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

by Bella Stumbo

  Linda Kolkena Broderick was never much more than incidental in the Broderick story, the forgotten second victim, the "new wife," who had also died. In the beginning, even her maiden name was frequently misspelled both in the press and in court documents—Kokino, Kokine, etc.

  But Dan's friends were the worst offenders. In their most stunning display of insensitivity, when the American Ireland Fund staged a tribute to Dan at a $250-per-plate black-tie dinner during the summer of 1990, complete with speeches and slide show photographs of Dan Broderick with his children. Linda Kolkena's name was not once mentioned, her picture never once shown. Several of her girlfriends in the audience cried in anger.

  As her sister once quietly observed, fighting back tears as she spoke to a gathering of reporters outside the courtroom during the first trial, "Linda has become nothing more than a parenthetical in this case, a cheap bimbo, a gold digger, a dirty four-letter word … Why? I don't understand why. Doesn't my sister's life count, too?" The gathered reporters could only avert their eyes, until Maggie Seats finally gave up and left. She had only been in town for the day, on business. Unlike the Broderick and Bisceglia clans, none of the Kolkenas could afford to leave their jobs to attend the trial full-time, to establish a courtroom presence in Linda's memory. Maggie's impromptu little press conference barely made a mention in the next day's paper. Even the prosecutor, Kerry Wells, didn't have time to see her, she said later.

  When Betty wasn't on the jail phone, she was churning out personal letters on her yellow legal pad—letters that convey, better than anything else can, the increasingly detached state of her mind. Those she wrote to her two daughters were particularly eerie. This was not a mother in jail on charges of murdering their dad. This was a dutiful, concerned mother enduring an inconvenient period of temporary separation, nothing more.

  To Lee, on November 27—three weeks after the shootings—Betty wrote:

  "Please take care of my cameras. They are very valuable to me. You can use them but be careful. No sand, no water, no dropping. If I ever get out I may still be a photographer. Also, the cellular phone—sell it or just cancel [it] for now, $35 a month even if you don't use it.

  "Are the furs in storage? Who has my TV from condo kitchen? … My roommate's birthday is Dec. 9, a Saturday. I want to get her ‘Presumed Innocent’ in paperback with a ribbon tied around and a nice birthday card. Could you do that?"

  Then the woman who had been too helpless to help herself at her own divorce trial gave her daughter some brisk, efficient financial advice on what to do with the $250,000 she stood to gain from her late father's life insurance policy: "Every single day that money is not in an interest-bearing place, you're losing money. HONESTLY, EVERY DAY COUNTS!! Especially with such large sums of money. You're going to be an heiress, like you only read about. You'll be able to fully live off the interest alone, and when you start earning money you can leave the interest in there. NEVER touch the principle … Your money can only do two things, GROW and GONE. Depreciable things like cars, clothes, trips SPEND your money never to be seen again. ... In your case, I would look into several HIGH-INTEREST CDs—FDIC INSURED CDs earn you MORE money on top of MORE money. Be smart about this! Most people never get such an opportunity in their lifetimes."

  Then, it was back to Betty as usual. "How are your nails? Did you go back to Kristi—she probably hates me, thinking I went someplace else. Tell her my nails are all bitten."

  And finally, she worried about what Brad was up to. "Now that I'm locked up, girls are coming out of the woodwork asking Brad out. What a riot! My only rule is not in MY condo, MY bed (God forbid), or with MY money! [unhappy face] Keep an eye on him."

  Her letters to Kim in Denver were decidedly different in tone, an awkward blend of breezy chitchat, laced with ill-concealed anger:

  "Dear Kim, Are you freezing!! Are you having any fun?" she wrote prior to the 1990 preliminary hearing, which she knew Kim would be attending at the prosecution's request. "Does the DA pay for your plane ticket? They should, if they want you!! Tell them you want the $$—don't make anything easy for them to PROSECUTE ME!! The fucking bitch [Kerry Wells] thinks I won't stand up to her and her lies. Ha! Ha! Ha! I've been through too much for too long to tolerate any more legal bullshit from ANYONE ever!!!

