Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine November, 2009
After she confessed to a young reporter about the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, Betty Broderick became an icon for women scorned. Twenty years later, that reporter reconnects with the killer who launched her career.
BY: Amy Wallace
She took her gun, entered her ex-husband’s house, tiptoed into the darkened bedroom where he slept with his new young wife, and shot them both dead. In just seconds Betty Broderick ended two lives, but her vengeful act would do a lot more than that. Pop culture has long had a familiarity with ladies who kill the men they can’t keep. People have been singing “Frankie and Johnny” since the turn of the 20th century; George Cukor directed his classic film The Women in 1939. Twenty years ago, however, Betty riveted our attention like no other scorned woman. Instantly she became a new kind of antiheroine. Not only has the post-Betty era been richer in female payback, but unwittingly, in ways none of us could have imagined, she has helped change the rules of retribution.
On November 28, 1989, just after Thanksgiving, I drove to the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, near San Diego, to talk to Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick for the first time. It had been three weeks since she’d murdered Dan and Linda Kolkena Broderick. I had a hundred questions, but they boiled down to two: Why had an affluent 42-year-old woman with four children and a home in La Jolla overlooking the Pacific Ocean thrown it all away just to get even with the father of her kids? Had he really done her so wrong? I had no reason to think she would see me. Then, all at once, there she was. Betty was tall, statuesque, if a little plump, with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore jailhouse garb—a gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. As she took her seat in a hard plastic chair on the other side of a glass partition, her blue eyes flashed with intelligence. Smiling wanly, she picked up a phone receiver connected to one I held to my ear and began to talk.
That interview with Betty was my first big scoop as a journalist. Eight weeks before, I had started a new job at the Los Angeles Times. I was 27 years old, green, and determined to prove myself. Suddenly I was a lead reporter on a story the whole country was talking about. Overnight Betty had become not only infamous but culturally significant: the focus of a debate over whether divorced women inevitably were treated unfairly. Betty’s suspicions that her husband had cheated, combined with her claim that she had been a victim of emotional abuse—assault by lawyering—resonated with many women. People,Ladies’ Home Journal, the syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen—everyone had an opinion about what had made her snap. Eventually Court TV would cover her trials (there were two; the first resulted in a hung jury), Oprah Winfrey would interview her in prison, and her case would inspire two top-rated TV movies, three books, a documentary, even a skit on Saturday Night Live.
When she took her seat across from me at Las Colinas, Betty seemed tired but self-assured. For the next half hour she recited a catalog of complaints about her ex-husband’s slights and infidelities. She had supported Dan while he completed Cornell University Medical School, then Harvard Law. She had raised their two sons and two daughters almost single-handedly, with little help and less money. Then, when he had finally achieved everything they’d scrimped and worked for—he was a thriving medical malpractice attorney—he threw her over for Linda, his receptionist. Since then, she said, he had tormented her in and out of court. If I could understand every moment of her marriage and its undoing, she said, I would agree that Dan was to blame, not her.
She didn’t acknowledge the murders. It was immediately clear, however, that one conversation would not be enough. After our jailhouse meeting, Betty started calling me collect and sending frequent letters, always on yellow legal paper and always in pencil.
