Murder Trial Grips San Diego : Justice: The first live broadcast from the downtown courthouse has residents riveted to testimony of jealousy, passion and greed. Viewers square off in defense or condemnation of defendant Betty Broderick.

At the Quel Fromage cafe in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood, the sort of subdued salon where the customers linger over croissants and espresso, one item has kept the regulars riveted for a month.

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

“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,” he said of his customers.

Betty-backers or Betty-bashers are 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.

And 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 young, attractive new wife.

Her trial has generated a more intense, personal interest than any other in recent San Diego history.

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

And it has revealed the weaknesses and embarrassments in Daniel and Betty Broderick’s lives, the kinds of details few people want their neighbors to know.

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

Witnesses told about a man who called his wife “old, fat, ugly, boring and stupid” and an irate mother who dropped her sobbing children on their father’s doorstep.

The case has been Page 1 material for local newspapers on repeated days. And some of the more emotional testimony was televised--foul language and all--on a San Diego station, the first time a trial at the San Diego County courthouse has been broadcast 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).

With the case due to go to the jury this week, experts in sociology and psychology said the public fascination 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 the book, “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.”

It is mostly women who line up each day for the few free spots in the 36-seat courtroom--those not taken by family members or the eight accredited reporters.

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 overriding theme, he said, is: “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 . . . has thought about,” he said. “And that may be everyone.”

Aleene Friedman, 55, of Solana Beach, who works as a therapist treating patients suffering from chronic physical pain, said she believed 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.”

No matter what it is, the jury’s verdict is unlikely to put off the 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 located 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.”