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

by Bella Stumbo

  Betty also returned home to a stack of mail that included more notices of insurance and credit card cancellations from Dan, plus a stack of bills. She had said she wanted independence, now she had it.

  Her anger was instant, as she stood alone in her big house on the hillside. She stared at her sad, drooping Christmas tree, with its presents to the children underneath, still unopened, and thought of all that she had lost. Property. Status. Money. Dignity. And her children. She hadn't seen them for nearly a month now. They had again spent the holidays with Dan and his office girl on a ski trip. Linda Kolkena had stolen her life. Her husband, her kids, her money. Without working a day for any of it.

  She marched to the phone and called his house. She got the answering machine. It was 7:30 on Sunday night. How could they not be home? The holiday was over. They were home. She was convinced of it. The fucker had turned off the ringer again. Keeping her from her children. Again.

  She didn't even pause. She gripped the phone in her hand, with its maddening "Please leave a message" recording, waited for the beep, then spat out another of her furious messages, studded with even more references to cunts and fuckfaces than usual.

  It's not hard to imagine Dan Broderick's fury when he came home, turned on his answering machine, and heard Betty spewing forth. By now that machine had become a red flag to him, too. He listened to Betty's voice. In his house. Disturbing his peace. Why couldn't he control this woman?

  But he knew her game: now that he couldn't legally fine her anymore, she thought she was home free. She thought that he, Dan Broderick, was powerless.

  Well, she would see.

  He filed another contempt motion—his first based on her language alone.

  Three days later, Betty was back in court, defending her mouth to a judge.

  In his complaint, Dan argued that her foul language was every bit as offensive as her physical rampages through his house, smashing windows and spraying paint and kidnapping his children. He beseeched the court to find her in contempt of his restraining order and, accordingly, be "incarcerated in the county jail therefore."

  Betty argued that, apart from her right of free speech, Dan's complaint was sheer hypocrisy. She had in fact learned the term "fuckface" from the Broderick clan, she said in her formal response:

  " 'Fuckface' is considered to be a term of endearment in the Broderick clan. I first heard it from Dan's sister, Christy, during a Scrabble game seven or eight years ago. After getting over my initial shock, I realized that everyone thought it was quite funny, especially coming from such a sweet-looking young lady. 'Dear Fuckface' is how the family starts letters to one another. In using this terminology, I was simply using a family endearment. Other shocking terms of endearment invented and used by the Broderick clan are 'penis breath' and 'dickhead.' These terms … are used throughout their everyday communications with one another … They have been doing this around my young children for years."

  Dan lost that round. Judge Anthony Joseph declined to jail Betty for using dirty words. Instead, he let her off with a lecture.

  But this battle had hardly begun.

  Instead, Dan began collecting Betty's ugly messages and filing regular OSCs. Typically, over the next months, he would gather her offending messages for a period of several weeks, then file them collectively in one OSC declaration. Other times, however, he would file a contempt based on one message alone. It all seemed to depend on his mood. It was a replay of late 1985, except now, instead of trying to have her jailed for vandalisms, it was strictly vulgarity: nearly every dirty word she uttered into his answering machine went into his files.

  Thus did 1987 become the year of the renewed Order to Show Cause. Dan filed. "I was entitled to explode," she says. "And the truth is, I loved leaving those messages. All I ever had was my tongue. I did it for the shock value. And every time I used that language on his machine, I felt a little bit better for a while. I couldn't stop from doing it."

  In April, in court again for more phone messages, she received a five-day suspended jail sentence.

  Not until May would Dan finally have his way.

  But anger, combined with pressing financial fears, cleared her head significantly during those first months of 1987—at least sporadically.

  She began the year by filing two motions of her own—one for increased spousal support and another for modified custody, giving her guaranteed visitation.

  But her certainty that she would never get a fair shake from the San Diego courts only grew. At a first contempt hearing, she says Judge Joseph broke into a friendly grin when Dan entered his courtroom and said, "Why, Mr. Broderick, to what do we owe this honor?" Joseph then told her, she says, that "he had great respect for Dan, and would that make any difference to me? I said that, yes, it did make a difference. But he just brushed it off."

