Chapter 1 - Betty Broderick

Posted by AngelEowyn April 20, 2023

Chapter 1 - Betty Broderick

SYNOPSIS

Betty Anne Broderick was convicted of murdering her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, and his second wife, Linda Broderick, on November 5, 1989. At a second trial that began on December 11, 1991, she was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and later sentenced to 32-years-to-life in prison. The case received extensive media attention. Several books were written on the Broderick case, a TV movie was televised in two parts In 2020, and just recently, an 8-episode miniseries was produced and aired on Netflix. It was this series that spurred me onto covering this one first.

BACKGROUND

Betty Broderick was born on November 7, 1947 and grew up in Bronxville, New York. She was the third of six children born to devout Roman Catholic parents Marita and Frank Bisceglia who owned a successful plastering business with relatives. Her mother was Irish American and her father was Italian American. The Bisceglias were strict parents, and a lot was expected of all their children. As Broderick later recalled, she was trained to be a housewife since the day she was born, or as she recalled: "Go to Catholic schools, be careful with dating until you find a Catholic man, support him while he works, be blessed in your later years with beautiful grandchildren". And oh, how we will see that THAT didn’t quite work out as planned. Broderick graduated from the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, where she earned a degree in early childhood education through an accelerated program. Her credits also earned her a minor in English.

In 1965, she met her future husband, Dan Broderick, at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Dan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest son of a very large Irish Catholic family. The couple married on April 12, 1969 at the Immaculate Conception Church in Tuckahoe, New York. Betty returned from the honeymoon pregnant with their first child, daughter Kim, who was born in 1970. She gave birth to four more children: daughter Lee (1971), sons Daniel (1976) and Rhett (1979), and an unnamed boy, who died four days after birth.

After Kim's birth, Dan completed his M.D. degree. He then announced his intention to combine his medical expertise with a J.D. degree and enrolled at Harvard Law School. Betty was the main provider for the family while Dan attended law school with the help of a student loan. Dan was quickly hired by a law firm in San Diego, California, and moved his family to the San Diego community of La Jolla (pronounced: La-HOY-a). Betty continued working part-time, often selling Tupperware or Avon products while raising the children.

THE DIVORCE

In the fall of 1982, Dan hired 21-year-old Dutch American Linda Kolkena, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant, to be his legal assistant. As early as October 1983, Betty suspected that Dan was having an affair with Kolkena, but Dan denied it. Against Betty's wishes, Dan moved out in February 1985 and soon after filed for divorce sparking five years of battles so violent that Broderick vs. Broderick became known as the worst divorce case in San Diego County. He eventually took custody of their children after Betty left the children on his doorstep one by one. Betty claimed that Dan confessed he had in fact been having an affair with Kolkena.

By this time, Dan had become a prominent local lawyer, serving as the president of the San Diego Bar Association. Betty claimed that Dan made it extremely difficult for her to find a lawyer willing to represent her in the divorce, which put her at a distinct disadvantage. Betty also believed that Dan used his legal influence to win sole custody of their children, sell their house against her wishes and cheat her out of her rightful share of his income.

The divorce was finalised in 1989, four years after Dan filed the petition. Betty’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. She left hundreds of profane messages on Dan's answering machine, and ignored numerous restraining orders that forbade her from setting foot on Dan's property. She vandalised his new home, and even drove her car into his front door despite the fact that their children were inside the house at the time.

On April 22, 1989, Dan and Kolkena were married. Kolkena had been concerned about Betty's behaviour and even urged Dan to wear a bulletproof vest to their wedding. However, Betty did not appear and the wedding proceeded without incident. After the wedding, Betty claimed that Kolkena taunted her by mailing her facial cream and slimming treatment ads.

Those who knew Daniel and Betty Broderick and were familiar with the hurt caused by their protracted divorce case indicated that it was often feared that their differences would end as Daniel Broderick had once predicted: “It’s not going to end until one of us is gone.” “This is not something that apparently happened overnight,” said Robert W. Harrison, a defence attorney who knew all three of the Brodericks.

Friends of Betty Broderick described her as a woman scorned. After 16 years of marriage to Daniel, a pillar in the San Diego’s legal and social community, she felt suddenly cast aside when their marriage unravelled. Because of her catholic upbringing, Betty, then 41, suddenly worried that she would no longer fit into what one friend called “the prim and proper Junior League type.”

