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

by Bella Stumbo

  Wells glared at her icily. "Mrs. Broderick, isn't it true," she then demanded in one of the trial's more indelibly preposterous moments, "that you were referring to Linda as ‘The Cunt’ from the very beginning of this separation?"

  Wells then played some more tapes. Betty listened without reaction. Wells finally shut the recorder off. Well? If Wells was searching for a vein, she had missed again. Mildly, Betty tried to explain herself.

  "This ordeal strung out for so many years, that by the end, for two, three years, that was my common, everyday conversation," she told Wells quietly. "I always called Dan a fuckhead and her cunt. I never used their names. I always said he was fucking the cunt. That is just what I always said ... I know, out of context here and stuff, it sounds obscene. [But] It was just water off a duck's back way back then, because that was just the long-established facts. That is the way that it was." She shrugged.

  "Did you think that was truly water off a duck's back, when it came to your children and how they were responding?" Wells asked through gritted teeth.

  "Yes," said Betty, exasperated. "... I said some nasty, disgusting, puke-out things," she said, because "I was puked out!" But, she insisted, "It was not shocking to anyone, especially not to Dan or Linda, my children."

  Wells moved on to Linda, always the last item on everybody's agenda in this trial. Back to the tape recorder.

  "Oh, no, cunt, it's you again," said Betty into the machine in July, 1986—just before she had received her bifurcated divorce. "… Your mere existence is a filthy statement on human life. You're like the scum of the earth. People like you are not new … they've been around since the beginning of time. Same old story …"

  Wells peered at Betty with pursed lips. She looked like a woman who had just finished cleaning out a Roach Motel.

  "That was a message you left directly, specifically, to Linda Kolkena, right?"

  Yup, Betty agreed tiredly. It was one of the first messages she ever left on Dan's new machine … "That machine was answered by Linda Kolkena when she came home. She heard the messages, she made those recordings, she edited out what she didn't want ... It was her operation. And the only purpose of this answering machine was to make his case against me. Other than that, he had nothing against me …"

  Wells asked next if Betty hadn't often threatened to kill Dan and Linda before their wedding. Little in trial seemed to anger Betty more.

  "No. That is one of the biggest black lies going around this town for a year before that wedding!" she said hotly. "The night they informed my children they were getting married, they started this nonsense about me coming to the wedding with a machine gun and killing everyone, that they were going to hire helicopters, armed guards … How do you think that made me feel?"

  She agreed with Wells, however, that Rhett had kept asking her if she was "going to kill Daddy?" But, she said, it was an idea planted in the child's mind by Linda and Dan, not by her.

  Wells marched to her tape recorder. In this message, Betty had told Dan: "Lee Lee told me that you are afraid of me. You better be afraid of me."

  Betty smiled at Wells, amused. "Around the wedding time," she said, "the girls told me that 'Daddy is afraid of you.' I thought that it was very funny. I said, 'Good, I hope he stays afraid of me.'"

  But, before the wedding, then, Wells pressed, hadn't Betty threatened to kill Dan? Betty looked almost surprised. "Oh, yes," she said. "I have done that probably through my whole relationship with Dan Broderick."

  It was so disjointed, so irrational, so nuts. The jurors looked dazed. Nobody was taking notes anymore.

  "You made jokes about it," asked Wells, "[that] you were bigger than he was, he was a wimp, you could beat him up?"

  Betty stopped the game. "Dan Broderick," she told Wells icily, "was never afraid of me."

  In the final analysis, Betty blamed Linda more than Dan for conducting "a smear campaign against me … She was just making a real ass out of me in public by telling people that I had said and done these things that I had never said and done. The boys will tell you that."

  At which point Kerry Wells delivered her lowest blow of the day—and also the most unfair one, since Jack Earley had never been allowed to interview the two Broderick sons.

  "Mrs. Broderick," said Wells, her tone one of elaborate, pointed condescension, "I've talked to your boys."

  Earley objected, and Whelan sustained him, although it was too late: now the jury knew, by innuendo, if nothing more, that Betty's sons were saying something pleasing to the prosecutor, whatever it was.