  Studying a court calendar for 1987 is a staggering testament to Dan and Betty Broderick's mutual determination to wear the other down. The year was a blur of legal actions, courtroom appearances, declarations, stays, vacated calendars, continuances, charges, and counter charges.

  Throughout January, Hargreaves was still seeking access to Dan's financial records. In addition, he was writing his own client beseeching letters begging her cooperation. A February deadline for appealing the $12,500 support order and also new arguments over the custody arrangement was fast approaching. "Please contact me immediately … Repeated phone calls to you have been unsuccessful," Hargreaves wrote her.

  But, by now, Betty had fired Hargreaves—at least in her own mind. Typically, however, she never confronted him with her gripes. Instead, she strung him along while she hunted for someone new. She was now calling Beverly Hills glamour attorneys again.

  Nobody surpassed Betty Broderick when it came to docile capitulation to the personalities around her. She was, and remains, constitutionally incapable of telling people to their faces how she feels about them. During her murder trial, for example, she raged constantly at what she saw as the ineptness of her attorney—but only behind his back. When he was around, she turned into a docile little girl. She also gossiped constantly about the hypocrisy of old La Jolla friends who refused to defend her publicly; at the same time, she accused some of her newer friends—divorce reform activists who did try to defend her—of "using my life story to advance themselves." In the next moment, she would then call the same women for friendly chats, or write them intimate letters from jail.

  Betty always needed a buffer between herself and the object of her resentments. Only on an answering machine, or in her endless letters, diaries, fliers, and other writings, or in conversation with third parties—usually reporters and other strangers—could she ever really muster the courage to say what was on her mind. It isn't surprising that her victims were in bed. Betty could never have shot two people who were up, dressed, and looking her in the eye in broad daylight.

  "Oh, fuckhead, it's me!" she told Dan's answering machine that month. "I took the advice of hundreds of people who told me to call Marvin Mitchelson a year ago. I finally did it. Called him. He's gonna come down here and tar and feather and make even a bigger public asshole of yourself than you've done all by yourself. I'm just going to have to pay him a little for it. This is going to be fun. [singing] The bigger they are, the harder they fall, tougher they talk … Asshole!"

  She ended up being directed instead to another attorney in Mitchelson's circle, William J. Glucksman. As a retainer, he took a $10,000 diamond necklace she was wearing.

  At about the same time, she finally decided to comply with the court order that she see a therapist. Dr. Gerald Nelson was the guest speaker at a La Jolla ladies luncheon, and Betty immediately liked his style. Better yet, he was a child psychiatrist. She could visit him to talk about the children, not herself. Her pride would not be sacrificed; at the same time the court's requirements would be met. She began sporadic visits to Nelson's office in Del Mar, a fashionable coastal community just north of La Jolla. In time, Nelson became such a trusted
friend that he was one of those she attempted to call on the morning of the killings.

  Meantime, Hargreaves's time clock was still ticking. Once again, Betty wasn't handling her attorneys with any maturity. Thus, in early 1987, she had, in effect, two attorneys. Within the next confused weeks Hargreaves finally gave up. Glucksman, who would last no more than a couple of weeks himself, promptly filed for a change of venue on grounds that Betty could hardly get a fair hearing in San Diego Family Court where Dan's former attorney, Ashworth, was now presiding judge—nor in a legal community whose titular leader was now Dan Broderick himself. Like Dan Jaffe before him, he intended to take Dan Broderick to the cleaners. His motion was denied.

  Betty dropped Glucksman, she says, because Dr. Nelson persuaded her that she needed a local attorney. He recommended a friend, Tricia A. Smith, whose office was also in Del Mar.

  Betty made an appointment with Smith for the next day and wrote in her February 4 diary, "Great!" Smith, a stately, silvery-haired woman with an efficient manner, would be Betty's fourth and last divorce lawyer. She lasted about a year before Betty fired her, too. After that, from 1988 on, like a lamb heading to slaughter, Betty represented herself.