  "How are your classes? I hope you don't miss anything coming here. How is sewing, cooking, piano?" She then offered maternal warnings about one of Kim's boyfriends. "Please don't ever speak to [him] again for any reason—the guy is trouble. Get tough, Kim—stop letting people manipulate you …"

  In a later letter, her tone was edgier: "How is the campus? Pretty? Are there places to hang out and meet people, like coffee shops, etc.? Keep a lid on your drinking—I always worry because you are the child of an alcoholic, and without you controlling it, you have genetic tendencies in that direction no matter what you do … Are you eating well? Start cooking—it's really fun! I'll send you recipes …

  "Do you really not want me to be able to speak to the boys? Creep … They should be allowed to speak to me and send me notes and letters … Give the boys long, warm hugs from me … Tell Kathy to take good care of my boys until they come back to their Mommy … Love you and miss seeing you! Mom XOX."

  She wrote Kim several more letters during the winter, most filled with small talk. Kim rarely answered. By summertime, 1990, Betty's letters were plaintive. "Kim, it's terrible going too long without talking to you!" she wrote. But, again, instead of addressing the issue most on Kim Broderick's mind, she launched into a discussion of where Kim should take a $10,000 watch Betty had given her for repairs. "Only an A+ jeweler should touch it. Neiman's will do it here for you …" By fall, less than a month before her trial, she wrote this: "Dearest Kimby—PLEASE write me or leave "This machine will accept collect" on your machine. Lee Lee and I get along great BECAUSE we talk all the time. We don't AGREE all the time—but at least we talk everything out. You are my number one baby—I miss you the most—don't hide—nothing goes away or gets better by ignoring it!!!" XOX. I can't wait for you to come home! Love, Mom."

  But she wrote to Brad most often, sometimes issuing only brisk housekeeping commands, but at other times expressing love and gratitude.

  "I have lots of time to think and dream in here, and since I've never been one to fantasize and I don't dare look to the future, I've had lots of time to smile and remember all the incredibly wonderful things we've done together," she wrote two weeks after the killings. "There is no point to this letter … just thank you for being there when no one else was, thank you for being strong when I was weak, for taking care of me and mine even now ... I love you." Although Brad always called her Betty, she signed it "Bets"—Dan's pet name for her in bygone times.

  For the next two years, Brad Wright would continue to be Betty's banker and loyal, all-purpose gofer. He never seemed to mind—even when she once hit upon the idea of turning him into guardian of her boys by marrying him from jail. "Why not?" she asked a reporter over the jail phone. "If I tell Brad, 'Get out here, you're getting married at two o'clock today,' he'd do it in a second! Then he'd be their legal stepfather, and he could have the money Kathy's getting. He would be a good, kind father, too, better by far than the shithead they had."

  Meantime, mail continued to pour in to her from women all over the world. The tone was usually the same: "All your prior emotions are still alive and well in me," wrote a typical middle-aged divorcee who got a raw deal. "I only wish I had your nerve … you are wrong when you said that nobody won. THEY lost. YOU won. You no longer have that sick, tense, enraged feeling in the pit of your stomach, wondering what 'they' are going to do next. They are no longer admired around town, while you're treated as though you don't exist. You are no longer humiliated nor do you have to deal with their harassment. Your future is not wonderful, but they have none—as they deserve."

  In time, she got so many letters that she began to get in trouble with her jailers for the clutter in her cell. "You're supposed to fit all of you
r belongings—everything—your shampoo, your soap, all your legal papers, everything, in a shoebox," she complained. "And I can't do it. I look at all this mail, and I ask them, 'What am I supposed to do? Eat it?'" For this kind of lip, she was periodically punished during the next two years, thrown into isolation for days at a time—"where they give you torture food, like hockey pucks of alfalfa and hay—all because I'm getting too much mail from women who got fucked over, too.'"

  But, in truth, Betty was always more thrilled by her male correspondents. And she would never learn to distinguish between the legitimate men who merely wanted her to know that not all husbands were as cruel as they thought Dan had been, and those—the majority—who simply got their jollies in the dark of night by corresponding with the black widow who had pumped two people full of bullets.

