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

by Bella Stumbo

  After a two-year battle with breast cancer, Everdina Kolkena died at age thirty-six. Maggie was then sixteen, Linda eleven. After six months of mourning, Arnoldus Kolkena, in formal, courtly Old World fashion, went into Salt Lake's substantial Dutch community in search of a proper mother for his children. His new wife was an upright Dutch widow, a neighbor lady the family had known for years—and who, in another sad twist of fate, is now also struggling with the same form of breast cancer that killed Everdina Kolkena. Life has not been kind to the Kolkena women.

  The Kolkena children took odd jobs, as soon as they were old enough. While Linda was still in high school, she worked as a waitress, a clerk at a sporting goods store, then as a telephone operator at a law firm.

  The premium in the Kolkena family was never on higher education or careers, at least not after their mother died, says Maggie. "Our expectation was to grow up and have children … You worked to work, not to have a career. We weren't cultured that way. The man would always be the breadwinner." Only Maggie went on to graduate from college. Both brothers enlisted in the military and built careers there. As soon as Linda had graduated from high school, with average grades, she applied to become a Delta Airlines flight attendant, based in Atlanta.

  Maggie tried to talk Linda into college but failed. "All Linda ever really wanted to be was a wife and mother … She was the kind of person who walked into restaurants and asked to hold other people's babies. She was very traditional." In fact, says Seats, Linda was everybody's favorite neighborhood baby-sitter during her adolescent years. Just like Betty.

  There were so many parallels between the two women Dan Broderick married. In later years, old friends of Dan and Betty would remark on how much the two women even looked alike—right down to their teeth. Like Betty with her overbite, Linda's teeth were her only real physical imperfection—she had a slight gap in front, until, friends say, Dan persuaded her to have it fixed. He even sent her to Betty's dentist, according to Betty.

  "It was heart-stopping," said one old friend who attended both of Dan's weddings. "The woman walking down that aisle was Betty, except fifteen years younger."

  When Linda was accepted for the Delta training program, the note placed in her records said: "Attractive. Very mature for her age. Appears and acts much more intelligent than her academic background indicates … Educational background is limited and may be a problem. However, she is a good candidate."

  But Linda's career with Delta had barely begun before it ended. Hired in June, 1981, she was off her six-month probationary status for only two months before being fired in February, 1982, for "conduct unbecoming a Delta employee." The specifics were these, according to records later subpoenaed for Betty's trial by the defense:

  Linda and three other flight attendants, all of them off duty, were flying from Atlanta to Salt Lake City for a ski weekend, when they became involved with two obviously drunken male passengers. All six were sitting in the back rows of the airplane. According to on-duty attendants who lodged the complaint against Linda, she sat on one man's lap while he caressed her thighs; she was also loud and used vulgar language; then she went into a toilet with the man for several minutes, causing other passengers to joke about how this couple was "joining the Mile High Club." When the supervising stewardess on duty told Linda to shape up or else, she apologized, but gave them a false name and, according to the complaint, returned to her seat—only to continue openly smooching the same passenger.

  In her later appeal to Delta management, Linda admitted that she had used a false name and bad language. But she denied taking the man into the toilet. Instead, she said—and her three friends backed her up—she had been sick all day with a queasy stomach and diarrhea, and the man had only come into the toilet with her to see if she was okay. And the reason she had been sitting with her legs across his lap, she said, was because he refused to get out of her seat. She was trying "not to be rude to a paying Delta passenger."

  "It was these gentleman's [sic] first flight on Delta so we felt a need to put on our P.R. hats," wrote one of her three friends in her defense.

  Whatever the real truth of the incident, this much is clear: pretty young Linda Kolkena, then not even twenty-one, at last liberated from the stern vigilance of her Dutch Catholic household, was having a little too much fun that day. But Delta was unforgiving.

  From there, Linda worked briefly for an Atlanta attorney. Since she had never learned to type, she was a Girl Friday, a receptionist who also performed some semi-paralegal chores. Understandably, she didn't advertise the reasons for her dismissal from Delta. It is unclear whether even Dan Broderick knew. In a eulogy for the San Diego Daily Transcript three days after her death, her former boss, Atlanta attorney Don C. Keenan, wrote that Linda "wanted to do more with her life than be a flight attendant—with all due respect to flight attendants … She was just wonderful with people." Keenan encouraged her to attend law school, he said.

  Instead, Linda followed a boyfriend on a job transfer to San Diego. That relationship ended shortly thereafter, but she remained in San Diego—working as a pool receptionist in the same commercial building where Dan Broderick had his offices.

  If Dan thought Linda was beautiful at first sight, she was apparently equally dazzled by the dynamic, handsome young attorney with the killer smile and droll wit who passed her desk each day. "She thought he was a god," a friend later said.

  She hadn't been at her job for more than a few months before Dan Broderick, then thirty-eight, hired her as his personal assistant. Although she had no formal training as a paralegal and no experience in medical malpractice, her previous law office experience qualified her for the job, her friends later insisted. Besides, they agreed, Linda was remarkably bright, a quick study, a hard worker, and, in general, an asset to any office.

