Betty Broderick: Telling on myself

What do you do when you have struggled loyally for years beside your husband, living in financial hardship as you bring up your joint children virtually as a single mother, working toward the good times that you can see coming for all of you, only to discover that your husband is committing adultery and is planning to leave you? Worse, he aggressively denies his affair, denouncing you as crazy to your face and to everyone you know, while he schemes to walk off with everything you have worked so hard for as he is reborn into a new life with a star-struck younger woman, as pretty as you once were, who will enjoy everything you have invested in – your financial security, your home-life and even your children. Worse still, he is a notoriously hard-ball lawyer with every intention of crushing you in any way he can, of erasing you from his life, of reducing you to nothing, so that he can move on as if you never existed. Daniel T. Broderick III’s relentless harassment of his discarded wife, Betty, made her increasingly crazy as he and his girlfriend – then second wife – Linda Kolkena Broderick piled on the pressure, until one day, on November 5, 1989, at her wits’ end and believing herself to be acting in self-defense, she confronted them in the early hours of the morning and in a panic shot them both dead. A multitude of onlookers has absolved Betty for what she did. Many even admire her, especially if they have suffered similar fates to hers. One juror at her trial openly questioned why she had taken so long to kill Dan under such extreme provocation. Now, twenty-five years into a thirty-two year to life prison sentence for her second-degree murder of Dan and Linda Broderick, Betty has reluctantly decided to give her personal account of what led up to that fatal and fateful day, when all three of their futures came violently and abruptly to an end.