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

by Bella Stumbo

  "My kitchen will be redone soon, that will make the TOTAL renovation of my house complete. I have spent the maximum amount of money possible to impress everyone with my importance and make sure there is nothing left that Bets can possibly get half of. Ha! Ha!

  "I have some really sickening news to share! After fucking her since early '83, I've asked Linda to marry me!! (If I was Al Kinzler I'd be insulted.) She loves me just as I am—rich and foolish—and won't try to change me …"

  One thing you can say about Betty—she left a helluva paper trail.

  Dan's father was not amused. In a formal, typed return letter to his son that month, he congratulated Dan on his engagement. He thought Linda seemed "a classy girl and I hope makes for you a fine wife."

  Then he got straight to the matter of the "latest missive from Bets," which he had enclosed:

  "Aside from the abominable language, this is overladen with venom and vitriol," he wrote. "I did not show it to your Mother ... I send it along to you only because it may possibly be of use to you in your legal problems with Bets. Her obscene ranting and raving leads me to believe she is truly a demented psychopath; and very probably should be committed. Were I you, I would be concerned for my own and Linda's safety." The elder Broderick urged his son to "take whatever action is appropriate" to protect himself.

  He signed off with, "All best wishes. Sincerely," then the one handwritten word: Dad.

  That fall, Kim began college at the University of Arizona—yet another disappointment to Betty: her daughter had neither the grades nor the interest to enter a more prestigious school.

  After a brief return to La Jolla High School, Lee, meantime, had dropped out for good, in favor of correspondence courses. Dan later accused Betty of "paying other children" to do Lee's homework for her. Lee also found a boyfriend, a John Travolta look-alike and would-be model, moved in with him, and they both went to work at a steak house in the Village. In addition, she accumulated so many speeding and traffic tickets that she lost her driver's license. The Broderick sons continued at Francis Parker, not Bishops. It was now their fourth school season without their mother.

  But, interestingly, according to her diaries, Dan had apparently made an overture to return the boys to Betty. "Fucking asshole says boys can live here now! Three weeks after Bishops started! No money for clothes or vacations …" she wrote on September 26. She naturally rejected the whole notion, since nothing had changed. No divorce settlement, no kids. She would never bend. No matter how much it hurt. And it hurt. It was destroying her, in fact. She was a mother without children, a wife without a husband, a woman without a life. But it had been going on so long now that some days she barely noticed how narrow, how obsessed, and how empty she had become. Now she was consumed totally by notions of her "fair share," of the "bargain" Dan had broken, of his refusal to "settle" with her. Her threats to kill him increased, too. But nobody paid much attention. It was just Betty's flamboyant way of talking.

  But, in fact, Dan was still trying to reach an out-of-court settlement—on his terms. In late September he sent her yet another proposed property settlement plan. (He was still working on the alimony issue, he advised; and he did not mention the custody issue.) This one was a five-page document. The bottom line was: he was now prepared to give her a cash settlement of $180,563.

  He calculated the value of his law practice at $1.4 million and the pension plan at another $478,163. Both these figures were based, not on current value, but on their value at the time of the separation, which Dan and the courts consistently set at February 28, 1985, the day he walked out. At that time, according to Dan's calculations, their community property also included about $57,000 more in various small partnerships. He meticulously added in the value of his bank accounts on the day he moved out, too: His personal checking account then held $260, his personal savings account another $46. The reason for these scanty accounts, he later explained at the divorce trial, was because he kept most of his money in his law firm account.

  The total of all these numbers came to $1.9 million. That, said Dan, was the value of their community property—at the date of separation.

  He therefore owed her, he estimated, exactly $967,716.

  But then, he began his subtractions for money she owed him.

  He claimed $948,581 in Epstein credits. This was the sum of all debts he had paid on their community investments prior to the 1985 separation, he told her. Her half of those Epstein debts, he said, was $474,291.