  One regular correspondent, Bill, from Los Angeles, wrote her about his tennis game, the six books he had read last week, and the wonderful new French restaurant he had just discovered, "very renowned by the movie set." Ending one letter, he wrote: "It is past midnight, I am off to the bed, and I will close with love, kisses, erector sets, toys, and visions of sugar plums. MAY I VISIT YOU??? Are you allowed platonic conjugals? Here is a kiss, put it where you wish. X."

  Betty always said, indignantly, that "Of course I know these guys are flakes, why else would they be writing to a woman in prison?" But she answered every letter faithfully.

  At about the same time the San Diego press was getting bored with Betty, the national media got wind of her story. Among those first on the scene, naturally, were the TV tabloids. Hard Copy lobbed the opening salvo, on the eve of Betty's first trial in 1990, in a lurid segment complete with actors playing the roles of Linda and Dan seminude in bed, in the moments just prior to their deaths. At the end of the program, the hostess called Linda "a home-wrecker." As it turned out, that pretty well summarized the position later adopted by most of the national press. Despite the jaundice of the San Diego media, most national accounts of the Broderick case in the months to come were sympathetic to Betty to a sometimes astonishing degree. Most, like the Ladies Home Journal, approached the story from the standard angle of a woman scorned.

  Friends of Dan and Linda Broderick were staggered by the onslaught of positive publicity toward the beast who had shot their friends to death. They struggled, mostly in vain, to comprehend the Betty Phenomenon.

  "Betty is incredibly bright. She used to tell Dan that she would ruin him, make him pay," Sharon Blanchet remarked, after Betty made the Barbara Walters show. "She always said she would make Oprah and 60 Minutes. And she's doing it. She's created all of this by sheer force of her own personality. The facts have nothing to do with it."

  Chapter 32

  The Cast

  San Diego County District Attorney Edwin L. Miller, Jr., was privy to all of Betty's fan mail—prison correspondence was at that time routinely copied for the prosecutor to read. And so he knew that what he had on his hands was the specter of a feminist cause célèbre; an educated, articulate, flamboyant woman who would wrap herself in the rhetoric of emotional and legal battery, who would defend her crimes by trashing not only Dan Broderick but also the entire legal system within which Edwin Miller worked. Judges, divorce attorneys, that stable of court-appointed "experts"—all would be on trial, right along with Betty Broderick. She held every promise of becoming a virtual feminist star upon Edwin Miller's crime-infested firmament.

  He moved with speed, and decided flair, to defuse the menace. He not only named a woman to prosecute the case, he picked the head of his Domestic Crimes Unit. A woman who dealt routinely with battered women and abused children. A woman who had seen the very worst: wives with broken bones and faces swollen or slashed beyond recognition, babies with cigarette burns, starved into whimpering helplessness, sodomized literally to death. One wife was so terrified of her husband that it took her two years to report his murder of their six-year-old daughter and lead police to where the child's body was buried. Another case involved an eighteen-month-old baby who had literally been strangled to death by forced fellatio, before being stabbed and tossed into a garbage dumpster.

  These were the people whose world Deputy District Attorney Kerry Wells, Miller's choice, inhabited.

  The press, naturally, loved it. Woman against woman. A catfight. What could be finer?

  Wells would, in fact, prove to be a controversial choice, either brilliant or disastrous, depending on who was doing the critique.

  On the downside, she was young and relatively inexperienced in trial work. A Los Angeles native and graduate of Southern California's Whittier College of Law, admitted to the bar in 1980, she was thirty-seven when she was assigned to one of the most sensational murder cases in San Diego history. Most remarkably, she had never prosecuted a murderer during her ten years in the district attorney's office.

