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

by Bella Stumbo

  Until the Twelfth of Never

  by

  Bella Stumbo

  ISBN 1482369559

  EAN 978-1482369557

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ is published by Taylor Street Publishing LLC, who can be contacted at:

  http://www.taylorstreetbooks.com

  http://ninwriters.ning.com

  ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ is the copyright of the author, Bella Stumbo and her estate, 1993-2013. All rights are reserved.

  The principal editor of this book was Linda Goudge, Bella Stumbo’s sister.

  When ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ first appeared, it became a literary sensation, subsequently winning the Edgar Award for non-fiction.

  This republication marks its twentieth anniversary and it is with great pleasure that we re-release this astounding book to a new generation of readers who may, for the first time, be learning about one of the most explosive American divorces ever to be captured in print, ending in the double-murder of Daniel T. Broderick III and Linda Kolkena Broderick in the early hours of the morning of November 5, 1989.

  Bella Stumbo, legendary reporter of the Los Angeles Times, spent several years meticulously researching this book before she ‘put pen to paper’, largely dictating it over the phone to her sister, Linda Goudge, who was the first and principal editor of this towering work. Famously, Bella Stumbo rarely either ate or slept while she composed her newspaper articles; so what must she have gone through to produce the five hundred plus pages of this book?

  By the time ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ was published, Betty Broderick had begun serving two consecutive sentences for second degree murder; two Lifetime television movies had been made; and Oprah Winfrey had aired two of her highest-rated programs ever, discussing the case.

  Additionally, several other books were published to explain what happened and hundreds of thousands of print inches were devoted to the question of how seemingly blessed lives could end in such wanton blood and violence.

  However, ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ has always been regarded as the definitive account, pleasing neither the Broderick and Kolkena families, nor Betty Broderick with whom Bella Stumbo was in regular contact right up until Ms. Stumbo’s death, with its even-handed treatment of the breathtaking details.

  The jury verdicts were controversial—it took two trials for a jury to convict Betty Broderick of second degree murder—and the American public was sharply divided over who was the Broderick monster—Dan, Linda or Betty—in the story of a ‘perfect wife and mother’ or a wife from hell, either way disintegrating from a once beautiful, wealthy and accomplished woman into a relentlessly outraged double murderess.

  That the crime took place years after Dan Broderick had left home, and why, is explained in detail in ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’, and we will leave it to you, our readers, to form your own opinions on what led to the blood bath.

  Since the publication of ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’, the author of this book has succumbed to cancer (in 2002) and Betty Broderick has remained in prison, still unable to persuade the legal system that she has the slightest remorse for what she did.

  In 2010, Betty Broderick faced her first parole board since her conviction and sentencing. All four of her now-grown children attended the hearing, as did Larry, brother of Dan Broderick, and Roger, brother of Linda Kolkena Broderick. Two of the children argued that their mother should be released; the rest argued against.

  The 2010 parole board refused to order her release on the grounds that there was no evidence that Betty had moved on, that she remained anything other than locked in a private cell of remorseless rage, still wishing to punish the two people who she feels destroyed her fairytale former life, and whom she has already killed.

  But this much is beyond dispute: to this day, two trials later, Betty still frequently speaks of Dan Broderick, and sometimes Linda, as if they were still alive and well and tormenting her.

  "He's such a shit!" she exploded one day, nearly fifteen months later, after reciting some past example of his sins against her. "I'd like to kill him!"

  "But, Betty," her listener replied, "you did."

  Silence. Pause. Then a small, confused laugh. "Yeah, well … but I didn't get revenge ... he didn't suffer enough."

