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

by Bella Stumbo

  And, certainly the teenagers at La Jolla High School feel their youth—and many of them do drugs in celebration. Lee Broderick was among them. But one day at lunch hour she got caught by campus security officers, snorting coke in a car with some of her buddies. The school called Dan to tell him that she would probably be suspended for at least three days, and that a parental counseling session was in order. He agreed to be present at eleven the next day. But that night, Lee ran away. Three days later, she was still missing.

  Betty reported her disappearance to the police.

  Dan didn't. He was fed up.

  He heard of Lee's whereabouts for the next six months, only through Kim—she was living with other teenagers in a beach community south of La Jolla. Dan did nothing to track her down. "I did not try to contact her during that period," he testified later in the divorce trial, because, he said, his younger daughter knew his rules. Furthermore, this incident was only the latest among many, he said. Lee had run away from home several times before. She disobeyed his curfews. He had warned her repeatedly, he said, that "this is not appropriate behavior ... So I ultimately told Lee, shortly before she left permanently, that 'You cannot do this again and run away any more. If you have a problem, come home and let's discuss it, but don't stay out all night.' At that time she was just sixteen years old. But Lee does what she wants."

  And so, for the next six months, Lee Broderick was a child without a home. Betty talked to her off and on, but Lee wouldn't return to either parent. She had said sayonara to the madness of family life.

  Kim, meantime, wrecked her car that spring, without injury. She also became pregnant by the construction worker Betty so disapproved of.

  That weekend, Betty went on a Presbyterian church retreat. She returned neither calmed nor focused.

  "Tax man says I owe $38,500!" she wrote in her diaries on April 14. In hindsight, it was just another of Betty's bad decisions that, in her attempt to gain independence, she had demanded responsibility for her finances—but then she hadn't taken responsibility. The IRS commanded her attention no more than the San Diego courts did. Taxes were lower on her list of monthly priorities than her bill to the local florist. She neither budgeted for, nor paid for, them.

  "Dan in Mexico with cunt," she wrote the next day, with growing hate. "Left only $40 for Kim. Lee missing; boys here."

  Then Lee surfaced again, with a bang. She crashed her car, and it was finally clear even to Betty that her daughter needed professional help. She persuaded Lee to check into the McDonald's Center, where La Jollans with drug problems usually go if they can't get a bed at Betty Ford.

  Betty was torn between shame and concern, between fear of what people would think, fear for Lee, and her own refusal to believe her child could be a drug addict. Lee, meantime, protested that it was just a one-time thing, that she wasn't hooked on anything. But wiser heads at the drug recovery home were telling Betty Broderick that Lee needed treatment. And so Betty signed her daughter in for what was supposed to be a month-long recovery program.

  "It was the most horrible thing I've ever had to do," she says. "I didn't know what to do! There I was, all alone, trying to make this life decision, and I didn't even know where Dan was! It was definitely one of the high water points of my life. I was shaking, I was so nervous—I was in worse shape than Lee was."

  At the same time, her mind had already whirled ahead to consider the potential benefits of this family crisis. Maybe this would bring Dan back home. "I thought that if he attended the family sessions, then maybe, finally, he would be able to identify a little bit with his own drinking problems," she admitted years later from jail. "I thought maybe it wasn't too late, after all, to save our family—that maybe Lee's problems had some higher purpose."

  But Lee stayed at McDonald's only three days before she walked out and called her mother from a nearby pay phone to come rescue her.

  "She told me that she wasn't one of them; she said she was in there with all these hard-core addicts and alcoholics, and that it was a ridiculous waste of time and money, that she didn't belong there. She told me she wasn't a drug addict. And," says Betty with a rueful sigh, "I believed her." So she picked Lee up in the parking lot of a shopping center and took her home, where Betty's friends, Gail Forbes and Lynn McGuire, tried to help her design a home treatment program for Lee. It was hardly enough to see Lee through.

  But, in those days, Betty didn't have the time or self-control to focus on one young girl's unhappiness. She was too busy trying to survive herself.

