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

by Bella Stumbo

  It would of course net her another contempt a few weeks later.

  For the third Christmas in a row, Dan and Linda took the children skiing, while Betty spent the holiday in Pasadena with Brad and his dying mother. For Betty it was a trip of mixed emotions. On the one hand, she felt loved as usual. On the other hand, she was beginning to loathe herself in nearly every respect. "I remember this huge party at the Jonathan Club, and I wore my gorgeous black velvet skirt—but I was getting so big. Thank God it had an elastic waistband … When I saw the pictures later, I looked like an elephant. Brad's parents tried to make me feel like a part of their family. But I just wanted my own family."

  Before she left La Jolla, she also made reservations to go to Tahiti in January.

  "What do you do when you're totally down the drain?" she asks today, wryly. "You go to Tahiti, of course. That's what people do in the movies. So I got out the credit cards and said, 'Hell with it …'"

  Why she didn't get out the same credit cards in order to entertain her kids that Christmas was a question no longer even worth asking.

  She put her final signature to the year of 1987 with a vengeance by mailing a two-page, single-spaced Christmas letter to dozens of Dan's and her friends and relatives throughout the country. Her letter was accompanied by two photographs: one was the picture of Dan and Linda laughing together at a cocktail party, which she alleged that Linda had sent with the "eat your heart out, bitch" note attached. The second photo was of Betty and Dan on their wedding day. Across the Dan and Linda picture she printed the message: "Crash or No crash, It's a certainty that 1987 is the Year of the Bimbo."

  Her letter said:

  "I heartily apologize to you all for my lapse in correspondence the past several Christmases. I was only following the rules: 'If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all.' The last five years out here in sunny California have been living hell. Our darling family has been ravaged by Dan's classic midlife crisis with a nineteen-year-old receptionist. In '83 and '84 I valiantly tried to carry on and shouldered the burden of the trauma myself, figuring the whole disgusting mess was too asinine to be true and he would get over it. Instead of getting over it, he escalated the whole thing into a legal nightmare as well. During '83 and '84 he had completely rearranged our finances and our whole lives, lowering our life-style and putting us in a rented house and car. It was only then that he made his decision and walked out."

  From there, she went through the details of Dan's infidelity and her divorce in painful, shameless detail. She described her frustrating attorney search, leading up to the day that "big-shot San Diego lawyer went into court and got a FINAL divorce decree giving me no monthly support or any division of community property and he seized sole custody of our four children, granting me NO rights to any visitation." She told how he had her arrested for "stepping foot on his property" on the same night he "donned his top hat and cape and attended the annual Bar Association Dance with his office girl … The legal saga continues. I have amassed over $70,000 in legal fees!!! I have sold my jewelry, I have liens on my house, lawsuits by lawyers against me for fees and outstanding IOUs. I had no idea this could, and does happen in divorce. Dan says, 'The law says you own half—there is no law that says I have to give it to you!' He has used every legal trick and loophole to draw out and unnecessarily complicate things, so I will DROWN in legal fees and harassment. He is VERY GOOD at this, the nature of his noble profession.

  "All I can say is I'm sorry—I really am. I'm sorry for all our friends and relatives—we really enjoyed each other lo these many years.

  "I'm sorry for my children, whose lives have been shattered.

  "I'm sorry for Dan. I hope he can buy what he's looking for.

  "I'm sorry for myself. I have lost everything that matters to me.

  "I'm sorry for the world that the family and traditional values of love, trust, respect hold so little meaning in the eighties.

  "See why I haven't written? The NATURE OF BETTY WAS HER FAMILY. I gave it my all—truly. I have no idea where I go from here, but if I have any good news, I'll be sure to share it. I still have my inveterate 'Shutterbug,' thank God. My pictures are a constant source of pleasure. I still love to cook, travel, read, ski, dance, laugh, etc., etc., but find myself at such odds personally, socially, and financially. My imposed exile from my family is very hard to deal with.

  "Please write back and tell me your good news. Because of all the moves and upheaval, I haven't heard from any of you either (Dan does not forward my mail sent to Coral Reef). And send pictures!! I display and save every one of them. Remember a picture says a thousand words—no time to write—send the picture anyway.