  Wells wound up the morning session by trying to humiliate Betty over the bizarre Christmas letter she had sent to the Broderick family after Dan left her, containing the picture of Dan and Linda, along with their own wedding picture. Betty denied remembering that she even did it. When Wells pressed, Betty exploded in embarrassed frustration, in an emotional monologue bound to lead the five o'clock local news.

  "I honestly don't remember these things," she wailed. "I was operating under the most outrageous stress levels that any human being could be under! ... I don't remember being in court. I was a crazy person! He was telling people I was crazy—[and] I went crazy! I was like this," she shrilled, suddenly going into a startling, absurd mime on the stand, rolling her eyes upward, shaking her head, flapping her hands, and sticking out her tongue. "You see pictures of me like this, you know—like I'm some kind of electrified crazy person!" But the fact is, she said, calming, "I honestly, sincerely don't remember these things. If it was not for my sporadic scribblings and stuff in the diary, this would all be a blank to me. That is the only way I can piece things together."

  Then in another of those ingratiating little remarks that always left Wells white-lipped with insult, "But keep trying," Betty urged helpfully. "And when you hit on something that I can remember, then I'll remember more."

  The level of interrogation degenerated steadily, drifting ever further from the murders at issue. Wells next turned her attentions to what a bad wife Betty Broderick had always been, from the very start of the marriage. Her apparent purpose was to justify Dan Broderick's infidelity, if not his deception, too, by blaming Betty for virtually driving him out of the house. Wells didn't have much to work with, beyond the minor domestic spats Kim had described, plus remarks from a few former friends that Betty had sometimes nagged Dan over his personal vanity and workaholic ways. But Wells did her best. This was full-dress divorce court now.

  Wasn't it true, Wells asked, that theirs had always been a troubled marriage, well before 1983 when Dan finally told Betty of his unhappiness? "Have you ever stated that you felt the marriage was a disaster from day one?" she asked.

  Betty at first denied it, then amended herself to say that, yes, she had made that remark—but only because "If I was pregnant in the beginning, that, to me, was a disaster from day one …" Also, she added, she may have later said she had always hated her marriage, "in retaliation to Dan saying the marriage had been a disaster since April 12, 1969, in the divorce trial."

  "Had you threatened Mr. Broderick with a divorce on many occasions early on in your marriage?" Wells asked.

  "… Occasionally, yes," Betty said, shrugging helplessly. "If it was a big fight or something ... I guess so."

  Wells then marched her through everything from throwing ketchup bottles to tossing stereos. And what about the Brodericks' 1983 trip to Europe with Judge Milliken and his wife, Jeannie? That was the year Betty suspected that Linda Kolkena was now a part of her marriage, and Wells had obviously been briefed by the Millikens that it was a testy vacation.

  "What was your treatment of him like during that trip?" demanded Wells.

  Betty looked confused. "I don't know what you're referring to," she said.

  Wells rose to full height, removed her spectacles, and, in yet another classic moment of this murder trial, demanded to know: "Were you nice to him?"

  By now, nobody in this little courtroom would have been surprised if Wells next had asked: "And isn't
it true that you also wore hair rollers and icky, gooey face creams to bed with Dan Broderick every single night?"

  "Do you take any responsibility for any of the problems that occurred during the marriage?" Wells demanded.

  Betty looked at Wells levelly. "Yeah," she said, pointedly. "I take fifty percent."

  Wells turned to the matter of Betty's alleged black eye. Betty stiffened visibly. She didn't remember when it happened, she said vaguely. Maybe a few days before the Blackstone Ball. "I don't remember. It was with his elbow ... It wasn't any big deal. I didn't go to a hospital or anything … there was no blood …" But, she added firmly, "I was always afraid of him, and so were the children."

  But when had this black eye occurred? Wells persisted.

  Betty looked ready to either scream or cry. "I don't know," she stammered. "Sometime in 1987?"

  "After the separation?" asked Wells, incredulous.

