by Bella Stumbo
But to a later more celebrated, educated roommate—San Diego's highest-profile madame—she was a different person, more interested in small talk about schools, families, and the future. Like a pair of college roommates, the two women did each other's hair and makeup.
Then there was her eerie radiance. Like a rubber band finally snapped, she seemed almost relaxed. But her energetic mind was a constant tangle of ideas, couched in her usual wit and humor. She fretted over her magazine subscriptions, she worried about her hair coloring, she chattered endlessly over the phones about people, gossip, new babies, divorces, politics—everything except the only thing that really mattered. She even began to worry again about her weight. As Betty herself would later say, "I loved the first year, I needed jail, I needed the chance to hide away in my little cell ... to provide my own therapy. It was like R and R."
Meantime, to her friends in the outside world, Betty was a case study in escalating madness. Dian Black recalls, in particular, a weekend not long after the killings when she went to see Betty, and "she showed up [at the visitors' window] with these little pieces of tinfoil in her ears, and she asked me how I liked her new earrings. She was laughing, like it was all a big joke." On another occasion, Black recalls, "Betty sounded positively hurt when she heard a prisoner refer to her as 'a murderer.' She wasn't in touch with what she'd done at all."
In the months after her arrest, San Diegans were treated to nonstop details of Betty's $16,000 support settlement, her lavish shopping sprees. Her pretty pink-and-lavender Bob Mackie gown began to sound like a closet of fifteen; Dan's Jaguar and MG sports cars might have been Ferraris and Bentleys. The fact that they had taken a few trips to Europe and a Caribbean cruise rendered them overnight jet-setters. Their inexpensive little ski boat began to sound like an Onassis yacht. Their houses became "mansions," and, in time, even the original Broderick tract home on Coral Reef was sometimes described as "luxurious." Never mind that the Brodericks had only barely advanced from their Sears Roebuck installment payments to Neiman Marcus credit cards before they self-destructed.
In disaster, both Brodericks became larger than life, San Diego's favorite ongoing drama. To the middle-class majority—all those who live out their lives on finite budgets, weeding their own gardens and shopping at JC Penney's—here, once again, in the example of this pretty, privileged pair of overachievers crushed beneath the weight of their own uncompromising needs and greeds, was soothing validation of their own condition. There was always more than a little lip-smacking satisfaction in most local debate over the Broderick "tragedy."
From the beginning, Betty was a dream come true for the local press. Media switchboard operators all over town accepted her collect calls. She became a news addict, gorging herself on her own headlines. She couldn't get enough, and neither, for a long time, could San Diego.
First to be favored with Betty's phone calls was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. But the reporter, a young woman about to be married for the first time herself, soon lost sympathy with Betty and later wrote a decidedly unsympathetic story for the Times Sunday Magazine headlined "Till Murder Do Us Part," which she then sold to a TV movie maker, whose depiction of Betty was even more unflattering. Betty railed and swore that she had been cheated, deceived, and misrepresented.
But she was hardly deterred. Betty never met a reporter she didn't trust on sight. It was a measure both of her naivety, as well as her confidence in her own powers of persuasion, that, for the next two years, she continued to talk to nearly any reporter who asked, even in the midst of her trials. Her attorney finally gave up begging her to please, please shut up.
"If this case is presented right, I should walk on the whole thing," she told one reporter. She thought "a few hours of community service" was appropriate, "if I have to do anything." She called the La Jolla Light to complain about her fears of osteoporosis due to the poor medical care in jail. Before it was over, she would be issuing press releases from jail, written on her yellow legal pads, informing the world that "I am not an ordinary prisoner. I am Betty Broderick, and this case raises major issues which include ..."
