by Bella Stumbo
But now she was past her prime, she told the court. At this stage of her life, she could hardly hope ever to match her husband's earning power. She would in fact be lucky to find profitable employment anywhere.
"Everybody wants a kitten, and no one wants a cat," she remarked.
The men chuckled.
Court was recessed until January 30, when Judge Howatt would render his decision in the Broderick matter.
Chapter 26
What Would a Jury Say?
Throughout January, she seemed almost euphoric. Everywhere she went, she told her friends how well she had performed in court, how even Gerald Barry had praised her skills. She also showed everyone a lengthy article about the trial in the Reader, which openly suggested that the sealed courtroom was the improper result of Dan Broderick's influence in the legal community. At long last her story had made it into the press—and the press was on her side. The Reader had not blamed her at all for her part in keeping the hearing closed. Beneath a photo of Betty in the corridor, the story also pointed out that Dan had "managed to avoid being photographed" by coming and going each day through a rear door used by judges, "despite a county policy that allows such maneuvers only when there's a security problem or the possibility of violent altercations." Reporters Krueger and DeWyze also quoted Dan's remark to them in their interview a year before: The divorce trial, Dan had said, "is going to resolve some community property issues, but it's not going to end this thing. It's not going to end until one of us is gone."
It was a remark Betty studied with interest. Years later, she would say that she took it "as a direct threat—proof that I had been right all along: he was trying to kill me." It was perhaps at that moment that Betty's mind, already so paranoid and ravaged, turned from flip and furious to true thoughts of death. His or hers? Who knows? But, certainly, some new die was cast.
At the time, she was too buoyant that month to reflect anything beyond her own certainty of impending victory. She was going to win. She knew it. Her reputation would be restored, her worries over money removed. She would have $25,000 a month, plus all three children, plus a $1 million nest egg. Finally, the world would see that she had been right all along about Dan Broderick. She would be vindicated. No more Crazy Betty.
She felt so good she stopped writing in her diaries. She wrote no more hateful letters. She made no obscene phone calls. The divorce was over. She even took a job, not for the money but for the pleasure, at the La Jolla Pre-School Academy. Each day from seven A.M. to two P.M., Betty Broderick was once again surrounded by squealing, adoring babies. She began to think about a new diet. Some of her aches and pains vanished; for a few nights that month, she even managed to sleep straight through—no two A.M. anxiety attacks, no pacing about the house in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise. She began to remember what it felt like to be normal.
But what if she was wrong? The fear still flickered. She called her parents that month and begged them to come to San Diego to be in court with her for the verdict. She even offered to pay their airfare. "I just wanted my family there, to show the judge that I wasn't a solitary person, that I was part of a family that cared." But they wouldn't come. The aging Bisceglias hadn't been back to visit their daughter since 1986, when she left them sitting at the dinner table to drive her Suburban through Dan's front door and wound up in a mental hospital for three days.
"But then, a few days later, [her sister] Clare calls and invites them to her fortieth birthday party, a big bash in Beverly Hills, a lot of heavy Hollywood types—and, suddenly," she says bitterly, "they agreed to come to California."
The memory of Clare's birthday weekend still hurts her.
Because she was feeling new confidence in herself, she decided to go all out for the occasion. She got the boys for the weekend, took them to the barber, and assembled their best dress suits. She flew Kim in from Arizona. And she went on a major shopping spree with Lee. "And Lee got gorgeous—perfect black dress, $200 shoes, $100 earrings ... I was trying especially hard to puff her up because of all she'd been through." She then piled her perfectly groomed brood into a van and drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the Bisceglia clan was gathered.
It was a strained, unhappy weekend. Betty spent too much money trying to impress everyone. She still remembers a bill she paid in the hotel's star-studded Polo Lounge. "I took my turn and bought Sunday breakfast for everybody—strawberries and champagne for twenty people. It was horrendously expensive, but at the time, I still thought I was going to be fine—and all of it was a chance to try to get back in my family."
It didn't work. She begged her parents again to return to San Diego with her for court on Monday. But, again, they refused. "My mother wanted absolutely nothing to do with it, whether I won or I didn't."
She drove back to San Diego, hurt, angry, and filled with rising anxiety over the impending verdict. That night, too, she had an argument with Lee, who wanted to go out after ten with a shaggy-haired boy Betty didn't know. Betty told her that, if she left, she couldn't come back. Lee went, and didn't come back.
Court the next day was short but not sweet. Dan got nearly everything he asked for. Betty got nothing she wanted.
Howatt accepted all of Dan's numbers. He valued Dan's law practice at the date of separation; he agreed that Betty owed Dan nearly $750,000 in Epstein credits and cash advances; he accepted Dan's valuation of the pension fund and every other item of property, right down to the $12,000 piano.
Betty got half the pension fund—or around $240,000, which she couldn't touch until she was sixty-five without massive tax liabilities; she got the piano, the Warner Springs unit, and her house—all with their outstanding debts included.
When the final math was done, Dan owed her $33,606.02 in cash—but Howatt cut that by another $5,000, which was still due on the $16,000 that Judge Joseph had earlier ordered her to pay on Barry's legal fees.
