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

by Bella Stumbo

  Worse, because Castro had given her the boys for that week, visitation weekends for the remainder of October were also revised—the upshot being that Betty suddenly found herself with a substituted weekend that fell on the same date she and Brad had planned to take a three day, prepaid trip to Acapulco. So she had a choice of either keeping her commitment to Brad, or not seeing her sons for several weekends in a row. She spent the rest of the month worrying about what choice she would make.

  Throughout those final months, she continued to call her parents, trying to "just get them to listen to me." But, she says, they wouldn't. "I would tell them my life was destroyed, I was going crazy, Dan was killing me, I was losing my house, and they'd just say, 'Oh, well, and other than that, Betty Anne, everything's fine?'"

  Although her obsession with her own financial insecurity continued, she now seemed just as preoccupied with the future of the children. Why hadn't Dan bought the $1 million insurance policy for them, as Howett had ordered in January? She inquired about it so often in calls to the insurance agent that, later on, both the Broderick family and the prosecutor would suggest that she had deliberately delayed killing him until the policies finally went into effect in September.

  Autumn in La Jolla reflects itself only barely. Here and there a few leaves change color, the air clears and cools, the ocean shifts from royal blue to a deeper shade of blue-gray. But the bougainvillea, impatiens, and hibiscus still bloom, lawns remain thick and green, the towering palms still stand in sultry, tropical silhouette against the horizon. Golden teenagers still surf at the Cove, patio cafes thrive even at night. Only fashion and boredom dictate even a wardrobe change, from silks and cottons to richer, heavier cashmeres and light woolens.

  But to Betty Broderick, no matter where she lived, the seasons would always change in her mind as sharply, as poignantly as they did in her youth. She could smell the shifts in the air, even if they were happening not in her lush La Jolla gardens but two thousand miles east. She could still feel the chill in the wind as she skipped home, in her childhood, from Maria Regina, the fallen leaves crunching beneath her feet; she could remember the thick plaid Pendleton skirts she wore and the feel of her angora sweaters curling around her neck as she soared through the streets of Eastchester in her little green MG toward Mount Saint Vincent's College.

  And she would never forget the sharp bite of frost in the October air, more than twenty years past, as she had strutted so brightly, so smartly, so confidently across the Notre Dame campus in Great Bend, in her pretty, stylish fall clothes with her long blond hair swinging so free—to find herself that night sitting in the crowded, noisy, dim little college pub, across from the slender young man she would one day marry. She would never forget the yellow and rust chrysanthemums of fall, the thunder of Notre Dame football fans cheering, the clingy, sexy excitement of being young and desirable and so certain, then, that she was worth every bit of it.

  Two decades later, although her self-confidence was long gone, Betty would still connect autumn with the cozy, laughing pubs of Notre Dame and Manhattan, where, during their courtship—before the marriage, the babies, the struggles, and the studies changed it all—she and Dan had sat in worn tavern booths, drinking grog and looking at each other across tables with eyes of love, as they listened to "their song."

  Lovely, with your smile so warm, and your cheek so soft, There is nothing for me but to love you, just the way you look tonight. . .

  Rhett and Danny were excited when they told their mom, one October evening, that they were going to the Notre Dame game with Dad and Linda later that month. Kim was going, too. Only Lee had not been invited. Only Lee would not see where it was that her parents had fallen in love.

  For once, Betty did not say anything inappropriate to her sons. For once, words failed her. It hurt too much.

  "It made me so sad," she later said wistfully from jail. "All of my friends, mine and Dan's, friends that we knew before we were married, people we had grown up with—here all of them would be, all of us old enough now to have our own children in Notre Dame … but there's Linda Kolkina in the room where I should have been, with my children, my extended family, and all my friends for my whole life …"

  She always wondered what the other wives thought, when they saw Dan there with Linda and not her. "I bet they were looking at this young thing that's just adoring Dan, and didn't have any kids to worry about—and they're all forty-something. They must have been thinking maybe their husbands are going to go off and bring a young chickie home next year, too, and they're going to be gone. Just like me."

