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

by Bella Stumbo

  The tedium was over. On Monday, the Betty Broderick trial would finally begin. Apparently Betty's celebrity affected even Judge Whelan. After court that day, he told Union reporter John Gaines that he heard Meryl Streep had been out to Colinas to see Betty.

  It was, of course, not true. But the remark went a long way toward establishing what the tone of this trial would be, even from the bench. The judge himself was seemingly star-struck.

  By now, the defense camp was obsessed with worry over Betty's ability to testify in her own behalf. Some witnesses for the prosecution, like Gail Forbes, were making bets that Earley would never dare to put Betty on the stand. That was, of course, a ridiculous bet—Jack Earley couldn't have silenced Betty in court even if he had tried. She would have fired him, rather than be denied the opportunity to at last tell the world her story. Earley knew that.

  If only he could get her to cooperate, to at least say she was sorry, he moaned with mounting frustration and anxiety. "I need her to grovel!" But he knew she never would. It was catch-22: he was asking Betty to renege on the very emotions that made her kill in the first place. It was contrary to her own argument of self-defense.

  "Oh well," said Earley after one especially futile jail visit, shrugging. "I finally just told her, 'Betty, do what you want—but the captain doesn't go down with this ship.' She just laughed."

  * * *

  It was Saturday, October 20, the weekend before trial, and the Las Colinas visiting room was, as usual, crowded, mostly with young men in jeans carrying small babies, and mothers. Nearly everyone was either Hispanic or black. Babies cried, mothers wept and wailed, sometimes one of the husbands screamed an obscenity into the two-way phone, divided by thick Plexiglas.

  Betty bounced up to a chair behind the glass wall in her gray prison sweats, threw a friendly grin at another inmate, and began chattering away into her receiver. She had not lost much weight, as Early had hoped, and, contrary to Marion Pasas's firm instructions, she had had her bouncy Shirley Temple curls cropped short by Danielle of La Jolla the weekend before. But she still looked good, compared to the putty-faced, obese woman with three chins and ragged pony tail who had been jailed for murder nearly a year before. Her skin was pink, her blue eyes were clear, she was wearing careful makeup, and no roots showed.

  But nothing about her suggested a woman even remotely in contact with reality, with the fact that, come Monday morning, she would begin an ordeal that might end in a life sentence. She was instead zanier, funnier, and more defiant than ever, but with a strange new overlay of cunning about her. In one minute, she would say something clever, making her visitor laugh out loud; in the next she was literally winking as she confided, "I can play to Eloise Duffield [the elderly juror] ... I was humble for sixteen years! That's how I got in here! I can do that bit!"

  Then, like a scattergun aimed into thin air, her mind turned to her wardrobe. She had settled on her brown St. Johns cashmere for opening day at trial, she said. "I'm a little fat for it—but it'll be great on TV …" She had decided against her blue Louis Feraud suit, she said, "because it's so matronly."

  Then she was insisting again that she had done her children a favor by killing their father. "I feel like I'm a hero to my kids … They may not think that right now … but they'll eventually understand, even if it takes them a few years."

  If she was afraid, it didn't show. Instead, she only seemed high as a kite—wired, excited—anticipating her day in court. She was plotting her performance like an actress, bent on playing the wrong part, perhaps, but an actress still, rehearsing old lines in her mind. It didn't take a trained psychiatrist to see that Betty Broderick was gone, lost to the real world. More than ever, it was impossible to have a conversation with her. She was unable to listen to even the most trivial remark. Instead, she interrupted, rushing on with the monologue in her head. Like a stuck record needle, her mind was relaying the same, tired snatches of her story, just as it had done for months—but tonight it was worse; she had regressed even further, to the most basic elements of her original story, and, unlike times past, she could not be quieted, drawn back into the present even temporarily.

