by Bella Stumbo
Later, from jail, Betty lashed out at all of those who had tried to turn her into a party girl. "It was horrible. I tried it a few times. I went out with Patti Monahan, and sat on bar stools. And I used to wonder what was worse, if they asked me to dance, or if they didn't."
Still, in the privacy of her kitchen, where no one could see, she began answering singles ads, although, to this day, she is embarrassed to admit it. It was no more than a joke, she says. Just a silly lark.
But it wasn't a silly lark. She was desperate.
She scanned the list of men advertising themselves.
Richard. Who was Richard, she wondered? She stared at the ad. Could she? Would she? Richard. He was her age, the ad said. He was Italian. He was in real estate. Los Angeles. Studio City.
She flushed with shame, alone in her kitchen.
She walked around her big, empty house. She went onto the back balcony. She stared at the sea, down the hill. It was so silent. Too late to call anyone. Besides, her friends were tired of her, she knew. Her parents didn't want to hear it. And Brad would only agree with whatever she said. This is how it would be. She would be alone.
She walked back to the kitchen and wrote a short, bright note to Richard.
I don't have to meet him, she thought. I can do this, and let it go. But it won't hurt to see …
She walked to the corner mailbox with the letter and shoved it into the slot, before she changed her mind.
She felt a flash of hope.
Richard answered within a week.
"Good day, Lady Bets," he wrote. "… This is just a short note to briefly introduce myself and say hello. I am forty-three years young, Italian, 6'5" tall, a trim 185 lbs, and a nonsmoker.
"I am a real estate investor who enjoys a wide range of activities, including quiet dinners at home with friends, good conversations, dancing all night till dawn, and caring and sharing with others who also have solid values.
"Perhaps when you are free we can get together for a drink and an informal chat, either in La Jolla or Los Angeles … Looking forward to hearing from you SOOONNN!!! Warmly, Richard."
The enclosed photo showed a handsome man with a receding hairline and a moustache, dressed in Levi's, black patent cowboy boots, and a red plaid Western shirt with pearl buttons, sitting on a black leather couch. His dark eyes sparkled. His smile was friendly. He looked like a perfectly nice guy.
"What kind of creep advertises?" she thought, hating him. And she flung the letter into the bottom of her files, where it still lay years later after she was in jail, displaced wife and mother, accused of murder.
She never had a drink with Richard. She couldn't bear herself for even thinking of it. She hated Dan Broderick even more than she hated the handsome Studio City cowboy named Richard. He was turning her into a pathetic whore. Just like his cunt.
A few months later, however, she finally swallowed her pride and answered an ad in USA Today from an Arabian-horse breeder, who was looking for an "attractive escort" during a business weekend in San Francisco. Oliver was his name. She sent him a photograph and a note; in return, he sent her a round-trip plane ticket with a reservation at the exclusive Stanford Court in San Francisco. "And he had a limousine pick me up at the airport." It was a pleasant weekend, she says evasively, with her usual nervous laugh. "He was real nice and it was all very proper. We went to a play and to dinner. But he was looking for a permanent relationship, and I was still a married woman, so that was the end of that. The only reason I did it," she adds, "was because it was out of town. Nobody would know." In any case, she never saw Oliver again, and she never answered another personals ad. Not until she got to prison would Betty again begin corresponding with strange men.
Chapter 13
A Message to Fuckhead and the Cunt
Dan Broderick was enjoying his new home. His interior decorator was rapidly turning it into the elegant oasis he had always dreamed of, a formal sea of subdued colors, wingback chairs, paisley wallpapers, and moiré drapes in the bedrooms, Scotch plaids and creams in the den, with small framed pictures of spotted hunting dogs hanging on the staircase walls, and antique mirrors in the halls.
