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

by Bella Stumbo

  "Because," she said in the summer of 1990, "I was close to him. I don't know … [My attorney] says I could have imagined the whole goddamn thing ... I still don't know why it was dark. I don't know if I closed my eyes, or if they had drapes down. I don't understand this myself. I didn't even look at the room. I don't know."

  Did she say anything to him? Or Linda? "No," she said tersely.

  Then she fled the house.

  "... And the truth is, I had no idea if I hit anybody or anything when I left there ... I was just like—'Boy, you really did it this time.' I thought Dan would get up and be after me … That's why I didn't go home. I thought that sonofabitch was going to be after me, or at least call the police and have them after me. But I thought he personally was going to come after me. That's why I was scared to go home and went to Lee's and was hiding and everything, because I had no idea I hit anybody. And that's the truth ... I didn't know that they were dead until later, when I heard it on the radio or something."

  When police came, they found Linda, wearing black-and-white polka-dot shortie pajamas, face down on the bed, her long, blond, bloodstained hair mostly obscuring her face. Her body was in a diagonal position, as if she had attempted to escape the killer by moving toward her husband. The covers had been flung away. The most prominent police photograph presented later in court showed her rump and long, slender, tanned legs, flung out limply behind her. She looked like a rag doll, thrown aside by a bored, temperamental child.

  Dan was lying on the floor at the side of the bed, on his stomach, in boxer shorts, half hidden in a tangle of bedding. He, too, had apparently been attempting to flee his assailant, or else fallen off the bed after being shot.

  Linda had been shot first in the chest, frontally, the coroner later testified. As she reflexively moved away, turning, a second bullet had lodged directly in the back of her head. The first bullet "went through the breastbone and … the [second bullet] went through the brain stem … severing all communication with the brain."

  Dan had been shot once in the back. He had not died as swiftly as Linda, judging from the large pool of blood and saliva beneath his face. Nor was his wound necessarily fatal, said the coroner. He might have survived anywhere from "a matter of minutes" up to "maybe half an hour …" With immediate medical attention, he might have even lived.

  Betty's two remaining bullets missed their targets, but not by much. One lodged in a wall, the other hit the bedstand near Linda's head.

  For somebody shooting in the dark, experts later said, she had been remarkably accurate.

  Part Four

  Betty

  Chapter 30

  I Need Help

  Dian Black, not an early riser, sleeps in a bedroom heavily draped against the morning sunlight, and so she doesn't know exactly what time it was when Betty called. She guesses it was around seven A.M. when her husband shoved the phone into her hand, mumbling that it was Betty, "and she's upset about something."

  Black groaned and put the phone to her ear, trying not to wake up. Now what? she thought.

  "I need help," was the first thing Betty said to her. It wasn't the words, it was the tone of voice that caused Black to wake up despite herself. "She sounded so awful, I'd never heard her that way before … she was crying, and I could hear her making these sort of retching sounds," Black said later.

  "She said she'd been to Dan's house, and she'd fired shots, but she didn't know if she'd hit anyone." Black sat up and tried to concentrate. What lunacy was this? "I thought she'd had a nervous breakdown or something," she remembers. But Dian Black is a good and loyal friend. She opened her eyes, forgot sleep, and reached for a pen and paper.

  She tried to find out where Betty was, but "she could only tell me she was in a phone booth somewhere in Clairemont … she was so disoriented she couldn't tell me what street or anything, she finally said there was a Coco's [restaurant] across the street." Black got her to read off the number of the phone booth she was standing in, and told her to stay put. Black next called Ronnie Brown and told her to call Betty back, to keep her on the phone until Black was able to find her.

  Black also called Brad Wright at Betty's house. Danny answered the phone. Fumbling into her clothes, struggling to keep the alarm out of her voice, Black asked the boy to awaken Brad. After telling Wright what Betty had said, Dian Black set out to find her; but when she finally located the phone booth, Betty was gone, so Black went back home to wait.

