Dan and Betty’s House from “Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story”

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No true crime case has fascinated me quite as deeply as the murder of prominent La Jolla attorney Dan Broderick and his wife/former mistress, Linda Kolkena.  The intrigue is odd considering we know who the killer is (Dan’s first wife, Betty, confessed immediately following the slayings), we know the why (she could not get over the affair, the divorce settlement or the fact that Dan had moved on), and we know the how (on numerous occasions Betty has detailed sneaking into Dan and Linda’s Hillcrest home on November 5th, 1989 and shooting the couple dead).  There’s really no mystery here.  Yet, I.am.engrossed.  So is much of the world.  There have been myriad books and articles written on the subject, television interviews broadcast (including several with Betty conducted from prison), and a two-part made-for-TV movie starring Meredith Baxter that aired in 1992.  But the public can’t seem to get enough.  So it is no surprise that the USA Network decided to dedicate the second season of its Dirty John series to the case, with Amanda Peet and Christian Slater at the helm.  Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story hit the small screen this past Tuesday.  My interest was piqued long before that, though.  In fact, I started tracking down the show’s locations as soon as the first trailer was released!  The spot that most interested me, of course, was the home where Dan and Betty lived before their relationship went bad, which turned out to be a snap to find.

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In the first Sneak Peek of the series, which was released in early May, a young Dan and Betty are shown removing a “For Sale” sign from the yard of their new house.  An address number of “19854” was clearly visible on the front of the property in the scene and, thanks to its early-80s tract look, I figured it could most likely be found in the San Fernando Valley.  So, armed with that information, I headed over to Google and fairly quickly IDed the place as 19854 Dina Place in Chatsworth.

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I ran out to stalk it – from an appropriate social distance, of course – shortly thereafter.  I call the picture below “Stalking in the time of the Coronavirus.”  Winking smile

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Betty Broderick’s story is a tale as old as time.  Wife works to put husband through school (in Dan’s case, medical and law school) while managing the household and caring for the children.  Husband finally starts making money, opens up own practice, buys a house, and a new sports car.  Not long after, husband begins affair with young secretary (in Dan’s case, his 21-year-old legal assistant, whom he hired even though she couldn’t type).  Husband leaves wife for secretary, files for divorce, and things get ugly.  Extremely ugly.  At the center of Dan and Betty’s divorce proceedings was their longtime family home, which they both referred to as the “Coral Reef house.”

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The actual Coral Reef house (pictured in the top Google Street View image below) is located at 5555 Coral Reef Avenue in La Jolla.  Dan and Betty purchased the 5-bedroom, 3-bath, 3,000-square-foot pad, which you can see interior photos of here, in 1976 after their rental in nearby Clairemont was damaged in a fire.  Per a 1989 San Diego Reader article, Dan was just on the cusp of hitting it big financially.  Author Jeannette DeWyze states, “Betty said they moved there with virtually no furniture, and even after her third child, a son, was born in 1976, she continued to work nights as a cashier and hostess at the Black Angus restaurant in Kearny Mesa.  According to her, the family only became ‘solvent’ around 1979. ‘I can remember because we built a swimming pool in the back yard.  And that’s a luxury, right?  We financed it onto the house, so it wasn’t like we paid cash for it or anything, but we were able to increase the house payment a little.  So, in my mind, that’s when he had some money.'”  When a cracked slab was discovered at the property in the fall of 1984, the family moved out and into a rental nearby so that repairs could be performed.  Dan left Betty the following spring, moving back in Coral Reef alone for a time and then into a handsome dwelling in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood.  On February 4th, 1986, he sold their longtime home out from under Betty via a legal loophole (granted she had been trying to stall and hamper the process for months), and when she found out, she was so furious she proceeded to drive a car into his Hillcrest residence!  Like I said, things got extremely ugly.  As you can see below, Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story location managers really strove to find a house for the series that closely resembled the real thing, which I couldn’t appreciate more.

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The peaked red-tile roof, three-car garage, double front doors, stepped front walkway, and Spanish style of Dan and Betty’s actual former home are all a direct match to those of its TV counterpart, as you can see in the MLS photo of Coral Reef as compared to the image of the house used on the series below!

