A note from Laura:
I have decided to republish my pieces about Betty Broderick in light of her continued incarceration. I feel that my words, coupled with your words, are the only true justice Betty will see. She deserves to have her story told. Perhaps these truths will, in some measure, set her free.
January 4, 2017
A NEW piece about the Broderick case, in light of the Dirty John series:
Betty Broderick murdered her ex-husband, Dan Broderick, and his longtime mistress and wife of six months, Linda Kolkena Broderick, seventeen years ago today.
You know the story: maligned ex-wife and philandering ex-husband are locked in a vicious divorce battle. Ex-husband marries The Other Woman. Ex-wife kills them both.
My mind has changed about Betty. At first, I felt that she was a total victim, a woman wronged both by her man and by the system where her man was clearly king. I cheered her for murdering the philandering ex-spouse and the tweetie bird he fucked on the down-low for years before finally marrying her. After all, there was very little to like or appreciate about the victims. Dan Broderick was your garden-variety sleazeball personal injury attorney who weaseled his way into a post as the President of the San Diego Bar Association. Linda Kolkena was your typical skinny vapid blonde, a fantasy girl for a midlife crisis case who is stuck with an iceberg for a wife and has a fierce desire to spend his lunch hours Proving His Manhood while entangled in sweat-soaked sheets after sipping cheap champagne in the airport Holiday Inn.
It's the oldest story in the world. Rich successful man in an unhappy marriage takes a mistress who grew up poor and was looking for a sugar daddy. Rich successful man leaves the wife who helped to make him so damned rich and successful. The bimbo gets the spoils. It's vastly unfair to the wronged wife.
But now, I am just angry with Betty.
Not for the murders, mind you: while I do believe that all killing is wrong, I will also say that there were never two people who were more hell bent on antagonizing a woman who they claimed was crazy. Repeatedly...and loudly...and in their shared community...to mutual friends, to judges and therapists, to reporters, to anyone who would listen. People frightened of the tiger do not put their hands in the cage. Dan and Linda Broderick relished putting Betty Broderick through hell in the legal system, and of course there was no one to stop them. No one was willing to stop them. Dan was President of the Bar Association and had a lot of powerful friends.
After all, it isn't every day when the judge who presides over your divorce case just so happens to be a guest at your wedding to your office tramp with whom you cheated on your first wife for almost three years. I guess it's only fair to invite the judge after all. He was so helpful, looking the other way, while you robbed your first wife of her marital assets so that you could legally screw her out of what's rightfully hers when you finally got around to dumping the poor sad bitch.
Yet, on this anniversary of her crimes, I'm angry with Betty because she didn't think enough of herself and her womanhood to realize that she didn't need Dan Broderick or his money.
I'm angry with Betty that she didn't love her children enough to realize that they were the victims in the vicious divorce, and that her behavior greatly increased their suffering, up to and including the moments where she pulled the trigger.
I'm angry with Betty for failing to see that the ultimate revenge against two people like Dan and Linda Kolkena Broderick is to make them absolutely irrelevant in your life. You don't accomplish this with a gun. You accomplish this by refusing to play their games, by being the bigger person and knowing when to walk away.
By refusing to be their pawn any longer.
By realizing that she was giving them total control over her life every single time she took their bait.
Instead, she gave them total control over her life. She allowed it to happen. She allowed it right up until the moment when she shot and killed them both in their marital bed. I'm angry with Betty for failing to see that she had so many more options than that.
That she always did, even when she felt like nothing after years of abuse at the hands of Dan and Linda Broderick, both in the legal system and out. When she felt like she was lower than low after years of their petty antics, yet another fat and wrinkle cream ad sent "anonymously" to Betty by Linda Kolkena. When Linda sent Betty a photo of Dan posing with Linda at some legal function, with the scrawled caption, Eat your heart out, bitch!, Betty took those words to heart, and did.
It didn't have to be that way. Betty is not a stupid woman, but for some reason, she was never able to see that.
Ultimately, she freed herself from her tormentors, but in doing so, she just exchanged one kind of jail for another.
Both were of her own making.
It would have been so much better if Betty dried her eyes, realized that Dan wasn't coming back, and then focused her life and her energies on making something for herself, instead of obsessing about Linda taking what used to be hers.
After all, Linda Kolkena was used to taking Betty's sloppy seconds. In fact, Linda's entire life with Dan Broderick was pretty much Betty's sloppy seconds...right down to Betty's wedding china, which Linda Kolkena refused to allow Betty to have, even after the Broderick divorce went through, even after Linda Kolkena had ordered new wedding china for her marriage to Dan.
