The Dail Heart ~ The Heart Can Hold Two Truths

The Heart Can Hold Two Truths

The Good Old Boys Change Costumes

I knew Betty Broderick probably as well as almost anybody did during that final period before the shooting.

By then, Betty’s list of friends had diminished to almost nothing. She had her children and her dogs. She kept Shih Tzus. She bred them, actually. I know because she gave me one.

Betty was my client.

I worked in beauty salons then, first in San Diego and eventually in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, and as I sat down to write this, I realized something I had never quite put together before:

Beauty salons were the original social media.

Before Facebook. Before TikTok. Before livestreamed trials, comment sections, podcasts, influencers, and millions of people choosing sides from thirty-second clips, there was the beauty salon.

Everyone knew everyone’s business. Stories traveled from chair to chair, appointment to appointment, salon to salon. Everybody had an opinion. Everybody loved a good story. And let’s be clear: gossip in a beauty salon is very, very real.

The salon was where women gathered information. It was where marriages were dissected, affairs were discovered, divorces were anticipated, reputations were constructed, and lives were discussed while hair was being colored and nails were being painted.

It was social media with rollers, acrylic nails, champagne, and no delete button.

Everybody in the salon knew Betty because everybody loved Betty.

She was very smart. Very funny. Very kind. Always late. She would come rushing through the door carrying that purse phone of hers—one of the first cellular phones I had ever seen. This was sometime in the 1980s, and the thing looked and felt like she was carrying a brick in her purse. It must have weighed fifteen pounds.

Betty understood the stock market. She had stockbrokers calling her. They called her the Ten-Share Guru because she knew what to buy before other people knew what to buy. She could spot a trend before the trend had announced itself.

She was not a stupid woman.

She was not a helpless woman.

And she was not the one-dimensional lunatic people needed her to become after she killed Dan and Linda Broderick.

I met her daughters. They became my clients, too. They were lovely girls. Confused, certainly, because how could they not have been? But they were kind and smart, and they were living inside a family war that had consumed almost everything around them.

Nothing I knew about Betty excuses what she eventually did.

But what she did does not erase everything I knew.

America could not hold those two truths at once then, and apparently, we still cannot.

Now another woman is sitting in another courtroom while the country divides itself into opposing camps.

Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. Her defense argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible. The prosecution argues that she knew exactly what she was doing, planned the killings, and deliberately created the opportunity to carry them out.

And here we are again.

One side sees a calculating murderer.

The other sees a profoundly ill woman abandoned by the mental-health system.

Everybody picks a side. Everybody selects the facts that support that side. Everybody settles into a digital beauty-salon chair and waits for the next piece of gossip, the next courtroom clip, the next expert, the next facial expression to interpret.

The difference now is scale.

The beauty salon has become the entire world.

At the time of Betty’s trial, I was dating a lawyer, so you can imagine the conversations in my house. They were heated.

I was younger then and far more emotional than I am now. Perhaps some of my compassion for Betty was misguided. I knew her personally. I knew the woman who sat across from me. I had listened to her. I knew her children. I had seen the warmth, humor, intelligence, and generosity that could never be entered into evidence as neatly as a bullet, a threatening message, or a broken window.

My boyfriend saw the law.

I saw the woman.

There was division between us, and because it was still a relatively new relationship, it did not survive it.

Now I watch that same division playing out across America. Only now it is amplified by social media, stripped of nuance, and turned into a public blood sport. People are not simply discussing the Lindsay Clancy case. They are joining teams. Compassion is interpreted as exoneration. Accountability is interpreted as cruelty. If you recognize psychosis, you are accused of excusing murder. If you recognize murder, you are accused of denying mental illness.

We are apparently no longer capable of holding two truths unless one is being used to beat the other one to death.

But as I began comparing these two cases, I realized they are not similar in the way I first thought.

They are not simply stories about two women who became fixated and killed the people they believed were causing their suffering.

They are stories about power.

More specifically, they are stories about women who became the final, visible point of catastrophe while the powerful systems surrounding them escaped the full weight of public judgment.

Dan Broderick did not merely cheat on Betty.

I am not the moral police. Marriage, monogamy, infidelity, and the contracts people make and break with one another are an entirely different conversation. But let’s not sanitize what happened by calling this an unhappy marriage followed by a bitter divorce.