Linda was now a constant, open part of his life. She came to the house often, and watched the renovations. But the decor was all his. She never offered an opinion, says Dan's decorator. Dan Broderick's home was his castle. He would marry this woman in due time, but, for now, Linda Kolkena understood that he didn't want to know what fabrics she liked, what pieces of furniture she preferred. And she didn't care. She was happy enough to live in any house Dan Broderick was in.
One afternoon during the 1986 Memorial Day weekend, after dropping the children off at Betty's house, Dan and Linda went shopping for household supplies at the Price Club, a San Diego cut-rate emporium. There he bought himself an answering machine, installed it that afternoon, then left the house.
Betty discovered the new machine within hours, when she called to complain that he hadn't picked up the children on time, thus making her late for her job at the art gallery.
She didn't hesitate. Before his message tape had even finished playing, her mind was surging forward, eagerly awaiting the beep: "This is a message to fuckhead and the cunt," she told the new machine. "You have one hell of a nerve dumping the kids here on the sidewalk and zooming away without making any attempt to communicate with me about my plans for the weekend. Make me sick, both of you. I have a good mind to dump the kids back on you and drive away. Call me. We have a lot to talk about, asshole. And come pick up your four children that you're working so hard to have custody of. Congratulations. You can have them."
A few minutes later, she called again: "Fuckhead, come get the kids. I want to get rid of them, but I don't like driving to your shitty neighborhood. Hurry up and come get them, asshole."
An hour later: "Fuckhead and the cunt, come get the kids."
And, in her last call of the day: "I actually love this machine, 'cause then I can really just say anything I want. Tell the kids that you don't think it's wrong that you're screwing the cunt in the hall that has her legs wide open for anybody who comes by, and you paid for it? God, you got a sense of humor. I love it. You're all fucked."
That Dan Broderick, father of four children, including two teenaged daughters, had bought his answering machine in all innocence is beyond question. But never was a gift more heaven-sent to a man so litigiously minded—for it was instantly as clear as the little red light blinking on his machine that he was now going to be able to prove, with taped evidence, that he had been driven from his marriage by a crazy woman.
He wasted no time in maximizing the potential benefits of his new weapon. Within days of her first bombast into his machine, when Betty tried to call her children, she was greeted by the sweet, perky voice of Linda Kolkena, eerily similar to her own, telling callers on the Broderick family tape that "We're not home now."
Whether it was deliberate cruelty or only gross insensitivity on the part of Dan and Linda, the result was predictable: staggered by Linda's gall, pierced to the quick by sound of another woman's voice on her children's answering machine, Betty lunged at her tormentor through the telephone. Within the next days, she unloaded her pain with messages like these:
"Cunt, what's this we-can't-come-to-the-phone shit? You're not supposed to come to the phone at the house, you're supposed to screw at the house, answer the phone at the office … Dumb people drive me crazy!" Or: "Cunt, what are you doing on this machine? Don't you have a toilet to live in of your own?" And, "Cunt, what is your voice doing on this machine? ... If it's the Broderick residence, that assumes you're a Broderick, and you're nothing but a cunt. Anyway, where are my darling children?"
Later on, Betty would initially try to excuse all her ugly phone messages as the result of her frustration at finding Linda's voice on the answering machine. That was, of course, never entirely true. Betty exploded into the machine dozens of times over the next three years, regardless of whose voice was on the taped message, ju
st as she had the day Dan installed it. What is true, however, is that Linda, knowing full well how it antagonized Betty, continued to put her voice on the answering machine, off and on, long before she became the new Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III, legitimate mistress of the household. It was cruel, it was flaunting, it was inexcusable. Not until almost two years later, in response to a plea from Betty's attorney, did a judge finally order Dan to "get the girlfriend off the machine."
Not that it mattered by then. Unloading obscenities into Dan's answering machine promptly became Betty's most gratifying form of self-therapy. The more powerless she felt, the more vulgar her tongue became, and the more satisfaction she experienced—because she also soon discovered that, even more than her earlier petty vandalisms, those nasty little dollops got Dan Broderick's attention. They in fact drove him nuts. He could walk out on her, he could refuse to talk to her—but he couldn't escape her accusing voice, not even inside his own home.
