Broderick Says She Planned to Shoot Herself

Saying she intended to kill herself because she “had no life left,” La Jolla socialite Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick testified Wednesday that she crept into her ex-husband’s house, stole into his bedroom and fired the shots that killed him and his new wife.

Sobbing as she recounted the shootings, Betty Broderick said she planned only to talk to her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, and to kill herself--”to splash my brains all over his goddamned house”--when she entered his bedroom before dawn last Nov. 5.

After a bitter divorce that took four years and left her without her husband, custody of her children or an equal share of Daniel Broderick’s considerable assets, she felt as if she “was dead, been defeated, couldn’t fight anymore.”

In the dark room, standing in front of her ex-husband’s bed, where he was lying with his new wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, Betty Broderick said she saw motion. But she said she remembers almost nothing else from that point on about the shootings, not even firing her gun.

“They moved, I moved, and it was over,” she said.

Betty Broderick, who appeared to be holding back tears for hours during a second full day of testimony at her double-murder trial, did not hold them back as she recalled the shootings.

In the audience, her children, her family and her ex-husband’s family cried, too.

Kim Broderick, her eldest daughter, who testified last week against her mother and who sat Wednesday on the prosecution side of the courtroom, wept with two of her aunts and an uncle, Daniel Broderick’s sisters and brother.

Lee Broderick, Betty Broderick’s second child, who sat on the other side of the courtroom, behind the defense table with Betty Broderick’s brother, also brushed away tears.

When the day’s testimony concluded, the two daughters met in the hallway and embraced. Their mother sighed, rubbed her eyes and hung her head in her hands.

Betty Broderick, 42, is charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of her ex-husband and his new wife. If convicted, she could be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Daniel Broderick, 44, was a prominent medical malpractice attorney and a former president of the San Diego County Bar Assn. Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, was his office assistant.

Betty Broderick has pleaded not guilty and has been held since the day of the killings--when she turned herself in to police--at the Las Colinas Jail in Santee. She said Wednesday that, in the weeks after she was jailed, she realized she was “happy to be locked in a dark, little, safe room where nobody could get me.”

Interest Wednesday in Betty Broderick’s testimony, as it was Tuesday for her first day on the witness stand, was intense. A San Diego television station, KNSD (Channel 39), preempted an afternoon soap opera and aired live coverage of the seven minutes during which she discussed the shootings, a reporter for the station said.

Daniel and Betty Broderick separated in 1985, after 16 years of marriage. During their divorce, which was not final until 1989, Betty Broderick accused her husband of using his legal influence to cheat her out of her fair share of his seven-figure annual income.

Two days before the shootings, Betty Broderick received the last of a series of letters in connection with the divorce from her husband or his attorneys, she said.

The letter threatened her with fines and jail unless she stopped leaving vulgar messages on his answering machine, messages she said were rooted in frustration at not being able to reach her children, who were living at his home.

Shortly after Daniel Broderick moved out of the family home in February, 1985, Betty Broderick deposited all four of their children--the two girls and two boys--with their father. She said Wednesday she could not raise four children without a certain source of income.

After a lengthy trial in late 1988 and early 1989, San Diego Superior Court Judge William J. Howatt Jr. awarded custody of the couple’s two younger children--the two boys, since the two girls were by then adults--to their father. Betty Broderick was awarded weekend visitation rights, she said.

It wasn’t until the morning of Nov. 5, 1989, that she read the letter, Betty Broderick said.

“I just couldn’t stand it another minute,” she said. “I’d rather be dead. I had no life left.”

She also said, “I couldn’t get out of the hole I was dug into by all this legal stuff.”

Betty Broderick said Wednesday that the court file in the divorce case disappeared without explanation. She said that, during the trial in the divorce case, she entered the courtroom through the front door while Daniel Broderick and his lawyer “would come in through the judge’s entrance and be in the judge’s office every morning, talking to the judge.”

She said Daniel Broderick orchestrated the sale of the family house in February, 1986, without obtaining her signature. He had his lawyers go to court on another occasion and have an order entered against her without her even being present, an order she had lifted when she showed up just as the attorney was leaving court, she said.

While Daniel Broderick delayed a trial on the matters she considered important--alimony, child support and child custody--much of his legal campaign against her involved repeated criminal contempt hearings against her, frequently over side issues, Betty Broderick said.

Immediately after she went to Tahiti in late 1987, she said, he served her with contempt papers for leaving him with the family’s two dogs, she said.

She said, however, that even before the contempt actions began in earnest, she had “never got up” from a “left-right bam” in 1986.

The “left to me was the kids’ situation, with not being able to see the kids,” since, after leaving the children with her ex-husband, he decided when she could see them, she said.

“The right was the sale of the house from out from under me (in February, 1986) with no control,” she said.

“And right between the eyes was cutting off all the money and being absolutely, totally unreasonable,” she said.

Daniel Broderick deducted various amounts for her vulgar messages on his answering machine, leaving her owing him $1,300 in November, 1986, she said. She confronted him about it, and ended up being jailed for contempt, she said.

Through 1988 and 1989, Betty Broderick said, “I was in a state of escalating stress and depression about everything, and I wasn’t handling anything very well.”

As she sat in the kitchen of her La Jolla home early on Nov. 5, she felt “under a lot of pressure from a million different places.”

Also, she said she thought to herself, “I’m turning 42 years old and I’ve been through this (expletive) since I was 35. Seven years of my life--wasted.”

She decided to drive to her ex-husband’s home in Marston Hills and “go in and talk to him.”

As she drove, she said she thought, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go to court anymore, I can’t go to jail anymore. I want to end it. I had to make it stop, or I was going to kill myself.

“I wanted to kill myself right in front of him and splash my brains all over his goddamned house,” she said. “Everyone would know that’s why, that I wasn’t crazy.

“He wanted me to kill myself so that he could go on living and say, ‘See, I told you all. She was just a nut. She was just crazy.’ ”

Entering Daniel Broderick’s house with her daughter Kim’s keys, she walked upstairs into the bedroom holding the gun “as a show of force, a way to make him listen to me.”

Daniel Broderick scared her, she said. He had beaten her during the marriage, leaving her “bruised and marked up a little.” Though she did not detail dates or places for the abuse, she said she once suffered a black eye but “never got a broken bone” from his hitting her.

Pushing the door to the bedroom open, Betty Broderick said, she “stood there, and it looked like Linda moved and Dan moved toward the phone.”

The shots came so fast she does not remember pulling the trigger, only hearing five fast explosions, she said. According to testimony last week, two hit Linda Kolkena Broderick and one hit Daniel Broderick, mortally wounding both.

She said she wasn’t sure, but she might have heard her ex-husband say to her, “ ‘You’ve got me.’ I was thinking he was saying to me, ‘Don’t shoot.’ ”

No bullets were left to commit suicide, she said. Instead, she “went to get out of the room, to flee.”

“I grabbed the phone out of the wall and ran out,” she said. “I didn’t want him to call the police and have me arrested.”

It all happened “real fast,” Betty Broderick said. “I hardly remember being there at all.”