Dan abused his power.

Everybody knew it.

Dan was not simply Betty’s husband. He was a physician with a medical degree from Cornell and a powerful medical-malpractice attorney with a Harvard law degree. He had been president of the San Diego County Bar Association. He was deeply embedded in the legal establishment. He owned a bar where the men in that world gathered. It was the good-old-boy network in its natural habitat: attorneys, judges, professional power, money, favors, friendships, and influence all drinking in the same room.

And Betty was expected to enter that world and receive justice from it.

She struggled even to find a lawyer willing to go against him. Think about that. Her husband was a lawyer. Her husband knew the lawyers. Her husband knew the judges. And the legal system in which she was supposed to fight him was his home territory.

So Betty tried to represent herself.

People like to say that Betty should have handled herself better. Of course she should have. People say she should have followed legal advice. She should have stopped calling. She should have stopped raging. She should have stopped retaliating. She should have behaved rationally.

But rational behavior becomes increasingly difficult when the person across from you controls the board, knows all the players, and keeps changing the rules.

Dan sold the family home. He gained custody of the children. He used a system of financial penalties against her, deducting money from her support payments according to behaviors he deemed unacceptable. He weaponized legal language. He had her arrested, jailed, and briefly committed. Every time Betty reacted, her reaction became further evidence that she was crazy, while the machinery provoking that reaction remained respectable.

And yes, Dan cheated on her.

When Betty suspected the affair, he denied it and treated her suspicions as proof that something was wrong with her. She was told that what she could plainly see was not happening. Then, when the truth finally emerged, the same people who had called her crazy expected her to respond to the revelation with sanity, dignity, and perfect emotional regulation.

Again, none of this excuses murder.

It explains the pressure chamber.

That distinction matters.

Explaining how a building caught fire is not the same as applauding the fire. Examining the wiring, the accelerant, the blocked exits, and the people who smelled smoke but did nothing does not absolve the person who finally struck the match.

But if all we do is prosecute the match, the building will burn again.

Dan had power.

Betty had rage.

Dan’s power wore a suit, carried a law degree, and spoke in the measured language of the court. Betty’s rage screamed into answering machines, drove cars through doors, violated orders, and made itself impossible to defend.

Guess which one the system was designed to recognize as dangerous.

The person with institutional power could remain composed because the institution itself was doing the fighting. The powerless person had only her own increasingly desperate behavior, and every expression of that desperation made her easier to dismiss.

By the time Betty committed murder, all the surrounding complexity collapsed into one clean public story:

Crazy woman kills successful lawyer and his beautiful young wife.

And then the good old boys walked away.

Decades later, the machinery has changed, but the structure looks painfully familiar.

Lindsay Clancy is the person sitting at the defense table.

The pharmaceutical industry is not sitting beside her.

The fragmented mental-health system is not sitting beside her.

The practitioners who passed her from medication to medication are not sitting beside her. The model of care that reduces a suffering human being to a collection of symptoms and then attempts to chemically suppress each new symptom is not sitting beside her.

Over approximately four months, Lindsay had 32 prescriptions written and filled involving 13 different psychiatric medications.

Thirty-two prescriptions.

Thirteen different drugs.

Four months.

Those figures do not mean she swallowed every pill. They do not mean she was taking all thirteen medications simultaneously. They do not, by themselves, prove that medication caused the killings.

But for God’s sake, they mean something.

Some of these drugs can require careful tapering after sustained use. Stopping or changing psychiatric medications can involve withdrawal effects, rebound symptoms, worsening anxiety, insomnia, agitation, cognitive disturbances, emotional disruption, and destabilization. And while medications can be valuable and lifesaving, they do not necessarily resolve the original source of a person’s suffering.

So what exactly was happening inside this woman?

Which symptoms belonged to the original condition?

Which symptoms represented postpartum depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or psychosis?

Which effects came from beginning a drug?

Which came from changing the dose?

Which came from combining drugs?

Which came from discontinuing one and introducing another?

Which came from sleep deprivation?

And who was watching the whole woman while all of this was happening?

Lindsay sought help.

This is important.