It was, of course, just one more of Betty's pathetic, self-defeating measures, since Dan would only use her messages to bludgeon her even further until the day she finally killed him.
Like the good lawyer he was, he began building his case from the first day she spat into his answering machine. Over the next three years, she made literally hundreds of calls to his house. The overwhelming majority of them were completely innocuous, devoid of any offensive language at all, nothing more than a mother's calls to her children. But the only ones Dan saved—the ones that would dog Betty through countless divorce, custody, and contempt hearings, as well as her divorce trial and two murder trials to follow—were those that ranged from moderately ugly to disgusting. Eventually, Dan even began recording some of her private conversations with her sons.
Regularly, he would walk into his office and toss the latest, worst tapes onto his secretary's desk. "Here," he would say, "transcribe these in case we need them."
"He was infuriated by them, but he was always embarrassed, too," says Stormy (Ann Marie) Wetther, Dan's secretary, who still shudders at the memory of Betty's voice. "Just listening to her gave me the creeps. Her voice was so maniacal—it reminded me of The Exorcist. She sounded so evil, especially her laugh. It was a cackle."
Later on, fueling Betty's frenzy even further, her children told her that Dan would also often turn the telephone ringer off, or hide the telephone itself—which naturally only caused her to unleash even viler invective into his answering machine, thus adding to his collection. Neither Broderick could ever resist the bait laid out by the other.
Linda was also apparently an enthusiastic participant in gathering the tapes. "Linda used to love it when Mom would leave a bad message," Lee said later. "She'd say, 'Oh, great, here's another one we can use.'" Sometimes, Linda would also deliberately turn the answering machine on even when people were at home, Lee said, just to bait Betty into leaving yet another foul outburst.
Many of Betty's offending messages were strictly personal, harking back to old grievances between the two of them: "Fuckhead, who do you think you're kidding? Look in the mirror and tell me, who do you think you're kidding? Jesus Christ! You're like a slug with a fancy tie on—too low to kick and too wet to step on. Does that ring a bell? Love to the cunt."
Others were ominous, at least in light of later events: "Stop screwing the cunt long enough to return my calls. Left messages on the machine with the maid, with the secretary, et cetera. I have very important things to ask you. You're making me mad. I'll kill you."
Some were merely the infuriated, baffled wails of a woman stripped of all control: "What's this business about you continually sending the children to a psychiatrist? … You're the one who had a total mental meltdown. You're now fucking the secretary, acting like a fool, screwing your family all over the map, walking out on them. That's normal? … Jesus—there's nothing wrong with us! Why don't you go see somebody? You're the one whose mind is a pretzel."
But the most devastating were always those in which she burdened the children with her rage: "Rhett, this is Mommy. I'm out of the shower now. Where are you? You can make a choice today about staying with me or staying with the cuntsucker."
And some were simply painful to hear, her personal agony was so clear: "Cuntsucking asshole! What am I supposed to do now? I just want what's mine. I don't want to see you or the cunt, or the slums, any of your fucking bullshit anymore. Just want what's mine. That's all I ever wanted. I don't give two shits about you. You're not worth spit. Fuckhead, you've turned my life into a nightmare, I can't go to sleep. I close my eyes and I see you and the cunt, and I see you doing all your wonderful things, and, uhm … you're gonna be real sorry …"
After the killings, therapists had a field day analyzing Betty Broderick's sex hang-ups, as reflected in her messages. Defense psychologist Katherine DiFrancesca argued that there was nothing unusual in Betty's abrupt switch from a woman whose worst prior epithet was "Damn" to one who began to talk overnight like a besotted B-Team stripper. Language commonly deteriorates in pace with loss of self-esteem, said DiFrancesca. In her view, Betty was no different than millions of other people, male and female, who express their own rageful sense of devaluation by devaluing everything around them—and gutter language is typically the handiest, quickest outlet.