  During the chaotic weeks of the joint Hargreaves/Glucksman reign, Betty managed to meet the February 3 deadline for her support and custody motions. She wanted more money plus the children. As it would turn out, of course, she didn't want the children without the money guaranteed first.

  Her custody motion was based mainly on Dan's neglectful parenting. Among a host of specifics, she accused him of sending the children to school dirty and of being more interested in his career than in the children's health. When Rhett once got sick at school, for example, Dan had picked him up and taken him to his office instead of home to bed, she complained. Dan had even neglected Danny's teeth, which were crooked and required a retainer, she alleged. "About eight months ago, the retainer broke, and petitioner refuses to take Danny to get it fixed. Now, Danny's tooth is crooked again. Petitioner also refuses to allow me to take Danny to the orthodontist." Atop all else, she said, Dan never attended any school activities and "didn't even know who their teachers were." By contrast to his terrible parenting, she pointed to her own record: "While the children were living with me, I was a FULL-time mom … For fifteen years my parenting abilities were absolutely fine, from Petitioner's viewpoint. Now, while we're in litigation, if Petitioner's self-serving contentions are to be believed, he has taken a 180-degree turn with respect to my parenting abilities. It just does not make any good sense."

  She wanted at least $25,000 in spousal support. "My expenses are admittedly high," she said in her declaration, "but are consistent with the type of living standard I earned during my lengthy marriage to Dan."

  She then described the life-style to which she had become accustomed when he left her. Among other items: "We had five vehicles—an MG, a Gazelle, a Corvette, a Jaguar, and a Suburban for me and the kids. We traveled to Europe once a year, took frequent ski trips, cruises, island trips, and often paid the entire expenses of couples traveling with us, always first-class. I entertained frequently and extravagantly … All of this, plus unlimited ability to charge at every major department store in San Diego …"

  Now she had been fired from her job as wife and mother. "Being forced out of our marriage is like being thrown into a snake pit." She begged the court to "make an order giving me some parity in this matter."

  The Broderick divorce would never proceed on schedule. Betty's custody motion was removed from the calendar for an indeterminate period, in order that psychiatrists might evaluate the fitness of the parents, customary in most such disputes over children.

  Once again, however, Dan was victorious in advance. While the court order contained a specific proviso requiring Betty to "cooperate in submitting herself for psychiatric or psychological examination," no such language ordered him to submit to the same testing—and he never did.

  Just one more insult, added to the many already festering in her mind.

  By now, she was such a nervous wreck that she was periodically coming undone in public places, among strangers. Much of La Jolla was gossiping about her, this crazy lady who had burned up her husband's clothes, run the car into his door, and even lost visitation rights with her children. Even so, many mothers, armed with only the sketchiest of facts, were on Betty's side.

  Jana Hernholm, for example, a La Jolla mother who knew Betty only casually through their school activities, remembers running into her at a ski resort one weekend and feeling only pity. Betty was not the same cheerful, funny, intelligent woman Hernholm had known. "It was just so sad. Tears were streaming down her face all day … she couldn't stop talking about the wrongs she perceived. I'd say, 'Just put it behind you,' but she couldn't even hear me … She was just consumed by it. But it was also just so obvious to me that he was toying with her. He could've stopped it. He could've given her back her kids."

  Even so, at about the same time, Betty finally won a round herself. Although the custody matter was tabled, her spousal support motion got to court five days after Betty had hired Tricia Smith. Betty's case began at last to take some shape.

  Smith succeeded in getting Betty's monthly support increased from the $12,500 to $16,000. The judge agreed that he "blew it." He had intended, he said, to "maintain the status quo … [but] in my order, I completely omitted … taxes."

  It wasn't the $25,000 that Betty wanted, but it was the biggest loss that Dan Broderick had suffered in a courtroom in a long, long time.

