*Thirty-two years ago tonight, a woman disappeared. Attractive, in her 40s, a divorced mom who worked as a bookkeeper, she was last seen alive at the Lamp Post Bar in Oakland.
This woman, who was white, lived alone in an apartment in Berkeley. She had progressive politics, an interest in astrology, and was developing what probably eventually would have been a drinking problem. Since her divorce she had done some dating, including black men. She sympathized with the black activists who were struggling to establish community institutions to help educate, feed, and house people still living in poverty amidst the richest empire the world has ever known.
In fact, she was working at a low salary for the most radical black organization around, the Black Panther Party.
Five weeks after she disappeared from the Lamp Post on Friday the 13th of December 1974, Betty Van Patter's body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. She was a long way from home when she was found; or rather what was left of her was found off of Foster City, way down the peninsula from San Francisco. An autopsy determined a massive blow to the head had killed her.
After conducting various investigations, police, private investigators and journalists all came to believe that the Panthers executed Betty after she complained about irregularities in their financial records. Like all good accountants and bookkeepers, she was as straight as an arrow when it came to financial record keeping, and she worried that the Panthers' methods would get them into trouble with authorities. (In this she was prescient -- the group eventually was shown to have systematically misused government funds and lost all of its access to public monies that had helped fuel its growth.)
Far worse, the group was revealed to have engaged in repeated criminal behavior, including murders that undermined every positive thing it had ever tried to do. In many ways, the true story of the Black Panthers is a tragedy, because leaders like Huey Newton descended into petty criminality, violence, drug addiction and many other characteristics of the oppressed population they had so idealistically tried to serve.
Revisionists, including many who have tried to tell the story through various art forms, including plays, books, exhibits, speaking tours, conferences, and the like have largely missed the essential tragedy of this group's story, which is both Shakespearean in scope and as petty as the lowest street thug shaking down "protection money" with a swagger that betrays his essential powerlessness in this private market economy.
The criminals take bigger risks, pocket bigger profits, and pay a higher price for their indiscretions.
So, as I hope any reader may divine, I had and continue to have, a great deal of empathy for the aspirations of the Black Panther Party, as did Betty Van Patter. And, in fact, I knew many of the Panther leaders, including Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, and Eldridge Cleaver in my role as a progressive journalist at Rolling Stone. I interviewed them all numbers of times, and I liked them all, too, because they were charismatic, articulate, intellectually gifted individuals.
Elaine, in addition, was extremely beautiful and flirtatious. Huey was handsome and capable of carrying on conversations about politics, literature, poetry and philosophy, even as he snorted coke and swigged Remy Martin. I visited him in his infamous high-rise apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland, as well as in other venues over the years.
Eldridge I visited in prison. He gave me a hand-written letter running some 18 pages on yellow legal paper in response to questions I had put to him. His writing, even in letterform, was eloquent. I also knew and liked his wife, the lovely and forceful Kathleen Cleaver.
In fact, the night my first child was born, I left the hospital (which is what fathers had to do in those days -- the touchie feelie stuff like natural childbirth was just in its infancy) -- and went to a prearranged meeting with Kathleen in the Haight, where she insisted we smoke congratulatory cigars.
So, yes, I had lots of personal contacts with the Panthers at the highest levels, and I produced a number of articles sympathetic to the group, which had been subjected to outrageously illegal government disruptions under what was codenamed the "Cointelpro" project of the FBI.
But, in the process of doing these stories, I and my partners also started to become gradually aware of the dark side of the Panthers. We were journalists, first and foremost, so despite our personal sympathies for the Panther’s cause, we had an obligation to our readers to tell the truth as we learned it.
Thus, by the late 70s, now at the Center for Investigative Reporting, I helped coordinate the investigative article in New Times magazine that ripped the politically correct facade away from the Black Panthers and revealed the cruel, violent thuggery that had replaced all the idealism and all the hope they once had represented.
Just before the story appeared, Huey let me know through an intermediary that if I didn't prevent it from appearing that my family would be put at risk.
By now, I knew enough about his methods to take the warning seriously, and I bundled my young family off to a series of safe houses, much as I had myself used a few years earlier when someone I knew who was closely affiliated with the SLA had issued a death threat directly to me for co-authoring Rolling Stone's notorious Patty Hearst series.
(That threat had to be weighed against a counter-threat from the head of the local FBI who literally threatened to” cut {us} off at the knees" if we didn't show him the second part of our series before it went to press.
Long story short, we didn't, he didn't, they didn't, but I believe Huey tried to. People who appeared to be affiliated with the Party showed up at my home and at our office in the days following the publication of the New Times story. (The authors -- Kate Coleman and Paul Avery -- faced even greater dangers, and took the appropriate steps to protect themselves as a result.)
Eventually, as with all such things, this controversy died down and faded from the top of anyone's agenda. All of us proceeded to meet our fate in different ways.
Yet, all of these years later, one important part of the story remains unfinished.
That is why, tonight, I am remembering Betty Van Patter, and her family members, who have suffered in the aftermath of her murder for way too long. Very soon, a local Bay Area newspaper will publish a long story about this unsolved case. When that happens, I will link to the article, and summarize its content. I will also identify the author of a recent book who may well prove to be a main suspect in this long-ignored case.
Mysteries like this one remain unsolved until one day -- suddenly -- they are solved. Betty's killer or killers remain at large and have never paid for their crime. If Shakespeare were still among us, he most certainly would tell this story by focusing on the tragedy of the heroes (read: killers) and how they went bad. But also, he would have insisted that in the end the identities of those responsible for this heinous crime be revealed, and suffer the appropriate consequences.
The children of Betty Van Patter continue to demand in their quiet way that the truth of what happened to their mother be outed. In this way, they embody the deepest of truths -- that the powerful bond between a loving parent and his or her loving children must never, ever be breached.
To do so puts the universe out of balance. An awful scream pierces the air we all breathe. I hear these ghosts who swirl among us and I shudder at their screeching. The body of a murder victim does not rest at peace until her killer is brought to justice -- if only the symbolic but critical justice of exposure and shame, a la O.J. Simpson, for example.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's tortured world branded a man and a woman who joined in sexual desire with an awful "A."
I want to see the skies part and a letter branded on a killer who still remains among us, living his respectable life, publishing his respectable book.
That letter will be a red "K."
-30-
* Note on artwork: It is based on a photograph I made of a lovely woman sunbathing in a newspaper ad. I posted that photo at my blog Sidewalk Images some time ago. Via photoshop, I redrew elements of the image and manipulated it in a way I hope represents both the essential beauty of a woman at rest and the ugly physical reality of the blackness of death. This is a humble image, but one I felt I needed to create for this article, because my written words cannot do justice to the feelings Betty's case evokes.
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