  "I'd say come visit—but I don't even want to be around this mess— why would anyone else? Trial is set for end of July '88—six years from the start of all this!

  "I hope 1988 brings love, peace, happiness, and prosperity to us all. Love, Bets."

  It was finally becoming clear to everyone except Dan that Betty Broderick's telephone manners could not be corrected by the threat of jail. Her suspended jail sentences hung over her head like a club, ready to drop on a daily basis. But she no longer cared. "Fuck them. You bet I'm in contempt of court—utter contempt," she declared.

  She was now beyond the point of humiliation. Jail had not conquered her. She had not been broken by the cacophony of inmates at Las Colinas shrieking "Fuck you, Muuuuuther fucccccker" in the background as she made calls to her polite, embarrassed La Jolla friends. She had not bent beneath the indignity of communal toilets in tiny cells; she did not fold beneath the sheer fright of deputies shouting commands at her, ordering her to put her thumbs in her waistband as she passed them by en route to breakfast in the crowded, loud prison commissary. She had endured handcuffs and jail buses; she had been fingerprinted and mugged and issued a plastic ID bracelet. Betty Broderick had seen the other, sordid side of life—she was now, in fact, a part of it.

  But all she had learned from this loss of dignity and reputation was: she could survive it.

  None of it, she said years later, was any worse than the hell in her head as she paced her del Cielo home alone at three A.M.. Long before she went to jail on two murder counts, Betty Broderick had already become institutionalized in many respects. And she exhilarated in her own curious, newfound ability not only to withstand but even to enjoy it.

  "There's nothing more liberating than to realize that you don't have to live up to anything anymore," she said later. "After he sent me to jail, my image was already gone, so I didn't have to pretend anymore. I had nothing left to lose. I know it sounds crazy, but I suddenly felt free."

  Thus, in his single-minded drive to control her behavior, Dan Broderick was only compounding the problem he was so determined to conquer. Inadvertently, he was only helping to create, over the next months and years, the final, heedless, broken creature who would one day shoot him to death in his bed, her hasty bullet striking as close to his heart as she could get it.

  But Dan never would see it, never sense the danger. Instead, until the very eve of his death, he was still behaving like some legal Evel Kneivel rocketing his bike across the dark, deep chasms of his ex-wife's fraying mind.

  By 1988, it was a radically altered Betty Broderick abroad in the streets of La Jolla. This one was well beyond caring how she was perceived by others. Her social image was already in shreds. All personal vanity was gone, buried beneath the layers of fat. Her language was now so routinely crude, even in polite gatherings, that old friends like Brian and Gail Forbes lectured her about her foul mouth, especially in front of their children— but what did she care?

  By then, she was pacing the floors of her house all night, eating straight from refrigerator containers, and scribbling wildly in her diary. By then, those notebooks had literally become the "Diary of a Mad Housewife," except there was nothing even remotely amusing in Betty Broderick's proliferating pages. Now her mind gave her no rest; the late-night demons besetting her were relent
less, vicious, and growing ever larger.

  "Pressure from Hargreaves's seizure of $2,800 I badly need to pay bills. My credit cards at limit. I NEED THAT MONEY. T. Smith NO HELP AT ALL!" she wrote on January 7. Then, in another of her stark little lists, she complained again about everything from "skin entirely broken out" to her weight—"182 NEVER HIGHER! Fingernails bitten to the quick. THE STRESS IS KILLING ME!"

  On another page she wrote a short, ominous note to Dan, which— although never mailed—the prosecutor would later select, alone among the hundreds of pages of Betty's diaries, as evidence of premeditated murder, while the defense argued that it was merely a collective, colloquial reflection of her crumbling state of mind:

  "There is no better reason in the world for someone to kill than to protect their home, possessions, and family from attack and destruction," she scrawled. "You have attacked and destroyed me, my home, my possessions, and my family. You continue to repeatedly attack and steal and destroy. You are the sickest person alive. A law degree does not give you license to kill and destroy nor does it give you immunity from punishment. No one will mourn you!"

