Thursday, December 15, 2022

Cold Case Opening

I never met Betty Van Patter in person but I did speak with her on the phone at least once. Her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was helping us set up the administrative systems for SunDance magazine in 1972, and she asked Betty to talk with us.

At the time, Betty was working at Ramparts, and we needed her advice.

Alas, SunDance didn’t last very long, but a few years later, Tamara was again helping me set up administrative systems, this time for a new non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in Oakland.

In the interim, something unspeakable had happened. Betty had taken a job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, discovered a number of irregularities, which she reported to her boss, Elaine Brown. But rather than fix the problems, Brown fired Betty on Friday, December 13, 1974.

Later that night, Betty went missing. Her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay five weeks later. He skull had been bashed in.

***

Betty had been recommended for the job with the Panthers by David Horowitz, a former editor at Ramparts. A few days after Betty went missing, Tamara called Horowitz, who in turn called Elaine Brown.

Horowitz recorded the call:

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

EB: “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 she called the most famous private eye in the Bay Area, Hal Lipset, instead.

When Lipset advised her to go the police as well, she finally contacted the Berkeley Police six days after Betty disappeared. In response, the police conducted a thorough investigation, which included an interview with Elaine Brown.

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 “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

Brown’s attorney terminated the interview before the police could ask any more questions.

***

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

Until recently, Tamara had remained, in her 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 consider that possibility.

On January 12th, 1984, Tamara officially hired Lipset in investigate Betty’s murder. One of Lipset’s protégés was David Fechheimer, by then a prominent 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 told his old mentor what he knew. Afterwards, Lipset met with Tamara and told her she should have “no doubt” that the Panthers had killed her mother.

During that meeting, Tamara saw Lipset’s notes from his conversation with Fechheimer. They indicated who had ordered the killing and who had carried it out.

***

These are just a few of the salient details of this unsolved case. I’ll publish more in the future, because there is a lot more to this story and it needs to be told. Justice needs to be served. 

The statute of limitations never lapses on murder.


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