Before dawn on November 5, 1989, Elisabeth Anne Broderick, known all her adult life as Betty, killed her former husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, and his second wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, in San Diego. The couple had been married for seven months. The divorce that preceded their deaths had run for four years through the San Diego County courts, and it had already produced contempt findings, fines and jail time for the woman who would now stand trial for murder. She surrendered to police later the same day and never denied that she had caused both deaths.
What she disputed was the name for it. Across two trials her defense argued that years of emotional abuse, carried out in large part through the divorce proceedings themselves, had pushed her past the point of control. The first jury could not agree on a verdict. The second, in 1991, convicted her of two counts of second-degree murder, and in February 1992 she was sentenced to 32 years to life. Parole panels turned her down in 2010 and again in 2017, each time for the longest term the law allowed. She died in custody on May 8, 2026, at the age of 78, with her next parole hearing still six years away.
She was born Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia in November 1947 and grew up in New York, where she had a Catholic education from grade school on and went on to study English and early childhood education. In 1969 she married the man she would later be convicted of killing, and the couple had four children. The marriage lasted about seventeen years. Over that time the family settled in San Diego, and by the mid-1980s the Brodericks had a public profile in the city, to the point that she would later be described almost everywhere as a La Jolla socialite.
In the early 1980s her husband became involved with the woman he would later marry, and Broderick came to believe that the two were involved while her own marriage was still intact. The marriage came apart in 1985. That year Broderick began looking for a divorce lawyer, and several months later, in September 1985, her husband filed for divorce himself, after admitting to the affair. The dissolution became official in July 1986.
The formal end of the marriage settled almost nothing. The money and the property remained in dispute, and the case returned to court again and again over the following three years. A court ordered the family's former residence sold in early 1986, over her initial resistance. The divorce file itself was sealed.
The support figures became one of the central grievances of the case. By early 1989 Broderick was receiving about $118,000 a year in combined alimony and child support, roughly $16,000 a month by her own count, and she was asking the court for more than $250,000 a year. Her former husband's side proposed a declining scale instead: $9,000 a month for one year, then $5,000 a month for five more. A settlement offer made in 1987 calculated that she owed him $835,601.81 from the division of community property. Broderick, for her part, put his annual income at more than $1 million and maintained that he was using his command of the legal system to hide what he had.
Her conduct toward him in those years drew repeated sanctions. Over the three years before January 1989 she spent several days in the county jail and was fined thousands of dollars for disregarding court orders, and at one point she was sentenced to a month in the county's women's jail for repeatedly harassing him. Once, after she trespassed on his property and used abusive language in front of the children, he deducted $5,000 from her alimony. At a hearing in May 1988 a judge fined her $8,000. At her murder trial she would admit to a campaign of obscene telephone calls in this period and to other acts directed at him and his property.
The trial of the remaining issues opened on December 27, 1988. It was closed to the press and the public, on the argument that open proceedings would harm the four children, and the judge expected to rule on January 30, 1989, on only part of the community property questions. The divorce litigation, by then, had become a matter of public interest in San Diego even with the courtroom doors shut.
In April 1989 her former husband remarried.
The two deaths took place in San Diego in the early morning of Sunday, November 5, 1989. Broderick left the scene and, later that day, surrendered to police. From the start there was no question of identity. The question that would occupy two juries was what had been in her mind.
She was charged with murder in San Diego County, and the San Diego County District Attorney's office took the case to trial.
The first trial opened in the fall of 1990, about a year after the deaths. Broderick admitted the killings and took the stand. Her defense was built on the marriage and the divorce: she portrayed herself as a woman discarded after seventeen years for a younger one, and she accused her former husband of using his command of the legal process and his standing with the local bench to win unfair advantages in the settlement and in the hearings that followed. Her lawyer told the jury that his abuse had driven her past an emotional breaking point. She described herself in battered-woman terms.
The prosecution contended that both deaths were murder and relied on the years of harassment and contempt findings that had come before them.
The jury could not reach a verdict. The judge declared a mistrial, and the district attorney's office chose to try her again.