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    Not only that, but the TV pad still has a very ‘80s feel, despite being 2020, so producers must have been elated to find it!

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In real life, the 1976 home boasts 4 bedrooms, 5 baths, 3,989 square feet, a 0.41-acre lot, a pool, a jacuzzi, and a tennis court.

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I had to laugh at the Ferrari parked out front being that Dan bought the same kind of sports car shortly before leaving Betty – both on the series and in real life.  His was red, but still.  Life imitating art imitating life, I guess.

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The property’s backyard is also being featured on the series.

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The inside of Dan and Betty’s residence was, I believe, just a set – one closely based upon that of 19854 Dina Place.  And though I could not find interior photos of the home with which to verify that hunch . . .

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. . . an Instagram follower named mz._royale informed me that the very same property appeared in another true crime anthology series based in San Diego!  In 2018, it popped up as the supposed Rancho Bernardo home where Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) grew up in the “Creator/Destroyer” episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

I was thrilled to discover while watching that the home’s actual interior also appeared in the episode!

Though it is similar in layout and design to the inside of Dan and Betty’s house, as you can see above and below, the two are not one and the same, making me all the more certain that filming of Dirty John took place on a set.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine, and Discover Los Angeles.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Dan and Betty Broderick’s house from Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story is located at 19854 Dina Place in Chatsworth.  The couple’s real-life former residence can be found at 5555 Coral Reef Avenue in La Jolla.

Farralone – Frank Sinatra’s Former House

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While doing research on the Chaplin Court apartment complex, which I blogged about last Thursday, I came across some information about an oft-filmed-at Chatsworth-area estate formerly owned by Old Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, that, for some inexplicable reason, I had somehow not previously known about.  The mansion, which in most circles is known simply as Farralone, is a marvel of modern design that just came on the public market for the very first time in history a couple of weeks ago.  And, let me tell you, I took one look at the photographs featured on the real estate listing and became just a wee-bit obsessed with stalking the place.  So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there last weekend to do just that.

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Farralone, or the “Great Glass Mansion” or the “Sinatra Compound” as it is also sometimes called, was commissioned by Chase-Manhattan-Bank-heiress Dora Hutchison in 1951 and was designed by Pereira & Luckman, the architecture firm who also gave us the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the Theme Building (aka The Encounter Restaurant & Bar) at the Los Angeles International Airport, and, my personal favorite, the Disneyland Hotel.  Dora built the house to be used as a party pad and regularly hosted rousing soirees where she counted Ava Gardner, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, and Vincent Minnelli as guests.  When Dora moved back to her native New York, she leased the property to none other than Frank Sinatra, who remained there for almost ten years.  Sadly though, as you can see above, not much of the property is visible from the street.

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But that’s why God created real estate listings!  The estate, which was just put on the market earlier this month for a cool $12 million, boasts sweeping views, parking for over 200 cars, 10,000 square feet of living space, 4 bedrooms, 6 baths, 3 private offices, a conference room, a detached gym, a 50-foot swimming pool, 14 acres of land, a vineyard, a production studio, 16-foot ceilings, glass walls, and a 1,000-square-foot, 1-bedroom, 2-bath guest house (with its own separate pool) where my girl Miss Marilyn Monroe supposedly lived in for a time.

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Farralone has seen so much filming over the years that, according to a December 2nd, 2011 Forbes article, it not only nets up to $2 million a year in location fees, but also “comes with a property manager who acts as a liaison with the studios, paid for by the studios.”  The article further states that the “main house also boasts a lower level production studio equipped with conference room, edit bays, private office and a separate entrance, all paid for and maintained by the studios.”  Ironically enough, when we showed up to stalk the property some filming was actually taking place.  The super-nice security guard on duty informed us the the shoot was for a reality dating show of some sort, but she was unsure of the name.

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In the Season 4 episode of Californication titled “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, Farralone showed up as the residence belonging to Stu Beggs (aka Stephen Tobolowsky), where Marcy Ellen Runkle (aka Pamela Adlon) made a house call to give Stu a “full Kardashian” body wax.

