Everybody Talking About You-Know-Whose Trial

At the Quel Fromage cafe in Hillcrest, where the customers linger over croissants and espresso, one item lately has kept the regulars riveted.

Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick’s double-murder trial is “ the subject of conversation,” assistant manager Greg Campbell said last week.

Campbell said of his customers, “People want to see her serve some time in the Big House. That seems to be the consensus. We haven’t had any, as far as I know--what are they called?--Betty-backers.”

Betty-backers or Betty-bashers, everywhere around San Diego--at the coffee shop, at the gym, at the beauty salon, in the checkout line, around the television with friends--people are talking about La Jolla socialite Betty Broderick.

“Isn’t everyone?” said Kelly Kayarian, 49, a receptionist at the Circuit City electronics store in Point Loma.

Everyone is, apparently, because everyone seems to have an opinion about whether the 43-year-old mother of four is guilty of first-degree murder in the killings of her ex-husband, a prominent local doctor and lawyer who was once a county bar president, and his lovely, young new wife. Her trial seems to have generated a more intense, personal interest than any other trial in recent San Diego history.

More than the scandalous details of the collapse of the failed La Jolla investment firm J. David & Co. More than the racial tension highlighted by Sagon Penn, twice acquitted of the shootings of two San Diego police officers and a civilian ride-along.

More than the two campaign-financing trials of former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, and more than the downfall of financier Richard T. Silberman, convicted of money-laundering charges.

More, because the case of the lively middle-aged woman who went from high society to jail has virtually all the elements that high drama demands and that affect people in a personal way.

Her testimony, broadcast live on television, was watched avidly at the health clubs as the fitness-bound pumped away on their Lifecycles, and prompted steamy debate at beauty salons.

Witnesses have talked about sex, money, fancy cars, society figures, a younger woman, an allegedly adulterous husband, a jilted wife, vulgar language, jealousy, envy--and the admission, by Betty Broderick, that she indeed did the killings. The trial has been about what led her on Nov. 5, 1989, to shoot her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, and his second wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick--and whether, somehow, possibly, she was justified.

Testimony also has revealed many of the weaknesses and embarrassments in Daniel and Betty Broderick’s lives, the kind of intimate details few people would want their neighbors to know.

It has told about a man who made more than $1 million a year and an ex-wife who said she couldn’t live adequately on almost $200,000 a year in alimony.

About a husband who wrote to his wife that he felt he had to become wealthy before he could “indulge” in the “luxury” of being a nice person, and a wife who, according to her friends, was such a compulsive shopper that she woke at 6 in the morning to begin ordering from East Coast catalogue outlets.

About a man who told his wife she was “old, fat, ugly, boring and stupid” and an irate mother who dropped her sobbing children at her ex-husband’s doorstep for him to rear, and who left obscene messages on his answering machine.

This has been Page One fodder for local newspapers on repeated days. And some of the more emotional testimony was televised live--naughty words and all--on a San Diego station, the first time a trial at the San Diego County courthouse has been carried live.

“I don’t think there’s been one trial that has generated this much public interest in San Diego in the last 10 years,” said Don Shafer, news director of KNSD (Channel 39), which interrupted regular programming for three days running to air Betty Broderick testifying in her own defense.

“If they’re thinking of making a TV movie, this is one case that has it--the poor wife, the rich husband doctor-lawyer, the beautiful new wife, the tragic murders,” Shafer said. “It has all of those levels. In television, it’s got what we call a ‘high BQ’--bizarre quotient.”

The station received up to 100 calls an hour about the trial, Shafer said. There were complaints at first, he said, from talk-show and game-show fans upset about the interruptions, but, as the coverage went on, “we got calls saying, ‘When are you going to do it again so we can set our VCRs?’ ”

Orrin Fisher, manager of a Sound Company electronics store, said he was at home with his wife two weeks ago when the trial came on unexpectedly.

“I remember turning to her and saying, ‘Geez, it is like it is on TV sometimes, just as dramatic.’ Except (on the network dramas) they get it done in an hour. Like I said, I wished they’d stayed with it.”

With the case due to go to the jury this week, experts in sociology and psychology said the public fascination with the case is no surprise, since all murder trials attract attention. But the intensity of interest in the Broderick case is the culmination of “several layers of things, each adding to one below,” a sociologist said.

