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

by Bella Stumbo

  Histrionic personalities, by contrast, are people who thrive on attention, who enjoy being "center stage." They are actors, said Goldsband, who derive "enormous ego gratification from being noticed." Among their characteristics, they "exaggerate, do things in big, broad strokes" to enlarge their own self-image. Again, many histrionics are delightful, amusing people, he said—if the trait is subject to some self-control.

  But in Goldzband's opinion, Betty was a textbook example of both traits at their worst extremes. It was her total self-love, her sense of being "pretty near perfect" that led to her murderous rage when Dan rejected her, he thought.

  "She wanted Dan. She wanted not to be rejected. If there had been a settlement, that would have merely cemented her rejection, and she couldn't tolerate that," he said. "This is a person who, by virtue of her narcissistic needs, feels grossly rejected when her husband selects someone else to live with … she is perfect. It is inconceivable to this lady, because of her investment in the concept of her own perfection, that she could be rejected …"

  But, when that rejection comes anyway, when the severe narcissist's perfection is "besmirched," he continued, "rage is often the answer ... If attention slips away, they will do something to refresh it … they have a vast repertoire." Even Betty Broderick's handwriting in the diaries, her later obscene letters to judges and doctors, were characteristic of "a person who writes in headlines."

  Furthermore, "Her attitude toward her behavior is that it's constantly justifiable." The notion that she is in any way at fault, said Goldzband, is "totally alien … [she has] no empathy with feelings of others, beyond the superficial social level." However, she "may appear charming on a casual level," he said—and, in fact, he later remarked expansively, Betty was "the most charming, intelligent murderer I have ever dealt with."

  Goldzband did agree that Betty had been depressed at the end, but he dismissed it as an insignificant factor. And he scoffed openly at the notion that Betty Broderick was a battered woman in any respect. He in fact chuckled at the very question.

  Typically, Betty spent the day pretending that she was barely even listening as her mental condition was publicly dissected. Instead, she scribbled busily into her legal pads, interrupting herself only periodically to whisper vigorously, with her standard smile of implacable, impossible serenity, into the ear of Marion Pasas, who, in turn, looked more tempted than ever to bring her dizzy client down to earth, just for once, with a smart whack to the chops.

  * * *

  Earley countered with clinical psychologist Catherine DiFrancesca, a total personality opposite from Goldzband. Although she had done psychological evaluations for the county courts for years, DiFrancesca had none of the stagy traits of a professional witness bent upon wooing the jury. A small, dark-haired, bespectacled woman in her forties, dressed in a neutral suit, she was soft-spoken, somber, and utterly without affectations. She spoke not to the jury but directly to whichever attorney was questioning her. So matter-of-fact, so expressionless, so crisply professional was DiFrancesca that it was impossible to detect whether she even liked Betty.

  But DiFrancesca clearly had sympathy for the hell in Betty Broderick's head. Compared to Goldzband's ready, self-assured pronouncements, DiFrancesca was consistently unwilling to speak in absolutes. While Goldzband was quick to lay blame, she was quietly persuaded that it should be shared.

  After spending about twelve hours with Betty in nine sessions that year, DiFrancesca diagnosed her as suffering from a borderline personality disorder characterized, first, by histrionic traits, with narcissism secondarily.

  These were subtle but significant distinctions. Unlike Goldzband, who placed narcissism first, DiFrancesca thought that Betty's histrionic need for approval and applause far outweighed her narcissism. If anything, DiFrancesca believed that Betty Broderick suffered from insufficient self-esteem rather than an excess of it.

  At the heart of Betty's personality problem, DiFrancesca said, "She never did have a strong identity of her own … she saw herself as Dan Broderick's wife, the mother of his children, but she didn't really see herself beyond that."

  DiFrancesca did not think Betty saw herself as perfect. Instead, in DiFrancesca's mind, it was the exact opposite. "Some narcissists only wish they were great. [Betty] only wished she were as smart as Dan Broderick … She only wishes she were [perfect] …" But, in reality, it was always Dan Broderick she aggrandized, not herself, said DiFrancesca. It was through her perceived role "as aiding and abetting his life, and his career," said DiFrancesca, that she gained any sense of self-worth.

