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

by Bella Stumbo

  Wells called as her next witness Betty's former friend Helen Pickard, who turned out to be as enthusiastic in condemning Betty Broderick's personal habits as Kim and the Forbes couple.

  Betty was smart, charismatic, charming, said Pickard—but she was also a self-centered, extravagant, thoughtless woman who had picked on her husband for years. The children, said Pickard, were never the real issue. Dan and Linda were. And money.

  "She talked about them incessantly … she couldn't let go of it," said Pickard. "And she didn't want the children until she got a financial settlement … that definitely had to come first." Betty was "real close to money … She worshipped it. It was her main goal in life. She was an alcoholic spender," said Pickard, delivering a line that would be the next day's headline.

  On the Saturday before the murders, Betty had been "extremely upset" about Dan's announced plans to begin a new family, Pickard said. "Her last question to me was, 'Is Linda pregnant?'"

  In perhaps the most damaging blow of all, Pickard also recalled a telephone call she received from Betty in jail less than three weeks after the killings. Betty told her that she'd never been happier, and that Linda had been "destroying my life, my children, my social standing," said Pickard—and so Betty had destroyed Linda instead. "And, then," said Pickard, voice breaking, hand fluttering to her throat, "She laughed!"

  Jack Earley, for once, did not belabor his cross-exam.

  Instead, he walked up to the lectern, and, with an expression of utter disdain, remarked, "You've described a pretty disgusting person whose main concern was money, whose only redeeming quality was her pretty clothes … And yet, for whatever reasons, this was your friend?" It wasn't a question. It was a statement. He then turned on his heel and sat down, without giving Pickard a chance to respond. So there she sat, open-mouthed and blushing, confused that, suddenly, it was all over.

  But her discomfort didn't last long. In the corridor outside, her friends waited. Kim hugged her. Gail Forbes did, too. The media clucked about, asking questions. Within five minutes, Pickard was making jokes about Jack's picture display of Betty in earlier days. "I looked better at twenty-nine, too," she quipped. There was no charity here.

  Wells finished the day by reading to the jury her favorite selection from Betty's diaries; the November, 1988, notation said that:

  "There is no better reason in the world for someone to kill than to protect their home, possessions, and family from attack and destruction. You are the sickest person alive. A law degree does not give you license to kill and destroy, nor does it give you immunity from punishment. No one will mourn you."

  Earley protested again, in vain. That issue had already been resolved. Wells could pick and choose, but the jury would never be allowed to read Betty's diaries in their entirety.

  "I'm gonna keep Betty on the stand a week!" he swore after court that day, as angry as he ever got. "I'm going to take her through every one of those diaries, line by line, to show that one quote in its context!"

  So far, the week had been a complete rout for the defense. And it wasn't over. As Earley well knew, Wells had more damning testimony to come. "You know," he said, straight-faced, "Maybe I should just argue that no case is this good. It's too good to be true. Therefore, it can't be true."

  Marion Pasas didn't think any of it was funny anymore. Betty was wearing her down with her upbeat, frivolous courtroom manner. That day, clowning around during the morning session, Betty had stuck her tongue out at the courtroom photographer. "Even the bailiffs warned her at one point to remember that the jurors were watching her," said Pasas. "This whole case is so bad, it's like a landslide that won't stop!"

  Pasas studied her dagger red acrylics. Her yearning to bite one was tangible. A thumbnail had broken off. As she regarded the ugly, naked stub morosely, she lapsed into a nostalgia trip of the sort that perhaps only another criminal investigator can really understand. One of her very favorite clients, she reminisced, had been "an enforcer for a drug dealer. He did a murder for hire; he put fifteen holes in a snitch. He was ugly, but he was perfect in court," Pasas remembered fondly. "He never did anything, he never said anything. There was nothing he showed to the jury that was unlikable!" He got eleven years.

  But Betty Broderick might get life.

