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

by Bella Stumbo

  And none of the Broderick children accepted Linda. She was "nice sometimes," Danny tactfully told the judge. "But she can be like real bossy, and acts like she is taking my mom's place." Even Kim, who got along with Linda best later told the judge that she was a meddlesome snitch who was mean to her brothers and too uneducated to be a suitable mate for her Dad.

  Whenever the children came to Betty's house, they brought with them new tales of the wicked future stepmother, abusing and depriving them, thereby only stoking Betty's angry fires higher.

  "Once, Kim told me that when they went out on her birthday and she ordered steak and lobster, Linda made some remark like, 'Oh, we're really living high tonight,'" Betty fumed years later from jail. "How dare that bitch tell my children what they can or can't eat? They said she would complain about them buying a $5 bag of macadamia nuts, and then go spend $50 on a facial for herself!"

  Linda's friends tell a different story. "Betty poisoned the kids' minds so much that even at the dinner table, the boys wouldn't speak to Linda. They would ask Dan to pass the salt, even when it was right beside Linda's plate," says attorney Sharon Blanchet.

  Although families and friends will forever argue the matter, each side shifting blame, the reality is that both Brodericks punished their children in terrible ways. Betty could not behave like a mother should, not unless Dan gave her the money she demanded. But he only saw this as emotional blackmail from a woman who was not behaving like a decent mother should. And so he often punished her for her behavior by refusing weekend visits she had counted on, according to the children. On the other hand, Betty charges, "If he knew I had made advance plans, he would suddenly just drop the kids off."

  Dan's friends say the opposite was true. According to them, Betty was so jealous of Dan and Linda that she saw every visit by the children as their way of turning her into their baby-sitter—and, in retaliation, would frequently refuse scheduled weekends at the last minute to ruin their plans.

  For all their education and intelligence, Dan and Betty Broderick became a tragicomedy in action. Neither one of them could back off. They were a pair of gummy bears, locked in permanent, sticky embrace.

  And now jail became just one more ugly element of their story, a new tool in Dan's arsenal, one both foolish and useless.

  Instead of being cowed by her new status as both mental-ward patient and common prisoner, Betty only grew more defiant.

  "You guys, you're missing a gorgeous roast beef family Sunday dinner like we've always had," she told her children in a phone message. "I hope you're enjoying dog food with the cunt."

  Dan, meantime, was flourishing at every level. By now, he was president of the county bar association. He was in love; he was regularly photographed at local bar functions with the lovely Linda. His income was pressing upward, probably well over $2 million annually. His reputation was all that he had dreamed of, back in his Harvard days.

  "He was maybe the best-known lawyer in this town. But he didn't act like a big wheel," said Dan's young partner, Robert Vaage, who later inherited many of his pending cases. "And he was a great teacher." Vaage recalled one case in particular in which his opponent, a senior attorney in town, had insulted him in court. But Vaage won, and, when the verdict came in, he wanted to gloat, to rub it in. "But Dan warned me, 'Never bad-mouth people you have to do business with.' And he practiced what he preached. I never heard Dan say a bad word about anybody, Betty included."

  In December, Dan punished her again. This time, when her "allowance" check came, it showed deductions of $2,400 for bad behavior. Most of her November violations were for "offensive language" (fourteen times, or $1,400). She had also been fined for being on his property twice (total, $500) and for entering his house once ($500 more). Betty stared at Dan's meticulous invoice with strangling rage—and also vicious humor: clearly, she concluded, it was a better bargain to cuss into his phone than to visit his property; she got a lot more for her dollar.

  In the same letter, Dan also informed her that they had finally been advanced to the top of the La Jolla Country Club waiting list, pursuant to their application two years earlier. But "I elected not to make that payment [of about $45,000] … henceforth, neither you nor I are entitled to use the Club's facilities."

