Although I never met Betty Van Patter in person, I did speak with her on the phone in 1972. She was working at Rampartsmagazine across town at the time. Her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was helping us set up the administrative systems for SunDance magazine, and she asked Betty to talk us through that process.
What I remember about the phone call was the kind, thoughtful voice on the other end of the land line.
Like most startups, SunDance didn’t last very long, but in 1977 Tamara was again helping us set up administrative systems, this time for our new non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in downtown Oakland.
(Note: CIR announced yesterday it has merged with Mother Jones.)
Between that call in 1972 and 1977, something awful had happened. Betty had taken a job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, discovered a number of irregularities, which she duly 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 had disappeared. In response, the police conducted an 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 on “one weekend evening” after December 6th.
From other evidence we can be virtually certain that that evening was December 13th, the very night Betty disappeared.
But Brown’s attorney terminated the interview before the police could ask any followup questions.
***
In 1983, almost nine years to the day after her mother had gone missing, Tamara decided to meet again with private eye Hal Lipset in his San Francisco office to discuss the case. She asked me to accompany her to this meeting.
Until then, Tamara had remained, in her own 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 to re-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 chose to confide in his old mentor about 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 and I saw Lipset’s notes from his conversation with Fechheimer. They indicated who had ordered the killing only by initials (E.B.) and who had carried it out (F.F.)
A Panther named Flores Forbes was Brown’s head of security.
***
These are just a few of the salient details of this unsolved case. I’ll publish more over the next week, because there is a lot more to this story and it needs to be told. It’s time for justice to be served.
After all, the statute of limitations never lapses on murder.
(Part Four will appear tomorrow.)
HEADLINES:
Rudy Giuliani made it ‘dangerous’ for Georgia election workers, attorney says in closing arguments in defamation case (CNN
It’s the Beginning of the Disastrous End for Rudy Giuliani (Daily Beast)
CIR and Mother Jones Merge (CIR)
Impeachment inquiry threatens Biden with election-year headache (BBC)
Senate immigration negotiators see a ray of hope as clock ticks on Biden's aid package (NBC)
There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine (Foreign Affairs)
An emboldened, confident Putin says there will be no peace in Ukraine until Russia’s goals are met (AP)
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy faces doubters and detractors in US and EU (Al Jazeera)
Just as 9/11 altered America, so has Oct. 7 altered Israel (WP)
Humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza as Israel-Hamas war intensifies (CNN)
Hungry, thirsty and humiliated: Israel’s mass arrest campaign sows fear in northern Gaza (AP)
Unguided ‘dumb bombs’ used in almost half of Israeli strikes on Gaza (WP)
U.S. and China race to shield secrets from quantum computers (Reuters)
Older Workers Are Growing in Number and Earning Higher Wages (Pew)
Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists (Guardian)
Abortion Ruling Keeps Texas Doctors Afraid of Prosecution (NYT)
All the Carcinogens We Cannot See (New Yorker)
Why Is the Colorado River Running Dry? (Mother Jones)
When the New York Times lost its way (Economist)
Is This How Amazon Ends? (Atlantic)
Scores of underage Rohingya girls forced into abusive marriages in Malaysia (AP)
OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever Has a Plan for Keeping Super-Intelligent AI in Check (Wired)
Recent advances and outstanding challenges for machine learning interatomic potentials (Nature)
Artificial intelligence is not a silver bullet (NPR)
Supercomputer that simulates entire human brain will switch on in 2024 (New Scientist)
Thoughtful Neighbor Shovels Fallen Elderly People Off Of Sidewalk (The Onion)
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