  And she had functioned well for many years—although most borderline personality disorders usually manifest themselves by adolescence— because, said DiFrancesca, her support systems were in place. She was secure. Her collapse occurred only after—and because—she was abruptly stripped of her role as a wife and mother. Then her social status had been taken away, too. Thus, she found herself with no personality—no self—left. Once her anchoring forces were removed, she became increasingly "maladaptive as the stress and the years progressed." The picture of Betty DiFrancesca drew was reminiscent of an empty soda bottle—a mindless, helpless thing—buffeted about at sea until the forces of nature finally slammed it to smithereens upon the shoals.

  DiFrancesca also thought that, toward the end, Betty suffered from severe depression, caused by stress, sense of loss, feelings of helplessness. "And you cannot just snap out of a major depression."

  Nor did DiFrancesca find Betty's overnight vulgarities surprising. She routinely witnessed that sort of decline in women who feel devalued. The only real difference was that "Most are able to control it … Mrs. Broderick couldn't."

  And nothing, she said, better demonstrated Betty's total emotional erosion than her subsequent lack of empathy for her own children. But by then, DiFrancesca thought Betty suffered from such feelings of personal failure that she couldn't even see the effects of her actions on her children.

  Betty's spotty memory didn't strike DiFrancesca as deliberate or manipulative, either. It was typical of histrionic personalities, she said, that they often simply fail to concentrate, or they repress whatever is unpleasant.

  Wells did not badger Katherine DiFrancesca on cross-exam. If Betty was so powerless, so out of control, Wells asked politely, then why was she able to perform so well throughout 1989? How did DiFrancesca account for that?

  People with Betty's personality traits commonly cover up their real feelings by putting on happy faces, replied DiFrancesca. They keep all the misery inside, which is why the dangerous pressures build.

  Wells asked about Betty's boasts at being "the perfect wife, [and] mother."

  "No," DiFrancesca told Wells firmly. "I think she has very real, significant problems with self-esteem. She tries to bolster herself with talk of being a great wife and mother, but in reality, I think she feels very empty."

  Both sides then rested their cases. Only closing arguments remained.

  Over, too, was the biggest mystery of the trial: for three weeks, everyone had wondered if Wells, in a bit of last-minute theater, would call the Broderick boys to testify against their mother.

  Many months later, after the second trial, investigator Bill Green explained why that never happened.

  Before the first trial, he and Wells had gone to Denver to interview the two sons, he said. They had begun their interview with Danny, the older boy, in his bedroom. "The kid started out sitting up on the edge of the bed," recalled Green, still looking pained at the memory. "But the more we talked to him, the more he withdrew. It was actually physical. First, he lay down on the bed. But, within a few minutes, he was actually curled up in a fetal position."

  He and Wells had looked at each other and, without a word, got up and left the boy alone, he said. "And that was the end of it. We never even discussed bringing those kids into court again. No trial is worth that."

  Wells and Earley haggled with Whelan over jury instructions. They bickered over everything fr
om broad language to single words. Should medical testimony, for instance, be couched in terms of mental disorder or mental disease? Wells didn't want disease mentioned, but in the end, Whelan chose to include both terms.

  Although Earley knew he would lose the point, he also argued, for the record, for a self-defense instruction on grounds that Betty had "felt her emotional integrity, as well as her physical integrity, was under threat." That was equivalent to a physical attack, said Earley. No, said Whelan.

  Going to the other extreme, Wells argued that manslaughter should not even be presented as an option to the jury. In her mind, it was either murder or acquittal, with no in-between.

  Whelan overruled her. He would offer jurors all five traditional choices, at least in the death of Dan:

  —First-degree murder, meaning the killings were premeditated with malice aforethought.

  —Second-degree murder, meaning the killings were committed without premeditation or immediate provocation, but with malice.

