Broderick Testifies She Was Harassed by Her Ex-Husband

Inconsistent but not shaken from her story, La Jolla socialite Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick testified Thursday that she had reason to be aggrieved during a nasty breakup with her former husband, but conceded that her recall of details from their four-year divorce was hazy.

Under cross-examination in a third day on the witness stand at her double-murder trial, Betty Broderick said her ex-husband, attorney Daniel T. Broderick III, used his influence to harass her through contempt actions and to delay and manipulate their divorce proceedings.

She said he and his second wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, both of whom she is accused of murdering, told “horrid lies” about her, said she was crazy and contended that she pestered them and vandalized their property.

Broderick, 42, said she had called the couple vulgar names--out of frustration. She admitted to some vandalism, but said she was not responsible for all the things that had been damaged. And she said she “was crazy,” because Daniel Broderick had made her feel that way--like an “electrified crazy person.”

Because she was “operating under the most outrageous stress” imaginable during the divorce, she said, she had forgotten details and asked frequently Thursday for times, places and dates. When she remembered incidents, however, she remembered in elaborate detail, once even telling the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, “No, you’re all mixed up. You want me to help you?”

Broderick is being tried on two counts of murder in the shooting deaths last Nov. 5 of her ex-husband and his second wife. If convicted, she could be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

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

For the second consecutive day, portions of the trial were broadcast live on San Diego television station KNSD (Channel 39), which preempted regular programming four times Thursday to go live to the trial, a station spokesman said.

Broderick said she clearly remembered the court order that ended their divorce in 1989, four years after she and Daniel Broderick separated. The order, which awarded her $16,100 a month but gave custody of their four children to him, “shocked” her, she said.

She said she had been “bludgeoned” and “gang-raped” by proceedings that occurred “in taped-up courtrooms.” The lengthy trial, like the divorce file, had been sealed to the public, at Daniel Broderick’s request, she said. The file had disappeared, she said. All along, she sought public scrutiny of the case, she said. If people “thought I was crazy or not, they had no way of finding out because there was no file,” she said.

Broderick said there was no question that she left obscene messages on Daniel Broderick’s home phone-answering machine in which she referred to him and to Linda Kolkena with sexually explicit epithets.

Earlier this week, she said she had left those messages in frustration at not being able to reach her four children at his house. She amended that Thursday, saying she also was prompted by frustration with her ex-husband and by hearing Kolkena’s voice on the machine.

She said: “He was attacking me, overpowering me. The only way I had to fight back was to call him names. Big deal.”

Kolkena, she contended, “hated me from the beginning. I never did anything to her.” Under Wells’ questioning, Betty Broderick did admit that she had called Kolkena a “bimbo,” “stupid” and “classless.”

Broderick also denied threatening to kill her ex-husband and Kolkena about the time of their April, 1989, wedding, an allegation she called the “biggest of the black, horrid lies going around this town.”

She also said that her youngest child, Rhett, now 11, would “always ask me, ‘Would you kill Daddy?’ I’d say, ‘No.’ He kept asking me, kept asking me, ‘Are you going to kill Daddy?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? Will you cut it out?’ ”

Broderick is expected to complete her testimony today, San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas Whelan said.