A woman scorned
He was one of the most prominent attorneys in California and she was a devoted spouse. That is, until her husband no longer wanted her.
Betty Broderick was born Elizabeth Anne Bisceglia on 7 November 1947. She had a middle class upbringing in Eastchester, New York, a quiet little town some 18 miles (30 kilometres) north of Manhattan. Her childhood was uneventful. It centred around a stable home life and the local Catholic church. After graduating from high school, Betty attended the College of Mount Saint Vincent, a Catholic liberal arts college. At that time it was devoted exclusively to the education of women.
Betty was 17 when she met Daniel T. Broderick III, her future husband, during a football game at the University of Notre Dame. It was the first out-of-town trip that Betty’s parents had permitted her to take and it proved to be quite eventful. She fell immediately for the tall, lanky medical student. Betty and Dan dated for three years and in that time she often visited Dan’s large Irish-American family in Pittsburgh. Dan spent a great deal of time on the road during the couple’s courtship. He constantly travelled between Cornell Medical School, where he was completing his studies, and Betty’s Eastchester home.
On 12 April 1969, Betty and Dan were married. The elaborate ceremony was organized by the bride’s mother, after which the newlyweds honeymooned in the Caribbean. When they returned from honeymoon they set up home together in New York. It was the first time Betty had ever lived outside her parents’ house. She became pregnant early in the marriage – during the honeymoon, in fact. In January of 1970, she gave birth to a daughter, Kimberly. Four more children followed in quick succession, including a baby boy who lived for just four days.
For many years, the couple lived a very modest lifestyle, which was a reflection of their day-to-day financial challenges. Although Dan completed his medical degree in 1970, he decided that he did not want to further his medical training. Instead, the young father enrolled in Harvard Law School, which enabled him to become an attorney. Betty worked hard to maintain the home throughout Dan’s studies. As well as caring for the children, she brought in as much money as she could by selling Avon and Tupperware products on door to door. When Dan graduated in 1973, the family moved to San Diego. Dan used his knowledge of medicine to good effect by becoming a specialist in the field of medical malpractice. Courted by several law firms, he accepted a position as a junior partner with the firm Cary, Gray. Gradually, the Brodericks left their modest lifestyle behind. The couple were able to buy their first home, a spacious house in the city’s Coral Reef neighbourhood.
While Dan was not yet making great amounts of money, it was all a vast improvement on the couple’s previous lifestyle. However, he was devoting a considerable portion of the increased family income to his wardrobe and evenings out on the town with his fellow attorneys – necessary expenses, he explained, if one wanted to get ahead. Meanwhile, Betty was still working very hard. She had moved on from selling cosmetics and kitchenware to teaching religious classes at a local Catholic school. Then in 1979 she earned her real estate licence, an accomplishment that came hot on the heels of Dan’s departure from Cary, Gray. His aim was to create a law practice of his own – and he succeeded. Before long he was earning considerable sums of money.
Having finally achieved the status he had been seeking, Dan all but ended the late night outings with the other attorneys. There were still late nights, but these were limited to working at his office. The money began to accumulate. A maid was hired for the Broderick house and family vacations were grander and more frequent. However, as before, Dan seemed to want to spend most of his money on his own vanity. His expensive wardrobe was supplemented by contact lenses and a nose job.
The other woman
Dan might have cut down on his socializing with other lawyers, but it was through another law office that he met a beautiful, blond 21-year-old receptionist named Linda Kolkena. Although she was unable to type, and had nothing more than a high school education, Linda was hired by Dan as his personal assistant. It all looked quite suspicious to Betty but she held her tongue. She did not want to rock the marital boat when she had no proof that anything was going on. Meanwhile, Dan displayed little caution with regard to Linda. While on a trip with Betty to New York, the attorney was caught making a telephone call to her. And when the Brodericks were off on a family vacation to England, Dan had flowers wired to her.