Further frustrating to Betty was the fact that her ex-husband, through his command of the law and influence in local legal circles, was able to obtain custody of their four children and court orders sealing their divorce records. Although the divorce case is closed to the public, the bitterness it engendered made headlines.

The divorce went to trial in December, 1988, four years after the case was first filed. In the midst of the legal proceedings, Daniel Broderick also obtained protective orders aimed at keeping Betty away from his new family. According to several sources, Betty ignored some of those orders and was jailed for several days and fined thousands of dollars.

MURDERS

Eight months after buying a revolver and seven months after Dan and Linda were married, Betty Broderick drove to Dan's house in the Marston Hills neighbourhood near Balboa Park in San Diego. Betty used a key she had taken from her daughter Lee to enter the house while the couple slept, whereupon she shot and killed them. The murders occurred at 5:30 a.m. on November 5, 1989—two days before Betty's 42nd birthday. Two bullets hit Linda in the head and chest, killing her instantly; one bullet hit Dan in the chest as he apparently was reaching for the phone; one bullet hit the wall, and one bullet hit a nightstand. Dan was 17 days shy of his 45th birthday; Linda was 28.

Later in the day, authorities found Betty’s car in Pacific Beach. Inside, they found an empty .38-calibre, five-shot revolver. Police Lieutenant Gary Learn said that Linda Broderick was found lying on her stomach in the bed, dressed in her pyjamas and that Daniel Broderick, sleeping in his boxer shorts, was found lying on the floor, and the lieutenant said it was possible that the force of the blast knocked his body off the bed. Police confirmed that Betty often entered the house unannounced, sometimes to visit two of her four children still being raised by Daniel.

Evidence was presented at her trial that Betty had removed a phone from Dan Broderick's bedroom so that he could not call for help. Medical evidence indicated that Dan had not died right away, and Betty claimed that she had spoken to him after she had shot him which she then later in court recanted saying she could not recall if he had said anything.

The examination of Dan’s corpse revealed another important detail: a healthy liver. In the months after the murders, Betty had bolstered her description of Dan’s “cruel” side with the claim that he suffered from chronic alcoholism. Now, however, his own body seemed to tell a different story.

CONFESSION

After contacting her daughter, Lee, and Lee's boyfriend, Betty turned herself in to police, never denying that she had pulled the trigger five times, and was held in the County Jail at Las Colinas. Betty's explanation at both trials was that she never planned to kill Dan and Linda and that her crime was not premeditated - which was the basis of the trial. Was there intent or not?

Betty described the slayings as a “desperate act of self-defence” against a man who wanted to control her totally. “I had just bought about $400 worth of groceries on Saturday,” she said. “I bought fresh veal and swordfish and all this wonderful stuff. Do you think I knew? I had no idea I was going to do this at all. I didn’t know I was doing it.” But late Saturday night, Betty had trouble sleeping. So, Betty said, she got dressed, got in her car and started driving. “When I left my house, I didn’t know where I was going,” she said. “Sometimes I would go down to the 7-Eleven at La Jolla Shores and get a half chocolate-half coffee and go down and walk on the beach. I thought maybe I would do that. But then I didn’t. I went to his house.” “It always makes me mad when people call them the victims. Me and my kids were the victims. There are two dead people, but there were five victims,” she said, referring to herself and her four children.

THE TRIALS

TRIAL 1

Criminal Defence Attorney Jack Early represented Broderick at trial. Kerry Wells prosecuted for the State of California. Judge Thomas Whelan presided.

With two jurors seeking a manslaughter conviction and 10 pressing for murder, the first trial of Betty Broderick ended abruptly with a hung jury and no verdict. In court, jurors did not disclose the details of the deadlock. But one juror who asked not to be identified said that two of the people on the panel were seeking a manslaughter conviction, while 10 others pressed for murder. The voting started off at 7 to 5 in favor of murder. By Monday, the count had reached 10 to 2, he said, and the panel stuck there. The sticking point was over the issue of “malice,” or whether Betty had the premeditated intent to kill.

Testifying in her own defense, she contended at the trial that she did not have the premeditation the law requires for first-degree murder because she intended only to confront him and to kill herself.

