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

by Bella Stumbo

  "It was just incredible anxiety and depression, at the same time. The depression would make me tired, but I was so literally shaking with anxiety, just free-floating anxiety, that that would wake me up. It wasn't a specific nightmare or a specific thought. So I'd walk around, I'd read newspapers … And I'd sit in the kitchen, I'd turn on the lights ... If I was alone in the house, I'd put on music, and I'd turn on a lot of lights ... I'd watch Nightline ... or go back to bed and try to sleep."

  On the night of November 4, "I was so pooped that I went to bed in my clothes that night. The same outfit I was wearing when I turned myself in. A pink linen pantsuit … pink and white checks ... So I was sleeping in the outfit. I just kind of lay on top of the bed. I know it sounds crazy. But you are not talking to a normal person here …"

  So she lay in bed, at seven P.M., alone, thinking. About everything.

  "I just felt so unjustifiably punished for something I never did. I mean, I still don't know what I ever did to deserve being treated like this in the courts. I felt just the victim. They will not live to see that. No!"

  She dozed. "And then I wake up. And then I turn on lights, and I walk around the house … walked around the house and thought, 'Oh, great,' because it's like two o'clock in the morning. And then I go back to bed again.

  "Danny wanted to go to Tijuana the next day ... I said okay, but if we go, you're going to have to call Daddy and make sure he knows we might be late coming home, because if we go to Tijuana and we've got to be back by 6, it's going to ruin the whole afternoon worrying about how long it's going to take us to get through the border. So the plan was that in the morning we would call Dan—who, of course, wouldn't answer the phone."

  Thoughts of the children pressed in. Rhett had been four when it started. Now he was ten.

  "My kids are getting older and older, and he is violently mistreating them at this point, having thrown the girls out without education or cars or rent. The boys wanted nothing through this whole thing but to be with me. They're approaching teenage years, where I am very nervous about drugs and car accidents and marijuana, and I don't want my boys to go to shit while Dan's not watching them, and I don't want to get them back at eighteen, damaged goods, like I got the girls back. I wasn't going to give him the chance to ruin my sons. I wanted my sons back, and I couldn't get anywhere. When this [the killings] happened, I had no date in December to even look forward to—it was just sometime in December. And when you hear that, you know it's going to be sometime maybe next April. It was such a professional setup.

  "My last hope was Walter [Maund], that he was going to get the boys. He wasn't going to get me more money, but he was going to get the boys; and I was going to sell the house and go to the condominium, and we were going to live much, much poorer; but the boys approved of the condominium, and we were going to go live there. And then, Dan started putting Walter Maund through the hoops, and it was real evident, the day this [the killings] happened, that we were getting fucking nowhere.

  "... And I'm not walking away from my boys knowing that he was harming them. I'm not doing it. I will kill for it, goddamn it! I never thought—I'd heard—you know, women always say, I'd kill for my kids. Well, I'm a Scorpio, goddamn, and I will kill for my kids. I will. Goddamn it. I never knew I had it in me, but …" And then came the letters:

  "The letters that I got the night before this are absolutely definitive proof that he was going to throw me in jail again, and he was going to fine me again. He was going to say I was crazy again—it was the same cycle! And the battered woman syndrome is a cycle. You see the abuse coming because you've lived through the cycle several times ... I knew exactly what was coming next, because I had already lived through it in '85, '86, '87, '88, and here it was '89, doing it again.

  "That morning—you have to take all that I suffered and that I didn't react to and that I didn't stand up for and I didn't fight for—all those hours from spring of '83, through '84, through '85. The humiliations that I put up with and the stories that I heard that I was a fucking child molester and crazy and everything else, and no Christmas for five years. No birthdays with my kids. You build all that up in a pressure cooker, put that in a pressure cooker for six years and see what happens … Any person alive would have done exactly what I did, only probably four or five years sooner."

  She thought about suicide, too. She wanted so much to just lie down and never wake up.

  "When I went to bed that night, with Rhett in bed ... I mean, it was practically an uncontrollable urge to just do it that night. I mean, it would be the most welcome thing to be dead. The life, the pain ... I told you, I couldn't stand up, I couldn't breathe. No one loved me. Doesn't that sound trite now? But it was true. I mean, what is life if no one gives a flying fuck whether you're dead or alive?

  "And I wouldn't have been the first ex-wife that killed herself. They either take to the bottle or slit their wrists or go on pills, or they get carted off in a straitjacket, or they blow their own brains out. And I was suicidal for the last two years of this whole thing, because I couldn't believe what was going on. You lose your equilibrium on earth.

  "Without a jury he put me in jail twice. And now he was turning the clock back to '85 and [putting] me through the whole thing again. And Linda's going to put the answering machine back on to just literally fuck me over? Is it so much to ask that I can return the phone calls to my children on their own phone line, which isn't bothering anyone? I had fought this in court for five years, I'd spent over $100,000, and my life had been destroyed for the last seven years by that cunt, and she is going to do this with me now? And I was like, oh, no. Oh, nooo! I have had enough! I am dead. I am out of here. I am not doing this ever again in my life—never again am I going in a sealed courtroom to get gang raped by Dan Broderick and his lawyer and his friend the judge …

  "But you don't just lay there thinking of killing yourself—you only think of how to stop the pain. You know ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’? You know that dark tunnel she fell down? That's you. Going to hell and coming out God knows where, but I could not even see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was just in a dark, dark, dark free-fall tunnel to hell. And I just had to make it stop. The pain is so awful and the darkness is so dark, that you just need it to stop. You don't plan it—because once you start planning it [suicide] and thinking about it, then of course it doesn't make sense.