  Whatever Betty Broderick truly is—cold blooded killer or permanently damaged victim—she remains one of the most fascinating people alive and this is her story …

  Kathleen Hewtson

  Taylor Street Publishing LLC

  Part One

  Betty

  Chapter 1

  Betty

  At last, she had become too disgusting, too pathetic to bear, but only she could not see it. She grew fatter, messier, uglier each day, until finally she could wear nothing but sweat suits. Her hair was yellow straw, jerked back in a rubber band, a bristling ponytail, accentuating her pasty, multiple chins. She looked like a frowsy blimp, like some low-class Twinkies freak from a cheap trailer park; and her old friends, remembering how lovely, how willowy, how elegant she had once been, flinched and turned their own pretty, smooth faces away. How could she let herself go like that, they whispered among themselves, making mental notes to double their time at the gym next week.

  And she was even worse to hear. So loud, so foul-mouthed. She was no longer the witty, poised, proper woman they had known for years, and it was all because her husband had left her for another woman. But she no longer even spoke of him as her former husband. Now he was "the cuntsucker," the new woman in his life was "the cunt," and together they had "fucked me". She raved, she called old friends constantly, she lumbered like some awful beast into all of La Jolla's quietest, most fashionable restaurants, slamming her heavy body down, uninvited, into their polite company. No luncheon was safe from her embarrassing intrusions, her nasty mouth, her rantings. Up and down the stylish streets of La Jolla she went, into all the perfect boutiques with their $300 cotton blouses and $10,000 gowns, into the stately calm of the La Valencia patio café, through the private gates of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. She was everywhere, searching out the women she had once delighted with her intelligence and charm.

  But now she was a woman gone mad. Over and over again, she told them the same story, the tale of a woman deceived and cheated. Over and over, she told them, showed them, what it might be like to be a divorcée in La Jolla.

  And she was always crying. At school soccer games, when everyone else was basking in the sun, wrapped in well-being, she sat in the bleachers, crying. "My son,” she would tell them through red eyes, tears shamelessly streaming, "can't play soccer because his father won't let him go to practice. He's a class joke." She cried at an Anne Klein trunk show at Saks, leaving halfway through, because "I can't wear my pretty clothes anymore, I'm so fat I don't know why I even came!"

  Worse, she expected them to sympathize. Wasn't her ex a joke, she would demand, loudly, shrilly. Wasn't he a laughingstock in La Jolla? Weren't they all laughing at how the cuntsucker had hit forty and left his family for the office bimbo, a cheap slut? Wasn't it ludicrous how he had bought a red Corvette and run off with a woman young enough to be his daughter, how he had cheated her out of a fair settlement in the divorce, this hotshot, pretentious, millionaire lawyer everybody so admired? Wasn't it a scream what a hypocrite he was? For four yea
rs he had stalled before she even got a property settlement—and then she had been robbed blind. Look at her monthly support—only $16,000—a pittance of what he actually made, and hardly enough, she complained, to maintain her lovely La Jolla home in the hills overlooking the sea. Not enough to shop at Capriccio's, to travel to Europe, not enough even to buy her favorite praline chewy candies at Neiman-Marcus once a month anymore. The bastard had even refused to pay the country club fees. Worse, a judge had once ordered her to take vocational testing. The sonofabitch wanted to turn her into a clerk at I. Magnin's!

  Now, she told them, after sixteen years of marriage, she was virtually broke, forced to budget, and still she couldn't make ends meet. She was having to sell her beautiful seaside house and move into a tacky condominium across from a shopping center on the edge of town. Her new view would be pizza parlors, cinemas, and junky drugstores. Just the other day, a pilot light had exploded in her face. See, she said, shoving her drooping jowls closer, how she had no eyelashes or eyebrows left?

  Atop all else, he had taken her four children away, too, him and his legal buddies on the San Diego bench. They had given him sole custody and denied her even visitation rights for nearly three years—all behind closed doors in sealed proceedings. Even now, she only got them for two weekends a month.

  Didn't it make them sick? Didn't they want to vomit along with her? Could they imagine a perfect mother like herself being treated this way? Could they? And now, she told them, the asshole was torturing the children, too. While he was vacationing in Greece with his simpering whore, their oldest daughter was practically starving in college, he had put her on such a tight budget. He had written their other daughter out of his will entirely because "she won't kiss his ass." And her two small sons were both suicidal, they missed her so much.

