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

by Bella Stumbo

  So he undressed and went to bed with her, she says, and moved out the next morning.

  Dan's version of the night's events differed dramatically. He had not spent the night with her, he said during their divorce trial years later, but had instead told her flatly: "I'm leaving you. I'm going away. We can't live together anymore. It's been bad too long between us. This is not going to work. I have got to go." At the same time, he admitted that he hadn't told Betty he wanted a divorce when he moved out because, he hadn't yet decided "to do that." When he left, he said, Betty flung a jar of Dep hair gel at his departing back. Although she denies it, he said she also brandished a butcher knife at him.

  In any case, Dan left it to Betty to explain his departure to their children. That was a mother's work, not his.

  Any woman who has ever been left by a man, particularly for another woman, knows how Betty Broderick felt the morning after. Her mind was a stupid, dysfunctional tangle of shock, indignation, and self-pity, fading to hazy introspection, blurring to furious self-defense, finally collapsing into the only single emotion that, for the moment, at least, mattered: disbelief.

  He was fooling, this man who had been her constant companion for sixteen years, her roommate, the one who watched her put on her makeup, who saw her waterbags break, who had seen her tweeze her eyebrows, whose meals she had cooked. This man who had kissed her, passed out, bit his nails, and snored in front of her. They had schemed, quarreled, laughed, and watched TV together. They had held hands while priests baptized their babies, they had pooled their dirty underwear in the bathroom hamper, and they had been carried back in time, wherever they were, together or apart, every time in the last twenty years that they heard the Lettermen singing, "Going out of my head, can't take my eyes off of you ..."

  Nope. He was not serious. It was just another stage of his midlife crisis. Even if he was still carrying on with the cheap bimbo, he would come to his senses sooner or later. He was forty. That was all.

  It is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Broderick story that neither of these two would ever accept the decisions of the other. Dan would go to his death, still trying to make Betty behave like a lady, and she would go to prison, still incredulous that the man she married could actually leave her and mean it.

  It would become one of the ugliest, most prolonged divorces that San Diego had ever seen—a divorce sordid enough that, by 1988, the Oprah Winfrey Show tried to get Betty to participate in a program on "The Messiest Divorces in America"—which proposed to include, among other guests, a California woman whose gynecologist husband had sewed her vagina together. Betty refused. That was tacky, she said. Hers, she told the network hustlers, was a case of substance, involving legal abuse, divorce laws, emotional battery, and, in general, the entire cosmic imbalance between men and women.

  She was right about that. The Broderick story was never primarily about the ordinary, sordid details of divorce, such as money and children Theirs instead was always a struggle for power, but one totally out of whack. Because he had it, she didn't. He took it for granted, she never could.

  It took nearly five long, grinding years more, before these two would wind up that last night together in his bedroom, with Linda Kolkena lying in her polka-dotted baby dolls between them, their war finally done.

  Chapter 9

  Dan’s Space

  Betty and the children stayed in the rental house at La Jolla Shores. Dan moved back to the Coral Reef house. Construction was nearly done, but the place was a shambles, and it had no furniture. He couldn't stay there for long, she thought. He would be back.

  During the next days, she listened for his car pulling into the driveway. The children played, she went about her clubs, her shopping, and her school activities. Everywhere she went, she was cheerful, laughing, upbeat. She told all her friends that, in the latest phase of Dan's midlife crisis, he had moved out. But she made a joke of it. Her manner was that of a parent tolerating a rebellious teenager. It was all just too ridiculous, she said, but, what the hell: let him get it and the bimbo out of his system. And she didn't expect it to take long. She guessed he would be home within a matter of weeks, if not days.

  Her friends winced. Her forced nonchalance was painful to see. By now, everybody could see that this split was about a lot more than "space."

  Privately, Betty knew better, too. The weeks passed. He never called her, so she called him. But even then, she says—and he later agreed at their divorce trial—he never mentioned divorce to her. Instead, he continued to stall, talking about his further need for more "space."

  And she would hang up the telephone and think about that.

  Space?

  She stared at her children, racing around the house, oblivious to it all. Kim had turned fifteen the month before he left. Lee was almost fourteen, Danny was nine, only two days before Dan moved out. Rhett was six just a week earlier.

  She sat at her kitchen counter, drinking coffee and trying to concentrate on the morning newspapers. She phoned friends, she made notes and lists of things to do that day. And she shopped, more and more. Whether she was buying groceries, clothing, or a new bed of impatiens, it relieved her depression.

  She listened to the children. Laughing, yelling, fighting. Making a mess. Her babies. Her head hurt. Her babies. Not his. Hers. He had to be kidding. Where's my space? her mind inquired. What is a Mommy? Where is Daddy?

  Something hard began to form in Betty Broderick's mind, for the first time since she had quit teaching to have Kim. Why? Why were these her children?

  But the thought wouldn't hold, her mind was too crowded.

  What could she do, if he left her? How could she be a mother without a father? The fear was paralyzing, the notion staggering. What would her family say? Her friends?

  The kids didn't even know why their father had left. So far, she had never told them about Linda. They had no idea why Mom and Dad were always fighting. She had always told herself they were too young.