  But Betty refused to show the depth of her pain. Instead, cussing Dan to hell, she cheerfully went about the business of outfitting Kim in a fabulous new wardrobe for her autumn at Notre Dame—a stunning Armani leather jacket in Kelly green, plaid Ralph Lauren slacks, cashmere sweaters. "If I couldn't be there, then Kim would be me. She was a reflection of me. I bought her all the clothes I would have liked to wear, if I could have gone."

  She spent the Notre Dame weekend at Warner Springs, as depressed as she had ever been, feeling "so left out." She sat in the bar, drinking a Coke, and cried over her broken marriage to a woman she didn't even know, while everyone else watched the football game on TV. She told the woman how she had once been "a Notre Dame wife" herself until her husband, a brilliant lawyer, had left her for his secretary and used his connections to ruin her. "It was the saddest thing, that's why I still remember it," the woman later told reporters.

  Naturally, Betty took her frustrations out on her attorney, the beleaguered Walter Maund, who had written her a letter earlier in the month begging her to resume seeing her therapists in order to present to the court the picture of a "new" Betty Broderick. Maund reminded her that both doctors continued to believe that she was the best parent, and "It is important for us to support this attitude."

  Instead of taking his advice, Betty wrote him a scorching reply: "I greatly resent your letter ... if I need to go to a therapist, it is because of lawyers like you who take my case and take my money and DO NOTHING FOR ME." She attacked him for dragging his feet on the custody case since March, for permitting one delay after another, and further declared that "I am not interested in presenting a 'new' Betty Broderick. I am terribly fond of and in fact quite proud of the same one I've been and always will be."

  She concluded by ordering him to "get this case to court, Walter! The endless delays are torturous to the children, me, and my finances … The holidays are almost here again. The kids feel I've let them down again by not getting this into court."

  She spent the next week moving into her new condo while realtors continued their search for a buyer for del Cielo. A friend from a Bible study class Betty had attended a year earlier remembered later in trial how sad Betty had been as she walked through her house, trying to decide which pieces of furniture might fit into her small new apartment. She was especially worried that a large red-velvet easy chair would take up too much space. "She called it the kids' Santa Claus chair," her friend recalled.

  Betty did most of the moving herself, with the help of a couple of neighborhood teenagers she had hired, and a rented truck. Some nights she stayed at the condominium, again sleeping on the floor just as she had done at del Cielo years before. One night, after moving boxes by herself all day, she tried to light a pilot in the water heater, and it ignited in her face, burning her hand and singing her eyebrows and eyelashes. She wasn't hurt, but she sat on the floor and cried.

  She was lonelier than she had ever been, trying to adjust to life in this strange, cramped new place. Her one-time roommate, Lucy Peredun, had long since moved on, and now Betty would only need Maria once a week or even less. She was desperate for company; any stranger would do. So she decided to look for another roommate.

  At the end of October, she answered a "room wanted" advertisement in the La Jolla Light placed by a divorced, struggling woman in ill-health named Audrey. But, after a four-hour session with Betty in late October, during w
hich time Betty recited her entire "story," even Audrey decided she couldn't handle the stress of living with Betty Broderick. Betty was "in pretty bad shape," obsessed with her former husband and "desperate for someone to talk to," Audrey later told defense investigators. Only two days before the homicides, Betty had called Audrey, wanting to meet for coffee. Apparently none of her old friends were available that day.

  She decided to go to Acapulco with Brad at the end of the month. But she had a miserable time, she says, partly because she felt so guilty about the choice she had made. In addition, Betty Broderick was hardly in any condition by then, either physically or mentally, to blend into a flashy Mexican seaside resort scene.

  "It was one of those places where everybody there was either part of a married couple, or an aging man with his little bimbo. I wasn't either, so I didn't fit in anywhere. I just sat in my room all day and read books while Brad went sailing."

  That was how Betty Broderick spent her last free weekend.