  Could they imagine such a cruel, phony, cheap piece of shit? Weren't they shocked? Weren't they outraged, too?

  They studied their flawless nails, they made excuses to go: The gardener was waiting for his check. The decorator was coming. They were late for a committee meeting for the Jewel Ball. Bye-bye, darling, wonderful to see you. Kisses all around. And she would be left, sitting alone, or pawing frantically through her phone directory for the next old friend to call, to tell her story all over again. To seek sympathy where there no longer was any. Everybody saw but her.

  What they saw was a woman who had made all the wrong choices, a woman who had lost her man, a woman who was now alone, and so angry they couldn't relate. Crazy Betty, they called her behind her back. They didn't believe her lunatic tales of legal abuse behind closed doors. It was too much. All they knew was that this raving woman had been jailed twice, once for six days over her vulgar mouth. She had been committed by her ex-husband to a mental institution for three days after she ran a car into his front door. She was even rumored to be a child molester—and it made sense. How else in this day and age to explain a mother who had been denied even visitation rights? How else to explain the closed courtrooms for so many years, unless there was something truly horrible to hide?

  They shivered, they averted their eyes. For, in the end, all they saw, even the divorcées among them, was a woman they did not want to ever, ever be. Crazy Betty. She had become a nightmare in their midst, a woman in ruins.

  And, at last, she saw it, too.

  She awoke around four A.M. and stared into the darkness, listening to the sounds of her ten-year-old son breathing softly beside her. Little Rhett. He wore her robe around the house, he insisted on sleeping with her. Danny, thirteen, was down the hall. It was her weekend with the kids, and today she had promised to take them to Tijuana. She hated Tijuana. So dirty, so noisy … Why couldn't she sleep?

  She moved away from the boy. She had fallen asleep again in her clothes. A linen pants suit tonight. Too tight already. She shifted heavily, rising. The button was ready to snap. She was ready for the next size. So soon. What was it now, coming up? Size eighteen? Twenty? Her mind screamed. Why in hell couldn't God let her sleep through just one night, like everybody else? Everywhere in the La Jolla hills around her, normal people would wake at eight or nine, read the newspapers, eat buttered croissants, plan their perfect days.

  But she was awake in the dark.

  She got up and wandered into the kitchen. Maybe if she ate something …

  But she couldn't eat. She was so tired of eating. She went outside for the newspapers. It was Sunday morning, November 5, 1989. She moved softly, careful not to awaken those who still slept. Her jaw hurt. The dentist said she was grinding her teeth to nubs. She thumbed through the papers, comprehending nothing. Her mind was wild. She reached over and picked up the latest two letters from Dan's attorney to hers. More threats. More insults.

  One letter rejected her attorney's latest custody proposal and made reference to her "pathological obsession" with Dan and his new wife. She could spend "substantially" more time with her children—but only on "a trial basis," and only if she changed her ways. If she abided by Dan's rules. If she allowed him to be judge and juror, arbiter of her behavior. If she agreed that he could automatically terminate the new arrangement without court action, if he saw fit. If, if, if.

  She put the letter down and picked up the second.

  "I find [your client's] actions completely inconsistent with the contentions of her psychotherapists that her emotional disturbance and mental disease are improving. The contrary appears to be the case," wrote Dan's attorney, Kathleen Cuffaro. The letter also threatened to reinstate her suspended nineteen-day jail sentence if she didn't stop befouling Dan Broderick's answering machine, if she didn't cease her "odious behavior."

  Enclosed were transcripts of three telephone messages she had recently left on his answering machine. She skimmed them:

  "… Rhetty pooh … Where are you? Unless the cunt is playing with the machine again. We're all so thrilled the little fucker's back in town. You can't hear this, honey?"