Jurors had five options in the case:

First-degree murder (the murder was premeditated or considered beforehand)
Second-degree murder (lacks deliberation)
Voluntary manslaughter (a killing was committed after a sudden provocation)
Involuntary manslaughter, (describes a killing that occurs while doing something else without due caution)
not guilty on any charges.

After passing a note saying that the jury was “unable to reach a unanimous decision,” foreman Lucinda L. Swann, 26, of San Diego, a county air pollution inspector, told Whelan, the judge residing, in court that the panel could not decide whether the case was about murder or manslaughter. Whelan sent the panel back for more talks but, 29 minutes later, the jury returned, saying that it was unable to break the deadlock and that further talks were unlikely to help.

Forensic psychiatrist and criminologist Dr. Park Dietz, for the prosecution, used the analysis of Dr. Melvin Goldzband, who previously worked on the case for the prosecution. Dietz said Broderick has histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders. Goldzband had likewise diagnosed Broderick as "severely narcissistic" and "histrionic," and clinical psychologist Katherine DiFrancesca, testifying for the defense, concluded Broderick was "histrionic" with "narcissistic features".
A mistrial was declared by Judge Thomas J. Whelan.

TRIAL 2

The second time around and a year after the first trial, San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas J. Whelan did not allow evidence presented the first time, particularly testimony from a Marin County marriage counsellor, Daniel J. Sonkin, that Betty Broderick had been emotionally and physically battered by Daniel Broderick. I hate to say this but it seems to me like they just shifted the goal posts. The first trial didn’t work out, so let’s change the rules a bit to steer this in the direction that we want.

After reflecting on testimony at the first trial, the judge said before sentencing Betty Broderick last Friday that he believed Sonkin’s testimony did not prove she had been emotionally or physically abused. Meanwhile, Betty Broderick said, the prosecutor in the case was exceptionally aggressive at the second trial. Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells’ vigorous prosecution, which included a stream of objections to evidence offered by the defence, threw off Betty Broderick’s lawyer Jack Earley, she said. This was critical, Betty said, during the week she testified in her own defence. “Every time I opened my mouth, Wells objected,” Broderick said. “She had a long, long list that I couldn’t mention in this trial as irrelevant to the situation. And she was so disruptive with her objecting, Jack lost his train of thought. He skipped over a whole bunch of questions when he lost his train of thought. And if he didn’t ask, I couldn’t answer.” Earley, a Newport Beach lawyer, said there were ample examples of “relevant” material that Whelan disallowed.

In opening arguments, Wells portrayed Broderick as a woman possessed by hate and the need for revenge, and as a killer who most deeply resented, not her divorce from a prominent attorney, but the fact that her days as a La Jolla socialite were over. All of this testimony came from her children who had witnessed these events. Their marriage was not problem free from the very beginning with lots of threats of divorce. Betty would get angry when he went drinking with work colleagues instead of coming home and would lock him out of the house, sometimes wedging his favourite ski in the door so that he would break it when he opened the door, she would constantly throw things at him when she was mad, or break things that she knew were important to him and according to her daughter, she was known to dig her fingernails into his arms and scratch him. In public, she criticised him a lot.

Broderick’s defence attorney, Earley, characterised Daniel Broderick as a man with a drinking problem, one with two convictions for driving under the influence, and who once, with his wife at home with a newborn baby, drove home drunk with his three other children in the car.

After the verdicts came in, Betty Broderick said, her attention turned to sentencing. The sensible thing, she said, would have been for Whelan to have ordered her sentences to run concurrently. Though two people were killed, it all happened “so close in time” as to be “one incident of aberrant behavior” justifying concurrent terms, Betty Broderick said.

“It was so fast the gun never moved,” Betty Broderick said. “The fact that the bullet went other places, well, a gun kicks around. But it never moved. It’s not like I shot here and I shot over there. It was never like that.” If the sentences had run concurrently, producing a term of 17 years to life, Betty Broderick would have been eligible for parole within 10 years of sentencing. But Whelan imposed consecutive terms--saying two people died--meaning Betty Broderick would not be eligible for parole for at least 18 years.

Asked at the hearing why she then didn't commit suicide, as she said she'd planned to, Broderick responded, "I didn't have any bullets." Other facts seemed to have been lost in the drama. Broderick had bought the gun a month before her husband remarried. She practised shooting. She made threats. And, she took her daughter's key to sneak into a house that, under a restraining order, she was forbidden to enter, according to testimony.

