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

by Bella Stumbo

  They were perfect, this pair. They had it all. He was rich, and only going to grow richer. Past president of the San Diego County Bar Association, respected by all, an income of who knows how much last year—$2 million, $3 million? And Linda had him. They had been married six months. In the bathroom was the "Big O" calendar. Ovulation time. They were going to have a new family. He was trying hard to impregnate her. She was trying even harder to get him to.

  Bang bang bang bang bang.

  Two bullets struck Linda, one in her chest and, as she spun over, another in the back of her head. One bullet hit Dan in the back as he tried to dive off the bed. One hit a nightstand, the other a wall. He did not die instantly, as his wife did. Instead, he lingered on, anywhere from a couple of minutes to half an hour, according to the coroner, later, before strangling in his own blood.

  She walked around the bed, stepped over his body, yanked the phone out of the wall, and left.

  She went to a nearby phone booth, where she called one of her old La Jolla girlfriends and, according to later testimony, said, "I finally did it. I shot Dan. I could hear him gurgling in his own blood … and, it's true, they do shit their pants." The friend hung up on her in disgusted disbelief. Crazy Betty.

  She also called another, newer girlfriend, one who did not hang up, and said, "I need help." She then drove to her daughter's apartment. By sunset, she was in jail, surrendered.

  No problem, she told the anxious jail matron on suicide watch that night: "The matter has been resolved."

  And that night, for the first time in months, Elisabeth Anne Broderick slept until sunrise.

  San Diego, with a population of 1.1 million, is the sixth largest U.S. city, but it retains a remarkably sane, small-town flavor, clean and pretty, with dozens of distinctive neighborhoods abutting each other, many divided by small parks and brilliant blue waterways, with views of rolling hillsides, canyons, and the sea. City planners have refused to surrender open spaces to sprawling shopping malls and high-rise development. In San Diego, old buildings are not automatically razed for the new, but restored. The hills sparkle with pastel Victorians, Spanish adobes, and art deco monuments from the twenties. The city is so arranged that it's still possible to get almost anywhere in town within twenty minutes. Downtown is compact enough to cover by foot. Whenever the annual lists of America's most livable cities appear, San Diego is invariably named—and La Jolla, the elite coastal colony in the northern corner of town, is among the most prized addresses in San Diego or anywhere else in the world.

  The relatively unspoiled nature of San Diego is due in large part to geography. Located at the southernmost tip of California, it is an isolated urban pocket, buffered to the south by the Mexican border—Tijuana is only twenty-five miles away—and shielded to the north from the encroaching sprawl of Orange County by a twenty-mile stretch of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Some thirty percent of San Diego is occupied by U.S. military installations, mostly Navy. Although it is only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, San Diego has never been seen as a part of the California fast track, but, instead, as a lazy, conservative backwater with a world-famous zoo, a nice place to live, to retire, to raise families. Despite its size, it had never produced even one California governor until 1990, when former mayor Pete Wilson, a Republican, was elected.

  But within its own boundaries, San Diego is a thriving city-state, a place where the movers and shakers are easily identifiable. Here, everyone with pretensions to influence and wealth knows everyone else with the same ambitions, at least by reputation. A few names dominate, and the local press chronicles their every move, not only in traditional society pages, but also in quaint, immensely popular news columns devoted to civic gossip.

  The death of Daniel T. Broderick III and his new wife ranked as one of the biggest community shocks of the decade. San Diego has had its share of flamboyant crimes over the years—including the mass killer who shot twenty-three people to death in a local McDonald's a few years ago, as well as Robert Alton Harris, the first condemned killer to be executed in California in twenty-five years (for shooting two teenagers and then eating their Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers). But, in the main, murder is limited to all the usual places on the wrong side of the tracks. And seldom has any city seen one of its best and brightest gunned down so summarily.

