I was familiar with the Betty Broderick case before I met BM, but become a bit fascinated by her after having to deal with the BM in my life who exhibits many borderline traits and in my view, could easily turn to a murderous rage if DH tried to challenge her on a) the children or b) money. 

Her case is currently featured in a series on USA network and I must say, watching this and reading a lot of the commentary has really opened my eyes to how difficult it is to manage a relationship with a personality disordered individual. Betty was diagnosed at trial with having narcissistic and histrionic PDs and there are other sources that claim she has borderline PD. 

She seems to have successfully convinced the world that she was driven to murder her ex husband and his wife because he gaslit her about the affair. However, if you dig deeper, you can see that there were cracks in her marriage and signs of her being unhinged long before the affair began. 

Her lawyer essentially argued that her husband's lying about the affair drove better crazy. However, I was happy to see one psychologist say that what he did was not exactly gaslighting. Most people lie about affairs and gaslighting is meant to control the other person and it's not clear that he was trying to control her, only to hide his affair. It does seem as though he played hardball during their 6 year long divorce proceedings, but it seems like she played just as hard in return and she also went through a string of lawyers and eventually ended up representing herself because she refused to take legal advice. She claims she was left with nothing, but she was actually getting $16,000 a month in alimony (in the 1980s) and also a waterfront home worth $650K in the 1980s. She didn't get child support because her ex husband had full custody of the two minor children after Betty dropped them off at his house, pushed them out of the car, said "you deal with them!" and drove off. 

After the divorce proceedings began and even after the divorce was finalized, she regularly broke into her ex husband's home (using a key from her adult daughter) to destroy things (smearing food on the walls, spray painting items inside the home) and steal things (she stole the invitation list for her ex husband's wedding to his second wife). She also drove her car into his front door. She claims she only brought a gun to his home for her last visit at 5am, because he "wouldn't listen to me" and "I needed to make him listen" but then ended up firing five bullets while both her ex husband and his wife were sleeping. 

One of her daughters wrote a book about how long before the affair Betty would regularly through things at her husband and lock him out of the house. As a young child, the daughter wondered, "maybe dad would be home more often if mom wasn't so mad at him all the time." After the divorce, her sons begged their father to "let us go live with mom. she'll do crazy things if we're not with her." There are also some terrible recorded calls where her then 10-year old son begs her to stop being angry and using bad words, saying to her through tears, "mom, isn't two years long enough to be angry?!" Her only response is to say that his father is some expletive (bleeped out in the audio, I heard) who destroyed their family. 

Despite all this, she has become a folk hero for scorned women and her claims that she only went crazy because she was a "battered spouse" have resonated with many familiar with the case. Thirty years later, she is still blaming her ex husband for everything and not expressing any remorse for what she did. The only people who express skepticism about her claims are detectives who worked on the case, some of her children, and surprisingly enough Oprah, who interviewed her several times, including one interview after she was convicted in which she said the main thing she was sorry about was how her ex husband destroyed their family. 

All of this was a huge revelation to me, about how if someone has not experienced the direct rage of someone with a personality disorder, they will often take the claims of that person at face value. I've struggled with this with BM who has made some terrible, untrue accusations about DH. DH's family believes her telling DH that he is just "at war" with her and she is a "good person" who is only ever looking out for the children. Mind you, neither MIL nor BIL have ever asked DH what was going on, they've only listened to BM's histrionics over the phone and blindly assumed that what she was saying must be true.