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

by Bella Stumbo

  She got in the car to go down to the beach. But, instead, she said, "I thought that I am just going to go over there and talk to him and tell him that I just can't stand this anymore, it has to stop. It is ruining everyone, ruining me, ruining the kids ... I just thought the whole thing was so senseless … They were married. They had everything! Why couldn't they just let me and the kids have a life?" Her voice was steady now, the tears .gone.

  "What were you going to do when you got over there?" Earley asked.

  "Just talk to him, like I had before, just tell him, 'If you don't cut this out, I'm just going to kill myself.' I wanted to kill myself right in front of him … Just splash my brains all over his goddamn house!"

  It was purely coincidental, she said, that when she got to Dan's house, she discovered a house key that had belonged to Kim, laying in the front seat of her car in a box of miscellaneous keys she was moving to her condo. Then she remembered that she always carried her gun in the center compartment of her handbag, which she said had been locked in the car, when she got into it earlier. It was only on the spur of the moment, as she parked in front of Dan's house, she said, that she decided to take the gun with her, "as a show of force—a way to make him listen to me." How this incidental fit into her earlier talk of suicide was never clear.

  When she arrived in the bedroom, Earley asked, "Were Dan or Linda up?"

  "I didn't meet either of them up, no," she said.

  The audience waited with interest. In his opening, Jack Earley had said, one of them cried, 'Call the police.' Now, surely, the courtroom was about to hear that she was provoked, frightened, spooked into her heinous act.

  "What happened when you went into the door?" Earley asked.

  "I pushed the door open a little more than it was. I just stood in there. And it looked like Linda moved, and she went toward Dan, and Dan went toward the phone."

  "Did anyone say anything?" asked Earley. What followed was an exchange that would come back to haunt him in the second trial. But it sounded good now.

  "I don't know," she said. "... I don't know what happened because it was dark to me. I don't know if their shades were down or if I was in shock ... it was dark. I didn't see, I didn't hear. Everything happened that fast."

  "What did you do?" Earley asked.

  "I went into the room to talk to them or to wake them up or something. They moved, I moved, and it was over." Did Dan speak, asked Earley?

  "I hardly really remember being there at all," she said. She was calm now, her red face gone. She was concentrating. "I told people afterward that I thought that Dan said something. I thought that he did. I thought that when I got around the bed, I had a gun in my hand, and he said, 'You got me.' I don't know. This is all what I thought later, that he was saying to me, 'Don't shoot'."

  "What did you do?" asked Earley.

  "I grabbed the phone out of the wall and ran out." The reason she did that, she said, was because "I didn't want him to call the police and have me arrested."

  "Once you were in jail," Earley asked, "can you describe what your feeling was?"

  She responded quickly, almost smiling.

  "When I was first in jail, I don't remember being there … And then I started coming out of it a little, and then I slept. I was able to sleep for the first time in what seemed like interminable years to me. I was happy to be locked in a dark, safe little world where nobody could get me."

  "Are you happy about what you did?" Earley asked. "Well, of course not," she snapped. "No. Not at all." "Do you feel responsibility for the things you have done?" "Yes." Period.

  "Has that been an easy thing for you to get in touch with?" he asked. "No." Period.

  "I have no further questions, Your Honor," said Earley.

  It was nearly three P.M. Little more than an hour of the day was left—but it belonged to Kerry Wells. At last, after all these months, Wells would have the opportunity to exchange her first words with the woman she wanted to imprison for life.

  Chapter 36

  Kerry and Betty

  Betty spent most of the recess crying, said Pasas, who sat with her in the tiny holding tank beyond the courtroom. When she returned to court, tears still streaming, she looked worse than she had before. Her mascara was smeared, her face was swollen, she had eaten off her lipstick; even her curls had fallen flat. She carried a wadded ball of Kleenex in her hand. As she took the witness stand, she kept her face down, looking at no one.

