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

by Bella Stumbo

  Betty listened attentively. No, she said, she didn't remember either doing or saying any of that.

  Wells finally gave up, after accusing Betty of "embellishing" her story this year to save herself. Betty gazed at Wells with level eyes. "Maybe I'm just explaining it better this year," she said softly.

  "Well, I didn't think it was that bad," said Earley later that night from his car phone. His voice was half whimper, half laughter.

  Besides, why should Betty be faulted, he demanded defensively, just because she hadn't recited every horrid detail of the killing scene last year? Wells, after all, hadn't even asked her about it. "So, of course she has more details this year. She's had them all along …"

  Defense attorneys are a fascinating breed. Earley couldn't even be joked into letting go of that position. He cackled but he never cracked. Linda had screamed for the police from the start. He had always known it. He just hadn't chosen to fully reveal it until now.

  Over the jail phone later that evening, Betty was doing her best to sound as perky as ever. She thought she had done just fine that day, she said. But she knew better. At one minute she was giggling, manic. But in the next, there was a powerful new wistfulness about her. Even her voice changed—softer, huskier. For once, it was easy to get a word in edgewise.

  Well, what did it matter anyway? she finally asked. Her life was over anyway, even if she did get out of jail. And the truth was, she really didn't want out of jail, she said. She didn't want to face the life that awaited an aging double killer on the Outside. And, as always, she could conceive of no life at all, beyond being Mrs. Somebody.

  "Who'd marry me? And I can't do anything. I'd rather be here than be a poor, toothless bag lady. If I met a man that I could really like, it would change my attitude completely. But I don't want to be another Patti Monahan."

  She also talked about the pictures she had been shown in court that day, of the two broken bodies she had left behind. She denied seeing them.

  "I've been steeling myself for two years for it, I knew it was coming, that sooner or later, Wells would try to make me look at those pictures. But I didn't look at them," she insisted. "I focused on a corner of the top picture instead." And, she added, almost gaily, it can be done. "Have you ever had a friend with a crossed eye or a hairy mole? You know how you learn not to stare at it? Well, that's what I did—I just concentrated on a tiny little corner of those pictures, and I was also focusing on her [Wells]. She scares me. Jack doesn't. So I just kept my mind busy, to be on guard for her next question."

  And why couldn't she look at what she had done?

  She was silent for a couple of seconds. Then, resentfully, impatiently: "Because I don't want to see anybody dead, especially my husband! What's the point of having nightmares for two years? And obviously I'm afraid that if I look, I'll see something I will never be able to forget. Jack wanted me on redirect to say I'd seen the pictures so many times that they had no impact. Well, no! I'm never going to say I've seen bloody dead pictures of my husband, and that they don't matter to me. I'm just not."

  My husband.

  And what about this new testimony—that Linda had been awake? She stammered. Betty is a lousy liar when it comes to the big stuff. "Well, yes, she was awake. And she said that … what Jack said she said … and I'm only just now remembering some of these things. You know?"

  And then, naturally, she had to go, end this conversation. The deputies, she said, as always, were "taking us in."

  Kerry Wells came to court the next day again looking happy, smiling at reporters and pausing to make small talk with various well-wishers. A few congratulated her for her victory over Betty the day before. She accepted with a pretty blush.

  Her good mood didn't last long.

  Because, now it was Earley's turn again to question his client.

  The scene was vintage Earley. It was midmorning, and he was droning along, asking a boring, routine series of questions, when suddenly, in the jumbled context of discussing the Broderick children, he asked Betty, almost casually, if Dan had ever talked with anyone "about having you killed."

  It was a bombshell out of the blue. Courtroom spectators jerked to attention, wondering if they had heard right.

  Betty gaped at Earley in shock, too. For reasons that remain a tactical mystery, Earley had obviously not prepped her for this one. No, she said, reddening, then bursting into real tears, she had never heard that Dan was thinking of having her killed—"Obviously not!"

