San Diego’s Betty Broderick Murders Return To The Spotlight 30 Years Later
Speaker 1: 00:00 It was a case as shocking as it was riveting, the dutiful wife who supported her husband through law school in the years, he built a successful career as spurn for a younger version of herself. Then the ultimate revenge, Betty Broderick shoots, ex-husband Dan and his new wife, Linda, as they slept in their San Diego home on November 5th, 1989. And it's a tragedy with staying power. Joining me to discuss her new podcast on the broader killings titled it was simple is it's writer and producer, Pat Morrison of the Los Angeles times. Welcome to midday edition. Speaker 2: 00:32 Thank you, Mark. Speaker 1: 00:33 Betty broader expend the subject of several books and TV movies over the years. Why revisit it three decades later Speaker 2: 00:40 markets, as you said, the staying power is astonishing. And when we first undertook this, when we found out that there was a TV mini series in the works, we thought, is there anything else left to say? And I was astonished to go online and find out that there are still chat rooms, that there are spaces on Facebook where people who weren't even born when these murders happened, had so much to say about the underpinnings of it, about the nature of male, female relationships, about the nature of no fault divorce in particular, which California pioneered and the idea of gaslighting, which is everything old is new. Again, thank you, Ingrid Bergman, back into our vocabulary. Speaker 1: 01:23 A lot of the ways this was a picture perfect American marriage, but everything changed when the couple split up and there was a nasty high profile divorce in San Diego County. I give us the details of what happened there. Speaker 2: 01:34 This was a divorce who's beginnings, according to Dan Broderick, his family and his friends was essentially not long after the marriage itself in 1969 that he thought he had made a terrible mistake. And yet he stuck with his wife. He was Catholic. He went to law school. He went to medical school and came to San Diego and started working in a high profile law firm and set up his own practice. Both of the couples striving to be rich and famous. And from the broader point of view, the Betty Broderick point of view, it began when he was attracted to an assistant in his office and started seeing her on the side and then moved out of the family home and divorce proceedings began with a fairly one sided legal power in Denver Broderick corner and Betty Broderick feeling completely disempowered in her corner. Speaker 1: 02:25 And in both our trials, Betty Broderick says she didn't actually plan to kill Dan and Linda, the killings weren't premeditated. What's her account of the murders. Speaker 2: 02:33 She's told several different versions, but the basic version has to do with her feeling so oppressed by several years of legal documents of her house being sold, the family house being sold out from under her. When of course the other side said they had a deal and she simply refused to follow through that. She felt so frustrated and so angry and everything accumulated the fact that Dan was trying to get his new wife pregnant. The fact that she might be losing her home, that she wasn't getting the amount of money she thought she deserved. And that her mind just broke apart that morning. And she bought a gun sometime earlier, just before the new couple was married and drove over to Dan Broderick's house with it and broke into the house, took her daughter's key, got into the house, went upstairs to the bedroom and said she wanted to talk to Dan and Linda because he'd always avoided her before. He'd always call the police and say, you're violating a restraining order. She took the gun into, make him talk to her. And she said the gun went off because she was startled. When the two of them tried to call the police on her. Again, Speaker 3: 03:40 she's still maintained that to this day. Speaker 2: 03:42 As far as I know she has, we had one communication with her, which was an email sent out through the prison system because it's very difficult as you know now to talk to anyone in prison. And it said that she was a victim of a railroading legal system in San Diego. And that essentially wives divorced wives could not get a fair shake in this country. Speaker 3: 04:04 So who do we hear from in the podcast? Speaker 2: 04:06 Well, we hear Betty's own voice as it comes through at the trial at one of her parole hearings, Speaker 3: 04:15 you go and try and get wrinkles taken off your face. That weren't even there. I tried to be perfect, absolutely flawlessly. Perfect. For Dan Bobbitt, Speaker 2: 04:26 we hear the voices of her children who are now of course, all grown, who were the saddest victims in all of this really they're carrying this burden around for all of their lives. We hear from, um, the lawyers we hear from the divorce lawyer who represented Betty for a while in the divorce. And we hear from Jack early, who represented Betty in both criminal trials. We also hear from a woman who hasn't talked in 30 years about this. She was a friend of Linda's Linda's best friend, Rebecca laughs. Speaker 3: 04:55 When we said goodbye, we said, I love you. And that's something we always did. And uh, the next morning they'd been killed. She was a perfect friend. She was kind and generous and they're always there always, no matter what time of day, uh, if I needed her, she was there. Speaker 2: 05:19 And then we also hear from a man who also has not spoken in 30 years. He was a police officer at a casino. When he saw a man in a bar, listened to him, talk to him, a man who he said beyond a reasonable doubt was Dan Broderick talking about trying to drive his wife crazy and being unable to live with her. And then the conversation turned to a Hitman. And this man who then became a district attorney himself said, he'd carried the burden for years of not having spoken up as his own fiance suggested he do with not having said something to someone about a man who sounded very serious about something very deadly to his own wife, Speaker 1: 06:00 Broderick versus Broderick remains one of the most infamous divorce cases. And as you point out in the podcast, it raises important questions about the impact of divorce laws. Tell us about that. Speaker 2: 06:11 The year the broader X were married in New York was the same year, 1969 that California passed no fault divorce. The first state to do this. Ronald Reagan, the governor signed it into law and Reagan later said it was the biggest political mistake of his life. And since then, in those 50 years, we have seen scholars argue that no fault divorce has contributed to the feminization of poverty because in no fault, it was like dissolving a business contract. Nobody had to talk about who was at fault in adultery. A judge didn't take those things into account. And certainly didn't in Betty Broderick trial. When Betty had her divorce, her divorce trial, she thought I'm going to go into court and tell the judge what an awful man. My husband is cheating on me like this in no fault that doesn't matter anymore. And how no fault divorce has changed the equilibrium of the post divorce world for men and women is important. The Stanford study found that several years after no fault divorce, the standard of living of women went down. The standard of living of men went up. So that's an issue, a part, the idea of now, how do we get the faults out of no fault divorce, but it played very prominently into the lives of the broader. Speaker 1: 07:28 And you say that you hope listeners will learn something about themselves. And after researching, writing and telling the story in the podcast, have you thought about what you've learned about yourself, Speaker 2: 07:37 Mark we're journalists. And I think that one of the reasons that we like to write and research, the stories that we do is because we think what would I do if I were confronted with the same circumstances where people turn out to be heroes or people turn out to be cowardly where people rise to the occasion or fail to do so. So what would we do if our own lives got turned upside down? If our loved one said, I'm leaving you. If all of a sudden the world that you had planned for yourself for so many years was snatched away, which is what Betty Broderick said had happened. So we examine our own lives. We examine our own relationships. Speaker 1: 08:16 I've been speaking with writer and producer, Pat Morrison of the Los Angeles times. Thanks very much, Pat. Speaker 2: 08:21 A pleasure. Thank you, Mark.
