Dan and Betty Broderick's divorce played out over five vicious years, was the talk of La Jolla. Betty finally put an end to it all -- with a .38-caliber revolver.
This week, host Mark Olsen hands the mic to reporter Yvonne Villarreal as she interviews Alex Cunningham, the show-runner of Bravo’s new TV series “Dirty John.”THE FIRST TIME DAN saw Betty, she says, he told friends that she would be his wife. She barely gave him a second look.
“My father was a disciplinarian, there is no question,” says Larry Broderick, Dan’s brother, who noted that all his siblings went to college--and every boy attended Notre Dame. “Our will to succeed is inherited. It’s genetic.” And Dan, says Larry, was the brightest in the family. Now that idyllic life had come to an end. She says that her mother, angry that Dan wouldn’t dress up for the wedding, refused to store any of her belongings and insisted that she move everything into Dan’s tiny medical school dormitory room. As her life went “from bliss to disaster,” Betty says, she threatened to leave him. But she changed her mind when she discovered she was pregnant. Before the wedding, she had begun teaching third grade.
Dan and Betty were quickly absorbed into the Gray, Cary social scene--a fast-paced network of attorneys and their mates. Betty, whom Dan referred to as Betts, soon threw herself into being Dan’s partner. During this time, she says, she never paid a bill--she didn’t even have a bank account in her name. Dan took care of the money, she says, and she raised the kids. “If by other people’s definition it wasn’t happy, it was the deal I made,” Betty says. “It was the kind of family we both were from.
Over a dozen years, Betty threatened to leave Dan a hundred times, Dan’s brother Larry estimates. Dan responded by retreating from Betty and escaping into his work. “He didn’t pay much attention to her,” Larry says. “The more it happened, the more he would tune out.” But 22-year-old Linda Bernadette Kolkena caught his eye. A former stewardess and paralegal from Salt Lake City, Kolkena was bright, organized and engaging. She hadn’t been to college and she couldn’t type, but just a few months after she became the receptionist on his floor, Dan offered her a job as his legal assistant.
“I can’t imagine what I could have done, short of shooting him, that would have been a stronger statement than this,” Betty wrote in 1988. But Dan refused to leave. Larry Broderick says that despite the turmoil, his brother’s Catholic upbringing made him unable to give up on the marriage. But Betty says Dan was simply buying time. “Dan transformed himself from a husband to a lawyer plotting strategy in his case,” she says.
Dan got a temporary restraining order keeping Betty 100 yards from the house, his car and his office. She promptly violated it, swinging an umbrella through a large picture window and smashing a new toaster. In November, Dan filed criminal contempt charges against Betty. She was determined to defy him. By her own admission, her 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.
Betty claims that Dan and Linda were “ruining” her children. As the custody and support battles dragged on, their younger daughter, Lee, dropped out of high school. Dan later disowned her, formally writing her out of his will. He asked Kim to move out when she turned 18, although he later relented, and eventually paid her college tuition. Betty focused her energy on gaining custody of Rhett and Danny. The boys, who are now 11 and 14, gravitated toward their mother.
“She was the mother of his children, and he really didn’t take the strong measures he could have taken,” says Ned Huntington, a friend who succeeded Dan as president of the county bar. “He didn’t want the guilt of being punitive toward her. So he let her get away with a lot of atrocious acts. He just wouldn’t punish her.”
“We are a couple in our mid-70s, and we are hanging on by our fingernails to get through this,” she said flatly. She didn’t open the glass storm door between us. “We have nothing to say.” “What she doesn’t understand is she only had one choice: his funeral or mine. I hate to tell you, she would have preferred mine. ‘My daughter killed herself’ is more acceptable than ‘My daughter stood up for herself.’ ”THE DAY AFTER the slayings, San Diego County Deputy Medical Examiner Christopher Swalwell concluded that Linda was killed instantly when a bullet penetrated her brain stem. Dan died more slowly, as blood filled his right lung and made it more and more difficult to breathe.
The memory still haunts Brad, but he has remained devoted to Betty. In recent months, he has managed her affairs--selling her house and putting her furniture in storage. Although Betty’s daughter Lee lives nearby in Pacific Beach, Betty’s mail has been forwarded to Brad’s fence-construction business, and most weekends he drives to the jail to deliver it.
Betty herself had gotten an abortion--against Dan’s wishes--when Kim was 4 and Lee was 2 and she “needed to come up for air.” Fifteen years later, however, she made a public example of Kim--to punish her, Kim believes, for relying on Linda. Betty says Dan was bluffing. Two days before the murders, when she received the legal papers at her door, Betty says she decided “he was never going to let me have those kids.”But Sharon Blanchet believes Dan had made himself clear. If the boys came to stay, she says, Betty knew she would lose her excuse to intervene in Dan’s life. “She was a woman who used her children to her purpose, and her purpose was to make life as miserable for Dan as she possibly could,” Blanchet says.
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