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

by Bella Stumbo

  "Dear Wilma, I understand that you sat next to an acquaintance of mine a few weeks ago on an airplane to Tucson," he wrote. He accused Engel of presenting a "warped perception" of the details of his life to his friends. Furthermore, he added, "I also understand you called him on several occasions at his hotel room in Tucson after the flight and later in Atlanta. For John's sake [Engel's husband], I'll keep that to myself.

  "If you spent a little more time trying to cope with the obvious shortcomings in your own life and less time endeavoring to titillate people with stories about mine, you would probably be a lot better off. Sincerely yours, Daniel T. Broderick III."

  "I took it as a blackmail letter," Engel said. "He was threatening to tell my husband I was having an affair if I didn't stop criticizing him. Dan Broderick was evil." Engel—who was not having an affair—immediately showed the letter to her husband, also an attorney, who was equally shocked at its petty, unprofessional nature. Four years later, both Engels volunteered to testify in Betty's murder trial about Dan's bullying tactics, but the judge ruled all character testimony concerning the deceased irrelevant.

  Besides the money she got that spring from the sale of Coral Reef, Betty also received another $16,000 from Dan, who had sold their Fairbanks Country Club membership—again without consulting her. She was furious. On the other hand, she was again cheered by this money from Dan. Although she would eventually learn otherwise, she apparently still thought at the time that it was some sort of gift, a display of largesse on the part of a wayward husband, recompense for his sins.

  Witlessly, she continued digging her own financial grave. Ever since Dan walked out on February 28, 1985, the clock had been steadily ticking away her share of their community property. But not until she finally got to divorce court years later would she fully comprehend what the financial liabilities of the ex-wife really are. Her lesson would come in the form of a subtle little sandtrap which, in California, is called an Epstein credit. Although the name varies, most community property states now have some equivalent of the Epstein—which, simply put, is the means by which the supporting spouse can, when finally divorced, charge the dependent spouse for one half of all community debts accumulated, not from the date of divorce, but from the date of separation. Epstein credits would later cost Betty Broderick nearly half a million dollars in her share of the wealth she had helped her husband accumulate. Epstein credits are just one more reason she killed him.

  But, at the time, she "just assumed that the courts would automatically see that I got half of whatever we owned—I thought that's what community property laws meant."

  * * *

  Meantime, Dan refused to pay Jaffe's $10,000 retainer, despite the fact that he knew he would be reimbursed during the eventual property settlement for every cent he paid Betty in cash advances. Instead, as he later admitted in the divorce trial, he told Betty, "Pay him yourself." Why he took such a hard-nosed stand, given his persistent claim that he only wanted a speedy resolution to the divorce, is anybody's best guess. But the theory that makes the most sense is Betty's own: Dan Broderick, being a smart lawyer himself, recognized a heavyweight when he saw one. He didn't want Dan Jaffe fiddling in his finances. Jaffe, unlike Betty's next lawyer, was apt to take him to the cleaners, and he knew it.

  But, at the time, Betty didn't care. She was, in fact, glad. If Dan wanted a divorce, he should pay for it. And if he didn't pay for it, maybe he didn't really want it? It was a confused point of principle and hope that she would never abandon. Besides, how could she be divorced if she wasn't participating in the process?

  And so, instead of mailing Dan Jaffe a check herself to keep him on her case, she bopped around La Jolla all summer, complaining to everyone that Dan wouldn't even pay her attorney fees. And she wasn't about to pay Jaffe herself since she didn't even want a divorce.

  Jaffe, meantime, who hadn't been keen to take on a San Diego divorce case in the first place, was not getting any happier.

  "I admit I have been foot-dragging on this case in the hope that some competent San Diego family lawyer would rush forward and represent Mrs. Broderick in this matter," he wrote Dan's attorney, Ashworth, in January, 1986. "… [But] since it appears that, if Mrs. Broderick is ever going to obtain competent counsel it is going to be my office, I am prepared to go forward and represent [her] upon receipt of a $10,000 retainer payable by Mr. Broderick …"

  By April, Dan Jaffe, still unpaid, finally tired of all the games. By then, he was also as annoyed at Betty as Dan.

