Part I is HERE.
Betty Broderick died yesterday after spending almost half her life in a California prison for the double murder of her ex-husband and his new wife. There's been at least one movie made about her and, I think, a Netflix series. She was a murderer AND many people empathized with her. She was very controversial.
Back in the late 80's after more than twenty years of marriage and four children, Betty's husband Dan, a successful attorney she had supported through medical and law school left her for a much younger woman who worked for him. He married the new woman, moved her into the family home and won custody of the children, while Betty spiraled publicly and emotionally through years of bitter court battles, humiliation and increasingly erratic behavior.
On November 5th, 1989 (two days before Betty's 42nd birthday and 37 years before Pluto and Juno meet up again in 2026), Betty entered her old home, the home Dan and his new wife Linda now shared and shot both her ex-husband and his new wife to death while they slept. She claimed she went there to commit suicide and lost control/the gun just went off/she didn't remember. Her first trial resulted in a hung jury (probably mostly to do with sympathy/empathy for the jilted and 'replaced' Betty) and her second trial - a conviction and jail sentence that would last the rest of her life.
Scorned wife, philandering/Jupertarian husband, MURDER, let's take a look at these charts for our Juno/Pluto series and see what Juno is up to.
Betty was born on November 7th, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York. I don't have her birthtime, so am using a solar chart (pulling her Sun to the ascendent, I have found these charts tell the same story as a timed natal, but in a different way). Betty's Sun is in Scorpio, and her Moon is in Virgo. She has a tight Chiron/Sun conjunct Mercury. The 12th house stellium (and, yes, I realize I am putting the Sun here) is the core wound pattern and it's a big one. The 12th house is the house of undoing, institutions (including prisons), hidden enemies and self-sabotage. Scorpio here intensifies everything toward obsession, death/rebirth cycles and power. Sun conjunct Chiron in Scorpio in the 12th is an almost unbearably literal signature for Betty. Her wound is her identity. It's hidden from view and unhealing. Chiron in Scorpio wounds through betrayal, through having power stripped away, through the experience of being annihilated by someone you merged with. The Sun here never fully shines in the public world - it operates in secret, in the dark. And her Sun is in an EXACT square to her Pluto in Leo (and Pluto rules her chart).
Juno (Hera) is the goddess of alliances like marriage as institution and identity. She doesn't just love Jupiter/Zeus, she is the wife of Jupiter. When he strays she doesn't leave. She destroys. She gets revenge.
Betty's natal Juno at 3-degrees Capricorn in an exact quincunx to her natal Jupiter in Sagittarius with her Jupiter conjunct Venus is crazy. The quincunx/inconjunct is a 150-degree aspect of mis-alignment and adjustment. The two planets can never quite find each other. Her Juno (marital identity, the role of wife) is in perpetual, irresolvable tension with her Jupiter (expansion, philosophy, foreign-ness, abundance) and Venus (love, worth, beauty). She was literally married to a Jupiter archetype - a powerful, expansive man/a lawyer (and Jupiter rules legal themes). I didn't include his chart here, but Dan had his 2nd-house Venus conjunct Betty's Juno and Dan's Venus was in an exact opposition to his Venus (and to Betty's Juno). For Betty with Jupiter conjunct Venus in Sagittarius in the 2nd house Dan is the man who gave her abundance, status, self-worth only to take it all back. When Jupiter/Venus left, her Venus-worth went with it. Betty and Dan's Junos faced each other across the Cancer/Capricorn axis. His Juno clinging to home, mother, emotional security and hers in Capricorn grasping structure and status (and resources that 2nd house). They were each other's Juno mirrors. Each activated the other's 'psychological bounding' wound simply by existing in the relationship. The opposition didn't just describe their conflict - it really was their conflict, and it was baked into the marriage pie right from the beginning.
Betty's Libra house/11th house - a container for relationships - holds the planet Neptune. This is her idealization of marriage as a concept. Neptune in Libra dreams of perfect union, perfect justice, perfect partnership. In the 11th it becomes kind of a social ideal. She put him through medical and law school while raising children. She was the sacrificial, idealizing Neptune/Libra wife to a degree that became pathological. Neptune dissolves boundaries. Here it dissolved the boundary between her identity and her marriage. When the marriage ended, she had no container left.
