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

by Bella Stumbo

  Whelan agreed. Dan's state of mind wasn't at issue, nor was Linda's—only Betty's was. And, since Betty didn't know about any of these alleged plots and schemes, they could have had no bearing on her motivation in killing. Furthermore, since this wasn't a self-defense case, Dan's reputation for violence was also irrelevant, Whelan ruled. Thus, he banned all three witnesses from his courtroom.

  After the hearing, Earley angrily vowed to reporters that he would appeal any negative verdict based on improper exclusion of evidence.

  "The jury deserves to hear both sides, whether they believe it or not," he declared. "One of the problems is that the jurors are looking at Betty's testimony and saying, 'Hey, here's a woman who's a little bit on the crazy side', "he told the San Diego Union. "But, when you look at what she's been claiming all these years, when you look at the evidence, lo and behold, Dan was at least professing to other people—and so was Linda—that they were doing exactly what Betty said they were doing!" And was it logical, he demanded, to think that both Taylor and Smith—two men from entirely different walks of life—would fabricate the same tale?

  Wells ignored all questions about Dan's alleged schemes to destroy Betty. "A lot of people don't realize how much information you get from crazy people out there," she snapped as she swept past.

  Newspaper headlines the next day blared: "Broderick Target of Death Plot?" asked one. Just as San Diegans had begun to get bored with the Betty Broderick story, it became steamier than ever.

  By Tuesday, Whelan had had it with all the gossip, innuendo, and media speculation. He was particularly tired of picking up the paper to see Jack Earley complaining about his rulings.

  And so he slapped a gag order on both attorneys and their investigators, forbidding them from publicly discussing evidence or potential evidence, at the risk of going to jail. At the same time, contrary to his promise the year before that the Broderick trial would be wide open, he also imposed a ban on selected sidebar hearings, normally available in transcripts to the media, and ruled that certain hearings on witnesses would now be closed to the press, too.

  It was all downhill for the defense from that point forward.

  After hours of argument behind closed doors, Wells and Burakoff succeeded in so limiting the testimony of Daniel Sonkin that he finally walked out in a professional rage. In a press conference in the courthouse corridor, Sonkin reiterated his view that Betty Broderick was a victim of not only psychological but also physical and sexual abuse. "But," he said angrily, by the time the prosecution and the judge were finished, he had been forbidden from even suggesting that Betty was either physically or sexually battered. Instead he would be permitted to testify only to his opinion "that Mrs. Broderick was emotionally abused … but that is not the complete story, and it is not fair to trivialize the issue of battered women in that way."

  Thus did the defense lose its only expert witness on emotional battery. Nor did Earley attempt to replace Sonkin at the last minute. What the defense had originally billed as a potentially pioneering case in emotional battery ended up with no mention of battered-woman syndrome at all—emotional, physical, or sexual.

  Instead, aside from Dr. Lusterman's remarks on the effects of infidelity, Earley allowed Trial Two to limp to its lame ending with only the mental health testimony of psychologist Katherine DiFrancesca, who, for all practical purposes, might as well have been a prosecution witness, since she again testified that, regardless of Dan's role in Betty's emotional demise, Betty had a latent personality disorder from the outset. Betty remained stable only so long as her familiar anchors were in place, namely her identity as a wife and mother and respected member of the community, but once those supports were stripped away by the divorce and Dan's subsequent behavior toward her, said DiFrancesca, she had collapsed emotionally into a severely depressed, essentially defenseless victim of her own personality failings.

  At the same time Earley's defense was fizzling to its finish, the prosecution was going all out for glamour to convict Betty. In place of Dr. Goldzband, Wells now produced Dr. Park Elliott Dietz, a $300 per hour forensic psychiatrist with a national reputation. Among his resume highlights, Dietz had testified for the prosecution in the case of John Hinkley, the would-be assassin of President Reagan, and for the defense in the case of Robert Bardo, the obsessive movie fan who shot television actress Rebecca Shaeffer to death. Never mind that Dietz had been on the losing side in both cases (he said Hinkley was sane and Bardo a schizophrenic). His credentials were enough to impress a San Diego jury. (After he finished with Betty, Dietz would go on to the sensational Jeffrey Dahmer serial murder/cannibalism case in Milwaukee—where he would testify that Dahmer was sane in part because he paused long enough to use condoms before sex.)

