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

by Bella Stumbo

  That weekend, Frank and Marita Bisceglia visited their daughter for thirty minutes at the county jail. There was never much hope that the meeting would be anything other than confused and painful, just one more small scene in this family tragedy—and it wasn't. There sat two proper old people in their retirement years, smiling as brightly as they could manage through the smudged glass at their once perfect, golden-haired daughter, as they tried to operate the awkward jail phones, while other visitors shoved and pushed and chattered noisily about them. And while Betty Anne, reduced to brittle, festive laughter and frenetic babble, tried to make them understand that which they could never understand—the insupportable pressures in her head and heart that finally led her to shoot two people to death in their bed.

  Later, Betty appeared almost angry that her parents had at last come to visit her. Her father was still "a sweetheart," but her mother seemed only to evoke the same old antagonisms. "The bottom line is always the same—look what I've done to her!"

  A few months after the "incident," Betty said she had once again tried in a phone conversation to make her mother understand. "I said to her, I said, 'Mother—I mean, it was—this was literal self-defense, you know, me or him! This was it! This was—and there's no other story for it—from my heart, honestly, this was self-defense.'"

  But, she says, her mother only cried and hung up.

  Now Betty sounded ready to cry herself, but didn't. Instead, she switched to her usual rapid-fire, defensive chatter, as she sarcastically recited all that she should have said to her mother:

  "… Like, 'I'm so sorry at this late date in my life that, for the first time ever, I've disappointed you. I'm so sorry, Mother, that I didn't kill myself and keep the women's club happy!'

  "I wanted to say to my mother—I mean, this is my mother's almost last chance, being that she's in her seventies and I'm in my forties that …" She lost her train of thought and started over. "You know, she writes me letters like—'Whatever happened to my gorgeous towhead daughter, who was the great Girl Scout and the president of her class?' And I'm like— 'Fuck, Mom, I'm still here! You know? I'm still here! It's the same little wonderful girl you used to know, and you're making me feel like I should feel bad that I'm still here!'"

  But, she finished, wistfulness blended with eternal resentment, "I don't say any of that to her, of course—she'd have a heart attack."

  Her voice broke, she couldn't go on. But, typical Betty, she didn't just hang up. She lied politely and said, "I gotta go, the guards are taking us in now."

  The next day Jack Earley produced the expert witness he had selected to put it all in context, to finally explain, once and for all, what combination of forces had ultimately driven Betty Broderick mad enough to kill.

  His choice was Daniel Jay Sonkin, Ph.D., a marriage and family counselor in private practice in Sausalito, California, a fashionable bedroom community near San Francisco. Sonkin had coauthored two books on male batterers, edited a third, and was a regular paid witness in criminal and civil cases involving domestic violence. Earley hired Sonkin, he said, based on "high recommendations" from a battery of experts around the country.

  A horse-faced young man, maybe forty, with long, glossy hair, shagging modishly to his collar and parted in the middle, Sonkin was from the Dale Carnegie school of charm. From the minute he took the stand, he turned his body to the jury and spoke exclusively to them throughout. His manner was ingratiating, collegial, and, at times, breathtakingly flip: "Yeah," he quipped at one point to some remark Wells had made about Betty shooting Linda, "She didn't like her." Grinning, he looked to the jury for approval, which was not forthcoming. They glared at him stonily.

  Which is not to say that Daniel Sonkin wasn't a good witness. To the contrary, he did all that he was hired to do, plus some, during his nearly six hours on the witness stand. In fact, he did his job so well—and with enough seeming certainty that Betty Broderick was indeed a battered woman in every respect—that by the time the second trial rolled around, Wells would manage to get him excluded altogether.

  Sonkin's message was clear: having spent around eight hours talking to Betty Broderick, her parents, and her sister Clare, as well as immersing himself in the literature—her diaries, her autobiography, Dan's Marriage Encounter letters, and court records—it was his firm opinion that Betty was not only an emotionally abused woman, but also one who had been sexually and physically abused during the entire sixteen years of her marriage to Dan Broderick.

