Testimony Concludes in Broderick’s Trial

Consumed by rage from a bitter divorce, La Jolla socialite Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick suffered from distinct personality disorders that magnified her feelings and led her to kill in anger, a prosecution psychiatrist said Tuesday at Broderick’s double murder trial.

Testimony in the case concluded later Tuesday, however, with a different diagnosis. A defense psychologist said Broderick’s personality disorders--and the situation she found herself in during and after the divorce--led to a “stable instability” that left her unable to adequately control her emotions or to remember what she did.

Focusing on Broderick’s mental state, both experts centered their testimony on the key issue in the case, due to go to the jury today: whether she had the intent to kill her ex-husband and his new wife. She admits firing the shots that killed them both on Nov. 5, 1989.

Over prosecution objections, San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas J. Whelan, who has presided over the 15-day trial, decided late Tuesday that jurors will be told today that they have five options in deciding the case: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter or not guilty of any charges.

Broderick, 43, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, and his second wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick. 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, 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, she accused her husband of using his legal influence to cheat her out of her fair share of his seven-figure annual income.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, the prosecutor in the case, argued Tuesday that Whelan should instruct jurors to assess Broderick’s liability as either murder or none at all, forgoing the option of manslaughter verdicts.

She contended there had been no suggestion at the trial that Betty Broderick acted without the intent to kill that is required for a murder conviction, a claim defense lawyer Jack Earley disputed.

First-degree murder means the killing was premeditated, while second-degree lacks that deliberation. Voluntary manslaughter means a killing was committed after a sudden provocation; involuntary manslaughter describes a killing that occurs while doing something else without due caution.

Whelan said fairness requires that he offer all five options to the jury, although he said he was undecided whether to offer a voluntary manslaughter option in the death of Linda Kolkena Broderick. He said he would decide that today, after thinking overnight about whether there had been evidence showing that she provoked Betty Broderick.

The prosecution psychiatrist, Melvin G. Goldzband, said Tuesday that Broderick repeatedly provoked her ex-husband and his new wife. She was driven by two personality disorders to attract attention, to prove her own importance and to show her “glorious victimization,” said Goldzband, whose office is in San Diego.

Rejecting defense claims advanced last week that Broderick was the victim of emotional abuse during her marriage, Goldzband said she was “severely narcissistic,” or inordinately self-focused, and “histrionic,” satisfied only when she was the center of attention.

To some extent, everyone is narcissistic and histrionic, and each of us carries any number of other personality traits, Goldzband said. But when those traits become disorders, they “enlarge and take over the personality,” he said.

When Daniel and Betty Broderick separated, she, like other people suffering from those disorders, felt extraordinary rage and rejection, Goldzband said.

Typically, she made a “suicide gesture,” slitting her wrists in 1983 but not hurting herself so seriously that it was a genuine suicide attempt, he said. And she began to “act out against the person who would besmirch (her) perfect image,” Goldzband said.

As other witnesses had described in previous testimony, Goldzband said that Broderick drove her car into her ex-husband’s front door, smeared a pie on his bed when he was not home and left vulgar messages on his answering machine.

Telling neighbors and friends about what she had done reinforced her idea that “her behavior, in her mind, is always justified, reasonable and explainable,” he said.

Goldzband said he believed the vulgar messages were aimed more at the couple’s four children--who lived mostly with their father after the separation--than at Daniel Broderick, to try to provoke them to “act out against their father.”

“The kids very transparently became a tool that (Broderick) used to get back at her husband,” Goldzband said. “Nothing else was as important to her.”

Not even the amount of her alimony, which she contested, though it was eventually set at $16,000 a month, Goldzband said. Even if it had been much more, he said, “that wasn’t what she wanted--at all. She wanted Dan. She wanted not to be rejected.”

When she couldn’t have him, Goldzband said, her rage and rejection progressed and built, driving her purposefully to the killings. He said they were “simply the manifestations of her own rage, to break up her own household and make trouble for them.”

Countering that claim for the defense, Katherine DiFrancesca, a clinical psychologist in San Diego, suggested that Broderick could not have intended to kill because, by last November, she had lost the “executive function to control emotions,” especially anger.

DiFrancesca said she believed Broderick should be diagnosed as histrionic with “narcissistic features.” She also said she thought Broderick suffered from serious depression.

Those traits lay dormant until the separation, she said. Then, over time, there was a “total breakdown as the years progressed and the stress progressed.”

Broderick’s basic personality flaw, DiFrancesca said, is that she does not have a strong sense of her own identity. She saw herself as her husband’s wife and mother to his children, not as her own person, and when that identity collapsed, so did her happiness, DiFrancesca said.

Left by herself, Broderick acted as people with her disorders do, DiFrancesca said. She tried to put on a happy face by acting “energetic” and a “little madcap.”

Because of her degree of self-focus, Broderick probably did not even recognize that her vulgar messages might have offended her children, DiFrancesca said. The language--sexually and scatologically explicit--was “so explosive” that it “really shows how out of control she was.”

During and after a nasty divorce, women like Broderick “feel devalued,” DiFrancesca said. “They are rageful. They are devaluing everything around them.”

But, she said, it was not deliberate. Broderick ended up “doing things spontaneously.”

Testifying in her own defense two weeks ago, Broderick said she did not remember very much about the shootings themselves. DiFrancesca said that was in line with her diagnosis, since “forgetting is really an issue.”