Angry Betty: Divorce can be an ugly business, especially when one of those involved is a raging lunatic with serious anger management issues.
The Craigslist Killer: A brilliant medical student with a gambling addiction hits on a killer idea to clear his debts. Log in, pick a victim, execute.
The Town that Killed Ken McElroy: He was a bully, a pedophile, a cattle rustler, a petty thief and a womanizer. But, as Ken McElroy was to learn, you can only push people so far before they start pushing back.
Numbers: A schoolboy with an unusual hobby brings down a killer in this harrowing tale of child rape and murder.
The Most Hated Mom in America: What kind of a mother goes out partying while her two-year-old daughter is missing, presumed dead?
Nightmare in Suburbia: When is teenager’s mutilated corpse is found dumped on a suburban street the race is on to find her killer, a drug addict with suspected snuff movie links.
Going Postal: An angry and disgruntled postal worker, one customer complaint too many, a workplace massacre that shocked America.
A Starring Role in Murder: One of television’s most iconic fictional detectives finds himself on the other side of the law, charged with a brutal homicide.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume16
Angry Betty
Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia was born on November 7, 1947, in
Eastchester, New York. Her father, Frank, worked in the construction industry
and Betty grew up as one of six siblings in a stable, middle-class environment.
She attended Catholic school and thereafter earned a degree at Mount Saint
Vincent College, living at home throughout her school years. She met her future
husband Dan Broderick at a Notre Dame football game when she was 17 and it was
love at first sight for Betty. Thereafter they began dating with Dan frequently
traveling back and forth from Cornell Medical College where he was a pre-med
student. It seemed a match made in heaven and the beautiful young couple made
it official on April 12, 1969, when they tied the knot. Then, after a honeymoon
in the Caribbean, they returned to New York where Betty found out that she was
pregnant. It appeared that things could not get any better.
Life for the newlyweds was no cakewalk, though. Dan had not
yet completed his studies and Betty was working to support him. Fortunately,
she was a talented woman with an appetite for hard work and a stand-by-your-man
attitude. Times may have been tough but the couple lacked for very little
during those years. Betty saw to that.
In January 1970, Betty gave birth to her first child, a
daughter named Kimberly. Thereafter, she almost immediately fell pregnant
again, delivering another daughter, Lee, in July 1971. Dan had in the interim
obtained his degree but just months into his medical residency, he decided that
the life of a physician wasn’t for him. He wanted to become a medical
malpractice attorney and enrolled at Harvard, bent on obtaining a law degree. Betty
supported him in this decision. Before long they’d packed up their young family
and moved to Massachusetts. There, Dan devoted himself to his studies while
Betty took on the joint responsibilities of caring for their infant children
and earning the money to pay for their food and rent. She could often be found
going door-to-door in their Boston neighborhood selling Avon or Tupperware,
with Kim on her hip and Lee in a stroller.
Not all of the money that Betty earned went on necessities.
While she and the kids made do with bargain basement clothes, Dan had a taste
for the finer things in life. He was known on campus as “Dapper Dan,” a
reference to the well-cut sports coats and silk ties that he favored. These, he
told Betty, were the tools of his trade. If he wanted to make it as a
high-priced malpractice lawyer, he needed to look the part.
Early in 1973, the Brodericks were on the move again, this
time to California, where Dan had earned a summer clerkship at a Los Angeles
legal firm. He then decided that he wanted to move to San Diego where the
competition was less intense. With his dual degrees in law and medicine, Dan
had his pick of jobs and he eventually accepted a position as a junior partner
with Cary, Gray. With Dan’s long years of study finally delivering a financial
dividend the couple put a down payment on a beautiful home in the upmarket
Coral Reef neighborhood. It was the next step on the upward trajectory of the
Brodericks.
Not that it was all plain sailing. As a junior partner,
Dan’s salary was a long way south of the kind of money he’d eventually earn.
Betty still had to work. For a time, she taught religious classes at a local
school and, in 1979, she obtained her real estate license. Betty didn’t really
mind anyway, she enjoyed working, enjoyed making a contribution to her family’s
wellbeing. It was what her middle-class Catholic upbringing had prepared her
for.
So far the Brodericks’ life had been one of near unbroken achievement,
a virtual parable of the American Dream. But the first dark clouds had already
appeared on the horizon. Dan’s obsession with getting ahead in his career was
beginning to take a toll on his family life. Not only did he put in ungodly
hours at the office but he also began spending more and more time socializing
with his lawyer buddies, something that he saw as mandatory to succeed in his
profession. As a result, Betty and the children (who now numbered four) barely
saw him. While she was home keeping house, he could be found either burning the
midnight lamp at work or drinking in some Irish bar with members of the legal
profession or with his fraternity, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.
