Thursday, December 21, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 9)

 Fourteen years after Elaine Brown’s book came Flores Forbes’ revealing memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” in 2006. While in prison serving time for second-degree murder for the Richmond incident, Forbes had started his college education, which eventually led him onto urban planning and a job with the city of New York.

Though he was doing well in New York, Flores Forbes was not always able to contain himself as he attempted to deal with his feelings about some of his past actions. Sometime around the 25th anniversary of Betty’s disappearance, in 1999, a New York-based freelance writer, Scott Sherman, overheard Forbes bragging at a party about his past life as a Panther gunman.

That fed into Sherman’s work on an article for The Nation in 2000 about the Panthers’ role in David Horowitz’s conversion from a reliable friend of the left into an outspoken enemy.

In “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes provided an elaborate description of how he staged and executed the botched Richmond incident. That is the only criminal action he admitted to, although he stated there were others. In the book he indicated that he came to genuinely regret the things he did as a security officer in the Black Panther Party.

“Shit, if there was a witness who had the courage to testify against us, we would bribe them. Or, as we’d tried to do in Richmond, take stern steps to ensure they didn’t show or testify.”

“There was still the shadow that my past casts over my life.”

 “Upon close reflection, I realized that the passing of Huey P. Newton…meant that one less person was alive who actually knew what my past deeds were, and with each passing, that number would get smaller.”

These sound like the words of a man hoping to avoid paying any further price for his crimes beyond the time he had already served in California prisons. 

Could the murder of Betty Van Patter have been one of those deeds? After all, he was the party’s head of security at that time, and therefore responsible for doing any dirty work required. As he toured the country promoting his book, Forbes visited Oakland, where he was politely received at a reading in a bookstore at Jack London Square.

During the question and answer period after his talk, Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, raised her hand:

“Mr. Forbes, "You talked about the Lamp Post extensively in your book.  My mother, Betty Van Patter, was the Panther bookkeeper who was last seen at the Lamp Post on December 13th, 1974, and then found murdered.  Given your position in the Party, would you please comment on this?" 

Forbes, clearly taken aback, could only mumble this denial/non-denial answer:

“I did not know who Betty Van Patter was."

After the reading, as he was walking with his family nearby and saw Tamara approaching from another direction, Forbes steered his party aside to avoid encountering her a second time.

***

Over the 49 years since Betty Van Patter was killed, her murder has been mentioned in many other news articles and books, as well as in academic writings that mainly focus on the historical significance of Black Panther Party.

Driving much of the coverage during all those years has been the brilliant, tortured figure of David Horowitz, who used Betty’s case to argue that the Panthers were not a source of progressive change at all but essentially a gang of thugs. As more and more evidence has surfaced about the street brutality promoted by Huey Newton, Horowitz’s perspective gained a measure of credibility.

Even Elaine Brown, in her memoir, acknowledged the dark side of the Panthers: “Huey and his entourage of restless gunmen were prowling the after-hours clubs with no purpose other than to intimidate.”

Of course, Brown and others (particularly academics) who continue to defend the party’s legacy, argue that they were “armed revolutionaries” fighting repressive institutions, including police agencies that were targeting black people all over the country.

To a great extent, the Betty Van Patter case has been politicized by all sides, and rarely assessed simply as an unsolved murder, which is finally what the family asked me to do. It’s impossible to shed all personal bias, of course, but I’ve spent every bit as much energy looking for evidence of a counter-theory as for corroboration that the Panthers were at fault.

The family has pretty much given up hope there will ever be charges or a trial in the case, particularly since, as Forbes noted in his book, fewer and fewer people are still alive who know the actual details of any of the Panther-related crimes.

That the Panthers killed Betty is the only scenario that fits the known facts, but without definitive proof, it remains possible that someone else could have been involved.

An obvious suspect would have been an ex-boyfriend, like Ken Baptiste, the married man who she was still emotionally entwined with when she disappeared. The anguished entries to her private journal indicate that he was the source of some of what seemed to be troubling her in her final days. But he also appears to have cooperated with the police extensively, and to have made serious efforts to locate her when she was missing.

The police appear to have never really considered any theory other than the Panthers were at fault. But they could never build a plausible case based on real evidence – -everything was circumstantial. Elaine Brown’s statements over the years have done little to exonerate her and the Panthers from the crime, however. 

If anything, Brown has dug herself into a rhetorical hole around the case by strongly suggesting a motive – that Betty raised suspicions by asking too many questions at a time when the IRS was already actively probing the group’s finances.

In this context, it is not known whether Betty herself even was aware of law enforcement interest in the Panthers’ financial practices. The types of questions she was raising were simply the obvious ones any accountant or bookkeeper has to ask. Where was the money coming from and where was it going? Bookkeeping is all about keeping track – money in and money out.

Part of the confusion inside the organization may have been that Brown and others apparently knew very little about financial accounting themselves, so the straight-forward questions any scrupulous bookkeeper would have asked struck them as much more suspicious than they actually were.

Another factor here is the substantial and unrelenting pressure generated by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies on the Panthers. Could this have been a factor — directly or indirectly — in her murder?

I’ll examine that angle at length tomorrow.

(Part Ten will appear tomorrow.)

Part Eight

Part Seven

Part Six

Part Five

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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