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

by Bella Stumbo

  Wells then invited Kim to embarrass her sister. What about Dan's conflict with Lee, leading him to write her out of his will?

  With a shy smile at her sister, sitting in the front row, Kim obliged.

  Well, she said, Dad hadn't meant to be mean to Lee. He was "just upset … Lee got caught doing drugs at school … and she stole things." So Dad was only trying to shape her up—through her purse.

  Jack Earley's burden, in his cross-examination of Betty Broderick's daughter, was to somehow discredit her, embarrass her, reveal her distortions—but with gentleness in the extreme. Eloise Duffield, he knew, would not like him a bit if he was too mean, too sarcastic toward this young victim of such a terrible family tragedy. Of all the jurors, Eloise Duffield, the sixty-two-year-old mother of four who sat in the back row of the jury box generally observing all she saw with tight-lipped disapproval, had become Earley's daily weathervane. The smaller her mouth grew, the more he worried. "I just can't tell if it's me she hates more, or Kerry," he brooded.

  His tone was pleasantly bland, as he addressed Kim. He looked like a kindly schoolteacher, correcting a messy history paper. For the next couple of hours, Earley tried to make Kim admit that she had helped inflame her mother's ragged emotions throughout the divorce with her complaints about Dan's treatment of her and Linda's meddling. Hadn't she often called Betty from college, crying about how Dan was cheapskating on her budget? Hadn't she complained constantly to Betty about the worn-out state of her wardrobe, and Linda's interference? Weren't there some contradictions in her testimony? Earley asked mildly.

  Rummaging among his evidence boxes, he even produced a pair of Kim's high school shoes, which Betty had once presented in divorce court as proof of Dan's negligence. They were black, short-heeled pumps, so run down that at least half an inch of the white plastic spines were showing.

  Kim Broderick, brown eyes flashing, was ready to take him on. With a slight smile of condescension, she said those shoes had not bothered her in the least. Instead, it was her mother who had been so shocked by the sight of them that she had confiscated them and said, "You are forbidden to wear these."

  As for her complaints to Betty about Dan's rigid budgeting of her monthly college expenses, "I was laughing about it," she insisted. Mom simply mistook her mock tears for the real thing. Mom was like that.

  Earley sparred with Kim over everything from Dan's grocery budget to the names he and Linda called Betty in front of the children. Kim agreed that Dan and Linda had both called Betty fat and crazy. But she would volunteer nothing more. It was like pulling teeth. Kim Broderick was not going to offer anything to help her mother.

  Finally, Earley obliged her to at least concede that her father was also given to his own temper fits. Yes, Kim said, testily, Dan had once hammered a defective lawnmower to bits, he had thrown a sliding glass door off the bedroom balcony on another occasion, and once he had tossed an aquarium out a window, although, she added defensively, no fish were in it. "It was already broken."

  At last, Earley could stand her defiance not a minute longer. He began taunting her—and, at the same time, flashing forbidden character evidence before the jury.

  Would it change your mind about your father, he asked, if you knew he had written a blackmail letter to Wilma Engel? That he had poured beer on Linda in a bar?

  Kim looked shocked. "Dad wouldn't do that." She was on the verge of tears. All she wanted, she finally snapped in a breaking voice, was to see that "the other side of this story comes out, too."

  Earley had overstepped himself, and he knew it, and he backed off fast. Eloise Duffield was beginning to shift in her chair, her mouth now the size of a dime.

  But in the corridor afterward, Kim, for once, was not crying. Instead, surrounded by Broderick siblings and the La Jolla ladies, she was laughing angrily as she held up her foot. See, she said—all her shoes were run-down, even this pair, because she was pigeon-toed.

  Later, Kim Broderick sat in a bar near the courthouse, nursing a Coke and bumming cigarettes, as she remembered the day in 1985 when her mother left her at Dan's house. The memory still brought her close to tears.

  She was only fifteen at the time. "And I never understood that he was having an affair. I didn't know a lot of things that were making Mom so mad," she said. "But even now that I'm older, I still don't understand why she had to take it out on me! She never explained anything," said Kim bitterly. "She just dumped me at his house and drove off!"

