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

by Bella Stumbo

  Then it was Dan's wedding day.

  "No more cheap whore. Now she's Mrs. DTB3," Betty wrote in a single line on a notepad the night before.

  Her remaining friends worried about her. Among them was Helen Pickard, who had watched and listened for months, longer than most others would. Pickard, mother of three, had been divorced a few years earlier. Since there was no major money to fight over, hers had been a peaceable settlement. Afterward, to support herself and her children, she had organized a successful janitorial service, cleaning office buildings. She rose each day at four A.M. to supervise her crew and, in time, made all her affluent La Jolla friends with maids smile at her growing expertise about the best toilet bowl cleansers and floor scrubs. Helen Pickard never would really understand Betty's bitter complaints about getting only $16,000 per month in her divorce settlement. Even so, she liked Betty and was in the habit of stopping by her house each morning for coffee—partly because Betty was the only other woman Pickard knew who was always up at dawn. Over coffee, Pickard heard "the story" over and again, and she tried to counsel Betty to shape up. When Betty stole the wedding list, Pickard urged her to return it, just as Sharon Blanchet had tried to persuade Linda not to steal it back. "I just felt sorry for this poor girl [Linda] who was only trying to get married," says Pickard.

  Then, the day before the wedding, Pickard says, Betty called her to say that "She was going to buy a new watch and have the date of Dan and Linda's wedding engraved on it 'just for fun.' She was laughing, but I thought it was creepy. It worried me." So Pickard called another of Betty's former friends, Jeannie Milliken, whose husband, the judge, was performing the wedding ceremony, and the two agreed to set up a beeper system for the day to monitor Betty's movements: Helen would spend the day with Betty, "and if she got away from me, I could let Jeannie know."

  But, Pickard stresses, "I never thought she would kill them. I only went over there because I was afraid she might do something to embarrass herself—like drive by and honk, make some sort of scene. You know Betty's crazy sense of humor." Also, says Pickard, "I just felt so sorry for her. I knew if it were me in her position, that would've been the hardest day of my life. I just didn't want her to be alone." Pickard stayed at Betty's from seven A.M. until eleven that night. She tried to get Betty to go with her to Palm Springs, "but she didn't want to go, because she was certain that some of the Brodericks would be coming by to say hello. It was so sad. She was still referring to them, even then, as 'my family.'

  "But she was cheerful, the way Betty always is—a little quieter than usual, sort of melancholy, but definitely in control," Pickard recalls. "She didn't cry or rave. But she kept returning to the topic of the third child who died. I don't think she ever got over that, and, for some reason, she always blamed Dan for it … Then she got out her wedding album, and we looked through it. At one point she said, 'You don't feel sorry for me, do you?'

  "And I said, 'No, I don't, because you can do anything you want in life.' I told her, 'You're getting to be boring. If the legal system is so bad, go be a lawyer. If you want to be a pinnacle of La Jolla society, go do it!' Betty was so smart, so talented. There was nothing she couldn't do well. I would have given anything for even half her gifts."

  As the sun set over La Jolla, Pickard says she told Betty, "Okay, now. This day is over. You'll never have to go through with it again. Go on now, get on with your life.' But I just don't think she had any faith in herself. She had no identity, beyond Dan's."

  Pickard recalls the day as mostly excruciating. It was an agony, she says, watching Betty watch the clock, as time dragged on and on. But finally, late that evening, one of the Brodericks did come to see Betty. It was Nancy, Dan's third sister, "And it was just heartbreaking," Pickard recalls, "to see how thrilled Betty was that at least one person in that family hadn't forgotten her." The three women went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the heart of La Jolla Village. And finally Betty Broderick went home to bed. April 22 was over.

  Years later, after Helen Pickard had become a prosecution witness, Betty remembered that day with nothing but angry humiliation. "Helen Pickard was never my friend! She was not my confidante, she knew nothing about what went on in my life. She just barged in every morning, and I tolerated her. I was perfectly fine the day of Dan's wedding—I didn't need a baby-sitter! In fact, I was planning to do something with him [Black]. But because I'm the wimp I am, I didn't throw [Pickard] out when she showed up because I'm a polite person." Betty is still rewriting history to suit herself, to this day, only more so.

