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Betty Broderick, Whose Murder Trial Was Grist for TV Movies, Dies at 78
Betty Broderick, who shot and killed her former husband and his new, younger wife in 1989, a double murder that, with its overtones of marital betrayal, obsession and revenge, was grist for headlines, television movies, talk shows, a podcast and at least five books, died on May 8 in San Bernardino County, Calif. She was 78.
Her death, at a hospital to which she had been transferred last month from the California Institution for Women in Corona, in her 37th year of incarceration, was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. No cause was provided.
On Nov. 5, 1989, Ms. Broderick entered the home of her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, a prominent malpractice lawyer in San Diego, and Linda Kolkena Broderick, a former flight attendant who became his legal assistant and, while he was still married to Ms. Broderick, his lover, and shot them in bed with a .38-caliber pistol.
Ms. Broderick, then about to turn 42, immediately turned herself in to the police, and never denied firing the fatal shots at her former husband, 44, and his second wife, 28. But she denied committing murder, claiming in media interviews and in the courtroom to have been a victim of years of psychological abuse.
Her two trials — the first ending in a hung jury and the second in conviction on two counts of second-degree murder in 1991 — turned on whether the shootings had been premeditated or were a spontaneous outburst after a long period of what Ms. Broderick described as mental torture.
Her rage at being wronged, and her desire for vengeance, became a mirror in which many ex-wives who had also been through hostile divorces caught a glimpse of themselves.
Ms. Broderick spoke to magazines and newspapers before and after her trials, and twice appeared from prison on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” angrily venting about her husband.
“He went off with the bimbo at 40, driving a red Corvette — haven’t we heard this before?” she told The Los Angeles Times three weeks after the killings.
She claimed that Mr. Broderick, the head of the San Diego County Bar Association, had used his wealth and legal connections to win custody of their four children and to deprive her of a fair financial settlement when they divorced in 1986.
“His was the white-collar way of beating you,” Ms. Broderick told The New York Times between her trials. “If he had hit me with a baseball bat, I could have shown people what he did and made him stop.”
In San Diego, where the couple had once been socially prominent and lived in a five-bedroom home in the affluent La Jolla community, there was plenty of sympathy for her.
“She worked hard to help send her husband through medical school and law school,” a letter-writer to The San Diego Tribune said. “How did he reward her? He traded her in for a younger model.”
In the years leading up to the fatal shootings, Ms. Broderick’s behavior had grown increasingly volatile. When she first suspected her husband of cheating, she burned his clothes in the backyard.
He moved out in 1985. After that, she spray-painted the inside of his new home, rammed her car through his front door and left vulgar messages on his answering machine. He obtained a temporary restraining order and had her held in a county mental hospital for three days.
At her first trial, mental health specialists called by both the prosecution and the defense testified that Ms. Broderick was narcissistic and histrionic. Melvin G. Goldzband, a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, refuted her claims of emotional abuse.
“She wanted not to be rejected,” he said, adding that she would have been angry even if her husband had agreed to an extravagant monthly support settlement.
“People extend battles because it’s the only form of the relationship that they have,” Dr. Goldzband said.
Ms. Broderick was sentenced in 1992 to the maximum possible term: 32 years to life in prison. She was twice denied parole.
Elizabeth Anne Bisceglia was born on Nov. 7, 1947, in New York City, one of six children of Frank and Marita (Curtin) Bisceglia. Her father was an owner of a family plastering business founded by his father in 1908.
She grew up in Bronxville, N.Y., and attended the College (now University) of Mount Saint Vincent, a Catholic institution in the Bronx.
She met Dan Broderick, the oldest of nine children from a Pittsburgh family, when he was on the cusp of entering Cornell’s medical school in Manhattan. They married in 1969. After completing medical school, Mr. Broderick decided to get a law degree at Harvard and enter the lucrative new field of medical malpractice law.
The young couple and their two children moved to San Diego, where Mr. Broderick’s career flourished, two more children arrived and the couple was welcomed into elite social circles. They bought a ski condo in Colorado and dug a swimming pool in the backyard.
But even before Mr. Broderick began an affair, Ms. Broderick was unhappy in the role of socialite and mother, and her family’s privilege seemed to bring her little pleasure.
“Mom was always kind of weird,” her daughter Kimberly Broderick Piggins told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Mom would get mad at Dad all the time. Once Mom picked up the stereo and threw it at him. And she locked him out constantly. He’d come around to my window and whisper, ‘Kim, let me in.’”
In addition to Ms. Piggins, Ms. Broderick’s survivors include two sons, Daniel and Rhett; another daughter, Kathy Broderick; and seven grandchildren.