  In Sonkin's opinion, Dan Broderick was clearly "a functional alcoholic" who often came home at night and forced drunken sex on his wife. Betty had told him so.

  As for the physical abuse, while Sonkin agreed that, in Betty's case, the battery was not extreme, he pointed out that even one or two black eyes can last a lifetime in terms of fear. It's not just the hitting that matters, he said—it's the loss of trust that goes with it, and the lasting fear. The bruises may go away, but the emotional anxieties, the dread, never vanish.

  It was a dazzling smorgasbord of choices: if the jury didn't buy emotional abuse, then try physical battery, and if they didn't like that, how about sexual assault?

  True, Betty denied any physical battery; but Sonkin could see through her evasions, he said. Based on what he had heard and read—and he obviously accepted as gospel truth every single thing Betty said about Dan—it was obvious to him that Dan Broderick was a classic male batterer. Betty's own consistent denials that she had been physically or sexually abused only further persuaded Sonkin that his diagnosis was correct: One of the chief characteristics of battered women, he said—really intelligent, well-educated women like Betty—is that "they are ashamed, so they deny it."

  But such denial was typical of most battered women, he said. Betty was only masking her feelings.

  Among other clear indicators of battery, he continued, was Betty's ongoing view of Dan "as nearly omnipotent ... In many cases where battered people kill," he said, "they don't even believe the person has died." He cited Betty's continuing references to Dan in the present tense as a perfect example.

  Wells began to hold her head and rub her neck as she listened to this yuppie from Sausalito, whose credentials she later snidely derided as "mail order." She objected constantly, with more anger than she had shown so far in this trial. Each time, Sonkin smiled at her pleasantly, almost condescendingly.

  Nor did Sonkin trace any of Betty's problems to her upbringing. As far as he could tell, Betty's family was fairly normal. The only reason she had withdrawn from them as the years passed, he thought, was because like most battered women, she couldn't bear either to lie to them, or to tell them the truth. Instead, as Sonkin saw it, the problems tracked back to Dan's family. He had heard [from Betty] that Dan's father was physically abusive to his mother and that most of the Brodericks were heavy drinkers. "Violence begets violence." It was generational.

  In Sonkin's final diagnosis, Betty was severely depressed, overwhelmed, suffering "stress disorder … [T]hat's the diagnosis we use in battered women."

  You could almost hear Kerry Wells's brain cells, like a bowl of Rice Krispies, going snap, crackle, and pop as she rose to cross-examine Daniel Sonkin. She paused, visibly trying to control herself, then spoke in a voice trembling with indignation.

  But doesn't she lie? Wells asked, close to shrill.

  Sonkin calmly agreed that there were "numerous inconsistencies" in Betty's statements.

  Wells then walked Sonkin through the various medical reports on Betty, noting that none mentioned complaints by Betty that she had been either suicidal or battered. She read at length from the 1986 California mental hospital report, which had been based largely on a standard psychological test Betty had taken before she decided not to cooperate any further—and which concluded that she was a "borderline personality … histrionic and narcissistic."

  As every expert knows, said Sonkin with a tolerant smile, psychological testing is entirely subjective. "People read them like horoscopes; they are no
t valid for court." Also, he added, at times of severe trauma, "a lot of battered women come up looking borderline."

  (Borderline personality disorder, as defined by leading psychiatric manuals, refers to "a pervasive pattern of instability of mood, interpersonal relationships and self-image, beginning by early adulthood." Among the chief characteristics of a borderline may be some or all of the following: unstable personal relationships, "alternating between extremes of over-idealization and devaluation"; impulsiveness in such self-destructive areas as sex, spending, substance abuse, binge eating; mood swings ranging from depression to anxiety; lack of temper control; self-image problems; chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom; and "frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.")

  But, although it was she who had introduced the topic, Wells was not interested in exploring borderline personality disorders any further.

  Instead, she moved on to Dr. Nelson's remark from the 1989 divorce trial that Betty "is not mentally ill. If she murdered Mr. Broderick as she has threatened to do … she could never be called incompetent … This lady knows what exactly what she is doing."