  "No, no," said Betty, as close to crumbling under pressure as she would get in this trial. "I don't know. I don't know!" Whether she was lying, or just embarrassed, her misery was real. She did not want the matter of a black eye to be an issue in this trial. But, she knew, Jack Earley did. She was caught between taking her lawyer's advice and preserving her own personal ethic.

  Wells wanted her to retract the black eye altogether. "It wasn't a black eye, was it, Mrs. Broderick? You had been crying because you had a fight before the Blackstone Ball. You had mascara all over your eyes because you had been crying. He did not give you a black eye, did he?"

  Betty's composure was gone. Her eyes practically begged Wells to back off this one topic. "Unless there were major, major injuries, like blood, broken bones, and things," she told Wells softly, "I didn't consider at the time that I had been improperly handled."

  But Kerry Wells, supposed expert in battered women syndrome, would not back off. Whether Betty Broderick was actually a battered woman or not, prevailing wisdom suggests that most battered women hide it in shame. But Wells now taunted Betty with her silence. If Betty had been physically battered, why hadn't she discussed it before now? If Dan gave her a black eye, why didn't she write about it in her book? Why had she even denied it? "In fact, you have told reporters that he never touched you, haven't you?" demanded Wells.

  Betty finally snapped. "That's not true, is it?" she said sarcastically. "We have five children. He obviously touched me." Reporters stirred happily. Hell with murder. The catfight was heating up.

  Wells moved on. What about this alleged suicide try in 1983? Betty had slit her wrists and taken every pill in the house? Was that correct? Yes, said Betty, meekly. "We didn't have many pills, but, yes." Yet she had not seen a doctor later? No. "Dan was a doctor. He taped them up."

  And did she have scars from that incident? inquired Wells politely. If so, "Can I see?"

  What followed, in a murder trial replete with classically absurd scenes, was yet another one.

  Wells marched to the witness stand. Betty showed her wrists. "They're there and there and there," she told Wells, helpfully pointing them out. "This one is better," she explained, pointing to her left wrist, "because I'm right-handed."

  Wells peered. Then, having finished her inspection, she violated all the rules: "I'm sorry, Your Honor," she told Whelan. "For the record, I don't see what the witness is showing, but I won't pursue it."

  Earley leapt to his feet, yelping at the impropriety of Wells's editorializing. Whelan only shrugged. If Earley wanted his client to show the jury her wrists so they could search for scars themselves, that was fine with him.

  It was fine with Betty, too. She popped out of her chair, eager as a child at last liberated from some formal, adult dinner table, and began walking down the row of jurors, holding out her wrists for them to see, chitchatting confidentially every step of the way.

  "I used a man's razor," she told Southwick and others in the front row. "I'm right-handed, I cut myself three times here. I'll show you … That is a scar," she said, as she made her way down the jury box. "That is another scar: that would be the third one on that hand. On this hand ..."

  Wells finally howled in objection. Whelan almost smiled. "Don't talk to the jury, Mrs. Broderick. Just point it out with your finger."

  Betty smiled apologetically and shut up. By then she had gotten to the last juror anyway. She scampered back to the witness stand, looking completely pleased to have at last been permitted to make some small personal contact with these twelve silent strangers. Whether they saw scars or not was anybody's guess. They remained, as always, inscrutable.

  Not that it mattered. All this little sideshow added up to was more work for Jack Earley, who was now obliged to hunt up a cosmetic surgeon, who would later testify in a five-minute appearance that there were in fact discernible scars—at least on Betty Broderick's left wrist.

  Compounding the absurdity of the suicide scars scenario, Kerry Wells wanted to have it both ways. During the first trial, she wanted there to be no scars on Betty's wrists, no serious suicide attempt. But she had revised her thinking before the second trial: One reason Dan Broderick had been obliged to lie about his affair with Linda for so long, she then argued, was because "He was afraid she would kill herself—after all, she'd tried it once."

  And why had the supposedly perfect mother dumped her children on their father after he moved out? Wells asked next. Like so many other questions, it was one Betty could have answered with honesty to her own benefit—had she not been so saddled with guilt over her own failure to do the picture-perfect thing.

