I realized I had "The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy (The Shocking Inside Story)" shelved under "so bad it's good" and "unintentionally hilarious." ThaI realized I had "The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy (The Shocking Inside Story)" shelved under "so bad it's good" and "unintentionally hilarious." That made me think perhaps not everyone will understand it's not the real crime of a depraved serial killer who raped and murdered countless defenseless females I find "amusing," but the author's defensive narration of this sordid tale.
I was born in the late 1970s and have heard of Ted Bundy for much of my life. I remember his execution in 1989 and when they showed his dead body in the media. I watched tabloid news tv, and the Daytime talk shows that were obsessed with this wicked human being and his murders. Perhaps it was his seemingly well-mannered appearance in contrast to his heinous actions, but the Bundy murders always fascinated me.
True crime author Ann Rule built her reputation on Ted Bundy. Rule was Ted Bundy's friend and co-worker (they worked together at a crisis hotline center). To her, he was a handsome, hard-working, sensitive, up-and-comer. As a writer who penned detective stories and worked with the police department, she could not see what was before her: a narcissistic sociopath who preyed upon innocent women.
Everybody knows the tale of Ted Bundy. He's as notable a character to 20th-century American culture as Jack the Ripper is to the British Victorian Era. The parents he was supposedly born to were, in actuality, his grandmother and grandfather, as his true mother was the girl he'd thought was an elder sister. Born outside of marriage, he spent the first months of infancy in an orphanage. In his early years, he was raised by an abusive man whom Ted looked up to as his only source of male authority. When he was older, he moved to live with his mother and her new husband, who adopted Ted as his son.
Ted was a respectable-seeming guy, a college student at the University of Washington who was majoring in psychology when Rule met Bundy. Rule was a decade older than Ted and trusted him so much. She let her children play with him. Rule goes on at length in her book about how she wasn't sexually attracted to Ted. Sure, sure.
Ok, so maybe it was platonic, and she just felt like a big sister to him. She trusted in Bundy.
Rule makes a big deal about her friendship with Ted, but she only knew him for a couple of years. Of course, during part of those years, he was abducting women, killing them, and violating their corpses.
Then Rule says she never really knew the real Ted Bundy. They were just casual friends, but he seemed so nice. She had taken a maternal liking to him. After a time, they lost contact. But Ann never forgot about him.
After Bundy was arrested for murder, they two wrote and called each other. Ted insisted on his innocence, and Ann listened to him, believing him. She sent him money for his defense. When he escaped from prison, and there was a nationwide manhunt for him, Bundy sent her letters, proclaiming his innocence. Even after he went on a murderous spree in Florida, killing a young girl, Rule could not affirm his guilt. Only after being in the courtroom and being confronted with genuine forensic evidence could the savvy writer of detective stories concede the man she considered a friend was a monster.
This book was a useful source of insight into the life and crimes of Ted Bundy, but even more so for the author, who used this to catapult her career.
It took me over two years to finish reading Until the Twelfth of Never by Bella Stumbo, and not because the book is bad or boring in any way.
It took It took me over two years to finish reading Until the Twelfth of Never by Bella Stumbo, and not because the book is bad or boring in any way.
It took that long because I was so emotionally gripped by this dense work of non-fiction; it became too much for me to bear. When I first started this book, I found myself (wrongly) transferring the Betty Broderick story to a very similar divorce situation in my family and feeling deeply for Betty. While the Broderick case does have its eerie parallels to that particular divorce, it’s not my divorce, so it’s not really my business. Plus, it was a protracted, messy split; now, I feel pity for neither individual involved, only for the children.
It’s always the children who suffer most in divorces. Sure there are kids who are better off with a more stable environment that post-divorce parenthood might provide, but divorce affects every child in a deep and meaningful way. In the case of the Broderick children, their parents used them as weapons in a viciously cruel duel that led to murder.
Like so many kids of my generation, I’m a child of divorce, and it’s shaped how I look at the institution of marriage. To be blunt, marriage is an all-or-nothing with me: either never or forever. As someone who cherishes her personal space and privacy, I can completely understand why a permanent lifetime partnership with one person is not many folks� cup of tea. Marriage is not a fairy tale, plus it can be very unglamorous and tedious.
On the other hand, I don’t view matrimony as a romantic bonding of two supposed soul mates. Despite being a romance reader, I don’t consider marriage as the ultimate end game of every love story.