  —Voluntary manslaughter, meaning the killings were committed in the heat of passion, with provocation, but without malice aforethought.

  —Involuntary manslaughter, meaning that the killings were basically accidental, the result of negligence, as in, for example, a traffic accident.

  —And, finally acquittal—not guilty on all charges.

  But Whelan had to think it over that night before he decided to include a manslaughter instruction for Linda, too. Initially, he was reluctant, he told a flabbergasted Earley, because, even now, at the trial's conclusion, "I still don't see where the provocation [for killing Linda] was." Lucky for Betty that Tom Whelan was on the bench and not in the jury box.

  On the telephone from jail that night, Betty was more defiant and acerbically funny than ever. She hadn't called to talk, she had called to vent.

  "By the time DiFrancesca saw me, I'm surprised I was only borderline. I was like a dead person. I was a zombie. I didn't have any personality left whatever. I was just boo boo bah bah."

  Also, she said, laughing cynically, "I was dying to ask all those psychotherapists, have you ever tested anyone who came out normal? What is normal? Can you take these tests and come out normal? You can't. But I'm not nuts enough to get off on it. If you're going to argue on nuts, argue on nuts! Get me off on nuts. And then you send me to the mental institution for two months, and when they find out I'm perfectly normal, I go home like a hundred other people.

  "All the psychological testimony drove me crazy … What am I? Narcissistic, and histrionic, and manic depressive, or pissed off?"

  And: "You know what's really ironic?" she asked. "Their criteria for a narcissist was so perfectly Dan Broderick, it made me die! It was exactly Dan. Self-centered, megalomaniac, Mr. Importance. When it came to selfish, he made goddamn near everybody look bush-league."

  After court that day, she said mockingly, she told the bailiffs, "I'd like to go look in the mirror and see if my hair looks okay, but I wouldn't want to be nar-ci-cisssssss-tic." She laughed again. These idiots wouldn't know a narcissist if they saw one.

  Chapter 38

  To the Jury

  It was a full house with a long waiting line on the day of closing arguments. The summations were mostly echoes of the opening statements.

  Wells was, as usual, organized, focused, and precise; she finished her plea for two first-degree murder convictions in about an hour.

  Betty Broderick, Wells told the jurors, had "ambushed" two helpless people sleeping in their bed. It was "a double execution." There was nothing rash or impulsive about her act. She had been threatening to kill them for literally years. "This was not a manslaughter case … The law does not allow a person to charge into other people's homes with a loaded gun, to confront them, catch them totally off guard, unprotected, helpless, and kill them both, and then say, 'But, gosh, I didn't really mean it. I shouldn't be responsible.' She is responsible for murder, period."

  What's more, Wells argued, Betty Broderick never thought she would pay for her crimes. She cited housekeeper Cavins's testimony that Betty had said, "No jury will ever convict me." After the killings, she had told Kim, "Don't worry, I'll be out in a couple of days." Betty thought that "she had a free ride, that the world would say she was justified."

  "It was always 'Me, me, me!'" said Wells, rigid with anger. Narcissistic, histrionic—what difference did all these terms make? To Wells they all added up to the same thing: "I call it selfish and cruel, not narcissistic."

  Wells scoffed at the defense argument that Betty had gone over to Dan's house that morning, gun in hand, to force him into a discussion. "Hogwash," she said. What rational person could believe that Betty had seriously expected to have a conversation with Dan Broderick at 5:30 in the morning? "What's he going to say?" Wells asked sarcastically. " 'Oh, good morning. What would you like to talk about?'" If Betty had wanted a discussion that morning, Wells asked, then why wasn't there one? Certainly, she held all the cards that morning.

  And what fool would buy the argument that Betty had been thinking of suicide that morning, rather than murder? This was cold-blooded, premeditated murder in the first degree, pure and simple, she said.

