A 48-year-old grandmother, Walker killed her husband in the Los Angeles suburb of Hacienda Heights six months after Betty killed Dan. Her husband had been beating her for years, but on Mother’s Day 1990, he kicked her awake at 4 a.m. That afternoon he told her he would kill her. “Today,” he said, waving a shotgun in her face, “will be your last goddamned day on this earth.”
In fact, it would be his last day. That night, after calling the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for help that did not come, Walker found herself wrestling with her husband for control of his .25-caliber handgun.
It went off, and he was dead.
She was convicted of second-degree murder, like Betty. But in May 2007, after 16 years in prison, Walker left a Pomona courtroom a free woman. Her passport to freedom was a writ by a three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeal. Two of the judges had denied a similar writ that Walker’s lawyers had filed in 1992.
Between then and now, society and the law had changed. “They actually overturned themselves,” Beth Collins-Burgard, the lawyer who argued Walker’s case pro bono, told me. With support from her firm, Latham & Watkins, she works closely with the California Habeas Project, which seeks to free victims of domestic violence by identifying women whose battery was not properly acknowledged at their trials.
It’s hard to imagine such a project existing pre-Betty. Which is ironic, since for all the reciprocal mean-spiritedness that exploded between the Brodericks, Dan did not physically abuse Betty. If anything, it was the other way around.
Not that Betty is any closer to conceding this today. Like an insect trapped in amber, Betty has stayed exactly the same. I’ve gotten four letters from her during the past year. If they weren’t dated, I’d never know 20 years had passed. The litany of Dan’s misdeeds remains at the top of her mind, complete with dates and times, which she scribbles in the margins. “He was a vicious evil person…. Manipulative, dishonest, and relentless,” she writes. “Here we are 21 yrs later and nothing has changed. I felt ‘Gang Raped’ all along—I expect the same at my [Parole] Board Hearing.”
Betty’s four children and two grandchildren are thriving, she says, enclosing a family portrait taken in prison against a backdrop of blue sky and puffy white clouds. Kim, Lee, Danny, and Rhett stand in a line behind a kneeling Betty, who is sandwiched between her two young granddaughters. They’re a striking family. The boys look a lot like Dan.
In her last letter to me, Betty says she’s at peace with herself, her children, her friends, and her God. What more, she says, can anyone ask for?
But there is one thing more: an end to her vitriolic obsession with her dead ex.
“Leaving your family at 40 is a huge mistake,” she writes, referring not to her own imprisonment but to Dan’s departure from their marriage. “It postpones ever looking at yourself and dealing with your personal demons. We all come to the day of recogning [sic] eventually. ♪ Growing up is Hard to do ♪ Neil Sedaka ….Dan couldn’t let go and move on…. Even if I stay here forever it’s an improvement over the HELL I endured in 1989. I have a whole new life now and I’m back to being the safe, happy, healthy person I was before Dan & Linda targeted me for destruction.”
Sounds like a Mad Men marriage…