  But why shouldn't they know about their father's slut? she now asked herself. The hardness in her head grew, until the pressure hurt. But it wasn't fear anymore. "No, no, nooooo," as she would say later from jail, with chilling concentration to each syllable. Nooooo. From here on, it would be anger. Fuck him. What was she supposed to do for money, anyway? Where was her monthly allowance? For years, he had given her a household allowance for groceries, entertainment, assorted expenses that she might not be able to charge. Now what? Call and say, "Pretty please?”

  What in the hell does he expect me to do? Where is my share of the money? Where is my choice? In June, the lease on the La Jolla Shores house would expire. Just where did the sonofabitch expect her and the children go? What exactly would Dan Broderick's pleasure then be?

  She called his office more and more during those next weeks. Most times, she was the epitome of sweet docility—don't nag, don't push, her mind told her. But sometimes her anger overflowed, and she would end up castigating him for his juvenile selfishness. He was acting like a college kid on summer break. His manner was placating. He would not discuss coming home, but whatever she needed, he reassured, he would provide. Just charge it. Send him the bills, he would pay. She was thinking of taking the kids to Warner Springs the first week of April, for Easter vacation—yes, he said, that would be nice. Have a good time. Their sixteenth wedding anniversary was coming up, too. Of course, he said, he would be there. They would go out to dinner.

  The signals were always so mixed. Less than a month after he left her on St. Patrick's Day in March, he came back to the house to see her. He was loaded, she says now. He stayed overnight. They slept together. But it shames her to discuss it, to admit that she did what so many women do—confused sex with commitment: "I don't know what I thought," she says, "except that he was still my husband."

  But he didn't come back. More weeks passed. She hated him.

  The rental house was close enough to the beach that the kids could walk down. It was also near one of La Jolla's p
rettiest little shopping centers, a quaint enclave near the sea where suntanned people wearing Rolexes, faded Polo denims, and expressions of complete well-being sit at outdoor cafés on weekend mornings, drinking Kona coffee and eating chilled melon as they skim their Sunday newspapers.

  Betty loved the Shores. As soon as Dan came back, they would buy a house there. After what he was putting her through, he was going to owe her the home of her choice, and plenty more. No more Coronado.

  She and the children spent Easter weekend at Warner's Ranch, a comfortable, unpretentious place with sports fields, horseback riding, swimming pools, and hiking trials. Betty and the kids always enjoyed it more than Dan did. Their condo, one of hundreds, was small but nice. Four years later, only days before she killed, Betty Broderick would go there alone to nurse her wounds during the weekend of the USC-Notre Dame game.

  But in the spring of 1985, she was still full of intractable hope. She spent the weekend almost relaxed. She pictured Dan rattling around their big, empty, messy Coral Reef house alone. He was probably already sorry. Maybe he would be back home when she and the kids got back to La Jolla, ready to beg her forgiveness.

  She returned instead to a house full of rats. Rats. Big, brown roof rats. They were everywhere. She opened the door to the sounds of their scurrying feet. The children screamed, and so did she. Stringy brown bodies were darting through the kitchen, into the bedrooms. Just like New York City cockroaches in a fifth-floor walkup when the light is suddenly turned on at night, they were awesome to see in their teeming flight.

  She walked through the house, horrified at their droppings, cringing at the sounds of their claws on the floors, their frightened squeals. They had been eating things for the week she had been gone, including, as her attorneys would later show in court, the hems of all her floor-length evening gowns.

  Oh, God. Where was her husband? Where was the father of her crying, terrified children?

  She snatched up the phone and called him. She was semi-hysterical, and furious. How dare he leave his family in a rat-infested house? Was he mowing his lawn today or fucking the cunt or what? He had to get over there immediately to help. It was time for him to act like a goddamn parent, not a college kid. In short, Betty was not polite.

  And Dan got even, without a pause. "Good luck," he told her. And hung up. It was her problem, not his. She listened to the dial tone in disbelief. Rats were running over his children's feet, and their father was telling her that it was her problem?

  Later, in their divorce trial, Dan agreed that he had been so antagonized by Betty's "tone" that day—she was rude and demanding—that he had hung up without offering to help. Besides, he added, he didn't see the big deal—if it had been his problem, he would simply have taken the children to a hotel or motel until the exterminators came. "You had thirteen credit cards, and you had plenty of cash and plenty of resources to go and live in any hotel in this country," he told her in court.

  Thus did Dan Broderick, in his anger at his wife, punish his children, too. In the years to come, both Brodericks would hurl charges of child abuse at the other, and, certainly, Betty's eventual behavior would become far more garish. But the reality is that Dan Broderick also consistently placed his children's needs second to his own. Not only that, he set the precedent, by doing it first.

  Betty and the kids killed the rats.

  They set out traps, they called the exterminators. "For the couple of days, we couldn't sleep, just listening to the sounds of the traps snapping at night," said Lee Broderick later, during her mother's trials. "It was super gross!" Once, she said, shuddering, they caught a small rat in the toilet and flushed him down. Another time, they captured a rat in the oven and roasted him alive.

