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

by Bella Stumbo

  "Virtually every lie that Elisabeth tells on the stand should be refuted, regardless of how long it takes." Also, Dan and Linda must be "humanized." Their friends should be paraded before the jury and each "should take the opportunity to ramble on a little about Dan and Linda … Make the defense object. Make the court rule in their favor. Part of each anecdote or story will find its way into the minds of the jury."

  He wanted Wells to prepare a chronology of "Elisabeth's escalating violence" to show that "her violent reactions and responses were always unreasonable." In addition, Wells should more precisely chart all the legal actions Dan had taken, to show how many were filed strictly in response to motions or actions taken by Betty.

  He also advised Wells not to appear alone this time around, to "bring to the courtroom as much help as you can. The idea being to communicate to the jury that Elisabeth is a heinous murderer and a serious menace to society, and that the state is serious about putting her away forever …" Also, he added, none too subtly, Wells could obviously use the help herself.

  In addition, he didn't want Wells to skip over the murders this time. Instead, she should thoroughly dissect the events of that morning. "[Elisabeth's] whole story from beginning to end ... as to her plans to commit suicide ... is simply not believable. If she intended to commit suicide, why didn't she leave a suicide note for her kids?"

  As for Dan's character, "You have raised the point that if we attempt to present Dan as a man of character and high moral standard, we would run the risk of Dan's character being assassinated by Wilma Engel, certain doctors who ran into Dan… and/or certain attorneys who felt Dan had gone overboard in his role as an advocate. In that connection, please be assured that both Dan's family and friends are willing to take our chances in this regard … versus what might be said by scoundrels produced by the defense ... If Dan was the man we know he was, surely the doctors and attorneys who could be called by the defense could be dealt with easily … [and] the Wilma Engel letter is not damning in our view, especially if we can get to who she was talking to on the airplane …"

  And, last but not least, "I would be inclined to play the tapes and have the boys testify as late in the trial as possible, so as to have the greatest possible lasting impact on the jury."

  By summertime, Wells was a tangle of nerves, trying to figure out what to do differently this time, whose advice to take, which way to go. She was even being nicer to reporters, mainly because she wanted to pick their brains. She wanted a performance review from those who had sat through the entire first trial.

  "Do you think I should be tougher on her?" she asked this reporter in a long phone conversation. Or should she try to kill her with kindness? But how could she do that? "I just get so angry every time I ask her a question, the way she twists and lies! But it's the way she treated her children that gets to me the most—that's why I have no compassion for her at all."

  Should she focus harder on first-degree murder, or should she go even deeper into the divorce war trenches with Earley? Should she ignore Betty's lies, or expose every single one of them? "How can I not respond to some of the outrageous things she says?" Wells asked. "She lies about everything! How do I let the jurors know that it's all lies?"

  She didn't mention Larry Broderick's letter—which didn't surface until Earley got a copy of it during the next trial—but she admitted that the Brodericks were griping that she hadn't better defended Dan's character. At the same time, Kerry Wells knew from experience that family and friends are always idealists about their loved ones. She knew that, if she opened that door, Jack Earley would romp through it with glee—and with worse than Wilma Engel's perceived blackmail letter, or a few angry doctors to complain about Dan's strong-arm negotiating tactics. Even Wells conceded in private that Dan Broderick was no saint, especially when it came to his treatment of Lee—nor did she approve of his lies to Betty about the affair. "But what was he supposed to do! He was afraid she would kill herself!" she said, exasperated.

  And what about the narcissism? Did that work? Did she overdo the tapes?

  She wasn't getting any answers, but it didn't matter. She was getting relief simply by talking about her dilemma. That summer afternoon conversation was one of the few times during two trials that Kerry Wells let down her guard with a reporter long enough to reveal that, beneath the cold, brusque facade, she was just one more ordinary, vulnerable, confused human being under major pressure. And her worst pressure of all concerned the two young Broderick boys: should she call them to the witness stand to testify against their mother in the second trial? At least one of them would say, she knew, that Betty had threatened that Saturday night to kill Dan the next morning.