  Pasas would never believe Betty Broderick deserved the long prison term she was bound to get. She liked Betty. Lately she had even been acting as her caterer. For the first time in a year, Betty could now have something for lunch besides the standard jailhouse bologna sandwich and apple—but only if Pasas remembered to bring it. "So every day, I try to remember. Sometimes I take her a fruit salad, and real coffee, or brie and French bread. She gets so excited, especially when I bring her coffee—and she loves Payday candy bars. She's always so grateful when I bring in that bag." Pasas was making herself feel lousy, because yesterday she had forgotten. "She's always real sweet about it. She tries to pretend that she really doesn't mind … but I can see how disappointed she is." Pasas's earlier frustration over Betty's maddening, self-destructive courtroom behavior had evaporated entirely. She was now too depressed with herself for letting even one day pass without bringing this woman who would be going to prison for so many years a fresh piece of fruit, a cup of coffee, and a candy bar with nuts. "Tomorrow," she said, "I think I'll get her a crab salad. And some grapes. She'll like that."

  Melancholy had spread to the Broderick camp, too, during this first week of trial. With each morning's headlines, with every evening newscast, the friends and family of Dan and Linda Broderick were obliged to relive their pain. Not far from Pasas's office, in one of San Diego's most fashionable new Italian restaurants, attorney Sharon Blanchet was going through it all in her mind once again over dinner. It was just so unfair that Betty had killed them. So impossible. So unreal still, after all this time. She remembered the evening before Dan and Linda were married like yesterday.

  "Linda had bought Dan a pocket watch," Blanchet said. "But the night before, Maggie dropped it, and it broke. And I remember thinking instantly, 'No more time.' ... I know it sounds silly," she said with a self-conscious smile, "but I'll never forget it. That phrase just ran through my mind—it came out of nowhere: 'No more time.'"

  The last day of Kerry Wells's case was yet another mixed bag of witnesses. First she called Steve Frantz, a local attorney, who recalled meeting Betty at a shooting range in 1986. He remembered her, Frantz said, because she was such a terrific shot. She hit the bull's-eye every time.

  Next, Wells summoned Brad Wright, ostensibly for the purpose of asking him about the weekend events surrounding the crime. But, just as important, Wells wanted to establish firmly in the eyes of the jurors that, for all Betty Broderick's complaints about Dan and Linda, she herself also had a good-looking, virile young lover, right up to the night of the killings.

  Wright's manner was thoughtful, cautious, mature. Yes, he agreed, he had been Betty's "boyfriend" since 1985. Betty blushed like a girl and smiled sweetly at him throughout his testimony. Here, for the first time in her life, was a man—unlike father, brothers, and husband—who had always been willing to stand beside her, publicly and without shame, no matter what.

  That's loyalty. And now, Kerry Wells was trying to crack it. It was laughable. There was always about Brad Wright an almost childlike naivety, a thing way beyond guile, which rendered him incapable of seeing ordinary events in the same way that most adults do. His wall of innocence was impenetrable.

  So far as he could tell, Wright told Wells, Betty was just fine the night before the crimes. He recited the routine of the evening. Dinner, TV, and bed. When he heard Betty's Suburban firing up at around dawn, he thought nothing of it, because she was an early riser. He thought she was off for her daily walk on the beach. He went back to sleep. The next he knew, Danny was waking him to say that Dian Black was on the telephone. He and Forbes had then gone to discover the bodies. After which, he had gone sailing. Jurors gasped at that news, reporters snickered. Otherwise, Wright was useles
s to Wells. She tried in vain to make him say that Betty would sometimes cancel weekends with the children whenever "she found out Dan and Linda had plans." Wright blinked at her, befuddled. To the contrary, he said, Betty was always canceling weekends with him because of her plans with the children. They always came first.

  Wasn't it true, Wells demanded, that Betty had told the "kids to stab Linda?" Wright offered one of his best, boyish smiles. He had sure never heard that one before, he said. Wells finally gave up.

  Finally, Wells called Dr. Ruth Roth, the marriage and family therapist who had briefly attempted in 1987, at the behest of both Dan's and Betty's attorneys, to mediate the Broderick divorce dispute.

