Friday, December 22, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 10)

One piece of evidence that lay unexamined in the Betty Van Patter case for decades until I asked about it was Betty’s strange note to herself on or about November 1st, 1974:  “[415] 644-6743 Police.” 

When I spoke to 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 doodled when listening to someone on the phone.

So we concluded that she must have either 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 showed 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 one contact with Betty in the past, during an arrest of a former boyfriend, when she was charged with disturbing the peace. But he did not mention a phone call from a few weeks before she went missing, or any other recent contact with Betty. 

One of Tamara’s brothers, Greg Baltar, searched and found that Frederick had retired after 29 years at the BPD in 2002 and had died suddenly 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, two weeks after Betty had gone 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.’ And on March 3rd, 1975: “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 had 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 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 any law enforcement agency against the Panthers so it is inconceivable that she called them. But it seems quite credible that the police 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 at the time 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 in the first place? 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, whom she hoped to meet.

The identity of the man who came 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, we know that Betty got up and left with him. Her next known location, from all the known evidence, was the Lamp Post, but that’s where the trail grows cold.

Betty’s daughter Tamara and I met with Alameda County D.A. Tom Orloff on October 22, 1991 to discuss his view of what happened. Orloff said he believed 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.”

But Orloff said he did not have enough evidence to bring charges.

While considering the various scenarios, it occurred to me to be an exceedingly odd circumstance that the Panthers had 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? Also, it is noted in the police file that the Panthers knew that Betty had her office keys with her when she disappeared.

Yet the locks were changed anyway. 

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

At the Lamp Post on the 13th, Betty would have been under the province of Jimmie Ward, a man well-known and feared by those who knew him. 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 even being aware?

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 believed that Betty knew too much and that she was raising her concerns with Hiestand and others. If she now was missing, she had with her the 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 to 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 such a fashion.

As to who was calling the shots about her fate, Horowitz and reporters Ken Kelley and Kate Coleman, among others, 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 private investigator David Fechheimer to his mentor, Hal 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.

Other sources have corroborated that Newton called the Lamp Post whenever he wanted to, dispensing orders for “bad things” to be done. Ward was his cousin, the party funded the bar, Newton killed one of Ward’s brothers in a dispute, and everyone feared the wrath of Huey P. Newton. Including Jimmie Ward, Flores Forbes and Elaine Brown.

But to this day, these various scenarios are just that — scenarios. The case has never been solved. And unless someone who knows the truth comes forward, it will remain that way.

The statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

Part Nine

Part Eight

Part Seven

Part Six

Part Five

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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