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

by Bella Stumbo

  Slowly, ploddingly, Earley marched jurors through the entire history of the Broderick marriage, from start to finish, from young students in love, to immense wealth in La Jolla, to Dan's decision to leave Betty for the younger, lovelier Linda. He left out virtually no detail of Betty's story.

  He never once mentioned the phrase 'battered woman's syndrome.' But he strongly implied that this was a tale of psychological battery that so eroded Betty that she finally snapped. She had been undermined on a daily basis, by both Dan and the legal system, until, finally, "she found herself in a pit with no handles." At one point, he even compared her to Martha Mitchell, late wife of former Nixon Administration Attorney General John Mitchell, of Watergate fame. "They said Martha was crazy, too," he told the jury—until history proved otherwise.

  Then, operating on his theory that "juries like a little showmanship," Earley unveiled a big photo display of Betty, Dan, and their children in happier days. As he continued speaking, he tore away picture after picture, with theatrical flourish, demonstrating all that Dan had robbed her of.

  "You have to understand her life," he told them. He worked his way up to the time when Dan met Linda, lied about it, then finally left Betty in a rental house.

  Rip. Gone was a photograph of Betty in her home.

  Earley then explained that she had never given her children away but only taken them to stay temporarily with their father, due to rats, her New York trip, etc.. But, rather than settle with her, Dan had simply used them as a weapon against her.

  Rip. He tore away a picture of Betty with her children.

  Then Dan filed for divorce and, Earley said, even attempted to serve her with divorce papers at a Bishops fashion lunch—at the same time he was telling everyone she was crazy.

  Earley ripped away a photo of Betty at a social function, surrounded by pretty, well-groomed women.

  Finally, by 1989, said Earley, she was completely defeated, humiliated at being fined, jailed, denied even visitation with her children and rendered financially subservient. Meantime, she had grown fat and unattractive. She was a wasted woman, stripped of all anchors in her life.

  Rip. Gone a final picture of beautiful, slender Betty in tight jeans in 1986. In its place, cleverly concealed until now, was the worst photo of Betty that Jack Earley could find—the obese woman with vacant eyes and triple chins, who had been booked at Colinas for murder only three years later.

  "She was someone who was left without family, children, home, who she was, where she was going," said Earley, gazing dolefully at the single ugly photograph left on his flannel-board display.

  So she went to Dan's house on the morning of November 5, 1989, he said, "thinking of all the things that are bothering her," just wanting to talk to him. She took the gun with her, explained Earley, only as a way of forcing him to talk to her. It was just a grandstanding stunt.

  But then, Earley said—suddenly mumbling so that reporters had to strain to hear, and even then nobody got it clearly—"It was said, 'Call the police!'"

  So she panicked and fired.

  She shot, in "a heightened state," Earley continued blandly. But she had no memory of it at all; instead, she had intended only to kill herself if Dan wouldn't talk to her. And she had snatched the phone out of the wall, he said, only in a reflexive action, developed through years of fear, "so that he couldn't call the police because she had violated the restraining order."

  Earley never did explain his murky remark about someone in the bedroom saying "Call the police." Which would later prove to be a stroke of genius on his part.

  In conclusion, he begged the jury to look not at the mere facts of the killings but also at Betty's mental state. "What was she dealing with, what made her do this? If she is guilty of a crime, what crime is she guilty of?" He then shuffled back to his chair and sat down—without saying what he himself thought the answer to that question should be.

  The jurors stared, confused. Reporters looked at each other to see if they'd missed something. For the first time all day, even Betty Broderick lost her steady expression of polite, sweet attentiveness and stared at Earley in bewilderment.

  Chapter 34

  The Prosecution

  And now, after all the months of talk, it was time to see exactly what Betty Broderick had done. On the second day of the prosecution case, Wells introduced the deceased to the jury.

