Hell Hath No Fury by Bryna Taubman

Author:Bryna Taubman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1992-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

“I think that there may be thirteen or fourteen people out there who can be fair jurors…The problem in this case is going to be finding a judge who can be fair…I think you will find there’s a great deal of prejudice in the legal community…I’m glad that citizens, individual people, and not attorneys make these kinds of decisions.”

By then the San Diego Reader’s long article on the Broderick divorce, based on the eighteen-month-old interviews with Dan and Betty, had been published. The television tabloid shows were also hot on the story of the rejected wife who had killed her rival and her ex-husband, a prominent attorney.

Wolf, getting dozens of calls from the media and sacks of letters expressing support for or outrage at Betty, retained a public relations firm to handle the demands on his time and to counter some of the negative publicity. That proved to be a mistake that would haunt Betty for the next two years. The prosecution referred to the PR firm at every opportunity, as proof of the defendant’s penchant for telling her version of events to anyone who would listen.

At a bail hearing at the end of November, Kerry Wells described Betty as an “absolutely uncontrolled and angry woman” whose release would pose “a significant threat to the rest of this community.” She presented letters from Dan’s brother Larry and a statement from Kim—“she indicated that her mother has had an extremely unpredictable personality”—voicing concerns about their safety if Betty got out on bail. She didn’t.

Wolf maintained that his client was still having trouble understanding her situation. “She’s not really acclimated herself to what’s going on in these proceedings,” he told reporters outside the courtroom.

She was adjusting to life at Las Colinas, apparently. Betty’s friend Helen Pickard recalled in court that she received a call from Betty in jail at Thanksgiving. “She said she’d never been happier, and she acted like it…Her voice was exuberant and she sounded great.”

Other evidence surfaced later that indicated that sometimes Betty was very aware of what she had done, if not too clear on why or what was going to happen next. Months afterward Kim recalled in court the meeting with her mother a few days after the murders that had so frightened her:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.