Betty Broderick, Convicted of Killing Her Ex-Husband and His New Wife in 1989, Dies at 78

Betty Broderick, the former San Diego socialite whose bitter divorce, double murder, and two sensational trials made her one of the most discussed figures in American true crime history, died on May 8, 2026 at a California medical facility. She was 78. Her preliminary cause of death was determined to be natural causes, with an official ruling still pending from the San Bernardino County Coroner.

Broderick had been transferred from the California Institution for Women in Chino to an outside medical facility on April 18 after her condition required a higher level of care. All four of her children were with her when she died at 3:40 a.m. She never left prison. She died as she had lived for more than three decades — behind bars, serving the sentence handed down in 1991 for two murders she never denied committing.

What She Did

In the early morning hours of November 5, 1989 — two days before her own 42nd birthday — Betty Broderick drove to the Marston Hills neighborhood of San Diego, used a key she had previously taken from her daughter, and let herself into the home of her ex-husband Daniel T. Broderick III and his new wife Linda Kolkena Broderick. The couple was asleep in bed. Betty fired five shots from a .38-caliber revolver. Three connected. Linda was struck twice in the head and chest and died instantly. Dan was shot once in the chest and reached for the phone. Betty pulled it from the wall, walked out, and called her daughter.

Dan Broderick was 44 years old. Linda Kolkena was 28. They had been married for seven months.

Betty turned herself in to police that same morning and never denied pulling the trigger. She was tried twice — the first trial ended in a hung jury. The second jury convicted her of two counts of second-degree murder in 1991. She was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 15 years to life, plus two years for illegal firearm use — effectively 32 years to life.

The Marriage That Came Apart

The story that preceded the murders was the one that captivated the public and split opinion for decades.

Betty and Dan Broderick had met as young Catholics from the East Coast, married in 1969, and built what appeared from the outside to be an exceptional life. While Dan pursued his law degree and later his medical degree — both at Harvard and Cornell — Betty worked to support the family and raised their four children. By the early 1980s, Dan had become a prominent malpractice attorney in San Diego, serving as president of the local bar association and earning an extraordinary income.

In 1982, Dan hired 21-year-old Linda Kolkena as his legal assistant. Betty said she suspected an affair almost immediately. Dan denied it for years. The couple separated in 1985. What followed was a divorce proceeding that Betty, who was represented by a series of attorneys, described as systematically unfair — arguing that Dan's connections in the legal community made it impossible for her to find adequate representation. Dan won primary custody of the children. The house was sold. The financial settlement, Betty argued until the end, did not reflect her decades of contributions to his career.

Dan and Linda married in April 1989. Seven months later, Betty shot them both in their bed.

The Trials

At both trials, Betty's defense centered on the psychological toll of the divorce and what her attorneys characterized as years of emotional and psychological abuse. She maintained that she had not planned to kill anyone — that she had gone to the house to talk, that Linda's scream startled her, and that the gun fired in the chaos. Prosecutors presented a premeditated double murder: a woman who had purchased a gun a month before the wedding, who had taken a key from her daughter, who had disabled the phone after shooting her ex-husband as he reached for help.

The jury at the second trial believed the prosecution. Betty was convicted and sentenced to life.

The Parole Hearings

Betty first became eligible for parole in 2010. All four of her children testified. Two said she should remain imprisoned. Her son Dan said his mother was a good person who had "got lost along the way" — and then said releasing a lost person into society could be a dangerous mistake. Parole was denied.

She was denied again in 2017. Prosecutors described her as "completely unrepentant." In a letter she wrote that year, Betty described herself as "a political prisoner" and maintained she had been a victim of long-term domestic abuse. Her next parole hearing was not scheduled until 2032, when she would have been 84.

The Cultural Afterlife

Few true crime cases have generated the sustained public conversation that the Betty Broderick case produced. The murders were depicted in a two-part 1992 television film — A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story and Her Final Fury: Betty Broderick, The Last Chapter — with Meredith Baxter playing Betty and Stephen Collins playing Dan. In 2020, USA Network aired Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, with Amanda Peet as Betty and Christian Slater as Dan. The case has been covered in books, podcasts, and nearly 30 episodes of true crime programming over three decades.

The enduring fascination with the case reflected a genuine ambivalence in public opinion. For some, Betty Broderick was a murderer who executed two people in their sleep and refused to show remorse. For others, she was a cautionary portrait of what happens when a woman devotes her entire adult life to a marriage and is discarded — and what the legal system looks like when the other party is a well-connected attorney. Neither reading fully resolves the facts of what happened at 5:30 a.m. on November 5, 1989.

Betty Broderick arrived at the California Institution for Women on February 26, 1992. She died there — technically in a hospital bed nearby — 34 years later. She was 78.

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