Dirty John: The True Life of Betty Broderick

Netflix’s newest anthology film, Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, has viewers talking about the shocking true story. For the murders of Dan Broderick and his second wife, Linda Broderick, Broderick is currently serving a sentence of 32 years to life in prison.

Three times she’s been turned down for parole, and her next hearing isn’t until January 2032. The following is a summary of Betty Broderick’s statements regarding her criminal behavior.

Having tied the knot in 1969, the Brodericks are now the proud parents of four grown offspring.

Betty and Dan Broderick met in 1965 at Notre Dame and tied the knot in Westchester, New York, five years later. Two of their children were daughters, and the other two were males.

After the birth of their first child, Kim, Dan opted to go to medical school at Cornell and later law school at Harvard, so Betty had to find work to help support the family.

In 1973, after Dan Broderick was employed by a legal firm in La Jolla, the Broderick family relocated to the affluent neighborhood of San Diego. By 1978, Dan had worked his way up through the ranks to become a prominent malpractice attorney with his own thriving firm.

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Is Betty Broderick still alive in 2021?

It’s been about 30 years since Betty was given her sentence. According to Express, Betty is still with us today at the ripe old age of 73, and she can be found locked up in Chino, California at the California Institution for Women. She will probably spend the rest of her life in jail.

On two separate occasions, Betty reportedly was denied parole. In January 2010 and then again in January 2017. One year and one month later, in January 2017, a two-person panel of the California parole board ruled unanimously against granting her parole.

By the time she’s parole-eligible again in 2032, she’ll be 84 years old, as reported by People. In 2017, Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs said to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Betty Broderick is an unrepentant woman.”

She feels no guilt and has no understanding of what led to the murders, so the author writes. She simply replied, “They pushed me over the edge, and here I am.”

People claim that Betty wrote a letter to the show’s producer Katie Dunn after the April 2017 release of the episode of Murder Made Me Famous that included her.

Betty allegedly wrote, “I have no one to speak for me.” To quote the police report: “This was a case of domestic abuse: a pattern of coercive control that persisted throughout our marriage right up until the day I killed them.”

Whether or not Betty was guilty was a point of contention among the jurors.

This appears to be a simple scenario at first glance. A victim of the shooting, Betty turned herself into authorities. However, Betty maintained her innocence and entered a not-guilty plea to two counts of murder.

The jury in Betty’s first trial in 1990 could not agree on her guilt because they could not determine how much of it was deliberate and how much was the result of her shaky mental state.

Was Dan Broderick really an upstanding attorney who put up with years of abuse at the hands of his desperate ex-wife?

Or, was he a manipulator who, over time, deprived Betty of the things she cared about most—their children and eventually their home—so that she would have nowhere to go?

In court, Betty reportedly said, “He was the white-collar way of beating you,” as reported by The New York Times. ‘Had he hit me with a baseball bat, I would have been able to show people what he did and get him to stop.

On her second trial for murder in 1991, Betty was found guilty. The jury concluded that Betty did not premeditated plot the murders, which would have resulted in a first-degree murder conviction.

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When and where did Daniel and Linda Broderick’s murder take place?

At Linda and Daniel’s house in San Diego, California, on November 4, 1989, Betty brought a rifle she’d bought eight months before.

Betty gained entry to the house by using a key she had stolen from her daughter, and once inside, she went straight to the master bedroom, where she took the couple’s phone and hid it under the mattress so they couldn’t call for help.

As soon as 5:30 rolled around, she started firing her gun at them. Linda, who was only 28 years old, was shot multiple times and died at the scene.

Despite being shot in the chest and having two other bullets hit the wall and nightstand, 44-year-old Daniel was conscious and conversed with Betty as he died.

Betty was encouraged by her daughters to turn herself into the police after the bodies were discovered. She testified that she didn’t mean to kill either of them and only fired her weapon after Linda woke up and insisted Dan call the police.

Her attorneys argued that she suffered years of emotional and mental abuse at Dan’s hands. Two counts of second-degree murder led to her 15-to-life sentence.