'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (5 page)

The Broderick story is perhaps one of the most overpublicized and discussed cases of betrayal and abandonment. It’s a story that follows the disintegration of a woman spurned and obsessed, and whose final act was one of murder.

Betty was a college student in New York when she met her future husband Dan, a premed student, at a Notre Dame football game. The pair dated for several years, became engaged and married in April 1969. Less than a year later Betty gave birth to the first of her four children, and the couple soon moved to Massachusetts, where Dan would attend Harvard, changing his career focus from medicine to law.

Betty helped support her husband during those early years, taking various jobs day and night to pay the rent and buy the food. In 1973 the young family moved to Los Angeles, and then soon after to San Diego, where Dan took a job as a junior partner with a local law firm. Overwhelmed by the crushing debt of her husband’s student loans, Betty continued to work, teaching religious classes and earning her real estate license, her salary helping to keep the family solvent.

By 1979, following the birth of their fourth child Rhett, Dan had formed his own law firm and was quickly becoming one of the more successful attorneys in southern California. His success eventually led to a seven-figure salary, which allowed Betty to stay at home and fully devote herself to their children. Her hard work, devotion, and support of her husband, she believed, had finally paid off. But despite the appearance of an “idyllic” marriage, all was not well with the Brodericks. While Betty may have thought she and Dan were partners for life, Dan had other ideas. He often worked late into the evening, socializing with other attorneys at local pubs. His affinity for pubs resulted in one explosive confrontation with Betty while on a family vacation, when Dan spent more time in the local bar than with his family.

Dan was thought by many to be cold and distant, and as hard as she tried, Betty felt she could not please him. Friends could easily see changes in her demeanor at the end of the day when it came time for Dan to return home from work. Betty would transform from happy and easygoing to nervous, even afraid.

As Dan’s law practice prospered, his marriage faltered. By 1983, and after fourteen years of marriage to Betty, Dan’s attention was diverted toward another woman. Her name was Linda Kolkena, and Dan first spotted her at a party he attended with Betty. Linda was only twenty-one, but Dan was so smitten he soon hired her as his personal assistant. It wasn’t long after they met that Betty began to suspect something was wrong. She’d catch her husband sneaking away to call Linda on the phone, and he’d even call her during family vacations. During one trip to England, Betty discovered that Dan had sent Linda flowers. While away with the children on a camping trip that summer, Betty could not reach her husband on the phone. Upon her return Betty finally blurted her concerns about the pretty assistant, but Dan denied that anything illicit was going on, calling his wife paranoid and insecure.

After a surprise visit to her husband’s office, Betty finally learned the truth. She arrived unannounced bearing gifts to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday. But Dan was gone, and so was his assistant. They had left for lunch and never returned. Betty walked into Linda’s office and saw a portrait of Dan there. Incensed, and believing that her husband was having an affair with his assistant, Betty drove home and pulled out all of Dan’s expensive, tailor-made suits. She threw them into a pile in the backyard, poured gasoline on them, and set the clothing afire. When Dan returned home Betty confronted him about his assistant, but Dan again denied he was having an affair. It wasn’t long after that confrontation that Dan finally admitted the truth, that indeed he was involved with his assistant and he wanted a separation from Betty.

* * * * *

O
VER
the next several years the Betty Broderick story was one of rejection, violence, verbal abuse, and finally murder. Feeling scorned and unable to accept the loss of her husband and a life she loved and felt she deserved, Betty became more and more erratic. And given Dan’s stature within the legal community and knowledge of the court system, he saw to it that Betty was thwarted at every turn, which added to Betty’s anger and resolve, and to her increasingly bizarre and dangerous behavior.

After announcing his intention to seek a divorce, Dan moved the family into a spacious rented home, claiming repairs were needed at their own home. But when the repairs were completed Dan returned there, alone. Enraged, Betty would visit and vandalize the home. On one occasion she took a chocolate cream pie, which had been baked by Linda as a gift for Dan, and smeared it across Dan’s suits and the very bed she’d once shared with him. On another occasion she threw a wine bottle through a window.

Dan obtained a restraining order against Betty, which infuriated her even more, especially since the separation wasn’t anything she wanted. She certainly didn’t want a divorce and told friends that her difficulties were all caused by her husband. He was the one manipulating their break-up and who had cast her into a rental home and who made
her
appear to be the bad guy while he appeared to be the victim. Her psyche degenerating, Betty struck again during the Christmas season of 1985. With Dan and Linda’s relationship already publicly acknowledged, the couple took Dan’s children away for a holiday vacation. Betty, alone, once again broke into her former home and destroyed holiday gifts left under the tree. Even after moving into a new home, Dan could not rid himself of Betty, who drove her van through Dan’s front door. Betty was taken to a mental hospital and sedated. She was released after three days.

For the next three years, despite numerous restraining orders, Betty continued to harass her estranged husband and his girlfriend, often leaving dozens of profanity-laced messages on his home answering machine. And with each message Dan would withdraw alimony money for every obscene word heard on the tape. He also began to deduct higher amounts, as much as $1,000, for other misbehavior, such as taking the children without advance warning. Even the children, who Betty said she loved more than anything else in the world, became pawns in her continuing battle with her husband.

Betty’s anger had boiled over into obsession and torment by January 1989. Their divorce now final, she was completely crushed by the courts, which awarded custody of the children to Dan and left Betty with only $30,000 in cash. The final blow came three months later, when Dan announced his engagement to Linda.

On November 5, 1989, Betty Broderick awoke before dawn and drove to Dan’s home. She used a key she secretly took from her daughter to let herself inside. She walked upstairs, a .38 caliber revolver in hand, and into Dan’s bedroom, where he and Linda were sleeping.

Betty fired, killing them both.