Here's a thinker: the needlepoint cover on the bed in which Dan and Linda were murdered was purchased by Betty, early in her marriage to Dan. One must ask: was the blanket so beautiful that Dan Broderick simply had to keep it, even have it on the bed you used to screw your second wife? Creepy. Not to mention tacky.
I always thought that Betty should have gone to law school. She was basically raped by the San Diego legal system and every attorney involved in it. What better way to beat them at their own game than becoming one of them? Can you imagine what Dan and Linda Broderick would have said about that? It would have eaten them both alive.
There were a million things that Betty could have chosen to do. Instead, she engaged in the most self-destructive behavior possible, providing both Dan and Linda with ample material with which to victimize her. Incredibly, Betty left many terrible messages on Dan Broderick's answering machine, when she would call about picking up the children. It just so happened that the airy voice of Linda Kolkena Broderick was on the outgoing message, stating that "we cannot take your call." Betty wasn't a big enough person to let things like that go. She took their bait every single time, as Dan and Linda knew she would. That's why they did it in the first place. "This message is for Fuckhead and The Cunt," is a direct quote from one of Betty's expletive-filled calls.
Dan left Betty for what was basically a younger version of herself. The physical similarities between Betty Broderick and Linda Kolkena are shocking. Both were beautiful blonde women with svelte figures. At the time of Dan's departure from their marriage, Betty was as close to perfect as a woman could get. She was easily one of the most attractive women in La Jolla society.
Understandably, when Dan dumped her for Linda, her vanity was attacked. She was humiliated and embarrassed. Did Betty resolve to maintain her unbelievable good looks, have enough of a sense of self-worth to realize that it was Dan's loss, and to realize that she, Betty, could find any number of men willing to marry her? No. Instead, Betty stopped taking care of herself. She overate and gained a lot of weight. She was pudgy and puffy and usually looked like a mess. This only intensified her envy of Linda, who now had Dan's entire wallet to spend in order to look her absolute best.
Betty didn't have to do that. She didn't have to do any of it. She could have chosen to ignore them. She never had to hand them both her power.
Instead, she chose to end three lives in the early morning hours of November 5, 1989. She fired the shots that murdered Linda Broderick and Dan Broderick, but as soon as she did, Betty Broderick ceased to exist, too.
I don't shed any tears about Dan and Linda Broderick. The world needs fewer sleazebag attorneys, it seems. It certainly could use fewer raging alcoholics with obnoxious fellow alcoholic friends who have predilections for quoting The Blues Brothers ad nauseum, which was apparently a cherished past time of Dan Broderick's. (How original.)
As for Linda Kolkena Broderick, she was a disgrace to every person who has ever worked hard for their money, to every woman who used their brains and their talents, other than sexual, to get ahead in a man's world. As a paralegal myself who holds a degree from Purdue University and who graduated at the top of my class and who paid for every dime of her university education herself, I especially bristle at when Linda Kolkena Broderick is referred to as a "legal assistant" or "paralegal." Being the office hoer and cheerleader to your partner in infidelity does not a legal assistant make.
The end of Betty Broderick, however, is a crying shame. What might have been, had Betty decided to rise above their pettiness and cruelty and realized that happiness is your own to make?
The truly sad part is that I believe that, had they lived, there is no way that Dan and Linda Broderick would still be married. Have you ever heard Dr. Phil say, "If they'll do it with you, they'll do it to you?" Dan would have tired of Linda as she aged, much as he tired of Betty when she started to age. There is always another bimbo glossing her lips in the ladies room who is only too happy to take your man. Then again, Linda Kolkena Broderick was supposedly sleeping with her ex-boyfriends, namely a cartoonist named Steve Kelley, by all accounts a very nice man who truly loved Linda, around the time of her marriage to Dan. Linda was never the sharpest pencil in the box, with only a high school education, and her only talent seeming to be spreading her legs for other women's husbands. It would have caught up with her, eventually.
Nope. Now Dan and Linda Broderick are rotting corpses, she buried in the wedding dress she wore only six months earlier. They are also martyrs because of the murders, and Betty is widely regarded as a nutcase, a pariah, a fool.
I'll agree with that last one. She could have played it a million ways, found her own thing, and discovered that a man who thinks that he is enough for two women is always barely man enough for one. She could have gotten back at her tormentors by refusing to let them define her, manipulate her.
Instead, she was their ultimate victim...by making them her victims.
Dan Broderick and Linda Kolkena
"Count du Money" and "Liebchen"
I guess The Count hadn't du Money
to fix Liebchen's teeth just yet.