  A small thing, perhaps, in the larger scheme of all that was happening to her—but to Betty Broderick, it was devastating. Now she had no country clubs at all. She could not get dressed up in her pretty clothes and go to lunch with the ladies in a place of infinite well-being, to pretend that none of it mattered. Not unless someone invited her. Because Dan had "elected" not to join. Any idea she had that she owned half of their money collapsed under the weight of one central fact: until she got a court-ordered property settlement, it didn't matter what she owned—he controlled it. She was now a beggar. He was king.

  Her frame of mind during that holiday month, and her special concerns, were reflected in this early December entry in her diary, written, as always, in her even, clear script in a loose-leaf notebook:

  "Overwhelmingly depressed

  —kids here (Danny and Rhett)

  —house a mess (wallpaper, paint, etc.) missing:

  —Casey's party

  —Blackstone Ball

  —Ireland Fund

  —Milliken party

  —Armstrong family party

  —Loma Larks

  —no confidence in attorney

  —Huge weight gain, don't fit in any of my nice clothes

  —no Christmas money

  —girls didn't come or call (they knew I wanted Christmas picture)

  —bought Christmas tree I couldn't afford ($77)

  —spent all of Gail's $6,500

  —no money to survive on

  —picked up $340 worth of greens I can't afford

  —no garage for car (raining)

  —termites in house

  —roof leaking."

  By mid-December 1986, her diary was a blur of notations about sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, and fear. Finally, she took her first positive step forward and directed Hargreaves to file for a temporary spousal support order. The hearing was set for December 30. "I had to do something. He had simply cut off my money with his fines! Stupid as I was, I wasn't into starving!"

  In the same week, the 1985 battle over Christmas money repeated itself. She refused to take the children on their annual holiday ski trip to Utah unless Dan paid her about $7,000 extra for expenses. Nor could she entertain them in her La Jolla home, according to the letter her attorney wrote Dan, since "her home is only partially furnished and cannot accommodate all of the children, unless they sleep on the floor or with Mrs. Broderick."

  Dan Broderick's reaction was by now predictable: Up yours. He had offered the same $2,000, and he wasn't about to be the victim of "reverse ransom," as he called it. He was so angry, in fact, that he wrote Betty a letter saying, in effect, that he took her decision as final—no last-minute changes of heart allowed: she could damn well forget seeing her children for a single day at any time between December 19 and January 4.

  And forget it she damn well would. She was still trying, nearly two years later, to teach Dan Broderick that "there's more to fucking than fun." See how long the bimbo found him so dashing and romantic with four kids hanging around his neck. Yes.

  Betty never would come to grips with either Dan's determination or with Linda Kolkena's commitment to him. It would take more than four snotty kids to derail Linda's dream of becoming the next Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III.

  Dan and Linda took the children skiing that Christmas and seemed to have a fine time.

  She was everybody's charity guest that season. But she was in misery. "All Betty could see was the unfairness of what had happened to her," said Vicki Currie. "All she could talk about that Christmas were those fines."

  Everywhere she went, she was heaped with unwanted advice: Compromise. Forget it. Move on.

  They didn't understand. She hated them for it. She fled home, frustrate
d, to her diaries and notebooks and legal documents and the refrigerator. "I was happier when I was by myself. They made me feel crazy. And, I knew I wasn't crazy. I thought they were crazy, just like Dan Broderick. Everybody was telling me constantly to just roll over, that black was white. I am not color-blind."

  Mostly, she spent the holiday season of 1986 calculating her living expenses for the upcoming spousal support hearing.

  According to her figures, she needed $28,500 per month.

  She arrived in court on December 30 wearing her usual upbeat, chipper, how-can-I-please-you face. She was the bright student at the spelling bee, the innocently hopeful little girl, laughing too gaily, making too much small talk, as her eyes roamed the room. Waiting for Dan to enter. She was always waiting for Dan. And, she knew, inside, that if only she was charming enough, if she only showed them how sincere she was, both the judge and Dan would treat her well. They would like her. Dan would come to his senses yet. Betty was always a woman who lived somewhere outside herself, forever setting the real Betty aside in some pastel, placid dreamworld, where all things including herself were perfect, where all conclusions were ideal. She is still that way today.