  "Tom Ashworth has not returned a number of my calls wherein I tried to find out what was happening with you," Jaffe wrote Betty. "… It is clear that you still do not want a lawyer to represent you and there is simply no way I can help you in this matter." She didn't respond, and, days later, he officially quit in a second letter.

  "I am not appearing as your attorney of record at this point, since I have not received a retainer," he wrote. But, in parting, Jaffe still tried to warn Betty that she was embarked on a course of disaster: Dan Broderick and his attorney were proceeding with the divorce. If she didn't move in her own behalf, he told her, the divorce would be accomplished by default—just like the house sale, it would be done with or without her participation.

  But Betty couldn't hear. In time, three other attorneys would run into the same frustrating, self-defeating brick wall of Betty Broderick's blind stubbornness. One by one, she hired them, and then fired them, finding every reason under the sun to refuse their advice.

  Meantime, Dan was busy in April, attempting to get her to agree to his proposed divorce settlement. In a friendly "Dear Bets" letter, he outlined a plan that, in its essentials, awarded joint legal custody of the children "with primary physical custody to me and reasonable visitation to you." He would provide no child support, but would continue to pay her $9,036 in monthly spousal support until "further order of court." As for the property issues, he asked her to accept his evaluations of their communal wealth, including his assessment of his law practice.

  By his numbers, she would get half of their property, or $334,000; in addition, he would assume their community debts, estimated by him at $345,000; but in exchange, she would make no claim on his multimillion-dollar law practice. However, he added, in a note of sweet reason, "I think you should be entitled to share to some degree in the fees I later collect from my work while we were married and living together." But he intended to subtract forty percent from those fees for overhead, then prorate the rest, based on the time he had been living with her while he worked on the case. Admittedly, he conceded, the 40 percent overhead deduction was arbitrary, based on his own calculations.

  He then provided a practical example of just how his formula would work: "Assume that I received a fee of $600,000, and that two-thirds or $400,000 of that sum was community property. This $400,000 figure would first be reduced by the overhead percentage, leaving $240,000. Your one-half share would be $120,000, and from that $120,000 I would be entitled to deduct what had been paid to you up to that point in time as spousal support. In other words, if you had received six months of support that had not already been taken into account in earlier distributions, then this hypothetical $120,000 would be reduced by six times $9,025, or $54,150." In short, she would get about $65,000 from his $600,000 case.

  He urged her to let him know soon if his proposal was suitable and signed off with "Best regards, Dan."

  "I didn't know what the hell it meant," she said later, "but I did know it sounded like I was getting royally screwed."

  As it turned out, it was the most generous offer she would ever hear from Dan Broderick.

  She ignored it. She also ignored an earlier letter from him in March, advising her that he intended to seek a bifurcated divorce. "This will authorize the court to separate the issue of our marital status from the property disposition," he explained to her. "This is fairly common in cases involving complex property issues." In other words, he wanted a divorce now, with the property settlement worked out la
ter—years later, as it would so happen. She ignored that letter, too. He couldn't divorce her if she had no attorney and didn't participate.

  Betty Broderick did not do women proud. Instead of acting like a rational female adult responsible for her own lot in this life, she opted instead to behave like the cute, helpless, wining little girl she had been trained from birth to be. Old habits die hard.

  Unfortunately for her, she was now playing hardball with a master. Dan Broderick had been busy protecting his own interest ever since the day he walked out. But she would not figure that out—if she ever did—until nearly three years later when the Broderick divorce finally went to trial. At which time, in one of the most breathtaking examples of stupidity, blind faith, and arrogance that any woman ever displayed, she walked into court without a lawyer and represented herself in what amounted to her own financial beheading. She came out of it with a cash award of $28,000, while he walked off with his multimillion-dollar legal practice. Betty's modus operandi throughout this story was enough to cause even the most tepid of feminists to weep.

