Friday, December 19, 2025

Cold Case (Part 7)

Four days after Betty Van Patter’s body was identified in January 1975, Berkeley Police Officer Dave Frederick contacted John Conomos of the U.S. Geological Survey in an attempt to understand the probable drift of the body in the bay.

Conomos told Frederick that the average net drift of anything caught up in the tidal action from the central bay region, which would include Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, would be about a mile and a half to a mile and three-quarters a day south towards San Jose.

That Betty’s remains were found near Foster City was therefore consistent with her body having been dumped somewhere in the central bay region.

Within days of identifying Betty as a murder victim, the Berkeley Police held an interview with Elaine Brown and Joan Kelley of the Black Panther Party, as well as their lawyer, Charles Garry.

Kelley was the EOC official who supervised Betty’s work and issued her paychecks. She told police she generally saw Betty about once a week at the Panther school when she was dropping off or picking up papers related to her work.

For her part, Brown insisted to the detectives that she fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. The police noted in their files that this was contradicted by all known evidence. Strangely, Brown then added that she ran into Betty unexpectedly at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

The evidence indicated that Elaine fired Betty on the 13th, not the 6th. And it seems most likely, though not conclusive, that the night of December 13th was the time that Elaine would have seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoken with her. It also is logical to think that Betty would have gone there to meet Elaine, courtesy of the note handed to her by the man at the Berkeley Square.

These details matter. We believe Betty was at the Lamp Post the night of the 13th. That is the last place she was seen. But we don’t know why she went there.

Before the police got an opportunity to ask Brown more questions that might have shed light on these matters, her attorney, Charles Garry, terminated the interview.

And that effectively concluded the most active part of the investigation into the murder case by the Berkeley Police. They did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone for the murder of Betty Van Patter. They suspected Elaine Brown knew more than she told them, but they couldn’t force her to talk. But it is reasonable to say that she at least could have been much more helpful in solving the case had she wanted to be.

Over the weeks and months to follow, police did track down and interview many of the people who had known Betty over the relevant time period. The consistent picture that emerged was that she had seemed excited to be working for the Panthers, admired Brown, but was concerned about some of the financial irregularities she witnessed, especially at the Lamp Post, and was trying to get things cleaned up to save the party from possible legal troubles.

The police did not seem to delve very deeply into any alternative scenario – such as her love life or a stranger killing. They did follow various leads that went nowhere, such as the identity of the man who talked to Betty and handed her a note at the Berkeley Square the night she disappeared. Despite numerous conversations with witnesses, rumors and leads, they were never able to identify this man.

As the months went by, new entries to the case file started tapering off, and eventually all activity on the case ceased completely. Thus it joined the many other cold cases that remain unresolved year after year, decade after decade, perhaps forever.

David Horowitz, meanwhile, publicly completed his odd personal transformation from a prominent leftist into an outspoken advocate of ludicrous right-wing ideas, and in interviews, said that Betty’s murder had been a major precipitating factor behind his political conversion.

Perhaps he had good intentions, but Horowitz’s protestations hardly helped solve the case. Rather, he only succeeded in politicizing the matter.

Then again, almost single-handedly for decades, Horowitz kept Betty’s case from fading completely from the limelight. He mentioned it in his speeches and articles. And significantly, in 1995, he published a long article by Kate Coleman in Heterodoxy, a journal of his non-profit Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

In that article, Coleman named who she believed ordered the murder and who did it. She also described attending a bookstore reading in Berkeley, when Elaine Brown was promoting her autobiography, “A Taste of Power.” During the question period, Coleman asked Brown whether she was in touch with Newton while he was in exile in Cuba, including the period when Betty was killed.

“Quite a bit, in fact,” Brown answered after an initial hesitation. “And I have the phone bills to prove it because he would call collect. It was costing me three and four thousand dollars a month!” Coleman surmised this was a highly relevant admission when it came to who within the Panther hierarchy might have ordered Betty to be killed.