  And, "Hey Rhett … Why can't you hear this? Has the cunt been playing with the phone again? This really amuses me that she has nothing to do after all this time but play with the stupid phone. Marriage must be great. Ha …"

  She stopped reading. Her language was the same as it had been for years. Her brain fought for focus. Jail. That's what he wanted. He wanted to punish her again for her tongue. It would never end, not until he took away the last puny, pathetic weapon she had left.

  She picked up a pencil and wrote on the bottom of the Cuffaro letter: "I can't take this anymore … the cunt interfering with what little contact I have left with my children … constant threats of court, jail, contempt, fines, etc. … them constantly insinuating I'm crazy.”

  Then she started a letter to Cuffaro.

  "Dear Ms. Cuffaro. Your verbatim transcripts of calls to my sons are of no use to anyone but to me to show the courts the endless abuse I suffer at the hands of the mentally deranged Mr. Broderick … [Two judges] ordered my ex-husband to keep his office cunt off the kids' telephone line. … I am really sick of being his victim …" She stopped, shoved the papers away. Seven years of her life spent this way. Wasted. In two days more, she would be forty-two. Old. Old and failed. Old and disgusting. And alone. She would never be like Rose Kennedy after all. Never the sheltered, aristocratic Catholic matriarch, presiding over generations of children in her compound. No role, no future. Alone.

  And why? Why? What had she ever done to deserve this shame, this pain, this unbearable fear?

  Nothing. Nothing, was what.

  She went to her car and pulled away.

  It was near sunrise. The ocean shimmered in the distance, the air was damp and cool, dew dripped from the thick hibiscus and bougainvillea in the streets outside. A few Mexican maids trudged down the sidewalks, en route to demanding, early-rising masters. A lone, middle-aged jogger sprinted past, barreling toward the sea. Her handbag was on the front seat. Inside it was her little gun. The gun she had bought last spring. A .38 Smith & Wesson. She loved that gun. "My teeny weeny ladies'
gun," she often called it. Sometimes she carried it around the house in the pocket of her robe. It calmed her whenever she touched its cool metal. It fit her hand so nicely. She had never fired it, though, not since the day she bought it. But she knew how. She knew guns. In school, she had been a marksman. So many years ago … before she had traded everything away. For him. For the cuntsucker.

  She roared out of La Jolla's hills and thundered onto the freeway, heading south, toward downtown San Diego, fifteen minutes away. Past the Price Club, past Sea World, past the airport she went, deeper and deeper into the city. Into Dan's new neighborhood. To what she always called his "mansion in the slums."

  She parked in front. It was a looming, two-story house, on a cul de sac, just north of Balboa Park, with a red brick façade and white columns flanking the front door. Like a southern plantation. So like his father's house in Pittsburgh, set back from the street, with its big, fancy lawn. Towering eucalyptus trees whispered above as she crept across the grass, gun in hand. No traffic, no dogs. Dan hated dogs. Silence. The house was dark.

  She went around to the back door. She used her daughter's key to let herself in. It was quiet, only the two of them were here now.

  She slipped through the formal, expensive rooms, this fat, disheveled, broken woman, and moved softly up the stairs, and entered the bedroom.

  And there they lay. Two of the world's beautiful people. Her one-time husband, the father of her children, Dan. So handsome. More handsome, in fact now, at forty-four, than he had been in their youth. Thin, dark, with a smile to die for. "The bong," she had called it, in college when they were courting, to describe the delirious feeling of young love. "The Way You Look Tonight," the Lettermen's big hit of 1961, had been "their song." But now, there he was, in his boxer shorts, lying next to the new wife. Linda. So young, only twenty-eight, and so undeniably beautiful, too. Slender, perfect features, her long, blond hair flung across the pillow. Tanned legs, red nails. Youth at its best. In black-and-white polka-dot baby dolls. Once the receptionist, now his wife.