  Her father relied on her to help him out, she said. He asked her what he should bring home for dinner, he asked her to help him figure out how to cook it. She liked it—which is why, she admitted with blushing candor, she didn't want him to marry Linda. "I didn't want Dad to marry anybody … our relationship was getting so good, I didn't want somebody else to interfere. I knew he wouldn't need me as much anymore."

  She recalled her parent's fights in her childhood. Her mother, she said, was always "so jealous about the craziest things." Once when she was very small, for example, the family was watching a country-western music special on TV, when Crystal Gayle came on "with her hair down to the ground, and Dad was talking about how pretty it was … And Mom went nuts. She yelled at him about how ugly it was and how it must have dead ends, and that he shouldn't talk about other women in front of her."

  And, yes, she said, as she got older she played both sides against the middle. Whenever Dan wouldn't give her money for something she wanted, she would "go running to Mom, hysterical." But she never expected the day to come when she would hear her mother telling her over a telephone not only that she had just shot her father but "that she had killed him for me! That she couldn't stand the way he was treating me!"

  Her face colored as she fought back tears. "What did I ever do to deserve that guilt?" she asked in pitiful exasperation.

  And so, maybe if Betty Broderick had been able to apologize to her oldest daughter for shooting the father she loved, if she had been able even once to say that she was sorry for hurting her children, if she had been able to explain honestly, even five years later, why she had left Kim at Dan Broderick's empty house that spring night back in 1985—how frightened she herself had really been beneath her anger—it might have made a difference. Maybe. But Betty never could do any of that.

  Two of Betty's relatives were also in town that day—her youngest brother Mike, an electronics company executive from New Jersey, and her cousin Connie Lawler, a svelte airline executive married to a New York City criminal attorney. That evening they visited Betty in jail. Neither had spoken to her in over two years. But it was easy to tell what they were hearing, just watching Betty, as she spoke to them by turns from the visitor phone. She was flushed, radiant, animated, on fast forward. She was telling them "the story."

  Both emerged from the visiting room looking stunned. "That's not the Betty Anne I know," said Lawler, aghast. Not once in thirty minutes had Betty asked a single personal question about family, as the old Betty would have done. Instead, said Lawler, she had raved like a loon. "She's manic! Why isn't someone helping her?"

  Mike Bisceglia looked shocked enough to cry. Then, angrily, he wanted to know why Jack Earley wasn't attempting some sort of psychiatric defense? "Betty Anne could have a chemical imbalance, to make her do something like this." He swore to discuss it with Earley.

  But, next day, both Lawler and Mike Bisceglia were gone, and Betty Broderick was a woman alone again, with only Dian Black to complain futilely in her behalf.

  Just as Kerry Wells loved Dan Broderick's tapes, she also loved his housekeepers. They became another of her favored trial weapons. Before this drama was done, she would call four of them to testify to Betty's hate of Dan and Linda, her threats to kill them, and whatever other assorted items they could think of to inflict further damage.

  Linda David, Dan's housekeeper for six months in 1987, portrayed Betty as a calculating, vengeful woman who never really loved her husband. She said Betty had told her she only married Dan because she knew he would
be a money-maker. After the divorce, David quoted Betty as saying that she knew Dan and Linda only wanted to be left alone but that it would never happen. "I'll either make his life a living hell or I'll kill him."

  Sylvia Cavins, David's mother and Dan's housekeeper for the last two years of his life, talked about Betty's greed, which annoyed Cavins in the extreme. "I told her once that some men support their families [for a year] on what she got for a month," said Cavins, who also lectured the boys similarly. Once Cavins said she had even taken the two Broderick sons on a tour of the ghetto and told them "they shouldn't believe it when Betty said she was having money problems." In her coup de grace, Cavins also testified that Betty had threatened to her personally to "put four bullets in Dan's head, one for each of the children" at his wedding. Furthermore, said Cavins, Betty predicted that she would get away with it, "because when the jury found out what Dan did to her, she said they would let her off."