Given her statement, Coleman knew that it had to be entertained that perhaps it was Huey Newton who had ordered Betty’s murder. But Newton couldn’t be questioned because he was dead, having been gunned down in 1989 by a young man trying to impress the Black Guerrilla Family, a narcotics prison gang, on the streets of Oakland.

(Part 8 tomorrow.)

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Thursday, December 18, 2025

Cold Case (Part 6)

On December 20, 1974, one week after Betty went missing, the Berkeley Police Department issued the following APB:

MISSING PERSON. BETTY LOUISE VAN PATTER, AKA BETTY LOUISE BALTAR, WFA, 10-12-29, 5-3, 116, GRN, BRN, 2009-HASTE ST. APT-E, BERKELEY, CALIF. LAST SEEN WEARING DARK CLOTHING, POSSIBLY DARK COAT AND DARK GLASSES. HEAVY DRINKER. REPORTED MISSING ON 12-19-74.

The BPD also conducted an extensive search for Betty’s whereabouts. One of the investigating officers was named Dave Frederick. In his first report, dated December 20th, Frederick stated that he had checked all of the apartments in and around Betty’s building at 2009 Haste Street, “with negative results.” He also visited four nearby hotels, and found no trace of her.

Officer Frederick filed his second report the next day, December 21st. In it he described having conducted a further check of houses in Betty’s neighborhood, as well as calls to five taxi companies, Highland Hospital and Alcoholics Anonymous. He also interviewed two people who were associated with Betty professionally, and learned, apparently for the first time, of David Horowitz.

In his next report, Frederick described what he learned from interviewing Horowitz, which was that Elaine Brown claimed that she had fired Betty. But, Frederick added: “Horowitz stated to this officer that Elaine Brown and several other people were not telling him the complete story and that he is extremely upset over the matter.”

Later in the report, Frederick wrote: “He (Horowitz) states that she (Betty) is basically an honest person, but if she found some shady or underhanded dealings with regards to the Lamp Post or the EOC organization, she would probably have quit or requested to have a different job with the organization. He stated that probably the last thing she would do would be to expose the organization to any police agency.”

Finally, there is this: “I asked Horowitz point blank if Van Patter might have come to some harm within the organization. He stated he did not believe so and Elaine Brown was desperately trying to run for Oakland City Council. He states that the last thing she would need would be any sort of implication in the disappearance of a white female.”

Throughout the rest of December and January, the Berkeley police continued their extensive search for Betty Van Patter. Besides routine steps like dusting her car for fingerprints, putting stops on her bank accounts, and obtaining her telephone records, they continued to interview people, sometimes multiple times, about what they knew.

On January 3rd, they noted information from a confidential source (labeled CS-3) that Betty had “discovered irregularities in the form of ‘kick-back’ payments to Jimmie Ward…CS-3 stated that the victim had arranged to get an appointment to see Elaine Brown on 12-13-74 [the day of her disappearance] and that the issue to be discussed was the victim’s reluctance or refusal to misrepresent items on the Lamp Post account.”

Three weeks later, on the 20th, the BPD heard from Foster City Police that a Jane Doe whose body had been floating in the bay a few days earlier was Betty’s, based on positive identification from 34 points of comparison of “bite-wing” dental x-rays.

The missing person case now turned into a homicide investigation.

(Part 7 tomorrow.)

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Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Cold Case (Part 5)

In the summer of 1974, Betty Van Patter was excited about starting her new job as a bookkeeper at the Educational Opportunities Corporation (EOC), which was operated by the Black Panther Party.

She supported the Panthers, their revolutionary political philosophy, and their community programs, which included a free school, a free breakfast program, and a jobs initiative.

Almost alone among black power groups of the era, the Panther leaders voiced support for women’s rights, Latino rights and gay rights, and formed alliances with white radicals. They also welcomed whites into their inner circle, an openness that quickly elevated the party to a kind of a rock-star-like status on the left.