Ms. Broderick and the murders have exerted a long hold on pulpy pop culture. A 1992 CBS television movie appeared in two parts, starring Meredith Baxter. The first installment, “A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story,” for which Ms. Baxter was nominated for an Emmy Award, was followed by “Her Final Fury: Betty Broderick, the Last Chapter.”
The story was adapted as the second season — broadcast in 2020 on the USA Network — of the anthology series “Dirty John,” with Amanda Peet as the jilted Ms. Broderick and Christian Slater as her adulterous husband.
Bella Stumbo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote a book about the case, “Until the Twelfth of Never,” in 1993, a year after “Hell Hath No Fury” by Bryna Taubman was published.
In 2020, The Los Angeles Times produced a podcast series, “It Was Simple: The Betty Broderick Murders,” which included interviews with the defending and prosecuting lawyers and the jury foreman.
The title was ironic; nothing about Ms. Broderick’s story was as simple as it seemed. At her second trial, the prosecution played a tape of her son Danny, then 11, pleading with her to stop tearing the family apart with her destructive behavior.
“You want everything,” he said. “You want all the kids, all the money, to get rid of Linda — and it’s not going to work, Mom. You’ve been mad long enough.”
Ms. Broderick replied, “No, I haven’t.”
A lifeguard overlooks an outdoor swimming pool.
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Teenagers hoping to hold the whistle as a lifeguard or camp counselor, or just work any job this summer are having a hard time getting hired.
“They now have more competition. There may be fewer jobs available,” says Brad Hershbein, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “They kind of get stuck with the short straw.”
Many factors are contributing to the competition for entry-level jobs: AI, inflation, tariffs, even those oil tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf. But all signs are pointing to 2026 being the worst job market for teens in decades.
“So many people are increasingly desperate to find a job, any job, especially if they have college loans,” Hershbein says. “That makes it that much harder for someone younger to be able to compete.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 219,000 fewer teens working this May compared to last May. Their participation in the labor force has been sliding since a peak of nearly 58% in the 1970s. Today, about a third of teens are in the labor force, either working or looking for summer work.
Mariella Silva, 19, had to hustle before finding a summer job as a barista at Zeke’s Coffee, a roastery and coffee shop in Washington, D.C.
She says now that she’s working, she feels more grown up. She is learning from her older coworkers and starting to understand and appreciate the value of money. She says, “Every time I spend something, I’m like, oh, this is like two hours of work.” She says she really feels the pinch of inflation when she considers whether to buy a meal out in the world, “I’m like, hmm. . . there’s food at home.”
Her boss, Jesse Lauritsen, doesn’t actually hire many teens. For starters, their schedules are hard to accommodate. Teens often have school or sports commitments and are new to the idea of carving out big chunks of time for work shifts.
“If they can only work one day a month, there’s no point in really hiring them,” Lauritsen says.
Economist Brad Herschbein notes that hiring managers may view teens as an investment that won’t pay off right away. “It’s almost a community service, rather than getting that productivity right away,” he says.
The dwindling job opportunities for teenagers means that plenty of them won’t get their first workforce experience while they’re still young, he adds. “A growing share of 18- to 19-year-olds are neither employed nor in school. They’re not really engaged in child care either.”
Economists call such people “idle.” It’s a strong term, but might be accurate, according to time-use surveys.
“They do seem to be engaging in a lot of leisure,” says Hershbein “The quintessential stereotype is, you know, someone’s playing video games all day.”
That pattern doesn’t just worry their parents. Many cities and school districts are trying hard to line up job opportunities for young people.
At a community pool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gayle Hurn hires over a hundred lifeguards and swim instructors every summer: She says she’s got a roster full of teenagers from around the city. “I think we need to start viewing teens as a really important part of the infrastructure of the workplace.”
Hurn says everyone who visits the pool feels the joy that her young workers bring to their job, even if she admits that teenagers can be hard to manage. “It’s my job to help them not just get a paycheck, but really build them so that when they move on from me, they can be super successful and really great contributors to whatever other work environment they join.”
Hurn makes them put away their phones, she works around their vacation schedules and she helps them through difficult conversations.
Happily, she adds, her teen employees are totally worth it.
A ranger who was assigned to a climbing patrol on Mount McKinley in Alaska, North America’s tallest peak, died after falling into a crevasse on Thursday, the National Park Service said.
Officials identified the ranger as Robin Pendery, 33, of Enumclaw, Wash., a seasonal employee for the park service, and said she had been near a camp that sits at about 14,000 feet up the mountain when she fell. Parks Service workers responded immediately, the agency said, but Ms. Pendery did not survive. It did not release further details about the incident.
Ms. Pendery’s death came just over a week after three members of a Latvian climbing expedition died in an accident on the same mountain in Denali National Park and Preserve.
The Park Service said that Ms. Pendery had joined the mountaineering staff at the park in 2024.