Her first trial ended in a hung jury. Her second trial, in October 1991, saw Betty convicted on two counts of second-degree murder. She was sentenced to thirty-two years to life and is eligible for parole in 2011.

* * * * *

F
OR
Betty Broderick, it was life imitating art as she appeared to take her fatal marital cues from the movie
Fatal Attraction.
In this movie a married man, played by Michael Douglas, engages in a brief but exciting sexual fling with a colleague, played by Glenn Close. Although the Douglas character initially finds the relationship erotic and exhilarating, he quickly decides to break it off so he won’t ruin his marriage. But his lover refuses to accept this rejection and instead begins relentlessly stalking him, believing she can still win back his love and rejuvenate their “special” relationship. It finally escalates to the point where one evening she breaks into her former lover’s house, holding a large kitchen knife.

Instead of being the obsessed lover, Betty Broderick was the obsessed estranged wife who could not let her husband or her marriage go.

As noted earlier, statistically speaking, women kill at far lower rates than men. But when they do kill it is often due to jealousy and abandonment and the feelings of betrayal caused by rejection. Clara Harris and Betty Broderick are definitely not the first women to be accused of murdering their spouses in a jealous rage.

Betty was a traditional woman of her time who believed in the all-encompassing romantic fantasy, the one where you meet and marry your true love and then live happily ever after, eventually walking into the sunset together. Betty idealized marriage and what it could do for her as a person. Her only goal in life was to become a beloved wife and mother. Unfortunately she married a man who did not share her sentiment or dream, at least not with her.

At the beginning of her marriage she was very much on her way to making her dreams come true, serving as the ideal wife for a fiercely ambitious husband by placing his professional aspirations first, something that many women of her generation did, willingly or not. They supported their husbands’ rise to success, believing one day they would gloriously share in that success. And as long as Betty worked hard alongside her husband and supported his dreams, she could feel safely connected to him. After all, how could Dan leave such a valuable life partner? But like many young romances, the happy ending she had scripted in her mind was not meant to play out in real life the way she wanted it to.

While Betty believed she had found a charming, handsome, and intelligent man in Dan Broderick, he had some narcissistic qualities. People like Dan tend to have a grandiose sense of themselves. They want to be recognized as special, important, and unique. Their preoccupation with unlimited success often helps them to achieve that success. After all, it’s what they already believe to be true about themselves.

Narcissistic people often need excessive praise and admiration and they often find it in socially charming ways. Narcissism and infidelity are often linked. People who marry people with narcissistic tendencies can be in for a rough road with lots of suffering. Such spouses tend to be self-absorbed with an amazing sense of entitlement exacerbated by a lack of empathy for the emotional harm they cause others. Betty Broderick was certainly unprepared for the dark side of a failed relationship with a narcissist. And that failure appeared to strike at the very core of her being.

Betty described her husband as intermittently abusive, but as long as she was able to be the kind of wife who could help him get to where he wanted to go, she was able to stick around. But as soon as she didn’t meet his needs or was not a reflection of who he wanted to be, she was dismissed and left. By her account, he did very little to consider her feelings or experiences during their marriage, but as long as Dan was providing her with what appeared to be family stability and a successful life, Betty could accept his behavior as part of the package of marrying an extremely successful man.

She also felt that as long as she was doing so much for their family and his career, she would be indispensable to her husband. Dan Broderick’s name-brand suits, late nights out with the guys, plus the financial burdens he placed on his wife were all okay in his mind as long as he was benefiting and supported in living the life he felt destined for.

Contrary to comments Betty once made on
Oprah
in 1992, there doesn’t seem to be evidence of physical abuse, though she does appear to have been emotionally neglected. The marriage was not about her needs, unless her needs happened to be met while his were being considered and pursued. Although Betty didn’t know it, she could have a place in Dan’s life only as long as she helped him get where he wanted to go. That’s probably why he agreed to marry her in the first place. On some level he sensed he could do what he wanted and she would be okay with that while providing him with a big family, another sign of his success.

What Dan was not prepared for was a woman who may have appeared whole on the outside, but emotionally was more like a half a person. Without Dan in her life, Betty could not exist, feel lovable or even effectively okay in the world.

When we think about unrequited love, we don’t tend to think of it within the context of a marital union. Once someone marries, we assume that there is some degree of reciprocity in the relationship. After Dan Broderick committed the ultimate betrayal and traded in his older wife for a new and improved model, a.k.a. the trophy wife, Betty turned into a stalker. A stalker is someone who continues a relationship when the other person is not at all interested in it. The pursuer often presses his or her need for more connection and intimacy while the object of the pursuit wants and desires more freedom and autonomy. The person engaged in this type of stalking behavior is often fixated, persistent as well as morbidly preoccupied. There is an obsessional nature to their behavior. When women stalk, they tend to do so in an attempt to achieve intimacy. Betty Broderick became an obsessional estranged lover, which makes up the largest category of pursuers/stalkers.

This category tends to consist of people who just cannot let go of the romantic relationship. Their entire sense of self-worth is caught up in the need for the other’s love. Any evidence to the contrary is seen as an inconvenience to overcome. Through merging with the other person they view themselves as having a higher status in life, that is, “If somebody loves me, then I’m not so bad.” The stalker’s theme lyric could be “You’re no one ’till someone loves you!” The most common motivator for the pursuit is a strong desire for reconciliation. When attempts to reconnect with a former lover become obsessive, the pursuer is usually labeled as love addicted.

While erotomaniacs (erotically obsessed people) are said to be more psychotic, believing they have a connection to the person that they are stalking when in reality they don’t, estranged lovers are thought to be more psychopathic or personality disordered.

Betty’s condition best fits into the diagnostic category of borderline personality disorder. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, this is a “serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image and behavior. This instability often disrupts work and family life.”