I was happy to finally be married. I wanted to be married very much on my life and I was

looking forward to cooking and fixing up a house and cleaning and having children.

On her wedding day, the newly minted Mrs. Broderick, bets to her husband Betty to everyone else,

looked romantically toward a future as enchanting as the lace veil around her shoulders. It

was all supposed to be so perfect. But then again, art all marriages at the start.

We were very happy together. I thought we did have a perfect marriage.

When life goes spectacularly bad, some people will tend to say afterwards that,

well, they saw it coming. On Dan and Betty's wedding day, April 12, 1969, for Betty's mother and

later Betty herself, it was Dan insisting on wearing a pinstripe suit and brown buckled shoes.

What good could come from being married to a man who wore a get-up like that to his own formal wedding?

Whatever good there had been, 20 years later it was more than gone. It was dead.

In 1989, Broderick broke into her ex-husband's house in Hillcrest and shot him along with his new

wife while they were sleeping. She was arrested later that day. You could look at this then as a

story beginning and ending in two marital beds. In 1969, it was Betty and Dan's honeymoon bed.

And in 1989, it was Dan's bed with Linda, his new wife of not quite seven months, which Betty

displaced, dispossessed Betty and her five shot, nickel-plated Smith and Wesson,

sought to it that they would never live to share ever again.

The man and woman who had stood at an altar 20 years before and made everlasting vows,

now they were close to each other again. For murder can occupy his intimate of space as love,

so that Dearest Betts could hear Darling Dan say, okay, okay, you got me.

She spelled it out matter of factly for a reporter a few months later. There was no pain and

there was no blood. It was simple. Mom called and said that she was in trouble, now she needed

...