I’d like to say I was assigned to the Betty Broderick story because I had a reputation for getting the ungettable. In fact, I drew the short straw. After the killings, a veteran police reporter was assigned to cover the investigation. Being less experienced (and, not incidentally, female and thus, presumably, more persuasive with Betty), I was assigned Betty duty. My job was to describe her world by reaching out to her and every friend she had—what’s known in newspapers as the “soft” side of a hard news story. That kind of assignment can be difficult if not impossible. Once Betty and I made contact, though, our relationship became instantly and strangely intimate. About a month after the killings, when my boyfriend asked me just before Christmas to marry him, the first congratulatory note I received arrived in a plain white envelope postmarked Las Colinas.
Receiving good luck wishes from a woman who’d slain the man she’d pledged to honor and cherish was spooky, but that wasn’t why I chose not to write about that letter—or several others Betty sent. The conventions of newspaper journalism left no room for a reporter’s personal reactions to her subject, and I was still trying to master the distant, omniscient voice that was required. Today I see that kind of detached storytelling as more male than female, but when it comes to denying emotions, there is one way in which women usually trump men: We have trouble, many of us, expressing our own anger. Not Betty. Wrath was at her beck and call; often she visibly shook with it. That is what made her so fascinating to many women, including me. My parents had divorced when I was a kid. I’d grown up in a house where my mother’s rage was frequently stifled, until it boiled over. Me? I tried not to be angry. It felt dangerous. And yet with Betty, I found myself leaning in, not out.
After the Broderick murders, I received many letters from divorced women who had read my stories. In each one’s voice I heard the same warring emotions: revulsion and admiration. While they didn’t condone the killings, they said they understood what drove Betty—a soccer mom in a Chevy Suburban with license plates that read LODEMUP—to open fire. Betty saw marriage as an economic contract and divorce as a sin. At five feet ten, she was a perfect size 6 who’d majored in English at a women’s Catholic college in upstate New York. When Dan introduced himself to her at a party not long before her 18th birthday, he said he was an MDA—a doctor, almost. He and she were raised to believe that the goal of newlyweds was to get ahead; he would make the money, she would be the trim, tailored helpmate and stay-at-home mom. Each used the other to become the archetypal beautiful couple chasing their dream. “I bought into a 1950s Leave It to Beaver marriage,” she told me, “and he stole my whole life.”
Still, I found the outpouring of empathy for Betty surreal. “I believe every word Betty says—because I’ve been there,” one woman wrote in a letter to the editor. “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?” While many dismissed Betty’s claim that she was a victim of emotional battery, she had tapped a rich vein of discontent. With the nation’s divorce rate approaching 50 percent, many women were struggling to maintain their standards of living after their marriages had failed. Sentiment was gathering about lack of post-divorce equity. At the same time, Americans were finally beginning to recognize the abuse some men inflict on their wives and partners. By saying she represented both issues, Betty had become a symbol of a quiet revolution.
“You ought to do a story on ‘Custody Wars in San Diego,’ ” Betty wrote to me in her loopy script. “Deadly warfare—kills everyone involved (except the lawyers, of course).” Many of her letters had the breezy tone of a postcard from a friend on an extended vacation. Ever chatty, often funny, she would apologize for how frumpy she’d looked at her last court appearance. “I had been up since 4 a.m.—no cosmetics, no hair stuff, no sun, exercise, no jewelry, same ole outfit—My picture probably will make a good case for Battered Women!” She told me she’d written an autobiography. Its title: “What’s a Nice Girl to Do? A Story of White Collar Domestic Violence.”
Sounds like a Mad Men marriage…