Broderick Admits Son Hid Handgun : Murder trial: She says he feared she would use the weapon to shoot his father.

Murder defendant Elisabeth Broderick’s son tried to hide her loaded handgun because the boy feared she would shoot his father, Broderick acknowledged from the witness stand Thursday.

Broderick used the .38-caliber gun to fatally shoot her ex-husband and his new wife months after that incident.

She contends that the shootings were her unplanned reaction to years of emotional abuse; prosecutors say they were premeditated murder. Prosecutors plan to seek a sentence of life imprisonment if Broderick, 44, is convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Daniel Broderick III, 44, and his wife of six months, Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28.

Under cross-examination, Broderick testified that she bought the gun in March, 1989, and showed it to her two sons, now ages 12 and 15, to warn them that it was dangerous.

“Danny was so concerned about the fact that you were going to use this gun to kill his father, that he stole it from you, grabbed it and took it and ran outside to try and hide it from you,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kerry Wells said, referring to the older of the two boys.

“That’s what he said, yes,” Broderick answered.

Broderick testified Wednesday that “anger doesn’t cover” how she felt on the morning of Nov. 5, 1989, when she entered her ex-husband’s Marston Hills home.

Her bitter divorce and custody battle had lasted so long that, by 1987, “I was terrified, distraught, disillusioned . . . destroyed,” Broderick, 44, said under cross-examination.

“So, anger doesn’t come close to what I was feeling,” Broderick said.

Wells tried to impeach Broderick’s testimony and consistently zeroed in various things Broderick did before the slayings, such as driving her car through the front door of Daniel Broderick’s house and leaving obscene messages on his answering machine.

She asked repeatedly why Broderick used one particular obscene word to describe Daniel Broderick and another in reference to his second wife and former legal assistant.

“I’m having so much fun! I love this machine!” Broderick said on one tape-recorded message. “I want to go to court to prove that you’re a (expletive) and she’s a (expletive). This is so much fun!”