  The next morning, she drove over to Dan's house to pick up Kim for breakfast. Of the Broderick clan gathered inside, only Dan's brother Dennis came outside to greet her. "He gave me a big hug and a kiss, without hesitating for a moment. He was happy to see me." She was so grateful she later wrote him a thank-you note.

  She pumped Kim and her other children for every detail of the wedding, alternately gloating and brooding. She couldn't get enough.

  The ceremony had been brief. Afterward, Dan had raised the flags of both Ireland and the Netherlands on his flagpole. He had been radiant, so happy, said housekeeper Sylvia Cavins later, that he had hugged her and, for the first time in the eighteen months she worked for him, "told me to call him Dan, instead of Mr. Broderick."

  But Kim didn't tell her mother any of that. She instead told Betty only what she knew she wanted to hear. The boys had refused to smile for the photographer. Good. And, according to Betty, Kim had laughed at the Kolkena family for being "so low-class—she said they jumped up and down, and yelled and clapped at the end of the ceremony. She said it was so embarrassing!" Betty loved it. And that wasn't all. "Then, later, they all went to some sleazy, disgusting Mexican bar down in Old Town," said Betty, still relishing it years later from jail, "with Linda still in her wedding gown!"

  But the facts remained the same. He had married her.

  And the little things gnaw at Betty still: He had worn a proper, rented morning coat to Linda's wedding, after he had ruined Betty's beautiful wedding in his ugly street suit and brown shoes. "He wore the same exact rented gray thing that he would never wear to my wedding."

  Then, there was the matter of Linda's wedding china pattern—a flowery design of the exact type that Betty says Dan forbade her from choosing for their wedding. "The sonofabitch told me no flowers. But this service for twelve, Limoges, that they got had little tiny pink and blue flowers all over it. It's very, very girlish and it looks very luncheony. I couldn't have flowers, but here this little bitch goes out and buys flowers. Flowers, flowers everywhere. He forgot to tell her no flowers."

  Meantime, Dan and Linda still had Betty's wedding china, moved to Cypress from its storage days at Coral Reef. Now she wanted it back, as soon as they returned from their honeymoon.

  And that was the final blow—their honeymoon. Where did they go on their honeymoon, but back to the Caribbean. Worse, they took a cruise on a large, elegant sailing ship almost identical to one Betty had dreamed of sailing for years, once she and Dan got rich. Dan had taken his new wife on Betty's magic ship, to the exact same part of the world where he had honeymooned with her. And no way did she think it was just simple male thoughtlessness and insensitivity. "The bastard did it on purpose, he wanted to hurt me."

  Meantime, proud as Dan Broderick was of his beautiful new wife, young enough to be his daughter, he was also a bit self-conscious about it, it seems, judging from several telegrams he sent to his pals back in San Diego from the honeymoon ship. Nearly all of them made not-so-veiled references to sexual exhaustion:

  "Marriage consummated. Linda with child. Name under consideration—General Michael I. Neil Broderick. Your proud servant, DTB," read one he sent to Mike Neil. "Getting weaker," said one to Mike Reidy. Others were signed, "Your victorious servant, Danny Boy." And so on.

  While Dan and Linda were gone, Betty attended the funeral of a woman she and Dan had known for years—the wife of an attorney and mother of three, who had died of cancer.
"I was so glad they were gone, that I wouldn't have to see them there—that I could go." But she left depressed over more than the woman's death. Her whole ruined life was reflected in that funeral. "Every friend I ever had was there, all crying in the church about this wonderful wife and mother. They were lauding her for that. And that's what I was! Yet they would barely even say hello to me. It was like I was invisible. Why was I different?"

  Among her first acts, the new Mrs. Daniel T. Broderick III promptly put her voice back on the family answering machine.

