The La Jolla Con

It was just before seven in the morning on November 5, 1989, when a telephone call connected two people across the quiet Sunday stillness of San Diego. On one end was Brad Wright, the boyfriend of a young woman named Kim Broderick. On the other end, crackling with something that sounded almost like excitement, was Kim's mother, Betty Broderick. "I finally did it," Betty told him, according to trial testimony. And then she said something that made Brad Wright's blood go cold. She told him she had been to the house on Cypress Avenue in the Marilee neighborhood of La Jolla, that she had let herself in with a key she had never returned, and that she had gone upstairs into the bedroom where her ex-husband Daniel Broderick the Third and his new wife Linda were sleeping.

Brad Wright called Kim. Kim called the San Diego Police Department. And by the time officers arrived at that gracious hillside home, the lives of two people were over, and one of the most divisive, most debated, most exhaustively documented domestic homicide cases in California history had just begun.

To understand what happened that morning, you have to understand what the years before it looked like — not just the legal battles and the courtroom maneuvers, but the human beings at the center of them.

Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia was born in New York in 1947, the daughter of a strict Catholic family, a girl who by every account was driven and bright and full of ambition at a time when ambition in women was most socially acceptable if it found its expression in the right husband. She found him. Daniel T. Broderick the Third was handsome and magnetic and going places — Harvard Law, a medical degree as well, the kind of man who filled up a room. They married in 1969, and Betty, as everyone called her, threw herself into building the life they had both imagined. She worked to support them through his graduate years. She raised their children, eventually four of them, while he built his practice into one of the most successful medical malpractice law firms in San Diego. By the mid-1980s, they were a fixture of the city's upper-tier social world — La Jolla charity galas, the right clubs, the right zip code, a life that looked, from the outside, very much like the one Betty had worked so hard to construct.

But by 1985, the marriage was fracturing in ways that would prove irreparable. Dan Broderick met Linda Kolkena, a young woman who was working as a receptionist at his law firm. Betty would later insist — fiercely, and in language that courts repeatedly found to be threatening — that Dan had been conducting an affair long before he admitted to it. Dan denied that the relationship with Linda became romantic until after the separation. What is not disputed is that the marriage ended bitterly, that Dan eventually filed for divorce in 1985, and that what followed was four years of litigation so prolonged, so contentious, so filled with mutual accusations that it became almost its own institution in the San Diego courts.

Betty's behavior during those years was, by even sympathetic accounts, extreme. She left profane, screaming messages on Dan's answering machine — messages her own children could hear. She drove her car through the front door of Dan's home. She was held in contempt of court on multiple occasions. Dan, who was both her adversary and, as a prominent attorney with deep connections in the local legal community, held tremendous structural power in the proceedings, was awarded primary custody of their children after Betty's outbursts. Those custody decisions devastated her. She experienced each court ruling, each sanction, each contempt finding not merely as a legal loss but as a theft — of her children, her status, her identity, the life she believed she had rightfully earned.

Dan and Linda married in April 1989. Betty's divorce settlement had been finalized by then, with Betty receiving a monthly payment that was substantial by most measures but that she found humiliating relative to Dan's income and the life they had shared. She talked about her rage constantly — to friends, to her children, in journals, on those answering machine tapes. She was, in the words of a therapist who testified during trial, consumed by it.

It is important to hold both of those truths at once: that Betty Broderick had been through a genuinely brutal divorce, that questions about fairness and power in those proceedings were real and were raised by observers at the time — and that by the autumn of 1989, her documented behavior had long since crossed every recognizable line.

On the night of November 4th, 1989, Betty took a revolver she had purchased some months earlier, drove to the house on Cypress Avenue, used a key she had kept from a time when she had access to the home, climbed the stairs in the early-morning dark, and entered the bedroom where Dan Broderick, age 44, and Linda Broderick, age 28, were asleep. She fired multiple shots. Linda Broderick died almost immediately. Dan Broderick died minutes later, not before — according to trial testimony — managing to reach a telephone. His call never connected.

A neighbor would later testify to hearing a woman's voice, and then the sound of something terrible.

Betty Broderick drove away. She called Brad Wright. And then she called Kim.

The investigation that followed was, in terms of identifying a suspect, not complicated. Betty herself had announced what she had done. San Diego Police Detective Tom Craig and his colleagues were working, in the immediate aftermath, not a whodunit but a why — and a how, and what the law would ultimately make of it all. Betty was arrested later that same day, November 5th, 1989. She gave a statement in which she said she had not gone to the house intending to kill anyone, that she had gone in despair, that she had not expected what happened to happen. Prosecutors would spend the next two years systematically dismantling that account.

The evidence assembled against her was extensive. There were the months of threatening phone messages, meticulously documented. There was the purchase of the firearm. There were statements Betty had made to friends in the period leading up to the shooting — statements that a number of those friends, in what must have been an agonizing position, would repeat on the witness stand. There was the key, deliberately kept. There was the act of entering a home in the pre-dawn hours, climbing the stairs, entering a bedroom where two people lay sleeping.

Prosecutors argued, and the evidence they presented supported the argument, that this was not a woman who had snapped in a moment of sudden passion. This was, they contended, a woman who had carried murderous rage toward her ex-husband and his new wife across months, who had obtained a weapon, and who had made a deliberate choice.