She was not sitting at home refusing care while everyone around her begged her to see someone. She reached toward the system. She saw providers. She entered treatment. She went into psychiatric care. She reported that something was wrong. She searched for answers. She was desperate to get better.

Help was not absent for lack of trying.

What was absent was help that reached her.

Instead, there were more appointments, more diagnoses to consider, more prescriptions, more medication changes, more attempts to manage the symptoms—and still a woman moving closer to catastrophe.

This is where the pharmaceutical industry becomes the modern good-old-boy network.

It does not need to gather in a smoky bar. It gathers through institutions, prescribing protocols, medical authority, telehealth portals, liability structures, and an economic system that can deliver another medication far more easily than it can deliver sustained, intimate, human care.

With Betty, power wore a tailored suit and knew the judge.

With Lindsay, power wears a white coat and writes a prescription.

And somehow, when everything explodes, the woman still takes the fall.

People point to Lindsay’s Google searches, her use of time, the errands she asked Patrick to run, and the sequence of what she did as proof that she could not possibly have been psychotic.

She planned it, they say.

She looked things up.

She knew how long he would be gone.

She checked the time.

Therefore, she knew exactly what she was doing.

But this reveals how little most people understand about psychosis.

Psychosis does not necessarily leave a person babbling in a corner or lying like a lump on a couch. A person can be psychotic and still be highly functional. A psychotic mind can use a telephone, perform a job, care for children, search Google, consult a clock, conceal an intention, and complete a series of organized steps.

The psychotic mind can be horribly efficient.

What is broken is not necessarily the ability to carry out the plan.

What is broken is the reality from which the plan arises.

Within a psychotic reality, the conclusion may appear perfectly logical because the underlying premise has become detached from shared reality. If the mind believes that something unbearable is true, it can construct an orderly response to that false or distorted truth.

Planning does not automatically prove sanity.

Functioning does not automatically prove sanity.

Looking normal does not prove sanity.

And because psychosis can coexist with intelligence and functionality, people often do not recognize it until something irreversible happens.

The defense argues that Lindsay suffered from postpartum psychosis. The prosecution disputes that and maintains that she retained the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of her actions. That is the legal question the jury must decide.

But the larger question belongs to all of us:

How many times can a woman say she is not all right, be given another prescription, and still be considered adequately helped?

How many medications can move through one woman’s life before we are permitted to question the system prescribing them?

How many providers can touch a case before somebody becomes responsible for seeing the whole case?

And why are we more comfortable examining every Google search made by a suffering woman than examining the industry that wrote 32 prescriptions in roughly four months?

This is where division becomes useful.

As long as we are screaming at one another about whether Lindsay is a monster or a victim, we are not looking upward.

As long as one side is screaming “murderer” and the other is screaming “postpartum psychosis,” the institutions surrounding her remain safely outside the frame.

That does not mean every practitioner involved was careless. It does not mean psychiatric medication is always harmful. It does not mean that every tragedy can be prevented or that every person asking for help can be saved.

It means the system must be examined with at least as much ferocity as the woman.

But it rarely is.

Because powerful systems know how to disappear into complexity. They divide responsibility among so many professionals, corporations, appointments, diagnoses, prescriptions, and protocols that no single part appears to be responsible for the final result.

The woman, meanwhile, has a face.

So we put the face on trial.

This is the connection between Betty and Lindsay.

Not that their lives were the same.

Not that their crimes were the same.

Not that their states of mind were clinically identical.

The connection is that both women became the final containers for catastrophes shaped within larger systems of power. Both became the visible problem while the invisible machinery remained respectable.

With Betty, the machinery was marriage, money, gender, social status, and a legal establishment dominated by men who knew one another.

With Lindsay, it is fragmented psychiatric care, the medicating of distress, institutional authority, and a pharmaceutical system that can keep offering pills without necessarily delivering healing.

Two different eras.

Two different women.

Two different horrors.

The same old structure.

The good-old-boy network changes costumes, but somebody still takes it up the ass—and somehow, it is still the woman.

Both women were suffering.

Tremendously.

Yes, we can say that some of Betty’s suffering came from her inability to move on. People said it then, and people still say it now:

Why didn’t she just move on with her life?

But what life?

What life had been left for her to move into?

