Broderick Says She’s Lost Hope of Fair Trial : Crime: ‘It’s me against everybody,’ murder defendant states on eve of a hearing over her request to write and call her children.

On the eve of a hearing on her request for permission to talk to her two sons, Elisabeth A. (Betty) Broderick told The Times that she has lost all hope of receiving a fair trial in the San Diego courts.

“It’s me against everybody. I can’t go against the system anymore,” Broderick said in a brief interview Tuesday night at the County Jail in Las Colinas. “I give up. I’m dead. I’m gone. My family is dead. It’s over. I cannot fight this machinery.”

“The kids are going to have to grow up without me and, when they turn 18, they can see me again,” she said. “I’m throwing up my hands on the whole thing.”

Broderick, 42, is charged with murdering her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, 44, and his new wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, in the bedroom of their Hillcrest home Nov. 5. She has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.

In a request filed Dec. 20 in San Diego Superior Court, Betty Broderick asked permission to write and call her two sons, Daniel T. Broderick IV, 13, and Rhett Broderick, 10. The boys have been living since November in a Denver suburb with Daniel Broderick’s brother, Larry Broderick, who is the court-appointed temporary guardian.

Before Wednesday’s hearing began, Judge Peter Riddle announced that it, as well as all hearings in the Family Court case, would be closed to the public. The judge said he was acting to avoid “the very real possibility of psychological damage to the children.” Riddle said the order will remain in effect until Feb. 14, 1997, when Rhett turns 18.

Because of the order, the result of Betty Broderick’s request could not be learned. After the 40-minute hearing, which Broderick did not attend, all the attorneys in the case declined comment.

On Tuesday evening, anticipating that the hearing would be frustrating for her, Broderick had asked a friend to call her lawyer and tell him she would rather spend the day in her jail cell than go to court.

Dressed in prison garb, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, Broderick repeated her claims that her ex-husband, a prominent and wealthy medical malpractice attorney, had bilked her out of her rightful share of his seven-figure income. She sketched a dreary portrait of their early life together in a Boston tenement, when he attended Harvard Law School and she baby-sat to help feed their first child.

But money, she insisted, was never the issue for her.

“I don’t care about money. The subject of this is the kids. That’s always been it for me. The whole reason I’m here is the kids,” Broderick said, as she sat in a partitioned row of inmates, separated from visitors by a plate-glass window.

“I can manage poverty. We were poor for years,” she said. “But I couldn’t handle having to watch while somebody hurt my children, over and over. I can’t tell you the phone calls I’d get. It was ripping my heart out on a daily basis, non-stop. What could I do?

“He took my reputation, my home, my children. These things don’t have a money sign on them. How do you buy a reputation that I’d built for 40 years? I can’t go out and make new children. The word was he was going to have more. That made it even worse.”

Despite the hopelessness she expressed, Broderick appeared energetic. She smiled often and laughed ironically when she was asked to describe life in jail.

“It’s eye-opening,” she said. “I get to ask some good questions. I never knew you could shoot crack. I’m learning a lot.”

“Everyone is so nice to me here,” she added, noting that her first cellmate was Karen Wilkening, the convicted madam, who curled Broderick’s hair before her first court appearance. “I’m no threat to them.”

Wednesday’s hearing clearly weighed on Broderick’s mind.

“All my life, from when I was a little tiny kid, all I wanted to be was a mommy,” Broderick said. “Before this (divorce), I had what I’d dreamed of: a charming husband, a nice house, healthy children. I was doing what as a little girl I wanted to do. And Dan was doing what he, as a little boy, wanted to do. We were on Cloud 9 for a very short time, because it took us so long to get there.”

“I’ve been a good mother. Those kids were my life. My husband worked every weekend. Who do you think was home? He called it ‘women’s work,’ ” she said, grimacing. “All the money was him, everything to do with the kids was me.”

After she lost custody of the children, she said, “psychologically, I was so stripped.”

A reporter asked: “What would you tell people who say you’re a bad mother because you murdered your husband?”

Broderick responded: “There is a real good answer for that, but I can’t tell you. I want to. But. No, it’s premature.