  Betty was delighted with her new attorney. She also recalls with satisfaction how Smith had ordered her to "look rich when I came to court that day." And so, says Betty, "I wore my brown cashmere Oscar de la Renta with my gold jewelry, and when I walked in, Trish said, 'You do rich good!'"

  She even remembers the shoes she wore—"My four-inch Charles Jourdan pumps. I always wore four-inch heels to court so I could look down on that little nerd [Dan]. He was such a little shit, and when I had those shoes on I was about 6'2." I went nose to nose with [Dan's attorney] Gerald Barry. I was right in those heels—'Don't fuck with me, boys!' Hah. They're so used to looking down on us. Next to my tongue, my height was the only real weapon I ever had—until, of course, I bought the gun," she added with a sour little chuckle.

  Within a month Dan appealed the temporary spousal support order. Although he eventually lost, his action only further persuaded Betty that he had no intention of settling with her in any speedy fashion, but was instead stealing time to accumulate ever more debts against her share of their community property. "Tricia told me it was the first time she ever heard of anybody appealing a temporary support order," Betty said later.

  Dan's friends denied any such deviousness. "It was such an incredible amount of money for any man to have to pay. We all encouraged him to appeal it," says Stormy Wetther.

  At the same time, because the court order failed to specify clearly that Betty's $16,000 was to arrive on the first of each month, Dan didn't send her next check until the end of the month, she says—by which time her own bills were backed up. So she had to pay more attorney fees, she says, to get the order rewritten to clarify the due date, "to add in just that one little thing." To her, it was pure harassment, nothing more.

  Meanwhile, Tricia Smith was fast discovering, as Dan Jaffe and others had before her, that Betty Broderick could never suppress her anger long enough to focus on the longer-range goals of winning a fat settlement and, presumably, getting her children back.

  February was one of Dan's busiest months in contempt court. Altogether, he filed three separate actions against her. By now, even one bad word was enough to drive him to seek redress.

  In March, he filed his sixth contempt.

  "… at 9:30 P.M., Citee telephoned my home. I answered the telephone and said ‘Hello.’ Respondent said: 'Aw, dickhead.' She then hung up," said Dan in his declaration. By now, he was also advising the judge of what specific penalties he thought approp
riate: five days in jail and/or a fine up to $1,000.

  "And that one wasn't even me! He must have had another fan," Betty still insists, laughing. "For one thing, 'dickhead' isn't my word. Besides, I would never call Dan Broderick one name and hang up—that wasn't my style. Once I got the sonofabitch on the phone, I'd talk until he got mad and hung up."

  But as winter turned to spring, her telephone voice grew uglier, especially toward Linda. "I'm so glad you put the machine on, fuckhead. I like talking to the machine, and I'm sure you're just recording every little word for the future, and I'm glad of it … because every little word is true ... I don't know how either one of you can do any of this … She's ruined six lives, and her life was never anything that counted to anyone anyway, so she had nothing to lose, has nothing to lose. Once a cunt, always a cunt. It wasn't like she was an upstanding citizen and had any friends or anything, that anyone cared about her … It's a shame that your income plummets this year, isn't it, sweetie? [kissing sounds] You're so cellophane … You think you're so clever, and you're just a classic fool."

  Chapter 16

  Gripes

  March, 1987, was her most lunatic month so far. Her diaries, always a good measure of where her mind was, became wild, disjointed things, painting the portrait of a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Even her penmanship began to lose its neat legibility, turning instead into loose, double-sized scrawls with ever more exclamation points and underlined words. Some pages contain only three or four words. To read these chronicles from beginning to the end is a progressive journey into madness—one reason that the defense could never get them introduced into trial. The prosecutor didn't want jurors to travel to hell on Betty Broderick's express. By early 1987, she had become an insomniac worrying about money, children, and her health—"can't sleep, back pain ... do I have ulcers?" She worried about being jailed for her telephone calls. She was also beginning to distrust her lawyer—"Is she for me or agin me?" Tricia is not giving me the service I need!" In particular, Smith was not returning her phone calls fast enough.