  Chapter 29

  November, 1989

  Tuesday was Halloween. Dan had said the boys could come to Betty's house that night so she could take them trick-or-treating. She carved a pumpkin, decorated the house with witches and goblins, and made a batch of Rhett's favorite "spider" cookies. They were growing up so fast. By next year, Danny would regard trick-or-treating as beneath his adolescent dignity.

  But later that day, they called to say that they couldn't come over after all. So she spent the evening handing out candy to other people's kids.

  Then it was November again. On the seventh she would be forty-two. Sixth anniversary of her suicide threat. On the twenty-second, Dan would be forty-five. Sixth anniversary of the clothes burning. Six years it had been going on. Six.

  She moved more of her things to the condo. She made appointments for the following week with realtors and her accountant. She complained bitterly and obscenely about Dan and Linda to anybody who would listen. She lunched, she went to the market, and she shopped, always carrying her big brown purse with the .38 inside. She toyed that week, too, with the idea of buying herself a new Mercedes convertible two-seater that had caught her eye, mainly because of the color—"the most gorgeous turquoise metallic, a deep blue-green." Maybe that would lift her spirits. Besides, once she sold the house, she could afford it. Yes, she decided, she would go buy that car soon. Next week.

  Then, toward the end of the week, her attorney forwarded two letters he had just received from Dan's attorney, Kathleen Cuffaro.

  Later, in trial, Betty couldn't remember whether the letters arrived on the same day, or separately. But she thought they both came on Friday. She opened them, scanned them, and, she says, threw them on a kitchen counter for closer study later. But she instantly got the gist: One letter was threatening to throw her back in jail, the other said no to her custody proposal.

  Cuffaro's first letter, dated October 27, included three transcripts of Betty's latest phone messages. As Betty's messages went, these were actually fairly mild, even tedious after all these years, containing, among them, a total of only three "cunts" and one "little fucker." All were explosions of frustration because she couldn't reach the boys.

  But, Cuffaro wrote, since the divorce decree in January, Betty had committed at least twenty similar acts of contempt "of which we have documentary proof." If Betty didn't cease her "odious behavior" immediately, Dan was prepared to file contempt charges—and, if that happened, Cuffaro said, "I firmly believe … another jail sentence will be imposed." In conclusion, she noted that, contrary to reports by Betty's doctors, she saw only evidence that Betty's "emotional disturbance and mental disease" was worsening, not improving.

  The second letter, dated November 1, was a scathing rejection of Maund's latest custody proposal, which had suggested a permanent, unconditional return of Danny and Rhett to Betty. In essence, Cuffaro told Maund to forget it: Dan was prepared to discuss returning the boys to Betty only on a trial basis, with the strict condition that the arrangement could be automatically terminated by him, unilaterally and without court action, if Betty violated any court orders … "or if she further involves Danny or Rhett in her pathological obsession with their father and his wife."

  In conclusion, Cuffaro suggested that Maund "try again to come up with a proposal that is consistent" with prior custody discussions with Dan. She also wanted to know precisely how much child support Betty would be demanding during any prospective "trial period."

  On Friday, Betty also took Lee shopping. It was Nordstrom's big midyear sale. Betty mentioned Dan's latest legal papers to Lee, and said he was about to send her back to jail. But she didn't dwell on it at length, Lee later testified. That evening Betty picked up her sons and went to a football game with them. It was her first weekend visit in nearly a month.

  On Saturday, November 4, she took them for haircuts. She went to Jonathan's and spent almost $400 on gourmet groceries.

  When Helen Pickard dropped by for a cup of coffee that day, Betty also told her about Dan's latest threats to jail her, Pickard later testified. Betty complained, too, Pickard said, that she couldn't accept the children for Thanksgiving "because Linda still had her china."

  That afternoon, she went to Rhett's soccer game and sat in the bleachers crying, because "The poor little guy hadn't played enough to be any good. But he was trying so hard,” she said later from jail. "It just broke my heart." She also took a walk on the beach with the boys, where she ran into a young surfer friend of Kim's, and hers. She told him how much she hated Dan Broderick and would like to kill the asshole. The boy had heard it all many times before but, he later told the jury with visible reluctance, her language was bluer than usual that day. "She was one pissed-off lady."

