Who Is Daniel T. Broderick from 'Dirty John' Season 2?
There is no "dirty John" in the second season of Dirty John. Instead, there is Daniel T. Broderick III (Christian Slater), the ex-husband of scorned housewife Betty Broderick (Amanda Peet). In 1991, the real-life Betty was convicted of murdering Daniel and his new wife Linda Kolkena in an act of violence that marked the culmination of an ugly, lengthy legal battle between the two.
Prior to going through “the worst divorce case in San Diego history," Dan and Betty were married for almost two decades and lived a seemingly luxurious and successful life that belied escalating tensions in their marriage. Read on for a primer on Daniel Broderick, his relationship with Betty, and the events leading up to his death.
Daniel and Betty were college sweethearts.
Daniel T. Broderick was born in Pittsburgh in 1944 and raised in a large Irish Catholic family (he was one of nine children). At 21, he met 18-year-old Betty (then Bisceglia) at the University of Notre Dame, from where he would graduate in the spring. Betty, who was visiting with a girlfriend for the weekend, told The L.A. Times that she wasn't initially attracted to Dan, who "had long skinny sideburns, round tortoise-shell glasses. You’re talking geek city.” But Daniel pursued Betty via mail after she went home to New York, and the two reconnected when he moved to Manhattan to study medicine at a Cornell University campus there.
“He was very ambitious, very intelligent and very funny,” Betty told The L.A. Times. “And I am those three things. We were from the same kind of background. We both wanted the same things in the future…He promised me the moon. The guy asked me to marry him every day for three years.”
He switched from medicine to law.
Though Dan studied medicine at Cornell, he decided he didn't want to be a doctor and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the early 1970s. He and Betty moved to Massachusetts, where she supported him by working part-time during his studies. His plan to combine his two skillsets of medicine and law ultimately paid off—after graduating from Harvard in 1973, Dan went to work for Gary, Cary, Ames & Frye, a prestigious law firm in San Diego, California. The family moved again.
In 1978, he left that firm to start his own practice and became a hugely successful medical malpractice attorney. He worked on a number of high-profile cases in the San Diego area, and in 1987 served as as president of the San Diego County Bar Association.
His marriage to Betty was troubled from the start.
Four years after they first met, Dan and Betty married at a church near her parents' home in Bronxville, New York. But tensions arose in the weeks leading up to the wedding—Dan upset Betty and her mother by refusing to wear a rented tuxedo, insisting on a less formal blue pinstripe suit. Though this may sound like a small disagreement, it foreshadowed what would become a highly volatile marriage. Per The L.A. Times, Betty claims Dan immediately started treating her differently after they were married, firing the maids at their honeymoon house and expecting her to "cook and clean." But she also said this dynamic, where she took care of the household and children while Dan took care of the money, was an arrangement she was willing to live with: "If by other people’s definition it wasn’t happy, it was the deal I made. It was the kind of family we both were from.”
Dan himself once said their marriage was unhappy from the start. “She glosses over a lot when she says we were both happy,” he said, according to the San Diego Reader. “She tells my children that we had a blissful, happy, healthy marriage until I went crazy when I was 40. That’s just pure fiction!” Their relationship, he said, suffered from “real incompatibility problems,” and he acknowledged he was “far from the kind of good, loving husband I could have been.”
Daniel left Betty for his much younger assistant, Linda Kolkena.
In 1983, Dan hired 22-year-old Linda Kolkena as his new legal assistant. Betty soon began to suspect an affair, and her suspicions only grew when Dan wouldn't fire Linda. After discovering that he had absconded with Linda on his birthday, Betty went home and set fire to a pile of his clothing.
Dan eventually confirmed to Betty that her suspicions were correct, and moved out of the family home in early 1985. Betty scornfully noted to the San Diego Reader that he left her “three months after his 40th birthday party—with a red Corvette and a 21-year-old…I said, ‘You’re it! You’re it! You are the cover of Midlife Crisis magazine."
Dan filed for divorce in September of that year, kicking off what soon became known as “the worst divorce case in San Diego history.” Some highlights included: Betty leaving a series of foul-mouthed voicemails on Dan's answering machine; Dan sending Betty itemized deductions to her allowance to penalize her for the voicemails; Betty driving her car into the front door of Dan's house, and Dan having Betty committed to a psychiatric hospital. According to The L.A. Times, Dan once made a prediction that turned out to be uncannily accurate: "“It’s not going to end until one of us is gone.”
Dan and Linda were both murdered by Betty.
Per Betty's recollection, early in the morning of November 5, 1989, she was going through a new stack of legal papers she had received from Dan. "It was an absolute rewind of the hell of the last years," she said. "I knew I was not going to wake up another morning in the same position." She drove to Dan and Linda's home with a shotgun, let herself in with a key she had taken from her daughter Kim, walked into the couple's bedroom and began firing. She later told The New York Times that her memory of the act itself was foggy: “I don't know that it was a conscious act. I had no idea I fired five times." She killed both Dan and Linda.
Betty was found guilty of two counts of second-degree murder, and sentenced to 32 years to life. She's been incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino, California ever since. In 1990, the Daniel T. Broderick III Award was established in Dan's memory, and is given out annually to an attorney in the San Diego area who "best exemplifies civility, integrity and professionalism."
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