  But how could she do that to children, she asked? On a more practical level, would it backfire? Would the jurors hate her for it? "Will I take the fall?" Or would their testimony be worth it?

  "I've thought about nothing but this case for two years," she finally said, sounding exhausted. "I have to hold on to my faith in justice. This time, I just hope the jurors will reach a decision—any decision—whatever it is ... I just want it to be over."

  Then, toward the end of the summer, Danny and Rhett came to San Diego for a short vacation—and the judge ruled that Betty had a right to visit with them, under supervised circumstances, away from the jail, with the boys' attorney and a social worker present.

  It would be Betty's first opportunity to exchange a word with her sons in nearly two years. Rhett was now twelve, Danny fifteen.

  She was so nervous the night before, it was painful. "Oh, don't be silly," she said, laughing shrilly, her words as staccato as hail on a thin tin roof. "They're my babies. They love me, it's going to be like we were never apart!" And then she wouldn't discuss it anymore. No big deal.

  Later, one of those present at the visit said Betty was so tense that she actually arrived with a list of questions clutched in her hand, reminders of things to ask her sons. It was, said the observer, a sad little meeting, filled with awkward small talk, a few hugs, and no tears. Mainly, Betty had behaved. She had not said anything inappropriate. "It was perfect," Betty later reported gaily. "It was as if we had never been separated. Fuck, I can't wait to get out of here and home to my boys. They need me. Danny's getting so tall …"

  Then it was September. Jury selection was scheduled to begin again in three weeks.

  Betty was hyper on the phone that night, but it was a happy excitement. One more hung jury and they would have to let her go, wouldn't they? "How many times can you try a person? What about double jeopardy?"

  Earley only shuddered after every conversation with her. She was so much more confident now, more the victim than ever. Time had only sanded away the initial ragged, hysterical edges, which at least had lent her a certain pathetic vulnerability during the first trial. Never mind remorse—now the tears and confusion she needed to display on the witness stand, Earley knew, would be harder to come by than ever. Betty had been allowed too much time to think—and to bask in the public glory. Most recently, even the TV news show 20/20, anchored by Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, had made arrangements to interview Betty at the jail. She was thrilled. She had hit the big time. She seemed on top of the world that week.

  But so did Earley. For all his concern about the impact of Betty's swelling ego on her upcoming testimony, he wasn't about to turn down Barbara Walters either. He was, after all, a young man yet, with a full career ahead, long after Betty Broderick had become but a faded memory.

  Then came the most lurid episode since the killings themselves—and one almost impossible to see as anything short of a systematic setup, given the fact that it was now only days until Betty's second trial began. Now, according to local newspaper headlines, Betty Broderick, after a year of making no jailhouse news at all, had suddenly turned into a vile, vicious prisoner attacking deputies and, moreover, rubbing her own feces over prison walls.

  "Betty Goes on a Rampage," read a page-one Tribune headline of September 5. "Broderick Injures
Three Deputies in Jail Scuffle." The story included a color photo of Betty in her underwear, and received more prominent play that day than the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  According to the jail officials, Betty fought with several deputies who had come to move her from her cell to an isolation unit for four days as punishment for an earlier infraction of rules. One press account said she had refused a deputy's order to move from a bench; a later version said she had tried to wrest keys from a deputy to unlock her handcuffs. The details were never clear.

  Whatever the case, when the deputies came for her, Betty, clad only in green jail panties and a sweatshirt, clung to her top bunk and, they later said, kicked them as they attempted to break her grip. According to one female deputy, Betty kicked her hard enough to cause her to hit her head on a television set. Another claimed that she suffered a strained shoulder after Betty grabbed her arm.

  But, even more sensational, Kerry Wells promptly reported to Judge Whelan that, after Betty was subdued and placed in the isolation cell, she defecated and then smeared her feces over the cell walls and door.

  Nor was that the end of the story.