  The other two housekeepers were nowhere near as impressive as Cavins and her daughter, either in appearance or manner. One was Marta Shaver, a nervous, high-strung, middle-aged woman with an immovable cap of auburn hair that looked like a wig, who had been Dan's first housekeeper for a year. The other was Robin Tu'ua, an angry Amazon, as tall and heavy as Betty, but with a decided eye to her own sex appeal. Her colored blond hair fell to her waist, and she wore as much makeup as Tammy Faye Bakker, albeit more skillfully applied. She described herself as Dan's “governess," after Shaver left.

  Shaver was so theatrically rehearsed, particularly in telling about the "total devastation" of Betty's Boston cream pie caper, that Earley finally sniped that she should take her tale to Hollywood. Whelan yelled at him to “Knock that off!" ["Let's be logical about this," Betty said later, laughing at the whole episode. "How could I have possibly gotten that much mileage out of the cunt's crappy little pie?"]

  Tu'ua admitted once eavesdropping on a telephone conversation between Betty and Rhett, in which, she said, Betty had told the crying boy that he couldn't come visit her until he got rid of Linda. Betty's language was so crude that "I would prefer not to repeat the words," said Tu'ua primly, adding that Betty had once threatened to shoot her, too.

  Wells's next witness was Betty's old friend Patti Monahan, whom Betty had telephoned on the morning of the killings, allegedly to utter the gruesome line, "It's true, they do shit their pants, and I could hear him gurgling in his own blood."

  But, by trial time, Monahan said she could no longer remember exactly what Betty had told her, except that she had been "very graphic."

  Monahan's memory lapse was a nuisance for Kerry Wells, but not a significant one. Over Jack Earley's impassioned objections that it was double hearsay, Whelan allowed Wells to trot Monahan's boyfriend onto the stand to testify that, even if Patti couldn't recall, he remembered exactly what Patti said Betty told her that morning. And so the grisly quote—which Betty always heatedly denied—was entered into testimony.

  There wasn't much Earley could do after that—except, in one of the more bizarre footnotes of the entire trial, enter into evidence a crime report clearly stating that Dan Broderick "had not defecated before he died."

  On cross-exam, lacking much alternative, Earley settled for humiliating Monahan as best he could. He obliged her to reveal publicly that, after twenty-two years of marriage, she was receiving only $2,700 a month from her own successful attorney ex-husband.

  "Do you think a wife deserves half of the community property?" Earley asked.

  "Well, I don't know," Monahan said hesitantly. "I never gave it a thought ... I didn't think of percentages ... I only thought about what it took to lead a full, lucrative life, and what a woman needed to be happy …"

  In criminal court, as in divorce court before, Lee Broderick was always the odd child out. Of all the Broderick children, perhaps none was more cruelly used in the ugly struggle between her parents than Lee. Before she was even eighteen, Lee Broderick had been bounced around, bartered, branded bad, and generally treated like everybody's most annoying, unwanted pest, instead of like a young girl with more reason than most to stray from the sweetheart path.

  After the killings, she became even more of a pariah, at least among the Broderick clan, because she consistently refused to say that her father was a complete saint and her mother a total bitch. Lee never departed from the idea that it was a two-way street.

  But, as would later become amply clear in court, Lee Broderick never really belonged to either side. To the contrary, she may have been more hurt than any of the other children by her father's death, simply because she never got the opportunity to win back his approval, to make peace, to feel his hug one more time, as she had when she was a child. So many of the early Broderick family photos show a beautiful little girl with chubby cheeks and sparkling eyes, of maybe four or five, sitting on her handsome young dad's lap, the two of them always touching, his arm around her, her arms around his neck, or just holding hands, always looking at each other with such uncomplicated love.

  Wells called Lee to the witness stand, ostensibly to establish the events of the morning of the killings. More likely, she did it for the sake of appearance, to dilute any notion among jurors that she was afraid of Lee's testimony.