In 1978, Dan decided to quit Cary, Gray and set up his own
law practice. Betty, as always, was supportive and her belief in her husband
was well-founded. As someone who was both a qualified doctor and a qualified
lawyer, Dan Broderick was eminently competent at his particular field of law.
The practice took off immediately and grew exponentially. Even better for Betty
was that Dan curtailed his social activities and began spending more time at
home. If the marriage had veered off track for a time, it was back on the rails
now.
The next few years were generally good ones for the
Brodericks even if they were punctuated by discord. Most often, the arguments
had to do with money. Dan Broderick had always been a vain man and he continued
to lavish money on status symbols and on his own appearance. In addition to the
expensive suits he so loved, he paid for hair implants and for a nose job. He
also stopped wearing his glasses and switched to contact lenses. Betty had no
problem with that. What she did have a problem with was when Dan tried to tell
her what to do with the money she earned from her real estate deals. Whenever
she spent any of that on herself or on the children, he’d berate her for
wasting money they couldn’t afford.
And that wasn’t the full extent of Dan’s controlling
behavior towards his wife. He intimidated her. So much so that she would become
a nervous wreck in the hour before he was due to arrive home. She’d spend that
time dashing from room to room making sure that everything was just the way he
liked it. Not that she got much appreciation for her efforts. Dan Broderick, it
appeared, had lost interest in his wife and at least some of that interest was
being directed towards another woman.
Her name was Linda Kolkena, she was 21 years old and she was
a gorgeous blond. Dan and Linda first met at a party thrown by one of his
lawyer friends early in 1983. Then, Dan had surprised his wife by commenting to
a friend about Linda. “Isn't she beautiful?” he’d said somewhat breathlessly.
Betty had never known him to comment on another woman’s looks before.
At the time, Linda was working as a receptionist for another
attorney, despite having no paralegal, or indeed, administrative skills. Prior
to that, she’d worked for Delta Airlines as a flight attendant but had been
fired over inappropriate behavior with a male passenger during a flight. None
of that seemed to bother Dan. Shortly after the party, he lured Linda away from
her current employer and hired her as his personal assistant.
Betty was suspicious from the start, but her friends told
her that she was being paranoid. Dan was not the kind of man to cheat on her,
they said. Subsequent events, however, would prove otherwise. While the
Brodericks were vacationing in New York in the summer of 1983, Betty caught Dan
making a whispered phone call to his assistant. She also found out that Dan had
sent Linda flowers. When she confronted him about this, Dan refused to explain.
He simply told her that she was imagining things.
But Betty was not so easily deflected. Her next move was to
phone one of Dan’s paralegals and asked her directly if Dan was having an
affair with Linda. The woman, perhaps deciding that discretion was the better
part of valor, said that she knew nothing. However, she told Dan about the call
and suggested that he should be straight with his wife. Dan did not take kindly
to the advice. He fired the woman on the spot.
And then came the incident that would push the conflict
between the Brodericks from accusation and denial into outright warfare. The
occasion was Dan’s thirty-ninth birthday and Betty had decided to surprise him
by arriving at his office with a bottle of champagne and a dozen red roses. But
Dan wasn’t there and neither was his assistant and none of his staff appeared
to know where they’d gone. Betty then decided to wait for her husband but
neither he nor Linda returned that afternoon. Eventually, humiliated, Betty
left.
The drive across town was a distressing one for Betty, her
emotions fluctuating between rage, sorrow, and a steely determination to show
Dan Broderick that she was not a woman to be messed with, to be used and then
discarded the minute the first doe-eyed bimbo paid him attention. By the time
she pulled into the drive, she had decided what to do. She marched directly
into the house, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom and started emptying
Dan’s closet. Then she took a pair of scissors and began ripping and tearing
the expensive, tailor-made suits that he loved so much. Finally, she carried
the shredded mess out into the backyard, making several trips. As her stunned
children watched, she poured gasoline on the pile and lit a match. Thousands of
dollars’ worth of Dan Broderick's expensive clothing went up in flames.
Betty expected a reaction from Dan and she was ready for a
fight when he got home. But he said nothing that night, not even raising his
voice in anger about his destroyed clothes. Over the weeks that followed, Betty
continued to harangue him, begging him to be straight with her. On the last day
of February 1984, he finally admitted that he was sleeping with Linda. Not only
that but he told Betty that he was seeking a formal separation. Thus were the
battle lines drawn.