  Sonkin dismissed Nelson's remarks with a cynical shrug, as the casual commentary of a doctor who was obviously only "trying to help her get her kids back …"

  Wells next tried to make Sonkin recant his view that Betty was a battered woman, and admit that, instead, Dan Broderick had been the battered partner in this marriage. Dan had no history of hitting anybody, she pointed out—but Betty had called Dan names and had attacked his property. Furthermore, she challenged Sonkin, if Dan Broderick was so violence prone, why didn't he just "punch her out" when she went to his house to confront him?

  Because, said Sonkin, irritably, "he used the courts" instead. And, no, he said flatly, regarding Wells with open contempt, he didn't think that Dan Broderick was the victim in any respect.

  "Don't battered women classically remain passive?" Wells demanded, almost shouting. "If she's afraid of him because he's been beating her for sixteen years, why would she go over and taunt him?"

  Because, said Sonkin, looking tired of Wells's hectoring, not every woman is alike. Some battered women behave passively; others don't. Betty didn't.

  Wells finished with Sonkin by demanding to know why, if Betty Broderick was so "depressed," could she still control herself enough to conduct her own divorce trial? Sonkin repeated his view that Betty Broderick was not crazy, but, instead, only an extremely intelligent woman under severe stress. And so, of course, she could pull herself together at times. But it didn't mean much, Sonkin said. She was still a physically, sexually, and emotionally battered woman. With that, the defense concluded its case-in-chief.

  At last, after all these months, it was nearly over. That night at dinner with Sonkin, Jack Earley, Marion Pasas, and Dian Black resembled three survivors of a shipwreck, finally sighting land from their little raft, after weeks of too much sun and saltwater. Their mood was almost zany, an explosion of hilarity, exhaustion, and relief, with a heavy overlay of gloom. They had fought the good fight, all three of these people whose lives had been so entangled with Betty Broderick's for so long, but now they were girding for the worst. And if they all three sounded a little nuts tonight, it was understandable—six months or more, locked in embrace with Betty, takes its toll on the sanest of people.

  Earley's gallows humor was at its best. It was driving him crazy, trying to read the faces of the jurors: when one plump juror smiled at him on the way out at recess, he could never decide whether it was because she liked him or because she was "just anticipating her next Butterfinger from the hallway vending machine." And what about the young one, the sun-tan parlor employee, the consummate California child—would she even survive until the end of the trial? Every day she came to court looking more and more like a piece of parchment. Maybe she would soon just disintegrate into a pile of dusty flakes and hair and fingernails in her chair. Everybody giggled.

  Dian Black, meantime, who had been on this roller coaster ever since she picked up her telephone at seven A.M. on November 5, 1989, only looked dazed—Betty kept telling her over the phone that she wished this trial would hurry up so "she can get home in time for Thanksgiving."

  "She shouldn't even be on trial. She's crazy! She needs therapy," said Black, for maybe the one thousandth time since the trial had begun. She had begun to sound like a Greek chorus.

  For her part, Pasas was sympathizing with Betty's sexual repression. "What a slut," Earley wise-cracked at Pasas.

  Daniel J. Sonkin, a mere newcomer, could only look bemused and a bit shocked at all the madcap irreverence—because, as it turned out over dinner, he seemed truly to believe all that he had said in court that day.

  He felt genuine pity for Betty, he said. He thought she was "pathetic" in her incessant need to please. Every little detail about her behavior seemed to pain him—asking for a pen and paper in court, for example; asking Whelan if the jurors could ask questions, then asking them if they could hear her. Even her constant smiles at friends in the audience had nothing to do with arrogance, he thought—instead it was just a trained behavior pattern, hiding the repressed personality beneath.

  "She's so easy to dislike, to be disgusted with … because she's just not in touch with her feelings." But, he argued with more unaffected, winning passion in private than he had in court, Betty was just one more battered woman, without self-esteem, starved for unconditional love, which she had never received, not from Dan, nor from her parents and friends.

  "That's why she was so great with kids—they didn't ask for more," he said, gazing sadly into his spaghetti.