  Dietz promptly declared Betty Broderick a flawed human being, an extreme narcissist with histrionic traits, suffering from a mixed personality disorder. But, he said, she was definitely sane and responsible for her acts.

  "The person rules the condition, the condition doesn't rule the person," said Dietz. A middle-aged man with a bland, controlled manner, he was distinguished mainly by his devilish eyebrows, which shot like inverted V's nearly into his receding hairline. Also, he didn't blatantly curry favor with the jurors. He was too self-confident for that.

  Dietz had, of course, not interviewed Betty. He hadn't even tried. He didn't need to. He could see all he needed to see, he said, based on many hours of reading through court transcripts, medical reports, and her own writings.

  And what those materials had shown him, he testified, were the traits of a woman who fit every single medical definition of a narcissist. While only five of the nine criteria defined by psychiatric manuals are necessary to qualify as narcissistic, Dietz found that Betty fit nine out of nine, ranging from grandiosity, swollen ego, and lack of empathy for others, to "a feeling of entitlement—that the world owes me respect, money, and fame." She was, in short, an extremely distorted human being, well before Dan left her for Linda, in the opinion of Park Dietz.

  He supported his views by quoting extensively, but selectively, from both Betty's diaries and her Marriage Encounter letters—further enraging Earley, who had by now exhausted himself arguing the unfairness of these piecemeal excerpts from documents which he would never be permitted to enter into evidence in full.

  Buttressing his assertion that Betty required undue, constant attention, Dietz read this passage from her Marriage Encounter letters: "I feel no one admires me and I need that," she had told Dan, at age twenty-eight. And, read Dietz, "The number one thing I loved about you was how much you loved me …" Among other examples of her narcissistic grandiosity, he also quoted, in all seriousness, a flip remark Betty had once made to Kim that one day she would run away and marry a Saudi prince who would lavish her with riches.

  And so on. Just about everything Betty Broderick had ever written or said, short of her grade school essays, was now being thrown in her face as evidence that she had always been a twisted personality.

  That Betty was histrionic was obvious, Dietz said, as demonstrated by her constantly exaggerated emotions, temper tantrums, and colorful language—anything to keep attention on herself. "The emotional pitch is more important than facts to the histrionic … it keeps them in the limelight." He also conceded that, if controlled, histrionics can be quite charming to others. Hollywood, he quipped in his only moment of attempted humor, was full of them. "They can be fun. They know how to work an audience."

  But Dietz disagreed with DiFrancesca that Betty was a borderline personality, because, he said, borderlines normally can't get along with others, and obviously, for many years, Betty Broderick was very easy for everyone to get along with. Nor did Dietz think she was severely depressed after the divorce, since she had functioned so well. Dietz didn't believe Betty Broderick had ever been seriously suicidal either. Her one alleged effort, wherein she "had scratched her wrists," had been nothing more than an attention-getter, typical of her personality problems, he said, because "S
he's too narcissistic to harm herself, to harm such a perfect thing."

  For the first time in Dietz's testimony, Betty glanced up from her legal pad with an expression other than benign. Who was this insulting asshole on the witness stand? She glared at him with purest contempt.

  Earley's cross-examination of Dietz was interminable. It also got nowhere. Afterward, Wells dismissed Dietz quickly. It was four P.M. on the evening before a four-day Thanksgiving recess, and she had something more powerful than Park Dietz in mind for the jurors to take home with them for the holiday.

  She marched again to her tape machine, which had begun to resemble nothing so much as a machine gun aimed straight at Betty Broderick's head.

  Earley stiffened, called for a bench conference, lost, returned to his table, and listened to the tape with a stone face.