From San Francisco and New York to Hollywood, wealthy people in the legal, publishing, and entertainment circles threw parties and made donations that helped fund Panther programs and defend them during the numerous trials stemming from their violent clashes with police and rival militant groups.

After a period of growth and global prominence, and under the relentless pressure of attacks by police agencies and the FBI, the Panthers had peaked as an international revolutionary organization by the early 70s. They needed to retrench so they ordered all their regional offices and branches to close down and the most important regional leaders to come back and work out of headquarters in Oakland.

Meanwhile, David Horowitz recommended Betty to Elaine Brown, who, in the absence of the party’s charismatic co-founder Huey Newton, was now the head of the party. (Newton had fled to Cuba to avoid murder charges.)

A number of others chose to leave the party completely. In a phone call in September, Betty explained to her daughter, Tamara Baltar, that among those leaving were Audrea Jones and William Roberts.

The departure of Jones and Roberts had created a vacuum around the administrative and bookkeeping functions for the EOC and the party, which led to an immediate increase in Betty’s responsibilities. On August 31st, 1974, Betty wrote her mother, Venus Floyd, describing her new work opportunity:

“They want and need to get things in order on a straight basis, and I can do that. The big thing I have going for me is that I know how to do it and have very few hang-ups about black people. I think they recognize that.”

Later in the letter, Betty addresses what she knew to be one of her mother’s major fears:

“Please don’t feel frightened for my physical safety. I am not in the least worried about that part of it. What I need to look out for is legal problems, not physical problems. If anything, I am super protected physically. There is no one in the whole organization who would lift a finger against me physically.”

Later that fall, Betty wrote her mother again:

“As of last Tuesday, I have been asked to take on the structuring of the books and supervision of the whole of the Black Panther Party operation. After meeting Elaine Brown (the very lovely and articulate young woman who is now the acting head of the party) and hearing her proposal to me – and after talking to four attorneys and several other people, I met again with her Friday.

“I told her I would like to help and she said she was so relieved she could cry. She has a mountain of responsibility on her shoulders right now. She is a dynamic, educated, intelligent, forceful person and she has given me her complete trust.”

Later in the letter she continued, “As I proceed with this whole thing I am becoming more and more aware that there is no need for fear.”

On October 22nd, Betty wrote to her mother again, indicating that she was becoming much more familiar with the inner workings of the Black Panther Party.

“All of their money has gone to help people in various ways. Medical, dental, food, clothing, car repair, rent, education, childcare – you name it. Very few people know of all the good they have done. Eventually, the Black Panther Party as such will not be called that but something else.”

Then she described the various party projects she was working on. “Aside from the party per se, I am taking care of the EOC and teaching and supervising things on the accounting end. There’s also the Lamp Post, which is taking more time as well.”

The Lamp Post was a bar run by Newton’s cousin, Jimmie Ward.

Then suddenly, for Betty things started to deteriorate. In a letter on October 31st, Betty for the first time expressed reservations about her co-workers. “My biggest problem and frustration is in getting the people I’m working with to do what they’re supposed to be getting done on time. It takes a lot of patience. They are never rushed about anything…”

Although she did not share it with her mother, Betty Van Patter was developing a deep concern about what she was witnessing as bookkeeper for the EOC and the Lamp Post.

By mid-November, Betty’s daughter Tamara, saw that her mother was becoming quite agitated while telling her that cash was being taken out of the register at the Lamp Post and not accounted for. “They don’t understand that the register tape shows cash coming in and so when they just take cash out of the drawer, it shows up as not accounted for,” she said.

In her journal, Betty wrote: “Something very heavy is happening in my life right now…There will be a crisis point – I know it. It’s rapidly approaching – I can feel it. There is an imminent danger.”

