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

by Bella Stumbo

  It had taken him six years. But, finally, Linda Kolkena's years of patience had paid off. She would be the new Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III.

  Betty was out of town that week. She had taken the boys to British Columbia on what was supposed to be a fishing trip of two or three weeks. For the first time since 1985, her need for a vacation with her children had outweighed her stubborn refusal to do it unless Dan gave her extra money. This time, she gave up and agreed to pay for it out of her monthly support. So Dan let them go.

  But within a week, she cut the trip short and returned home. "NO MONEY," she wrote in her diary, in large, slashing letters. On the same page, in small, tidy script, she also noted, "Dan announces he's getting married. Asshole!" That was all.

  But she then called Dan's partner, Bob Vaage, and told him, in reference to the society announcement about Dan's proposal to Linda on bended knee, "By the time I get through with Dan Broderick, he'll be down on both knees!" Wacky Betty, at it again.

  "I did it to be funny," she said later, embarrassed. "I didn't think that Dan Broderick on the floor of a bar doing anything was newsworthy—that was his natural position when he was drunk."

  "Mom was real quiet when I told her that Dan had proposed to Linda," Kim recalled later. "I was real surprised. I thought she'd be mad enough to kill him then. But she really didn't show any reaction at all until she found out they were going to start a new family."

  For her own part, Kim hadn't been too happy about it herself. Her father had reneged on his promise to her that he "wouldn't marry anybody ... I guess I was just afraid, like Mom always said, that if he had a new family, he wouldn't love us as much anymore."

  Two weeks later, while Dan and Linda were in Hawaii with her children, Betty checked herself into the care of a La Jolla plastic surgeon for an $8,000 overhaul. She had her forehead lifted, her eyes lifted, and her stomach tucked. In particular, she told the doctor, she wanted him to erase all signs of her C-section scars.

  "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I went over there," recalls Candy Westbrook. "There was my friend, with staples still in her head, fat as a pig, and she'd just had her stomach tucked. I wanted to say, 'Betty, this is crazy. Why don't you just go on a DIET?' But I didn't have the heart. She was so completely nuts by then. Just nuts."

  "It was like everything else I tried," Betty said later. "It made me feel better for about an hour." Worse, she didn't look any better either.

  The same month the mother was getting herself redone, her oldest daughter, Kim, was getting an abortion. According to Betty, Lee stole several hundred dollars from Betty's bank card account to help her sister pay for it.

  Adding to Betty's pain, although Kim did finally confide to her mother that she was getting an abortion, she also said she preferred to take a girlfriend with her to the clinic, rather than Betty—but, Betty later discovered that the girlfriend had been Linda. "I went ballistics!" She says. But she never told Kim how she felt. Even today, Betty can't admit to the depth of her hurt about anything, not in any real way.

  "I went to Linda," Kim later explained, sadly, "because every doctor I knew hated Dad, and I thought, 'Oh, God, if I get maimed …' Linda named a good doctor and offered to drive me over. It wasn't that I liked her more than Mom … but she was closer to my age, and when you're getting an abortion, you just don't want to go through it with a parent!"

  But Betty got her revenge, Kim added bitterly. She used the abortion as another example of Dan's irresponsible parenting. "Mom told everybody about it. The whole world knew!"

  Betty denies telling more than one friend. Instead, she says, she counseled Kim on alternatives to abortion. "I was willing to raise the child ... it would have actually been great therapy for me. By then, I had no purpose in life at all. I would've loved a little baby."

  Compounding the deteriorating mother-daughter relations, Kim also came to Betty's house one evening and stole a batch of Betty's taped phone messages—which Betty herself had recently stolen from Dan's Jaguar, when Kim drove it over.

  "What would you do?" asked Betty later from jail, laughing. "There they were, in his glove compartment, all ready to go to his secretary for transcription, so he could use them against me. So of course I took them. Then Kim, the little bitch, came over, because she was so afraid Dan would be mad at her, and ransacked my house, and took them back to him.

