Betty Broderick

Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia was born on November 7, 1947, and grew up in Bronxville, New York. She was the third of six children of Frank Bisceglia (1915 to 1998) and Marita Bisceglia, née Curtin (1919 to 2007). Her father, who was Italian American, owned a successful plastering business with relatives; her mother was Irish American.

The Bisceglias were strict parents who expected a great deal of their children. Betty later said she had been trained to be a housewife from the day she was born: go to Catholic schools, be careful with dating until you find a Catholic man, support him while he works, and be blessed in later years with grandchildren. She said her school friends were raised the same way, which left her little room to rebel.

She attended Maria Regina High School in Hartsdale, New York, and graduated from Eastchester High School in Eastchester, New York, in 1965. She went on to the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, where she completed a degree in early childhood education through an accelerated programme, with a minor in English.

In 1965 she met Daniel T. Broderick III, the eldest son of a large Irish Catholic family from Pittsburgh, at a dance at the University of Notre Dame. He was a 21-year-old senior about to begin medical school at Cornell. They married on April 12, 1969, at the Immaculate Conception Church in Tuckahoe, New York.

Their first child, Kim, was born in 1970, followed by Lee (Kathy) in 1971, Daniel in 1976 and Rhett in 1979. Another son died four days after birth. Dan earned his M.D. at Cornell in 1970 and then a J.D. at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1973, while Betty was the family's main provider. The family then moved to La Jolla in San Diego, where Dan joined the city's largest law firm and later founded his own medical malpractice practice. Betty raised the children, sold Tupperware and Avon products part time, and became part of La Jolla's social scene.

In 1982 Dan hired 21-year-old Linda Kolkena as his legal assistant. Betty suspected an affair by October 1983, which Dan denied. He moved out in February 1985, and after Betty left the children at his house one by one, he took custody of them. A drawn-out and hostile divorce followed. Betty said Dan, by then president of the San Diego Bar Association, made it hard for her to find a lawyer, and believed he used his influence to win custody, sell the family home and deny her a fair share of his income.

Her conduct became increasingly erratic. She left hundreds of profane messages on his answering machine, ignored restraining orders, vandalised his home and drove her car into his front door while the children were inside. The divorce was finalised in 1989. Dan and Linda married on April 22, 1989, with plain-clothes security present; Betty did not attend.

A month before the wedding, Betty bought a Smith & Wesson revolver. At about 5:30 a.m. on November 5, 1989, she let herself into the couple's home at 1041 Cypress Avenue in Marston Hills, San Diego, with a key taken from her daughter Kim, and fired five shots in their bedroom. Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, was killed instantly. Dan Broderick, 44, was hit in the chest and did not die immediately. A telephone had been removed from the bedroom.

After calling her daughter Lee, Betty turned herself in to police the same day. She never denied pulling the trigger but always said she had not planned to kill them, testifying that she fired when startled by Linda shouting to call the police.

Defence attorney Jack Earley argued that Broderick was a battered wife driven over the edge by years of psychological abuse. Prosecutor Kerry Wells described a planned, deliberate killing. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz testified for the prosecution that she had histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders.

The first trial, before Judge Thomas J. Whelan, ended in a mistrial in 1990 when two jurors held out for manslaughter. At the second trial in 1991 the jury convicted her of two counts of second-degree murder. She received two consecutive terms of 15 years to life plus two years for use of a firearm, a total of 32 years to life.

She arrived at the California Institution for Women in Chino on February 26, 1992. The Board of Parole Hearings denied her parole in January 2010 and again in January 2017, finding that she had neither shown remorse nor acknowledged wrongdoing. She would not have been eligible again until 2032.

The case split the Broderick children. Kim testified for the prosecution about her mother's long-running anger; Lee testified for the defence. In later years Lee and Rhett supported their mother's release, Rhett saying the only two people she had been a danger to were dead. Daniel told the 2010 parole hearing that his mother was a good person who had got lost and that releasing her could be a dangerous mistake. Despite their differences, her children and grandchildren visited her in prison, and all four were with her, in person or by video call, when she died.

An article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine led to the two-part television film A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story and Her Final Fury: Betty Broderick, the Last Chapter (1992), starring Meredith Baxter, who was nominated for an Emmy. The 1991 Law & Order episode The Wages of Love was partly inspired by the case. Books include Bella Stumbo's Until the Twelfth of Never (1993), Loretta Schwartz-Nobel's Forsaking All Others (1993), Bryna Taubman's Hell Hath No Fury (1992) and Kimberly Dotseth's She Gave Her Pearls (2023). Broderick published her own memoir, Betty Broderick: Telling on Myself, in 2015.

She gave interviews to The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, Hard Copy and Headliners and Legends. The case was covered by Deadly Women, Murder Made Me Famous (2017), My Favorite Murder and Oxygen's Snapped (2020). In 2020 the Los Angeles Times released the podcast It Was Simple: The Betty Broderick Murders, and the second season of Dirty John dramatised the story with Amanda Peet as Betty and Christian Slater as Dan.

Broderick's case became a defining American true crime story about divorce, wealth, gender and revenge. Supporters saw a woman discarded after supporting her husband through two professional degrees; prosecutors, juries and parole boards saw a calculated double murder. Decades later the case remains a staple of podcasts, documentaries and debates about the battered woman defence. Her victims, Daniel T. Broderick III and Linda Kolkena Broderick, are buried together at Greenwood Memorial Park in San Diego.

In April 2026 Broderick fell and broke several ribs, and later developed septic infections. On April 18, 2026, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved her from the California Institution for Women to an outside hospital, Chino Valley Medical Center, for a higher level of care. She was pronounced dead there at 3:40 a.m. on May 8, 2026, aged 78. A doctor determined the initial cause of death to be natural causes; the official cause was left to the San Bernardino County Coroner. Her son Rhett said three of her children were at her bedside and the other joined by FaceTime. Her burial place has not been made public.