Within a few weeks, she would be dead.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Cold Case (Part 4)

In the mid-1970s, when we were reporters at Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I decided to take an in-depth look into the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to disrupt the Black Panther Party.

In a 1967 memorandum, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had stated that the program’s intent was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.”

By September 1968, the Panthers had emerged as the leading edge of the black power movement in the U.S. A key FBI memo solicited suggestions from its field agents for new ways to “create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the (Panthers), as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.”

In another memo, in July 1969, Hoover declared that the Panthers were “without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Starting late in 1968, there were numerous police raids on Panther offices around the country, sometimes including federal law enforcement officials. Several Panther leaders were killed or wounded, many others were sent to prison, or fled into exile.

In the course of gathering documents under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing Panthers and ex-Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown, Bergman and I were able to document hundreds of actions taken by FBI agents in pursuit of Hoover’s stated goals.

Many of these involved “disinformation,” sending letters purportedly from Cleaver to Huey Newton, for example, or vice versa, promoting the growing paranoia and distrust that was driving the two leaders toward an eventual split.

I interviewed Elaine Brown during this period. She was the acting head of the party while Newton was in exile in Cuba. She was smart, articulate and projected a sense of power.

“The government didn’t succeed in destroying us,” Brown told me. “We survived…These motherfuckers intended to kill every one of us. But it’s too late now. Our ideas are out there –- they cannot be erased from the minds of the people.”

After months of work, Bergman and I produced a story that presented an exhaustive catalogue of the federal government’s war against the Panthers. We also noted that the FBI’s relentless attempts to disrupt the organization “encouraged local police departments to harass the group” as well.

But the process of reviewing a huge number of law enforcement files had also exposed to us evidence suggesting there was a sinister side to the Panthers, including internecine violence that had nothing to do with government provocation but was more like ruthless gang activity.

In 1977, once we had founded the Center for Investigative Reporting and opened an office in Oakland, we received numerous complaints from people in that community that the Panthers were by then “out of control.” Several Panther sources stated that Newton in particular was wreaking havoc inside the inner-city neighborhoods by committing random violent assaults, often fueled by consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time.

We decided that CIR should look into these allegations, and the result in 1978 was a long investigative article called “The Party’s Over,” by a courageous Berkeley journalist, Kate Coleman, and a veteran police reporter, Paul Avery, published in New Times magazine.

(Avery was later portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 Hollywood movie “Zodiac” for his work on the unsolved case of a notorious serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Their article, “The Party’s Over,” documented dozens of violent incidents caused by Newton and his “security squad” against members of the party who had provoked Newton’s wrath, as well as non-party members, including a prostitute he killed, a tailor he pistol-whipped to the verge of death, and other random victims of his rage.

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Monday, December 15, 2025

Cold Case (Part 3)

A few days after Betty went missing, her daughter Tamara Baltar called David Horowitz, who in turn called Elaine Brown.

Horowitz recorded the call:

Horowitz: “I got a call from Betty’s daughter who says she hasn’t been home since Friday.”

Brown: “Well, listen, let me tell you something about Betty. Betty wanted to know too much of everything…And she was getting into the Lamp Post…I was scared of her getting into my campaign books and all the other stuff. She started asking about where money was going.”

After some back and forth, Brown told Horowitz that she had fired Betty.

Horowitz then called Tamara back and told her that she should go to the police. But Tamara didn’t want to involve the police since they might be biased against the Panthers so instead she called the most famous private eye in the Bay Area, Hal Lipset.

When Lipset advised her to go the police as well, she finally contacted the Berkeley Police six days after Betty had disappeared. In response, the police conducted an extensive investigation of her as a missing person. Only after Betty’s body was found did the police interview Elaine Brown, on January 23, 1975.

In the interview, which was conducted at the office of Panther attorney Charles Garry, Brown claimed that she had fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. (The police investigators noted in their files that this was contradicted by all the known evidence.) Brown then added a curious detail — that she had seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her on “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

From other evidence we can be virtually certain that that evening had to have been December 13th, the night Betty disappeared.