  Everywhere she looked, during those early months of 1986, there were new lessons for a discarded wife to learn. According to her friends, she was supposed to "get out and meet new guys." She was supposed to get a job, get the kids back, go to school, jog, pay her bills, budget, hire a cheaper gardener. Loosen up, let him go, ignore them. Grow up, be classy, rise above it all. Be cool. Have fun. Be a new person. Don't be Betty Broderick anymore.

  But she did take a few baby steps.

  She got a part-time job at the Simic Art Gallery in La Jolla Village. And she liked it. "It was 7-Eleven art, so I didn't have to know anything about real art," she later said from jail, laughing. "But I had fun. I got to wear all my pretty clothes and see people every day, and the hours were flexible enough so I could still spend time with my kids after school. I liked it—and the owner [Mario Simic] was a real hunk." That's how Betty talks about handsome men. Like a teenager.

  "And Brad picked me up every night after work," she says. Then they would go to Alphonso's for enchiladas, or down to the beach for crab.

  See, see, was her message to nagging friends: I am getting on with my life. I am fine. I'm not crazy, he is! Now, get off my back!

  She was fine. Yes, she was.

  But Brad wasn't fine. He never would be. True, he was handsome, he was sweet, and his credentials were okay, too. He was educated, a graduate of the USC business school, and, she adds with a certain pride, "He was brought up right." His parents, well-to-do retirees from Pasadena, observed the amenities. He not only knew his wine but even how to swirl it casually in his glass for a few seconds while the waiter stood by, waiting for him to taste it. Betty especially loved his mother, Kay.

  Brad was also, during the next long, tortured years, her most faithful friend. "Once, in the middle of it all," she later said, in one of her more subdued moods, "I had tried to talk to my parents about what was happening to me, and they wouldn't listen, so I was lying in bed, and just crying my heart out; and Brad came in, and he just held me while I cried, and he didn't say a word. Nobody had ever done that before …"

  But Brad wasn't Dan. He wasn't as smart, he wasn't rich, and he lacked flair. He spent his days, for God's sake, measuring construction pits and debating the merits of chain link versus steel mesh, supervising a handful of blue-collar workers in his modestly successful little fencing business. Beyond that, his main passion was sailing. Worst of all, he was six years younger than she was. Betty Broderick was no Cher. She was caught irretrievably in the old-fashioned double standards of her upbringing—which said that women always marry men who are one, two, perhaps five years older. No more, no less. Like Dan, three years older—that was perfect. "I know six years isn't that much. But he seemed so much younger. He had no life experiences. He was just so innocent, he always seemed like my eight-year-old."

  It was just one more door to a new future slammed shut by her past. She was, and remains, completely embarrassed at her lonely liaison with Wright. It was a comedown. She could see it in the eyes of other La Jolla wives, women whose parties she and Dan used to attend—women who once openly envied her for her husband, so much smarter, more successful, more handsome than their own. One of Betty's most fatal flaws was her inability to forget what other people were thinking. She was her mother's daughter. She was Dan's wife. Image was all.

  "I remember once when I had Brad escort me to a major charity event," she said later, still squirming at the memory. "I felt so stupid and failed and old. Here I was, getting fat, in my ugly matron's dress, with this young hunk, this sweet guy, but he was a nobody—and I didn't want to be the other half of a midlife crisis joke. I felt like a fool, and everybody acted as if we didn't even exist. I went overnight from front-row tables to the back of the room."

  Have a little sex, it's good for you, her divorcee friends urged her, giggling.

  Become a slut, her mind silently retorted. Become a pitiful, aging whore.

  "I thought Brad was so cute, I always told her to go for it," says her friend Vicki Currie. "But she just always just pooh-poohed it."

  In fact, just to make double sure nobody thought she was being promiscuous, Betty told several friends that Brad was gay.

  Brad Wright was not gay. In reality, Wright had finally introduced the proper Catholic girl to sex with a man not Dan, and, according to him, she was liking it fine. "She called me Animal," he said later with a sheepish grin, "and I called her the Dinosaur, she was so old-fashioned." Then, "After she started to get so big, I called her Bear." Once, he offered, guileless as a blushing boy, he even crushed one of her ribs during sex.