  In a move even jail authorities later conceded was rare, the scuffle had been videotaped. A police dog had also been brought to the cell that night.

  In the next astonishing development, the jail then released the video to an attorney for one of the injured deputies—who in turn promptly gave it to San Diego reporters (after first trying in vain to sell it to TV networks, according to the San Diego Union). In addition, the attorney, James J. Cunningham, also filed a claim for at least $25,000 in damages in behalf of the wounded deputy. He had done so, he said, to "get in line" for any money Betty might later receive for movies, books, and interviews.

  * * *

  Thus, in the days just prior to Betty Broderick's second trial, prospective jurors all over San Diego County were treated on the nightly TV news to the spectacle of a large, frightened-looking, half-naked woman cowering in her bunk, holding on tight, as several pairs of hands snatched at her. One deputy even seemed to be holding a Taser gun.

  But the struggle itself was murky. No deputies were seen on the film to be receiving injurious blows as they finally overpowered their prisoner and hauled her away to isolation. Likewise, the specter of Betty defecating in her isolation cell and then flinging feces around was never shown on any film. No evidence was ever produced. Just more sensational hearsay.

  Jack Earley naturally raised holy hell. It was a complete setup, he raged to the media and the judge, a completely premeditated, staged scuffle designed and timed deliberately by jailers to damage his client's chances for a fair retrial—just one more example of how stacked the San Diego legal system was against Betty Broderick, not because she had killed but because of whom she had killed.

  Earley demanded a trial delay until the negative publicity died down, and he also asked that Betty be transferred from Las Colinas because he feared for her life. "The word is out on the street with deputies that if you have trouble with Betty Broderick and you get it on videotape, you're going to be able to sell it ... to make money, you're going to be able to sue," he told Whelan.

  Meantime, San Diego Country Sheriff Jim Roache issued a press release, denouncing attorney Cunningham's actions as inappropriate and unprofessional. But Roache had no good excuse for why the video had been released by the jail in the first place to an attorney hustling a buck. According to a sheriff's legal advisor later, the tape was turned over to Cunningham because he presented a subpoena for it as part of a worker's compensation claim. "It was just one of those things," he told a Union reporter. "It fell through the cracks."

  For her own part, Kerry Wells pled complete innocence. She had only brought the matter to the court's attention because of Betty's upcoming interview with 20/20, she said. She wanted Whelan to issue a gag order prohibiting Betty from discussing the incident to elicit sympathy from potential jurors.

  Whelan refused Wells her gag order. At this point, said Whelan, with mild irony, any concern over publicity was irrelevant at best. "I fail to see what more she could say."

  At the same time, he also refused Earley's requests for a trial delay and a transfer of Betty to the downtown jail.

  Betty was angry, she was defensive—but, most notably, after all this time, she was at last completely and openly humiliated. What her own foul, childish taped conversations with Danny and Rhett playing in a silent courtroom couldn't do, what six days in jail hadn't been able to achieve in La Jolla's ladies circles four years before, what all the years of being called Crazy Betty hadn't done to her pride, what even two homicides hadn't achieved, had now finally been accomplished. She had been shown in all her vulnerability, with "my Jell-O thighs" thrashing and quivering in white, grainy light on television for all the world to see. She looked like a beached whale clinging to that bunk. And she had been accused of squatting, defecating, and then flinging her own excrement on the walls. It was the final disgrace, and she could not handle it.

  For once, all her natural glibness failed her: it was all lies, she sputtered. She didn't kick anybody, she only reacted in fright. There were so many of them. Plus, "I hadn't done anything. Who thinks I'm stupid enough to try to grab some deputy's keys?"