But at that point Garry terminated the interview — before the police could ask any followup questions.

***

In 1983, nine years after her mother had gone missing, Tamara decided to meet again with investigator Hal Lipset in his San Francisco office to discuss the case. She asked me to accompany her to this meeting.

Until this meeting, Tamara had remained, in her own words, in “complete denial” that the Panthers could have been responsible for killing her mother. But questions raised by CIR reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery, as well as by David Horowitz, slowly convinced her to reconsider that possibility.

On January 12th, 1984, Tamara officially hired Lipset to re-investigate Betty’s murder. I co-signed the agreement.

One of Lipset’s protégés was David Fechheimer, by then a successful P.I. in his own right. Fechheimer had been working for the Panthers’ defense attorneys in 1974 and knew a great deal about Betty’s case. He now chose to confide in his old mentor about what he knew. Afterwards, Lipset met with Tamara and told her she should have “no doubt” that the Panthers had killed her mother.

(Part 4 tomorrow)

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Sunday, December 14, 2025

Cold Case: (Part 2)

The Black Panther Party was an extraordinary, historically significant attempt by a group of young black people to aggressively fight back against entrenched racism in U.S. society. Its leaders established a number of remarkable programs, including a free school, a free breakfast program, and an armed effort to monitor arrests of black people by the police.

The party, unlike other black power organizations, welcomed white support and forged alliances with Latino groups and gay organizations. It also developed a strong cadre of women leaders, like Elaine Brown, who helped the party gain international prominence.

At the same time, some of the party’s leaders, including Huey Newton, could behave like common street thugs, shaking down local merchants for “protection” money, and running drug and prostitution rackets out of various locations, including the Lamp Post.

The visionary programs and the criminality co-existed side by side. It wasn’t one or the other; it was both at the same time. The party’s complicated legacy cannot be understood without acknowledging that unpleasant reality.

The BPP was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist director of the FBI, as a severe national security threat. He and other elements of the federal government waged an illegal campaign known as COINTELPRO to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Panthers.

Certain state and local law enforcement forces cooperated with the FBI in this effort, which at one point resulted in the brutal murder by police of Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago.

The Panthers also waged a terror campaign of their own, executing party members suspected of being agents or informers, as well as killing innocent members of the community whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Co-founder Huey Newton was at the epicenter of all that was good and all that was evil about the Black Panther Party.

One of Newton’s major supporters was David Horowitz, a Berkeley radical, who got Betty Van Patter her job with the organization. He knew Betty from Ramparts magazine, the left-wing voice of the movement to upend racism and imperialism during the 1960s, where she had worked when he was an editor.

In the aftermath of Betty’s murder, Horowitz underwent a long and very public political migration from the far left to the far right, where he emerged as one of the fiercest critics of progressives in this country. He wrote books and articles and delivered lectures that shredded the idealistic vision of those seeking progressive social change by comparing them to Stalin’s murderous regime in the Soviet Union and Mao’s reign of terror in China.

As Horowitz used his intellectual ability and historical knowledge to carry on his anti-left crusade, he repeatedly cited his guilt over Betty’s death as the catalyst that had propelled him on his journey. (Many progressives believe he was simply exploiting Betty’s murder to justify his crusade.)

In 1976, Lowell Bergman and I co-authored a major piece in Rolling Stone magazine on the FBI’s Cointelpro initiative to destroy the Panthers. In the process of doing that and related articles, we interviewed Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, Eldridge Cleaver and many other Panthers and their most prominent supporters, including Hollywood celebrities, left-wing lawyers and Berkeley intellectuals.

While we were doing the Rolling Stone article, Bergman and I became aware of the dirty underbelly of the Panther organization, and later at the Center for Investigative Reporting, I edited the breakthrough investigative article by reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery called “The Party’s Over,” in New Times magazine in 1978.

