by Bella Stumbo
As Betty summarized the contents of those old letters, a flicker of something akin to pain crossed her face. She reiterated them in their essence: Dan had agreed he wasn't "the kind of husband or father that he wanted to be or that I should have," but, first, he wanted to be "a very important man … very prominent and very rich … and as long as he had to concentrate on those goals, he didn't have time to be home with the family … And he said that 'We're almost there,' if I would just give him more time …"
From there, Earley walked Betty through her many social and school activities to show that, while she was always an active mother, Dan was a consistently absent dad, always busy at work.
In his quest to portray his client as a hardworking, long-suffering housewife and mother, married to a selfish ingrate, Earley found no detail too minor to reveal, from the cars the Brodericks drove to the trips they took, especially after 1982, when the good times really began to roll. His goal was to inundate the jury, newcomers to this whole story, with so much evidence of the mental anguish visited upon an unsuspecting wife by her materialistic, philandering husband's prolonged lies and vanities that, in time, the homicides might seem a nearly inevitable outcome. It turned out to be a smart strategy.
Kerry Wells took copious notes. The deeper Earley went into these life-style items, the deeper she would also later descend, until, finally, the whole spectacle seemed less like a first-degree murder trial than some wacky, tacky Hollywood parody of ‘Divorce, Yuppie Style’.
Meanwhile, having apparently noticed one juror frowning in puzzlement, Betty turned to Whelan and asked if the jurors could "ask questions if they don't understand?" Her tone was so solicitous, so naive, that several jurors smiled as Whelan patiently explained to her: no.
Earley moved on to 1983, the beginning of what Betty always called "the Linda problem." For the next two hours, the jury listened to the saga of one more marriage gone sour, all because the husband had found someone who made him feel better than his wife did.
Until Dan met Linda, Betty said, their marriage had been normal. But, after that, she said, he had become a changed man virtually overnight, suddenly aggressively critical of everything about his life: Yet he lied to her—he denied that any other woman was involved. Instead, she told the jury, beginning to cry, he blamed her. He said "A lot of it was my fault because I was old, fat, ugly, boring, and stupid …" She was bewildered and crushed because "I was thirty-five years old! And I wore size eight, which people know can't be very fat for someone nearly five-eleven ..."
Through her sobs, she then recounted her last-ditch efforts to compete with the younger, carefree woman: She had become just one more Aging Wife, trying frantically to "fix it" in every way she knew how. It was the one certain point in her testimony that probably caused every housewife in San Diego to put down the iron and turn up the volume on the TV set.
"If your husband is telling you that you're not pleasing to him anymore, you try to do whatever it is better, that he does not like," she said, choking on her tears, her voice a thin, reedy wail. "You know—if the problem is you're not a good cook, you take cooking lessons. If you are not a good housekeeper, you keep house better. If you are old, fat, ugly, stupid, you try to be younger, you try get wrinkles taken off your face that weren't even there!" In another segment that would make the evening TV news, her face reddened and crumpled, she shrieked in frustration, "You even get your tooth fixed!" she cried, halfway opening her mouth, pointing a finger toward some lower tooth. "I have this one tooth with a tiny little millimeter, something, crooked ... I tried to be perfect. Absolutely, flawlessly perfect for Dan Broderick ... I was very proud of him, I wanted him to be proud of me ..."
But none of it had worked. She next told the jury of her anguish on the night Dan announced that he had hired Linda as his assistant. But even then, she said, wiping away her tears, she had been torn. Certainly, she wanted Dan to hire help. "As I've said earlier, Dan was always under a lot of pressure working … You don't make that kind of money by not working hard. None of it is luck ... He would fall asleep with the legal file on his chest and wake up in the morning and do it again." But Linda Kolkena? Who couldn't even type? No.
