Prosecutor Probes Broderick on Claims of Domestic Violence : Murder trial: Defendant’s marriage to man she killed is focus of testimony in a shortened court day due to jurors with flu.

Elisabeth Anne (Betty) Broderick testified Wednesday that her husband “never really meant” to hit her during their marriage, but did on several occasions.

Under cross-examination from Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells, Broderick softened comments made earlier in the week, in which she said her then-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, had often hit her so hard that she was left with a black eye, a sprained ankle, a broken sternum and other injuries.

“You actually broke your sternum?” Wells asked.

“Yes,” Broderick said.

“You actually broke the bone?”

“It’s not a bone. It’s a cartilage,” Broderick replied.

Wells asked why Broderick had not reported the injury during a subsequent visit to a San Diego hospital.

“I didn’t really talk to anybody,” she said.

Wells continued to press about the severity of her injury and whether her sternum was actually broken.

“Well, that’s what it felt like . . . for a very long time,” Broderick said.

Broderick is accused of murdering Daniel Broderick, 44, and his second wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, in the bedroom of their Marston Hills home on the morning of Nov. 5, 1989. Last year’s trial ended in a hung jury.

Wednesday’s session was cut short because two jurors came down with the flu. Superior Court Judge Thomas J. Whelan said that, after conferring with attorneys, he decided against seating alternate jurors in place of those with the flu.

As a result, he said today’s session of Broderick’s second murder trial is also in doubt. At the close of the Wednesday’s session, which ended at 11 a.m., Whelan admonished jurors not to watch the ABC news show, “20/20,” on television Friday night.

He said the network has scheduled a lengthy interview with Elisabeth Broderick, whose 44th birthday is today.

Court will not be in session Monday because of Veterans Day, but the attorneys remain hopeful that the case will go to the jury by Thanksgiving.

Much of Wednesday’s cross-examination focused on Broderick’s suicide attempts, what Wells characterized as Broderick’s unwillingness to challenge her ex-husband for custody of their four children and her spending habits.

She asked Broderick about out-of-town trips after her separation from Daniel Broderick and whether she had ever worn a $10,000 party dress. Broderick disputed the price but failed to say what the dress did cost.

Wells asked Broderick if she remembered telling Ruth Roth, a licensed marriage, family and child therapist that Daniel Broderick would “die first” before she would ever agree to be “a single mother with four children.”

Roth recently testified that Broderick made such a comment during a counseling session.

Broderick said that, at the time, she was an “absolute basket case . . . horrified and scared,” about raising four children without an official custody or support agreement with her ex-husband.

Wells asked Broderick repeatedly about times Daniel Broderick allegedly physically hurt her and whether anyone ever had witnessed such an incident.

She said that her ex-husband, a prominent medical malpractice attorney and past president of the San Diego County Bar Assn., was “too in control and too smart” to strike her in front of others.

Wells asked about an incident in which Broderick testified that her husband pushed her to the ground after her skis brushed against his.

Pressed for details about his motive, Broderick said, “He had a temper. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt me. I think he was embarrassed that he pushed me down.”

Broderick also testified that, in 1983, when her marriage was faltering, she slit her wrists and took painkillers.

She said that, in 1983, she dumped most of her husband’s wardrobe in the back yard and burned his clothes, sparing only his favorite formal attire.

Wells asked if she considered the effect that suicide attempts and burning their father’s clothes might have had on her children.

Broderick conceded that her children were “kind of shocked” about the clothes incident.

Several times during Wednesday’s cross-examination, Wells pulled pages from diaries that Broderick had kept during and after her marriage to her ex-husband.

Wells has been allowed to introduce pages from the diary, but defense attorney Jack Earley said he has been barred from introducing the diaries as a whole. He said the documents chronicle Elisabeth Broderick’s emotional deterioration and the gradual erosion of a 16-year marriage.

He was barred from introducing the diaries during last year’s trial as well.

At one point, Wells cited a page from the diary, and Broderick snapped, “If you’re going to keep putting in pages of the diary, you should put in the whole diary, which show my day-to-day demise and destruction.”

When cross-examination resumes, Wells is expected to ask Broderick about the morning of the slayings two years ago.