  Sonkin's remarks had sobered the table. Nobody spoke for a while. Finally, Jack Earley, in an uncharacteristic moment of melancholy, said softly, "You know, I don't think Betty can get well. She just needs to get old." Besides, he added sadly, "What would she do if she did get out?"

  As testimony wound down, nearly everyone looked exhausted. Pasas, always so meticulous about her appearance, had a run in her nylons. Earley had a pimple on his nose. Only Kerry Wells arrived in court looking refreshed. In a rare display of good humor, she even smiled at the assembled reporters as she strode by. The message was clear: she was ready for the kill.

  She called a string of cleanup witnesses, including a receptionist for Dan who described the vulgar messages Betty periodically left at his office, and two of Dan's first housekeepers, who told how he had suffered at the hands of his vicious ex-wife.

  In addition, came the Forbes couple. Describing Betty's call to her from jail on the night of the Blackstone Ball, Gail searched for the most devastating word she could find to characterize Betty's mood: "Exultant," she said. Brian, in his second appearance, testified, among other things, that Betty had used such foul language in front of his children, he was forced to reprimand her. With that, Forbes, distinguished senior attorney at Gray, Cary, Ames and Frye, stalked somberly from the courtroom. It was always hard to match up this proper, pious little man on the witness stand with the grinning Brian Forbes in a photograph Betty had once taken at a party in pre-Linda days: Forbes was wearing a white lace woman's bra wrapped around his head like a cap, with Dan laughing at him in the background.

  "What a fun bunch of guys," Betty said later from jail, sarcastically. "Brian Forbes has always had the foulest mouth of anybody I know."

  The trial ended on the fifteenth day of testimony with mental health experts, compliments not of Jack Earley—who would have been happy to leave the jury mulling over Daniel Sonkin's allegations of abuse and David Lusterman's analysis of infidelity—but of Kerry Wells, who called as her final witness San Diego psychiatrist Melvin G. Goldzband to explain the inner workings of Betty's mind. Although Earley had not even raised the issue of his client's mental competence, Wells was determined that these twelve jurors would not retreat to the privacy of the deliberation room harboring even the faintest concern that maybe this woman was simply crazy, incapable of formulating a premeditated plan to kill.
/>   Goldzband took the witness stand armed not only with all the data Kerry Wells could provide, including Betty's diaries and autobiography, but also with a private three-hour interview with the defendant herself. That fact, in itself, presented an interesting footnote to poor Earley's ongoing uphill struggle with his unmanageable client. It wasn't that Earley had instructed Betty not to talk to Goldzband. According to the rules, the prosecutor is entitled to a psychiatric interview with the defendant if the defense intends to introduce similar testimony. But Earley insists he told Betty not to speak to Goldzband until either he, Bowman, or Pasas was there to monitor the interview. Instead, Goldzband went to the jail on his own, and Betty cordially invited the enemy agent in for a friendly chat.

  And so, Goldzband could now hang Betty Broderick with her own words. And he did his best. All that hampered him was his own style. A small, graying, avuncular man who had been in the "expert testimony" business for thirty-five years, Goldzband tends to condescend—he delivers the gospel truth with expansive, exaggerated patience to people who might be too slow to get it. He grated on the jurors' nerves, as it later turned out, and was thus dumped in the second trial for a slicker, more expensive hotshot from Los Angeles with a national reputation.

  Style aside, his opinions were interesting.

  First his diagnosis: "My impression of this lady is that she's got mixed personality disorder, (a less severe condition than borderline disorder) mainly with facets of narcissistic and histrionic traits," he told the jury. But he thought the narcissism was primary.

  Wells wasted no time in getting to the point: did that mean she was crazy?

  No, said Goldzband. Absolutely not. Betty suffered from no psychosis. Instead, he said, these terms refer merely to "personality traits—the way people are."

  For example, narcissism, most simply defined, merely means self-love. Most people possess narcissistic traits to some degree—but in the average person this is a simple measure of self-esteem. In severe cases, however, individuals become "so totally self-oriented" that they see themselves as the center of the universe and as virtually perfect.