  In one of her next acts, Linda refused to return Betty's wedding china, despite entreaties from both Kim and Lee, Gail Forbes, and even Sylvia Cavins. Dan himself was ready to return it—why did they want it anyhow?

  Absolutely not, said Linda. She was sick of Betty Broderick's incessant demands. Betty hadn't asked for the china in the divorce trial, and she wasn't getting it now. Period. In fact, Linda told friends that she would rather break it, piece by piece, than give it back to Betty.

  "It was childish, I suppose," said Sharon Blanchet later. "But Betty didn't want it before—and then she did want it. Linda just got mad. It was the principle of the thing. It was the same with the answering machine. She said, 'How long do we let her rule our lives?'"

  Betty, of course, instantly broadcast Linda's latest meanness. After the killings, gossip became so distorted that one friend of Betty's doggedly insisted that Linda had, in fact, dropped the china, a piece at a time, from a second-floor balcony onto a driveway, right in front of Betty's eyes.

  "That never happened," Betty said later. "But Linda Kolkena was definitely on a power trip after she married him. That china was just cheap junk. I only wanted it for sentimental reasons. There was no reason for her not to give it back." Not long after the wedding, Betty also began telling friends about a new spate of anonymous fat and wrinkle ads she said she was once again receiving in the mail from various San Diego-area postal depots. Linda, of course. Nobody believed her.

  Dan, meantime, resumed his old fining system, although it was now clearly illegal.

  "Dear Elisabeth Anne," he wrote in May, "Enclosed please find your alimony check for the month of June 1989. Note it is in the amount of $15,903.77. I have withheld $86.23 for the cost of replacing the light fixture you destroyed with your car when you drove up the front walk a couple of months ago and $10 for the cost of replacing the bricks that you chipped. Sincerely yours, Daniel T. Broderick."

  And again in June: "Dear Elisabeth Anne: Enclosed please find your alimony check for the month of July 1989. Note I have deducted $340, which is the cost of the family portrait you defaced when you brought Rhett over with an earache …"

  Betty denied damaging the portrait, which had an X slashed through Dan's face—but even if she did do it, she said later, "He wasn't allowed to fine me. That was court-ordered support. He was supposed to take me to small-claims court, or send me a bill or something. He was writing his own rules again."

  Why these two newlyweds didn't finally back off, why they couldn't see the dangers ahead in their continued determination to conquer a woman already ragged beyond reason, remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Broderick story.

  Chapter 28

  Down, Down, Down

  Still, Betty tried to keep up pretenses. That spring, she put $5,000 down for a social membership in the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, which mainly entitled her to restaurant privileges. "She was so proud, just to be seen there again, among all the right people," said Pickard, Betty's lunch guest at the club one day. Colleen Stuart recalls similarly poignant scenes. Once, during the summer, Stuart remembers, she went to visit Betty at her house. "And it was the saddest thing I ever saw. She had all these lovely tables set up on her patio, with blue cloths and matching sun umbrellas. It was like a restaurant waiting for business. She even had fresh flowers on every table. She had all these expensive invitations engraved in gold printed up. Boxes and boxes of them. They said, 'Mrs. Betty Broderick cordially invites you to lunch on such-and-so day.' She was trying so hard to just go on without him. And she was being so Betty—so cheerful, upbeat. It was awful. Betty could never just break down and cry in front of anybody. The only two emotions she knew were anger and fear …"

  But, Betty's defenses were failing her at an alarming pace. Her once-bright mind was now so clouded that, increasingly, she could not match the trappings of acceptability with appropriate social behavior. Heads turned at the beach club as she grew louder, more obscene, angrier than ever before, pillorying Dan over her Caesar salad. Now, everywhere she went, she talked of nothing but Dan and Linda, how they were trying to destroy her, drive her to suicide.

  "I thought that after the wedding, once she realized that it was really over, she might get better," Candy Westbrook said. "Instead, Betty only went crazier. She couldn't even put away their wedding pictures. She pretended that it all still existed. I always wanted to take that damned wedding album out and burn it."