  It never occurred to Black to call the police, she said later, "because I guess I just didn't believe her—I thought she'd just flipped out …"

  Brad Wright was also initially confused, uncertain as to how seriously he should take these latest disjointed ravings of his girlfriend, now somewhere abroad in the city. He dressed hurriedly and trotted a few doors down the street to the home of Brian and Gail Forbes. The Forbeses and their five children were only beginning to stir, on what should have been just another lazy La Jolla Sunday. Gail had the coffee on.

  But, as she listened to Brad's account of his conversation with Dian, Gail Forbes instantly understood that this was, most likely, no false alarm. She, more than most of Betty Broderick's friends, had been seriously alarmed for months at the deterioration she saw. She had warned Dan to watch out, and finally earned Betty's undying animosity by agreeing with Dan that Betty should not have even visitation with her children, unless it was supervised.

  Now, she seized the telephone and called the police to report a possible homicide—only to realize, midway through her call, that none of the three adults present knew Dan Broderick's actual street address. They only knew how to get there. And so she got a polite brush-off—the San Diego police dispatcher was singularly uninterested in an unconfirmed crime at an imprecise address.

  Thus it was that Bradley Wright and Brian Forbes, two tanned, fair-haired men given to Polo shirts, chinos, and tennis shoes—who had, neither of them, ever in their lives been witness nor party to a violent crime, either in society or in war—climbed into Wright's new Porsche and sped toward the central city to discover, on the second floor of a pretty antebellum mansion framed by towering eucalyptus and cypress trees, the bodies of Dan and Linda Broderick, sleeping in their own blood.

  It would affect Forbes far more than Wright. Two years later, sitting on the witness stand, Forbes, a small, balding man, circumspect in a gray suit and white shirt, would still look stunned as he described that morning. He remembered every detail, down to how fast he and Brad had made the drive across town. He told how he had banged on Dan's front door "with an open hand," how he had shouted for Dan, how he had finally been hoisted through a laundry room window by Brad, how he had rushed up the stairs, "calling their names, in case they were awake ... so that we wouldn't surprise them …" It was clearly the most dramatic moment in Brian Forbes's life, one he would never forget. "They were greenish," he said during the first trial, of the bodies he found. By the time of the second trial, he had grown more graphic: the pool of blood and saliva under Dan Broderick's head, he said, looked like "cookies-and-cream ice cream."

  For Brad Wright, it was a lesser moment, this first encounter he had ever had with Daniel T. Broderick III. After reporting the incident to the police, he went sailing for the rest of the day. "Why not?" he asked later, looking blankly surprised at the question. "I knew Betty wouldn't be calling the house [looking for me], because she knew I had a [sailing] race that day."

  Betty, meantime, was still waking people up, changing lives forever. After rousing Dian Black, she had called her daughter Lee, who was also asleep. "I shot your Dad, I shot the sonofabitch," she said, according to Lee's later testimony. Like Black and most others dragged into this incredible day, Lee sleepily wondered if her mother had finally gone completely mad. Either way, it was clear that a crisis of some sort was at hand. She and her boyfriend, Jason, got dressed and waited. Fifteen minutes later, Betty arrived. She was crying, babbling, and generally hysterical, Lee later said. When Lee made her a cup of tea, she vomited it u
p.

  But Betty was coherent enough to persuade both Lee and Jason that, this time, Mom was serious. Disjointed as her babble was, it was still filled with riveting specifics.

  She told the two dumbstruck teenagers that she had to do it, according to Lee's testimony. She cited Dan's remark to the Reader that "It wouldn't be over until one of us was gone ... I couldn't let him win."

  She told her daughter, too, that she felt "empty and dead inside and that she was so miserable she couldn't go on another day." She also mentioned again, Lee said, that she had received "a paper that was gonna put her in jail."

  She told Lee and Jason that she had tried to enter through Dan's front door, but the key wouldn't work. So she had gone around to the back door, where the key did work. She had crept through the house, gun in hand, and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. There, she told Lee and Jason, she had fired blindly into the darkness. "She said she fired the gun once, and it fired five or six times. She said she wanted to kill herself, but she didn't have any bullets left," Lee later testified.