  Dan Broderick was an immensely successful medical malpractice attorney who dazzled most people with his credentials alone: he had both a law degree from Harvard and a medical degree from Cornell. In 1987, he served as the county bar association president. He was so polished, smart, charming, and handsome—from his perfect hair to his trademark rose boutonnière—that his friends openly predicted he would one day move on to the U.S. Senate and maybe even the White House. He had his enemies, of course—many doctors and attorneys who had tangled with him hated him and his tactics. But, in general, Dan Broderick was widely regarded as a model attorney, a dynamic litigator with a reputation beyond reproach. His track record was so impressive that a mere call from his office, it is said, was usually enough to cause defendants—and their insurance companies—to call it quits and settle out of court. His settlements were often astronomically high because he was increasingly able to pick and choose, accepting only the most dramatic, winnable, and lucrative of cases involving major institutions, both public and private. Small-time targets rarely interested him.

  Linda Kolkena, a onetime Delta Airlines stewardess, had advanced from a pool receptionist in his office building to his personal legal assistant before becoming his second wife.

  When Dan fell to bended knee in 1988, in front of a crowd of cheering attorneys, secretaries, and paralegals in a fashionable downtown bar to propose in the most old-fashioned of ways, it made the gossip columns. "The earnest-looking fellow down on one knee on the floor at Dobson's the other night was attorney Dan Broderick, asking his paralegal, Linda Kolkena, to marry him," the San Diego Union reported. "Much too public a proposal to turn down. They'll marry in April."

  Even in a larger, meaner city beset by daily examples of human folly, the Broderick case would probably have attracted attention, it was such a glaring example of all-American values gone awry. This splendid little saga had it all. It was steamy, it was sexy, it was replete with obscenities and violence, it contained every cliché ever heard about the nouveau riche fallen beneath the weight of their own venality. It was the tale of a woman scorned, a woman locked in battle over her man, her money, her children, and her rights as a long-term wife. It was a morality tale of Biblical proportions, involving adultery and covetousness, all of it wrapped in a great big flag emblazoned with the almighty U.S. dollar—and concluding in what, on the face of it, appeared to be a most blood-curdling case of stark, premeditated murder in the first degree. Shooting them in their sleep? No soap opera writer could have concocted better.

  It was the timeless tale, too, of the Happy Hour mating game, the story of young dandies and aging heroes drifting through their misty hazes in the evenings at the town's most popular watering holes, singing their college fight songs and speaking of power and money and their own latest, clever professional coups—they were "Players," all—while yet another subculture of young ladies—call them Jennifers or bimbos or mere innocents—cruised among them, their perfumes and mousses wafting through the air like chum in shark-infested waters, all hunting for a husband, and too bad if he already happened to be nominally some other woman's man. The rationale is always the same: that Old Love was dead. The Player told her so. Love. That is the language young women speak, while they are still young and firm and unscarred, and it isn't even their fault. It was the language of Linda.

  The Broderick homicides riveted the entire city. Newspaper headlines blared, television crews turned out in force, trying to get a glimpse of the crime scene, the killer, the Broderick children, even their dogs. Throughout San Diego, cynical jokes were being made about what the Broderick case might mean to cheating husbands. Nor was it a comfortable time to be a high-profile Other Wom
an. Within a few weeks, bumper stickers were appearing: "Do You Know Where Your Ex-Wife Is Tonight?" wisecracked one. "Bimbos of the World, Unite," read another. "Free Betty Broderick So She Can Kill Another Lawyer," said another. And, from the unamused: "Burn, Betty, Burn."

  The funeral was a large, heartbreaking affair attended by at least a thousand mourners, including many of the city's most prominent lawyers and judges. The huge downtown cathedral echoed with sobs as friends and family passed by the two caskets—his covered with hundreds of red roses, hers laden with white ones. Because Dan was a loyal member of such Irish-American societies as the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a huge floral shamrock stood to one side, and an Irish American trio, tears streaming down their cheeks, sang "Danny Boy" and other mournful ballads.

