Dan & Linda Broderick

Case background and investigation

Daniel T. Broderick III, 44, a prominent medical malpractice attorney and former president of the San Diego County Bar Association, and his wife, Linda Kolkena Broderick, 28, were shot to death in their bedroom early on Sunday, November 5, 1989. The shooting took place at their home in the Marston Hills area of San Diego, near Balboa Park. The person who fired the shots was Dan Broderick's former wife, Elisabeth "Betty" Broderick, who at the time lived in La Jolla.

Dan and Betty Broderick married in 1969 and had four children. They separated in 1985 after 16 years of marriage, and the divorce, which was not final until 1989, was bitterly contested, the Los Angeles Times reported. Linda Kolkena had worked as Dan Broderick's legal assistant; the two married in April 1989. In the years before the killings Betty Broderick left abusive messages on her former husband's answering machine, vandalized his home and drove her car into his front door, according to CNN.

On the morning of the shooting she entered the house using a key she had taken from one of her daughters, went upstairs and fired a .38-caliber revolver at the couple as they lay in bed. According to trial testimony summarized by the Times of San Diego, five shots were fired and three struck the victims. According to Wikipedia's account she turned herself in to police that day, and she remained in custody for the rest of her life.

Betty Broderick admitted firing the shots. The contested issue at trial was her state of mind. She was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Her first trial in 1990 ended in a mistrial when the jury split, with ten jurors favoring a murder conviction and two holding out for manslaughter, the Los Angeles Times reported. At a second trial in 1991, a jury found her guilty of two counts of second-degree murder. She was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 15 years to life plus two years for use of a firearm, a total of 32 years to life, and entered the California Institution for Women in February 1992.

She was denied parole in January 2010, when the board found she had not shown remorse and two of her children opposed release, and again in 2017.

On April 18, 2026, she was moved from the prison in Chino to an outside hospital. She died there at 3:40 a.m. on May 8, 2026, aged 78, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. Her son told reporters she had broken ribs in a fall and later developed infections. The treating doctor attributed the death to natural causes; Oxygen subsequently reported that San Bernardino County records list the manner of death as an accident. The case was dramatized in two 1992 television films and in the 2020 series Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story.