  Never in her entire career, declared Roth, had she confronted a case so unsolvable as the Broderick matter. Not because of Dan Broderick, but because of his strange, wild wife. In her three sessions with Betty, Roth found her entirely uncontrollable.

  She told of Betty's threats to kill Dan before she would become a single mother of four; she told about her Tarasoff warnings to Dan.

  But, Roth said, despite Betty's anger at Dan, she had still repeatedly tried to persuade Betty to take custody of the boys. In Roth's view, it simply made more sense for the "stay-at-home mommy" to have custody of the children, with the working father visiting. But Betty wouldn't hear of it.

  With a prim apology to the jury for her language, Roth then read Betty's precise words to the court: "I'm not going to be the single parent of four kids. He'll die first …" And, "The less I see of them, the better. No kids, no bother … he's a cuntfucker."

  During one session, Roth testified, she and Betty had gotten into a squabble over Betty's terminology. Referring to her notes, Roth thought that at one point, Betty had accused Dan of "sucking." But, she told the jury, deadpan, Betty had gotten furious and yelled at her: "I said fucking, not sucking. He fucks, she sucks!" Almost everyone in the courtroom fought back smiles except Kerry Wells.

  Not until the second trial did Jack Earley become organized enough to realize that, besides her three sessions with Betty, Roth had also interviewed Dan once during her mediation efforts—but, she said during the second trial, she hadn't taken any notes on Dan. It was, Roth admitted, the only time in her career that she could recall not taking notes on a client. She couldn't remember why she had made that exception for Dan Broderick.

  It was enough for Earley. With a slight smirk, he sat down—but not before reminding the jury that, in all the long years of the Broderick divorce war, which included numerous psychiatric reports on Betty and all four children, there was never even one thin file on Dan Broderick's mental health. Only he had not been formally evaluated, ever.

  With that, the prosecution's case was concluded. Now it was Jack Earley's turn.

  That night, he looked frazzled, distracted and rigid with worry, as he headed off to Las Colinas for one last session to "prep" his client for her testimony. Betty would be his first witness in the morning.

  For weeks, the defense team had discussed it, worried it, analyzed it, and fought their own doubts about whether or not she could do it. And now, at the eleventh hour, the question was still alive.

  "I'm telling you, she's ICP," Pasas told Earley one last time.

  "Uhmmmmn," he muttered. "Well, let's see how it goes tonight …"

  While he was gone, both Pasas and Earley's assistant attorney, Lisa Bowman, sat in tense anticipation in their offices, waiting to hear whether it was red alert, or an aborted mission.

  Would Earley decide to give it up? Would he take one last look at his angry, remorseless client and decide that she was too out of touch to defend herself? Would he file for an incompetency hearing?

  The two women worked silently through the evening, preparing the defense. Pasas poured over her thick stack of witness interviews, writing out questions for Earley to ask and making last-minute phone calls to witnesses. Bowman worried over her charts and graphs, and time lines showing the "litigious assault" Betty had suffered over the years.

  Two hours later, Earley called Pasas from his car phone.

  "I think she can do it," he said.

  "Oh, shit," said Pasas, putting down the phone with a sigh. It was all systems go. Ready the nukes. Betty Broderick would hit the witness stand in the morning.

  Chapter 35

  The Defense

  The hallway was more jammed than usual on October 30, the day Betty Broderick took the witness stand in her own defense. Court-watchers, some carrying lawn chairs and brown-bag lunches, had arrived at the crack of dawn to be first in line the minute the doors were opened.

  The press was out in double force. One local TV station would even interrupt its regularly scheduled soap operas and talk shows during the next four days to present Betty's testimony live—and, as later ratings would verify, it was a smart decision. Half the housewives in San Diego, it seemed, were pleased to pass up a few episodes of ‘As the World Turns’ and ‘Sally Jessy Raphael’ to follow the saga of Dan and Betty and Linda.

  Elisabeth Anne Broderick, wearing a muted beige plaid suit with gored skirt, took the stand. After all those frustrating years of trying to tell her story, she at last had the full attention of the city of San Diego, and beyond. The floor was finally hers.

