‘I Wanted to Die,’ Says Broderick of Killings : Murder trial: La Jolla socialite says she recalls only having ‘shot a gun in the dark’ and then fleeing.

Saying that she “wanted to die” and had no plan to kill anyone but herself, La Jolla socialite Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick testified Friday that she crept into her ex-husband’s house, sneaked up the stairs into his bedroom and “shot a gun in the dark.”

Under cross-examination on her final day of testimony, Broderick repeated the testimony that she gave earlier in the week at her double-murder trial, saying she remembers very little about shooting her ex-husband, attorney Daniel T. Broderick, and his new wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick.

Crying, she said she recalls only firing the gun, then fleeing.

Betty Broderick is accused by prosecutors of hating the couple for breaking up her marriage and of murdering them in anger after a bitter divorce from Daniel Broderick. But she said she did not intend to kill them last Nov. 5 when she stole into her ex-husband’s Marston Hills home.

“I wanted to die,” she said. “There was no plan. I wanted to die.”

If convicted of both counts of murder, Betty Broderick, 42, could be sentenced to life in prison without parole. She has pleaded not guilty and has been held since Nov. 5--when she turned herself in--at the Las Colinas Jail in Santee.

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, 28, was his office assistant.

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.

A San Diego television station, KNSD (Channel 39) broadcast portions of the trial live Friday morning, the third day in a row it preempted regular programming for the case.

Betty Broderick said Friday that her recall of details from the four years leading up to the killings was often not clear. She insisted, however, that she was not trying to be evasive, telling Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, the prosecutor in the case: “I’m not lying. I’m trying to help you, and help me, get it right.”

Betty Broderick’s testimony--four days on the witness stand--ended with jurors reading Daniel Broderick’s assertion, made years before the killings in a booklet he kept during a Marriage Encounter session, that, as his ex-wife has maintained, his primary concern was with his own financial success, not family life.

“I tell myself that I’ve got to earn a decent living, establish myself as a lawyer, acquire certain necessary possessions before I can indulge the luxury of being an attentive, thoughtful person,” Daniel Broderick wrote during the counseling session, a weekend encounter affiliated with the Catholic church.

But, as Betty Broderick stepped down from the witness stand, Daniel Broderick’s brother, Larry Broderick, a suburban Denver forest products executive, said he “was outraged at what this woman did to my brother for 20 years.”

“I believe this woman is an incredible monster,” Larry Broderick said in the hallway outside the courtroom. “Dan had to put up with her greed, avariciousness and hate for his entire married life, and five years after that.”

Betty Broderick’s daughter, Kim Broderick, 20, a college student who testified for the prosecution against her mother when the trial began last week, said she was “confused.”

“I don’t want her to suffer but, at the same time, she should be punished for what she’s done,” said Kim Broderick, the oldest of the couple’s four children.

Not wavering from her testimony on Wednesday, Betty Broderick said again Friday that she fired the shots that killed her ex-husband and his second wife.

“I have never changed my story, because there’s only one story,” she said.

She said she was prompted to go to his house before dawn last Nov. 5 by a letter, the last in a long line of legal papers from her husband, that she received two days before. It threatened her with criminal contempt--the possibility of jail or fines--unless she stopped leaving obscene messages on his answering machine.

She told Wells that she had glanced at the letter when she first received it but read it for the first time early that morning.

Already, Daniel Broderick had instituted some “20-ish” contempt actions against her, she testified earlier in the week.

Though they had separated in 1985, their divorce trial did not take place until late 1988 and early 1989, and Betty Broderick said Daniel Broderick was responsible for the delay.

After the trial, he won custody of the couple’s children. He also was ordered to pay her $16,100 a month in support--a considerable sum, according to defense lawyer Jack Earley, but only about 10% of his monthly take-home pay.

The letter threatening contempt meant that Daniel Broderick was “still attacking me, bludgeoning me, taking unnecessary advantage of me,” Betty Broderick said Friday.

She said she decided to drive from her house in La Jolla Shores, a fashionable seaside neighborhood, to Daniel Broderick’s home, about 10 minutes away. Entering his house just before dawn with a key she said she found in her car, she climbed the stairs to his bedroom, where he was in bed with his wife. She hoped to talk to him, she said.

After that, she said, her memory is hazy.

“I know I went to Dan Broderick’s house and shot a gun in the dark,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I hit anybody, I didn’t know what to do, where to go.”

Two of Betty Broderick’s five shots hit Linda Kolkena Broderick and one hit Daniel Broderick, mortally wounding both, according to testimony last week.

Defense attorney Earley contends that Betty Broderick did not have the premeditation the law requires for first-degree murder because, as she said again Friday, she intended only to kill herself when she sneaked into their home last Nov. 5.

“There was no plan here,” she said. “I’m telling you that, when I read this letter (threatening her with contempt), I gave up.

“I gave up on life. I didn’t want to live any more.”

Wells asked Betty Broderick whether she had revealed an intent to kill herself--or her ex-husband and new wife--by telling a nurse in jail a couple days after the killings, “The situation is resolved.”

Betty Broderick said she did not remember making that statement.

She admitted she had threatened to kill her husband any number of times over the years, but really didn’t mean any of those threats seriously.

“I probably said I was going to kill him a million times before, but I never said I was going to shoot him,” she said.

Calling the words “I was going to kill him” a “catch phrase,” she said they were an exaggeration, like a story she told recently to a jail visitor. “I said (to the visitor), ‘I love it in lock-down in Las Colinas jail. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.’ Obviously, it’s not the happiest I’ve ever been,” she said.

Betty Broderick also said she did not hate either her ex-husband or his new wife, whom she said he had met--and began having an affair with--in 1983. She hated only what they did, she said.

“I did not like what Linda Kolkena did to me or my family,” she said.

“I hated what Dan Broderick was doing to me and my children,” she said.

She added, “In my estimation, Dan and Linda never suffered for a minute through the seven years me and my children suffered tremendously.”

The trial is scheduled to resume Monday, with defense lawyer Earley putting on more witnesses.

SLAIN HUSBAND’S: thoughts on their marriage, A25