Ruined once, Betty Broderick was, in short, ruined twice, this time by her own media appeal. It was never a fair match, Betty's relationship with the press. She was so eager for an audience, and the press was so cynically eager to give it to her that, very quickly, she became one of the most overexposed, over-reported killers in San Diego County history. Consequently, most of the San Diego media soon began to display a tired, cynical bias against her, well before her first jury was ever selected. The afternoon newspaper, the Tribune, in particular, began to mock her openly as no more than a frivolous scatterbrain. In May of 1990, for example, months before her first trial, columnist Alison DaRosa printed this snide little item under the caption “Sitting Pretty":
"Elisabeth Broderick, accused of murdering her ex-husband and his new wife, doesn't like the way she's looked in recent newspaper photographs. So she hired a professional photographer to capture her at her best. She curled her hair, applied makeup, and pressed her clothes; the photographer brought studio lights and backdrops."
In fact, the photographer in question was on assignment from the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, and Betty hadn't even wanted to pose for him. She was enough of a photographer herself to know that "They can make me look like some crazy ax killer, like Lizzie Borden, if they want to." But she did it, thanks in large part to her own attorney's persuasion. Betty could never just say no.
Black humor became the local media order of the day.
Columnist Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times referred to her so often that he eventually began most of his entries without introduction, writing simply "More Betty"—a typical tongue-in-cheek item being, "Don't tell Betty Broderick, but the number of attorneys in San Diego Country increased 42 percent from 1986-91, the largest jump of any urban county in the state."
The whole city, in fact, at times seemed caught up in sick irreverence over the Broderick case. During Halloween of 1990, for example, another columnist reported that a couple had shown up at a party dressed as Dan and Linda—in pajamas with bullet holes.
Nightclub comics made hay with Broderick jokes. One local club balladeer, Michael Angel, even got the lyrics to his little ditty, "Brenda Bombay," printed in full in a local newspaper:
You always wanted to be special, you always wanted to be known.
And sometimes life is just not fair, but you wouldn't leave it alone.
'Cause you just couldn't stand to lose, and let him get away with abuse.
And so you thought you'd even the score, as you headed out your front door …
But you just can't take another life, then claim to be the battered wife.
'Cause when it's finally said and done, you still hold the smoking gun.
By November, 1991, midway through her second trial, a couple of local radio disc jockeys were also gleefully promoting a "Betty Broderick Christmas Album." Song titles, according to a newspaper column, included:
"Frosting the Old Man with a .38 Snub-nose," "I'll Be Home for Christmas with an Uzi," and "I'm Dreaming of a Short Sentence." Topping their offerings was a song titled "The Twelve Days of Christmas," including these lyrics:
On the fifth Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Five rounds of lead
Four obscene phone calls
Three (bleep) yous
Two extra chins
And a car driven through the front door.
And late-night talk show hosts never had it so good. Some devoted hours to the killings, fielding furious debates into the wee hours of the morning between Betty sympathizers and those who wanted to see her gassed: was this the tale of a vengeful woman scorned, as so many headlines suggested—or was she driven to kill in self-defense by one powerful man's psychological abuse and a nation's disregard, legally and culturally, of a woman's rights, as her mushrooming mail insisted? Was this former housewife and mother a case study in the imbal
ance of power between the sexes, of gender bias in the legal system, especially divorce courts? Was she a symbol of all that feminists would remedy—or was she just a selfish, vindictive narcissist? Was she an emotionally battered woman, or was Dan Broderick a battered man? Were the Brodericks merely an example of the much-touted, materialistic "me-generation" of the eighties, somehow different from all the generations that came before? And what blame, if any, should be assigned to Linda Kolkena? Was she just an innocent young woman who took love where she found it, or was she an insensitive bitch? And so on and on.
Betty Broderick had unwittingly tapped a mother lode. And this was not yet even the season of ‘Thelma and Louise’, the controversial 1991 film about two female buddies who, fed up with sexism in all its forms, got their guns. But the saga of Betty Broderick was always Hollywood-bound.
Not until the end of her second trial, however, would anyone ever publicly raise the issue of her sanity. Then it was the frowning jury foreman, speaking to a swarm of reporters, who introduced the question:
"Clearly [Betty's] reactions were never something a normal, reasonable person would do … But since no insanity defense was offered," he said, shrugging helplessly, "we just had to decide how Betty Broderick perceived the world … That was our biggest problem."