  And so she waffled, she evaded, she never really answered. Her shame was transparent. She burbled on about her father's birthday party, and the rats. But she never told the whole truth. Instead, she said, again, "I really don't remember a whole bunch of this stuff from way back there …"

  Eloise Duffield puckered, so did even the younger jurors. Earley burrowed into his papers, waiting for this squall to pass. He had, of course, begged Betty just to be honest—"But she just can't admit that she used her kids."

  Typically, Wells couldn't drop the topic while she was ahead.

  "Do you remember telling people that you dumped your kids off at Dan Broderick's house because if you weren't going to be Mrs. Dan Broderick, you weren't going to take care of the kids?" she demanded.

  Yeah, said Betty. She remembered that. Then, in a gush of spontaneity, in a voice of anger and pain: "I did want him to be more involved with the children," she said, fighting tears. "He was thinking of needing 'his space,' having his second childhood, wanting to be alone ... he had left me with the kids … with the rats and everything. He didn't offer any help. I was overwhelmed. I wanted help. I wanted him to know how hard it was, how difficult, how time-consuming it was to do the job I was doing with those kids. I wanted him to get involved!"

  It was a touching speech. Wells was untouched.

  "You wanted to punish him, didn't you?" she accused. "Make his life miserable by dumping four kids in an empty home, full-time?"

  "If that's what you want to say," said Betty tiredly.

  Earley finally rose to his client's defense. "If bringing your kids to their father is 'dumping them,'" he objected, "that is [Wells's] definition. Calling that house or Dan Broderick a 'dump site' is argumentative." Sustained.

  So far, apart from the theater, not much new had emerged from the rhetoric of the day. Wells did, however, stumble over one somewhat surprising little item. For a year prior to her trial, Betty had always insisted that she never once exchanged a single word with Linda Kolkena. But now, in court, that turned out to be untrue.

  "Didn't you have a confrontation with Linda once when you were in the [Cypress] house? You went in the house, and you were not supposed to be there, and you were yelling at her and scared her?" asked Wells.

  "I let her in the house in 1986," Betty agreed. But she denied any confrontation. "I said, ‘I just wanted to see who you were.' But I don't know that that scared her." Wells pressed. Hadn't Betty used "vulgar language, obscene w
ords at that time?"

  As always, Betty pleaded memory lapse. "It was a very long time ago."

  Asked about the encounter later, Betty only laughed it off, over the jail phone. "It was a two-minute exchange. The little cunt was so inconsequential, I just forgot about it."

  Wells had so far danced around the legal mire. But now, it was time to step directly into the swamps, to confront head-on Jack Earley's argument that Betty Broderick had been driven to kill in large part by five years of "litigious assault" unleashed upon her, a common housewife, by her "gladiator" husband.

  Earley's own charts showed more than thirty legal filings, nearly half of them for contempts alone. But Wells's point of view was always uncomplicated: No matter how many contempts had been filed, Betty had been convicted of contempt only four times and jailed only once—thanks to Dan Broderick's tolerance.

  Betty's position, by contrast, was equally implacable: All of those contempts were strictly designed to delay the divorce proceedings while Dan accumulated ever more Epsteins, at the same time she was obliged to spend thousands in attorney fees to defend herself against them.

  Wells began by stating that Betty had been convicted only four times.

  What was she saying? asked Betty, incredulous. She was cited countless times.

  "Well, that may be true," said Wells. "I'm talking about contempt actions now, when the notice was filed for contempt, and you actually had a hearing about it. There were only four of those, right?"

  "Wrong," said Betty.

  "How many are you saying there were?" asked Wells.

  "A lot more!" said Betty. "Twentyish," at least. "I would go down to court on contempt actions, we would show up in the courtroom, there would be Judge Joseph; but Dan wouldn't show up … Just drop it, change it, or move it."

  "You were held in contempt at that first hearing, is that not true?" Wells asked.

  "Which hearing …?"

  "April 2, 1987."

  "Concerning what, is what I need."