Broderick long suspected her husband was having an affair, which she confirmed when she tried to surprise him at the office on his birthday and learned he'd spent much of the day with his legal assistant. In a rage, she threw his clothes into the yard, doused them in gasoline and set them ablaze. She said Dan Broderick abused her and then used his legal connections to crush her as their marriage broke up.

"The family hates these lies because Dan was about as honourable and wonderful a guy as you would want to meet," said his brother Larry. "There are hundreds of people out there who feel the same way about him. All he wanted to do was get away from this woman."

By her own admission, Betty’s language was becoming more and more crude. She chose obscene nicknames for Dan and Linda, whom he was openly seeing, and used them in frequent messages on his answering machine. So Dan began to withhold $100 for every obscene word she used, $250 for each time she set foot on his property, $500 for every entry into his house and $1,000 for every time she took one of the children without his permission. In one month, Betty claims, Dan fined her so many times that her allowance totaled “minus $1,300.” A month later, a judge ordered Dan to pay Betty $12,500 a month--a sum that was later increased to $16,100 a month.

Betty Broderick's diaries were read in court, and Dan's answering machine tapes were played -- including one in which their son pleaded with his mother to stop using "bad words" about his father. The couple's oldest daughter, Kimberly, testified that her mother told her she hated the girl's father and wished the children had never been born. She said he used a little-known legal clause to sell her house without her signature.

Mental health experts for the defence said Broderick was depressed; prosecution experts said she was a narcissist. Broderick's retrial, among the first cases carried on Court TV, resulted in guilty verdicts on two counts of second-degree murder. It was a compromise verdict because jurors couldn't agree that the killings were premeditated. In several media interviews after the trials, Broderick continued to portray herself as the victim.

Kim Broderick, 21, the oldest daughter of Daniel and Betty, testified that her mother had shown violent tendencies for years and had talked openly and often about killing her ex-husband and his new wife. Her sister, Lee, 20, testified that Daniel cut her out of his will after learning of her drug use.

Brad Wright, Broderick’s boyfriend after the divorce, said that Broderick has been largely misrepresented by the local media. “She was not a socialite,” Wright said. “She was just a housewife with four kids trying to settle a divorce, as she has told me. The media keep repeating that she was a socialite.

VERDICT

Twenty-five months and two trials after the murder, she was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder. She was also convicted of two counts of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Jury foreman George Lawrence McAlister said several members of this panel, including himself, were leaning toward a verdict of first-degree murder and several others toward a manslaughter conviction, and that what resulted was a decision “somewhere in the middle.” Much of that decision was based on Broderick’s own description of the killings, McAlister said, which the jury asked to have reread during deliberations. “Her reactions weren’t something a normal, reasonable person would do,” he said. “It became a question of, ‘How did Betty Broderick perceive the world?’ ” Jurors began deliberating Thursday afternoon and asked Monday to review Broderick’s description of the killings--98 pages of testimony.

As the two trials unfolded, Broderick told and retold a story--rebutted by Daniel Broderick’s friends and family--of emotional terrorism at the hands of an influential, cunning ex-husband. Her story touched many of the jurors, foreman McAlister said. Throughout the deliberations, he said, “we thought we could have a hung jury.” “We all had some sympathy for her. We felt it was a tremendous tragedy,” he told reporters after the verdict was read. “But we saw so much aberrant behaviour.”

Whelan sentenced Broderick to two identical terms of 15 years to life. State law called for him to add an additional two years because she used a gun. He called the case a “tragedy from start to finish.” But, he said, Broderick showed a “high degree of callousness” by shooting the couple, then pulling a phone out of Daniel Broderick’s reach as he lay gurgling in his own blood.

The only time Broderick looked up during the two-hour hearing was when the prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, called her a “very disturbed woman.” Broderick put the stack of papers aside, looked to her left at Wells, and smiled. Then she went back to the stack. Wells, who had asked Whelan for the maximum term, was obviously pleased when she heard him announce the sentence. “Yeah!” she exclaimed softly.