  "Dan Broderick was all that we could hope for in a lawyer," said U.S. District Court Judge William Enright, one of many to eulogize the couple. "A brilliant mind, a magnificent and eloquent speaker, a man of unquestioned integrity—his word was his bond, his reputation his most prized possession … He made us all proud of our profession of lawyering, he represents the best of what we are and what we ever hope to be …"

  "Linda offered a new life, a second chance," said paralegal Laurel Summers, a close friend of both. "She gave him the optimism to marry again and to hope for a second family. Together they were such a delight with their broad smiles, twinkling eyes, rich laughter, and sweet terms of endearment … Their life among us has ended, but all of us here will be together on days and nights in the future to drink and sing and laugh. Without Danny and Linda, the wine will never be as wet, the songs will never be as pure, and the laughter will never again be as joyous."

  Vince Bartolotta, later president of the San Diego Trial Lawyers Association, tearfully remembered the slain couple's pet names for each other. Dan called Linda "Little One," and "Liebchen"; she referred to him as "The Boy."

  Mike Reidy, one of Dan's most devoted friends, sang "Teach Your Children Well," as mourners departed to the cemetery.

  The four Broderick children were pitiful to behold. The two older daughters cried helplessly. Dan Broderick's two small sons looked bewildered, ashen little men who would need years yet to comprehend.

  Linda's tombstone inscription, selected by her sister Maggie, is a line from the poet William Blake:

  She who kisses the Joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity's sunrise.

  Dan's is a line from the song:

  Oh Danny Boy, We love you so.

  She never tried to hide or run. She surrendered later that day, accompanied by a lawyer, at the downtown San Diego police station. The gun was still in her purse at her daughter's house. From there, Betty Broderick was transferred to the county jail for women, charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

  A routinely ugly, sprawling, one-story complex, the Las Colinas Women's Detention Facility sits on seven weedy acres on the far side of Santee, a scrubby little town thirty miles east of San Diego, heading into the desert. The jail houses around four hundred and fifty inmates, mostly young minority toughs serving short time for drugs, assault, prostitution, and similar short-term offenses.

  Betty had been there once before, for a six-day stay in 1987 on a contempt of court conviction over her foul mouth. But this time, Colinas would be home for two years, through two murder trials, and she would serve the hardest kind of time, in protective isolation from the general prison population, because, although she was something of a house pet to some inmates—the big, bad, funny, blond mama who had offed the abusive old man and his chick—she was to other prisoners a target, an intrusion into their world, the La Jolla "rich bitch" who couldn't cut it on $16,000 a month. They pushed her around, they scared her to death. Thus, after a few days, she was moved from the general population, where inmates eat together and have far more freedom of movement, and housed instead in a small area of the jail reserved for high-risk prisoners.

  For the next twenty-seven months, she lived in an eight-by-twelve foot cell for two with a communal toilet against the opposite wall, a foot from the bunk beds. She was awarded clean cotton underwear once a week; microwaved meals were placed outside her door on the floor in Styrofoam containers. Sometimes, depending on who her latest roommate was, the sign on her door warned deputies: "Do Not Enter Without Backup." She rose with the sun to the bark of her jailers; from one small, hermetically sealed window she could peer onto the concrete and steel of other barracks and catch a small slice of the sky if she stretched her neck. No more palm trees and bougainvillea and ocean views for the former Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III. No more "real coffee," only watery decaffinated. But the coffee, and the absence of dental floss, would be the only things she ever really complained about during the next two years. Betty Broderick adjusted to jail with astonishing speed. "I was glad to be in that little room," she said later, "away from everything, where nobody could get at me. For the first time in years, I felt safe."

  She spent her first night at Colinas stripped naked in the so-called rubber room, a padded cell, under suicide watch—routine for accused killers. Normally, prisoners emerge from this solitary, degrading ordeal in predictable fashion: drained, shamed, docile, and terrified over what they have done. Typically, they ask for tranquilizers, priests, or attorneys, or all three.