  In addition, he was charging her another $200,438 for cash advances since February 1985. This included the $140,438 down payment he had made on her house at Calle del Cielo, plus the extra money she had received on Coral Reef, plus another $20,000 paid to her and Hargreaves in 1986.

  Thus, between Epsteins and cash advances, her debt to him came to $674,729.

  If she accepted his proposed property division, he also calculated that she would owe him an additional $112,334, because that was the difference between the value of the assets she would receive and his.

  Which brought her total debt to him to $787,063.

  That left her with $180,563 cash due from him. He would keep his law practice, and his house. She would keep her house, the furniture already in her possession, the piano, and the Warner Springs ownership. He would keep their investments in Colorado condominiums, office buildings, and lots in the fashionable ski resort of Telluride, nearly all of them money-losers, according to Dan.

  Betty studied the document in astonishment.

  What kind of fool did he think she was? How did the pension plan shrink to $480,000 when it had been worth at least $650,000 two years earlier, by his own admission? What about the hundreds of thousands he had lent his brother Larry?

  Why was she obliged to pay half of the losses on his bad investments when she had no control over them? How was the piano now worth $12,000, when they had only paid $8,000 for it in the first place? And so on. A million other items swirled and clanged through her head. She even remembered the long-gone $37,000 Corvette. Where was her half of that? No. Wait. Now she remembered—Barry had called it a company car. Right.

  Where was he getting these values from?? What a lying, cheap sonofabitch. Still, Betty didn't pick up the telephone and start another search for an attorney. She didn't hire an appraiser. She didn't even call a Telluride realtor and ask what the going price was for lots in the area where she and Dan had invested. She didn't do anything.

  Even now, after all she had been through, Betty Broderick hadn't the foggiest notion that it was finally hardball time.

  Dan, meantime, was busy ingratiating himself with Dr. Dess. In a brief but strikingly personalized note to Dess that month, Dan thanked the doctor for his efforts, but warned him that his recent letter to Betty "will undoubtedly trigger a venomous attack on your integrity and competence." He also confided to Dess that many of Betty's "former friends" had called him over the last three years in frustration, wondering how to persuade her to seek psychotherapy. But, he concluded, "I firmly believe that there is no hope for her or for anyone whose life is dependent upon her for stability or the development of self-restraint."

  If William Dess had never met either Dan or Betty Broderick personally before forming his earlier opinions, he had now, on the eve of the divorce trial, met both of them through their respective letters. In their own ways, one so diplomatic, the other so destructive, both Brodericks had done everything conceivable to color his final judgment.

  Throughout the fall, Betty hurtled heedlessly onward. She complained to her diaries of back pains, stress, insomnia. The boys were with her most weekends, including Halloween.

  Then, at the end of October, Dan wrote Betty a polite two-paragraph letter, asking if she wanted to share the children with him over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. This was not the same man who had just written William Dess, basically calling his ex-wife hopelessly unstable, if not nuts, and worrying about her damaging impact on his children. This time, he even gave her two
full weeks to reply.

  But she didn't even open the letter. It was the Notre Dame weekend again. She knew he was going. Taking the cunt. Now his fiancee. Soon to be his wife. He was looking for a free baby-sitter again. Either that, or Dan was nearly as emotionally inconsistent as Betty. She returned the letter to his office with "WIFE-BEATER" slashed across it in big, embarrassing letters.

  It annoyed Dan Broderick in the extreme. As soon as he got it, he dictated a letter to Dr. Gerald Nelson, whom Betty intended to call into court in her behalf on the custody matter, to say that he had "reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is just no way I can voluntarily surrender custody of my sons to my ex-wife. I honestly don't believe she is emotionally capable of taking care of them in her present mental state."

  Dan had met with Nelson a few weeks earlier to discuss the custody situation. He had not been impressed—mainly because, as he would later say in divorce court, Nelson immediately told him to give Betty however much money she wanted, in order to promptly resolve the custody dispute, which was only hurting the children.