  This was a tape Wells had apparently just discovered, since she had never played it before. It was a conversation between Betty and Rhett, just before Thanksgiving, 1987. Rhett was sobbing from the beginning. At issue was where he and Danny would spend Thanksgiving. Dan had said they couldn't go to Betty's, and Betty was demanding to know why not. Here is their exchange, in part:

  Rhett: "I dunno. He just said no." [crying]

  Betty: "What are you gonna do over there?"

  Rhett: "I don't know." [crying]

  Betty: "What's the matter?"

  Rhett: "My stomach …" [crying]

  Betty: "Well, I'm going to make a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, with all my wonderful food, and the Forbeses are coming, and the Michaelsons are coming, and the Sarises are coming. [cheerful] We're all going to have a wonderful time … and you guys need to be here. You don't belong in the slums with the cunt and your father and his drunken, divorced asshole friends like last year. Remember last year—the cunt said, 'Your father's an asshole'?"

  Rhett: "Yeah." [sniffling]

  Betty: "She was right. [laughing] But he's a rich asshole and she's too smart to walk out on him …"

  Then, from Betty:

  Betty: "Poor little Muffy [Rhett's dog]. I put her out back to get some exercise and sunshine, and she's crying. She wants her babies back."

  Was she giving the puppies away? Rhett cried, sounding heartbroken.

  Betty: "We're giving three away! I can't keep them. There's nobody here to play with them."

  Rhett: "N00000! [crying] Can't we keep them?"

  No, said Betty. She then told him whom she was giving the puppies to.

  Rhett: "But I want a baby!"

  Betty: "You had a baby. Muffy. But you missed her growing up … because Daddy's such a fucker. Right?"

  Rhett: "Right."

  Betty: "So, why give you another baby and you'll miss it growing up again …?" The boy was silent, except for his sniffling.

  "Rhett, I hate to tell you this," his mother continued, in a tone of weary patience. "But you've got to learn to stick up for yourself. You've got to speak up to Daddy and the cunt. He's killing you all. He's ruining your lives and killing you, and you've got to speak up and fight back."

  Rhett: "I'm not dead." [crying]

  Betty: "Well, maybe you're not dead physically, but emotionally you're dead. You don't have anyone who loves you or cares about you over there, and he mistreats you … treats you like a little piece of shit, and he's a coldhearted bastard fucking an office cunt … what kind of a parent is that?"

  Rhett: "A cold one?"

  Betty: "A bad one. A very, very, very, very bad one. And you shouldn't put up with it anymore. You should tell him to fuck off. You and Lee Lee and Danny should say, 'Fuck off, asshole,' and come over here. Tell him to drop dead and go away. And then you'd be happy over here. Right?"

  Rhett: "Right."

  Betty: "You gotta stick up to him … he's a maniac. He is a raving mental maniac."

  Rhett: [muffled response]

  Betty: "Just get away, just get over here. I'll get the police to beat the shit out of him."

  She went on to tell Rhett that maybe she would even "come over and bring the TV cameras," too. It would be a rescue operation, she quipped, "like getting the hostages out of Lebanon … the Iranian hostages, a sneak attack … You're little prisoners of war. Poor babies."

  Then, all lightness gone, annoyance in its place, she demanded: "Rhett, when are you gonna get over here?"

  Rhett: "I don't know …" [sad]

  Betty: "When he tells you you can't come over here for Thanksgiving, don't you say anything back? Or do you just say, 'Oh?'."

  Rhett: [no answer]

  Betty: "Well, go fight. Beat up Daddy. Bye."

  Rhett: "Oh, wait! Mom?"

  The buzzing dial tone rang across the courtroom, intermingled with the little boy's shrill, pleading cries.

  "Mom?"

  "Mom …?"

  But Mom had hung up.

  With that, Wells briskly wished the jurors a happy holiday. Earley looked like he might vomit.

  Betty was as oblivious as ever on the phone that night. "What are we going to do here? Nothing is getting out!" she fumed. "Where is our expert on litigious assault? Where is our expert on codependency?"

  It was the first time all year that she had expressed any real interest in witnesses to address those themes. Always before it had mostly been battered-woman's syndrome.