  Kerry Wells marched to the lectern with barely a glance at the weeping killer and commenced:

  "We have covered quite a few subjects over the past couple of days with you," she said crisply, without preliminaries. "And I have quite a few questions to ask you. I may not be going chronologically, and if I am talking about something that you are not following, you make sure to let me know. Okay?"

  The transformation in Betty was instant. Her face cleared, the tears stopped, her eyes focused on the slender young district attorney standing rigidly before her. Betty Broderick knew the time for crying was done. Now was the time for concentration. Concentrate.

  In ten minutes, even the puffiness disappeared. For the next two days, this would be a game of wits, two women vying for control. It was alternately funny, embarrassing, and absurd. And, it was always a battle of styles.

  Wells seemed too disgusted with Betty Broderick to even look at her. Instead, each time she approached the witness stand with an exhibit, she stood behind her, arms folded across her chest, chin jutting, literally looking down her nose at Betty through her sliding spectacles, so that Betty was obliged to twist around in her chair to face her inquisitor. Earley promptly objected that it was rude, and Whelan agreed. Wells had at least to face the defendant.

  Wells's first purpose was to portray Dan Broderick as a reasonable man who had done everything in his power to leave his wife peaceably—and fairly—to begin a new life, but had been thwarted every step of the way by a vengeful woman determined to destroy him rather than let him go. The only reason Dan Broderick had gotten a restraining order, then begun levying his fines, filling his contempts, and finally jailing her was because he was "at his wit's end" trying to control this wild woman who, as Wells often remarked, "lies about almost everything!"

  But Betty consistently defied the portrait Wells was trying to paint. At times the raw edge of her rage and ego showed; sometimes she retorted with irritability, sarcasm, or condescension. But, in the main, the harder Wells hammered at her, the more docile and obsequious Betty became. She was usually only polite, confused, and, beyond all else, eager to make Wells understand. She wanted Wells to like her.

  But Wells never did figure out that an ounce of sugar would get her a lot further with Betty Broderick than all her pounds of salt. By contrast to Betty, Wells only sounded harsher by the hour, increasingly unsympathetic not only to Betty, but also insensitive to the larger women's issues which Betty Broderick symbolized to countless aging, divorced women everywhere.

  Wells began with Dan's fining system, which was a mistake. For one thing, she was not in firm command of the chronology of the long Broderick divorce war. Plus, by now, as even many of Dan's friends would admit, his informal fines were not among his most attractive tactics. But Wells was determined to defend them from the outset.

  "It was the vandalizing of the [Coral Reef] home that led up to Dan ultimately fining you in your alimony, wasn't it?" Wells demanded.

  No, Betty corrected her—the fining didn't start for at least eight months after the Coral Reef house had been sold. And the fines were never for vandalism—only for her language.

  Wells was good at hiding her own confusion. Never mind, she snapped. The point was still the same: Dan's fines, whenever they occurred, were lawful, were they not? No court-ordered support was in effect at the time, was it? He was paying her $9,000 a month out of the goodness of his heart, was he not? He was merely withholding money to which she was legally not even entitled—wasn't that true? "If he really wanted to be a real jerk," dema
nded Wells, "he didn't have to pay you anything, did he?"

  Betty stared at Wells in momentary bewilderment. "Right," she finally agreed, quietly. Dan Broderick really didn't have to pay her anything.

  Wells's apparent lack of empathy for any long-term wife and mother who had been suddenly left dependent on the largesse of the departing husband always verged on the startling. Betty Broderick's talk of "fair share" seemed alien to her, at least in the courtroom.

  Next Wells plopped a thick stack of checks down in front of Betty, showing that Dan had been paying all her bills during their separation, and writing her personal checks, too. His checks were written to nearly every major department store in town. Wells selected one to show Betty. It was made out to Saks Fifth Avenue.

  "Did you shop at Saks?" demanded Wells.

  Betty looked at her with such innocent surprise that half the courtroom smiled. "I shopped everywhere," she said.

  "And what is this bill for—$425?" Wells demanded sarcastically, waving another bill. "A fur?"