  She expected that Wells would try to make her look at the death scene pictures, she said. She was bracing for that, it bothered her. "Oh, nooooo, no, thank you," she said, shaking her head like a prim, proper lady who had just been invited to peep into a skin flick parlor. "Why should I look at them? I don't have any mental picture of [it], I don't remember it, why should I start having nightmares now, a year later?" Besides, Brad had told her the scene "wasn't that bad, not that much blood." But, even so, she promised smugly, "If Kerry Wells makes me look at them, it's going to backfire on her, because I may throw up on her. Unless," she added, "I laugh."

  And why would she laugh? "Because," she explained, gone to lunatic euphoria, "it's all over! Whatever happens, it's over. I don't have to worry about anything anymore!"

  And so on. There was nothing to do but listen. "I think I have a great case, if Jack would get his ass in gear! I think we can win," she said merrily.

  Walking out into the balmy Santee desert air was like escaping a pressure chamber. It's not easy to describe thirty minutes sitting eighteen inches from Betty Broderick's face, looking through the Plexiglas into her eyes. It would be different if they were small, evasive eyes full of stupidity. But these were beautiful blue eyes, filled with direct, alert intelligence. They shone with anger, they went frigid with hate, they bubbled with humor. All they lacked was that occasional sideways evasiveness that comes with guilt.

  You cannot stare Betty Broderick down for shooting two people to death.

  Chapter 33

  Trial Time

  It was chaos in the corridor outside Department 27 on the Monday morning of October 22, 1990, when the matter of The People of the State of California versus Elisabeth Anne Broderick went to trial.

  Reporters and television crews clotted the hallway. Every major media outlet in San Diego County was there. Besides the media, some two hundred members of the public were queued up along the wall, hoping to gain one of the few remaining seats in the tiny courtroom. Most were women.

  The Broderick and Bisceglia siblings flew in from all over the country, in rotating shifts, to attend nearly every session of the trial. It was one of the most twisted, sorry spectacles of the whole drama, watching these two groups of successful, educated people setting up their separate camps in the courthouse corridors daily, avoiding each other like strangers in an elevator—one family motivated by grim, tight-lipped anger and pain, the other lost in an agony of confusion and guilt. In years past, these two clans had behaved according to the norms of most contemporary extended families. Now, that fragile structure had collapsed into bitter dust. Seldom has a crime better demonstrated just how shallow, how transitory, latter 20th century middle-class American family relationships can really be.

  Only rarely, in the three weeks of the trial, did one of the Brodericks make the twenty-yard walk across the invisible line to display a trace of compassion for the hapless family of the woman who had killed their loved one—but when it happened, everyone in the corridor crowd noticed.

  "Hi, Frank," said Terry Broderick one morning, bashfully. One of Dan's younger brothers, now in his thirties and a stockbroker in San Diego, Terry was suddenly across enemy lines, standing in front of Betty's brother Frank, a big, friendly, shy Nashville businessman, who was sitting, sad-faced, with his wife, Maggie, one of Betty's college classmates. "I'm Terry," reminded young Broderick, holding out his hand. Frank Bisceglia looked at first stunned, then touched to the point of tears, then awkwardly embarrassed. So was Terry. The two men shook hands, muttered a few inanities about the weather and San Diego. They had nothing to discuss, the chat was only seconds long, but the handshake was worth a million words.

  In court, the two families sat on opposite sides of the aisle. At recesses, the Broderick siblings were constantly surrounded by a pin-striped gaggle of Dan's attorney friends. Adding
to the crowd were three of Betty's former, closest La Jolla lady friends—Gail Forbes, Helen Pickard, and Patti Monahan—all now prosecution witnesses. They showed up regularly, ostensibly to comfort Kim, who was usually weeping by recess. During court sessions, they sometimes hung around the halls, schmoozing with TV technicians and shooting the breeze with whoever else from the Broderick camp happened along. At lunch, everyone would go off together. An unseemly air of thrill overhung it all.

  Brad Wright, Dian Black, and Ronnie Brown, who came to court nearly every day, sat with the Bisceglia family. Lee attended only sporadically, but also sat with her mother's family. So sharply divided were the camps that the two sisters only rarely defied the pressures, even to go off for lunch together alone.

