Who Killed Betty Van Patter?

 Forty-seven years ago today, on December 13, 1974, a 45-year-old bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a bar on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square.

She had been fired from her job at 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 white supporter of the party, had witnessed irregularities and misuse of cash by party members and had warned Brown that they were illegal and if not stopped could bring unwanted attention from law enforcement authorities.

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.

Later that night, she was spotted at Jimmy's Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue nearby in Oakland. The Lamp Post, owned by a cousin of Newton's named Jimmy Ward, was the site of many of the illegal cash transactions Van Patter was worried about.

Meanwhile, back at the Berkeley Square, one of Betty's friends arrived to join 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 night was the last time any of her friends or family heard from Betty Van Patter. Her badly beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay over a month later, on January 17, 1975.

***

The Black Panther Party was an important, historic attempt by a group of young black people to aggressively fight back against racism. Its leaders established a number remarkable programs to monitor police arrests of black men, a free school and a free breakfast program for poor children.

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 acted like a gang of street thugs, shaking down local merchants with protection money, and running drug and prostitution runs out of various locations, including the Lamp Post. 

The visionary programs and the criminality co-existed side by side.

The party was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist head 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 killing of Panther leader Fred Hampton and a colleague in Chicago.

The Panthers also waged a terror campaign of their own, murdering party members they suspected of being agents or informers, as well as 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 center of all that was good and all that was horrible about the Black Panther Party.

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

In the aftermath of Betty's murder, Horowitz underwent a loud and public political migration from the left to the 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 rampage in the Soviet Union and Mao's reign of terror in China.

As Horowitz used his considerable 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 propelled him on his journey.

For my part, I never met Betty, but her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was a principle member of our group that founded SunDance magazine and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), and she also helped Mother Jones magazine get off the ground.

Lowell Bergman and I co-authored a major piece in Rolling Stone magazine about the FBI's massive Cointelpro war to destroy the Panthers in 1976. In the process of doing that and related articles, we interviewed Newton, 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 uncomfortably aware of the dirty underbelly of the Panther organization, and later at CIR, we helped coordinate the breakthrough investigation that led to an explosive 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 could happen to the Panthers if they didn’t stop their financial abuse came to pass. Law enforcement authorities effectively shut the party down for the illegal misuse of government funds.

During the four-plus decades since Betty's murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists have tried to solve her murder case. 

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. She was allegedly held in a secret chamber attached to the Lamp Post, where she was reportedly raped and tortured for an unknown amount of time 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 specifically killed her, who ordered it and why.  Probably the most informative and provocative piece is Kate Coleman’s "Death in Berkeley" in Heterodoxy in 1994. In it, Coleman revealed that the well-known private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, told his mentor, the legendary private eye Hal Lipset, who it was who ordered Betty’s murder and who carried it out.

Coleman names those allegedly involved.

Nevertheless, no charges were ever been brought against anyone in this case and whoever was responsible remain free. Accordingly, this holiday season will be the forty-seventh straight that Betty Van Patter's children endure knowing that justice in their mother's case has yet to be served.

That her unresolved murder has never been prosecuted or solved is a deep stain on the legacy of the Panthers and a deterrent to those who would otherwise celebrate their many good deeds.

But the statute of limitations never runs out on murder, and neither does the memory of old investigative reporters.

Therefore, if you or someone you know has any evidence that could help solve this troubling case, please contact somebody — anybody you trust — in law enforcement, the media or me.