  "Huh? $425?" Betty repeated, staring at Wells in astonishment. "For a fur?"

  Earley buried his smirk in his papers.

  Undaunted, Wells next waved a check for $3,000 under Betty's nose. It was made out by Dan to Betty. And what, Wells demanded to know, in the smug, theatrical manner of one who has just uncovered the smoking gun, had Betty written on the bottom of that check? "What did you say?"

  Whereupon, Elisabeth Anne Broderick, who had never wanted a divorce at all and, certainly, in early 1985, didn't believe that one would ever really occur, was obliged to read her private little note to her husband aloud before the court. She blushed, her voice was soft.

  "Thanks, sweetie," is what it said.

  Presumably, in Kerry Wells's eyes, she had just exposed more of Betty's lies—because she still wasn't done. She handed Betty another check with another written notation, and asked her to read it. "Thanks, hon," Betty recited, almost whispering.

  "Mrs. Broderick," challenged Wells, "you made the impression that you were being left destitute in February of '85 … that you did not have any money … That is not true, is it?"

  "It was true. In my eyes, yes, it was true," said Betty vaguely. But she was no longer focused, her eyes drifted into her lap. Her mind was at least temporarily lost, somewhere back in 1985, amid those still hopeful little love notes she had written on two checks so long ago, in her pathetic bid to woo back home again the man who was, at that time, still her husband.

  Nearly every woman on the jury looked pained, and so did a few of the men. Particularly Walter Polk.

  Not that Wells failed entirely. Far from it. Time and again, she showed the jury examples of Betty's assorted evasions, exaggerations, and outright lies. Time and again, she pushed Betty into corners where this woman— who can even tell you today what her street address was in Boston in 1970 and recite the phone number, too—could only shrug helplessly and innocently claim, "I can't remember."

  The sale of the Coral Reef house was a good example. Wells wanted Betty to admit that not only did she know that Coral Reef could be sold without her permission, but that she had also been represented in negotiations by a competent attorney, Dan Jaffe.

  Betty denied it all. Jaffe had never been her attorney of record, she said, since Dan wouldn't pay his retainer. Nor did she recall Jaffe ever urging her to sign any papers concerning the sale of Coral Reef. She remembered only that "he was upset that he had come all the way down to San Diego" but did not get his retainer.

  Wells later summoned Dan Jaffe to testify that he had spent the day trotting from the office to the car in order to consummate the house sale, a deal he thought was excellent for Betty. But she wouldn't agree. Instead, she had driven him to the airport, saying she would think about it.

  * * *

  Whether Betty was deliberately lying or truly confused remains among the lingering enigmas of this tale. Either way, it was a pattern throughout both her trials. At times, she recalled too little when it would have benefited her so much more to openly recall it all, if she honestly could. And there were so many of these damaging, transparent little memory lapses. At heart, it always seemed to reduce to a matter of her pride. Some things, usually small things, simply seemed to embarrass her too much to face. To this day, Betty's personal ethic remains her own private puzzle. Throughout two trials, she would admit to major offenses—including double homicide—but deny other obscure, largely irrelevant incidents. Yes, she would readily agree, she threw a champagne bottle through a window—but not the umbrella. Yes, she stole the wedding list, but she never defaced a photo of Dan and his father. No, she hadn't taken photographs of Dan and Linda at Kim's graduation—but, yes, she had taken pictures of even their bathroom at his Cypress house.

  In the end, it was pick and choose. When was she lying, when was she telling the truth? Had she truly forgotten some things in her stress and anger, or was she merely being manipulative, as the prosecutor insisted? None of it was relevant to the fact of murder, of course—only to Betty Broderick's credibility.

  But all the trivia added up. Not least, by her own inconsistencies, Betty also saved Wells from looking like a fool for even pursuing some of these childish incidents.

  "I keep telling Betty, just tell the truth about the little stuff," Earley said later, tiredly. "But some things she just will not admit to. It's going to take her some time."

