couches and stuff … But I'd decided I wasn't going to get them back anyway, and I couldn't stand being a part-time mother anymore, or a housewife alone. What's the point of standing around in the kitchen all day crying? But I really don't know what I was doing, I wasn't really thinking anymore."

  Dan and Linda and their friends were about to leave for the Greek Isles. But before they did, Dan sent a letter to Betty's attorney, outlining plans to leave his sons with his housekeeper and, on weekends, with Laurel Summers, Dave Monahan's paralegal girlfriend.

  What? Sometimes, lately, Betty actually felt dizzy looking at Dan's latest legal communiques. Leave her children with housekeepers? And, worse yet, "another bimbo?" When they had a real, live mother living fifteen minutes away? She felt another familiar wave of nausea, born of shock and rage. Why? Why did he hate her so? Why was he so punishing?

  In another of her few counterattacks, Betty went to court in late September, demanding the right to care for her own children while Dan was traveling. And she won. Judge Castro gave her the boys for the time Dan was in Greece. But it was not a clean victory, because, in defending his own plans, Dan argued that Betty couldn't be trusted to send Rhett to school, that she encouraged him to "play hooky." Thus, in an insulting caveat, Castro, taking Dan at his word, added in his order that "Respondent shall be responsible for making sure that the child, Rhett, shall attend school during the period she shall have custody … failure to comply … shall cause the immediate suspension of further visitation."