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

by Bella Stumbo

  Still, in the beginning, she had ambitious plans. She promptly wrote to the other most famous female killer she knew, similar to herself —Jean Harris, the headmistress who shot her Scarsdale Diet lover to death after he jilted her. Betty's purpose was to inquire into a program at Harris's New York State prison that allows young female prisoners to keep their babies with them for the first couple of years. Betty thought she'd organize something similar at Chowchilla. She was thrilled when Harris (since paroled) replied, despite the fact that Harris told her, basically, to forget it: California doesn't have enough wealthy white Catholics to fund such a charitable effort.

  She also immediately decided to run for president of the Women's Advisory Committee at the prison. "It's kind of like being class president, and of course I can win—piece of cake!" Already, she was a campus celebrity, she proudly reported. "It's like every day I have to go out to meet my public. Girls I don't even know come up to meet me," she said. "They call me the cruise director. They love me!" She was going to organize the place, just as she had once organized luncheons for La Jolla charities. Betty was going to become president of Las Patronas at last.

  No epiphany occurred, in short, when the doors of the Big House clanged shut behind Prisoner W42477. Betty Broderick did not suddenly see the light, fall apart, and cry out, "Oh God, what have I done? What have I become?" No moment of clarity came to dilute her fury, soften her heart, and redirect her thinking. And no human help came her way, any more than it had at Colinas. So the same old reels still rolled through her head, a continuing, relentless slide show of all the injustices, real and imagined, she had suffered. The ruination continued, ignored, untreated, and unabated.

  She grew more self-obsessed, more paranoid, harder by the day. Her mind turned ever inward, devouring what was left of its brilliance. Within six months of going to state prison, her personal world was filled only with enemies. The bubbly girl-at-camp persona vanished. Instead, her anger and self-vindication steadily spread over the next months, like a quick cancer, even killing out her bawdy black humor. Within weeks, Betty wasn't funny anymore.

  First to change was her already graphic language. Now she added "butt-reamer" and "motherfucker" to her repertoire. And, increasingly, she made no distinctions in her audience. The old Betty, who could at least be canny and proper when it suited her purposes—as in her divorce trial, for example—disappeared. She spoke of butt-reamers not only with friends but even to her children's attorney. She wrote letters to her sons, which she knew were censored by their Denver therapist, Thomas Meehan, to "Dear Danny, Rhett, and Asshole Meehan."

  And her remarks about Dan became ever more tasteless, flaunting, cruel. "Happy Saint Patrick's Day," she said in a postcard to a friend in March. "At least now I don't have to worry about Dan getting drunk and killing himself. [happy face] On another occasion, she remarked that she was glad to hear Danny was growing so tall. "I always wanted him to get big enough to beat up his Dad—but I took care of that for him. Ha Ha."

  Eventually, nearly everyone involved in the ongoing custody debate over the Broderick boys agreed that it wasn't a good idea for them to visit her in prison that summer, and so they didn't.

  In time, her anger even spread to Brad, the only friend to visit her in prison during the first year. Out of the blue, she suddenly decided that she wanted him to move out of the condominium she had given him two years earlier and sign it over to Lee, who was then working at a La Jolla restaurant. "It's the only fair thing to do," she said sourly. "He can get out as easy as he got in. He would've been paying rent somewhere else anyway." When he refused, she accused him of being like all the others, stealing from her, using her to advance himself.

  And, as always, in her mind, her parents were failing her. When the Bisceglias, after fifty years in Eastchester, suddenly packed up their belongings and moved into a senior citizens' complex in Nashville to be near their oldest son, Betty could summon no compassion for them—instead, she saw it only as one more slap at her, one more rejection. "It's just their way of saying, 'See what you've done to us? Now we even have to leave our home because of you, because of the shame you've caused us.'"

  Otherwise, her daily concerns were exactly the same as they had always been, since the first day she went to jail. She worried about her magazine subscriptions, and, within days of her arrival at Chowchilla, she sent a shopping list to Dian Black, asking for, among other items, "in order of importance": sunglasses; Estee Lauder makeup; bright 4 pc jog suits; tweezers and nail clippers (Revlon); Chanel #5 lotion, spray; Coppertone or Ban de Soleil tan lotion. Etc.. Plus, of course, the hair coloring. She also asked that the rest of the box be filled with food and stationery (4 Payday candy bars, 1 bag of mints, canned coconut, skinless boneless sardines, Triscuits). Brad, she told Dian, would pay for it all.

