Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Who Murdered Betty Van Patter?

 Forty-nine years ago today, on December 13, 1974, 45-year-old Betty Van Patter, mother of three, was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a bar on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square.

She had just been fired from her job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party by Elaine Brown, who headed up the party while co-founder Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Van Patter, an idealistic supporter of the party, had witnessed irregularities and misuse of cash by party members and had warned Brown that they were illegal and needed to be stopped to avoid bringing unwanted attention from law enforcement authorities.

While she was at the bar, a man walked in and handed Van Patter a note. She got up and followed him out of the door.

Later that night, she was spotted at Jimmy's Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The Lamp Post, owned by a cousin of Newton's named Jimmie Ward, was the site of most of the illegal cash transactions Van Patter was worried about.

Meanwhile, back at the Berkeley Square, one of Betty's friends arrived to join her, only to find her missing. He then placed a telephone call to the Lamp Post and asked if she was there.

"That party has left," he was told.

That was the last any of her friends or family heard from Betty Van Patter. Her badly beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay over a month later, on January 17, 1975.

***

The Black Panther Party was an extraordinary, historically significant attempt by a group of young black people to aggressively fight back against entrenched racism in U.S. society. Its leaders established a number of remarkable programs, including a free school, a free breakfast program, and an armed effort to monitor arrests of black people by the police.

The party, unlike other black power organizations, welcomed white support and forged alliances with Latino groups and gay organizations. It also developed a strong cadre of women leaders, like Elaine Brown, who helped the party gain international prominence.

At the same time, some of the party's leaders, including Newton, could behave like street thugs, shaking down local merchants for protection money, and running drug and prostitution rackets out of various locations, including the Lamp Post. 

The visionary programs and the criminality co-existed side by side. It wasn’t one or the other; it was both at the same time. The party’s complicated legacy cannot be understood without acknowledging that.

The party was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist head of the FBI, as a severe national security threat; he and other elements of the federal government waged an illegal campaign known as COINTELPRO to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Panthers. 

Certain state and local law enforcement forces cooperated with the FBI in this effort, which at one point resulted in the brutal murder by police of Panther leader Fred Hampton and a colleague in Chicago.

The Panthers also waged a terror campaign of their own, executing party members suspected of being agents or informers, as well as killing innocent members of the community whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Co-founder Huey Newton was at the epicenter of all that was good and all that was evil about the Black Panther Party.

One of Huey's major white supporters was David Horowitz, a Berkeley radical, who got Betty Van Patter her job with the organization. He knew her from Ramparts magazine, the left-wing voice of the movement to upend racism and imperialism during the 1960s, where he was an editor.

In the aftermath of Betty's murder, Horowitz underwent a loud, long and very public political migration from the left to the right, where he emerged as one of the fiercest critics of progressives in this country. He wrote books and articles and delivered lectures that shredded the idealistic vision of those seeking progressive social change by comparing them to Stalin's murderous regime in the Soviet Union and Mao's reign of terror in China.

As Horowitz used his intellectual ability and historical knowledge to carry on his anti-left crusade, he repeatedly cited his guilt over Betty's death as the catalyst that propelled him on his journey. Many progressives believe he was simply exploiting Betty’s murder to justify his crusade.

In 1976, Lowell Bergman and I co-authored a major piece in Rolling Stone magazine on the FBI's Cointelpro initiative to destroy the Panthers. In the process of doing that and related articles, we interviewed Newton, Brown, Eldridge Cleaverand many other Panthers and their most prominent supporters, including Hollywood celebrities, left-wing lawyers and Berkeley intellectuals.

While we were doing the Rolling Stone article, Bergman and I became aware of the dirty underbelly of the Panther organization, and later at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we coordinated and I edited the breakthrough investigative article by reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery called "The Party's Over," in New Times magazine in 1978.

That article, more than any other, pierced the facade of the Panthers and documented some of the awful crimes carried out by Newton and his followers, including the murder of Van Patter.

A few years after she died, Betty's warning of what would happen to the Panthers if they didn’t stop their financial abuse came to pass. Law enforcement authorities closed in and effectively shut the party down for the illegal misuse of government funds. The Party really was over now.

Meanwhile, during the nearly half-century since Betty's murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists have tried to solve her murder case. 

To date, none of us has succeeded.

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. She was allegedly held in a secret chamber attached to the Lamp Post, where she was reportedly tortured before she was killed by a massive blow to the head. Her body was then dumped into the Bay.

In the years since this happened, some evidence has been produced as to who killed her, who ordered it and why.  Probably the most informative and provocative piece is Kate Coleman’s "Death in Berkeley" in Heterodoxy in 1994. In it, Coleman reported that private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, later told his mentor, private eye Hal Lipset who ordered the hit and who carried it out.

Lipset’s notes, later obtained by Betty’s family, listed the two as “E.B” and “F.F.”

Betty Van Patter’s murder constitutes a deep stain on the positive legacy of the Panthers and their many important accomplishments, and it remains officially unsolved.

But the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

(Part Two will appear here tomorrow.)

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