Part of the attraction might simply be rooted in gender, said Gordon Clanton, a professor of sociology at San Diego State University and author of a book called “Jealousy.”

“Other women may identify with Betty, because they, too, have in their own views been badly treated or rejected by men in their lives,” he said. “That factor alone would make a lot of women interested in the case.”

At the trial, the people lining up each day for the few free spots in the 36-seat courtroom--those not taken by family members or the eight accredited reporters--have been almost all female.

Still, the case has an appeal that transcends gender, Clanton said, because “it’s not just a detective tale but a psychological riddle on top of a mystery.”

“Why did (Betty Broderick) do it? Was it justified? Since she did it, was it otherwise excusable? That’s really a rich series of questions,” Clanton said, “because everyone brings their own values, experience and sense of justice, and it really becomes a morality play for the community.”

The play, he said, has one overriding theme, since Betty Broderick contends that Daniel Broderick used his legal influence to manipulate and delay their divorce proceedings, then to cheat her out of her fair share of his considerable assets and custody of their four children: “Can one do something to drive someone to murder?

“That’s a question that anyone who’s ever been under pressure, who has imagined themselves murdering somebody, maybe not admitted it but has been in touch with some powerful anger of their own, has thought about,” he said. “And that may be everyone.”

Aleene Friedman, 55, of Solana Beach, a therapist who treats patients suffering from chronic physical pain, said she believes the trial “touches on what we don’t like to think is our own possibility in life, if we became so angry and driven--that we might kill.

“I’d like to think we might not,” Friedman said. “But we might. We don’t think we’d kill another person. But we might. One doesn’t say, ‘That’s all right.’ But it’s more of a haunting thing.”

Her friend, Muriel Goodman, 60, of University City, a part-time social worker who watched the Broderick trial on television, said she can remember, when things began to go bad with her marriage, that she had “what we could call a kitchen implement in my hand, then putting it down.”

“I feel that mental abuse is most of the time worse than physical abuse, and I think that’s what (Betty Broderick) got,” Goodman said.

Lara Jensen, who works at Clean & Lean Laundromat & Fitness near San Diego State University--where clients can tan, work out and do their laundry, all at the same site--said she watched the trial on TV, too.

Betty Broderick appeared to be “pretty crazy,” Jensen said.

Watching with customers, “we were just saying the normal stuff, saying what everybody’s saying, that she wasn’t justified in what she did,” Jensen said. “There’s no reason to kill anybody.”

At Images Hair Design in Scripps Ranch, receptionist Gail Lillie said clients frequently talk about the Broderick trial.

“Everybody thinks the poor thing did it,” Lillie said. “Mainly everybody’s feeling sorry for their children, who now don’t have a father and now aren’t going to have a mother around them.”

Kayellen Young, 27, a cashier at the Souplantation restaurant in Point Loma, said she avidly watched the televised portions of the trial.

“It’s like watching a soap opera,” she said. “A soap opera brought to real life.”

Linda Dunn, 35, a cosmetologist at Hester & Co. in Miramar, said she has been following the case “big time,” in part because she has been sending clippings from San Diego newspapers to Utah, where her niece works with Linda Broderick’s sister.

“I don’t have any doubt that I think her husband, Dan Broderick, was a total jerk,” Dunn said. “But I still don’t think he deserved to die.”

Lt. Mike Dunn, Linda Dunn’s husband, a pilot with Fighter Squadron 126 at Naval Air Station Miramar, said the trial is even the subject of conversation with the fighter jocks in their ready room. “Before we start flying we read the paper and talk about the Broderick case,” he said.

Mark Leisinger, general manager of the San Diego Athletic Club downtown, said he hears something “every day” about the trial, where clients who regularly watched Geraldo Rivera on the workout-room TV set were much more attentive when the show was interrupted for Betty Broderick segments.

“But I think a lot more comments will surface after a verdict is heard,” he said.

No matter what verdict the jury eventually reaches, it is unlikely to end public interest in the case, said Faye J. Girsh, a clinical and forensic psychologist who testifies frequently in court cases.

“I see a lot of people, clients, who are in similar positions to any of the three people, Linda, Dan and Betty,” said Girsh, whose office is next door to where Daniel Broderick and Linda Kolkena Broderick worked. “I think what happens in that case is going to make a difference to other people involved in the same thing.

“This case has the highest interest level of any I’ve seen for many, many years,” she said.