  "And I couldn't do it with the kids around. I just couldn't. And I kept thinking, and why kill yourself? I mean, damn it, what did you do? I mean, they want you dead, and that will put an end to it, killing yourself. Even if I did kill myself in their house, you wouldn't have seen any funeral on TV. They would have swept my bones in the backyard and told everyone, 'See, we told you she was crazy.'"

  In the darkness, she sat up on the edge of the bed, clammy, her heart pounding. The terror was overpowering. Every nightmare movie she had ever seen had come true. She was it. She was going mad. She had gone mad. Maybe she should drive to a hospital and sign herself in. Maybe doctors could quiet her heart. Maybe kind nurses in white would stroke her hair and calm her mind and make her well again.

  But why? Why? What had she done?

  They had everything. "I mean—they get married, and they go to Greece, they go to New England, and they're traveling, they've got everything, including my children. They've fucked me happily, and they're still going to go back and say I can't even call my kids? Ha, ha, ha, ha. No, no, no. Oh, no, no, no! Six years of it. I have a long, long, long fuse, but they got to the end of it. I mean, I took shit and shit and shit and shit and shit daily since 1983! No judge, no court ever said I can't call my kids. Linda could just do this herself, and it was her who would take the time to do this … and, I'm telling you, it's a spark to a stick of dynamite to tell me I can't talk to my kids. Betty Broderick can't talk to her kids because Linda Kolkena decided I'm not going to talk to my kids? Oh, no. Oh, nooo!

  "Any normal person would have, a long time ago … done something to say I'm not
taking this anymore, you sonofabitch. Any man would have beat the living crap out of him six years ago."

  Around four o'clock she was up and awake for the final time. She was not going back to bed again that night.

  She went to the kitchen and tried to read the newspapers. But she didn't care about the news. Instead, she picked up the two Cuffaro letters and studied them again, letting them sink in more fully this time—especially the one that, to her, was a direct promise of jail again. "Because the last time the judge had us in there, he got red in the face and screamed at Dan Broderick, because Dan had brought me on contempt in front of this judge about eight times, and the judge said, don't you dare come back in this room with these contempts unless you want her to go to jail. So if Dan came back with another contempt, I was going to jail for sure—or, at least, that's what I read into that letter.

  "I was just so tired of being the defenseless, helpless victim of these two maniacs. What the fuck do they want from me? They want me to go away and never speak to my kids again? No. They will not live to see that. I will not live to see that. I mean, my heart starts racing, my blood pressure goes through the sky. This case was not about your husband marrying a younger girl, and it was not about money. It was about the kids."

  She tried to describe the interior of her head at that point:

  "I was so depressed, I felt so completely helpless … and it didn't help that I was turning forty-two years old. I looked like shit, I felt like shit, my life was going down. Down, down, down. And they're still coming at me. I went crazy. I went absolutely crockum. There's a scene in the ‘Superman’ movie where he flies around the earth real fast, and he screams this bloodcurdling scream that the whole world—well, that's what I felt like. I felt like standing up in my kitchen and doing a primal scream so loud that the whole fucking world would wake up and go—'what's that?' It's Betty Broderick going over the edge.

  "But, you know, nice girls don't do that ... I just literally did the Superman scream inside ... I wanted to cry real bad, sob and cry. But when you've been as far along as I was, and cried and shook and threw up so many times, you can't cry anymore. You just want to die. I mean, as I sit here, I can't explain to you the real physical feeling of death inside, just absolute death."

  "I just had to get out of there. I just had to make it stop. Oh, it's literally physical. I feel like a fool talking about it, because there really are no words for it, but the morning that this happened, I was literally holding onto things to walk around. I was like—I mean, I looked like I was a cripple or something. And you have this tension headache, of course, that you've had for the last six years. And my back was always out, and my shoulders were slumped, and my stomach was slumped, and my frown in my face was just—your whole face kind of falls. You feel like a bloodhound ... if someone measured me, I would have probably measured out at 5'6". Because I felt like I was being literally pounded into the ground."

  She went to the car. But, before she left the house, she wrote three lines on the bottom of one of the Cuffaro letters. Her penmanship was steady, her thoughts exact:

  "I can't take this anymore. 1. Linda Kolkena the cunt interfering with what little contact I have left w/ my children. She's been doing it for years. We've litigated it CONTINUALLY. 2. CONSTANT THREATS of court, jail, contempt, fines, etc., which is very scary to me and no matter what the evidence, I always lose. 3. Them constantly insinuating I'm crazy."

  "It was the letters that did it … It was basically those three things. ... I was just sitting there writing it down, saying I just cannot stand this. And I had no reason to believe it was ever going to stop or get better.