  But she could barely put together a coherent sentence as she tried to explain the feces incident: It was true, she said, strangling on embarrassment. She had lost control of her bowels while they were dragging her out of her bunk. "They scared the hell out of me, so I, uhm, yeah—pooped in my pants ..." Then, when they took her to the isolation cell, which has a small window in the door, "The goddamn toilet was overflowing. So I took off my panties and I—they—I looked up, and there they were—all watching me through the little window … and they were taunting me. One of them said—they said, 'Look, she's fucking her finger.' It was disgusting. I've seen them do this before. They're sadists. Once I saw them set up a bunch of black girls in a cell with one white gay girl … Anyway, yeah, so ... I got mad. I took off my panties and I threw them at the window, at their smirking goddamn faces. But I did not do what they're saying I did—rub it around and stuff …"

  In any case, nobody looked at the incident as alarming enough, if true, to cause a pause in the prosecution of Betty Broderick.

  And then, typical of Betty's often astounding personal control, despite the trauma she had just been through, she walked out of her isolation cell the next morning to appear before the nation on 20/20—where she delivered one of her most articulate, focused, subdued interviews yet. Although she lapsed periodically into the minutiae of "the story," she mainly managed to present herself to a national news program as a symbol of universal issues confronting women. Later, she was proud of her performance.

  "I said this country has to reevaluate its definition of a weapon. No woman can take on an angry man … the law has to take into account the differences between men and women in terms of their respective power. Men have all the power. I said, 'Sure, his friends are now building all these shrines to him—but that only reinforces my case. You bet—Dan Broderick was a great lawyer. That's why he could do to me what he did. Joe Blow couldn't do half of that to his wife, because he wouldn't have the know-how or the clout. This whole case is a story of extremes—extremes of poor to rich, and all the rest. I said that I represent the extremes of what can happen to women in divorce courts."

  In a predictable bid for higher respectability, 20/20 cloaked its subsequent program in rhetoric about the pioneering aspects of the Broderick case in the largely untapped field of emotional battery. At bottom, however, it was also so pro-Betty that, as one of Dan's friends remarked bitterly, "It was barely a notch above Hard Copy. I expected more from Barbara Walters."

  Then it was trial time again. Jury selection would begin on Friday, September 20.

  Meanwhile, Earley, Pasas, and Bowman were all out of town for part of the week. Sitting alone in jail the prior weekend, Betty was semi-hysterical, as visibly unwell as she had ever b
een. She literally screamed over the phone, "Where is Jack's outrage? Where is my legal representation here? I should have a press conference!"

  Dian Black, on a weekend visit, meantime, listened to her rave about how Patti Monahan had once borrowed an expensive white leather jacket from her and never returned it, "and she wanted it back," said Black. "She spent ten minutes telling me how she was going to write Patti a letter, demanding that jacket back." She also wanted Kim to return the $10,000 watch Betty had given her. What's more, she also wanted Black to return a copying machine Betty had loaned her. On the eve of her second Judgment Day, Betty was, in short, not reflective. Instead, she had escaped entirely into an obsession with "things."

  That same night, she was also served with the deputy's lawsuit.

  "How pathethic can you get … they're suing me for $25,000?" Betty hooted. "You never ask for less than $2 million!" Dan had taught her that.

  But, on the bright side, People magazine was coming to interview her next. She was looking forward to it, despite the fact that Earley was advising against it. Something about the reporter had alerted him to bad news ahead. Well, screw Jack. She was doing it anyway, she declared. And later, of course, Jack would be glad, she added sarcastically. "He'd be happy to see his name in a Dell comic book."

  (Earley's instincts turned out to be right: People became one of the few national publications to take a decidedly sour note in the Broderick matter, openly hoping, in its eventual story, entitled "Rage of a Woman Scorned," that the second Broderick jury might be nicer than the first.)

  That weekend, too, Betty somehow found a pair of scissors and cropped her hair as short as it had ever been. "It's a Geraldine Ferraro wedge cut," she said over the phone, sounding as giddy as someone on a drug trip. No more Danielles. She had also lost all interest in her wardrobe for Trial Two. She would wear the same two or three pants suits the whole time (Escadas, of course). "Why not?" she asked. "Look at all the shit the 'La Jolla socialite' took last time for just trying to look like me! Maybe I'll just wear my jail sweats the whole time, make that bitch Wells have a cow. After all, that's who I am now. Right?"