  Then, in perhaps the most tasteless moment of the entire trial, Wells even attempted to defuse defense medical reports indicating that Dan Broderick had not defecated in death. Maybe the reason Betty had made her crude remark to Patti Monahan that morning was because she herself had defecated. "Maybe that's why she went to a Clairemont gas station—to clean herself up," said Wells. Even reporters looked shocked. "Jeez, I feel like I'm on some kind of weird drug trip," muttered one.

  Betty, for once, was not hiding in her yellow legal pads. Instead, she studied Wells intently, smiling slightly but with decided contempt at this stupid woman who was publicly suggesting that she had soiled herself over Dan Broderick.

  Jack Earley, as usual, shuffled about for nearly three hours in his best bewildered, doleful fashion, likable as ever, but at the same time confusing the bejesus out of everybody with his extemporaneous ramblings about this tale of human nature at its worst—a nebulous mass of details, some glaring, some subtle, about a sixteen-year marriage gone bad, followed by six years of an ugly power struggle, complicated by the Other Woman.

  Betty was pushed over the edge, Earley argued, by Dan Broderick's "crazy-making" tactics. She was a woman who had trusted her husband—only to be told that she was "crazy" when he began his affair with Linda, and to be increasingly abused after the separation, said Earley sadly. "He knew how to push her buttons." Dan's only miscalculation, he added, had been in expecting that she would eventually kill herself, instead of him.

  Earley begged jurors to read between the lines, to notice all the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ inconsistencies and distortions in the prosecution's case. Who, asked Earley, could seriously believe that Betty Broderick had self-destructed from simple jealousy and anger of the sort that millions of other people suffer but survive? Who could really accept that only Betty Broderick was at fault, that she caused it all, while "Dan Broderick never did anything wrong?"

  And don't forget, he begged, how she had tried, more than once, to get on with her life. She got a job in 1989. She was trying to get her children back; she went to a therapist. "She was trying to set her life right … She was trying!"

  But then, he said, it had begun all over again. Dan changed visitation orders to suit himself, custody hearings were delayed, he even began fining her again. Then she got the final, threatening Cuffaro letters. "Was that conciliation?" he asked.

  Then Earley tried to do for Betty what she wouldn't or couldn't do for herself: apologize. "This," said Earley, his voice suddenly filled with sadness, "was an act of craziness, emotion. There is no excuse for what people do to each other. But I ask you to place responsibility where it belongs. She was acting on emotion. She was a victim of emotion. Put it in context in laying responsibility. Use your common sense."

  But he didn't tell them what conclusion they should reach
, what verdict he thought was appropriate. He did not ask them to set his client free, nor did he even make a plea for manslaughter. He merely trusted in them to make "the right decision."

  And sat down.

  The defense had rested without even saying what nature of killing these were.

  Reporters stared at each other, pencils still poised for the final line that never came. Jurors frowned, Betty glared. Even Judge Whelan, lying back in his chair, as usual, with his eyes closed to Earley's lulling monologue, had a delayed response. It took him an extra minute to realize that Earley was done, to pull himself upright and bring the day's formalities to an end.

  Later, Jack Earley was blunt in his explanation. He couldn't ask for manslaughter, he said, even if he had wanted to, without outraging Betty, who expected him to argue that she should be set free, that jurors should ignore Whelan's legal instructions. But how could he make that ridiculous request, even for show? Betty had, after all, shot two people to death, and Jack Earley had a reputation to defend. "And it's hard to humiliate yourself in front of your peers."

  The next day, in her first act of defiance since the trial began, Betty arrived in court wearing her gray jail sweat suit with SD JAIL printed across her back in large black letters.

  In her second act of defiance, she turned and whispered openly to reporters across the railing: she was protesting Whelan's refusal to admit either her full set of diaries or the entire Broderick divorce file into evidence. This was a kangaroo court, she said. Jurors would never know the full truth, only selected portions of it—so she was making the only statement she could.

  Wells, who could not abide any act that might supply Betty Broderick with even a whit of juror sympathy, insisted that Whelan explain that Betty's jail clothes were of her own choosing. She didn't want Eloise Duffield or any other juror worrying that this poor woman had been condemned to prison already. Whelan declined.