It was about 5:30 on the morning of Sunday, November 5, 1989, when Betty Broderick let herself into the house at 1041 Cypress Avenue in the Marston Hills neighborhood of San Diego. She used a key she had taken from her daughter weeks earlier. She climbed the stairs to the bedroom where her ex-husband, Dan Broderick, 44, and his wife of seven months, Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, were asleep. She fired five shots from a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. Linda died in the bed. Dan, wounded, reached for the telephone. Betty pulled the cord from the wall and left. By nightfall she was in custody, and a divorce that had lasted longer than many marriages had become a double homicide.

A Marriage Built on Sacrifice

Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia was born in Brooklyn on November 7, 1947. She married Daniel T. Broderick III on April 12, 1969. He was a medical student who finished an M.D. at Cornell in 1970 and then enrolled at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1973. Betty worked and raised babies while he studied. Daughters Kim and Lee were born in 1970 and 1971; sons Daniel IV and Rhett followed in 1976 and 1979.

In San Diego, Dan built a medical-malpractice practice that made him one of the best-known trial lawyers in the county. By the mid-1980s his income was roughly $1 million a year. In La Jolla, Betty, who had sold Tupperware in the lean years, believed she had earned every bit of it.

Linda Kolkena and the Four-Year Divorce

In the fall of 1982 Dan hired a 21-year-old former Delta flight attendant named Linda Kolkena as a legal assistant. Betty suspected an affair almost immediately. In February 1985 he moved out, and that September he filed for divorce. Betty spray-painted the walls of his new house and drove her car into his front door, an act that earned her a three-day psychiatric hold. Dan responded with a fine system: $100 for each obscenity, $500 for each time she entered his property, deducted from her support.

The financial fight was not settled until January 1989. Betty received $16,000 a month in spousal support and a $28,000 cash payment; Dan kept custody of the children. On April 22, 1989, he married Linda.

Five Shots Before Dawn

Betty later said she had gone to Cypress Avenue to talk, or to kill herself in front of them. Five rounds were fired from a five-shot revolver. Three struck the couple. Linda was hit in the chest and head and died instantly. Dan was struck as he moved toward the phone. Betty yanked the phone from the wall so no call could go out.

She drove to her daughter Lee’s home and talked about what she had done. She was arrested the same day, two days short of her 42nd birthday. From that morning until her death she never spent another night as a free woman.

Two Trials, One Hung Jury

The first trial opened in October 1990 before Judge Thomas J. Whelan. Deputy District Attorney Kerry Wells argued premeditation: the stolen key, the loaded gun, the phone ripped from the wall. Defense attorney Jack Earley put the marriage on trial instead, arguing that years of psychological abuse and financial control had pushed Betty past a breaking point. The jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of murder. Whelan declared a mistrial.

The second trial began on December 11, 1991. That jury convicted her of two counts of second-degree murder. Whelan sentenced her to 32 years to life: two consecutive terms of 15 years to life, plus two years for using a firearm. She arrived at the California Institution for Women in Chino on February 26, 1992. Like the Menendez brothers case a few years later, her trials turned a courtroom into a national argument about whether abuse could explain a killing.

Parole Denied, Twice

Betty’s first parole hearing came on January 21, 2010. Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs called the killings “a cold dish of revenge.” Betty told the commissioners, “I had one choice: to shoot them or myself.” Her daughter Lee spoke in favor of release; her son Dan Jr. spoke against it. Commissioner Robert Doyle told her, “Your heart is still bitter, and you are still angry,” and the board denied parole for 15 years.

She was back before the board on January 4, 2017, at age 69. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said afterward that Broderick “still has not developed appropriate insight or remorse for these gruesome murders.” The board issued another 15-year denial. Her next eligibility date was set for 2032, when she would have been 84.

Dirty John and a Long Afterlife on Screen

Meredith Baxter played Betty in the 1992 CBS movie A Woman Scorned. Then, on June 2, 2020, USA Network premiered Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, a season created by Alexandra Cunningham, with Amanda Peet as Betty, Christian Slater as Dan, and Rachel Keller as Linda. The series reached a new generation on Netflix and reopened the old debate: was she a victim of a manipulative husband, or a woman who could not accept losing.

By the time of her death, her story had been retold in at least five books and roughly 30 television shows and podcasts. Decades earlier, the Hall–Mills murders had turned a New Jersey minister’s widow into a tabloid figure for the same reason: a killing that looked like jealousy, and a public that could not stop taking sides.

Death in Chino, May 2026

In April 2026, Betty tripped inside the California Institution for Women and broke several ribs. On April 18 she was moved to Chino Valley Medical Center, where an infection set in. She died at 3:40 a.m. on Friday, May 8, 2026, aged 78. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s coroner division later ruled the manner of death an accident, the cause natural: sepsis following the fall.

Her son Rhett told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “She passed away from natural causes with three of her children at her bedside, and the other was FaceTiming.” A family statement said the children would remember her as “an amazingly fun, smart, engaging and loving mom.” Dan Jr. said separately that what she did was unforgivable, and that he chose to hold on to the good moments anyway. She left four children, seven grandchildren, and a parole date, six years away, that she never reached.

Why This Case Still Matters

Betty Broderick became a proxy for an argument that has never been settled: how much a bad marriage explains, and how much it excuses. Prosecutors saw a woman with a stolen key and a loaded gun who killed two sleeping people and then made sure they could not call for help. Cases like the Lululemon murder show how readily the public reaches for a story about the killer’s grievances; the Broderick case shows how long that story can outlive the victims. Dan Broderick was 44. Linda Kolkena was 28. Neither one was ever the main character.

At both of her parole hearings, seven years apart, Betty Broderick was asked in various ways whether she was sorry, and the record of those hearings does not contain the word.

Related Cases

• The Menendez brothers — Beverly Hills sons, hung juries, and an abuse defense
• The Lululemon murder — a Bethesda coworker killing and the lie that unraveled
• The Hall–Mills murders — a 1922 minister, his choir singer, and a widow on trial

Sources

• Wikipedia — Betty Broderick
• NBC 7 San Diego — Betty Broderick, convicted killer and former San Diego socialite, dead at 78
• Times of San Diego — Convicted murderer Betty Broderick dead at 78
• Oxygen — Betty Broderick’s manner of death revealed
• NBC News — Betty Broderick denied parole in murders (2010)
• NBC 7 San Diego — Parole denied for convicted killer Betty Broderick (2017)

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