  "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," said Kerry Wells to the jury. "This case, to put it in the simplest possible terms, is about hate, revenge, and murder. It is about a woman who had so many things going for her that she could have done so much with, like a million-dollar home in La Jolla, like a $16,000-a-month income, like intelligence and education, friends, four beautiful children. But none of it was enough because she was so consumed by hate."

  Wells delivered her opening arguments from a podium, with a loose-leaf binder containing her entire speech before her. Her voice trembled at the start. She wore a severe gray suit. Her only concession to feminine decoration was a tiny coral rosette hanging on a thin chain just below her collar. If she had any makeup on, even lipstick, it didn't show. She looked pretty. Most of all, she looked innocent, earnest, and outgunned sitting all alone at her table, while Jack Earley, Marion Pasas, and Betty Broderick sat at the defense table. It was a strategic decision of the most calculating sort, of course. As in jury selection, Wells's aides were simply sitting in the audience.

  Her opening was brief—maybe thirty minutes—matter-of-fact, and untheatrical. She began with a tight focus.

  "This case is not only about murder—it is about premeditated murder," she told the jury. This case was about evil—not male-female domestic relationships, not about divorce. Betty Broderick had killed out of lowest, meanest jealous rage and had wantonly hurt her children in order to feed her own selfish needs. Period.

  Betty Broderick had driven across town to Dan and Linda's house, said Wells, and she had taken a gun, loaded with hollow-point bullets, which "are designed to kill." She had used stolen keys to let herself in a back door. She had crept up the stairs to their bedroom. She had not even walked directly into the bedroom through the main door, but instead crept around through a back entry, "where she would be the least likely to be seen by anyone sleeping in the room."

  During all this time, Wells pointed out, "she clearly had the opportunity to think about what she was doing, stop, to turn back—but she didn't."

  She recounted how Betty had repeatedly threatened to kill them: "Killing Dan and Linda Broderick was something she had thought about a long, long time," she told the jury.

  And so, "She snuck into Dan and Linda's home in Hillcrest in the early morning hours while they lay there sound asleep, at their most vulnerable. She shot them dead." If this wasn't a case of first-degree murder, Wells said, she didn't know what was.

  But that wasn't the end of Wells's argument. She then stepped beyond her first-degree murder scenario and into the swamps of divorce court. She spent the next half of her opening statement heaping blame on Betty for the failure of the marriage itself.

  "… It wasn't the loss of love or the emotional loss that made her so mad," Wells asserted. "The defendant has said that she was never in love with Dan Broderick, that she married him because she knew he was going to be a money-maker …"

  Therefore, in Wells's scenario, when Dan finally left, Betty was consumed with hatred simply because "she felt she was being gypped out of her investment in him as a money-maker and the prestige of being Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick …" To Kerry Wells, it was that simple: Betty Broderick was determined "to make him pay for being the one that left, and she didn't care who she destroyed in the process."

  She then focused on the "intentionally destructive" nature of Betty's actions over the years—everything from the vandalisms (car through the door, Boston cream pie, etc.) to the "obscene, vulgar, and ugly" phone messages.

  Especially the latter. Betty's messages would turn out to be Wells's favorite and perhaps most lethal weapon in trial. In pretrial hearings, Earley had argued heatedly that they should be inadmissible since they were taken out of context; they were but a handful of rash remarks made over a period of years in the course of literally thousands of messages, he protested. Wells insisted that the messages instead showed premeditation. Earley had also argued that Betty's thirty-minute 1987 conversation with Danny should not be allowed in court since the recording was made without her knowledge—illegal in California. Wells countered that Betty clearly knew someone was listening in. Earley further argued that if the selected tapes Dan had edited out of hundreds of Betty's phone messages from 1986 to 1989 were relevant, then Betty's own diaries from those several years should be equally admissible in their entirety, as rebuttal. Why was it fair to play dozens of Dan's hand-picked tapes to the jury as evidence of Betty's state of mind during those years, asked Earley, without giving her own personal writings over three years equal weight in establishing her deteriorating state of mind?