  Four days later was their sixteenth wedding anniversary. Dan had said he would take her to dinner. She spent the day primping, and hauling out her favorite clothes. Something blue. Dan always loved her in blue. But late in the afternoon he called to say he couldn't make it after all. He had to go to a business dinner instead with "a bank teller."

  She fixed dinner for the children and herself.

  She tried to think clearly.

  She thought about her family. Her father would be seventy-five years old on May 1. The family was having a party in New York. She would go. That would make her feel better. She had never needed her family more.

  She shopped. She went everywhere, she bought everything: shoes, lingerie, party dresses. She didn't even look at price tags.

  He didn't call. Day after day, he didn't call, not even to ask about the rats. He didn't care, even about his own children.

  She made her plane reservations.

  The bastard. Who did he think he was? What was she supposed to do with the children when she went to New York for the birthday party? What was she supposed to do with the rest of her life? Raise four children by herself while he went on his merry way?

  Uh-huh. Right, Dan.

  Finally, the idea that had been forming in her mind, the hardness in her brain, identified itself. Lee and Kim were fighting again, the racket was nerve-grinding, as always.

  Pack up your things, she said to Kim. You're going to see Daddy.

  Kim cried, but Betty was firm. "You're going to live with your father, she told the girl. She bundled her daughter into the car, as the other children gaped. Through the quiet streets of La Jolla she went, moving reverse pattern, from her pretty, palatial rental home on the Shores, back over the hills, back into the tracts from whence they had come. The Coral Reef house was dark. Dan wasn't home. She didn't care. Kim was fifteen. A big girl. Dan would be home eventually. She put Kim out of the car and drove away.

  "I came home later and found Kim there, in this empty house, crying, Dan said later. “I couldn't believe Bets had done that to her own child.”

  But Bets had only begun. Over the next few days, she took the other three children to him as well. It was perhaps the single worst strategic mistake she would make during the next four years.

  Later, she would argue that all she had done was to take the children from a rat-infested rental house to stay with their father in their own home while she attended her father's birthday celebration. Which was partly true. But the main reality was that Betty was using the children in an attempt to bring back Dan. "I wanted to show the sonofabitch that there was more to fucking than having fun—let him see what it was like to try raising four children," she later told a court-order therapist.

  Rarely has a woman so misread a man.

  "But you know what the fucker did?" she told the therapist, still amazed. "He just kept them!"

  It is not hard to imagine Dan Broderick's shock when he arrived home in his red Corvette late that night, after a long day at the office, to find his daughter crouched in a corner of his dark, empty, cold house, sobbing amid her little suitcases of clothes and teenage trinkets.

  What kind of mother … ???

  Then came the other three. All crying, all confused, all deposited on his front lawn with their clothes and toys, all wanting to know what was happening. Why was Mom acting this way? When would they all go home again?

  What kind of woman!!??

  Certainly, this was not how Dan Broderick had intended the script to go. He had left his wife. Wives who are left are supposed to mourn, weep, make scenes, do whatever women do. But good wives always comply. They talk to their girlfriends, they consult their mothers, their priests, their lawyers. They take classes at the local university, they get a new haircut, they get a job, and, presto, they are soon married to another man, a hardworking Joe who becomes a good father to the last father's children. That's how it's supposed to go.

  What the wife never does is resist. She does not fling her babies onto the front lawn of the departed husband, who has made his decision, who has obligations, who has to go to work tomorrow morning, for Chrissake.

  But now, in the spring of 1985, here sat Dan Broderick, age forty, in charge of four needy, weepy young children—with a twenty-three-year-old g
irlfriend waiting for him downtown.

  What's more, here's the kicker: Betty would not repent. Not that day, not the next week, not for the next four years—never. Her best friends begged her to get the children back, but she consistently refused even to discuss custody without "a fair financial settlement, so I know I can support them the way I had always intended. If he's going to destroy this family because he wants to fuck the cunt, that's his business. But I want what's mine. Until I get it, until I know that I can give them exactly the same life-style, every privilege I had planned, then let him and his girlfriend raise them." Not least, she wasn't emotionally capable of raising four kids anymore, she said. How could a woman who had stupidly swallowed lies for so long teach children anything about self-respect, personal integrity, and honesty?

  Also, by now, although Dan was still months away from telling her the truth about Linda, Betty was no longer under any illusions: her children had told her that Linda was constantly at the Coral Reef house. Her house.

  But still she hadn't given up. Not really. Now he would see that he couldn't do without her, the mother of his children. He would give up his bimbo and come home. He could never raise them without her.

  One more time, Betty misread her man. By her own renegade actions she had only supplied her runaway Catholic husband with further justification for his own actions, from that day forward. Even if he had none before, Dan Broderick now had concrete reason, in his mind, to loathe her. Never once did it occur to him that he was just as responsible for his children as she was. That was woman's work. She had failed. She was fired. This was war.

  And so, instead of even picking up the phone to call her, to see if perhaps, as parents, they might discuss this business of child-care, Dan simply matched Betty's own hotheaded game. To hell with you, he basically said. Anything you can do, I can do better.