Prosecution Seeks to Use Broderick Quotes : Trial: Judge to rule whether dramatic statements allegedly made by murder defendant about her ex-husband and his new wife are admissible.

In graphic language, Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick told a friend in the hours after killing her ex-husband and his new wife just how she executed the shootings and said she could hear him “gurgling in his own blood” as he died, court records indicate.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas Whelan, who is presiding over Broderick’s upcoming double murder trial, said Friday that he will wait to decide whether to allow that utterance--one of two contested statements--to be heard at the trial.

Whelan said he will decide whether the statements are legally admissible if and when prosecutors seek to present them to a jury.

The final round of jury selection in the case is due to begin Monday with questioning of the 73 potential jurors who, in the past two weeks of preliminary inquiry, indicated they could be fair despite the intense publicity the case has generated. The trial itself might begin later next week with opening statements, lawyers in the case said.

Broderick, 42, faces two counts of murder in the shooting deaths last Nov. 5 of Daniel T. Broderick III, and his new wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick. They were shot as they slept in their Marston Hills home.

Daniel Broderick was a prominent medical malpractice attorney and a former county Bar Assn. president.

During and after a bitter divorce, Betty accused Daniel of using his legal influence to cheat her out of her fair share of his seven-figure income.

Broderick confessed to the killings in a March interview in The Times. She said they were a “desperate act of self-defense” against a man who wanted to control her.

Broderick, who has pleaded not guilty, has been held without bail at the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee since November.

At Broderick’s preliminary hearing last March, prosecutors put on several witnesses who said that, after the shootings, Broderick called friends and family--and discussed the shootings--before contacting a lawyer and turning herself in.

However, none of the statements to family and friends that were discussed at the preliminary hearing were as explicit as the two utterances Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells indicated Friday she might present at the trial.

Broderick made one of the statements to a friend, Patricia Monahan, shortly after the killings, according to court documents filed late Thursday, and Monahan allegedly made the other statement.

According to the legal papers, Monahan said Broderick told her:

“I shot (him),” she said, referring to her ex-husband with an obscenity. “I shot five times. I stood there and I could hear him gurgling in his own blood.”

Broderick went on to graphically describe her ex-husband’s physical reactions to the shooting, according to the records.

The other statement, according to the court records, is:

“Betty has really flipped out this time. She said she shot Dan.”

Broderick’s comment about Daniel’s blood apparently contradicts a comment she made in the March interview with The Times. She said then: “There was no pain and there was no blood. It was simple.”

Meanwhile, according to the legal papers filed Thursday, Monahan does not remember making the statements.

Defense lawyer Jack Earley said that Monahan’s lack of memory and the undisputed fact that the statements are legal hearsay--the repetition in court of what a person heard someone else say out of court--should mean that the utterances should be barred from the trial. Hearsay statements are not allowable in court.

Prosecutor Wells, however, argued that under an exception to the complicated hearsay rules, the utterances were acceptable. And, she suggested, the jury might find the statements compelling in deciding Betty Broderick’s state of mind at the time of the killings.

Whelan said he did not want to rule on the issue if the statements were not actually going to be presented at the trial, and without knowing more about where and when Monahan recited the statements.

Wells told Whelan she definitely would not refer to the utterances in her opening statement. She declined to say whether she would use them at another point in the trial.

In other rulings Friday, Whelan decided that a psychologist who took part in Daniel and Betty’s divorce could testify that she twice warned Daniel that Betty had threatened him or his property.