  "Basically he [was] saying if she gets everything you have, then maybe, maybe, she will be able to bury it and be with the boys," Dan said. "And I went back and thought a lot about that, and I didn't think that opinion was worth the air he used to give it to me …"

  A few days afterward, he wrote Nelson another letter thanking him for his efforts to solve "this intractable problem," but saying, in effect, no thanks, he would see Nelson in court. No way would he relinquish custody of the boys to Betty. He cited her "wife-beater" comment to Nelson as one of the latest reasons why. "Aside from the fact that I never, in all the years I was married to her, laid a hand on her in anger, I view that method of communication as bizarre to say the least."

  In retrospect, it was perhaps almost inevitable that Betty Broderick would eventually kill in the month of November. It had become her most nightmarish month, as a glimpse at both her household calendar of 1988 and her diaries would later show. Always a holiday-oriented person, so occasion-minded that she never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, she had measured out her life in sentimental dates. But now, with chilling care, she was remembering new anniversaries in her diaries, circling them with big black slashes on her calendars.

  Especially in November. November 1, she wrote in her 1988 diary, was the second anniversary of her first jailing after she had gone to protest the minus $1,300 check. November 7 was now not only her birthday "but the fifth anniversary of slitting of wrists." His birthday, on November 22, was now "fifth anniversary of clothes burning."

  Even Christmas was no longer Christmas, the time of her once glorious parties, filled with laughter and fun and accolades from all. Instead, in Betty Broderick's mind, it would forevermore be "the real date of our separation, the first time he went public with Linda the Cunt Kolkena in front of my young children on that ski trip."

  It was just one more layer of Betty Broderick's personality that had been stripped away and deadened by this interminable scorched-earth divorce war. But it was a loss that remained in the interior of her mind, invisible to everyone but her. Betty kept a lot of herself hidden in those last months.

  Now her focus had turned to Kim, who was being nickle-and-dimed to death, in Betty's view, by her stingy father. It began when Dan put Kim on a budget at college. It was time she learned some financial responsibility, he said.

  Kim wailed to Betty. Dad wasn't giving her enough. She was living like a bum. She didn't have enough clothes. She had no travel money. Once she even told Betty that she had no food. Dan Broderick was whistling in the wind if he thought he was going to teach a child of his and Betty's financial discretion overnight. But, typically, he was stubbornly determined.

  Matters came to a head when Kim ran up a $400 phone bill one month. Dan refused to pay it—"Get acquainted with the U.S. Postal Service," he told her. And so her phone was disconnected. She promptly ran crying to her mother, who immediately paid the bill, cursing Dan Broderick to hell as she did.

  The result of Betty's habitual rush to the rescue was of course predictable: Kim's phone bill was just as large the next month. And, again, Betty paid. She was no more responsible than Kim was, and, years later from jail, she even admitted it.

  "I was always spending money I didn't have. I went into more and more debt on my credit cards, etc., because I paid Kim's phone bills. But I just couldn't cut her off. I wanted her college experience to be comfortable and fun. Dan and I had the best undergraduate educations our parents could afford, so why shouldn't our kids, too? I felt so bad that Kim didn't have a car that I even bought that for her, too—which, of course, she crashes before the first payment was even due …"

  Betty was also driven by the same strangling old resentments of Dan's life-style. Every dollar her children didn't get, Linda Kolkena did. It infuriated her that while Dan was doling out $300 or $400 at a time to his daughter, he was spending a fortune on himself and Linda. His home remodeling had cost at least $300,000. His sports cars and wardrobe were lavish to the point of ostentation. And now Linda Kolkena was wearing designer labels, too.

  When Kim came home for Thanksgiving break that fall, Betty took her on a shopping spree to San Francisco. "I bought her shit from one end of the town to the other, all on credit cards, just so she would feel good. So she wouldn't feel deprived because her parents were divorced. She went back to school with suitcases full of ski jackets and all kinds of gorgeous stuff ... we had fun …"

  Later, in jail, prior to her first trial, Betty Broderick only sounded bewildered at the news that Kim had joined the prosecution camp and was calling her mother, among other things, a spendthrift who made Kim feel guilty by spending money on her that Kim knew Betty didn't have.