A parole board will determine whether she actually remains in prison past then. If the sentences had run concurrently--that is, a term of 17 years to life--Broderick would still have had to serve two-thirds, about 10 years, before she was eligible for parole. Earley asked Whelan to send Broderick to the California Institute for Women at Frontera, in Riverside County, the state’s maximum-security prison, saying it is the closest to San Diego. Whelan said he will recommend that she go there, but the final decision is up to prison authorities. Until court officials pulled together the necessary prison papers, Broderick remained at the Las Colinas Jail in Santee. She had been held there since she gave herself up.

APPEAL

Defence attorney Earley said that a key aspect of his appeal will be his allegation that Daniel Broderick once solicited a hit man to kill his estranged wife. Judge Whelan rejected appeals to enter evidence on those allegations. “In 1984 and 1985, he talked to someone in his office about what it would cost to have her killed,” Earley said, “what guarantees he would have that it would not get back to him and how it would be done. He told a number of people it wouldn’t be over until one of them was gone.”

DISTRESS SUIT

A lawsuit filed by Betty Broderick, stemming from an altercation with jail deputies that was videotaped and later shown on television, was dismissed. San Diego County Superior Court Judge J. Richard Haden dismissed Broderick’s lawsuit, which was filed against attorney James Cunningham and sheriff’s Deputy Michele St. Clair. Haden ruled that the lawsuit lacked merit. Haden dismissed a similar lawsuit against the county last week.

Haden said that Broderick, who acted as her own attorney, failed to show how release of the videotape caused her to suffer embarrassment and emotional distress. Broderick, 45, had sued both Cunningham and St. Clair for allegedly releasing the videotape.

The videotape showed Broderick dressed in a sweatshirt and underwear and struggling with deputies who were trying to remove her from a top bunk at the Las Colinas Women’s Jail. The Sept. 1, 1991, jail altercation occurred while Broderick was awaiting a second trial.

The tape released by Cunningham was an edited version of a videotape shot by sheriff’s deputies and aired on various television news programs and tabloid shows. He passed out copies of the tape at a Sept. 18, 1991, press conference that he called at the downtown County Courthouse.

Cunningham is representing St. Clair, who sued Broderick for injuries allegedly suffered in the jail altercation. St. Clair, 25, is asking for $25,000 in damages for a strained shoulder that she allegedly suffered in the fight with Broderick. Jail officials said the scuffle began when Broderick kicked one deputy and pulled St. Clair’s arm when deputies were trying to remove her from her cell. Deputies were trying to transfer her to an isolation cell as punishment for grabbing a jailer’s keys to free herself from handcuffs.

A sheriff’s spokesman said at the time that videotaping inmates was routine in violent incidents. Jail officials at Las Colinas released the video to Cunningham when he subpoenaed it as evidence in a worker’s compensation claim he filed on behalf of St. Clair. Sheriff Jim Roache later criticised Cunningham’s decision to release the video as “inappropriate and unprofessional.” Roache also denied charges by Broderick’s defence attorney at her second trial that sheriff’s officials and the prosecution were involved in a conspiracy to deprive Broderick of a fair trial.

PAROLE HEARINGS

The California parole board denied Broderick parole in 2010 after a 5-hour hearing in which she continued to blame her actions on her husband's extramarital affair and their bitter divorce. "I allowed the voices in my head to completely take over," Broderick told the parole board. "I took the lives of two wonderful people who were loved by many." Yet when pressed for details on her actions, Broderick repeated what she had said during her trials: "Linda came at me and the gun went off." "She was totally not remorseful, didn't even try," said Richard Sachs, a San Diego prosecutor who handles so-called "lifer hearings."

The hearing featured emotional testimony from Broderick, her children and Kolkena family members. Broderick’s children were divided: Two wanted her released; two did not.

The parole commissioners said Broderick showed no repentance for the murders. “Your heart is still bitter, and you are still angry,” said Board of Prison Terms Commissioner Robert Doyle. “You show no significant progress in evolving. You are still back 20 years ago in that same mode.” The California Institute for Women heard from 10 members of the Kolkena and Broderick families as well as Broderick, who gave a lengthy statement. She denied, as she had at her two trials, intending to kill the couple but said she had violent thoughts as she went to the home. “I had one choice: to shoot them or myself,” Broderick said she recalled thinking.

One of her children, Kathy Lee Broderick, said she missed her father but told the board that her mother could come and live with her. “She should be able to live her later life outside prison walls,” she said.