  Wells stiffened as sharply as if someone had just jabbed her with a cattle prod. But she didn't even have time to demand a bench conference—Whelan, frowning, was already rising, moving toward the corner of the courtroom out of hearing of the jury, where all private quarreling occurred. The rest of the morning passed in eerie silence with jurors and spectators watching the animated, hushed argument among lawyers and judge at the far end of the room. Betty sat on the witness stand and dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex. She looked drained as the cameras focused tightly on her face. In the corridor, the Court TV reporter was sending urgent dispatches live to six million viewers about this delicious new development.

  Jack Earley lost the argument.

  After lunch, Whelan issued a stem admonishment to the jury, concerning Earley's remark:

  "This morning, Mr. Earley asked if Dan Broderick had ever hired someone to kill Mrs. Broderick. There is no evidence before you that such a statement is true. And the defendant herself is not aware of such an assertion. It is a mere allegation, not relevant to these proceedings. So disregard that question. The question and the answer shall be stricken."

  After that, despite Wells's earlier efforts either to keep him out or severely limit his testimony this year, Dr. David Lusterman returned to deliver his same, earnest lecture on the devastating effects of infidelity. But, this time, almost nobody was really listening. Too much new excitement was in the air.

  After court Wells and Earley were swarmed by reporters wanting to know what Earley had been talking about. What plot to kill Betty? Wells marched off, stony-faced, without comment. Earley shrugged. He couldn't elaborate, he said, because the judge had ordered him not to.

  But his docility would not last.

  On Monday, the jury was excused for the day, and the courtroom was closed to the public and press for hours. Inside, Wells and her assistant, Burakoff, were now also trying to block most of the testimony of Earley's battered woman expert, Daniel Sonkin. When reporters were finally allowed back in for the remainder of the hearing, Jack Earley, looking as angry as he ever does, barely waited until everyone was seated before he promptly, publicly named his murder-for-hire informant.

  He did it in the context of another chaotic sentence, protesting Wells's efforts to limit Sonkin's testimony: "Obviously, the court is taking a position at this time that, and still my position with Dr. Sonkin is, that we have the evidence of Paul Taylor, who Mr. Broderick solicited to murder …"

  Wells literally screamed her objection. Whelan was even angrier. No more gentle, sleepy-eyed "Knock it off, Mr. Earley" remarks. Red-faced, he accused Earley of posturing for the press and instantly cleared the courtroom again. Earley hung his head, wearing his most doleful face of remorse.

  Reporters stampeded to the phones to locate this Paul Taylor.

  Taylor was a cab driver—and he was not eager to talk to the press, beyond confirming that Earley wanted him to testify. Earley had learned about Taylor through a tip from one of Taylor's regular passengers, a woman who had been watching the Broderick trial on TV. She said that, after the killings, Taylor had told her about a conversation he once had with Dan about possibly having Betty killed.

  Pasas wasted no time in finding Taylor for an interview. And she later reconstructed this version of their conversation:

  Taylor had first met Dan sometime in the mid-eighties—he couldn't remember the exact year—when he went to Dan's office to deliver a deposition involving his daughter, who was then Dan's client. While he and Dan waited for a ste
nographer to arrive, he told Pasas, the conversation turned to the topic of wives. Taylor's own first marriage had ended on a sour note, and he, too, had won custody of his children. Taylor told Dan that he had gotten custody of his children by "getting rid of his wife temporarily," said Pasas. Namely, the wife had gone to jail over some undisclosed offense, apparently drug-related.

  Dan had then told Taylor that sounded like something he also needed to do, except, "I need to get rid of Betty permanently," said Pasas, recounting her interview with Taylor.

  Taylor told Dan he thought that could be arranged, said Pasas. From there, the two had a detailed discussion of what it might cost—Taylor thought maybe as much as $500,000. But Dan wanted assurances, Taylor told Pasas, that the murder could not be traced to him. Dan did not want to do anything illegal himself—"He wanted it to be risk free," Taylor said. When Taylor told Dan that nothing was ever entirely risk free, the conversation ended, according to Pasas, with Dan saying that "he would think about it." Taylor said he never heard from Dan again.