By then, Dian Black, standing at the edge of the crowd, could only shake her head sadly. Privately, she had been complaining for two years to Betty's attorney that "this woman is not competent to stand trial without therapy first! She needs help to understand what she's even done!"
Always, caught dead center in the fishbowl of public fascination, were the four Broderick children. Pawns first in their parents' long divorce war, they next became ammunition in their mother's murder trials. Nor would the emotional abuse they suffered at the hands of manipulative adults pursuing their own agendas end, even after the final verdict was in.
In the first bizarre twist to the tale of the children, within days of the killings Rhett and Danny, then ten and thirteen, were sent to live, not with relatives of either of their parents, but, instead, to another broken home, Kathy Schmidt Broderick, former wife of Dan's brother Larry and mother of Larry's three minor children. For months, Betty was forbidden by the courts from contacting her sons, either by phone or letter.
But daughters Kim and Lee, then nineteen and eighteen, remained free agents, and, for a brief moment in the wake of the killings, they seemed united in the idea that, even if Dad was dead, they had a duty to support Mom.
Two days after the shootings, on her forty-second birthday, both wrote her remarkably loving notes.
"Mom, I don't know what to say. I love you so much," wrote Kim. "Everything will be okay! I'm taking care of Danny and Rhett as well as I can. I'll try to do what's best for them, but some things are out of my control ... Be tough, Mom ... I love you and I'm here for you whenever. Call me if you can … I'll take care of things, Mom. We will all be fine. I love you—Kim."
And, from Lee:
"I guess this is not the best birthday you have ever had. This is going to be hard for everyone, not just you. I hate to see you spending this holiday season without any friends or family. We all love you, Mom … There is [sic] a lot of people on your side. You are not alone. ... I will come and visit whenever I can. Love you, Lee. P.S. Danny would like me to tell you that he misses and loves you. I'm sure Rhett would say the same, but I just couldn't ask him."
But that small moment of emotional harmony between the sisters would not last. Within a few weeks, Kim moved to Denver, where she was soon agreeing with Uncle Larry that her mother should be denied both bail and contact with her brothers. But Kim always insisted that her decision to become the prosecution's star witness was her own. What turned her stomach, she said later, was her first conversation with her mother after she was in jail. "I expected her to be saying, 'Oh my God, what have I done?'" Kim said. "But she never even apologized for killing Dad. Instead, she said she'd done it for us, that she couldn't stand the way he was treating us. She wasn't sorry at all. She was laying guilt on me, she wanted me to be glad she did it, and when I wasn't, she called me a traitor." She finished on the verge of tears.
In time, Kim also became a star player in the media circus. Before it was over, she would blast her mother on such TV programs as 20/20, Maury Povich, and Oprah for leaving four children homeless. She loved her mother, she said, but "I think she should be punished for what she did." Her photograph would dominate half a page in People magazine, along with the deadly quote: "I didn't like it that Dad got restraining orders against her, but what could he do? When he tried to deal with her, she screamed obscenities. Now at least he's living in peace. He's probably better off."
Lee, meantime, remained in La Jolla. She visited her mother regularly on weekends, bringing her Estee Lauder cosmetics, moisturizers, hair coloring, magazines, and other items Betty regarded as essentials of survival.
Unlike Kim, Lee refused to cooperate with the prosecution and, thus, became even more ostracized by the Broderick clan than she was while her father was alive. "She's a thief, a drug addict, she's just like her mother," Larry Broderick once hissed in a telephone interview. For a time, Lee was not even permitted to know her brothers' telephone number in Denver. Later on in trial, the DA went nearly as far, once even suggesting that Lee might have somehow been involved in her mother's crime, for insurance purposes. Through it all, Lee Broderick marched with her head high, her expression frozen, her feelings hidden. And, unlike her sister, Kim, she consistently had only one firm answer for the media hordes: "No comment."