  That evening, Brad came over for dinner. She can't remember what she cooked, or what time she went to bed, but it was early, around 6:30, she thinks. She had promised to take Danny and Rhett to Tijuana the next day. Brad and the boys stayed up, watching TV. Brad spent the night, sleeping in a guest room. Rhett later came to bed with her. She had fallen asleep in her clothes.

  Dan and Linda spent their last night having dinner at a local Mexican restaurant with several close friends. They were still exuberant about their trip to Greece and thinking about an Outback expedition to Australia next, says his friend Cuffaro, who dropped the couple off at home, for the last time, at around 11:30 Saturday night. It was, she adds wistfully, a very happy evening. Dan was drinking peach schnapps. And both Dan and Linda were radiant. They were talking about having a baby. According to Linda's ovulation calendar, Monday was the peak day of her cycle.

  Betty couldn't sleep. As usual, she was up and down all night, catnapping fitfully. When she talked about that night later—in several different conversations during the months before her first trial—her thoughts came in a confused, sometimes contradictory tangle, and always in her eerie mix of present and past tenses.

  "I was just so depressed for months and months—Maria had become a nurse. I wouldn't pick up my towel after a shower. I wouldn't move, I wouldn't do anything. I wouldn't water plants, I wouldn't cut my roses. I had gorgeous roses. It was too much of an effort to go down and cut them. I couldn't even open my eyes. My eyes were always like half drawn. I can't even describe the feelings of such tiredness—just bent over in the middle, with this big heavy weight on your chest. I think the weight on your chest feels like a horse's hoof … It's like you can't even breathe, and it's just awful. I could carry on conversations, but I had no retention whatever. You could tell me that yesterday I made a deal to go out to lunch with you, and I'd have no recollection of even talking to you.

  "... I felt like I was being literally pounded into the ground. Literally. And it was that kind of pounding, when you hear the big buildings and those machines go 'Boom! Boom! Boom!' I was getting pounded. And the only thing you think of is freedom and escape from the pain. You know—just make it stop.

  "The kids were there that weekend, and I cried, looking at them all weekend, beca
use I hadn't seen them in so long … because he went into court, took my weekend away. So I hadn't seen them in a month. Then when I finally got the boys—it was Sunday morning when this happened —and I was going to have to give them back at around 5:00. And I felt like I hadn't even seen them, because there was a soccer game and this and that. And Danny Broderick was invited to go to Disneyland, and this really broke my heart—he told his friend no. He said, 'Mom, I couldn't go, because if I went to Disneyland, then I'd never get to see you.' And I thought, 'Oh, great, the guy's going to have to give up his social life to see his mother?'

  "I was crying at Rhett's soccer game … Usually when I see my kids, no matter how depressed I was, I was perfect. It was like two people. I was like a split personality—from a lunatic to a perfectly happy person the minute I have the kids. The only thing that made me happy was my kids slamming in the front door, yelling 'Hi, Mom!' And they'd slam in the front door, and the door would fly back and go boom against the wall, and that would make me instantly happy. I would feel fine. But this is the only weekend I've ever experienced where I was crying with them the whole time. I was crying because I hadn't seen them in so long, these legal papers were threatening me, she [Linda] was going to start the bullshit about the machine again … She wouldn't give me the china and that stuff, and I was moving, and I was under a lot of pressure physically, moving all by myself. I was just really, really under tons of pressure. Kim was upset and hysterical that Dan wasn't supporting her ... It was all falling on me.

  "I couldn't even breathe ... so depressed that to take a breath was an effort, much less to do aerobics or all those things. I used to be such a high-energy person … And now I was dragging around like a dead man. I'd go to bed dead tired, feeling like I could sleep for six weeks, and then an hour later I'd wake up. And then I'd walk around the house and I'd drink coffee, I drank coffee all day and all night. It was decaf, a lot of it.