Everything Betty had worked for had been taken from her. The marriage she had invested in, the career she had helped build, the money, the home, the family, the social world, and the future she believed she was creating had all been transferred into somebody else’s life.

Then she was told to move on as if “moving on” were a destination—as if another life were waiting conveniently outside the courthouse with the engine running.

There wasn’t.

Perhaps people understand that better now in this post-COVID world, after millions watched their businesses, health, relationships, security, communities, and entire ways of life disappear. It is easy to tell someone to begin again when you are not the one standing in the ashes.

And Lindsay Clancy was suffering, too.

Tremendously.

These were two women whose suffering had become so total that they could no longer see a life beyond it. Their worlds had narrowed until the only resolution their minds could locate was the removal of what those minds had identified as the cause.

For Betty, that cause became Dan—and Linda, the woman occupying the life Betty believed had been stolen from her.

For Lindsay, inside the distorted reality her defense argues was postpartum psychosis, the suffering became entangled with her children. The children she loved became, within that psychotic collapse, part of what had to be removed for the suffering to end.

That is what people do not understand about psychosis.

They think a psychotic person must be incoherent, incapacitated, babbling in a corner, incapable of looking at a clock or searching Google or carrying out a sequence of actions.

But the psychotic mind can be terribly organized.

It can gather information.

It can make arrangements.

It can execute a plan.

What is broken is not necessarily the person’s ability to perform the steps.

What is broken is the reality from which those steps arise.

I am not saying that either woman was innocent of what she did. I am saying that neither woman could see another way to make the suffering stop.

The mind had collapsed the entire world into one unbearable problem and one catastrophic solution:

Take out the cause, and the pain will end.

But the pain did not end.

It multiplied.

It moved into the children who survived Betty. It moved into Patrick Clancy. It moved into the families, the courtrooms, the people watching, and everyone left trying to understand something almost too terrible to hold.

And then we divided ourselves into teams.

Because choosing a villain is easier than examining suffering.

Condemning one woman is easier than examining the people and institutions that failed her.

And this is where the heart becomes more than a sentimental idea.

The mind divides because division makes the unbearable easier to organize.

Innocent or guilty.

Victim or monster.

Compassion or accountability.

Choose one. Reject the other. The discomfort disappears.

But truth does not always arrive in clean halves.

There are many truths moving within these stories. There is suffering. There is illness. There is power. There is desperation. There is institutional failure. There is personal choice. There is manipulation. There is consequence. There are innocent people who were killed and surviving families who will carry that pain for the rest of their lives.

There is not one truth here.

There is a perfect storm of truths.

Division asks:

Who is the villain?

The heart asks:

What is true here?

What are all the truths moving within this situation? What suffering, power, illness, desperation, failure, choice, and consequence converged to create this perfect storm?

Division asks us to choose one truth and use it to destroy all the others.

The heart asks us to hold every truth present.

The heart can hold the murdered children and the suffering mother.

The heart can hold Betty’s responsibility and Dan’s abuse of power.

The heart can grieve Linda without pretending she occupied no place in the machinery of Betty’s collapse.

The heart can recognize psychosis without turning murder into innocence.

The heart can demand accountability without requiring dehumanization.

The heart does not ask us to choose between truths.

It asks us to become large enough to hold them together.

That is not weakness.

It is not spiritual bypassing, misplaced compassion, or an inability to judge right from wrong. It is a more exacting form of consciousness because it refuses the narcotic simplicity of choosing a side.

Division asks:

Who deserves punishment?

The heart asks:

Where did the suffering begin?

Who benefited from looking away?

What systems protected themselves?

What was ignored, dismissed, medicated, manipulated, or silenced?

And what must finally be confronted so this does not happen again?

The mind wants a side.

The mind wants a verdict.

The heart wants the whole truth.

Because recognizing the abuse of power does not excuse the final act. Recognizing psychosis does not erase the dead. Compassion does not require us to abandon accountability.

But refusing to recognize all the truths operating within a tragedy ensures that the machinery producing these tragedies remains untouched.

So the woman takes the fall.

The legal establishment continues.

The pharmaceutical industry continues.

The good old boys change costumes.

And the suffering finds another woman.

 

Narayan