Until the twelfth of never
Betty Broderick was positioned, by personality and acculturation, to be a victim of her husband, in the view of Stumbo, a recently retired reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Betty, described as beautiful and intelligent, was raised by her rigidly Catholic parents to be the loving wife of one man and the mother of his children. She was also trained to have "an infinite capacity to put on a happy face." She helped support Dan while he attended Cornell Medical School and Harvard Law School; after they moved to San Diego, he became a millionaire and president of the local bar association. When Dan began an affair with a former airline stewardess, he divorced Betty and determined to deprive her of their shared assets in a settlement. The San Diego legal community closed ranks behind him in his campaign of what one psychiatrist described as "legal abuse." In 1989, after several years of this treatment, Betty fatally shot both Dan and his new wife Linda. Betty's first trial ended in a hung jury, her second in a guilty verdict and a sentence of 30 years to life. Stumbo's sensitive portrait is not so partisan as to depict Betty as a saintly martyr, but it is nonetheless a searing depiction of a woman so conditioned by what she perceived as traditional femininity that she became self-destructive, "a woman in ruins."