  "It's scary how much she's like Dan," Betty says today of her oldest daughter. "She only thinks of herself, and she will say whatever her audience wants to hear. She's going to end up in a mental institution by the time she's forty if she doesn't learn some basic honesty." Mothers and daughters. If Betty hears, in her analysis of Kim, echoes of herself, or her views on her own mother, it doesn't show.

  Not much could break through Betty's personal preoccupations by the summer of 1988. But Lee's life-style was increasingly forcing its way in. Betty was positive that her daughter, still living mostly with friends, was now back into the drug scene. "Some of her friends were right out of Nightmare on Elm Street." She brooded, she worried about what to do, and, of course, she blamed Dan, who had washed his hands of the whole mess.

  She returned to her ongoing diary letter to him, and wrote: "Writing Lee out of your will was the most ridiculous, asinine, immature, vindictive thing I have ever heard of. As usual, you use money to CONTROL everyone. You're winning again. Will you be happy with her head on a plate or body on a slab at the morgue? Probably not even then, because she didn't jump to your commands."

  But Betty then actually pulled herself together long enough to take some constructive action. She hired private investigators to track down her daughter. They found her at a La Jolla street celebration in August and prodded her into a car where Betty was waiting. She talked her daughter into going to a drug hospital in nearby Encinitas. This one, unlike McDonald's, was a locked-down facility. Once in, Lee was there, in theory, for a month-long program.

  The hospital promptly called Dan for both money and a discussion of Lee's treatment, and he went to see his daughter for the first time since she ran away five months earlier. Lee's doctor recommended that she be sent later to a boarding school out of town, away from the influence of her La Jolla pals—an idea Dan supported. But Lee didn't want to go and asked her father if she could come live with him again instead.

  Dan agreed, he said later in divorce court—but with three conditions. "I said, 'Well … you can come and live with me, but, one, you will have to stay away from drugs; two, you will have to come in at a reasonable hour at night; three, you're going to have to be nice to your brothers and not abuse them verbally,' like she tends to do. I said, 'When you're ready to live with me, you understand those three conditions—let me know.'"

  This time, Betty was even more hopeful than before that Lee's hospitalization might bring Dan to his senses. "But," she says, "he wouldn't even come to the programs for parents. He was too busy."

  Even then, Betty could not accept that Linda had won. The former Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III would still have taken her husband back in a minute. "Well, maybe … but only for the sake of the children," she admitted snappishly from jail years later.

  In any case, ten days later, Lee persuaded Betty once again that she was not a true addict, and talked her mother into taking her home again.

  Chapter 24

  Down

  Lee went on her merry way, Betty continued her decline.

  She was isolating herself more and more. Sometimes, that summer and fall, she would "just stay in her bedroom all day and cry," according to her maid, Maria Montez. Other times, she would sit in a depressed slump and flip through hundreds of family pictures, which she kept in Rolodex files all over the house. She also had boxes of family memorabilia—including every card Dan ever sent her. They were always the same—large cards with preprinted messages for birthdays, Mother's Day, and anniversaries. His only personal touch, apart from buying the card itself, was to write "Dear Bets" at the top and "Love always, Dan" at the bottom.


  And then there were the boxes and boxes of her children's cards and school papers. "To Mommy, Happy Birthday, Love Kimmy," said one, written in the childish scrawl of maybe a sixth-grader. Among the most touching items in her collection was a Halloween essay Rhett had written the year before in third grade: "Every year on Halloween, my mom makes sugar cakes but the special kind are the ones with spiders on them they are not made out of sugar but out of chocolate fudge," the child wrote. "… This year I'm going to have fun fun fun. I'm going to invite [his friend] Evan to my mom's house or Evan is going to invite me to dinner ... If I go to my mom's house … me and my mom and Evan would all go trick-or-treating … I'll go to Mom's if Dad lets me go. It's a maybe … The end."

  When she tired of this sentimental journey, she would add to her burgeoning library of clippings from magazines, newspapers, and books. The themes were lately always related to women as victims and survivors.

  The loneliness was crippling.