  Betty Broderick begged to differ.

  * * *

  Summer passed uneasily in the Broderick household. Dan was working late hours as usual, Betty was in a heightened state of suspicion. But she said nothing. Maybe she was imagining it all.

  It was a warm September evening in 1983 when Dan came home, late again, and told her over dinner that he had hired someone to help him a the office, beginning the following week.

  "I thought, 'Great! Now the guy will have some time to spend with his family'," Betty recalls. She asked who his new assistant was.

  Linda Kolkena, he said.

  "Her! It was her!" She pauses, even now, years later, staggered by her own memories, strangling again on the wave of realization that had swept over her at the dinner table that night: It was true! He was having an affair. The bimbo was real.

  "I asked him how in hell he could be hiring Linda Kolkena to be his assistant—she wasn't a paralegal, she didn't have a college education, she didn't even know how to type!" Again, she asked him for the truth. Again he told her that she was wrong, that she was being childish. Linda Kolkena, he told her, was just a bright young woman whose assistance he needed. She would do client interviews and research. Typing was not a job requirement.

  By most later accounts, Dan Broderick was lying, even then. In a tale consisting of a long list of "What Ifs?" on both sides, here stands the first: What If Dan Broderick had been capable of honesty that night, of conquering his own doubts and fears, to accord his wife the minimal degree of consideration required to keep any human being's self-respect afloat, instead of stringing her along for another two years?

  Instead, he only told her again that she was being silly.

  But Betty didn't think so—and, in those days, she still assumed she had some household clout. Her solution was swift, devoid of pussyfooting small talk:

  "I told him to get rid of the little bitch by October 1, or get out."

  October 1 came and went, and Linda stayed. "He told me," she recalls now, struggling to control her rage, "that it was his practice, his decision and his house. He said that if anybody was going to move out, it would be me."

  So much for Betty Broderick's per
ceived view of her authority over Daniel T. Broderick III. The nerd had disappeared forevermore, along with Betty Broderick's confidence that the ground beneath her feet was sure.

  She was furious, she was insulted, she was dizzy with indignation. But she also recognized the altogether new sensation of fear. Before she could even finish the righteous speech her mind was trying to form, the clutch of fear smashed her in the chest, leaving her breathless, confusing her thoughts. In years past, Dan had stayed out with the boys almost all night, and she had always wondered if he'd been with a woman, if maybe they'd gone to see prostitutes like in the cheap novels, in some rite of passage, in some haze of drunkenness. But she had never felt more than a passing twinge of suspicion.

  And never before, not once in fourteen years, had she felt so afraid. She went to the bathroom mirror and stared at her face. She was, she knew, a pretty woman. Now she leaned closer, studied the fine lines under her eyes. She smiled at herself, she fluffed her hair. She posed alone in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. Anger welled up. She was still a young woman. She was not old, fat, ugly, and boring. Or was she?

  She felt nauseous. All those years, all those children … Rhett was only four, Danny just seven, the girls only twelve and thirteen. No. It was not possible. It was a cliché. He was a smart man. He wouldn't. He couldn't. What would people say? What would his parents say? Her parents? No. He would not dare to leave his family. He would be disowned by everyone. She had leverage. Yes.

  How could he? How could he touch another woman?

  Casual sex was beyond her comprehension. In Betty Broderick's mind, sex was the single most important, final display of faith in a man any woman could ever make, for it meant complete surrender of all control, of freedom, of choice. Until her tubal ligation, it meant probable pregnancy and guaranteed pain, nausea, physical misery. Nine times in ten years. Sex meant forever and ever and ever.

  Years later, in jail, her inhibitions remained so strong that sex remained the one subject she could never discuss with her usual witty glibness. Instead, she would always try to fly past it, to shrug it off. Dan, she would say, could never make love unless he had a few drinks to shed his self-conscious reserve. But she could never discuss her own.

  She sat in her bathroom, staring into space. Dan wouldn't. He couldn't.

  But if he couldn't, then why wouldn't he get rid of the girl? The girl who couldn't even type … Oh, goddamn him! Was he even using contraceptives now, too? She wanted to cry.

  Instead, she went into the family room, flipped on the TV, hunting for a news channel, and slowly her mind cleared. All her life, Betty Broderick had known how to get her mind off her own problems. She was not a sufferer—" I never liked being the victim," she said years later, long after she had made the passage from pain to something entirely worse.

  In the next months, her fury fought with her fear, ego battled with insecurity, but she never controlled any of it, not then, nor ever again. From that day forward, October 1,1983, Betty made all the wrong choices every step of the way. And so did Dan.

  "I should have divorced him then, before all the rest happened, before I let him convince everybody I was crazy, that he was justified in what he was doing," she remarked years later. "Because at that point, I still had my reputation and my sanity and my children."

  But Betty was Betty, and it was only 1983. And she was never getting a divorce. Never. For all her threats in earlier years, not once did it now cross her mind to divorce him. The time for that kind of talk was done.

  Instead, she went into a fierce retreat. She swallowed her ultimatum and her anger, and tried to pretend that there was no Linda Kolkena at the office.

