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

by Bella Stumbo

  In the beginning, she went into the courtroom with her husband. But, when the time came for her daughter to testify, she sat all day alone in the hallway outside, with a prayer book in her lap, a Neiman Marcus bag containing snacks and cough pills and Kleenex at her feet. Betty Anne didn't want her to go inside during her testimony, she explained, "because she doesn't want to hurt me. She said she would be uncomfortable if I was there. So I'll just sit out here. What matters is that she knows I'm here, just outside the door."

  It is so easy to see Betty in her mother. Just like Betty, Mrs. Bisceglia tries to hide all unpleasant feelings for the sake of strangers. She was friendly, charming, and determined to maintain a bright, chatty facade, no matter what the interior cost. In March, she confided brightly, she and her husband would celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. She was planning a large celebration for at least one hundred family members at a club on Long Island Sound. "And we already have a court order saying that the boys [Rhett and Danny] can attend," she added.

  But no aging lady, no matter how tough, could keep it up for long, not in circumstances like these.

  "My beautiful, intelligent child …" she said next, wistfully, fingers fluttering nervously in her lap, her worried eyes tearing over as her mind wandered. "Now, of course, she's lost all her looks, but …"

  She blinked hard, gathering herself as proper ladies must publicly do. "If only she had told us what was going on," Marita Bisceglia continued. "But she never did! I know she says now that we abandoned her, but we didn't. We just didn't know how bad it was. Betty Anne was always so upbeat when she called—'Oh, everything's fine, the weather's so beautiful.' I think she was so afraid she would disappoint us—her brothers and sisters all have such wonderful marriages, such beautiful families …

  "But we would have always been there for her, you know—if we had only known. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my child… Oh, I should have known," she went on, punishing herself. "Betty Anne always had so many nice boys chasing after her … I should have warned her from the beginning … I should have seen it …" Her voice went cold with a protective mother's belated hate. Then her mind was lost in time, back to Betty's wedding day, and she talked again about Dan's ugly brown shoes, and his arrogance. "I should've told Betty Anne to call the wedding off right then …"

  It was painful, listening to Marita Bisceglia second-guess herself, watching her wonder aloud, as any parent in her place must do, where she had failed. Verging on tears, she fled from the naked emotion, just as her daughter does. Pardon me, she said graciously—she had to run to the ladies room.

  Frank Bisceglia was the opposite. By the time of Betty's second trial, he wanted to express his anger publicly—at Kim, at Gail Forbes, at Helen Pickard, and anyone else who had turned on his child. Daily, before court, he strode back and forth in the corridor, glaring at the gathering of Broderick siblings and friends at the other end of the hall. When Gail Forbes once approached him, smiling timidly, only wanting to deliver a polite hello, he said, "I told her, 'How could you turn you back on Betty Anne this way? I hope the next time you go to confession, you take an oath—otherwise you'll lie."

  Saddest of all, neither of the Bisceglias could bring themselves to show any warmth or understanding toward their granddaughter Kim. She was a traitor in their minds. Pure and simple.

  And Kim was too timid to approach her grandparents.

  "Since they've been here," she said one day, eyes welling with tears, "they've taken my sister to dinner, but they haven't even called me. The only conversation I've had with them, here in court, they told me I hadn't done anything with my life. Grandpa told me that by the time Mom was my age, she had graduated from college, gotten married, and had me …" She laughed bitterly. "I wanted to say, 'Yeah, Grandpa, and look where it got her.'"

  "Why should we call her?" demanded Frank Bisceglia. "She knows what hotel we're in. Why hasn't she called us?"

  That afternoon, he took the stand in his daughter's defense. He didn't have much to say, but Jack Earley didn't care about that—his only real purpose was to present this sweet-faced, silvery-haired old man to the jury as evidence that Betty Broderick was the product of the sort of upstanding, courteous, meticulous family that makes America run.

  His conversation with Betty Anne the morning of the killings had been brief, no more than a minute long, said Frank Bisceglia in a strong voice. Betty had said she felt suicidal, but she never told him that she had just shot two people, he said. He had no idea. Betty cried silently the whole time her father was on the stand, paying attention to her miseries at last.