  But Dan, her sweetheart, her husband, and her identity in this life, simply brushed past her, tight-jawed and cold, and sat down at the table with his new attorney, Gerald Barry, a partner of Tom Ashworth—who was now presiding judge of domestic courts.

  She turned her attentions to the matter at hand—money and independence.

  She wanted full financial freedom from Dan. She wanted to pay her own house payments, her own taxes, and every other bill, "like a grown-up woman, not a goddamn child," she snaps today. At the same time, she didn't expect to suffer any decline in her life-style. Half of all that Dan Broderick owned was hers. That was their bargain.

  Still, she never even asked for half. Not even close, not during all the long years of their divorce struggle. At $28,500, she wasn't aiming for much more than 25 percent of his monthly income. But, she told the judge, with that much money, she wouldn't feel too cheated.

  Dan, by contrast, thought $7,316 was plenty for one woman without children—and that for only a limited period of time, until she got herself a job.

  "His lawyer kept talking about need," she said later, laughing bitterly. "Well, obviously, anybody could squeak by on $9,000 a month. Need had nothing to do with it. The point was fairness—percentages. Why was I budgeting while he and Linda were living like royalty?"

  She even came to court that day hauling a bag of worn children's shoes and rat-eaten dresses from the rental house to show the judge that Dan was not providing properly for either his children or her. That same bag would show up in divorce court two years later and also in her two murder trials.

  She suffered a crushing defeat in that early round. What she got from Judge Napoleon Jones, instead of $28,000, was $12,500. Worse, from that amount, she had to pay $4,000 to $5,000 monthly in property taxes and insurance bills, which Dan had borne before. In short, not only had she failed to win enough money to maintain her current life-style, she now had even less spendable income than she had when she was reliant on Dan's informal dole. Before Betty Broderick had fully even mastered the art of living rich, she was back to square one—worrying about money.

  Shifting the tax and insurance payments to her turned out to be an accounting error that the judge would eventually rectify with apologies—but not until Betty had spent several thousand dollars more in legal fees on a new attorney.

  At the same hearing, arguing that it was in the best interests of the children, Dan's attorney also succeeded in having the Broderick divorce case permanently closed to the public. According to Betty, Hargreaves barely protested, although she did. As a result, for the next three years, the Broderick matter proceeded in secrecy. Throughout the entire Broderick divorce drama, Betty could howl all she wanted about how she had been fined $8,000 for calling Dan a "fuckhead" or jailed for calling Linda a "cunt," but few people could believe such an absurdity—and nobody could go read the files or sit in on hearings to see for themselves. Dan Broderick was now free to take his ex-wife to court as often as he pleased without fear of being snickered at, either by reporters or his peers down at the courthouse.

  In the subsequent months and years, her sense of helplessness only increased each time she walked into a sealed courtroom to face Dan and his attorney. And the entire community increasingly wondered why the Broderick case rated such top secret status. Not until two years later did another divorcee tell Betty that her own attorney, an associate of Dan's attorney, had once told her that the Broderick case was closed because Betty was a child molester. "I thought I would just die right then, when I heard that—I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me," Betty recalls.

  Meantime, now that she had a firm, court-ordered support figure, Dan could no longer fine her even a dime for calling him a fuckhead without being in contempt of court himself. That was the only bright side of her dim month.

  The day after the court-ordered $12,500 award, Dan wrote Betty yet another of his legal letters. This one informed her that she was now responsible for payment of all insurance premiums. In addition, in an effort to help her into the world of independent finance, he outlined in meticulous detail which premiums expired on what dates, and provided the exact amounts she must henceforth pay. He also warned her that she had better start budgeting for her taxes. "I strongly suggest that you consult a tax attorney or an accountant about how to handle this right away." It was just one more piece of advice Betty threw away.