The time finally came when Betty could no longer fool herself about what she was witnessing. She threw caution to the wind and telephoned one of Dan’s female employees to ask if anything was going on between her husband and Linda. But she had chosen the wrong person. Not wanting to get involved, the woman denied any knowledge of what had become a very obvious affair. The employee would later tell Dan about the phone call. She was then summarily dismissed. Having been told that there was nothing going on, Betty’s next move was to seek therapy. If her suspicions were unfounded, she thought, she must be suffering from some form of paranoia.
Betty’s visits to the therapist continued until 22 November 1983, the date of Dan’s 39th birthday. Carrying a dozen red roses and a bottle of champagne, she showed up unannounced at her husband’s workplace. But what was meant as a pleasant surprise turned into one of the worst events of Betty’s life. Dan was not at the office, though there were signs that he had been there earlier in the day. His desk was covered in cake crumbs and there were balloons and empty wine bottles strewn around the room. Linda was not at the office either. Dan’s secretary told Betty that she had no idea where her husband was or when he would be returning. As she waited, it became clear to Betty that neither her husband nor his personal secretary would be coming back to the office that day.
Seeing red
Eventually, Betty went home. Then, with her children watching, she pulled Dan’s clothes out of his wardrobe and ripped them up. Finally, she made a bonfire of them in the back garden. Even after seeing the destruction, Dan said very little when he got home.
In a calm, seemingly rational, voice he told his wife that she had been imagining things. It was a variation on a speech that he had made on several previous occasions – whenever, in fact, he had been caught doing something suspicious. However, Dan’s words were no longer effective. He had pushed Betty to a point where she could no longer fool herself into believing that her husband was faithful.
Dan continued his pretence for months. He denied all accusations and he played the innocent. It was not until 29 February – that most unusual of days – that he owned up to the affair. He did so out of necessity – he was seeking a legal separation from his wife.
This momentous announcement was not the only thing to disrupt the lives of the Broderick family. Weeks earlier, a crack had been discovered in the foundations of their Coral Reef home. Dan, Betty and the children had been forced to move to nearby La Jolia while the damage was being repaired. When the work was finished it was Dan who returned to the family home: Betty and the children remained at the rental house.
The separated husband immediately set out to create a new life for himself. First of all he redecorated the Coral Reef house. The message was clear – Betty could no longer call the house her own, even though she had done so much to make it into a home. She would, however, still visit it when she picked her children up, or dropped them off. It was during one such visit that Betty began committing ill-advised acts of vengeance. She once took a Boston cream pie from the kitchen that had once been hers and smeared it over Dan’s bed and clothing. In reaction, the attorney took out a restraining order. He wanted to make sure that his estranged wife would no longer be able to set foot on the property. However, it was all in vain. Two days later, the tranquillity of the house was broken when Betty threw a wine bottle through his window.
By this point, it was quite clear that Betty needed the services of a good attorney. Her problem was that Dan was either a friend or an acquaintance of every one of San Diego’s best divorce lawyers. Her first choice, a man named Thomas Ashworth, declined to take the case on, only to represent Dan in the early stages of the proceedings. Betty then looked to Los Angeles, two hours up the Pacific Coast, for a lawyer who would be willing to represent her. The attorney she found, Daniel Jaffe, advised Betty that her aggressive behaviour would count against her. Yet Betty’s vandalism of the Coral Reef house continued. Worse still, Betty had taken to insulting Dan in front of their children and, it seemed, any neighbour within earshot. Despite her lawyer’s advice, Betty’s actions only seemed to become more serious. Things came to something of a head when she learned that Dan and Linda would be out of town. Grasping the opportunity, she broke into the house and smashed yet another window with yet another bottle.
Escalating aggression
By this time Dan had lost patience with Betty. He filed an Order to Show Cause, a document that required Betty to defend every one of her actions against a charge of contempt of court. And the list was getting longer by the day. It included spray painted walls, a smashed answering machine and broken doors. Instead of working towards a just settlement for his client, Betty’s lawyer was forced to spend his time keeping his client out of jail.