Which brought her net cash award down to a grand total of $28,606.02—$1,000 less even than Barry had proposed. Dan got sole legal custody of the boys—but, for the first time since 1986, Betty was at least awarded formal visitation rights on alternating weekends and holidays, plus the full month of July. An earlier request she had made to keep them until Monday mornings, in the event that she was denied custody, so she could serve her traditional Sunday dinners, was denied. The return deadline was six P.M. Sunday.
Betty was awarded custody of Lee, however, plus $1,500 in monthly child support until Lee was eighteen—but only on condition that Lee remain "a full-time student in high school."
Howett also ordered Dan to take out a $1 million life insurance policy, payable to all four Broderick youngsters—but excluding Betty. In the event of his death, she got nothing. Nor did Betty get her $80,000 in back attorney fees; she was responsible for her own legal costs, said Howett.
The only item of consequence that Dan didn't win entirely was spousal support. Howett kept it at $16,000 each month. But even that was qualified, contingent upon "further order of the court, remarriage, or the death of either party." Further, the order noted, "It is apparent to the Court that Wife must ultimately take some responsibility for contributing to her own support …"
Lastly, Howett re-stated the one-hundred-yard stay-away restraining order, preventing either party from "attacking, harassing, molesting, or in any manner bothering one another."
She drove home with a screaming mind. Not $1 million. Not even half a million. $28,000. A joke, an insult, an outrage. And only one child? She gets Lee, the troublesome one, the one he doesn't want, but not her boys? How dare the judge let him pick and choose among his children that way? What did they think she was, a garbage dump for Dan Broderick's refuse, his cleaning lady? She was supposed to mop up the mess he made by leaving his family?
Dan had gotten every single thing he wanted. The verdict was no more than a literal reading of Gerald Barry's wish list. Except for spousal support.
Spousal support. She wanted to stop the car and vomit, just think
ing about that, her rage was so great. How could the cheap sonofabitch even suggest $9,000 a month, then $5,000, and then nothing? After all she had done to help him get where he was? All those years of having his babies, cooking his meals, hostessing his parties, taking his shirts to the laundry?
Yet she was supposed to be grateful for $16,000? Ha. And how long would that last? "Until further order of the court." Which meant "until Dan Broderick decides otherwise, until he goes in again and appeals it," her mind cried. And when would that be? Three months? Six? A year? Where was her security?
And what did it mean, "until remarriage"?
It meant that if she found someone to marry, Dan was completely off the hook. He was getting married within weeks—but if she did the same thing, she got absolutely nothing from her sixteen years of investment in Dan Broderick.
Unbelievable. She felt like gunning the motor until the car hit five hundred miles an hour and aiming it directly at his goddamn house again. There was no solution. The divorce was finally over, but nothing had changed. Four years it had gone on. Yet, today, she was still just as dependent on the bastard as she had ever been. She couldn't make any plans, she couldn't budget, she couldn't relax. All she could do now was worry about when the ax would fall again. And fall it would, she knew, the minute she displeased him.
And what about her reputation? She was still a mother denied her children. An unfit mother. Unfit. Unfit! Now everyone would know. She was disgraced again. She felt dizzy. He had cheated, he had lied, he had treated her savagely. She had done nothing but call him childish names.
Yet she was the loser, the victim—and the fool. She had trusted in a judge to see through it, to laugh at Dan's deflated property estimates, his alleged losses. He made millions, yet he sounded like he was practically broke. And the judge let him get away with it.
She burned to sue him, in front of a jury, not only for criminal fraud but also for damages. What about defamation of character, slander, intentional infliction of emotional distress, mental cruelty, loss of consortium—all the stuff Dan Broderick pleaded in his own malpractice cases to win millions for his clients. He made juries weep over how mean people had been to them.
What would a jury say? What would twelve ordinary citizens say, she wondered, if they heard what Dan had done to her? They would of course side with her, just as the Reader had, once those reporters had heard the full story. The idea embedded itself, dangerously, in her brain, where it still remained nine months later when she slipped into Dan's house on the morning of November 5, 1989, with her gun.
The first target of her fury was Lee. The next time she spoke to her youngest daughter, she told her to stay away, that "$1,500 isn't worth what you're putting me through. You're killing me."
So Lee moved back to Dan's—and one more time became her parents' Ping-Pong ball of first choice. But, evicted by her mother, she found there was no room for her, either, in her father's house. Instead, she lived for the next few weeks in Dan's small pool house out back, which had no toilet. Nor would he give her a key to his house, she later testified, for fear that Betty might get it. So "if nobody was home, I'd have to go down in the arroyo" behind the house to relieve herself.
Betty fell into a few weeks of almost eerie, purposeful calm, of the sort terminal patients sometimes display. For once, she didn't instantly run around town telling everyone how cheated she had been—she, in fact, initially even refused to tell several friends what she had been awarded in trial. Part of it was pride—she didn't want anyone to know how far she had fallen from the grandeur she had anticipated. But, by then, too, even Betty had finally begun to see that few of her La Jolla friends sympathized with an ex-wife who was getting $16,000 a month in support.