  Then, abruptly, furiously, she would undergo an utter personality change, rising from her bed, dressing, and flinging herself again into the shops and restaurants of La Jolla with a vengeance, to spend money she didn't have. One day in January she hit I. Magnin's, where she charged $1,000 in cashmere sweaters. "They had a sale. I had never owned a cashmere sweater," she said later, vaguely. "I can't remember what all I bought. Maybe I bought the same one in every color … All I can remember is that I would've paid $1,000 for ten minutes of relief—and by then, the only time I felt halfway normal was when I was either eating or signing charges. Those things I could do alone, and they made me feel like everything would still be okay."

  But shopping was an emotional high of limited duration. By the time she got home, she was tired, depressed, frightened and enraged again. She threw the bags into corners, where, according to friends, they still lay, years later. "It was amazing," recalls Candy Westbrook. "She had all these wonderful clothes all over the house with the price tags still on them."

  Compounding Betty's miseries, according to her diary, mutual friends of hers and Dan's were finally being forced to choose. And most chose Dan and Linda over her. Among the most painful occasions of 1988 was Brian Forbes's fortieth birthday party. By then, Gail Forbes had decided that, if Betty couldn't move on with life, she would. And so, according to Betty, Gail told her that she would not be invited to Brian's birthday party because she would make other guests, many of them friends of Dan and Linda, "uncomfortable."

  Betty didn't say much about it in her diary, beyond a one-sentence notation that "I'm sick of solitary confinement, all alone."

  But years later, from jail, she still remembered that event vividly. "I'd even bought Brian a birthday present ... I got him a $60 massage at a place in La Jolla, because he loved massages …" But, as a consolation prize, she added bitterly, the Forbeses later invited her to a private family spaghetti dinner with their children. "I was so insulted and hurt." Even so, she still went.

  It was fast becoming a social trend: Betty Broderick was no longer invited to the main events, only the kitchen dinners. She was too much of an awkwardness for her friends to accommodate. Just a month earlier, during the Christmas season, that fact had been pounded home to her even harder when Lynn and Mickey McGuire, a legal couple who had been friends of hers and Dan's for years, staged a combination Christmas open-house party to celebrate their palatial new home in Rancho Santa Fe.

  "Lynn is my friend. But Mickey pulled rank, and so she called me, very upset, to say that Mickey had absolutely forbidden her from inviting me to their party because he had invited Dan and Linda ... So Lynn told me I couldn't come." As it turned out, she added, "Dan and Linda didn't even come, they had too many other party invitations that night. It wasn't even important to them. But it was important to me ... I just felt so bad about myself, I was getting so heavy, I was just such a mess. I needed people not to throw me away. But they did."

  In the same month that his ex-wife was fantasizing about her forthcoming Polynesian escape and dreaming of rejuvenation, while simultaneously wishing into her diaries that she could kill him, Dan only pressed harder. At the same time she was about to strip herself of legal representation by firing her fourth divorce lawyer, Dan Broderick—who was now chairman of the bar association's Judicial Evaluations Committee which rates candidates for judgeships—hit her with yet another contempt motion—this one for eight offenses, including her Hawaiian postcard and her unauthorized deposit of Topsy and Muffin in his living room. He also asked the court to throw her back in jail to serve out the remainder of her suspended nineteen-day jail sentence from June. A hearing was set for February 24.

  "It sounds cold," agreed Dan's friend Sharon Blanchet, "but what else was he supposed to do? A restraining order is a restraining order, and you can't make exceptions, just because it's the kids' dogs, or whatever. Otherwise, the whole purpose of the order is lost."

  Bon voyage, Betty.

  She did not enjoy herself in Tahiti. Pictures from that trip show a large, pale woman, wrapped in a pink and white floral Tahitian pareu, or sarong, sitting at a hotel restaurant table, surrounded by happy tourists. She wore the uncertain, dazed smile of a woman who didn't know where she was.