  The first full day of Kerry Wells's cross-examination of Elisabeth Anne Broderick was surreal, out of this world, from beginning to end. It bore no resemblance to a murder trial. It was now an obscenity trial, it was divorce court, it was two women, both wives and mothers, sparring all day long over everything from how best to care for children and husbands, to the price of clothes, to the precise time Betty Broderick first learned the meaning of the word cunt. It went on from 9:00 A.M. until 4:15 P.M., when court was finally adjourned—at which time, the TV cameras captured it all in one classic scene for the five o'clock news:

  There on the witness stand sat Betty Broderick, wearing her Madonna smile, completely composed, her expression a blend of satisfaction and sympathy for the poor prosecutor—who was sitting at her table, bent over, clutching her head with what was obviously a triple-strength Excedrin headache. Five minutes before court adjourned, in fact, in a sidebar conference with the judge out of hearing of the jury, Whelan had asked her with some concern, "Are you okay?" No, Wells had responded. "I'm feeling horrible, that's okay."

  "Hee hee ... I actually felt sorry for her," Earley chortled later, happier than he had been in days. "I wanted to go over afterwards and ask if she was going to make it, but I was afraid she'd hit me."

  Wells had begun the day with obscenity. She was determined to show that Betty was lying when she said she spewed vulgarities into Dan's answering machine only because she felt it had been deliberately placed there, with Linda's voice on it, to block her contact with the children. Wells wanted to prove—and she did—that Betty's invective occurred whenever the mood struck her, even when her children were on the line. Wells often seemed more preoccupied with demonstrating that Betty Broderick was an abusive mother than a murderer.

  She spent half the morning playing more than a dozen tapes of Betty's uglier messages.

  "I'm embarrassed to say I know you guys …" said Betty in one, because if her children lived with Dan and the cunt, "then obviously you must approve."

  Betty listened without expression. She would never betray a trace of shame or guilt over these messages—only anger at Dan and Linda for driving her to such extremes.

  "I was very upset that the children were horribly dressed, had no manners," she told Wells matter-of-factly. "They were not the children I was raising. They were out of control … they were very good children before this all started." She denied telling Rhett to "go beat up Daddy." Why would she say something like that? she asked Wells, seemingly genuinely confused. Rhett was too small to beat up anybody. Triumphantly, Wells played another tape.


  "You've got to learn to stick up for yourself," Betty said to Rhett. "You've got to speak up to Daddy and the cunt … He's ruining your lives and killing you … [he] treats you like a little piece of shit, and he's a coldhearted bastard fucking an office cunt … what kind of a parent is that? ... Go fight. Beat up Daddy …"

  It became a minor ritual: Wells would march to the recorder, punch the button, play a Betty message, shut the machine off, then turn to Betty Broderick, grim-faced, with arms crossed, and call for an explanation which, of course, was never there. Betty could no more rationalize her language or her memory lapses than she could explain why she had run her Suburban into Dan's front door. Either you understood impulsive rage, and the memory failures that sometimes go with it, or you didn't. That was it.

  Next Wells was in hot pursuit of the word cunt. It was a mindless chase, resulting only in one conclusion: Betty didn't remember when the word had entered her vocabulary. But Wells was so determined to prove one more Betty lie that she seemed not to notice how ludicrous she was making the State of California look.

  Wasn't it true, Wells demanded, that Betty had always claimed she never even heard the word cunt until Gail Forbes used it after being shown the Dicta picture Linda had allegedly sent—which was not until December of 1986? Yet here it was, on one of Dan's tapes, seven months earlier. How did Betty explain that? Wells waited in triumph, arms crossed.

  Betty only shrugged. She had been through so much, she said, she couldn't remember sequences very well. "I don't know precisely when I got that picture," she said. All she really remembered was that it was Gail Forbes who taught her the word cunt. "But maybe I'm mixed up when Gail said that." She offered Wells one of her sweetest smiles of helpless apology. She was sorry not to have the correct answer for Sister Claire Veronica.