  Then, there was her ongoing litigation. She refused to drop her appeal of the 1989 divorce settlement unless the Broderick estate reinstated Lee into Dan's inheritance—despite the fact that the Broderick attorneys were threatening to countersue for wrongful death, which would cost her children even more in legal fees. But Betty would not back off. Kim, who had enrolled briefly at the University of San Diego but then dropped out to work as a hostess at Reidy O'Neils, was still receiving support from her father's estate—reportedly around $3,000 a month. Kathy Broderick, meanwhile, was still receiving something on the order of $2,000 per month per Broderick boy, so long as she remained their legal guardian. Lee, meanwhile, got nothing. "It's just not fair," cried the Betty of old, whose lucidity still came and went. And when it came, it was, as ever, as sharply on target as a laser beam.

  Compounding her aggravations, Danny, then sixteen, spent the summer living with, of all people, Helen Pickard, in heart of the enemy camp, where, according to Kathy Broderick's orders, he had to work—as a busboy at Reidy O'Neil's. According to Pickard, his designated allowance, as decreed by Kathy Broderick, was only $10 a week.

  Betty's reaction was predictable. Not only was she outraged that her son had been ordered to bus dishes daily at his father's local shrine, in the company of "all his slobbering drunken friends," and in the shadow of loving photos of Dan and Linda, she was even more livid at the ongoing penny-pinching. A $10 allowance for her son, heir to a millionaire? While Kathy Broderick collected thousands each month for baby-sitting? "At the rate these bloodsuckers are going," she fumed, "by the time my boys are old enough for college, they're going to be broke. Why doesn't somebody stop it? It's grand theft!"

  Inflaming her even further, Danny next decided that he didn't want to live with Betty's brother Frank in Nashville. He wanted instead to stay with Pickard and attend La Jolla High School. "I am his mother," she fumed, out of all touch with reality now, "but he will not obey me!"

  Only little Rhett pleased her by agreeing to move to St. Louis to live with her brother Girard.

  That fall, Kathy Broderick agreed to relinquish guardianship of both boys. Girard Bisceglia took Rhett, but legal custody of Danny remained at issue. None of the Broderick siblings asked for him; only a cousin living near Los Angeles apparently filed for guardianship. Eventually, after six months of living with Pickard, Danny was allowed by the courts to move in with his sister Kim—who was then sharing a La Jolla apartment with several other twenty-something young adults. "For God's sake," Betty hissed. "I'd rather have him boarding with that fat-assed cleaning woman [Pickard]. I hate her, but at least she makes her kids go to school and do homework! My son will never even finish high school, living with Kim! Would someone tell me, please, why the courts have abdicated all responsibility for my children now, when they were so fucking keen to run their lives while Dan Broderick was alive?" It was, of course, just another of Betty's many good questions, amid the madness.

  But, before her first year in prison was over, she received what was probably her greatest legal satisfaction: bank attorneys for her sons filed a lawsuit against Larry Broderick for allegedly cheating them out of $295,000 in their inheritance by defaulti
ng on their share of his unpaid $450,000 debt to Dan. The case is pending. For reasons of her own, Kim did not join in the legal action.

  On the downside, a few weeks later, she learned that Danny, Rhett, and Kim had also sued her for "wrongful death," meaning that if she ever collected from her divorce appeal and the children prevailed on their claim, they might be able to collect monies from her. Most curious, according to the local legal newspaper, the suit had been filed under seal of secrecy two years earlier, in late 1990, although Betty wasn't officially served until March, 1993. Earley said he was taken by surprise, too.

  Meanwhile, the media circus continued. The first TV movie about Betty Broderick aired early in 1992—with such high ratings that a quick sequel on her trials was instantly planned. Although the first movie was unsympathetic, and Betty never saw it, she still wrote Meredith Baxter a fawning fan letter.