  It was another nightmare trip, she said later, even worse than Hawaii had been. "I didn't want to be a single woman wandering around the world …"

  And she returned from Tahiti to the same unhappy world she had left. No one met her at the airport, she noted in her diary, and her mailbox was stuffed with more legal papers: Ruth Roth's suit against her was proceeding; so was the suit by Scott's, over the boys' clothing; and there was another OSC notice. Her house was also a complete wreck from teenage parties held there while she was gone. A fire extinguisher had been squirted over her carpets and couches, ruining them. Lee's friends, she guessed sourly. By now, it was increasingly clear to everyone that Lee Broderick, then a tall, too-thin, pretty girl of seventeen, was bound for the wild side of life, at least for a while.

  The two Broderick daughters were always very different, even from childhood.

  Kim, then eighteen, was the peacemaker, the pleaser. Like her mother, she preferred evasion and conciliation to confrontation. She was the one who obeyed the rules and studied hard, at least in grade school. After the separation and divorce, she—alone among the Broderick children—quickly adapted to Dan's household rules. For a time, she was the Little Mother—and she liked it. It didn't stop her, however, from crying to Betty about what a cheap, mean man her dad was, when it suited her purposes. She never meant a word of it, of course—she was only a young girl playing both sides.

  Lee, by contrast, was the rebel, defiant and stubborn. In that sense, she obviously took after her mother, too—at least in her mom's later, go-to-hell incarnation. The two daughters were flip sides of the Betty coin.

  "Fuck you," Lee would scream at Dan, when he nagged her about grades, hours, and life-style. When he hectored her too much, she simply went over to Betty's house for the night, or the weekend. Once, after the divorce, she threw a glass at Dan's car. To hell with his rules, his controls. And Mom was, of course, always happy to receive her, partly so she could use it against Dad the next day.

  But, eventually, even Betty, who wouldn't have been able to distinguish a line of cocaine from spilt salt in those days, began to suspect that something was wrong. Too many young people were coming and going at all hours of the night. And they all were laughing too loudly. Their eyes were too bright.

  In La Jolla, as in every affluent American community riddled with adult neuroses and pampered, neglected children, drug abuse is of course a common youth problem. The only difference between Lee Broderick and her teenaged La Jolla friends was that she had perhaps a better excuse than most to challenge convention: None of their fathers were having their mothers jailed; none of their mothers were
racing around town rattling on about cunts, fuckfaces, and the poverty of $16,000 a month.

  It would be a few more months, however, before Lee became such a problem that both Dan and Betty Broderick were obliged to suspend their own wants and needs long enough to deal, however temporarily, with hers.

  Betty, meantime, had begun to attend meetings of Al-Anon, a recovery group for codependents of alcoholics and addicts. She went, she said later, in order to better understand the addictions not only of Lee but also of Dan. But she had thought Al-Anon was mainly a gathering for wronged wives. Once she learned that Al-Anon is less interested in addicts than in the flawed personalities who choose to live with them, she didn't hang around long. It is just another sad "What If" of this tale that Betty was never able to forget the sins of Dan and Linda long enough to concentrate on her own self-destructive reaction to them.

  Tricia Smith, meanwhile, was getting nowhere with the divorce case. In January, 1988, she wrote Barry, again demanding financial records that she had been seeking for nearly a year. "I am writing this letter to make one last, final demand for the discovery which has still not been forwarded to me in this matter," she wrote. "Although I have been extremely patient, you and your client seem to be attempting to avoid supplying me with the material requested." She concluded by threatening to seek legal sanctions if she did not receive the materials within thirty days.

  Included in the list of items she sought were all of Dan's tax returns through May '87; copies of all checks he had paid on various "partnerships" he had entered into—particularly with his brother Larry—and for which he would later seek Epstein credits; all data on his pension plan, loans, and contributions from 1984 to the present time; lists of all cases Dan had begun from the date of the 1985 separation to the present; plus much more. Tricia Smith was ready to go to war.

  But Betty couldn't—or wouldn't—wait any longer. By the end of January, she was driven—either by financial fear or fear of success—to self-destruct once more. First, against Smith's best advice, she fired an appraiser who was scheduled to evaluate Dan's law practice for the divorce trial. He cost too much, and Dan would doctor his books to fool him anyway, she reasoned.