  She looked pale and scared. Her bottle-blond jailhouse hair looked yellow as a lemon rind, her curls lay too close about her head, without style or order. She was so nervous she even forgot to smile.

  "Good morning. When were you born?" asked Jack Earley.

  "November 7, 1947, New York City." Her voice trembled.

  Earley's tone was flat, his expression blank. He is not the sort of attorney who dithers with such amenities as setting his client at ease. But he is methodic: for the rest of the day, his droning questions would move Betty Broderick through every single aspect, large and small, of "the story:" from her Tupperware parties in college, to her face peel in 1983, to the day she burned her husband's clothes over Linda Kolkena, to her attorney search, to her shock at being denied even visitation rights with her children, and much, much more.

  Most striking about Betty's first hour of testimony was her own demeanor. The transformation was astonishing. This was not the same furious, funny, blasphemous Betty Broderick who had been on the jailhouse phones all summer. This Betty showed no emotion beyond nervous timidity. No edge of hate shaded her tone. No disrespect for the dead was evident. This Betty was docile, visibly struggling to be as pleasing as possible.

  But the strain in her voice was apparent, the struggle within her so evident that everyone in the courtroom sat braced, waiting for the break that was bound to come.

  Earley got her through most of their struggling student years—the part-time jobs, the unheated apartments, the harsh pregnancies, the bus rides to the laundromat with Kim on her hip—before she finally broke down.

  "During that period of time," asked Earley, "how was Dan dressing?"

  "Dan's always been very meticulous about his clothes," said Betty, lapsing into her unconscious, chilling present tense. "... He loves clothes, he looks very well in clothes. He always looked much better than the average student. He always wore a jacket and tie to class, where the average student was wearing T-shirts and jeans in those years …" Her voice paused, lingered, wavered, and finally broke. "He was very dapper. Dapper Dan, we always called him …"

  It was a delayed reaction. Seconds later, she was strangling in tears, her face reddened and crumpled in pure agony. In the days to come, Betty Broderick would cry many times, but never again would she be as convincing, as spontaneous, as pitiful as she was in this one moment, sparked by her own brief memories of Dapper Dan.

  But she regained her composure quickly. Within the next hour, she even succumbed to her obsessive need to take notes. Might she have a pencil and paper? she asked Judge Whelan in her bashful little-girl voice. Whelan looked startled, shrugged, and passed the problem on to Earley, who only looked embarrassed. Betty instantly dropped her request, once she saw that it w
as somehow out of line.

  Within the next thirty minutes, however, she breeched protocol again when she noticed Eloise Duffield, who had an admitted hearing problem, straining on the edge of her chair. With a solicitous expression, Betty asked the juror directly if she was speaking loud enough for her to hear.

  Never a conventional killer, neither would Betty Broderick be a conventional defendant.

  Throughout the day, as Earley led her from Harvard, to the Plum Tree Apartments, to La Jolla, Betty never once betrayed a trace of anger toward Dan Broderick—only the naive innocence of a woman who never once suspected that her happy home was going to hell, even before Linda Kolkena came along.

  When Dan first began going out drinking with the boys on weekends, she tried to understand, she said, "because the guy really did work so hard." But she was admittedly unhappy because he was never home. She wanted to move back East to be near her family. But Dan wouldn't agree. His career was going well, and "he did not want to start from zero anywhere else ... He begged me to stay here."

  So, in 1976, at her urging, they had gone to the Marriage Retreat, where he had written her his letters, promising that once he reached his material goals, everything would be better. (Betty's own letters from that weekend retreat could not be found until the second trial.)

  Earley was of course eager to get Dan's letters entered into evidence, since they were solid proof, written in Dan's own hand, that Dan Broderick had always been a man far more interested in things than in people—and one, too, who had scoffed at the Catholic Church as "uncool." There were at least four Catholics on the jury.

  Thus, Earley prodded Betty to discuss them in detail, to establish that they had been of immense significance to her throughout the marriage, that they were a major factor in her later depressed state of mind.