  Lee was very nervous that morning, pacing the courthouse hallway with her boyfriend. Looking at her, it is easy to believe that Betty Broderick once weighed 110 pounds at 5'10". Lee is the same physical type that Betty once was, tall and almost painfully thin. She is also very pretty, with dark eyes and hair like her sister, but with sharper, more angular features. Her style of dressing is also different. She wasn't making any attempt to look like Little Bo Peep on the witness stand. Instead, she wore a tailored brown plaid miniskirt and brown blazer, with a string of pearls.

  "How do I look?" she asked, looking miserable.

  Wells approached her with caution, asking a series of perfunctory questions about the morning of November 5, when her mother called her.

  In a quivering voice, Lee recited the same details she had reported so many times before. It was all routine by now, she had told the story to so many police officers, investigators, and family members.

  It was only when Lee repeated for the jury that her mother had said she "pulled the phone out of the wall so he couldn't save himself" that Jack Earley looked as if he might swallow his lips. It was a devastating line that Lee would later amend in the second trial: Her mother had not said why she pulled out the phone—it was only Lee's assumption that she had done it "so that he couldn't save himself." But that was a year later. For now, the damage was done.

  Like Kim, Lee also agreed that Betty had often threatened to kill Dan. Oh, yeah, she said, with a shrug. "She had talked about it for a number of years."

  Throughout her testimony, after her initial stage fright passed, Lee's voice was matter-of-fact, detached; this was not her life, it was a movie she had once seen. Not until later, when Pasas and Earley were yelling at her outside, did Lee Broderick even realize how damning her innocent remarks had sounded.

  Wells, increasingly confident that this witness wasn't going to explode in her face, asked Lee about the night Betty had run the car into Dan's front door. Wells's tone had warmed notably.

  "Oh, yeah, she was definitely trying to do some harm to him," said Lee. Wells also got Lee to remember that, during a shopping trip to Nordstrom's on the weekend of the killings, her mother had been angry about the letters she had received from Dan's lawyers the day before. Wells almost smiled.

  "Did you love your father?" asked Wells, before sitting down. "Yes," said Lee, flushing.

  Earley looked as puckered as a man who had just eaten a wad of raw garlic as he took up cross-examination of the daughter he had expected to be his best foil to Kim. But since he would be calling her back as a witness in his own case, he was interested for now only in damage control.

  He reminded her—and the jury—that one of the earlier theories was that she was somehow to blame for her father's death.


  Lee agreed. "I was told by my lawyer that they were going to try to make it look like I had something to do with it." But, again, she showed no real emotional reaction.

  Earley got her to explain that her mother constantly threatened, as a manner of speech, to "kill people." Oh, sure, said Lee, looking surprised at the question. Mom was always saying she wanted to kill "a lot of people" when she was mad.

  And, yes, on the night Betty ran her car into Dan's door, he had refused to talk to her during the hour before. He had said, "Talk to my lawyer. Get out of my house." So Betty had left, and then returned to do her damage. When the police came, Lee added softly, apropos of nothing, they had taken her mother away "in a straitjacket."

  On the subject of Betty's personality, Lee agreed that Betty always hid her true feelings. "She always tries to pretend like everything's okay. But she can only fake it so long …" Lee also said her mother often told her that she "was scared of [Dan] and wished he would stop beating her up [in court]."

  Earley sat down. Lee would be back. Meantime, his gloomy expression said, he couldn't wait to have a word or two with her in the woodshed.

  There was never much apparent order to Kerry Wells's case.

  Now, departing from Patti Monahan and Lee, both of whom at least had some information bearing directly on Betty Broderick's state of mind at the time of the killings, Wells headed once again into the morass of domestic fault.

  It remained one of the central ironies of Betty Broderick's murder trials that the woman who couldn't get what she regarded as a fair divorce settlement in 1989, thanks to no-fault divorce laws, was now, in criminal court, going to prison for life if Kerry Wells got her way, based strictly on fault—not only for the killings, but also the domestic tensions leading to the divorce itself.

  It was Betty's fault, Wells argued, that the marriage had gone sour; it was her fault that Dan had left her; it was her fault that Dan was obliged to lie about his affair with Linda. "She threatened to commit suicide, way back in 1983," Kerry Wells once declared. "He was afraid to tell her the truth!"