  He lost. Whelan ruled for Wells on both counts. The tapes were legitimate evidence, but the diaries were irrelevant. The latter could be quoted selectively by expert witnesses, but would not be admissible in their entirety.

  In a pattern she would maintain throughout the trial, Wells then played a few of Betty's messages, standing by with arms crossed, lips pursed in distaste. Before the trial was over, she played so many of the tapes that reporters and even a few jurors began to listen with expressions of boredom.

  But the first time around, they carried plenty of shock value, mainly because of the deliberate, purring nonchalance in Betty's voice. As her words filled the courtroom, Betty busied herself writing on her legal pad, her expression as intent and unperturbed as that of a woman writing thank-you notes.

  Wells wound up quickly. Puckered as a woman spitting out a mouthful of castor oil, she told jurors how vile Betty had been in her language to Dr. Ruth Roth: "The little fucker was mine and he'll stay mine." Wells talked about how Betty had "dumped her children" on Dan's doorstep. She skimmed over the years of litigation, the contempts, the jailings, and the divorce trial. Instead she merely reminded the jury that Betty Broderick had walked off with $16,000 a month—"that's $192,000 a year!" She also credited Dan Broderick for his own success. He was a "unique" person who had worked hard for his wealth. Before she was done, Wells even brought up Dan's drinking habits, defending them as purely social.

  Jack Earley couldn't believe his good luck. Just as he had hoped, Kerry Wells was going to "get down into the mud" with him. He fairly skipped to the lectern, with visions of miscarriages, drunk driving arrests, unheated Boston basement apartments, Avon products, and red Corvettes dancing in his head. Gone was the worried Jack Earley of only twenty-four hours before. Now he was a man possessed of pain and indignation at all men who treat their wives the way Dan Broderick had treated his.

  His opening argument lasted nearly three hours.

  Unlike Wells, Earley used no notes to guide him. Instead, he shambled over to the jury and, peering at them solemnly, his tone flat, began his story.

  No two attorneys were ever more different in style. As Earley shuffles around the courtroom, ruminating, searching his mind for his next thought, peeping through his glasses and sometimes looking a little like a bewildered, myopic Mr. McGoo crossed with Lieutenant Columbo, he is ingratiating in the extreme. But his extemporaneous approach takes its toll on syntax, which he sometimes murders.

  Here, for example, are the first few paragraphs of his opening:

  "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to start by an apology on something that you will probably see, that the evid
ence will show through the trial, that is at least a problem with time," he began. "There is a lot of details in this case, there is a lot of evidence for you to have, and so to be able to put it in context and put it in order, there is going to be some time that is taken, some meticulous time. There may be times where it is frustrating, or frustrating for you, as the evidence is trying to be presented in logical order so that you can have it at the end.

  "One of the things that maybe we're not used to here in California, and the evidence is going to show, that what Elisabeth Broderick started to deal with in this case was a snowstorm. You are going to see a snowstorm of paper, a litigious assault that started sometime in 1985. You're going to see that there was a person who, while raised in the East Coast and knowing how to deal with snowstorms, had no training, no background, with the snowstorm of white paper that you will see, which takes eight volumes for the court to hold, not counting her paperwork or the paperwork that she was given. You will hear about Daniel Broderick, who was a very prominent, very well-known lawyer. He was very liked by the legal community; he fit in, and he had what people said was meticulous—somebody that you didn't want to be his opponent, because he negotiated sitting on your chest, someone whose reputation as a lawyer was the most important thing to him, more important than his family, more important than his children, more important than anything. He would do anything to protect it."

  With Jack Earley it is better to paraphrase. To his credit, he sounds a lot better in person than on paper. Jurors later said that they understood what he was driving at, even when he digressed into East Coast snowstorms. He also has an astonishing memory for detail, and he is a very good storyteller, thanks mainly to his intensity. "This guy grows on you, doesn't he?" remarked Union reporter John Gaines about two hours into Earley's presentation.