  On the plus side, she was well respected among her peers as a smart, efficient, hardworking, no-nonsense professional. In addition, Wells's personal profile was right for this case. Here was no stereotypical, unattractive spinster who might alienate a jury by her perceived inability to relate to a wife and mother in crisis. Instead, Kerry Wells was married (to another attorney), had two small sons of her own, and, not insignificantly, she was also pretty—reed thin, with short, curly, strawberry blond hair, and a complexion meant for Ivory soap commercials. At first glance, Miss Topeka came to mind. In court, she often wore Peter Pan collars trimmed with lace, and fragile strings of beads or pearls. Her gold earrings were never larger than dimes, her suits were always simple and tailored, usually gray, beige, or blue. When she smiled, she showed dimples and looked like a girl of eighteen.

  Which is not to say that Kerry Wells spent much time smiling during the two long years she spent trying to bring Betty Broderick to justice.

  To the contrary, Wells displayed such a complete, gut-level loathing of this pampered woman who dared equate herself with the battered women of Kerry Wells's experience that, in time, it became Wells's most glaring flaw. Her disgust was so personal, her dislike so intense, her moral outrage so pure that it became instantly apparent to both jurors and reporters alike. Everything about Betty Broderick, from her vulgar language to her witty, unrepentant interviews with the press, repulsed Wells.

  But in the beginning, as she faced mobs of reporters and TV lights outside each court hearing, Wells was almost charming, simply because her natural shyness showed. She seemed afraid of these clamoring hordes; she had never dealt with such noisy aggressiveness before, and so, initially, she blurted out a few bits of herself, spontaneously.

  "I've worked with battered women," she said one afternoon, exasperated, looking bewildered. "And this woman is not one! Betty Broderick is making a joke of a serious, important issue."

  But, as the days and weeks wore on, Wells lost her natural appeal. Instead, as she gained her bearings, she grew ever grimmer, so tight-jawed, humorless, and moralizing that, by the time the first trial was done, reporters were laughingly referring to her as "the Church Lady," after Dana Carvey's character on the television show Saturday Night Live.

  Her disgust with reporters feeding the ego and celebrity of this double killer was withering. She lost all patience with questions about even the most obvious circumstances of the case—Dan's infidelity, his fines, his controlling ways, jailing Betty for profanity.

  Yes, yes, she would snap—Linda refused to give Betty the wedding china. "But is that any reason to kill them?" And, yes, so Dan had lied about his affair. Yes, he had thrown her in jail and fined her. Yes, Betty Broderick "had a right to be angry—Dan Broderick was not perfect." But, she always finished in angry frustration, "Is that any reason to kill them?" It became her standard line, her answer to everything. But, increasingly, she refused to provide any answers at all.

  Instead, in time she simply ignored the press altogether, whisking by with the cold disdain of a woman passing through a swarm of flies.

  And, in court, she displayed not a shred of fem
ale compassion toward Betty Broderick, even when it might have served to soften her image to advantage in front of the jury.

  "I can't help it," Wells once remarked, of her own angry attitudes. "She's a cold-blooded murderer, and she lies about everything! I don't understand why anybody is buying her story! I don't understand why this case is attracting all this attention! This is not a feminist issue! This is not a case of psychological battery!"

  In one of her first public acts, Wells arrived in court on April 3, 1990, to inform reporters that, in the matter of Elisabeth Anne Broderick, the state had elected to seek life without possibility of parole—not the death penalty. The decision had been made, she said, out of consideration for the Broderick youngsters, who would probably be trial witnesses. The district attorney did not want to expose them to the "horrible trauma" of participating in a proceeding that could lead their only surviving parent to the gas chamber. Wells said this with pursed lips, jutting chin, and cold eyes. She did not look like a woman who was pleased with the decision Edwin Miller had made. But that perception turned out to be only more of her icy public persona—because many months later, she admitted in a relaxed moment that she had serious personal qualms about the death penalty.

  Throughout the two-year Broderick drama, Wells always seemed caught between conflicting, kinder, personal impulses, and the do-or-die professional ambitions of a woman walking the tightrope in what is still mostly a man's world. During the first trial, the stress eventually appeared to affect even her health. She grew thinner and paler by the day. A friend said she couldn't keep down food and was drinking cans of liquid nutrients throughout most of the first trial to keep her strength up.