* * *
From her cell at Las Colinas, Betty was still obsessed with the same issues that had so tormented her before the killings—money and litigation. Two murder charges had done nothing to dilute her loathing of lawyers. Within weeks, she was fighting with her second criminal attorney, Marc Wolf, whom she had hired to replace Frant, on grounds that Frant "mostly did drug cases." But Wolf was no different than all the others, she complained. Robbing her blind. She accused him of hiring a public relations firm against her wishes and, worse, racking up a $160,000 bill in less than six weeks—and she fired him. (Wolf consistently refused comment on his flamboyant former client.)
Betty turned over control of her finances to Brad and also gave him her condo. She pressed her appeal of the divorce settlement and launched a new court action, demanding contact with her sons. In a small victory, she was finally allowed to write to them on a limited basis, her letters subject to censorship by a Denver therapist selected by the Brodericks.
It was a legal war Betty would fight mostly on her own. Although two of her brothers were willing to take Danny and Rhett, the Bisceglia family was never an effective presence in San Diego family court during those early months. Instead, most of Betty's family members were so shamed and shocked by the killings that they kept the lowest profile they could, hoping that their friends, neighbors, and coworkers would never associate them with the infamous San Diego socialite killer. When publicity finally caught up with them in Eastchester, the elder Bisceglias were devastated. In custody hearings—again behind closed doors—the outraged Broderick clan, led by Larry, his brother's designated executor, simply ran over them.
Compounding Betty's outrage, she was convinced, with some cause, that Dan's brother Larry and his former wife, Kathy, were financially exploiting her children. Not only was Dan's estate paying Kathy Schmidt Broderick $50,000 or more per year to care for Betty's two minor sons, plus another several thousand dollars for private school tuition, Larry Broderick also billed the children another $50,000 as compensation for his duties as executor of Dan's estate. In addition, according to later court documents, Larry also failed to repay a 1988 loan for $450,000 from Dan's pension fund, further eroding the inheritance of the three Broderick children named in Dan's will. According to friends, he was also on the verge of declaring business bankruptcy.
Further, Dan's old law firm, Gray, Cary, Ames and Frye, submitted legal fees of nea
rly $400,000—so high that the court-appointed San Diego banker in charge of protecting the Broderick children's interests legally protested with such vigor that Gray, Cary eventually agreed to cut its bill by about 40 percent.
That same banker also took trenchant note, in his first legal challenge, of Larry Broderick's various other steep expenses, all charged to the Broderick children—everything from a new Jeep Wagoneer to travel costs and dinner tabs in luxurious restaurants, ostensibly to discuss estate matters.
Betty was both livid and vindicated.
"I couldn't get an extra cent from Dan Broderick while he was alive to cover what I spent on the kids for food, clothes, and entertainment. Now they're paying hired help $5,000 a month to keep them? At the rate these bloodsuckers are going, by the time my boys are old enough for college, all their money will be gone! Why doesn't somebody do something to stop it? It's grand theft."
Eventually, someone would. Two years later, the same bank, acting in behalf of the two Broderick sons, sued Larry Broderick for $295,000— their share of Larry's $450,000 unpaid loan to his brother's estate.
But this was still 1990. Kim was receiving around $3,000 a month— while Lee, the disinherited, got nothing, although she would eventually be entitled to one-quarter of the $1 million court-ordered insurance policy from the 1989 divorce trial.
Money was always the measure with the Brodericks, in death as in life. In another twisted note, the Broderick estate later even thought to bill Betty for twenty-five days of her November, 1989, support payment— every day beyond November 5, when she killed Dan.
Nor did the Brodericks show much more generosity toward Linda Kolkena's family. Although Linda was also beneficiary of $1 million in Dan's life insurance, the Brodericks challenged Linda's family's right to that money on grounds that, since she had died anywhere from one to thirty minutes sooner than Dan had, her entitlement legally reverted to him. Her family, in short, was entitled to nothing beyond what Larry Broderick and family chose to bestow. According to Linda's sister, Maggie, her ailing father finally received around $200,000. The Kolkenas did not contest it. Adding to the insult, according to a report by Paul Krueger in the Reader, a local mortuary even billed the Kolkena family for her share of funeral costs—around $7,000.