Betty has all her malefics in the 10th house of public reputation in fiery Leo. Pride, humiliation, rage punishment, dominance struggles, public downfall, notoriety, public de-throning. Saturn/Pluto is already a signature of enormous pressure, fate, crushing and transformative power, control struggles. In the 10th house of career/public life/father/husband - whatever was going to go on with this energy was always destined to play out in public. Maybe through a father. Maybe through a husband. Betty would speak loudly and act dramatically (Mars/Mercury in Leo 10th house). She left obscene phone messages, drove her car into his house. Leo wants a stage anyway and that 10th house - Cappy's natural house BTW, so connecting to her own Juno - DEMANDS IT. She also has her natal asteroid Narcissus there and that plays a role here, too.
She has Uranus in Gemini in the 8th - death, shared resources, sexuality, transformation, the assets of others. Mental splitting. Fractured thinking. Uranus here speaks of sudden, shocking disruptions in 8th-house matters. Two deaths (Gemini = the twins, duality). The method was sudden (Uranus). He got custody of her children and the house she shared with him - all 8th house Uranian disruptions of what was shared.
So, we have Dan's Venus activating her Juno. She became the total 'wife' because his love/bounty landed precisely there. His Venus/Juno opposition then pulled his desire toward the other woman, whose youth and availability was the Venus polarity when freed from the Juno polarity. His Juno/Saturn in Cancer in the 8th bound him to the domestic sphere karmically and that binding became the site of his death (Juno/wife - he dies at the hand of a wife and with a wife, Saturn - karma/endings, Cancer - home, 8th house - death/power entanglements, third party situations). His 10th house Jupiter/Neptune/Chiron never fully reckoned with consequence. Neptune in the 10th can dissolve accountability into self-mythologizing. These are two people whose charts were written for each other in the worst possible way. His Venus said you are my wife. Her Chiron/Sun heard I am nothing else. His Juno/Saturn in the 8th said this will end in the home through Juno. And it did.
On the day of the murders look what we have. Betty has Uranus and Venus right on her natal Juno. Saturn/Neptune are conjunct in Cappy, too and opposing transiting Chiron/Jupiter. Their story perfectly fit the collective chart. The Sun/Mercury was on her natal Sun/Chiron/Mercury with Mars in that house and the North Node was at the IC/root of Betty's chart (her natal North Node in Taurus is on Algol/losing your head/turning to stone) and the transiting South Node was on Betty's midheaven right between her asteroid Narcissus (this public placement really started to show during her second trial) and her Saturn/Mars/Pluto. This was most likely an old story. For Dan, on the day of his death, he had transiting Jupiter exact on his Saturn and transiting Chiron on his North Node. He had Uranus/Venus opposing his natal Juno and conjunct his natal Venus (along with Saturn and Neptune). The North Node is on his Moon in his solar chart.
When Betty died yesterday, her progressed Juno had moved to an exact conjunction with her progressed Sun at 3-degrees Aquarius
(so exactly inconjunct Betty's natal Juno and in an exact sextile with her natal Jupiter).
The marriage/alliance wound and her identity finally, completely collapsed into one point.
Pluto, having just stationed retrograde at 5-degrees Aquarius, was turning back directly toward that conjunction, bearing down with the full weight of finality and Juno is about to.
In Aquarius, Pluto turns the personal story into the collective story. Betty's story had stopped belonging to only Betty decades ago. It has become part of a larger cultural conversation about marriage, betrayal, female rage, replacement and erasure.
When she died, Betty's progressed Moon was also tightly conjunct the crime chart's Jupiter/Chiron which is amazing, too. Progressed Moon timings often coincide with emotional completions and karmic re-visitations. Here, the Moon returns her emotionally to the original wound-pattern that detonated her entire trajectory.
Keep in mind - Betty lived to be more than 80 years old. Dan Broderick died at 44. Linda Broderick at 28. They were shot to death while they slept in their bed. The chart explains the architecture of obsession, but it does not soften what obsession/what Pluto can cost.
That is perhaps the most important thing Juno/Pluto teaches. The archetypes, left unconscious, left unexamined, don't just wound the person carrying them. This is another reason for us to look at our natal Junos and natal Plutos and our Aquarius houses as we move through their retrogrades until fall ....
xo all
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