Betty was at first numbed by the realization that her
marriage was over, that she’d lost the only man she’d ever loved, the man she
still loved. But all too soon that numbness gave way to an almost
uncontrollable anger. How dare he? How dare he shunt her aside after all that
she’d sacrificed for him? Hadn’t she gone out to work to put him through
college? Hadn’t she raised his four children? Hadn’t she forfeited any chance
she might have had of building a career for herself? Adding fuel to the fire
was Betty’s growing realization that Dan’s affair with Linda had been public
knowledge for some time. All of their friends and acquaintances knew, all of
Dan’s staff. She felt utterly humiliated. It was only going to take one spark
to set her off and that spark occurred when Dan served her with divorce
papers.
Betty was by now living in La Jolla while Dan remained at
the Coral Reef home with their children. One afternoon, having stopped at the
house to visit her children, Betty spotted a Boston cream pie – Dan's favorite
– on the kitchen counter. Learning from the housekeeper that Linda had dropped
the cake off for Dan, Betty carried it upstairs and proceeded to smear
chocolate cream all over Dan's bed and over the clothes in his closet. When Dan
arrived home and saw the damage, he immediately had a restraining order issued
to keep his wife off the premises.
But Betty, as we shall see, was no respecter of court
orders. A couple of days later, she threw a wine bottle through a window at the
house. The police were called but decided not to take the matter further.
In the meanwhile, Betty was finding it difficult to hire a
divorce lawyer in San Diego. Dan was well connected and had recently been named
president of the San Diego Bar Association. No one was prepared to stand
against him. Betty was forced to look further afield and ended up hiring Daniel
Jaffe, a top-notch Beverley Hills attorney.
But Jaffe would soon have his hands full with Betty’s
increasingly erratic behavior. She continued to vandalize her estranged
husband's property, continued to verbally abuse him in front of their tearful
children and astonished neighbors. Jaffe pleaded with her to stop, warning her
that she was jeopardizing her chances of a fair settlement. Betty, though, was
beyond caring. Her latest escapade was to enter the house while Dan and Linda
were away for a weekend trip, and to smash windows with a bottle.
Returning to his damaged property, Dan finally decided that
enough was enough. The restraining orders quite obviously were not working so
he decided to use another legal device, a judicial order called an Order to
Show Cause or OSC. Over the next year, he’d use this repeatedly to haul Betty
before a judge to explain why she should not be held in contempt of court for
violating the restraining order. The first OSC cited the Boston cream pie mess
and the broken windows. Over time, there would be others involving a damaged
toaster, a wrecked stereo, a smashed mirror, a broken sliding door,
spray-painted wallpaper and countless similar offenses.
The OSCs, however, had no more effect than the restraining
orders. During the Christmas holidays of 1985, Dan took Linda and the children
on a winter vacation, leaving Betty to stew with anger in her La Jolla
apartment. Eventually, her resentment overwhelmed her and she got into her car
and drove to Coral Reef. Breaking into the empty property, she began tearing up
all of the presents stacked under the Christmas tree, tossing them around the
living room. Then she smashed a mirror and left.
In early 1986, not long after he came home to find that
Betty had invaded his house yet again, Dan decided to sell the Coral Reef
property. Perhaps he thought moving out of the home they’d once shared would
somehow appease Betty. He was wrong. The baronial two-story mansion he bought
in Balboa Park only seemed to antagonize her more. Not long after he moved in,
she drove her Suburban SUV through the front door of his new home. This time
Dan's usually restrained temper gave way. He vaulted the wreckage, pulled Betty
from her vehicle, and began slapping her. The two of them were still at each
other’s throats when the police arrived.
And this was an incident that was not going to be as easily
dismissed as the previous ones. Betty was hauled off to a mental hospital where
staff were forced to put her in a straitjacket as she continued kicking,
screaming and cursing. She would remain in confinement for three days before
being released, only to be served with another of Dan’s unending OSCs. They had
no effect. Over the next three years, she’d continue to plague Dan with obscene
phone calls, messages left on his answering machine, hostile confrontations and
acts of vandalism.
At the same time as she was slowly being devoured by this
maelstrom of hatred, Betty’s personal appearance was deteriorating. Overeating
had buried her once slim figure under layers of fat, she never wore makeup
anymore or styled her hair, her wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of baggy
shirts and tracksuits. Her level of decorum had declined as well. Once she’d
been a refined and cultured hostess. Now her speech was peppered with curses
and obscenities, even when addressing her children. It would be fair to say
that Betty Broderick was coming apart.