  And that wasn't all. Thanks to the TV coverage, two more witnesses stepped forward to say that they, too, had heard a man they believed was Dan Broderick threatening to have his wife killed some years earlier—and at least one of them would be far more difficult for Wells to shrug off than Paul Taylor, because he was, like Wells herself, a deputy district attorney, from San Mateo County in central California.

  Charles B. Smith, now thirty-two, entered this squalid drama because of a call made to Jack Earley by his onetime girlfriend, Teresa Naquishbendi. Now a suburban San Francisco housewife and mother of three, Naquishbendi, twenty-nine, had been folding clothes at home one day, she said, while she listened to the Broderick trial on TV. As she later told San Diego Union reporter Jeff Rose, she was only halfway paying attention, until she heard Betty mention taking ski trips with Dan to Lake Tahoe in the early eighties. Naquishbendi had also once taken a trip to Tahoe with Smith, then her fiancé. She was twenty at the time, and Smith was a twenty-three-year-old police officer about to enter law school.

  Naquishbendi stopped folding her clothes and studied the overweight, weeping blond woman on the TV screen before her. And the memories began to return. She knew this woman. She remembered seeing Betty Broderick and her husband in 1983 at Harrah's casino. "She was dressed very nicely … in a long gown, not a hair was out of place … she carried herself like a queen. On TV, she certainly didn't look like that, but, as far as the eyes and nose being in the right place, yes, it sure was [the same woman]," she said.

  Naquishbendi also vividly remembered being horrified at her boyfriend's account of a conversation he had in the bar one evening with a handsome, well-dressed young San Diego attorney, who had bluntly told Smith that he was either going to drive his wife crazy or kill her.

  By now, the entire scenario recounted by Naquishbendi was beginning to strike both Pasas and Earley as almost too bizarre to be true. Pasas seized the phone.

  Deputy DA Charles Smith immediately remembered the incident as clearly as his former girlfriend did. What's more, he spoke freely about it to both Pasas and to reporter Rose—and he was also willing to testify at the trial.

  Here is what Smith and Naquishbendi told Pasas midway through the trial, and Rose in a long feature interview after the verdict:

  Smith had been sitting alone in the bar, when he struck up a conversation with a stranger who said he was a San Diego attorney. When the discussion turned to Smith's engagement, the attorney—whose name Smith never got—had warned him against marriage and bitterly proceeded to describe his own miserable relationship. He then told Smith that he was either "going to drive [his wife] crazy" or, "if that didn't work, he was going to hire a hitman" to kill her, Smith said.

  The whole conversation had struck Smith as far more than just another idle, angry barroom diatribe by a husband fighting with his wife that night, which is why he later told his girlfriend about it. "It just got completely surreal … It was like something you saw in a movie where you overhear someone planning to kill somebody," Smith told Jeff Rose. "It was so horrifying that my eyes practically bugged out."

  Naquishbendi recalled details that Smith had forgotten. According to her, Smith also said that the man had even detailed his plan, saying he intended to drive his wife crazy by taking her money and her children through legal channels. And if that didn't work, he spoke of having her killed "and making it look like an accident."

  Naquishbendi had wanted to notify the police or hotel security immediately. But Smith wouldn't let her, on grounds that the man in the bar, for all his loose talk, hadn't actually done anything wrong. They would sound like fools.

  "I said, [talking] is not a crime," Smith told Rose. Besides, he stressed, he wasn't even sure of the man's identity.

  But Naquishbendi remembered that when she had later seen the couple going into a show, she had tried to approach the wife to tell her what her husband had said. But, she said, when the man saw her and Smith, he had turned abruptly away, pulling his wife with him.

  Smith agreed that he had not wanted to cause trouble, to make a scene. But, he told Rose, he still remembers Naquishbendi's last words to him, after the couple had vanished into the Harrah's crowd that night: "She told me, 'You will regret this … This is going to come back and haunt you'."