  "Is he okay? Did you hear him yell, did you see any blood?" Lee asked her. Betty replied that it was "completely dark," so she couldn't see, she didn't know—but, Lee continued, "She said she thought he was okay, because he said, 'All right, you shot me. I'm dead.'"

  Betty also told Lee that she had pulled the phone out of the wall, Lee testified, "so that he couldn't save himself."

  At that point, Lee said she had reached for the phone to call her father herself to see if he was all right—but then she realized that she couldn't. "I wasn't allowed to have Dad's private number," she told the court.

  And so, she called her sister, Kim, in Arizona instead—and Kim, from that distant place, tried to will her father into answering his telephone by ringing him repeatedly. When he wouldn't answer, Kim then called San Diego police and several hospitals, trying to get some information. But she could learn nothing. By that time, of course, Brad Wright and Brian Forbes were already at the house, along with the San Diego police—and an all-points bulletin was out for Elisabeth Anne Broderick.

  Betty, meantime, sent Lee and Jason off to her house to "check on the boys." While they were gone, she sat on the edge of their bed—her purse at her feet with its emptied .38 lying atop the cosmetics and wallet, in full view—and made several telephone calls.

  She called her father. "She said, 'Dan's driving me up the wall, he's driving me crazy, I feel like committing suicide,'" Frank Biscelgia later testified. "I said, 'Betty Anne, calm down, everything will be all right,' and before I knew it, she hung up," the old man recalled, his tone still filled with wonder.

  She also called Dr. Nelson, but couldn't reach him. At some point that morning, too, whether earlier or later, she also called her friend Patti Monahan, to tell her, according to later testimony, that "I shot the fucker, I finally did it," and, among other vivid details, that "It's true—they do shit their pants. I could hear him gurgling in his own blood."

  Lee and Jason arrived at Betty's house to find it surrounded by police looking for her mother—but they didn't tell her that her father was dead.

  Lee lied to them. She hadn't seen Betty, she said. "I told them I was just there to get some laundry."

  She and Jason then returned home to find Betty now collected enough to say that she wanted to turn herself in. After another phone conversation with Dian Black and Ronnie Brown, everyone agreed to meet at a La Jolla shopping center, in front of a restaurant called the Magic Pan.

  There, they all piled into Jason's Volvo and drove to the police station—where they sat for the next hour, parked in front of the building, discussing what to do. Nobody was able to move out of the car. "We just sat there, debating ... It was just so nuts," Black recalls. "We were all in a catatonic, frenzied state … we knew she needed to go to the police … but Betty was pretty much out to lunch, so we just sat there … We still didn't even know what had really happened."

  Finally, Dian Black and Ronnie Brown decided that, regardless of whether Betty had shot anyone or not, she needed a lawyer before she walked into the police station to surrender. "She was in deep shit—I knew that much. I knew she had gone into Dan's house and fired a gun," says Black, "and I just kept thinking, 'God, he's going to be so mad that he's never going to let her out of jail after this!"

  Secondly, Black hit upon the idea that somebody should go to Betty's house to get all her court records, her diaries, her autobiography, her letters. To anyone who hasn't been through the snarls of the domestic courts system, that might have seemed a paranoid, useless thought, Black agrees. But to her, it was completely rational. "I knew what Betty had been through. I knew that her file had suddenly vanished, that all her court records were sealed for all those years. So I wanted to make sure that at least her own personal records were safe, so her attorney could at least reconstruct what had happened to her. Those files were the only evidence she had. I didn't want them to just be able to lock her up and throw away the key without anybody ever knowing the full story."

  So Lee and Jason agreed to try again to raid Betty's house. Before they left, Lee later testified, her mother removed the diamond necklace and watch she always wore "and she put them on me." And, on a scrap of paper, at Black's suggestion, Betty wrote her will, leaving all that she owned to her four children. On the back of a photograph of Jason, she also wrote out a list of instructions about the location of various safety deposit box keys and other valuables. But, even then, says Black, "She was so out of it" that she had to be led like a child.