  Nothing changed. By now, Thomas Murphy, then presiding judge of family courts, was beginning to wonder why the Broderick matter was still cluttering his court calendar. He ordered a series of new settlement conferences to get the case moving. He also introduced a new expert into the mix. Clinical psychologist Dr. William Dess was assigned, not to interview either the children or the parents, but simply to review all the existing mental health reports for purposes of making a custody recommendation to the court.

  The conferences went no place, of course. As usual, Dan blamed Betty, Betty blamed Dan. After five tries—with one or both Brodericks failing to appear—the sessions were dropped. But Dr. Dess would remain in the picture for many months to come.

  Meantime, Betty had yet another contempt hearing on May 4. She wondered if she would be jailed this time, or fined again, or both.

  She was fined—partly because Dan had changed his mind about wanting to have her jailed. Instead, because Lee was in trouble, he appealed to Judge Joseph at the last minute not to jail the mother of his child in crisis. This annoyed Joseph in the extreme. He lectured Dan for misusing the court process. "He told Dan, 'Don't you ever come back here again unless you want her jailed.' And I never forgot it," Betty said later. "I knew if Dan ever filed another contempt, I was going to jail again for sure, because Joseph was so pissed that day."

  Even so, angry or not, Joseph complied with Dan's wishes. Instead of jail, he fined Betty another $1,000, atop her existing $8,000 fine. He also agreed with Dan that Betty should pay another $16,000 in Dan's attorney fees to Gerald Barry, at a rate of $1,000 per month. However, Joseph decreed, her monthly deductions should not exceed $2,000. Once she had satisfied her prior $8,000 fine, then the full $2,000 monthly deduction could be directed toward payment of Barry's fees. In other words, Dan could work it out however he liked, at a rate of $2,000 per month, until $24,000 had been extracted from his unruly ex-wife.

  Later that same day, a dazed and enraged Betty Broderick disgraced herself further at her children's school. For reasons that she can no longer remember, she had gone to Francis Parker and wound up in the office of Principal Dave Glassey, where she lost all control. Whatever business she had was forgotten as she exploded into tears and furious rhetoric, studded with her by now commonplace crudities. She told Glassey and an assistant what a rotten bastard Dan Broderick was, what an unfit father, what an immoral human being, what an alcoholic, abusive asshole he really was. She told them all about "the cunt" too.

  It must have been some scene—big, mad Betty in her power pumps, towering over two circumspect administrators, raving. She finished by giving Glassey a copy of her "book," and then telephoned Dan to call him more names in front of the principal and the assistant. Glassey, who appears on paper to be a very prim, proper man, would later tell investigators that he had finally been obliged to reprimand Mrs. Broderick for her language. Francis Parker is even more image-conscious than Dan and Betty Broderick were.

  A few weeks later, Dan mailed Betty his latest divorce settlement proposal. This time, he offered to give her $9,000 per month for one year, reduced to $5,000 per month thereafter, continuing for seven years (or less, if she remarried). That came out to a total package of $528,000 for eight years (or, less than half of his annual earnings at the date of separation in 1985). He offered nothing as her share of their community property. Instead, his proposal suggested that he had lost so much money on their various investments that she actually owed him hund
reds of thousands of dollars in Epstein credits for her share of the community debts that he had paid since their separation—more than enough wipe out her interest in his law practice. All that remained negotiable, in his view, was her half of his pension plan, which might come to $250,000 or so, but that was yet to be calculated.

  "Bullshit," Betty wrote in the margins of his proposal. End of discussion. She would see him in court. The Broderick divorce trial was now scheduled for July.

  Meantime, in another small victory for Betty, Dan's appeal of her $16,000 in temporary support was denied.

  She continued to lament her weight. She seemed to be gaining every day. But she wasn't even trying to diet anymore. Instead, she was now beginning to think about more cosmetic surgery. She could have a face-lift. She could have liposuction. Some doctor could suck the fat off her stomach, off her thighs, off her chin and neck. She could do that. Her friends all did it. She studied the brochures as she gazed out to sea and had another pastry from French Gourmet and wondered what Dan and Linda were doing tonight.