  At the same time Taylor, Smith and Naquishbendi were surfacing with their memories, a local hotel manager named Steven Griffin also emerged, wanting to help the defense. Griffin wrote Betty a letter in the middle of her second trial apologizing for his inadvertent role in the destruction of her marriage and volunteering to testify.

  He had been a friend of Linda's ever since she moved to San Diego in 1982 and was working as a receptionist at an office building near his hotel, he told Pasas—and, he said, he had been renting the same hotel room to Dan and Linda since early 1983. Furthermore, he said, sometime around 1987, he had heard Linda talk about sending anonymous things through the mail to Betty. In fact, Griffin told Pasas, Linda once asked him to mail a white envelope addressed to Betty with no return address, from El Cajon, a town near San Diego. He said he refused. And, at his final lunch with his friend in May, 1989, Griffin told Pasas, Linda had also told him that she and Dan intended to wear Betty down, sooner or later, through legal tactics.

  Griffin's motivation in coming forward was never clear. He had apparently gone through a bad divorce himself and, it seemed, also experienced a religious conversion of some sort. Either his conscience was bothering him, or bitterness over his own divorce was.

  Either way, here is part of what he had to say in the letter he wrote Betty in mid-November, 1991:

  "Dear Mrs. Broderick . . . I've written to you for a couple of reasons: I want to apologize for allowing rooms at [his hotel] to be used for their meetings. I see that what I did was very wrong. Second, I wanted to let you know that I tried to tell the whole truth about what I was a party to from January, 1983-May, 1989 …

  "… I'm sorry for hurting you and your family … I was told that the feelings were mutual in regards to both you and your husband being able to see other people; moreover, I was told you were aware of their relationship. Now I see that was a lie and how it hurt you and your children."

  Griffin said he wanted to testify to all this but had not been allowed. "It is obvious to me they do not want your side of this story told. I had no reason to hold anything against them or you. I just wanted to tell the truth. I feel my testimony would certainly have tarnished the halo they seem to want held above their [Dan and Linda's] heads …"

  He ended by begging Betty again to accept his belated apology. "May the love of God be with you."

  By then, too, thanks to another lead, Earley had also subpoenaed Linda Kolkena's Delta employment records. There is no overstating his glee when he discovered that Linda had been fired, not only for improper sexual conduct with a male passenger but also "for using bad language!" he reported, almost incredulous, as he sat in his office one evening. "And, in her ow
n defense, she said she just didn't think anything about it! That she used (such language) all the time!" Earley's toothy python's smile was wide enough to gulp a full-grown goose.

  A few blocks away, the atmosphere in the DA's office was apparently almost as comically incredulous. By then, Wells and investigator Green had also received defense copies of Linda's Delta files, which, according to Green, took the prosecution by complete surprise. "We didn't know whether to laugh or cry," he later recalled. "We just asked ourselves, 'How much worse can this get?'." Green had also interviewed both Paul Taylor and Steve Griffin with nearly as much haste as Pasas had—"and," he added dryly, "the worst part was that I didn't doubt the credibility of either one of them."

  In their only comfort, the prosecution team knew that Judge Thomas Whelan would never admit any of it into evidence.

  Earley knew it, too. He didn't even try to get Linda's Delta files admitted into trial. He knew Whelan would never let him go back that far in time to undermine her character. But he argued heatedly that Taylor, Smith, and Griffin should be allowed as witnesses to Dan's state of mind, and Linda's, throughout the years of the affair and the divorce.

  Wells countered that all three were irrelevant—but, still, she was obliged to concede far more than she would have liked in making her case. She agreed, for example, that Dan had a conversation with Paul Taylor about hiring a hitman to kill his wife—but, according to Taylor in his interview with investigator Green, she pointed out, Dan had then said he would never do anything like that "because it's illegal."

  Regarding deputy district attorney Smith, Wells dismissed his potential testimony as mere "hearsay" without "positive identification." And anything having to do with Linda Kolkena, including her alleged chats with Griffin about sending Betty fat and wrinkle ads, was "patent character assassination," Wells argued indignantly. The defense was trying to "produce by ambush."