  The Bisceglias stayed in a first-class hotel across the street from the jail. That night they hosted a gracious dinner for some of Betty Anne's friends. The trial was never mentioned. The loveliness of San Diego was discussed in detail. Frank Bisceglia told charming stories about the good old days in plastering, before drywall took over, times when people still cared for elegant rosettes and scrolls. Marita Bisceglia was a model of social grace and small talk. When the entrées were served, she said, "I have picked up my fork, so you may all please begin."

  Betty was on the witness stand for almost five days during the second trial. She cried as frequently as before, if not as spontaneously. For the most part, her testimony was no more than a prelude to the drama ahead: the morning of the killings. This time, everyone knew, the scenario would change drastically, given Earley's opening remarks. This time, Betty Broderick would have to testify that she had been provoked to a panic by two people who were not sleeping, as Wells maintained, but wide awake.

  And she did. Her face reddened and collapsed as Earley led her into the final scene. She had driven over to Dan's house, she said, with a jumbled mind crowded with feelings of fear and powerlessness. "All these thoughts kept churning in my head, like my eyeballs were turned backwards. It felt like the whole world was inside my head … It felt like hell, actually." After she got there, all of it was "like a slide show with a lot of slides missing," she said. It was dark. But it wasn't dark. She couldn't see them. But she could. She no longer remembered Dan sitting up and saying, "OK, you shot me, I'm dead." She no longer even remembered telling that to Lee or anyone else.

  But she remembered the most crucial slide:

  In contrast to her stark, one-line testimony a year earlier—that "They moved, I moved, and it was over"—she now said that she had barely stepped into the bedroom when Linda had yelled for Dan to call the police, She also remembered Dan lunging for the phone.

  And "I screamed, 'No!"

  And she had fired the gun.

  Or maybe she didn't scream.

  She didn't really know.

  "I grabbed the phone and ran out of there. I felt like I let out a huge scream. I don't know if I even made a noise … it was all sensation … this huge sensation … I don't really know what happened in that room. It was all these flashes of things …"

  Then she began to weep again.

  Before Earley concluded his direct examination, she also said, in a flat, steady voice, with her head down, that she regretted, after the killings, "that I wasn't able to tell anyone how sorry I was." That oblique statement was the most Earley would ever get from his client by way of remorse in Trial Two.

  Wells wasted no time in her counterattack. If Betty was sorry now, then why hadn't she said so in any of the hundreds of letters, telephone calls, and interviews she had conducted over the past two years?

  Betty had no good answer, beyond a vague explanation that her mail and calls were monitored by the jail.

  Wells was cold and derisive as ever. And, as before, Betty instantly collected herself and concentrated. But, for all the many reasons of passing time, circumstance, and Betty Broderick's mysterious mind, she was no match for Wells this year. Kerry Wells would win this battle, if not the whole war, on cross-exam.

  She called a jail deputy to testify that, during the first trial, Betty had gloated that "she had the jury eating out of my hands" with her tears. "Abso
lutely not," Betty said.

  Wells then began a relentless march through Betty's entire story, again down to the most minute details.

  But it was not the same game anymore. Wells was like a Doberman going for the throat—regardless of the rules of court. At one point, for example, in blatant violation of Whelan's pretrial instructions, she made passing reference to Betty's prior abortions. Earley howled in objection, and Whelan, visibly angry, instructed the jury to disregard Wells's remark as a violation of his order that Betty's pregnancies would not be discussed. Jurors should not assume that Betty had been purposely concealing information, said Whelan.

  But, as always, it was too late. The jury had heard. And, in Trial Two, Jack Earley would never be allowed at least to place those abortions in the context of nine hard pregnancies, breach births, cesarean sections, and miscarriages.