  Finally, she reached out and took a stranger into her house. Her new friend was Lucy Peredun, another displaced divorcee with a small daughter. She lived in Betty's pool house for six months. The arrangement was that Peredun would do light housework in exchange for free room and board—"but I think Betty mostly just needed a friend at that point," said Peredun, later a defense witness.

  At about the same time, Betty also met Dian Black, another divorce reform activist and paralegal who, in the months to come, would become a loyal friend. A pretty, vivacious woman in her late thirties and mother of two, Black had become an ardent advocate of self-education among women facing divorce after going through a long, ugly custody battle herself. When she heard about Betty, she called her. During the next year, Black spent many evenings listening to Betty's troubles over coffee. Sometimes, she could even drag her out to a movie. Other times, says Black, "She just wouldn't answer the phone for days."

  Sporadically, Betty also plunged into self-help efforts, most of them irrelevant to her problems. She took a graphology course that summer, for instance. She joined the Lifetime Health and Nutrition Center, at a cost of $436; then she discovered ‘Course in Miracles’, a Christian inspirational group which mattered enough to her that, even after she was in jail, she asked for special permission to keep the literature in her room.

  But none of it was enough to stop her suicidal free-fall.

  Next she began turning her anger on the very people in charge of her fate. Betty's reckless recourse to her yellow writing pad had started months earlier with her letters to Gerald Barry—but from July through September, she expanded her forum to include Dr. [William] Dess, and Judge Murphy himself. It was mind-boggling to behold. Her hateful calls to Dan's machine actually dropped off for several weeks because she was now more preoccupied with telling the "system" how fucked up she thought it was. She behaved like a drunk, without being one.

  She wrote long, rambling letters to the judge about Kim's abortion, about Lee's drug problems, and she complained violently about the Broderick divorce file—which had suddenly vanished a few months earlier. The judge thought it was due to some clerical blunder; Betty was convinced that it was just another element of a judicial conspiracy to suppress all evidence of what Dan had been doing to her behind closed doors all these years, The Good Ole Boy Network in action again. Lending credibility to her suspicions, the massive file was eventually recovered—but, coincidentally, not until a few weeks after the Broderick divorce trial was finally concluded in 1989.

  She also wrote to Barry again, blasting him for refusing to discuss the divorce case with her. To court-appointed psychologist Dr. Dess she complained that "we have wasted four months" in resolving her joint custody motion. Most of her letters were studded with references to cunts, sluts, assholes, fuckheads, and drunks. Not surprisingly, Dess's first report that fall endorsed the status quo: no visitation. Although he had never met Dan, Betty, or the children, Dess was persuaded from his review of the data supplied by Drs. Sparta, Roth, and others that Betty Broderick was bad for her children. And his opinion was decisive. It did not matter that, in interviews with the judge, all three minor Broderick children had said they wanted to live with their mother. Judge Murphy ruled against changing the custody arrangement, pending the final divorce trial in December.

  In another letter to Dess in September, Betty wrote:

  "I am still waiting for the statement of a SINGLE FACT that led you to your grandiose conclusion ... In your letter ... I fail to find a single name or fact that leads to your dramatic and totally erroneous conclusion. If I have to tell this story again, I'm going to vomit. How dare you submit such BULLSHIT to a court of law?"

  She listed eight reasons why Dan should not have custody. Her husband, among other things, was "a raging alcoholic" and "an abusive, obnoxious, coldhearted, detached father" hated by his children, whom he has "always scared to death by smashing, kicking, etc. when he doesn't get his way." In addition, he "has been openly fucking his office girl since 1983."

  From there, she went into an unbelievable seventeen handwritten pages, reiterating her entire story. She even told Dess about the rats and the dogs. The letter is exhausting to read; writing it must have taken her hours. But, by now, Betty's appetite for telling "her story" had become seemingly insatiable. Fury is awesome fuel.

