"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."
Bette Munroe was a waitress at a diner in Mayhew.
History[]
In her earlier life Bette had a husband and a son, both named Bernard. At some point she got divorced, and her son left for college and never came back to her. In reality he became a male prostitute in Gotham and was later incarcerated in the state penitentiary for "knifing his pimp".
By the late 80s, Bette was working as a waitress in a local 24/7 diner. On her days off, Bette wrote stories about her customers, always giving them happy endings. In Bette's head, she was secretly a writer just pretending to be a waitress, and she liked talking to her customers, seeing them as "raw material". She guarded her secret and never showed anyone her stories, but her ultimate dream was to achieve fame and recognition, taking part in talk shows and displacing Stephen King from the bestseller lists.
In early April, 1989, John Dee chose Bette's diner as his headquarters when he attempted to drive the world mad with his Materioptikon. Starting at 10 AM, everyone present at the diner fell under his spell and became a subject of his sadistic games. Under that psychic influence, Bette saw her dreams of fame come true, tried to calm down Marsh who attacked Judy, worshiped Dee as a god and then engaged in an orgy with her customers.
At midnight she became possessed by one of The Three and foretold Dee that he would "crush out the Dream Lord's life" in his hands. In the next hour, to their horror, Dee gave his victims their minds back for a while, and after that his games became even more depraved. Bette had to listen to Marsh's confession about his affair with her son while mutilating him in "penance". After that, along with other victims, she was reduced to her animal instincts, then she started listening to Dee's fairy tales with a childlike awe, then she switched to singing for his entertainment. Finally, the victims were overcome with religious ecstasy and started mutilating themselves and each other. By 8 AM, Bette was decapitated and dead along with everyone else in the diner.[1]
Physical appearance[]
Betty was a plump blonde middle-aged woman.
Personality[]
Bette was a kind but naive person who liked to delude herself into only seeing happy stories even when there were none. She wasn't willing to face the truth about her own broken relationships, so her writing served her as an escapist fantasy. She was a way poorer judge of character than she liked to think, as evidenced by her perception of Garry and Kate Fletcher as a happy couple, or her stories about Judy and Donna in which she happily married them both to "fine young men". The same line of thought shows Bette as a religious person, since she felt sorry for the girls for engaging in "sin against God".
Relationships[]
At least five years before the events of the story, Bette began having an affair with Marsh while he was still married. Bette believed she "looked after" him since his wife died, and they kept seeing each other after shifts every few weeks "for old times' sake".