  She didn't want to discuss the Rhett tape. But, like the Danny tape, she didn't think it was that bad—and everything she had said "was true."

  Almost incidentally, she also mentioned that, after court that day, the bailiffs had allowed her parents to remain behind for a few minutes to talk to her. It was the first time they had been allowed past steel and glass to touch their daughter since the killings.

  "And you know what the first thing my stupid-assed mother said to me was?" she asked, laughing, mimicking her. "'Oh, Betty Anne, if only you'd married Eddie Frye!' I didn't even remember who Eddie Frye was! I said, 'Mother, who the hell is Eddie Frye?'."

  "'Oh, he was the nice boy whose father owned the flag factory'."

  Meantime, she said, passing over it, her father had only hugged her and cried.

  Then the moment was gone. In the next breath, Betty Anne was a prisoner again, giggling over the phone at one of her cell mates.

  "They just love me here," she exclaimed. "The girl on the next phone was just telling her boyfriend that she's in jail with Betty Broderick, and she told him, 'If you don't say "I Do," I'll kill you!’ Her laughter was wild.

  And that was the end of Trial Two. Earley's only real defense, beyond Betty's own testimony, amounted mainly to the same parade of La Jolla women who had appeared in Betty's behalf the year before. With a couple of exceptions, they all returned, to say the same things. But this time, they better understood the rules of the game. If they wanted to take a swipe at Dan, they knew they would have to do it on their own, apropos of no question. Some were almost amusing in their determination.

  Asked something innocuous about Betty's baby-sitting days, for example, Wilma Engel suddenly blurted out, "I always felt Betty was intimidated by Dan. Dan Broderick even intimidated me, and I'm not easily intimidated." Marilyn Olsen did the same thing. Out of the blue, she declared that "Betty was very dynamic, very intelligent. Dan just seemed like an overgrown fraternity boy."

  Wells's jaw muscles were always the best monitor of her mood. Now, as these infernal women kept up their unsolicited remarks, she looked like she was grinding molars to hold her tongue.

  But Wells scored a few points of her own.

  Lucy Peredun, Betty's former roommate at Calle del Cielo, testified that Betty had told her, falsely, that all her attorneys had cruelly quit on her at the last minute, which was why she was representing herself in her divorce trial.

  Besides Pickard and Forbes, Wells herself also called another member of Betty's former La Jolla set: Liz Armstrong, a friend from Betty's investment club, testified that Betty was a whiz when it came to the stock market—not a woman apt to be so financially helpless as the defense cl
aimed.

  That night Betty called, fuming as usual over all the wrong things. Her mind was mainly on Liz Armstrong. "She made it sound like I'm plugged into flicking Wall Street! I didn't even know how to work my computer! It was for the kids—little green frog games!"

  From there, she went into a tirade over what she suspected Jack Earley intended to say in his closing argument. This time, Earley had hinted to her strongly that he was going to beg for a manslaughter conviction.

  She was livid. "He better not! I will stand up and scream and make a scene if he asks for manslaughter! Sure, he would consider it a major victory if he got manslaughter—but after I've gone this far, why should I accept that?" She was still expecting an acquittal.

  Closing arguments were predictable. Wells was swift and to the point; Earley took half a day. In her most theatrical moment, Wells marched around the courtroom, brandishing Betty's gun; Earley hooked up his ticking metronome.

  Wells again asked for two counts of first-degree murder. She pointed to the contradictions in Betty's testimony between the two trials. This year, Betty said she had been spooked into shooting by Linda's cry to call the police; but in the first trial Betty had said nothing about Linda speaking. Which version, Wells asked, did they believe?

  Wells also played the feminist angle this year—but in reverse. Sure, she said, maybe Dan should have been more honest with Betty from 1983 on. But, she said, trying to blame Dan for his own death—as the defense was doing—was similar to accusing a rape victim of asking for it by virtue of her dress, her language, her walk.

  She finished by saying, "If this isn't murder, I don't know what is!" Then, almost wearily, she begged the jury to return, this time, with a verdict—any verdict. "Make a call," she urged, and sat down.