  She marched into court with large color photographs of the death scene and arranged them on an easel three feet from the jury box: Dan was lying face down on the floor, half hidden by the bedcovers; Linda was sprawled face down across the bed, blood streaking her long hair. It is always startling, how fragile all living creatures seem in death. Brian Forbes was right—they did have a greenish hue. The pictures also clearly showed that, in order to reach the phone cord, Betty practically had to step on Dan.

  In the back row of the courtroom, the Broderick family cried. Kim was the first to leave. Lee, across the aisle, followed minutes later. So did Betty's sister Clare. But Dan Broderick's brothers and sisters, a tough lot, stayed, with tears running down their faces.

  In the days to come, Wells would haul her grim pictures around the courtroom, shuffling through them like a deck of cards, displaying first one, then another, depending on the witness on the stand. When not using them, she stacked them with deliberate carelessness along the tables and walls—virtually shoving them under Betty's nose. But Betty showed no reaction at all.

  Earley maintained a steadily grim expression until he got back to his office that night. Then, in an irreverent, cackling explosion of tension: "Looks to me like it was every man for himself up there that night. Obviously, Dan wasn't trying to shelter his new bride. He was trying to dive under the bed to save himself."

  Among Wells's first witnesses was a ballistics expert who explained why Betty's hollow-point bullets hadn't done more damage to Dan and Linda. Betty had, in a word, been cheated by the gun salesman—hollow points are effective only in guns with a longer barrel than a .38. Betty's teeny-weeny ladies' gun was never designed for such deadly ammunition. Betty listened, frowning.

  Wells also called a police consultant to say that, so far as he could tell, these were not panic shootings. "It looks to me like fairly well directed shots, given the accuracy," he said. In fact, he added dryly, causing jurors to smile, most police officers shooting in a panic are notoriously inept. "Cars get shot, trash cans, buildings ... to be frank, about the only thing that usually doesn't get shot is the suspect."

  But Wells had barely gotten her case under way before she was undermined by one of her own witnesses, a homicide detective who testified that he had found the telephone Betty ripped out of the wall lying in the hallway that morning, with its cord neatly wrapped around. But police photographs on display directly in front of him proved otherwise: the phone had been thrown wildly into a corner, its wires in a tangle. It was the closest the Broderick trial ever got to an "Aha! Gotcha!" When Earley triumphantly thrust the evidence photos in front of the officer's reddening face, he could only stammer that he had obviously been mistaken.

  Wells rebounded quickly, as she would do throughout this trial whenever she was in a pinch, by marching to the tape recorder and stabbing the button with a vengeance. For the next fifteen minutes, effectively erasing all memory of the overeager cop, jurors listened to a dozen or so of Betty's foulest phone messages. Snatches included:

  "I want to get rid of the kids … stop screwing the cunt … drunken, selfish, cruel-hearted … you're gonna be sooooo sorry. Fucking the secretary. Fuckhead … cunt … Cuntsucking asshole! What am I supposed to do now? I just want what's mine … I'll kill you."

  Wells then brought out her star witness—Kimberly Curtin Broderick, first child of Dan and Betty Broderick. She was then twenty.

  No prosecutor could have asked for a more credible weapon. The pretty, wholesome-faced young woman with the dark eyes and long, glossy brown hair pulled back in barrettes who took the stand on this autumn day of 1990, weari
ng a demure black dress with gathered skirt and schoolgirl flats, was the fulsome, ail-American girl, likable on sight. When she cried, half the jurors looked as if they wanted to cry with her. And she cried often.

  The crucifixion of mother by daughter lasted for the better part of two days. It wasn't so much what Kim said about Betty—it was the fact that she went the extra mile, reaching for details to damn her mother, without applying the same scrutiny to her father. Dan was dead, and Kim wanted Betty to pay.

  Wells began her questioning with the morning of the killings, when Betty had called Kim at school.

  "You know I had to do it," Betty had said, Kim testified. "I had no other choice. One of us had to die ... it was either him or me ... I couldn't let him win."

  During a hearing months earlier, Kim had said that when Betty called, her voice had been "shaking, she was scared." Now, Kim described her mother differently. "She was calm, she told me to calm down, to get a plane home."