That article, more than any other, pierced the facade of the Panthers and documented some of the awful crimes carried out by Newton and his followers, including the murder of Van Patter.

A few years after she died, Betty’s warning of what would happen to the Panthers if they didn’t stop their financial abuse came to pass. Law enforcement authorities closed in and effectively shut the party down for the illegal misuse of government funds. The party really was over now.

Meanwhile, during the half-century since Betty’s murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda County District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists, including me, have tried to solve her murder case.

To date, none of us has been successful.

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. According to some sources, she was allegedly held in a secret chamber attached to the Lamp Post, where she was reportedly tortured before she was killed by a massive blow to the head. Her body was then dumped into the Bay.

In the years since this happened, some evidence has been produced as to who killed her, who ordered it and why. Probably the most informative and provocative work citing this evidence was Kate Coleman’s “A Death in Berkeley,” published in Heterodoxy in 1995. In it, Coleman reported that private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, told his mentor, private eye Hal Lipset, who ordered the hit and who carried it out.

According to Coleman, Lipset’s notes were later obtained by Betty’s family.

To this day, Betty Van Patter’s murder remains a dark cloud hovering over the positive legacy of the Panthers and their many important accomplishments, and it remains officially unsolved.

But the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

(Part 3 tomorrow.) 

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Saturday, December 13, 2025

Cold Case: Betty Van Patter

At 11:30 a.m. January 17th, 1975, Sgt. R. Scofield, piloting San Mateo County Sheriff’s Helicopter 2-H-10, was on patrol above San Francisco Bay when he spotted a body floating about a mile south of the San Mateo Hayward Bridge, between markers 670 and 680.

He immediately put out distress calls to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Foster City Police Department, and the San Mateo Coroner’s Office. Within 15 minutes, the Coast Guard was on the scene, recovered the body, and took it to Old Warder Pier, on the corner of East Hillsdale Avenue and Teal Street, where representatives of the police department and coroner’s office quickly gathered.

The medical examiner observed that the body was that of an adult female in a state of “moderate to severe post-mortem decomposition.”

The remains were then transported to Chope Hospital for an examination and identification. The body was placed in container #7 and sealed at 2:05 p.m. An autopsy was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following morning.

It took three days for the coroner to determine an identity through the use of dental charts, but there was little doubt about the cause of death. The victim had been murdered -- killed by a massive blow to the head -- a “fractured calvarium” is noted in the autopsy report.

There was no water in the woman’s lungs, which meant she was dead before her body got into the bay. The coroner estimated she was in the water for around three weeks, drifting on the currents, back and forth along the tide lines.

***

Roughly five weeks earlier, on the night of December 13, 1974, 45-year-old Betty Van Patter was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a local bar called the Berkeley Square.

That afternoon, she had been fired from her job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party by Elaine Brown, who headed up the party while co-founder Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Van Patter, an idealistic supporter of Brown and the party, had witnessed irregularities and the misuse of cash by party members. She had warned Brown that these practices were illegal and needed to be stopped to avoid bringing unwanted attention from law enforcement.

While she was at the bar, a man walked in and handed Van Patter a note. She got up and followed him out of the door. (The identity of this man, who was black, remains unknown.)

Later that night, Van Patter was again spotted, this time at the Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The Lamp Post, a Panther hangout owned by a cousin of Newton’s named Jimmie Ward, was the site of most of the illegal cash transactions Van Patter was worried about.

Meanwhile, back at the Berkeley Square, one of Betty’s friends, an ex-boyfriend named Ken Baptiste, arrived to meet up with her, only to find her missing. He then placed a telephone call to the Lamp Post and asked if she was there.

“That party has left,” he was told.

That cryptic message was the last time any of her friends or family ever heard anything about Betty Van Patter until her body was found floating in the bay by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s helicopter.

(Part 2 tomorrow.)

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