  "[He] is a pathologically SICK person who is and has been systematically destroying my four previously happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids, and FOOLS LIKE YOU ARE ALLOWING IT," she told Dess. "There is not a single fact against me as a mother. I am madder than hell at lying, cheating, scumbag Broderick—I have every right to be and would be crazy if I weren't."

  Her handwriting got larger and larger as the pages continued. "AND I HAD NO LEGAL REPRESENTATION," she wrote in huge underscored letters on one page, "BECAUSE MR. BRODERICK WOULD NOT RELEASE MY FUNDS TO RETAIN COUNSEL."

  She then defined her own view of morality. "You don't need a law degree to know you're getting fucked—I am an intelligent, strong, ethical, terrific person and mother. I know what's right and wrong in this world, and I am willing to stand up for the RIGHT. I am proud of being an example to my children … Mr. Broderick did not become what he is because he was married to a whiny, weakling of a wife. He knew what I could do for him. He knew I was a better, stronger person than he. He picked the right girl to marry—but he picked the wrong girl to fuck!"

  She concluded her letter thusly:

  "Now I bet you proper legal assholes are totally shocked by my language. Why won't she just step in the gas chamber and shut her mouth like all the other women before her? BECAUSE IT'S WRONG. Betty Broderick."

  And those weren't her only indiscretions of the season.

  In August, she walked into Dan's house to pick up her children, and found a brief letter from Dan to his parents lying on a hallway stand. She opened and read it.

  It began as just another routine letter to "Dear Mom and Dad" from a son who dutifully reports home on a regular basis, even when he doesn't have much to say. He apologized for taking so long to write. His practice was going well. The kids were fine. He told them what a good time he and his sons had recently had in Hawaii. He reported on Danny's reptile collection—"[He] has several aquariums filled with various species of lizards and snakes." Kim was leaving for the University of Arizona in another week—"It's hard for me to believe I've got a baby daughter leaving for college." He reported on the progress of his home remodeling. The kitchen was a mess, but in three weeks the house would be done. He hoped they would come visit, since it had been four years.

  Then he got to the real point of his letter:

  "I have some exciting news to share with you," he wrote. "Perhaps you have already heard, as I have been so derelict in not writing sooner. I have asked Linda to marry me. I hope you'll both be happy for me and wish us well. I can understand that you may have mixed feelings about this because of her age, the fact that she is the educational equivalent of Al Kinzler [apparently a neighborhood character from his youth], an
d, well, she's Dutch, for God's sake, but she makes me happy, she loves me more than I've ever been loved before, and she loves me just the way I am and has no intention of trying to change me …"

  Betty couldn't leave it alone. "It wasn't even Dan's handwriting!" she says today, by way of explaining what would become another display of Betty Broderick mirth and wanton indiscretion. "It was Linda's handwriting. He had dictated a letter to his own parents!"

  She went home and parodied Dan's letter—and mailed it to the senior Brodericks in Pittsburgh, these people she had known for so many years, but who had stopped speaking to her when their son did.

  "Letter found in Linda's handwriting!" she explained at the top of the page. "Let ME rewrite this letter for Dan."

  Then:

  "Dear Mom and Dad,

  "I'm sorry it's been so long since my last letter. The kids are a mess, we just got back from a very expensive week in Hawaii. They had a horrible time because they really HATE the office cunt I always force them to be with. The boys are miserable living in the slums in a house that says 'do not touch' for children. They have no friends, no activities, and watch TV all day. Kim leaves for Arizona next week. It's a shame with her great looks and brains she's wasting herself there. With all the upset of the divorce her previously straight A's were down to D, F, and incomplete by graduation. I'm happy though. Arizona is real cheap. (Oh, and I forgot! Linda took Kim to get an abortion last week.) It's not one bit hard to believe I have a daughter going to college. Most guys forty-four do—but I HATE being that old. (Notice no mention of Lee in original. She had failed out of the public school I foolishly allowed her to attend, is using drugs, and is wanted by the police for grand theft. I guess she's ticked off I threw her out of the house, threw all of her belongings in the trash, and vindictively 'wrote her out of my will.' Teenagers!)