“We are heartbroken by the loss of a member of our Denali family,” Brooke Merrell, the park’s superintendent, said in a statement. “Our mountaineering rangers dedicate themselves to serving visitors and helping others in one of the most challenging environments in the world. Today, we mourn the loss of a valued colleague, friend and teammate.”
Ms. Pendery was a nursing student at the University of Washington, according to her LinkedIn profile, and then became a registered nurse. She had nearly a decade of experience as a seasonal mountain guide, including for Alpine Ascents International, an expedition company based in Seattle.
A biography page for Ms. Pendery on the Alpine Ascents website said that, along with Mount McKinley, she had climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Mount St. Helens in Washington State and Mount Hood in Oregon.
“She was a serious and compassionate professional,” Gordon Janow, the director of programs for Alpine Ascents, wrote in an email on Friday. “Highly respected by peers, thorough, competent and an absolute pleasure to spend time with. We guided together in India, and her level of care for clients and passion for the mountains were unsurpassed. We’re devastated and her companionship will be sorely missed.”
Mount McKinley, which soars to 20,310 feet above sea level, was renamed as Mount Denali, the name long used by Alaska Native tribes, by President Barack Obama in 2015, but last year, President Trump reinstated the name that honored the former U.S. president William McKinley.
The recent stretch of the climbing season in the national park, which typically runs from late April through mid-July, has been particularly deadly.
Last week, three members of the Latvian Mountaineering Association died and a fourth was critically injured in what officials described as an accident at about 18,000 feet on the mountain.
The recent death toll is above average for the mountain, where more than 130 people have died since the park started keeping records more than a century ago. Three people died in Denali National Park in 2025, according to Park Service data, and there was one death in the park in both 2024 and 2023.
The final matchup for the Los Angeles mayoral runoff remains unsettled, but precinct-level returns show the contours of the race. The incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, secured one of the two spots in the November election, but Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman are battling for second.
The results on the map reflect the nearly 500,000 votes that were tabulated on election night, which include early and mail-in votes that were returned early and ballots cast in-person on Election Day. Election officials are still in the process of counting hundreds of thousands of ballots in the race, and high-level updates will continue to be reported each day through at least June 12. But updated precinct-level data is not expected to be released until the end of June.
That means these results reflect voters who participated earlier in the process. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as ballots that arrived later began being processed, the updated results were notably more favorable to the Democrats than they were to Mr. Pratt. The lead Mr. Pratt had over Ms. Raman as of the end of election night had been cut in half as of Friday.
Even so, the incomplete results highlight the socioeconomic fault lines that have divided the city in this election and the coalitions that each candidate has built:
Karen Bass
Ms. Bass leads handily in the Black, Latino and white liberal strongholds that underpinned her 2022 election.
Three areas of support in particular stand out for her: South Los Angeles, where she got her start as a grass-roots activist during the crack cocaine epidemic; East Los Angeles and the East Valley, where organized labor routinely turns out Latino voters; and bastions of older white Democrats, like Mar Vista, which were part of her district when she served in Congress.
Wealthy precincts like Pacific Palisades, which was ravaged by wildfire last year, spurned her, but the Palisades also overwhelmingly opposed her in 2022.
Spencer Pratt
Mr. Pratt has done well so far in the most affluent parts of the city, including Pacific Palisades, where he grew up and where his family’s home burned down in the fires last year.
As a registered Republican, he also did well in pockets of MAGA conservatism like the Sunland-Tujunga area in the far northeast San Fernando Valley.
He won over some Jewish communities on the city’s Westside with direct appeals to pro-Israel voters and also did well in expatriate Iranian-American hubs like Tehrangeles in Westwood.
Nithya Raman
Ms. Raman, who was elected to the City Council in 2020 with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, has maintained her urban progressive base in places like Echo Park and Silver Lake, where she lives.
Her focus on affordability and her public policy expertise yielded support in dense neighborhoods with lots of cash-strapped, educated renters, like Los Feliz.
She has also done well in precincts around college campuses like Occidental College and the University of Southern California.
Of course, these results will change as the rest of the ballots are tallied over the next few weeks. Election officials have not provided an estimate of how many ballots remain uncounted specifically in the Los Angeles mayoral race, but countywide figures suggest that a substantial share of the vote is still outstanding.
As of Friday night, Los Angeles County had reported 1.6 million ballots counted and estimated that roughly 540,000 ballots remained countywide, with more still arriving. Late mail-in ballots have been more favorable to the Democrats this cycle, so the final results may move toward Ms. Bass and Ms. Raman at even higher rates than they did for Ms. Bass in the 2022 primary.
Rick Caruso, a centrist Democrat and former Republican, led on election night in 2022, but Ms. Bass steadily gained ground over the following weeks. She ultimately overtook him, winning the primary with 43 percent of the vote to Mr. Caruso’s 36 percent.
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