Friday, December 23, 2022

Who Ordered It?

One piece of evidence in the case that lay unnoticed by Van Patter’s family for many decades until I raised it was Betty’s mysterious note to herself on or about November 1st, 1974:  “[415] 644-6743 Police.” When I asked Tamara about it, she noted the way her mother had circled and made a mark next to the notation. She pointed to other examples of this and said it was the way her mother consistently responded when listening intently to someone on the phone.

So we concluded that she must have made or received a call from that particular number.

Tamara then located on the Internet a copy of an old police directory that connected that extension to a Berkeley Police Department Officer named Dave Frederick. She pulled out her own notes from December 19th, 1974, when she first contacted the police, and sure enough, Frederick’s name and extension show up on that list as well.

In fact, Frederick signed all the early “supplemental reports” during the extensive police hunt for Betty as a missing person. He noted that the department had had contact with Betty in the past, referring to an arrest of a former boyfriend, when she was also arrested for disturbing the peace, but did not mention any phone call from a few weeks before she went missing, or any recent contact with Betty whatsoever. 

Tamara’s brother Greg Baltar, meanwhile, searched and found that Frederick had retired after 29 years at the BPD in 2002 and had passed away in 2004, at age 54. 

It was also clear from the files in 1974 that the Berkeley Police were in touch with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which was investigating the Panthers’ financial irregularities.  (Back in 1969, the IRS had begun targeting the Panthers for intelligence purposes and for uncovering evidence of violations of any tax regulations.)

On December 26, 1974, while Betty was still missing, an entry in the police file noted that a “Ronald C. Williams S/A (IRS) 273-7255 ‘has the case on the Lamp Post.’ Later, on March 3rd, 1975, is this entry: “Fred Walter, IRS, said he was investigating the Lamp Post's books and Jimmie Ward told him the 4th quarter payroll records were missing because they were in the possession of Betty Van Patter.” (The police noted this could not be true because Betty disappeared before the fourth quarter books could have been closed.) 

So that brings us back to Betty’s mysterious notation. Is it possible that Dave Frederick had called Betty at her home to see whether she knew anything about the Panthers’ financial irregularities and/or whether she might be willing to cooperate with the IRS in its investigation? 

Those who knew Betty well maintain that she would never have cooperated with law enforcement agencies against the Panthers so it is not credible to think she would have called them. But it seems quite credible that they would have called her. Does that explain her note?

We know from multiple sources that Betty was increasingly upset in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and that she was seeking someone she could talk over her “situation” with. We know she tried to find Tom Silk and that she did talk with Fred Hiestand, who were two of the party’s attorneys.  

We also know that Hiestand told Elaine Brown just two days before Betty disappeared about Betty’s concerns about what she’d seen at the Lamp Post, with money taken out of the till and not accounted for.

Then there is the matter of Brown allegedly firing Betty. That Brown lied about the date – claiming it was a week earlier – is obvious – but did she possibly also lie about firing her at all? According to Brown herself, Betty had left her a phone message threatening to quit.

It seems more than plausible that while she was sitting at the Berkeley Square on the night of December 13th, Betty thought she could still salvage her job and was waiting to meet someone connected with the Panthers in that effort. It could well have been Brown, or perhaps Jimmie Ward, the owner of the Lamp Post, who she hoped to meet.

The identity of the man who did come to the bar and spoke with her has never been established, although the police ran down several leads about who he might have been. Whoever he was, and whatever message he imparted, Betty did get up and leave with him and she went – somewhere. The most probable location, from all the known evidence, is the Lamp Post, but that’s where the trail grows cold.

Tamara and I met with Alameda County D.A. Tom Orloff on October 22, 1991 to discuss his theory of what happened. Orloff offered as a scenario that Betty had gone from the Berkeley Square to the Lamp Post, where she was killed either as “a spontaneous event or it was planned from there.”

While considering the various scenarios, it occurred to me to be an exceedingly odd circumstance that the Panthers changed the lock on the door to the office where Betty had been working in the days after she went missing. Why would they do this if they already had her in their custody, probably fearing she might be an agent of some kind, and while they were trying to get information from her? It is notable that the Panthers knew that Betty had her office keys with her when she disappeared.

Yet the locks were changed, as the police confirmed. 

So what if “they” (the Panthers) were not acting in concert? Consider another scenario, one that would explain this and some other inconsistencies. 

What if, as of the 17th, when Horowitz first contacted her, Elaine Brown did not yet know what had happened to Betty? Elaine Brown is very smart; smart enough to avoid incriminating herself on a phone call that might be (and in fact was) being taped. So her bitter comments about Betty, from one perspective so self-incriminating, might actually have indicated that she was out of the loop in this matter.

Betty could have, and probably did, go to the Lamp Post on the 13th. There she would have been under the province of Jimmie Ward, a man well known and feared by those who knew him best, especially women. There is evidence that among Ward’s businesses was a prostitution ring, no doubt generating much of the cash that to Betty’s dismay kept mysteriously finding its way into and out of the bar’s cash register.

Ward had plenty to hide, and Betty represented a potential loose cannon, given her expressed concerns about what she'd witnessed at the bar. What if he, and not Brown, had been the one to summon her that Friday night, possibly without Brown being in the know at all?

If that is what occurred, then it makes more sense that Brown would have had the locks to Betty’s office changed the following week. 

As she elaborated in her book, Brown was acutely aware that Betty knew too much and that she was raising her concerns with Hiestand and others. If she now was missing, she had keys to the office where the party’s sensitive information was kept.

As for the forensic and anecdotal (via David Horowitz’s sources) evidence that Betty was held, and possibly tortured for as long as two weeks before being killed, this would rule out any personal motive and further tie the Panthers into her death. Only the Panthers had a known motive for holding and torturing her. A crime of passion (by her ex-boyfriend Ken Baptiste or someone like him) would not have been carried out in this fashion.

As to who was calling the shots about her fate, Horowitz and reporters Ken Kelley and Kate Coleman, among others, all came to the conclusion that it was Huey Newton, from his base in Havana. Evaluating all of the evidence, I understand why.

The chain of command could have been Newton to Ward, every bit as easily as it could have been Brown to Forbes, as was communicated via the investigator Fechheimer to Lipset, and later to the family. In her book, Brown describes taking a phone call from Newton at the Lamp Post, just like the calls -- as she admitted to Coleman -- she received from him frequently at her home number.

So Newton called the Lamp Post whenever he wanted to. Other sources have corroborated that this happened, and also that Newton dispensed orders for “bad things” to be done at or from the bar. Ward was his cousin, the party funded the bar, Newton had actually killed one of Ward’s brothers in a dispute, and everyone feared the wrath of Huey P. Newton. Including Ward, Forbes and Brown.

But to this day, these various scenarios are just that — scenarios. The murder case has not been solved. And unless someone who knows the truth comes forward, it never will be.

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