  She called her friends, she summoned the neighborhood kids for cooking classes, she took her children to museums and zoos, she worked harder with her women's groups, she went shopping. And she read. She was always one of the best-read women in her La Jolla circle. She was also in the habit of clipping articles that fascinated her. Years later, a review of her old files would uncover detailed folders on everything from fashion to the care and nourishment of roses to divorce and lawyers. By the summer of 1989, she also had a full file on the increase in handguns in America

  But now, in the autumn of 1983, she went to the bookstore and ordered everything she could find on midlife crisis. She would fight this thing.

  This was a task rendered easier by the fact that their material ascent was now proceeding beyond both Brodericks' wildest expectations. The money rolled in. Both of them adjusted beautifully to these fabulous new figures. In 1983, they bought a boat; they joined one country club and got on the waiting list for another. That spring, in a grand gesture, Dan also treated attorney Jim Milliken (later a judge) and his wife to a trip to Europe in reward for a malpractice tip from Milliken that netted Dan a multimillion dollar settlement. In contrast to their 1981 trip, this one "was five-star all the way," Betty recalls. By then Dan had even begun jokingly referring to himself as "the Count DuMoney" (pronounced du-mon-ā), she says.

  And their search for the dream house intensified. She combed the city constantly, presenting Dan with profiles of fabulous homes. But, by then the house hunt had become a symbol of their doomed future. For all their money, they could not agree on a house to buy. In divorce court years later, Dan said that they looked at about one hundred different houses between 1979 and 1985—sometimes as many as eight to ten in a single week. But he blamed Betty for showing him homes that were too expensive. She countered that nothing suited him: everything she found was either too shabby or too grand. "He drove every realtor in town crazy, and me, too," she remarked at one of her murder trials.

  They bought more and more things.

  For the first time, her wardrobe began to exceed his. "Louis Feraud is it for suits, Oscar de la Renta is it for dresses, Bob Mackie is it for evening gowns, and, for sportswear, Escada," she said later from jail. "I just love what I always called the Oscar Blues—I look terrific in blue, and most of his clothes, if you notice, are blue."

  Dan's pleasure in their new wealth was never any less aggressive than Betty's. But he still wanted to spend big bucks on big items, not domestic fluff. The Brodericks argued increasingly over priorities. "He wanted the kids to wear clothes from K mart, even though he wouldn't," she accuses. Simmering resentments came to a boil when he decided one day, without consulting her, to buy two lots in Fairbanks Ranch, a new glamour development north of La Jolla. His idea was to build their own custom-designed mansion there. He had bought the property not only as an investment, he said in divorce court years later, but also to put an end to their interminable house hunt. Besides, he said, he had thought Betty liked it there.

  She exploded. She hated Fairbanks Ranch. It was tacky. All flash and no class. Nouveau riche. And, how dare he spend their money that way, without even consulting her? But that was Dan for you, she seethed later from jail. Mr. Image. Count DuMoney. She had a million examples.

  "Once at a [charity] auction, for example, he bought two or three things, just to look important, and he wanted me to bid on a full-length black mink coat," she said. "I look like shit in black, and I didn't want it, and he was really pissed. All he cared about was appearances."

  The acrimony built, the squabbles continued.

  Even so, she was oddly lulled.

  At least he was coming home. At least he was talking houses. Maybe his infatuation with the bimbo had passed.

  Her perspective was restored in spades when he drove home one evening in a brand-new candy-apple-red Corvette, happy as a boy. He had bought it that afternoon in Long Beach, at $7,000 above the $30,000 sticker price, he told her. She didn't have time even to think about sharing his pleasure—because the next thing Dan told Betty was that, since he hadn't wanted to disturb her, Linda had driven him up to get it.

  "I thought, Jesus Christ! Is this a spoof on midlife crisis or not?" she recalls. The Corvette still galls her today. Later that week, she says, since they had only a three-car garage, which was
already full, Dan also talked her into selling her Jaguar, with the promise that as soon as they bought a bigger house, she could have a new one. She of course never got it, since he left her first. Adding insult to injury, not long after their divorce, he bought a new blue Jaguar for himself.

  During a trip they took to New York City a few weeks after Dan came home with his new Corvette, Betty caught him in the St. Regis Hotel lobby calling Linda. He told her it was only business. She remembers looking at him and thinking, "How can the bastard look me in the eye and lie to me this way? How can he treat me like such a fool?" The next day, establishing a pattern that would last until she went to jail, she went "revenge shopping." She walked down the street to the Elizabeth Arden salon where she bought her first Bob Mackie evening gown, a pink-and-lavender concoction of sequins and flounces, sale priced at $7,000. "And the sonofabitch damn near died," she recalls with satisfaction.

  Her birthday was only weeks away. On November 7,1983, she would be thirty-six years old. Dan's new assistant was twenty-two. Betty studied her complexion in the mirror. Light skin, but still good skin, she thought. But maybe it could be improved.

  She went to see a cosmetic surgeon.

  It would be only the first of her visits. In the next years, she would also have her forehead lifted, her eyes done, and the loose skin on her stomach from all the pregnancies surgically removed.