  She had been living alone in the del Cielo house for nearly three years now. She had put in a pool, and a pool house. She had spent thousands on its interior. But her fixation on the differences in life-style between herself and Dan only grew.

  "Tiny kitchen," she complained to her diary. "I need a family room!"

  Then, obsessively, fearfully, proudly, she recorded her latest shopping sprees, even the smaller ones: "I go to Price Club. Dump $200 for party stuff," she wrote on Memorial Day weekend. Also, "spent $450 at Saks."

  Only Lee could now interrupt her self-obsession. Her daughter had not reformed; even Betty Broderick, who barely even touched her dinner wine, could sense that.

  At the end of the month, she overheard Lee on the telephone, discussing "rocks" with someone. Betty didn't know what a rock was, "but I knew it was something bad from the sneaky way they were whispering."

  Betty didn't know what to do with her daughter, who didn't know what to do with her mother—and the father didn't want anything more to do with either one of them.

  By summer of 1988, in fact, Dan Broderick decided to punish his wayward daughter in the same way he punished her mother—through the pocketbook. He wrote Lee out of his will.

  "I was genuinely concerned … that if I died and she got a fourth of my estate, it would go up in smoke … that she would spend it on drugs or give it away or just squander it," he later explained in divorce court.

  But then it was Kim's hour. Dan and Betty's firstborn had grown up. It was her high-school graduation day.

  Betty looked through her closet for the most attractive thing to wear. By now, all her clothes were matronly three-piece outfits with flared skirts and jackets, mostly in shades of beige. Beige with white polka-dots. Beige with pink stripes. She had become an ad for the Mature Woman. How had it happened? she wondered. Only two years earlier, she had worn size eights and tens, and could still zip up a pair of thirty-two-inch jeans. Now she looked so bad. She smiled at herself in the mirror. She looked like Miss Piggy. She hated herself. She hated him.

  He would be there, at his daughter's graduation. It would be the first time in years that they had both attended a family function simultaneously. She was nervous. She wondered what she would say to him, what he would say to her. Their daughter, the little girl who had been conceived on their St. Thomas honeymoon 19 years ago, was graduating from high school. Surely, at least today of all days, he would talk to her. He would be nice. Surely.

  She dabbed at her plump, pale face and fluffed her yellow hair one more time. She felt hot. Her panty hose were too tight. She snatched up her purse, and her camera, and drove to the Francis Parker Middle and Upper School campus. To see Kim graduate. And to see Dan.

  And there, across the wide lawn, she saw Linda Kolkena. On Dan's arm. The pretty, slender, young Linda Kolkena. Flashing her wide, brilliant smile at Kim's teachers, at all the parents, at Betty's friends, mothers she had known for years. Acting as if she had every right to be there. Holding his hand.

  "Oh, I didn't care at all," chirps Betty today, perky as a mechanical songbird. "I just thought it was, you know, just so tacky of him to bring his girlfriend to our daughter's graduation—and she was dressed completely wrong, such gaudy jewelry for daytime …"

  Linda's friends later defended her decision to attend the graduation. "Linda knew it would be hard on Betty," said Sharon Blanchet. "But Linda and Kim were friends, and she thought she should go. Besides, Linda had every right to go. How long were she and Dan supposed to live their lives based on what would or wouldn't upset Betty?"

  "Mom never forgave me for inviting her," said Kim years later. A few weeks afterward, she remembers, Betty was supposed to visit her in her new apartment. Kim had cleaned and prepared lunch and was waiting. "And then she called me and said, I'm not coming. I just remembered how much I hate you!'"

  During graduation ceremonies, Betty sat on one side of the audience, Linda and Dan on the other. Afterward, Betty says, still bitter, Kim went first to them. But, typically, she attributes Kim's motives to—what else?—money: "They gave her a diamond bracelet, I gave her a leather appointments book—which side would you go to?"