  He consequently grew increasingly temperamental over matters large and small. On one occasion, he erupted in anger after Wells tossed her pencil on a table in exaggerated disgust at Betty. Earley resented Wells glaring at his client, too, he said, almost shouting at both her and Whelan. Another time, when Wells was interrogating Betty about a stack of bills Dan had paid, Earley angrily countered by holding up, in full sight of the jury, Betty's own thick stack of diaries. In so many words, he told jurors, in the form of a meandering objection, that this whole trial was dirty pool, from diary pages taken out of context to a few ugly phone messages culled from literally thousands over the years. They were getting a stacked story, not the true one.

  "Knock it off, Mr. Earley," Whelan said quietly, but with menace in his tone. It was a line that would become an increasing refrain in the second trial, where, it seemed, nearly everybody's temper was ready to blow, except for Betty's. The more the attorneys yelled, the more serene she became. She enjoyed having people fight over her.

  Wells continued to interrogate Betty about her failed marriage, the separation, and her behavior afterward. But, this year, Wells displayed a tactical genius to brag about. Methodically, she walked Betty through a dozen or more items of testimony provided by assorted witnesses. She did not preach, and, for once, she didn't divert attention by challenging Betty's every answer with domestic trivia. Instead, Wells simply asked her questions, then waited, arms folded, until Betty had answered, and went on to her next question.

  And, one by one, Betty Broderick disputed the testimony not only of her former attorneys and judges but also of her friends, Brad, and even her daughter Lee.

  Every discrepancy, Betty said—from whether she had called Gail Forbes from jail on the night of the Blackstone Ball or gone shopping with Lee on the Friday before the killings—was the fault of others who were either "lying through their teeth" (Forbes, Pickard) or "mistaken" (Lee, Brad). Virtually everybody's memory was faulty but hers.

  Even hard evidence was in error. She repeated that her obscene phone messages were aimed strictly at Linda Kolkena's voice—despite so many tapes to the contrary.

  She denied making any grisly remarks to Patti Monahan. It was only Monahan's boyfriend who remembered it—"eight months later," she added sarcastically.

  Through systematic, controlled questioning, Wells led Betty to attack not only Judges Joseph and Howett as part of the conspiracy against her, but also three of her four lawyers: Jaffe, Smith, and Hargreaves. Once started, Betty couldn’t stop talking. The only reason any of those attorneys had taken her case in the first place, she volunteered, was because it would be "a feather in the cap" of them all to be involved in her divorce. But, in the next breath, she contradicted herself by complaining that Dan Jaffe was "precisely the kind of lawyer I needed,"—which is why Dan wouldn't pay him. Yet she insisted Jaffe hadn't warned her about four-hour notices or bifurcation. Then, dismissing Smith, she complained again that no good local attorney would take her case.

  Wells nodded, then went on to her next question. Earley buried his face. Betty's mind was going in irrational circles for all to see. She was no longer the glib, collected, furious defendant of last year, saying, 'Well, let me help you … you've got it all wrong."

  Now, time and again it was, "I can't remember, I'm confused … I don't know … they're lying … they're mistaken … that did not occur …"

  She again assailed the Forbes couple as "perverted" for criticizing her language when theirs was worse. She insisted that her support checks had been altered by Dan throughout 1987, well after his informal ‘fines’ had stopped, despite a stack of $16,000 deposits to the contrary.

  Even Brad was mistaken when he testified that she had gone to bed around 9:30, instead of 6:30 on the night before the killings, she said. Nor could she have possibly told Lee about the legal mail on Friday because she hadn't gone shopping with Lee on Friday. Lee was mistaken. Nor had she invited Pickard to read the letters on Saturday. Pickard was a liar.

  It was, in short, a devastating day for the defense. Only Betty could not see. Instead, she sat through it all, looking alternately complacent and confused, smug and sad, indignant and then intimidated. Only she could not see that she was asking the jury to believe that she was a woman who had, in effect, been sabotaged, in ways both large and small, not only by her husband but by almost everybody else in her life, too. Virtually everyone involved in her story had the facts wrong. Everyone but her. And only she, in this silent courtroom, could not see how far afield her make-believe world had run, how paranoid she had become. She could no longer separate Dan and her legal wars from the innocent elements of life. But, then, that had been the case for years.