Marriage is a financial/legal/social/religious/familial union that bonds two people together as one for life. It’s no joke. Especially when kids are involved. Add adultery into the mix� and well, you’ve got a chaotic situation with wounded adults who lash out at each other only to end up hurting their children most of all.
While divorce rates have lowered in the past decades, they are still common in the US, with 30-40% of 1st marriages ending in divorce and an increasingly higher rate for subsequent marriages. The actual reasons for divorce vary, but depending on the state, most are filed as no-fault divorces for reasons such as irreconcilable differences.
In this book, Stumbo laments how no-fault divorce hurt Betty’s mental and legal well-being. At the time of its inception, many feminists worried the legal notion could harm women—namely, cheating husbands could easily divorce their innocent wives and leave them with nothing.
Ironically, today it’s mostly men who decry the perils of no-fault divorce, as more women file for divorce than men. From what I’ve seen of the divorced couples around me, people break up for every reason imaginable--even if the women do file most of the time.
Stumbo’s well-documented writing in Until the Twelfth of Never doesn't spare any details. All the players are portrayed fairly yet with brutal and blunt honesty.
Betty Broderick, self-proclaimed super-mom and super-wife, was married to super-lawyer Dan Broderick for 16 years when he left her for his much younger secretary, Linda Kolkena. Their acrimonious divorce stretched out for years, with each person doing their unholy best to make the other’s life miserable.
Betty was violent, foul-mouthed, and viciously cruel to their children.
As the President of the San Diego Bar Association, Dan knew every legal trick in the book to torment his wife in order to prevent her from getting an equitable share of their marital assets. And he, too, was cruel to his children, using his money as a cudgel to control them. He went as far as writing one of his daughters out his will when she wouldn’t follow his petty rules.
After the Broderick divorce was finalized, on paper Betty had a decent settlement. But due to her husband’s knowledge of the courts, Betty ended up owing Dan money! This was due to the multiple fines she incurred for being recorded cursing at Dan and Linda--which the judge had prohibited-- and multiple Epstein credits. (. She had to sell her home and move into a more "modest" dwelling, while Dan lived in a renovated multi-million-dollar mansion with his new bride.
I’m not going to rehash the entire story here, as a quick internet or YouTube search can supply all the sordid facts that are readily available. Suffice it to say, that what may have started with one spouse being the bigger jerk in the situation, ended up with two people turning into veritable demons in their hatred of one another.
My opinion on the matter is this:
1) Betty was four pennies short of a nickel. She was diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorder, but beyond that, Betty had no clue what right vs. wrong was.
Does that mean I think Betty shouldn’t have spent a single night in jail for the murders? No. Were I a juror on her trial, knowing what I know now, I would have convicted her of Voluntary Manslaughter, which would have given her a 15-to-30-year sentence rather than 30-to-life she received.
To this day, Betty Broderick has not apologized for the murders per se, but she has expressed remorse for the harm that it did to her children. Having read Stumbo’s book, I can say that’s the most self-awareness Betty seems capable of. Her hatred of Dan and Linda was all-consuming and she was wholly self-centered.
2) Dan Broderick was a vindictive, psychopathic narcissist who did everything in his power to drive his crazy wife over the edge. Linda Kolkena was not some blameless, young bystander, as she also had her part in driving Betty to higher levels of insanity by sending her ads for wrinkle creams and weight loss programs.
Does that mean they deserved to be shot to death as they slept in their bed? Of course not.
Life does not always mete out karmic punishments in a fair manner. If life was fair, a reasonable-minded judge would have seen precisely the game Dan Broderick was playing and put a stop to it. But the billion-dollar divorce industry that is fueled by angry applicants, along with judges, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, pundits, activists et al., is not always a place to look for equality or justice.
So Betty Broderick took out her own form of justice, which, unfortunately, destroyed the possibility of this broken family ever finding true peace.
Betty has been denied parole twice and most likely will die in prison.
Dan and Linda never got the chance to see if their life together as a married couple would thrive.
And the four Broderick children never got a chance to live ordinary lives, doing the normal things children of divorce do, like debating whether to go to Mom’s for Thanksgiving or Dad’s for Christmas, because Dad is dead and Mom is in prison for his murder.
Wendy, Lady Evelyn Quince
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