The defense, led by attorney Jack Earley, offered a different frame. They argued that Betty Broderick was a woman who had been systematically abused — not physically, but emotionally and legally — by a powerful man who had used the courts as a weapon and had taken everything from her. They argued that years of documented manipulation and isolation had left her in a mental state that, at the very least, raised reasonable doubt about premeditation and first-degree murder. The defense leaned heavily on what might be called the human context: the children, the sacrifices, the years of dependency, the power imbalance that had defined every stage of the divorce proceedings.

The first trial, which began in 1990, ended in a mistrial. The jury, after days of deliberation, was deadlocked — unable to reach a unanimous verdict on either first or second-degree murder. Several jurors indicated afterward that they had been swayed by sympathy for Betty's account of her years of mistreatment, even as others were convinced of her guilt. The deadlock was real and it was significant, and for a moment it seemed possible that the case might resolve in ways that would complicate any simple narrative.

The second trial began in October 1991, with Superior Court Judge Laura Hammes presiding and prosecutor Kerry Wells, who had also tried the first case, returning to present the state's argument with renewed focus. Wells was methodical, and in this second proceeding she was more effective in keeping certain testimony constrained and in keeping the jury's attention on the documented record of Betty's behavior in the months before the shooting rather than on the longer history of the marriage.

The defense again presented Betty herself as a witness — a decision that gave the jury an extended, unmediated look at her. Betty's testimony was, by most accounts, remarkable for its lack of conventional remorse. She expressed grief for her children and fury at what had been done to her, but her accounting of the night in question and the years that preceded it did not conform to the portrait of a shattered, desperate woman that the defense needed the jury to see. Prosecutors on cross-examination pressed her on the phone messages, the acts of vandalism, the threats. Betty's responses were, at times, defiant.

On December 10, 1991, the jury found Betty Broderick guilty of two counts of second-degree murder. The finding of second-degree rather than first-degree murder meant that the jury had concluded — at least implicitly — that premeditation in the strictest legal sense had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but that Betty Broderick had acted with malice aforethought when she took two lives. She was sentenced to thirty-two years to life in prison.

The appeals that followed were extensive. Betty's legal team argued various grounds, including issues related to jury instruction and the handling of certain evidence. The California Court of Appeal reviewed the case and upheld the conviction. Further petitions over the years raised continuing arguments about the fairness of the proceedings and about the broader issues of emotional abuse and its relationship to criminal culpability — arguments that placed the Broderick case in a conversation that was, by the early 1990s, becoming increasingly urgent in American legal culture.

Betty Broderick has been eligible for parole and has appeared before the California Board of Parole Hearings multiple times. Her parole was denied in 2010, in 2017, and again in 2020, when the board found that she continued to minimize her responsibility for the killings and had not demonstrated sufficient insight into the harm she had caused. She remains incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. Her next scheduled parole hearing is a matter of public record. She is now in her mid-seventies.

Over the decades, the Broderick case has attracted a volume of cultural attention that few domestic homicide cases ever do. It has been the subject of books, documentaries, a television movie in 1992 starring Meredith Baxter, and more recently a scripted drama series for the USA Network. Betty Broderick has been portrayed variously as a monster, a martyr, and everything complicated in between, and the tenacity of the public's fascination says something — something worth sitting with — about the anxieties and resentments and questions about fairness and power and gender and marriage that the case managed to crystallize.

But crystallize them around what? Around two people who were shot to death in their own bed.

Dan Broderick was forty-four years old. He had built something remarkable from ambition and intelligence, and whatever the failures and cruelties of his marriage — and the record suggests there were real ones — he was also a father, a colleague, a human being who had the right to live out his life. Linda Broderick was twenty-eight. She was young and she was, by accounts of those who knew her, warm and funny and genuinely loved by Dan's children in ways that were uncomplicated by the bitterness that consumed her relationship with their mother. She had done nothing in the eyes of the law that justified what happened to her in that bedroom. She was the youngest person in all of it, and she is the one least often remembered.

The case raises questions that do not resolve neatly. Questions about what happens to women who subordinate their careers and their independence to a marriage and then find themselves stripped of everything when that marriage ends. Questions about whether the family court system, in the 1980s in particular, was equipped to handle proceedings in which one party was a prominent attorney with institutional connections and the other was not. Questions about the line between documented grievance and criminal rage. Those questions are real. They were real then and in some measure they are real now.

And yet the jury system — twice convened, and ultimately unified in the second instance — looked at all of that, looked at the full and complicated record, and concluded that Betty Broderick had chosen, in the end, to pick up a weapon and end two lives. The law, the appeals courts, and the parole board have each, in their turn, confirmed that judgment.

What lingers, as it always does in cases like this one, is not the legal verdict. The legal verdict is clear. What lingers is something quieter: the image of a marriage that contained two people who both, at different times and in different ways, failed each other and failed themselves. The image of four children who lost both their parents on a November morning — one to gunfire, one to a prison cell. The image of Linda Kolkena Broderick, twenty-eight years old, who walked into a life that was not of her making and did not walk out of it.

The law has spoken in this case. The appeals courts have spoken. The parole board, looking into Betty Broderick's eyes across a hearing room table, has spoken more than once. But cases like this one have a way of speaking back — of refusing to lie quietly in the files — because they press on something that our culture has never quite finished arguing about. And maybe that unfinished argument is part of why we keep returning to them. Not for the answers, which the courts have given us, but for the questions underneath, which no court can resolve.