  "Jack should have asked for a halt to the trial right then and had her slapped into Patton [state mental hospital]," Pasas said later.

  But that is not how modem American justice works. In a system that proclaims even Jeffrey Dahmer sane, Betty Broderick's mental condition added up to no more than ugly personality quirks: her memory lapses were lies, her world view was pure selfishness, her confusion was calculated cunning—all of it mere grist for Kerry Wells's inexorable grinder.

  The Broderick trial had gone from bizarre, inept, and comic to cruel. And it got worse. Wells led Betty to reiterate that it had been the letter referring to her "mental disease" that helped push her over the edge on the morning of November 5, 1989.

  But why would that be so, asked Wells politely. Hadn't Betty always been confident that it was Dan who was crazy, not her?

  Betty's face hardened. Too late she saw the trap.

  "Dan Broderick never had a mental disturbance," she snapped. "He was just evil, vicious, and mean."

  Wells moved on to the main event. This time, she spent nearly an hour on the weekend leading up to the killings.

  Among her first acts, she marched to the witness stand with photographs of the two dead people, which she placed directly under Betty's nose. Betty might have been looking at a housing blueprint, her expression was so blank.

  Calmly, she repeated that she did not remember shooting them, or even seeing them, or hearing Dan cry out that she had shot him.

  "I was in a totally altered state of consciousness," she said. "I've already testified that I didn't remember driving there. I was scared to death at confronting Dan Broderick … I walked into the room. I've testified that it was dark. It appeared that way to me. I moved, they moved, the gun went off … I just tensed—like that!" She flushed, and grew more animated. "I don't remember pulling the trigger once, twice, three, four … I just went AAAAARGGGH! And I don't know if a noise came out. I just had this screaming kind of sensation, and a tensing …"

  Wells tensed, too. Hands clenched into fists at her sides, she paced back and forth before the witness stand, speaking through gritted teeth. Her exemplary restraint was fast disappearing.

  If Betty had taken the gun with her only to force a conversation, then why didn't she use it as such? "You didn't use the gun to say, 'Hold it, I want to talk to you,'" Wells yelled. "You shot!"

  But Betty was back in charge. Yelling she could handle. She shrugged helplessly. "I'm telli
ng you it all happened so fast. It wasn't a thought process. I moved, they moved, the gun went off. It was over that fast."

  Why had she gone in the back door?

  "I didn't want him to see me and call the police before I saw him." And why hadn't she mentioned that Linda had shouted "Call the police" during the first trial?

  Betty almost smirked at her. "Did anyone ask me that?" she asked innocently.

  "Yes!" yelled Wells.

  "I don't remember you asking me anything about it," said Betty.

  Wells fought for self-control. It had, of course, been Jack Earley, not Wells, who had asked Betty during the first trial if anyone spoke in the bedroom that night—and Betty had said no. A different attorney might have recited Betty's contradictory testimony to her own attorney—but Kerry Wells was either too sensitive or too proud. She dropped it.

  If the shooting was just a reflex action, she demanded next, then how was it that Betty had managed to reflexively point her gun at two people and land her shots so well?

  Betty didn't know. "I'm telling you, it was dark … so I couldn't have pointed it at anybody's chest." Nor did she now recall pulling the trigger, as she had testified the year before. "I did not move the gun … It probably bounced around a little, because that's what guns do."

  And hadn't she hit Dan's hand, as she was ripping his telephone out of the wall?

  Betty blinked at Wells, uncomprehending. She didn't recall that. "I don't remember seeing Dan at all." She hadn't seen anything, not even the furniture in the room, she repeated.

  Wells stalked to her desk and flipped through her files to the report of defense psychologist Katherine DiFrancesca and then began to read aloud from the document—which had only recently been made available to the prosecution. Not only had Betty told DiFrancesca, prior to the first trial, that Dan had said, "OK, you got me," she had also told DiFrancesca that she had then "hit him on the hand, because I didn't get him."