But Kathy Lee’s brother, Daniel Broderick, said his mother was “hung up on justifying what she did” and should not be let out. “She has never shown remorse. She has never acknowledged the consequences of her actions,” said Mike Neil, a close friend of Dan Broderick and a prominent San Diego lawyer. “If she were released, she would be a menace to society, and I think she is capable of killing again,” he said.

January 4, 2017 was the last parole request. At the end of a daylong hearing, the two-member panel found that Broderick was not suitable for release and denied parole for the longest term possible: 15 years. Broderick could request another hearing sooner than that if she meets certain criteria. Though Broderick at one point expressed remorse, the two-person parole panel all but shut the door on her ever getting out of prison.

THE PUBLIC TORN

Overnight, Betty became a symbol of the rage--and desire for revenge--so familiar to divorcing couples. At one La Jolla cocktail party soon after the killings, a man who attended with his second, younger wife on his arm joked: “I guess this is Be Nice to the Ex-Wife Week.” But many women saw themselves in Betty--a wife who refused to be broken when, at her husband’s whim, she was deprived of family, friends and a way of life. The case divided the community between people who saw her as a remorseless killer and others who saw her as a desperate woman driven to violence after an acrimonious divorce and emotional abuse from Daniel Broderick, a highly successful lawyer.

Soon after her story appeared in print, hundreds of people, most of them women, wrote to Betty and to local newspapers to say that while they didn’t condone murder, they understood the fury that prompted it. “I believe every word Betty says--because I’ve been there,” one woman wrote. “Lawyers and judges simply refuse to protect mothers against this type of legalized emotional terrorism.” Another wrote: “The inequities in court proceedings and financial settlements are . . . rarely believed or understood except by the women who experience them. Isn’t it time we take a good look at our courts and our system of divorce?”

Their divorce was so contentious that it became known as San Diego's worst-ever divorce case. The news made national headlines because, "she claimed she was 'a woman scorned,' divorced three years earlier by her husband, a wealthy attorney, who she said battered her emotionally with relentless legal actions. The prosecution, however, argued that Betty was an obsessive shrew who had terrorized Dan and Linda for years, resulting in his many Legal moves."

Their war of divorce is the epitome of the tragedies encountered when one spouse realises suddenly that his or her happiness has ended while the other desperately clings on to keep the marriage alive, an untouched fairy tale despite reality. It is a landmark case wherein it thrust to the forefront a stark realisation that often in cases of divorce one of the parties, usually the one who controls the money, can win big while the other is lucky to be left with the clothes on their back unrumpled. More so, it raised to the attention of women's divorce-reform groups as well as men's a truism that the divorce laws that currently exist do not adequately protect everyone in every particular situation.

THE MEDIA

Two days before Daniel T. Broderick III was killed, Betty Broderick received legal papers from her ex-husband that “were like hammers at my head,” she said in an interview with The Times. Broderick said those papers were the last in a series of acts of “overt emotional terrorism” by her ex-husband. When asked whether she felt any relief after Daniel and Linda’s deaths, she said, “I don’t know what I feel. I go through periods of peace, but then there’s a day like today, with the lawyer, the psychiatrist, reporters all asking me about the past. . . . I don’t know if my words will be used against me. “Momentarily, I felt like it was over. But now, I’m having to go through it all over again.”

And she continues to describe her actions as self-defence. “The only thing I was doing that morning was making it stop,” she says. “My lawyers hate it, because there’s no law that says I can defend myself against his type of onslaught. He was killing me--he and she were still doing it--in secret.

An article about Broderick's case in the Los Angeles Times Magazine led to the production of a television film called A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story, and then Part 2, Her Final Fury: Betty Broderick, The Last Chapter both in 1992). The murder was also dramatized in the season 4 episode of Deadly Women, titled "Till Death Do Us Part."

Broderick granted numerous television and magazine interviews. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show twice, Hard Copy, 20/20, and Headliners and Legends. At least four books were written about her story. More recently, the second season of the TV series Dirty John features the story of Betty and Dan Broderick from the early years through the homicides which was aired on Netflix.

The Betty Broderick Story on Netflix touches on the effect abuse and manipulation have on relationships and the series shines a light on how patterns of abuse can shape someone's behaviour to the point where she could eventually snap.

