Originally appeared in More Magazine December/January 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Standing behind her in the supermarket line, I could see the girl was pretty. Slightly built, her dark hair cut in a bob, she evoked an Asian Audrey Hepburn. Then I saw the scar. Perfectly straight, it bisected her upper arm about six inches below the shoulder of her sleeveless blouse. More than anything else, it was the color that hit me: Against her suntanned skin, the gash was bright purple.

Tough break, I thought, as the cashier scanned her saltines, her soy milk and her fifth of Jack Daniel’s. (I live in Hollywood; this is what passes for groceries among wannabe actresses.)

Maybe it was the tabloids staring vacantly from the rack, but my mind jumped to the cause of the girl’s wound—a late-night car crash, perhaps, or a sledding accident involving a barbed wire fence. In my head, I saw the girl in the ER, bravely biting her lip as a handsome surgeon mended her bicep. I imagined the argument she’d had with herself: Dare I, or dare I not, go sleeveless ever again? I admired her for answering yes, purple scar be damned.

Then she turned to swipe her debit card. This is the moment in the daydream where you hear the screech of a phonograph needle yanked across vinyl or the screen goes black. Because suddenly I saw that the thick purple line wasn’t a scar at all. It was a tattoo—a tattoo of a little bald-headed boy in footie pajamas drawing a fat, straight line with a huge purple crayon. It was a tattoo of a boy I recognized, a boy whose name I had known almost all my life. Harold.

In that moment, I thought: Maybe there is a God.

There is a photograph of me, age two and a half, lying on my stomach on a quilted pink bedspread. I am wearing a white nightgown and resting on my elbows, a book propped open in front of me. I have raised my head to look at the photographer, and although I am not smiling, I am very happy. I know this for two reasons. One, I’m kicking my feet in the air. Two, judging by the picture of a hot-air balloon clearly visible on the page I’m reading, I’m two thirds of the way through my first favorite book: Harold and the Purple Crayon, written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson.

Originally published in 1955, seven years before my birth, the book contains just 64 pages, many of them with only a few words. But the story’s impact on me—on how I see the world—could not be bigger.

I was raised not to believe in God. I’ve never turned to any religious text for solace, for guidance, or to make sense of my life. But at the age of 47, I still seek out Harold.

He’s easy to find. Open the book, and he’s on every page. Plunked down in an all-white landscape with only his wits and his crayon, he is nothing if not resourceful. “There wasn’t any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight,” the book says. So he draws a crescent in the sky. When he needs direction, he lays out a purple path so he won’t get lost. By his own hand, Harold always saves himself.

For me, Harold’s story has been a parable about making your own way in the world. Harold’s teachings are simple. His hand is steady. You could call him my guru. But that’s not quite right.

I guess you could say I worship in the church of the purple crayon.

“And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

When I was four years old, my mother put me in a borrowed yellow Karmann Ghia with a man I’d never met and pointed the car west.

We had been living in New Jersey for only a few weeks when my mom decided on this course of action. She believed my father, a young philosophy professor who was just starting at Princeton, had cheated on her. But that wasn’t all. At the local supermarket, she saw other faculty wives trudging from aisle to aisle, screaming children in tow. Suddenly, she knew she didn’t want to be one of them. How much her moment of clarity had to do with the fact that she’d met someone else—a graduate student back in California—I guess I’ll never know.

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.