The retrial began in September 1991, and it was televised. Broderick testified for six days. She again admitted that she had caused both deaths, and again she said that she had gone to the couple that morning not intending to kill anyone, only to confront them or to take her own life.
This time the jury reached a verdict. It found her guilty of two counts of second-degree murder, the conviction on which every later proceeding in the case would rest. Her claim of years of abuse had not moved the jury to anything less than murder on either count.
In February 1992 a San Diego County Superior Court judge sentenced her to 32 years to life in state prison. She was 44.
Broderick entered the California prison system in 1992. She was sent first to a women's prison in the Central Valley and spent about two and a half years winning a transfer back to a prison in Southern California, where she served the rest of her sentence. By her own account in the late 1990s she worked for years as a janitor, then took a job in the prison's mental health unit that paid $17 a month. She tutored other inmates studying for the high school equivalency examination and recorded books every week for the Braille Institute.
Her account of the marriage did not change in custody. She continued to describe her former husband as controlling and cold, and she maintained that she had never meant to kill. In a 2017 letter she called herself a political prisoner and said she had been a victim of long-term domestic abuse.
Broderick's first parole hearing came on January 21, 2010, at the women's prison in Chino. She was 62 and had served about 18 years. The hearing lasted about five hours. In her own testimony she said that she did not remember the day of the killings, that she had felt she had to kill them or kill herself, and that she "couldn't let them win." She told the panel that her life had fallen apart after her husband left her.
The two-member panel denied parole. It found that she had not accepted responsibility for the crimes, did not understand what she had done, and would pose a risk to the public if released. It set her next hearing fifteen years out, the longest term available, though she could ask to be heard sooner after three years if she could show progress.
The 2010 denial did not hold her for the full fifteen years. She came before the board again on January 4, 2017, seven years after the first hearing, at the same prison. She was 69. The hearing ran through the day and lasted about eleven hours before two commissioners. The San Diego County District Attorney's office opposed release.
The panel again denied parole for fifteen years, the maximum. A lack of remorse was among the grounds. Her next eligible date was set for January 2032, when she would have been 84, with the possibility that credits and other factors could move it earlier.
Betty Broderick died in custody in San Bernardino County on Friday, May 8, 2026. She was 78, had served more than thirty-four years of her sentence, and had been held in a state prison for women until shortly before her death. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced the death the same day.
Her death closed the case without any change to the record. The two convictions for second-degree murder stood, the sentence of 32 years to life had not been reduced, and no parole board ever found her suitable for release.
The central dispute of the case was never who caused the two deaths but why, and the juries' answers are the legal ones. The first jury could not agree. The second convicted her of second-degree murder on both counts.
Her claims about the divorce, that her former husband manipulated the courts against her and abused her emotionally for years, were her own account, put to two juries and to two parole panels. Neither jury accepted them as reducing the crime below murder, and neither panel accepted them as grounds for release. They are not established facts.
The date of the deaths appears in some later accounts as November 8, 1989. Reports at the time of both trials, and at her death, give November 5, 1989.
November 1947: Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia is born in New York.
1969: She marries; the couple later settle in San Diego and have four children.
Early 1980s: Her husband becomes involved with the woman he later marries.
September 1985: Her husband files for divorce.
Early 1986: A court orders the family residence sold.
July 1986: The divorce becomes official; disputes over support and property continue.
May 1988: A judge fines Broderick $8,000 in contempt proceedings.
December 27, 1988: The closed trial on support and property begins.
April 1989: Her former husband remarries.
November 5, 1989: Her former husband and his second wife are killed in San Diego; she surrenders to police the same day.
Fall 1990: The first trial opens; it ends in a hung jury and a mistrial.
September 1991: The retrial opens.
1991: The second jury convicts her of two counts of second-degree murder.
February 1992: She is sentenced to 32 years to life.
January 21, 2010: Her first parole hearing; parole is denied for 15 years.
January 4, 2017: Her second parole hearing; parole is denied for 15 years.
May 8, 2026: She dies in custody in San Bernardino County, aged 78.