Alexandra Cunningham, the Netflix series creator, explains why she chose to cover The Betty Broderick story "I had a lot of friends whose parents have gotten divorced. We're from sort of the same socioeconomic opportunities, and to imagine one of my mom's friends just losing her mind and killing her ex-husband and his new wife was just sort of tabloidy fun. But I didn't have any life experience to try to put myself in that place. My parents were not divorced. It was really just a thing that could have been in the New York Post — that kind of coverage," Cunningham says.

But later, revisiting the case via reporter Bella Stumbo's book Until the Twelfth of Never, she realised she could understand Broderick's mindset a lot more. "I realized that I'm not a teenager anymore. I'm a woman now in her 40s with kids, and with the same sort of opportunities as Betty had. I could put myself into her shoes and feel that panic and desperation — the idea of being abandoned, being lied to, being alone, thinking about what would happen if I found out I had been lied to for years. What would that do to my sense of reality and trust and belief that I was sane?" she says. That realization changed everything. "I also sometimes worry about what I'll do with my anger and what would happen if I just let it fly. Could I put it back in the bottle if I did that? And the answer is probably no, so the story acquired a lot of emotional resonance over the decades, and that's why I felt like I needed to do it now because I had sort of become Betty without the murder."

WHAT NOW?

Now 75, Betty Broderick has been in prison longer than she was Mrs. Daniel Broderick. Her failed bid for parole brought back strong emotions over a case that spawned several books and two made-for-TV movies starring Meredith Baxter, the mom from the hit series "Family Ties." It was the first time she had become eligible for release for the 1989 murders. The Brodericks' four children remain divided over whether she should go free. Dan Broderick's brother, Larry, said Betty Broderick's sob story portraying herself as the victim was a tissue of lies. He told CNN she made up stories about her ex-husband and his new wife during her two trials in the early 1990s. True or not, the story Betty Broderick told was so compelling it took on a life of its own. It apparently did not withstand the test of time as she went before the parole board. Hindsight tends to paint a sharper -- and harsher -- picture.

Broderick is currently serving her sentence at the California Institution for Women , in California. She will not be eligible again until January 2032, at which point she will be 84 years old.

The Betty Broderick trial occurred at a time when gavel-to-gavel TV coverage of such high-profile proceedings was still somewhat novel. It was the first case from San Diego televised live by CourtTV. Then-Superior Court Judge Thomas Whelan, who allowed cameras in, is now a federal judge. Prosecutor Kerry Wells, who tried both cases, is now a Superior Court judge in downtown San Diego. Wells was never comfortable with the publicity, and as a judge she rarely allows cameras into her courtroom.

There is even a petition in change.org from 2020 to set Broderick free. It reached over 2,000 signatures and is now closed. I don’t know what became of it:

In December 2023, next year, she will have actually completed the 32 years in prison.

Was Betty just a narcissist driving her husband into the arms of another woman or did her husband drive her crazy? We know that she killed them. This was never disputed. She confessed to that straightaway. However, what we may never know is what really drove her to do it. Was she telling the truth when she said that he was emotionally tormenting her or is she just a domineering, vengeful, narcissistic woman who couldn’t stand the thought of her ex husband moving on with another woman? Her children have already testified that she was domineering and that she would often be quite cruel with her punishments.

Most of us have gotten to this point at least once in our lives, we have felt this rage but we don’t cross that line. We can never condone murder in any way, but I can’t help but feel that Betty was given the short straw. There are aspects to the trials that I don’t agree with. For example, the way certain evidence was withheld in the 2nd trial - evidence that was relevant in the first trial. So how come it suddenly became irrelevant? Nothing had changed, except the fact that the first trial was declared a mistrial due to a hung jury. And the jury system itself … sometimes I feel that the only way a conclusion is met is to bully members of the jury who are trying to make a stand. This doesn’t really reflect the truth. Another problem I have is the attitude towards Betty’s profanity. She was angry, pissed off. She felt like everything was against her and that her hands were tied. So she expressed that anger. But the courts decided that she was emotionally disturbed. No, I am pissed off and calling you a dick head is what I feel right now. We really should stop invalidating women’s feelings. Calling a woman “emotionally disturbed” just because she is expressing her anger is a form of gas-lighting and we really should stop doing this.

Video 4: https://youtu.be/j22tDaIFOhw

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Deadly Sweet Nothings

Chapter 1 - Betty Broderick