From there, guided by Earley, she described the next year in agonizing detail: the ultimatum she had given Dan, either to fire Linda or move out; the day he came home with the new Corvette; her later suicide try; the clothes burning. But through it all, she told Earley, Dan insisted that she was imagining everything, "that I was crazy, losing it, that I should get help." And so, she said, at Dan's urging, she had gone to see a therapist for the first time, because "I wanted so much to believe him." She cried again. Jurors looked pained, Earley looked pleased.
But, just as a couple of female jurors seemed on the verge of tears themselves, Betty suddenly conceded that she wouldn't have been so upset about Dan's affair, except that "it was becoming a little too public for me, a little too embarrassing to me, that he was being seen everywhere with her."
So much for heartbreak.
By midafternoon, the jury was up to speed on events through 1987, from the car "bamming," to the bifurcated divorce without visitation rights, to the rats in the rental house. Betty told about Dan's fines, and being jailed when she went to protest the minus $1,300 check. "I couldn't believe it. I didn't think I was being unreasonable, to ask for money to keep me going through the month."
She admitted to some of the vandalisms—the Boston cream pie, a broken window, the spray paint. All done in anger at her own helplessness, she said.
Then, the jury got a first-hand glimpse of Betty Broderick's temper, aimed at her own attorney. Earley had asked her an innocuous question about Dan's cancellation of her credit cards. "Do you remember, when was that, in relationship to the Notre Dame game?" For whatever reasons, it annoyed her. Earley was "putting the cart before the horse on some incidents," she suddenly snapped. All these details and incidents of her life were being taken out of order, were being confused in the telling, she continued in a sharp, nonstop mini-lecture. "…. When the soccer game happened, I didn't know about the divorce yet! When the cake was smushed around, it was because he was still lying about Linda! He hadn't told me the truth yet, so I was highly, highly agitated about a lot of different things ... I didn't know what was happening with my house being torn down, my kids were at his house, he was starting to pull the plug out about letting me see my kids, go to my own house. I was in a tailspin. It is all very mixed up in my mind, but it is all close together!"
Earley waited, listening soberly until she was done—then asked her exactly the same question again. His flat manner seemed to both alert and calm her. This time she answered politely, promptly.
The day ended with more of the same—a barrage of details, large and small. She told about receiving "anonymous, harassing things in the mail … ads for wrinkle cream and weight loss."
The photograph from the legal newspaper Dicta was most hurtful, she added, because "Dan being president of the bar was something he and I had talked about since we had come to town." She studied the picture Earley had placed before her. Others in the photo were old friends of hers, too, she said, "So it was not only my husband, it was our whole social circle …" But she did not leave it at that. She kept talking. Pasas stiffened and began to pick at the tails of her hair. Earley stood, looking helpless to cut her off.
"This is him being admitted president of the bar association," Betty told the jury. Then she read aloud the caption printed by the publication itself, which clearly upset her even more than the attached "Eat your heart out, bitch" note:
**It says, 'With them is Linda Kolkena, paralegal,' and,"—she paused—“ ‘close friend of the president elect'!" The hate in her voice as she read those last six words was the closest she had come on this day to blowing it. “Tick, tick, tick," said Union reporter John Gaines under his breath. Earley hustled to snatch the picture away from her.
If seats had been for sale, bailiffs Jose Jimenez and Rita Long could have ma
de a bundle on Betty's second day on the witness stand. As theater goes, everybody knew that this was it, the must-see performance of the entire trial, because, surely, Jack Earley would finish with his domestic history today and get to the killings.
Wells arrived, looking as if Dracula had drained her during the night. Even Earley and Pasas skipped their usual morning amenities with the press. Earley was taking no comfort in the fact that Betty had handled herself well so far. If she was already sniping at him, what would happen when Kerry Wells got hold of her? His client would lash out in a fatal display of unlovability. He knew it.