Betty’s actions during the Christmas season of 1985 posed yet another challenge. While Dan and Linda were holidaying with the Broderick children, Betty had once again broken into the Coral Reef house. She had ripped open gifts that had been meant for Linda and had smashed a large mirror. The break-in was just one of many factors that convinced Dan to sell the Coral Reef home. Instead, he moved into a pillared mansion in Balboa Park, the most beautiful neighbourhood in San Diego. Despite Betty’s objections, the house in Coral Reef was disposed of. She retaliated by driving her Chevrolet van into the front of Dan’s new home. After the police arrived, Betty was placed in a straightjacket and taken to a local mental hospital, where she spent three days.
Day and night, Betty would leave obscene telephone messages on Dan’s Balboa Park answering machine. They were often overheard by her children.
This is a message to f***head and the bitch. You have one hell of a nerve dumping the kids here on the sidewalk and zooming away without making any attempt to communicate with me about my plans for the weekend. Make me sick, both of you. I have a good mind to dump the kids back on you and drive away. Call me. We have a lot to talk about, asshole. And come pick up your four children that you’re working so hard to have custody of. Congratulations. You can have them.
The trail of destruction continued for years. It led to countless appearances before a number of judges and Betty was twice jailed for contempt of court. Nearly six years elapsed between the separation and the divorce trial. Then on 30 January 1989, after eight days spent in a courtroom, Dan and Betty’s marriage was at long last dissolved. Though Betty had sought custody of the children, this was awarded to Dan. One mental health expert judged her unstable.
After assessing the couple’s financial situation the presiding judge determined that Betty actually owed her husband $750,000, because of the cash advances that he had made during the previous six years. As a result, Betty received a total cash payout of just $30,000 after nearly 20 years of marriage. The divorce ended nothing. Betty’s abuse and vandalism continued into the autumn of 1989. Then, in the early hours of 5 November, one last act brought it all to an end.
After dropping a recently purchased .38 calibre Smith & Wesson into her handbag, Betty left the cramped apartment in which she had been living since the divorce. She then drove to Dan’s home and entered the house by using a key that she had stolen from one of her daughters several months earlier. It did not take long to find the master bedroom. Dan and Linda, newly married, were asleep when Betty fired the first shot. Linda flinched, but made no sound. She was then shot a second time. Dan awoke to see his ex-wife standing before him with a gun in her hand. When he tried to get out of bed, the attorney was shot in the back. He began coughing blood, which made him gradually choke to death. That afternoon, accompanied by an attorney, Betty surrendered herself to the San Diego police.
Her trial began on 22 October 1990, a little less than a year after the murders. It was a media sensation. Betty’s counsel attempted to paint her as a woman who had simply snapped after being forced to endure a barrage of legal documents from her ex-husband. However, this line of defence became invalid in the face of the accused woman’s answering machine messages, together with some very troubling testimony from witnesses. The dead man’s housekeeper told the court that Betty had once stated that she would ‘put four bullets in Dan’s head, one for each of his children’. When Betty’s children took the stand her defence was all but demolished. Her daughters – including Kimberly, who had been estranged from her father – testified that their mother had repeatedly stated her desire to kill Dan.
Needless to say, Betty’s own account was somewhat different. The jury heard a story of her ex-husband’s deceit and betrayal. While she remembered very little about the morning of the murder, she did recall a time when she had considered putting the gun to her own head in front of Dan and his new wife. But she had not proceeded with that plan of action, of course. All she could remember about what had actually taken place was contained within two brief sentences: ‘I pushed the door open. They moved, I moved, and it was over.’ After four days’ deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom. It had been unable to reach a verdict.
In October 1991 Betty returned to court for her second trial. It went much the same way as the first – with one dramatic difference. In the middle of the trial Betty’s lawyer suggested that Dan might have tried to arrange for Betty’s murder at some point. Any discussion of this theory was squashed by the court. At that point the defence appeared to lose direction.
Betty was eventually found guilty of murder in the second degree. She received two consecutive sentences of 15 years to life for the murders of Dan and Linda. In 2010 she was denied parole.
Betty Broderick during her trial.