  Betty was aghast that Brad had told. First she fell into nervous giggles, chattering a mile a minute, trying to escape the topic. Normally so verbal, so unflappable, even on such topics as murder, she simply cannot talk about sex. The same woman who left such sexually explicit messages on Dan Broderick's telephone machine ("… you're screwing the cunt [in the hall] that has her legs wide open for anybody who comes by …") loses her tongue when it comes to any discussion of her own physical pleasures. To this day, she cannot admit that she has ever enjoyed sex with any man.

  But, she insists, sex was always better with Dan, "because Brad wasn't my husband. At least with Dan, even if it wasn't much fun, I felt like it was right."

  Even after Dan left her, after she was divorced, after her tubes were tied, after she was finally free of the fear of pregnancy, Betty never crossed the great divide to sexual liberation. She never even made it into the sixties.

  But, she agrees with a self-conscious laugh, sex was definitely different with Brad. No black-shrouded nuns sat at the end of his bed, crying "Procreate!" He believed in simple things, new to her—like sex in the daylight. "Suddenly, here was Brad, walking around the house naked! And I just didn't know anything about anything."

  After the killings, Betty rewarded Wright for his loyalty. She signed over her new condominium to him outright, in a quitclaim deed—"so the lawyers couldn't get it."

  At the same time, a new idea was beginning to crowd into her mind: she was a woman whose whole life had been cast in one direction, that of the professional Wife and Mother. It was all she knew how to be. Therefore, she needed to create a new household, complete with a new husband. If Dan could start over again, why couldn't she?

  Who was she kidding?

  Even dating was an impossible prospect. It's not hard to imagine her panic. Where does a thirty-eight-year-old mother of four who has no dating experience, no flirting skills, no persona beyond that of being "Mrs. So and So" even begin?

  Nowhere, is where. It was as hopeless as pitching a nun into a disco. They will not shimmy overnight.

  She stared at her body in the mirror, trying to imagine what kind of man, short of a complete loser in life, could possibly want this used mother of four, this body worn from nine pregnancies, this woman thrown away by another man. No man, that's who, her mind cried. In her view, there wasn't much
difference between being thirty-eight, fifty, or sixty-five. Her best days were gone; she was old. She no longer had anything left to offer. That's why Dan had left her in the first place. The fear was so bad. She stared at the liquor cabinet. Why couldn't she drink it away like so many other women? Instead, she went to the refrigerator.

  Betty would never realize that she was not alone. She had several divorced women friends, but she could not identify with them; her case was always, in her own mind, so special, so different. These women, long past their own nights, standing naked in front of the bedroom mirror searching for stretch marks and cellulite, had made peace with their lot. This was life. Men carry the clout, men call the shots, that's how it is. Women pick up whatever benefits they are given, women go on.

  They tried to reach her with their new wisdom. Come with us, they begged. Don't cry, they told her, patting her cheeks, her hands, her shoulders. Don't cry this way. There is life ahead. Don't be angry. Come with us to the bars, to the restaurants, they said. Let's go get our hair done, and our nails, and let's buy a new dress. Let's go out tonight.

  "But she just could not do it," says her friend Candy Westbrook, a vivacious Anne Francis look-alike who now runs a San Diego modeling agency and who had also long since become a lively part of the local dating scene. "She would say it was too humiliating, that it was different for me, because I was widowed, but she was divorced."

  Another friend, Melanie Cohrs, an attractive, easygoing La Jolla interior designer, also divorced, tried hard, too, to lure Betty into the San Diego singles scene in hopes that she would meet someone to take her mind off Dan and Linda.

  "Finally, we talked Betty into having a singles party at her house," Cohrs recalled, shaking her head, half sad, half amused. "But it was a disaster. Betty just couldn't do it. She wouldn't come out of the kitchen. Here were all these intelligent, dignified professional people in her house, most of them divorced, just like she was. But Betty thought it was all so degrading. She wouldn't talk to anyone; she spent the evening hiding, acting like the maid. She thought any woman who had sex on a casual basis was a slut, and she would tell me so."