For the next month, she was seemingly in control of herself, friends say, and even cheerful. "It seemed like she was putting it behind her and getting on with her life," says her friend Dian Black. "She was angry about the settlement, especially the kids, but she didn't talk about it much. She was more fun than she'd ever been."
But, inside, Betty Broderick was hardly maintaining. Quietly, from the thin, the cluttered, private confines of her kitchen, she called the district attorney in January to ask if she could file criminal charges against Dan for cheating her through his deals with his brother. They told her no. "They said criminal charges only applied if it was a business partnership, but not to divorce court. Well, to me, marriage is a business partnership." But she accepted it.
Methodically, she shopped around for new attorneys to appeal the divorce settlement and begin new custody negotiations. This time, she quickly found and hired two locals without fuss or struggle: Herman Hauslein, to challenge the divorce settlement, and custody attorney Walter Maund, whose orders from her were explicit—Get the children back before the fall school begins.
To her surprise, after all the time and money just expended in divorce court, Dan didn't contest Maund's mission. Instead, he suddenly entertained the idea of negotiations, speaking through his associate, Kathy Cuffaro.
But Betty knew why: Dan had just announced his wedding date. He and Linda would be married on April 22—ten days after the twentieth anniversary of his marriage to Betty. Even the date festered in her mind. How could he remarry in April? Why didn't the sonofabitch complete the cruelty by marrying Linda on the exact same date, too? Either way, he dearly didn't want their kids. He never had. He was going to start a new family. He wanted to unload his old family on her. Betty the baby-sitter. Betty the solution. Betty the sap. Right.
She continued about her business. She joined a women's self-help group and became active in HALT again; she attended a ‘Course in Miracles’ seminars; and she continued working at the preschool—although by now she was seriously looking ahead, worrying about what "real career" she might pursue. Law? The stock market? Real estate? But photography had always been a special interest of hers, and so she called Michael Campbell, a La Jolla portrait and society photographer she had met at a function months earlier, to ask his advice. She ended up as his unpaid assistant "to see if I like this stuff, and if I was any good …"
She went to a wedding with him and a couple of local parties, acting as his Girl Friday. They eventually talked of going into business together. Nothing ever came of it, but Campbell's relevance to the Broderick story did not end there. As it so happened, he was also the photographer Linda had commissioned to do her wedding pictures. He had already done Linda's formal wedding portraits. To this day, it is unclear whether Betty contacted Campbell with that knowledge in mind—which she vehemently denies—or by sheer coincidence. Whatever the truth of the matter, Linda Kolkena was instantly convinced that Betty was plotting somehow to sabotage her wedding—and so, this time, it was Linda, not Betty, who did the wrong thing.
According to Campbell, Linda called him in a panic to say he shouldn't have Betty working for him, that Betty was crazy, that she had been both jailed and institutionalized, that she had run a car into Dan's door, etc.. Linda was worried that Betty would destroy her wedding pictures, she told Campbell. Or steal them. Or look at them. In her mind, it was a nightmare that this horrible woman could be anywhere so near to her magic hour.
Campbell didn't know what Linda was talking about. He hadn't heard any of the sordid details of the Broderick divorce because Betty never told him about it, he says. He did know, however, that Linda had insulted him personally. He was a professional. Nobody touched his pictures, much less an unpaid amateur like Betty. What was the matter with Linda Kolkena anyway? According to Linda's friends, later, Campbell told her that she was the one who sounded crazy, not Betty.
Even so, Betty was humiliated. "I lied to him—I told him I never ran that car through anybody's door. I just sort of pooh-poohed the whole thing. But, my God, can you imagine how I felt? That car thing was four or five years earlier. I was trying to get all that behind me. She was hounding me. Why didn't she leave me alone? I thought after she got the prize and married the sonofabitch, she'd leave me alone.
What was the point of her doing this now?"
There was no real mystery to it, of course. Linda Bernadette Kolkena was in so many respects just like Betty had been twenty years before. A first-time bride with old-fashioned values, she saw her wedding day as the one perfect moment in life to be treasured forever. Despite her youth, despite the changing decades, Linda, like Betty, cared about every traditional wedding detail. Her friends would give her showers, and she would take them on a "bachelorette" party. She spent weeks searching for the perfect, flowing white wedding gown, finding the right florist for her bridal bouquet, the right musicians, the right stationer for the invitations, the premier confectioner for the cake. This was her fairy tale forever. And wedding photographs were a critical part of it. Like Betty, Linda Kolkena would also one day have a bound wedding album to show her children.
For weeks before her wedding, Kim said, Linda walked around the house humming lyrics from "Chapel of Love," the Dixie Cups's 1964 hit tune: "Going to the chapel . . . gonnnnnna get maarrrrrried . . . gooooing to the chapel of looooove ..."
Unlike Betty Broderick, however, Linda was not marrying a young man her own age, but another woman's former husband, the father of four children, three of whom would barely speak to her. She had been reviled on an almost daily basis as "the cunt," "the home-wrecker," "the whore." She had cried to her friends, she had complained, and she had waited patiently for nearly six years. Linda Kolkena had paid a far greater price for her man than most young brides ever do. Her wedding day would forever be tainted with hate—and it went both ways.