  "The little bitch! Now she says that. She was happy enough to get all those beautiful clothes and my money at the time. Besides," added Betty, suddenly sounding drained, "I thought I was doing her a favor. I was turning myself inside out, getting further into debt, thinking I was doing it for her good. Now she's going to punish me for it?"

  Indeed she was.

  On November 14, her diaries reflected more of her escalating miseries and fears:

  "storm electricity out

  "court at 8:30 A.M.

  "HARASSMENT TRAUMA [huge letters, half the page]

  "skin a mess 10 lbs. in a week nails bitten to blood

  "no sleep anxiety depression."

  A few days later, she resentfully wrote that not only were Dan and Linda turning her into their baby-sitter, but all her old friends were, too. For the first time, this woman who once thrived on the sounds of children laughing and playing around her house was furious that two of Danny and Rhett's friends were there: "Matt Currie here (parents had party). Evan here (parents had funeral). Betty is kids dumping ground! Shit!" Her handwriting slanted wildly across the pages, as tilted as her thinking.

  On Thanksgiving Day, she cooked a meal, according to another bleak little diary notation:

  "Thanksgiving! gold ware. new china. Candles. crystal, turkey mashed gravy stuffing broccoli corn yams rolls and butter champagne. Nightmare!" The day after Thanksgiving, she was obsessed with her health: "Comatose time. Severe anxiety. Back out. Down left leg severe pain. Blurry vision day and night. Insomnia (black circles). Headache. Skin breakout. Severe depression and fatigue. Major anxiety over total situation."

  That day, too, she noted that she had called the Battered Women Services Hotline, the Women's Legal Center, and a local women's resource center. But apparently none of them could help, assuming they could even understand what this exploding woman was trying to tell them. By the end of the month, some of her diary entries were almost illegible.

  And then it was December again, another Christmas without a family. She was fighting with Lee again.

  "Lee calls me a 'fucking bitch' after I spent $1,000 on skis!" she wrote angrily on December 3 in her diary. On December 12, Kim had an appendicitis attack. Dan flew over to see her. Betty
blamed it on the stress he had caused Kim over money.

  That same day, she wrote that she had missed her Investment Club meeting. "Too depressed." The next day, she skipped the St. Germain Silver Tea. "Too depressed."

  Still, she proceeded as if there was no tomorrow. The only thing she had done in her own best interests all year was make several visits to Dr. Gerald Nelson—sixteen sessions, according to her records. She was at least complying with the court-ordered "program of therapy" as a condition of any custody change.

  And, finally, the Broderick divorce trial was about to begin. Four years after Dan left her, Betty Broderick was at last going to get her day in court. The property settlement would be adjudicated; her monthly support would no longer be court-designated as merely temporary; and she fully expected to regain custody of her three minor children.

  But then, in mid-December, she got word that yet another postponement was in the works. According to Betty, she stormed into Judge Murphy's office "in my sweats, and I told him he would have to arrest me on the spot, that I wasn't leaving until I got a trial date. Dan Broderick was going to marry Linda Kolkena before he had even settled with me, and after that, it would have become impossibly confusing. Who owned the pension plan, who owned what? Me or her? She would've gotten more from being married to him a week than I got after sixteen years."

  Barry was there that day, she says. And both he and Murphy tried to persuade her to reconsider, to wait until she got an attorney.

  But Betty didn't want an attorney. She had decided months ago to represent herself in her final legal battle with Dan Broderick. She would appear "in propria persona," or "pro se," as it is known in legalese, when one party decides to go to court without an attorney. Her reasoning was simple: nobody knew what a sneaky cheat Dan Broderick was better than she did. She could expose him herself. "And there was so much history to this case. No attorney could've caught up with it. Besides it would've just cost me another small fortune in attorney fees."