  A few days later, she received notification that Dan had canceled her medical coverage under his state bar insurance policy, effective instantly. The letter was signed by Linda Kolkena, "legal assistant to Daniel T. Broderick III." "Paid whore," Betty scrawled on the copy.

  She was so upset that, days later, Hargreaves wrote a letter to Dan's attorney imploring that "in consideration for the feelings of Mrs. Broderick," all future correspondence affecting Betty be signed by Dan, "rather than having Mrs. Broderick receive copies of such correspondence executed by Linda Kolkena."

  Neither Dan nor Linda paid the least bit of attention.

  Betty began to focus her attention specifically on Linda Kolkena. If Linda had once been a trivial airhead who would soon evaporate, a stupid bimbo interchangeable with a million others whose worst offense had been putting her voice on the family answering machine, now Linda began to emerge in Betty's mind as a creature far more hateful—and substantive: Linda was now an arrogant, cruel little bitch, deliberately inserting herself into a divorce that was none of her business. Overnight, Betty's prior disdain began to take on the hues of indelible hate. And, certainly, Linda Kolkena proved in the next years to be remarkably insensitive toward the woman she was replacing. Later on, for example, when Dan finally sent Betty the deed to her own house following their protracted divorce trial, it was notarized by Kolkena. Betty tore it to shreds and threw it into a box of documents, which is where her defense attorney later found it in time for her murder trial.

  On the other hand, some of what Betty accused Linda Kolkena of doing, she probably never did.

  Finishing out the year of 1986, for instance, Betty raced around La Jolla almost gleefully treating everyone to a glimpse of a photograph she claimed Linda had sent her anonymously. The picture showed Linda and Dan at a party celebrating Dan's election as president of the county bar association. Dan, holding a drink, was grinning boyishly into the camera, with a radiant Linda at his side. The photo had been printed in a local legal publication called Dicta, and the caption identified Dan as the president-elect and Linda as his paralegal and close friend. Those three words alone were enough to drive a stake through the heart of any recently, unhappily divorced wife. "Since when does any publication editorialize about personal relationships?" Betty fumed from jail years later.

  But that wasn't the worst of it. The photograph Betty was showing her La Jolla friends had also been tampered with—just
beneath the picture and caption was a neatly typed two-inch-square note pasted in, which read: "It must KILL you to see these two happy together … EAT YOUR HEART OUT, BITCH!!!"

  This photo, Betty told everyone, had obviously been sent to her by "Linda the Cunt Kolkena." Could they believe that the bitch would be so vicious?

  No, they could not. They looked at Betty, so desperate for sympathy and support, and they looked back at the altered photograph. Capital letters and triple exclamation points. So like Betty's own notes. Nearly everyone suspected that Betty had sent the photo to herself.

  About the same time, Betty also said she began to receive anonymous ads for weight loss and wrinkle reduction in the mail—although, as it would later turn out in her murder trial, she may not have been imagining that those came from Linda after all.

  Either way, by the end of 1986, Betty Broderick was already down for the count. From here on, the most remarkable thing about her story is the way she refused to stay down. She just kept getting back up, over and over again.

  Chapter 15

  Mothers and Daughters

  In early January, she returned from a holiday visit with Brad's parents in Pasadena, where she had spent much of her time nursing her friend Kay Wright, who was then dying of cancer. It had been a sad time. By then, Mrs. Wright had become a surrogate mother to Betty, warm and sympathetic in a way her own mother never could be.

  Betty's own daughters meantime, weren't doing much better in their effort to cope with life than she was. Kim, a former straight A student, was about to flunk out of Francis Parker in her junior year, and Lee was only a year away from winding up in a drug rehabilitation hospital and quitting high school altogether. Nor were the boys doing well. Therapists expressed concerns that both might be suicidal, Dan's friends later said.