  For the rest of the day, Wells walked Kim through the most trivial details of her life with Mom and Dad, both before and after their separation. Wells's goal was to depict Betty Broderick as the most selfish, temperamental mother, unloving wife, and wanton spender any jury had ever seen. She wanted Kim to testify about everything from an incident when she was maybe seven years old, when Betty had once thrown a ketchup bottle at Dan, to Betty's anger at Dan's $150 limit on Kim's junior prom dress.

  And Kim followed Wells's lead with chilling docility. She became, on the witness stand, a teenager who had never seriously griped to her mother about Dan, Linda, or virtually anything else. She had not inflamed her mother with her complaints. None of the issues raised by Betty—from Kim's college budget to her treatment at the last Notre Dame weekend—had been any "big deal," Kim said. Her mother had exaggerated everything.

  Wells moved on to the crime, drawing the daughter ever closer to pulling the noose. Her initial nervousness gone, Kim went forward with increasing willingness.

  Yes, she testified, her mother had threatened to kill Dan and Linda "a lot of times." In fact, a month before Dan and Linda's wedding, Kim said, Betty told her she was going to put three or four bullets in their heads. Not until Jack Earley's cross-examination did Kim qualify this by admitting that her mother frequently said she was going to "kill" Kim, her sister, her brothers, and just about anybody else who aggravated her on any given occasion, including the dogs.

  But, she insisted to Earley, her father had taken Betty's threats seriously. In hindsight, Kim also thought Betty had deliberately stolen her keys to Dan's house.

  At Wells's prompting, Betty Broderick's oldest child even provided the jury with an additional motive for her mother's crimes: Two months before Dan had died, Kim testified, the court-ordered insurance policy of $1 million for the children had gone into effect, and Betty had told her, she said, " 'If I kill him, we'll all be rich.' She said that a lot," Kim added.

  According to Kim, Dan was never the mean, controlling, drunken, insensitive man that her mother described. To the contrary, it was Betty, as Kim remembered it, who had always been the temperamental, violent one. "I saw scratches on his back. She made moon marks on him. She'd stick her nails into your arms—all of us."

  Concerning Dan's drinking, Kim remembered that when the children were little, "Dad drank six-packs." Later on, it was occasional wine with dinner. But, after the divorce, she said—in direct contrast to what her sister Lee would later say—he was a near teetotaler. Except for St. Patrick's Day, she added with a wiltingly gentle smile. Then he would "get high." But, even when he did drink, "He was really funny and nice … Dad wasn't good with emotions at all. He had a hard time saying 'I love you' and hugging you. But when he was drunk, he had no trouble at all. He was really loving and affectionate."

  The jury watched with faces of purest compassion. They were suffering along with this demure, wounded young victim of such adult folly. It was tangible. Wells, sensing it, forged on with growing tenderness. Jack Earley began angrily objecting to every other question. Sidebar conferences were called increasingly. But it was a losing game for Earley, because, each time court was stalled for a conference, there sat Kim, biting her necklace, looking at her hands, and more often than not, crying softly to herself as she tried to avoid eye contact with everyone—except her mother. Amazingly, sometimes she would cast a furtive glance at Betty and smile like a little child lost, and Betty Broderick always would smile back, and nod, with sympathy.

  Wells returned to Betty's ugly phone messages, her purpose now being to lay the legal groundwork necessary to get Betty's 1987 conversation with Danny admitted into court. Kim was ready with all the right answers.

  Her mother's language had always upset the boys, she said—but she recalled vividly the night of Betty's conversation with Danny, because Danny never got that upset. It lingered in her mind.

  And so the tape played, all thirty awful minutes of it. It no longer mattered that Dan had deliberately taped it, that he was just as guilty as his wife for the pain being inflicted on his son. Dan was dead; Betty was on trial for murdering him. All that mattered now were the two voices filling the hushed courtroom: the young, heartbroken son, screaming and sobbing in frustration; and his coy, teasing, taunting mother, refusing to behave like a grown-up—to leave little Danny Broderick alone on a balmy California evening to go out and play, the way children are supposed to do.