  Not Betty. Instead, she burst forth the next morning, according to later testimony, wearing a smile so bright, a manner so blithe, that both jailers and fellow inmates were fascinated. She was, by all accounts, nervous, wired, and talking too fast—but she was talking. Small talk. Nonstop. "Cheerful," is how a jail psychologist later described her in court. No tears, no trembling. Mainly, she seemed embarrassed at all the fuss over her.

  But it was the purity of her remorseless rage that transfixed everyone in her path. If she was sorry for what she had done, she would never say so. If she was even mildly uncomfortable over having just killed two people, it didn't show.

  Instead, she told anyone who asked that she had performed "a public service." Shooting Dan and Linda Broderick, she said, "was the most sincere, honest act of self-defense that there can be in the world. It was justifiable homicide against a weapon you can't see—and nobody can tell me Dan Broderick and his cheap little bitch sidekick didn't have a weapon. His weapon was the legal system. I was under constant attack. You show me a soldier or a policeman or anybody that acts in self-defense—is he going to be held accountable for murder? Wrong!"

  That she was unusually intelligent was instantly obvious. And her verbal skills kept pace with her racing mind. She knew her own defense in advance of any attorney's promptings: she was an emotionally battered woman, and a victim of "litigious assault" perpetrated by the white male power structure. She had thought so for years. Her story, she declared, had nothing to do with jealousy or even money. Hers was the timeless tale of the imbalance of power between the sexes, at least in traditional marriages. She was typical of millions of wives who buy into the age-old bargain—he works, she housekeeps—only to discover in middle age that, when he walks out, "The wife doesn't even have the elemental rights of a business partner who got screwed. If Dan Broderick had defrauded a business associate the way he did me when he broke our contract, he would've been the one in jail today, not me."

  Nor was she ever at a loss for the perfect, colorful anecdote to drive her point home: "I would've been treated better if l'd been a good horse or a dog that served my master well for twenty years. At least you give that animal respect and thanks … I was a faithful dog for all those years, and he couldn't even afford me the respect of saying, 'Okay, she's too old and I want to get rid of her.' Oh no. He had to throw me out and say, 'She was a piece of shit for twenty years and always a problem, and I couldn't wait to get rid of her and she deserves nothing.' He was the coldest, meanest asshole on earth." There was never a whit of self-pity in her tone—only brutal, naked rage born of screaming indignation and disbelief.

  Otherwise, she treated jail like a minor nuisance in her dai
ly schedule. Among her first acts, she instructed her attorney to get a court order for special hair coloring, and she sent change of address forms to Time, Esquire, and half a dozen other magazines.

  She sent her daughter Lee a brisk memo of instructions:

  "Pay DMV registration and tickets (No more tickets!); remove brass candlesticks from house to condo; meet decorator at condo to install oak floor from front door into closet at top of stairs. It is all paid for. $800! The bitch decorator's name is Carolyn Oliver; get condo garage opened; move ironing board to condo; [and] in condo cupboards at top of stairs, hope you find a pink box of Clairess hair color—202 Palest Ash Blond. Get it and go to Sav-On Drug and get two more just like it."

  As she would do for years to come, Betty also enclosed a shopping list of beauty items she wanted, all carefully identified by brand name, everything from Clinique moisturizers (non-oily) to Revlon blush (glazed brownberry) and Lauder's Pink Caribe lipstick.

  To Brad Wright, a thirty-six-year-old fencing contractor who had become her boyfriend after Dan divorced her, she wrote girlish notes addressed to "Poopsie," "Popeye," or "Sweetheart," telling him at one minute how much she missed him; then, in the next, issuing strict orders that he immediately pay all her bills. San Diego's most notorious female killer, charged with two counts of first-degree murder, didn't want to be seen as a deadbeat. "And make SURE," she wrote Wright, "that you pay Saks—it's overdue." She dotted his letter, and Lee's, with little happy faces.