  "It was daylight when I left my house … like five or six or something. I don't know. I don't know what time it was. All I know is I don't go out in the dark anywhere. I'm scared to death of the dark …

  "But even when I left my house in the morning—when I left that house, I wasn't going to his house. If you asked me, where are you going, you saw me going down the street, I would have told you I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get coffee and then go down to the beach like I always did. I did that all the time. I don't even know how I went to his house or why. When I backed out of my driveway, I didn't know I was going to his house.

  "I figure that the point that I had to make the decision to go talk to him—which is really the decision that I made, just go talk to the sonofabitch—had to be by the 7-Eleven ... it must have been at that turn that I said to myself, 'What good is getting coffee and chocolate and walking on the beach another morning after all these years going to do? It's not going to make him stop, it's not going to make it go away, it's not going to make me feel better. I'm going to go talk to the sonofabitch. I'm going to make him stop.' But I don't remember really doing that."

  And what made her think Dan Broderick would be inclined to talk to her at six A.M.?

  "I didn't know as I went from step to step, but if I had confronted him and he said, 'Okay, you're going to go to jail for being in contempt because you're on my property,' I would have shot my brains out right in front of him. I was going to kill myself. ... I would have just shot myself right in front of him. I had to make it stop. And I told you I was not going to shoot myself in front of my own kids in La Jolla. What kind of headline funeral would that make? Everyone would say, 'Well, you know, Dan was right. She was crazy.' That's exactly what he wanted me to do. And so if I had to do myself in, I was doing myself in as messy as possible right in his house. But they still would have thought I was crazy, I guess, huh?

  "The importance of it was that when I backed out of the driveway and I left my house that day, I really was going down to get the coffee, to do what I always did. ... I did not get in my car and get a gun and back out of that driveway to go kill Dan Broderick … And that's the honest to God truth—I'm not making up a bullshit story here to save my ass."

  Then she was parked in front of his house.

  "I don't remember getting there, and I don't remember leaving there."

  She took the gun out of her purse, picked Kim's keys out of a box on the car seat beside her, and walked around to the back door of the house. It never occurred to her to knock on the door.

  "Knock on the door? Ha ha ha. Are you kidding? He wouldn't even talk to me if I knocked on the door … Years before, I knocked on the front door in broad daylight and said, ‘I need the keys to my car that Lee stole,' and he wouldn't open the door … Knock on Dan Broderick's door? That sonofabitch? He wouldn't even have gotten out of bed. He would have just called the cops.

  "But I never thought it through … Most things never even occurred to me. I mean, there's a million things—Why didn't you do this, why didn't you do that? It's because I didn't even think. There were a million things I could have done differently, but I wasn't thinking ahead. I was just doing. You know? I was a doo-doo. Actually, if I had planned it, I could have planned it much better."

  She crept through the house, up the stairs, and into their bedroom.

  What happened next is anybody's best guess. Betty's version would change dramatically throughout two murder trials. It's possible, of course, that she can no longer remember what actually happened in that bedroom. It's equally possible that she remembers every bit of it.

  Either way, in all its confusion and inconsistency, here is what she said before her first murder trial:

  It was dark. But she could see him. She could see them lying there together. "I was standing there with it [the gun] in my hand, so he thought I was going to shoot him, and he put his hands up like in the cowboy movies. Put your hands up, your two hands up, like stick them in the air? What do they say? 'Stick 'em up.' That's what he did."

  She fired in panic, she said.

  "But I have no memory of doing it. If I had a memory of this, wouldn't I be having screaming nightmares and shit? I can't imagine myself doing it, so I don't know. The whole time I was there, I never knew what was going to happen. I couldn't fathom ever in my life—I had never even struck anyone in
my life ... I had no plan. I had no plan of action, I had no plan of anything.

  "And I have never seen anything in that bedroom … I've never yet—have you? Do you know of any pictures out there of gory stuff? I have not seen a thing. I haven't heard or seen a thing that would like give me nightmares or traumatize me. I mean, I have no bad memory of that."

  Then she ripped the phone out of the wall.

  "I know they've been making a big deal about that phone from the beginning, but it was never a big deal to me. I mean, when I did it, I didn't really think about it … there were about ten other phones in the house right up on that floor in other rooms. I didn't cut the wire to the whole house or anything … All I thought about was, 'This is what they do in the movies.' And I didn't even know that he was hit, because he spoke to me so clear. I didn't think the guy was hit. I thought he was going to pick up that phone … He was right next to the phone, and the phone was on the floor when I got there. I mean, the phone was on the floor right next to him. On the floor. And I thought, 'Oh, my God, he's going to pick that phone up.' So I—I just did it because Dan was right there, and he spoke to me—he said, 'Okay, you got me, I'm dead,' or something like that …"

  She also hit Dan's hand with her gun as she stepped over his body to grab for the phone cord—which was not actually pulled out of the wall. Betty broke the cord in two at the center with her bare hands. But that detail didn't emerge until her second trial. In the second trial, too, Betty said that Linda was awake and cried out, "Call the police," causing her to panic and fire.

  But that was two trials later.

  If it was dark in the room, how did she see him put his hands up?