  Danny: "... Don't you think being mad for two years is enough, Mom?"

  Betty: "No, it took me twenty years of goodness to get mad … He's scum, Danny. Absolute scum. He's cheated and lied and fucked around … that money is mine. I earned it for twenty years of hard work and total shit from that asshole …"

  Danny: "… What else do you care about besides your money and your share of things to own? … Stop saying bad words! ..."

  Betty: "For two years while I was married to him, I put up with shit in my face and you kids never even knew it. You never knew he was fucking Linda while he was married to me, did you?"

  Danny: "No." [crying]

  Betty: "No, and I put up with shit for two years hoping he'd get over this, and he'd grow up, and he is obviously too weak a little faggot …"

  Danny: "But now, you know, if you care about your family, you would stop saying bad words."

  Betty: “… I'd rather be a lady and wonderful person and call a cunt a cunt. ... I wish he'd just die. I wish he would get drunk and drive his fucking car … then he'll be gone off the earth."

  And so on. Several jurors visibly flinched, listening to an adult abusing a boy so badly in her efforts to force the child to take her side. Betty scribbled in her pad, ignoring it all.

  With that, Kerry Wells wrapped up her day. If there had been any lingering doubts about Wells's willingness to use the Broderick children to win a conviction, it was gone. The only remaining mystery was whether she would also call Betty's two young sons into court to testify against their mother.

  For the defense, it was one of the worst days of the entire trial. Walking into the mob of reporters waiting in the corridor, Earley offered one of his best blank faces and remarked, dryly, "I'm extremely pleased with the way things are going. I think we've got them on the run."

  Dian Black, meantime, looked ashen as she left the courtroom. The Danny tape had stunned her. "I can't believe what I heard," she said weakly. "That was just so—sick! I had no idea she was capable of doing stuff like that to her kids." Then, bewildered: "Why is this trial even happening? If that tape doesn't prove she went nuts, what does? She needs help!"

  On the phone that night, Betty sounded perky as ever. "Well, I didn't think it [the tape] was that bad," she said, impervious to either shame or reason. She was more interested in the prim, schoolgirl outfit Kim had worn to court that day. "She never dresses that way," said Betty, laughing. What's more, half the clothes Kim was wearing to court every day were her dresses. "I think I'll ask Jack to introduce a motion that Kim can't testify against me wearing my clothes." It was
still all theater to her, nothing more.

  Kim arrived in court the next day, demure in a lace collar, less nervous, more aggressive than the day before. At times, throughout the day, she volunteered condemning details without even being asked.

  Wells knew she was at risk of alienating the jury if she spent much more time encouraging the daughter to condemn the mother. But she couldn't resist. Throughout the trial, Kerry Wells never knew when to quit overworking a good thing.

  She next got Kim to say that Linda's refusal to return the wedding china was no big deal. "Mom didn't like it, she bought new china." Wells even asked Kim why Betty had married Dan. Because, Kim promptly replied with authority, her mother said she felt sorry for Dan, and "he had asked her so many times, she finally gave in."

  And their fights? "She was always mad at him!" Kim replied.

  And why wouldn't Dan talk to Betty after the divorce? Because, whenever he would get on the phone with her, Kim said, "she'd scream and yell and cuss, so he'd hang up and say forget it."

  And so it went.

  Wells took Kim through the entire family history since the separation. Kim cried about the night Betty took her to Coral Reef. She recalled all the subsequent vandalisms, and even volunteered a few new ones: once, for example, she told the jury that Betty had written 'Fuck You' in lipstick on a mirror. And after the divorce, she said, Dan had been a wonderful father. But Betty always undermined him with the boys. For instance, she said Betty had once made Rhett cry by calling him "a spineless wimp" when he was afraid to run away from home. As for her own quarrels with Dan, she shrugged them off.