Betty looked calm, cheerful, and curious. Her complexion was rosy, her hair was fluffier. Her stage fright was gone. Today, she watched the audience with as much interest as it watched her. She winked at a friend. She smiled at the jurors as they filed in. Not least, in perhaps the truest reflection of her new confidence, she had chosen to wear the one dress Marion Pasas had begged her not to wear—a two-piece gold satin sweater combination with a flowing pleated skirt, more suitable for an afternoon tea at the Valencia than a murder trial. She wore pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. She looked like rainbow sherbet.
But her serenity didn't last. Because today Jack Earley was intent upon establishing Dan Broderick as just about the meanest, most violent drunk in San Diego. He wanted to lay the groundwork for an upcoming expert witness who would declare that Betty Broderick had not only been emotionally abused but physically and sexually battered, too—something Betty had always denied in press interviews.
Did Dan Broderick have a temper? Earley asked. Yes, said Betty. When he got mad he would "yell, scream, and smash things."
Earley then tried to get her to say that Dan had hit her, too. She wouldn't. Earley pressed. "And had he ever hit you while you were married?" he asked. "Yes." Period. Earley looked visibly annoyed. He had clearly spent hours discussing these questions with Betty. She knew where the defense strategy was supposed to lead, and, presumably, had agreed with it. But now, Betty was about to be Betty. Having agreed, or suggested agreement, she folded on Earley at the critical hour.
The most he could get her to say was that, yes, sometimes "I would be bruised and marked up a little." Whether she was overstating or understating the facts, it was clear to everyone in the courtroom that she hated this line of questioning. Earley pressed on. At last she agreed, with visible irritability, that Dan once gave her a black eye.
"I explained before that Dan was a very, very high-pressure person, mostly self-imposed," she said curtly. "But he was always wound very tightly, and if he got upset about something, he had an outrageous temper and a lot of strength that you would not think he would ordinarily have, and he would … there is a long, long list and record of breaking and smashing, yelling and screaming when he was in a fit of temper … After he finished smashing stuff he would say, 'Just be lucky it was not you, next time it might be you.'" And what was Dan like when he drank?
"It was a progression of moods and things," said Betty, irritably. "It would start at a party just being fun … and as he drank more and more, he would be more and more fun, doing really silly things, like flipping down staircases, falling out of chairs on purpose, Alligators and Turtles stuff. As the night went on, he would pass out … When he woke up the next morning is when most of these bad tempers would take place."
But Earley also wanted her to say that Dan had forced drunken sex upon her, too. "At night … when he came home from drinking, would he also be nice, would he be forceful, or …?"
Betty cut him off: "He would be very, very drunk many, many times coming home staggering, not making any sense, and I would just be real careful not to get him mad ... As I also said yesterday," she added sharply, "this was an ongoing problem!" Her tone of voice told Earley that was enough. She wasn't here to embarrass either herself or the man she had married, defense strategy be damned. Wells almost smiled.
Earley then turned to Linda Kolkena's offense against Betty. He did the best with what he had, to save his client despite herself.
First he told the jury of the two snide little notes Linda had written to Dan on a stack of Betty's bills: "This is for the fat one," and "Now we know how she keeps her girlish figure." He pointed out that Linda had been the one to sign the letters canceling Betty's insurance policies, immediately after the 1986 divorce. Earley then produced the deed to Betty's house, which Betty had received after the divorce, notarized by Linda, in letters as big as Betty's own name. The defense team had later found the deed in Betty's files, ripped to shreds. Earley liked this item so well he had taped the torn pieces of the deed back together so that the jury could see this example of one woman's needless cruelty toward another.
Then, there was Betty's perception that Linda was ruining her reputation. "It seemed I was the topic of Linda Kolkena's conversation most of the time," Betty said. "She told a lot of stories on me. Humiliating, embarrassing, flatly untrue things … 'Betty was crazy, Betty was sick … Betty had come to their house in the middle of the night. Betty had taken things from their nightstands …' Things like that." About the only detail Earley forgot to mention was the wedding china.
He moved inexorably onward, toward the crime, to the state of mind that led to the killings.