  To this day, Betty cannot admit what she did next: she followed Dan and Linda around the reception, taking their pictures.

  "She told the kids that she was photographing Linda's jewels for the divorce trial," says Blanchet, shaking her head. "Well, Linda's 'jewels' amounted to a string of pearls and a ring Dan gave her. Anyway, she followed them around, and it was so obvious—she embarrassed everyone, it was horrible. Linda said she even followed them out onto the street as they were leaving."

  Betty furiously denies it. "I did no such thing," she insists. "I just took pictures of everyone. I love to take pictures." In fact, she says she "can't even remember if I took a picture of the cunt."

  She does remember vividly, however, overhearing the remarks of a teacher who walked up to Dan and Linda—and confused Linda with Betty.

  "It was a teacher I had once had to the house, in 1984, for a lovely dinner, along with his wife … and I hadn't seen him in years," says Betty, with typical, forced nonchalance. "And, of course, I wasn't as heavy back then—so he thought Linda was me. He called her Mrs. Broderick. People were always doing that because she had the same blond hair. Anyway, it bothered me, and so I made a point of walking over to him later to tell him, 'I'm Betty Broderick, not her.' The poor man, he was so embarrassed." But not Betty. She had long since left shame far behind.

  "Why should I have been embarrassed?" she asks, brightly. "Don't you see—there could never be more than one Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III in La Jolla. That was my name—that's why Linda Kolkena wanted me dead; you can't replace a woman who's still alive."

  But a few weeks later, contradicting all that she had said, Betty scrawled this angry note into her diary: "Kim keeps coming to my house to steal things. She is now looking to remove the cunt's pictures I took at graduation."

  Kim later came along and scribbled her own angry retort on the same page: "Bullshit, Mom. I have no interest in those pictures! I WANTED TO SEE MINE! WHY would I want pictures of her?"

  During the same month, two more divorce settlement conferences failed to materialize. By now, yet another judge, Federico Castro, was involved in the Broderick case, and, at Dan's request, he ordered Betty to seek vocational testing—routine in many divorces involving wives who have not worked outside the home for most of their adult lives. As the very term implies, this is a court-ordered effort to get the weary old mom out of the house and back into the job market, so that she can contribute to her own support. Betty was insulted at the very notion of taking "rinky-dink tests to tell me if I should go work at a department store selling cosmetics or into assembly line work. I'm a college-educated woman. Why can't they ever order women to 'professional testing'?" Moreover, she saw it as just another delaying tactic. Why had it taken Dan so many years to even bring it up?


  In her only satisfaction, Castro at least ordered Dan to pay for the counseling—and the choice of the counselor was left up to Betty. With the help of her HALT friends, she settled on a woman who was said to be sympathetic to middle-aged women in her position.

  Even so, she was so angry at the belated, insulting nature of his demand that she went to Dan's house the next day to complain about it. But, she says, he refused even to speak to her. He was working in his yard, squatting next to some plants, and, "He wouldn't look up or even answer me. I wanted to wring his neck!" Meantime, Linda was upstairs, "looking out a window, shouting, 'Dan, Dan, do you want me to call the police?'," said Betty, mimicking Linda's voice, just as Linda had once mimicked hers.

  In the end, the vocational testing plan was dropped because Barry withdrew the request abruptly without explanation. That infuriated Betty as much as the original court order itself. Once more, Dan was jerking her around at will, with the help of obedient judges. First, she had been ordered to take the tests. She had complied; she had spent time with a counselor. But now that Dan had changed his mind—either because he didn't want to pay the $5,000 fees or didn't like the choice of counselors— the court order was voided, withdrawn, erased. Why? How? "Why isn't he in contempt?" she demanded.

  What's more, she says, compounding the degradation, the judge once even asked her if she had a boyfriend. "And I'm like—why does that matter? Dan Broderick has been living with his secretary! Does anyone ask him if he has a girlfriend? And if I had said yes, [the judge] would have said, 'Well, go home and have him support you.'" Little by little, Betty Broderick, sheltered for so long, was learning about double standards in the real world.