  "We have things in common. We're both forty-four. Our daughters Eva and Kim are the same age … You've always been one of my absolute favorites. You're beautiful, sweet, AND strong. You are shorter and thinner, but give me a chance to heal and then you'll only be shorter. I didn't gain weight till '87, two years AFTER Dan left. [happy face] …" As for what she had heard of the movie, "… You totally overlooked what Dan and Linda were doing to me that made me react … If you did not address the truth of what really went on with Dan and Linda, the aggressors, and me and the children, their victims, you missed the whole thing. [unhappy face]

  She finished by inviting Baxter to visit her for the full story. Baxter never went. Instead, she invited Kerry Wells for tea to glean further insights into Betty Broderick's true personality—and, when the sirens of Hollywood sounded, Wells went running. She even had a cameo role in the second film, as a courtroom spectator.

  Jack Earley, meantime, was as frustrated as he had ever been. Why was a TV movie being made, using his name and depicting his defense, when nobody had called either him or his client for their point of view? It was lousy, unfair journalism, in his view. He was of course correct—although, odds are, not a peep about integrity would have been heard from him had the tables been turned. Indeed, sacrificing the high road, Earley made at least one call to a Hollywood producer himself in the aftermath of the case, hoping to sell his competing side of the story. But nobody in TV-land was about to challenge a CBS production already under way. This time, Wells had definitely won.

  The San Diego attorney assigned to handle Betty's appeal before a three-judge panel was thirty-nine-year-old Roberta Thyfault. The appeal, set to begin in April, will probably drag on through the summer. Meantime, Thyfault, who immediately set off a round of black-humored chuckles all over San Diego by gravely telling a San Diego Union reporter that she could not discuss the case and, furthermore, "had also instructed Mrs. Broderick not to speak with reporters."

  "I wonder what rock she's been living under for the last two years?" cackled one journalist. At the same time, Thyfault also ordered Betty not to participate in a second Oprah Winfrey special, scheduled to coincide with the fall release of the second TV movie about her. Thyfault might as well have asked Betty Broderick to tear her tongue out—because, this time, in the flattery of all flatteries, the mountain was coming to Muhammad: Oprah was actually coming in person to Chowchilla to interview the woman who had made her ratings soar sky-high only a few months before. State prison authorities, evidently as star-struck as Thomas Whelan had once been in San Diego, immediately gave permission.

  Betty did not acquit herself well on the Oprah show. Not that it really mattered. She was lent legitimacy merely by the fact that here was Oprah Winfrey, queen of American talk shows, strolling around the prison grounds in her leopard-print sweater, this time almost purring in chumminess at Betty Broderick. They might have been two sorority sisters discussing a broken engagement, as Oprah inquired, so hushed and grave, into Betty's motives for shooting two people to death.

  Alas for Betty, she was unable to elevate the discussion beyond Oprah's fascination with the tawdry details of the shooting scene itself. Instead, clever, witty Betty lost her tongue in the presence of this icon of American values. She stuttered, stumbled, and in the end sounded mostly like just one more star-struck housewife, intimidated by celebrity, cameras, lights, and the prospect of around sixty million viewers watching her.

  In her most glaring moment of failure, when Winfrey asked what lessons she thought her story bore for other middle-aged wives, Betty couldn't think fast enough, for once, to answer. After years of stating her case literally hundreds of times with furious eloquence, now she couldn't find the words, nor the memory to even mention Epsteins, bifurcation, no-fault, or ex parte hearings, much less the eternal imbalance of power between men and women in a white male-dominated legal system. Worse, she finished her performance by agreeing, for the first time ever in a public forum, that, of course she was sorry that she had killed two people—but, she added in the next breath, revealing more anger and hatred than she ever had, only because Dan and Linda weren't around now to see that "I survived … a little pilot light in me wouldn't give up."

  And that wasn't the end of it. Contrary to Betty's expectations, Winfrey devoted her next day's show to what she billed as a "dramatically different account" of the story, another version "of what really happened"—as told by the Broderick children themselves.