"During the beginning months of '87," Earley asked Betty, "what was your feeling about your life and what was going on around you?"
Her answer was disjointed. She felt, she said, that she had been reduced to a beggar and a jailbird, without cause. From November 1, 1986, forward, she said, her face crumpling into tears again, "I was a basket case ... I was thrown in jail ... I don't remember being in jail. I know that I was there. I was handcuffed, mug shots, and everything else. I was literally in shock. To me, that was the left, the right, and bam! I never got up after November 1, 1986. I was just down for the count. I couldn't deal with anything … The left, to me, was the kids' situation, not seeing the kids; and the right was the sale of the house out from under me with no control; then, right between the eyes was cutting off all the money—being absolutely, totally unreasonable … just, you know, 'Die! Get out of my life! Get out of my life, go away, I owe you nothing. I have everything, you have nothing, and that's what you deserve!' I never recovered from that. I still never have recovered from that …
"So much of my life was all wrapped up in my husband, home, and my children, that when all three of those things were gone, there really was not anything else." Her voice trembled, but she did not cry. "I would just get up in the morning, and I would have nowhere to go, nothing to do. I didn't have to go grocery shopping, do laundry. I didn't have to drive the kids to school. I didn't have to do all the things that I always did. I was just lost," she finished, shrugging, with one of her apologetic, uncertain little smiles.
In the best of all worlds, Jack Earley wanted Betty Broderick to admit that she behaved deplorably toward her kids, that she had hurt them with her mad phone calls, and that she should have taken them back, financial settlement or not.
He was of course dreaming. Betty refused to admit that she had been irresponsible toward the children—but she at least tried to explain her behavior. It was, she said, always grounded in fear.
"When Dan first walked out, I was left with four children, with no security in a home or a car, no money in the bank, no plan of where I was going to get anything. I knew I was not capable of supporting these kids ... I just needed it all decided before I took on the responsibility of our children ... I was too nervous, too scared, totally distrustful of Dan Broderick ... To me, he was capable of giving me the four kids and just cutting off everything ..." And, she finished, she wasn't emotionally capable of handling even herself anymore, much less four children. "I wasn't handling anything!"
Earley led Betty through all the mounting pressures on her in the final, fatal year of 1989, at last arriving at the weekend prior to the killings, when she had received the two letters from Cuffaro.
"I felt like I was dying … the legal stuff was killing
me," she said. "My back had been hurting me for the last two years. I had not slept for the last two years. My skin was the worst that it had ever been, from stress. I had headaches from biting my jaw so tight …"
Then, early the next morning, she said, she saw the legal letters "out of the corner of my eye" and decided to read them carefully. "But I knew it was not good news, because I have never gotten good news from a legal envelope." Her face began to crumple and redden again. With Betty, the facial collapse always came before the tears.
"I was sick of it!" she shouted. "It was just more of the same, more of the same, more of the same! Threats! Manipulation! … And I was really mad at myself for not being able to get the kids back. Dan was delaying, putting Walter [Maund] through the same kind of hoops that he put Tricia Smith through ... He was going to divert us through contempt orders, criminal court. It was just the nightmare starting all over!"
She began to cry harder. "Another thing was that it was two days away from my birthday," she said. "I was just standing in that kitchen saying, you know, 'Jesus Christ! I'm turning forty-two years old! I have been put through this bullshit since I was thirty-five, seven years of my life wasted!'"
Her voice echoed off the walls as she rushed on, in a stream of consciousness, outlining her last thoughts before she got in her Suburban and drove across town to Dan's.
"… I haven't been able to get a job, or make a decision about where I'm living, or help my kids, or do anything! And I kept hearing him say it would never be over ... I was just a mess! Everything came down on me, and I just couldn't stand it another minute … them telling people I'm a child molester, that I'm crazy, an unfit mother! I just couldn't stand it another minute," she said, nearly shrieking now. "I would rather be dead! I had no life left! That is how I felt!"