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In the 2001 thriller Swordfish, Farralone was the house where Gabriel Shear (aka John Travolta) lived and where Halle Berry famously shed her top for the very first time onscreen – an act for which she was supposedly paid a whopping $500,000.  Thanks to some crafty CGI, the Sinatra compound was made to appear as if it was located in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles for the film, instead of Chatsworth.

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Farralone was also the home where Jack Wyatt (aka Will Ferrell) lived and threw his post-divorce party in the 2005 romantic comedy Bewitched.

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In 2006’s Dreamgirls, Farralone stood in for the residence belonging to pop star Deena Jones (aka Beyonce Knowles) and her music-producer husband, Curtis Taylor Jr. (aka Jamie Foxx).

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In the Season 2 episode of Mad Men titled “The Jet Set”, Farralone was used as the supposed-Palm-Springs-area home where Joy (aka Laura Ramsey) took Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) while he was visiting California.

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In the 2002 flick The Salton Sea, Farralone was the home where Nancy Plummer (aka Shirley Knight) and Verne Plummer (aka R. Lee Ermey) lived.

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In 2001’s Tomcats, the Sinatra Compound was where Kyle Brenner (aka Jake Busey) lived.

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The real estate listing mentioned that Farralone had been featured in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and I really have to pat myself on the back for this one because as soon as I read those words I knew immediately that the episode in question was Season 9’s “Kill Me If You Can”.  I was not even watching CSI regularly back in 2008 when the “Kill Me If You Can” episode aired, but I had caught it on TV at some point and when I saw CSI mentioned in the listing, my mind immediately flashed to an image of Lawrence Fishburne standing by the Farralone pool while investigating the death of an art dealer.  Why these random, useless bits of location information remain stored in my head is beyond me, but they do.  Smile

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Thanks to commenter Becky on the Design Public blog, I learned that in the Season 1 episode of Six Feet Under titled “An Open Book”, Farralone stood in for the home belonging to the parents of Brenda Chenowith (aka Rachel Griffiths).

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And thanks to the HGTV website, I learned that Farralone was where the Design Star contestants lived during Season 4 of the reality series.

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Location manager Scott Trimble also let me know that Farralone was where Optimus Prime came out of the swimming pool in the first Transformers movie.

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Fellow stalker Jason informed me that the estate also showed up as the party location at the very beginning of 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

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Farralone also popped up in the 2004 music video for Usher’s hit song “Burn”.

Usher–Burn–filmed at Farralone in Chatsworth

You can watch the “Burn” video by clicking above.

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Several articles have also claimed that the home appeared in the 2001 biopic Ali, but I scanned through that movie yesterday and did not seen anything resembling it pop up onscreen, so I am fairly certain that information is incorrect.  I am thinking that the house might have instead been featured in the similarly-named television movie Ali: An American Hero, but because I have never seen it and was unable to find it anywhere online,  I cannot verify that hunch.  One rumor that I can put to rest is that the Farralone pool was not actually the site of Marilyn Monroe’s second-to-last photo shoot, as the real estate listing and several articles about the property have claimed.  Truth be told, that photo shoot was not really a photo shoot at all, but simply consisted of photographer Lawrence Schiller snapping some stills of the starlet while she filmed scenes for her very last movie, Something’s Gotta Give.  The shoot, which took place a few days before Marilyn’s death and featured her skinny-dipping while talking to co-star Dean Martin, was not actually shot on location, but on a set that was built inside of Stage 14 on the Fox Studios lot in Century City.

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As you can see above, the pool from Something’s Gotta Give does not match the real estate listing photographs of the Farralone pool.

You can watch a YouTube video of the Something’s Gotta Give pool scene being shot, during which it is stated that filming took place on Stage 14 of the Fox lot, by clicking above.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Farralone, the former Frank Sinatra estate, is located at 9361 Farralone Avenue in Chatsworth.  You can visit the home’s official real estate listing here and you can check out some fabulous interior pics of the property here.