Beneath Betty’s exclamation points and girlish vanity, however, was a huge reservoir of narcissistic aggression. Despite her desire to be the poster girl for abused women, Betty—not her ex-husband—was the one who had been physically violent. Long before the killings, she had broken into her ex-husband’s home, smeared cream pies in his dresser drawers, rammed her car into his front door, attacked him with a knife, and left expletive-laced messages on his answering machine. Notably, Betty murdered Dan and his wife six conflict-filled years after her own marriage was over.
Betty used rage to stay connected to her ex. Even after she killed him, she often talked about Dan in the present tense, as if he were still around to be mad at. And angry she was—flippant and sarcastic one minute, bitter and despondent the next. Even when writing to a reporter, her charm was tinged with bile.
I had to wonder: How long would she stay this way?
On March 27, 1990, the phone rang on my cluttered desk in the L.A. Times bureau in downtown San Diego. It was Betty calling collect. Again. By this point I’d written several stories about her case, quoting her repeatedly. But on this day she was more expansive than ever. She was ready to talk about the killings.
Long before the sun rose that brisk Sunday morning, she recalled, she had been wide awake. Since the previous Friday, when she’d received Dan’s most recent court filings (they were haggling over money and child custody), she’d been twisting and turning. As she had told me more than once, Dan was powerful—by now he was the president of the San Diego Bar Association—and she felt his influence and high-placed friends were keeping her from getting what she deserved. That morning she decided she’d had enough.
She left her La Jolla home with a .38-caliber five-shot revolver in her purse and drove to the four-bedroom mansion where Dan and Linda lived. Using keys that belonged to her eldest daughter, Betty let herself in, climbed the stairs, and entered the master suite where the couple nestled under a colonial-print bedspread. She told me she’d intended to engage Dan in a conversation. Instead she raised her gun and began firing—“real fast,” she told me, “no hesitation at all”—killing Linda instantly. Dan, fatally wounded, lay on the floor near a telephone.
“He said, ‘OK, OK, you got me.’ There was no pain, and there was no blood. It was simple,” Betty said. “He was on the floor, and the phone was right next to him. I thought, ‘Oh, my God! He is going to be on that phone before I’m down the stairs.’ ” So she bent down next to her bleeding ex-husband and ripped the phone cord out of the wall. Then she fled.
With that, Betty Broderick had confessed, and she had confessed to me. This was a front-page story, one of the most important of my career. When I think of the murders, however, that final gesture—previously unknown to the public—lingers in my mind. Even more than firing the fatal bullets, the act of severing Dan’s last hope for help was utterly ruthless, the opposite of a coup de grâce. Betty didn’t see it that way. Although she had killed two people, she believed she was Dan’s victim.
After months of talking to Betty almost weekly, I’d grown weary of her self-justifications. As her trials loomed, I resolved that my last story about her would be a lengthy portrait of a marriage—and divorce—gone terribly wrong. “Till Murder Do Us Part” appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on June 3, 1990. I quoted from Betty’s autobiography and let her talk at length. I’d even gone to her hometown of Bronxville, New York, to get her mother’s view of what had happened. But I made it clear that Betty’s refusal to take responsibility for her actions was epic in its selfishness. I ended this way: “In one of our last conversations, Betty said that since the murders, she has warned her daughters never to depend on men. ‘That makes me so sad, because I really believed in my little fairy tale,’ she said, crying into the phone. ‘I would love for them to find husbands to provide for them. But I can’t tell my daughters to buy into that anymore. It’s too dangerous. Look at what happened.’ ”
Sounds like a Mad Men marriage…