Finally, on January 16, 1989, the battle between the
Broderick’s reached its zenith when the divorce proceedings came to court. But
again Betty’s actions raised eyebrows. On the eve of the hearing, she fired her
lawyer, Daniel Jaffe. Then she failed to show up at court making it an easy win
for Dan. He gained full custody of the couple’s four children, reinstatement of
the restraining orders, and a ban on visitation rights until Betty voluntarily
submitted to psychiatric care. As for alimony, Dan was required to continue
paying Betty $9,000 a month, a pittance considering he was making well over $2
million a year. He also used his legal expertise to deprive his wife of a fair
share of their joint assets. Most would say that he outright cheated Betty. In
the end, multi-millionaire Dan Broderick was ordered to pay his wife of 20
years, the mother of his four children, the woman who had worked to put him
through college, less than $30,000 in cash. Adding insult to injury, he
announced his engagement to Linda three months after the divorce was
finalized.
In retrospect, it is easy to condemn Betty Broderick’s
behavior. Divorces and extra-marital affairs are, after all, an all too
familiar feature of modern life. Those involved are required by society to act
maturely in coming to a satisfactory resolution for all parties. But that is to
take all of the emotion out of a situation that is, by its very nature,
emotionally charged. Each of us responds differently to these circumstances
and, in Betty’s case, the response quickly spiraled out of control. Minor acts
of vandalism built upon each other, escalating until eventually they drove
Betty Broderick to the ultimate act of retribution. They drove her to
murder.
On the morning of November 5, 1989, Betty rose in her La
Jolla apartment and shuffled into her small kitchen to make a cup of coffee.
Slumping into a chair, she picked up a couple of letters lying on the table and
scanned through them. They were just the latest in a long series she’d received
from her ex-husband’s attorneys, warning her to stop harassing Dan and his new
wife Linda or face the consequences. Betty had heard these threats before and
they no longer bothered her. In any case, this was the day that they stopped.
She’d been pushed to the end of her tether and she wasn’t going to take any
more.
After finishing her coffee, Betty walked to her bedroom,
quiet so that she wouldn't wake her two sons who were spending the weekend with
her. She dressed quickly, picked up her purse and walked out into the early
morning sunshine. The weight of the purse felt reassuring. It contained the .38
caliber Smith & Wesson she had just recently bought.
Sliding her overweight frame behind the wheel of her car,
Betty started the engine and pulled away from the curb. Minutes later, she was
on the southbound freeway heading towards awakening city of San Diego. She took
the Midtown exit and piloted the vehicle through the quiet streets, not
stopping until she pulled up in front of the attractive double-story in Balboa
Park.
Betty had a key with her, one that she’d stolen from one of
her daughters during a recent visit. But the key didn’t fit the front door so
she walked around to the back. There, a twist of the handle gave her access to
the house. Betty wasn’t thinking now. She was acting out a fantasy that she’d
run through so many times in her head that she was operating on autopilot. The
carpeted stairway took her to the upper floor. There she silently entered her
husband’s bedroom and stood watching for a while as he and his wife slept. The
bimbo was going to die first. She wanted Dan to know that his precious Linda
was gone before he ate a bullet himself. Walking to Linda’s side of the bed,
Betty pulled the .38 from her purse and leveled it at the sleeping woman’s
head.
The roar of the revolver sounded impossibly loud in the
carpeted room. The bullet slammed into Linda Broderick’s head with such force
that it caused her to bounce on the bed. Then the gun bucked again in Betty’s
hand and Linda lay still forever. Dan Broderick was rendered instantly awake by
the commotion and had just enough time to register his ex-wife standing with
the smoking gun in her hand, pointing it at him. He tried to scramble free of
the sheets but was cut down by a .38 slug to the back. The bullet chewed
through his innards and destroyed his lungs. He died within minutes, choking to
death on his own blood. By then, Betty had already called 911. She surrendered
willingly to the first officers who arrived on the scene.
There would be two trials, the first ending in a hung jury
and the second terminating in the best verdict that Betty Broderick could
realistically have hoped for. She was found guilty on two counts of
second-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive fifteen-years-to-life
terms. That meant that she would be eligible for parole in nineteen years.
Today, Betty Broderick is Prisoner Number W42477, serving
her time at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She has
adapted well to prison life where she tutors her fellow inmates to prepare them
for their GED exams. Her children don’t visit but she has a male friend who
stops by every week. In January 2010, the Board of Paroles turned down her
first request for early release, since she refused to acknowledge any
wrongdoing. She was turned down again in November 2011 and January 2017,
although she seems unfazed by these rejections.
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