  But Betty was always such a deceptive personality. She had been balancing inner rage with outward routine for so long that, at times, if it was important enough to her, she could still dress up, tone down her fury, haul out her natural wit, and entrance almost anybody. Sheer habit kept her afloat. Thus, throughout that summer, while she was driving her few remaining friends away in droves with her foul rantings, she was also visiting, at the recommendation of her new custody attorney, yet another psychiatrist, both alone and with the boys—and, by all accounts, she performed well enough to persuade him that her sons should be returned to her, despite her anger at Dan.

  But, at the same time that she was charming her new doctor, she was now also an armed woman. She had secretly begun carrying her .38 revolver with her wherever she went, inside her purse, along with a cellular telephone in case the children needed to reach her. That summer, she went to Neiman Marcus trunk shows, to the Valencia for lunch, to charity functions, always wearing her bright smile and her haunted, glittery eyes, and carrying her little Smith & Wesson. She was also huge now, she had aged ten years in three. Her old friends cringed at the sight of her. This woman bore no resemblance to the one they had once known. Yet nobody, her doctor included, could apparently see how bad it really was inside Betty Broderick's poor head.

  Some days, she couldn't function at all. Instead, says Dian Black, she would sometimes just hide out at home for days at a stretch. "Betty always had this thing—she couldn't stand the idea that she was imposing on anybody. She never wanted to be seen unless she was in an upbeat mood. Betty would never let anybody help her work things through. She just didn't understand that friends are for the bad times, as well as the good. Somehow she just never learned to trust anybody to accept her for all that she was. Betty thought she had to be perfect all the time. I used to call her the 'Happy Hostess.' If she didn't answer the phone, I knew she was in a depression and just wanted to be alone. And I tried to respect that." In retrospect, adds Black, second-guessing herself as everyone closely involved in the Broderick story does, "I wish I had gone over there and kicked the door down. I just didn't realize how far gone she was."

  Increasingly, too, Betty stopped taking early morning walks on the beach with her friend Ronnie Brown. "I didn't have the energy anymore to walk anywhere," she said later. "I'd just drive down and sit on a bench." More often, however, she watched the sunrise alone from within her house, where she obsessed the finances of her life as never before. Gerald Barry had been right—she couldn't keep her house on $16,000 a month, that was clear. The overhead alone, in mortgage, taxes, and insurance, ate up nearly $10,000, not to mention gardeners, pool cleaners, and Maria, her maid. Bills spilled off every countertop.

  She would have to sell. She would have to move to some tacky condominium.

  It was so unfair.

  So she pushed it out of her mind, and reached impulsively instead for the thick stack of mail-order catalogs sitting by her telephone, and called Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia, and ordered something new. Something
pretty. Something soothing. A crystal goblet, a new clock, a lawn chair. A toy for some child's birthday, a precious little gift for some couple's anniversary. It didn't matter. It felt better to buy.

  But it couldn't last much longer. Her credit cards were reaching their limits. Her income taxes loomed. She hadn't budgeted to pay them. She didn't know how. She didn't want to know how. She was in big trouble. Hell with it. She didn't care anymore. Maybe she would have the drapes replaced this week. By the time she went to jail, Betty owed the IRS nearly $40,000.

  Meanwhile, Linda was even ordering stationery like hers. Ivory and navy blue. Tiffany. Was there nothing Dan and Linda could do that was their own idea? Did they have to copy her taste in everything? The little bitch had even posed for a Christmas picture in an outfit almost identical to one of Betty's traditional favorites—black velvet skirt, white frilly blouse, with red-and-green-plaid accents. The slut. In her Christmas clothes.

  Her head hurt. Her back hurt. Her jaw hurt. All her old physical ailments were back. And she couldn't sleep anymore. "I'd go to bed and turn around, and goddamn if it wasn't one A.M. when I woke up. I was up and down all night—again."