Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick, the jilted ex-wife of prominent San Diego attorney Daniel T. Broderick III who turned to murder to settle festering scores with her longtime husband and his new bride before spending decades in custody for her crimes, has died at a hospital after being transferred from a state prison in San Bernardino. She was 78.
The first wife of the high-profile lawyer who specialized in winning medical malpractice cases was serving a 32-year-to-life prison sentence for the 1989 killing of her former husband and his wife, Linda.
Broderick’s death was announced by the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office hours after she died Friday. County officials said Broderick died at the Chino Valley Medical Center. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Rhett Broderick, the youngest of the couple’s four children, said he and two of his siblings were able to travel to Chino and spent time with their mother before she died.
“She passed away from natural causes with three of her children at her bedside, and the other was FaceTiming,” he said. “We were all able to come and be with her.”
According to Rhett Broderick, his mother tripped in prison several weeks ago and broke some ribs. Then she got an infection that turned to sepsis, and she was not able to recover.
Betty Broderick was convicted of entering the Hillcrest home Dan and Linda Kolkena Broderick shared and shooting both victims to death, seemingly while they slept.
The crime stunned the San Diego legal community, where Dan Broderick had served as president of the local bar association. The case was later fictionalized in a series of true-crime books and movies.
According to San Diego police at the time, Betty Broderick was a near-immediate suspect in the murders because she had been harboring increasingly violent rage against her ex-husband and his new wife.
Among other allegations, Betty Broderick was suspected of conducting a longtime vendetta against the couple, including ramming her car into the two-story brick home on Cypress Avenue.
She also was thought to have started a fire inside the home and stolen personal items from her victims in the days and weeks before the murders.
Broderick was tried in 1990 for the murders, but the case ended in a mistrial.
She was convicted following a second trial in December 1991. She never denied the murders; instead, she argued that she had been pushed to commit the crimes by her ex-husband’s abuse during the divorce and custody battle over the couple’s children.
Prosecutors said she was a cold and calculating killer who felt she had the right “to act out in vicious and extreme ways just because she was angry.”
The shootings took place on a Sunday morning, apparently after Betty Broderick received a letter from her ex-husband’s attorney, according to a 1990 story in The San Diego Union, one of the two newspapers that later merged to become The San Diego Union-Tribune.
She testified during her first trial that the letter set her off like a fuse. It warned her that she would face contempt-of-court charges if she continued to harass and threaten her ex-husband and his wife.
Broderick drove to the Hillcrest home and used a key she had taken from her daughter several weeks earlier. She crept up the stairs to the master bedroom and began firing at Dan and Linda Broderick with a .38-caliber revolver.
They were struck three times and both died. Dan Broderick was 44; Linda was 28.
Broderick left the home quickly but turned herself in to police later that day. She told investigators she did not intend to kill the couple, but only wanted to confront her ex-husband. She said she brought the gun with her to get her husband’s attention.
Broderick was twice denied parole – once in 2010 and again in early 2017.
During her first parole hearing, Broderick told the parole board she had no alternative to doing what she did; her life had been completely upended after her husband left her for Linda, his assistant.
“My whole world fell off its axis,” she said.
“I had one choice: to shoot them or myself,” Broderick said she remembered thinking at the time of the attack. “I couldn’t let them win.”
She also reportedly told the board she had “great remorse” for her actions, but board members rejected the parole application.
In 2017, she was eligible for another attempt at parole.
Then-Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs argued against setting Broderick free during that hearing, a daylong proceeding that stretched for more than 10 hours. He said afterward that he was grateful that the parole board denied her petition.
“Betty Broderick is an unrepentant woman,” Sachs told the Union-Tribune in 2017. “She has no remorse and zero insight into the killings … She just basically said they drove me to do this.”
Betty Broderick was born in 1947 in Bronxville, N.Y., the third of six children. She later told interviewers she was trained to be a housewife since the day she was born.
She met Dan Broderick at the University of Notre Dame in 1965 and the couple married in 1969. Dan graduated from medical school soon after but turned his attention to law, and was accepted into Harvard University.
The family migrated to San Diego, where Dan set up a law practice specializing in medical malpractice litigation. By 1987, he was broadly respected across the legal community and was elected president of the San Diego County Bar Association.
But the relationship soured and Dan began dating Kolkena, whom he had hired as an office assistant. They married in April 1989, just months before they were killed.
State prison officials told the TMZ news outlet Friday that Betty Broderick was moved last month for treatment to the Chino hospital where she died.
Rhett Broderick said he and his siblings focus on the better times they shared with their mother when they were kids.
“We always try to remember her as her best self – an amazingly fun and smart mother – and she will be missed,” he said. “We are saddened that our time with her as our mother was so short.”
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