The prosecutor, meanwhile—who naturally disagreed that there was any excuse whatsoever for Betty's mouth—became so engrossed in the theater of playing Betty's squalid messages (all neatly filed and dated by Dan from his earlier contempt and custody battles) that bored reporters began to refer to them jokingly as "The Best of Betty." The entire proceeding eventually began to resemble an obscenity trial more than a first-degree murder case. Even Betty got into the humor of it.
"Hit it, Pearl," she used to mime from her chair every time Deputy District Attorney Kerry Wells headed for the tape player.
In time, Dan would use Betty's phone messages to have her both jailed and fined, filing one contempt motion after another on grounds that her vulgar language was fully as offensive as her prior vandalisms. But that time was not now. Instead, in June of 1986, his eye was on a different target: Dan was getting a divorce, even if Betty wasn't, and he furthermore intended to take the children away from her for good. Toward that end, he took copies of her messages to the children's psychiatrist, Dr. Sparta, and to his attorney—both of whom agreed, he later said, that "until Bets sought psychiatric help," she was too unfit even to be granted visitation rights with her children. His divorce court date was July 16.
Around the same time, in a onetime event the prosecutor would later feast upon, Betty also stopped by a shooting range to practice her aim—which, bystanders later testified, was excellent. Betty said that she was only looking for a hobby she could pursue on her own: "Finding people to go golfing is a pain, I don't play tennis, but shooting is a solitary thing. You just go out and do it."
As he had done the summer before, Dan again sent the children away to camp and then to visit his parents without consulting Betty. She was no longer a factor in any parental decision. She was also growing more aware with every passing day of just how completely dependent she was on Dan Broderick's largesse, even for her groceries. Her whole life had been a continuum of reliance on two men—first her father, now Dan. That dawning realization made her angrier still. Yet, some days, her reaction to her own captivity was almost comic.
"Fuckhead, I want to get my car fixed," she told his machine one day. "It's a mess, and the [insurance] policy is in your name, so you have to do it. Ha Ha. Bye." Then, moments later, laughing, she called back: "The car is also in your name, so you're stuck doing it. Bye. Tootleloo!"
Other times, she wasn't amused at all: "Fuckhead, pick up this phone right now," she hissed into the phone on one occasion. "I'm opening the mail and I see that the insurance on this house has been canceled. I now have no insurance on a major investment. Policy canceled, effective May 31, 1986. What's happening here, fool? Idiot, answer the phone … The whore won't mind if you answer the phone for a little
while … Sweetie, answer the phone … this house has no insurance because fuckhead didn't pay the bill."
Dan's collection of Betty tapes grew by the day.
Meantime, judging from a couple of letters Dan wrote Betty in early July, his anger was keeping fully apace with hers. One letter protested her "obnoxious phone messages," which, he reminded, were in violation of his restraining order. "It would be one thing if you were civil, but your lectures and disgusting language are unacceptable." He finished with a furious blast over her alleged attacks on his person and property, coupled with a promise to punish her where it hurt most—in the pocketbook: "A couple of months ago, I agreed to help you remove your Christmas decorations from the storage locker. [But] That was before you ripped the antenna off my car and tried to break the rear window. I don't intend to come near you, voluntarily at least, ever again. I also don't intend to pay for the storage locker any longer."
Money was always the measure. In his second letter that month, Dan was preoccupied with the ownership of their modest little motorboat. "There is no way we can share it," he wrote. "If you and I have learned anything over the past seventeen years, it's that we can't cooperate with one another. If you want the boat, I'll sell you my half for its fair market value as determined by the local Bay liner dealership. If you don't want the boat, I'll buy your half … Please let me have your decision on this in writing. In the future, I would appreciate it if you would communicate with me in writing."
"Miserable bastard," Betty wrote in the margins of his letter, talking to herself again. "You want everything your way. You have no sense of right wrong true false indecent immoral. God will thank you for it."