  This time, as Jason and Lee approached Betty's house, they were apprehended by police and taken to headquarters for questioning.

  With the help of her attorney boyfriend, Ronnie Brown had, in the meantime, finally located a lawyer, Ron Frant, who was willing to come to his office on a Sunday to meet Betty Broderick.

  It must have been quite a scene, these three women cruising around town, now in Black's Nissan Sentra with its dark tinted windows, waiting for Frant to arrive at his office, two wondering if one was a killer or only a hysterical divorcee who had gone over the edge. So far, they had heard no news on the radio to help them decide. Not until Black stopped at a pay phone to check in with her husband did they learn that, according to a radio bulletin minutes earlier, Dan and Linda Broderick were dead.

  Neither Dian Black nor Ronnie Brown is cut out for this sort of thing. They are nice women, not harborers of murderers. Shivering with shock, fear, and dawning astonishment at their own role in this day, they drove their friend to Frant's office, hugged her, cried, and split.

  "Ronnie and I were so scared by then we couldn't even talk anymore," Black says now. "I expected to be surrounded by the SWAT team any minute—guys with Uzis, you know? 'Come out with your hands up!' It still seems like a bad movie, that whole day."

  A little later, attorney Frant escorted his client to the downtown San Diego Police station, where she officially surrendered.

  And that is the story of how Elisabeth Anne Broderick, once so pretty and bright and full of fun, became the fat, blowsy, dull-eyed killer who was arraigned on two counts of first-degree murder on November 7, I 1989—her forty-second birthday.

  Chapter 31

  Showtime

  Oh, no. No need to worry about her, she assured everyone who asked during her first days in jail. She was just fine. A-OK. It was as if the killings hadn't even happened. Betty was still the happy hostess of Dian Black's memory, busy setting everyone else at ease, getting out the place mats, pouring the coffee, offering drinks—hiding herself, saying and doing all the right things.

  Whether she was chillingly indifferent to her crime, as the prosecutor would later argue, or simply so psychologically ruined that she was incapable of comprehending what she had done, or just so angry that she didn't give a damn, will always be arguable. But this much is beyond dispute: to this day, two trials later, Betty still frequently speaks of Dan Broderick, and sometimes Linda, as if they were still alive and well and t
ormenting her.

  "He's such a shit!" she exploded one day, nearly fifteen months later, after reciting some past example of his sins against her. "I'd like to kill him!"

  "But, Betty," her listener replied, "you did."

  Silence. Pause. Then a small, confused laugh. "Yeah, well … but I didn't get revenge ... he didn't suffer enough."

  In time, she would at least tacitly acknowledge that she had killed a man she had once loved. But she would never express even a whit of remorse for it, not to her children, not to her parents, or her friends, nor, later on, despite her attorney's desperate pleas, even to the two juries deciding her fate. She would never abandon her claim that she had killed in self-defense, that she was a victim of emotional battery, driven to protect herself and her children.

  It was, of course, the thing that always set Betty Broderick apart, that made her, at least for a moment in time, the object of national fascination. Such purity of purpose, whether it is based on fact or fancy, principle or paranoia, is a rare thing in this or any other time—especially when the potential price is life in prison.

  For the next two years, like a chameleon, Betty would adapt to whatever her prison audience required. She would ingratiate and conciliate. To one of her first roommates, a street corner prostitute, she apparently sounded sufficiently tough. "She said she must not be as good a shot as she used to be because she had five [bullets] but only got three in," the inmate later testified in court. Betty only laughed, dismissing her former cell mate as no more than "a snitch, trying to cut a deal with the prosecutor to save her own ass." Betty hardened fast. Within weeks, she was as conversant in jailhouse jargon as a woman who had spent her youth in juvenile hall instead of among the nuns at Sister Maria Regina's.