Woman Scorned: A Proper Sentence for Betty Broderick

Betty Broderick: A Woman Scorned

On November 5, 1989, Betty Broderick killed her ex-husband, attorney Dan Broderick, and his new wife, Linda Kolenka Broderick, at the couple's home in San Diego, California. At the time, Betty and Dan Broderick had been divorced since January 1989, but the divorce had been particularly rancorous, with Dan often baiting Betty, and using his legal expertise to take advantage of her. As a consequence, and perhaps because of her own mental instability, Betty had been unable, at the time of the double murder, to move on from her divorce from Dan. She had also threatened to kill the new couple several times, had smashed her car into the front doorway of their new home, and vandalized their property in various ways.

The double murder committed by Betty was the culmination of a bitter divorce and custody battle (Betty and Dan had four children), that had raged since the mid-1980's. Betty Broderick's first murder trial, in 1990, resulted in a hung jury. Her second trial resulted in a conviction of second-degree murder. For the murders, Betty Broderick received "two consecutive fifteen-years-to-life sentences" ("Betty Broderick: Divorce, Desperation, Death"), and will first be eligible for parole in 2011. As "Betty Broderick: Divorce, Desperation, Death" also points out, of this case:

a naive woman is ruthlessly mistreated, encumbered and driven to a bedlam of instability by a one-sided law and a conceited, conniving villain who avails every puppet-string of that law. Dan Broderick, no doubt a brilliant lawyer, saw to it that all loopholes of a law his layman wife didn't understand were used in his behalf against her. Whenever she flipped out, he was there to hand her a shovel to let her dig her grave deeper.

The case is a complicated one, however, because, although Betty clearly premeditated and committed the murders, her ex-husband Dan had a hand in bringing his ex-wife's emotional instability to the point where she would actually do so. He took advantage of her to the point where she received an unjust divorce settlement and was denied custody of their children. He imposed monetary sanctions on her for leaving messages replete with curses on Dan's and Linda's home answering machine. Clearly, Betty was mentally unstable, but instead of using his ubiquitous connections in the San Diego community to get help for Betty (Dan Broderick was a doctor as well as a lawyer, so it is impossible that he did not see or recognize the signs that Betty was disintegrating mentally) he instead egged her on. (That is no reason why Dan Broderick and his new wife should have been killed by Betty; however, it is clear in hindsight, in reviewing various details of the murders and what led up to them, that had Dan simply offered Betty a bit more consideration, kindness, fairness, and simple courtesy during the divorce process, her blood probably would not have boiled to the point where she felt she needed to murder Dan and Linda, to get (as she put it in a jailhouse interview, "relief" ("Betty Broderick: Divorce, Desperation, Death").