In 1983, everything began to break down.
Betty suspected her husband of having an affair with a receptionist Linda Kolkena, who worked in the same building as him. She questioned Dan, yet he boldly denied it. For years she still suspected Dan, with the knowledge that he was spotted with her at events and restaurants. He continually told her she was crazy and essentially gaslighted her into questioning her own sanity. She asked him to get rid of Linda from his building, yet he defied and he went on to hire Linda as his assistant.
Betty began to struggle to keep up her wifely duties such as looking after the children, keeping the house, and planning and attending social events when she felt like her control on her marriage was in freefall. Dan would not even let her have a housekeeper. In this same year, Dan missed Betty’s birthday party, and she subsequently attempted to take her own life. She wrote in her memoir that evening that ‘he was making me crazy with his lies’.
After two years of self-doubt and paranoia, they moved out of their Coral Reef home into a new property. Almost immediately Dan moved out of their family home in 1985 and back into the old property, claiming that he simply needed some space and time to think about his life. Whilst Betty still held on to the hope that her marriage would be fixed and her happy life could resume, Dan had ulterior ideas.
Betty, wishing to teach Dan a lesson that he could not just up and leave his responsibility as a husband and father, dropped the kids off one by one at his house. In an interview in the San Diego Reader, Dan said that Betty ‘would just leave them there with their personal things, their clothes, and wouldn’t tell me they were coming, and just drop them there. “Here. They’re yours. You want to be apart from me. Well, see what it’s like raising a family by yourself.”’
Dan had moved his young assistant Linda into the house, and she began to take over Betty’s role. She even recorded the answer machine message on their house phone.
He finally admitted his affair to Betty and confirmed her fears. This was the beginning of a downward spiral for Betty, which was catalysed when Dan assumed custody of their children. Dan was a prominent and ruthless lawyer, that exercised his power and authority to gain complete control over Betty. She did not stand a chance against him.
He filed for divorce and the process was lengthy and arduous. The next few years saw Betty’s mental health and sanity declining, with Dan playing on this fact and pushing her even deeper into the depths of despair. He had complete control over her, by doing vindictive things such as docking her support payments each time she did something wrong, such as calling him or turning up to his property. He would also grant her permission to see her children, only to change his mind last minute.
He knew that he was playing with her emotions and he knew that the further he upset her, the more inclined she was to do something that would make her look bad in court.
Betty became violent and chaotic, breaking his things, driving a car into the front of his property, and leaving abusive messages on his phone. She showed signs of extreme mental decline, yet no help was given to her. Instead, Dan played on this to achieve full custody of the children, and to keep the majority of their money.
After years of torment from both Dan and his new wife, who he married in 1989, Betty finally snapped. Seven months after Dan and Linda’s wedding, Betty broke into their house at night and shot them both.
The biggest question is whether Betty Broderick is a callous and cold-blooded killer, or if she is a woman scorned, who eventually broke down after years of gaslighting and emotional abuse.
Tara Bates-Dufford, a forensic psychologist says that ‘gaslighting is a form of psychological and emotional manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their memory, perception, and sanity’.
She says that Betty ‘was already a malignant narcissist…She had a need for order. When she was being gaslighted by her husband, it created a loss of control for her, which exacerbated her underlying issues’.
The creator of the series on this case, Alexandra Cunningham says in an interview with Marie Claire, that:
‘there was no discussion or discourse [at the time] of how one person in a relationship can influence the other’s behavioural psychological autonomy by isolating them, by calling them ‘crazy,’ by limiting their access to money, or by making them feel like they are losing their position in society and their identity’.
Whilst Betty committed an unspeakable act in killing her ex-husband and his wife, the psychological abuse that she suffered at the hand of Dan was also abominable. She actively chose to commit the act of murder, yet many believe that this was the consequence of her mental state which was manipulated and pushed by others to the point of no return.
Betty, when talking about why she believed the murders were committed in self-defense, told the Los Angeles Times that ‘my lawyers hate it because there’s no law that says I can defend myself against his type of onslaught…he was killing me — he and she were still doing it — in secret’.
Whether Betty was forcibly pushed towards murder as a result of trauma, or whether she acted out of severe hatred towards a man who had taken away her life by leaving her, will remain unknown. As Bates-Dufford said, Betty already had traits of a personality disorder. This disorder, combined with the trauma of insecurity and paranoia about her marriage, a harrowing divorce, and her inability to frequently see her children could very well have tipped Betty over the edge.
People remain divided with their views on the case, with two of the Broderick children in support of their mother, whilst the other two want nothing to do with her. What Betty did to Dan and Linda was completely awful, yet it brings a question to light: can gaslighting and emotional abuse cause a perfectly good person to commit an unspeakable act?
Was Betty a victim of her situation and the manipulation of her ex-husband, or was she a woman scorned, whose revenge went too far?
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