  This time, not only did Kim appear, to say, among other things, that she thought her mother had premeditated the murders, but Daniel T. Broderick IV, sixteen, also appeared for the first time in public to discuss his mother. The boy was relaxed and cool, just as friends say his father always was. Tall and lanky, he also resembles Dan Broderick physically. In his main contribution to the show, he applauded his mother's performance on Oprah's show the day before, because she didn't go "over the edge like she normally does." He also told the world that he had heard his mother threaten to kill Dan and Linda—but mostly Linda—for years. "But I never thought she had the guts to do it." He thought her motive was jealousy. And he said that, yes, he and his brother had wanted to live with Betty, and at the time blamed their father for keeping them apart. But now, he said, he understood that it wasn't Dan's fault at all. It was the courts who wouldn't let them live with their mother.

  Winfrey concluded the show with Maggie Seats, housekeeper Robin Tu'ua, and attorney Kathleen Cuffaro, all of whom portrayed Betty as nothing more than a totally loveless, dangerous liar.

  Cuffaro's remarks were the most interesting—and distorted. According to her, the last letter she wrote to Betty's attorney, the one "that Betty says sent her over the edge," had been a letter flatly offering to return the boys to her if she would "stop leaving these nasty messages on the answering machine." According to Cuffaro, her letter had basically said, "If this [custody] is really what you want, then stop doing these things … and we'll let you have the boys—we'll give it a try."

  Oprah expressed shock. Betty knew she was going to get custody of the boys back? she asked, incredulous.

  "Right," said Cuffaro. She did not mention the qualifications—the "trial period," the condition that Dan could unilaterally cancel the custody arrangement. She did not mention that child support was still unresolved. She did not mention the insulting reference to Betty's "pathological obsession" with Dan and Linda contained in her final letter. Cuffaro did not, in short, accurately convey the condescending, controlling contents of her last two letters, which might have sent even a woman far more stable than Betty Broderick into a rage.

  In fact, Cuffaro continued, she thought the main reason Betty had killed Dan and Linda was because she finally knew she had it all—$16,000 per month, plus impending custody. The war was over. Betty had killed, Cuffaro said before sixty million viewers, simply because there was nothing else left to do. "… She knew she wasn't going to have anything else to fight about."

  Not least, Cuffaro added that Betty had also received $40,000 more than her half of the monies from the Coral Reef house sale. But, typical of everyone in the Broderic
k camp, she made it sound like a gift.

  Winfrey seemed to simply accept it all. "Betty, Betty, Betty," said Oprah, shaking her head sadly and peering mournfully into the cameras, burying Betty Broderick once and for all.

  Betty, Betty, Betty, indeed.

  She had, of course, asked for every bit of it. Still, it's hard to blame an irrational woman for her own self-destruction, particularly at the hands of the media, which contributed so hugely to her trusting, blind abandon and self-justification in the first place.

  But Betty learned nothing from her latest media foray. Instead, typically, she only tried to blame someone else for the disaster—in this case, Helen Pickard and Kim, who, she insisted, had pressured Danny into appearing on the Oprah show. Nonsense, of course. But it didn't matter anymore. Betty was beyond the point of assimilating new information.

  That same week, she also entertained a crew from Hard Copy in jail—wherein, more than ever, she blamed Linda Kolkena for undocumented cruelties. Even on the Oprah show, Betty still referred to Linda as "a cheap office girl" who never graduated from high school, although by then, Betty had been told dozens of times that, whatever else Linda was, she was not nineteen years old and in fact had graduated from high school.

  But she was insulted to be told that her performance on Oprah was lacking—because, as ever, she had her fan mail to reassure her that she was both correct and completely charismatic. And, indeed, thanks to both the TV movie and the Oprah shows, yet another swamp of sympathy mail poured into Chowchilla from women who still found Betty a heroine. She received so much new mail, in fact, that she had to store some of it along the back edge of her prison bunk. Now she was literally sleeping with her fan letters. But, as always, she was most fascinated with letters from the smattering of her would-be male lovers. It is extraordinary, how many American males seem to have an abiding urge to die at the hands of one tough lady. Several were planning to visit her. One man, she reported giddily, was flying all the way from Pennsylvania.