Jury Told of Broderick’s Depression at Time of Killings

Testimony in Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick’s double murder trial began to wind down Wednesday with the final few defense witnesses saying that the La Jolla socialite was depressed and upset before and immediately after she shot and killed her ex-husband and his new wife.

Broderick was crying, throwing up and “very confused” in the moments just after she shot her ex-husband, attorney Daniel T. Broderick III, and his new wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, said Dian M. Black, one of Betty Broderick’s closest friends.

Black said that Betty Broderick called her shortly after the shootings last Nov. 5 and said, “I need help.”

Betty Broderick, 43, faces two counts of murder in the shooting deaths 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.

In the months before the shootings, Black said, Betty Broderick was “very depressed.”

Just after the shootings, Betty Broderick called from a pay phone, sounding as if she “was in shock,” Black said Wednesday.

“She was rambling a little bit. She tried to talk, to tell me she went over there to confront Dan.”

A couple hours later, when she met Betty Broderick, just before Broderick turned herself in to police, Black said Broderick admitted “she had shot at them,” referring to Daniel Broderick and Linda Kolkena Broderick, “but she wasn’t sure whether she hit anybody.”

“The way she told me was, ‘I shot at them. It was dark,’ ” Black said.

Black, the next-to-last defense witness, added that she had “never seen Betty that way in her life.”

“It was like her body was there but it was a shell,” Black said.

Broderick’s defense is expected to conclude today with one last witness, an expert in mental trauma.

The prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, is expected to present rebuttal witnesses for the next couple of days, San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas Whelan said. The jury is likely to get the case next week, Whelan said.

Betty Broderick has pleaded innocent and has been held without bail at the Las Colinas Jail in Santee since she surrendered the day of the killings.

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

Testifying last week in her own defense, Betty Broderick admitted firing the shots that killed her ex-husband and his new wife.

Her defense attorney, Jack Earley, contends that she did not have the premeditation the law requires for first-degree murder because she intended only to talk to Daniel Broderick and to kill herself when she stole into his house last Nov. 5.