Saturday, December 23, 2023

Postscript

“Once upon a time, it was the best of times and the worst of times and they all lived happily ever after.”

So goes the fairy tale, but as we all know, real lives rarely resemble fairy tales. In fact, sometimes they turn out more like the opposite of a fairy tale.

Yesterday, I wrapped up my ten-part series on the tragic Betty Van Patter case, no closer to a solution than before I started. A dwindling number of people who know what happened to Betty are still alive and not one of them is talking.

Throughout the series, I tried to remain neutral and fair towards everyone involved. That’s how I operate, both by nature and training. The fact I could come to no definitive conclusion brings me little satisfaction.

For Betty’s three kids, it’s been 49 Christmas seasons since their mother disappeared, which casts a pall over what, at least in the fairy tale, should be a time for joy.

So for them what would some sort of closure look like?

If charges were filed in the case, that might lead to a trial and the possibility of convictions, which would represent a measure of justice in the case.

But even just knowing for certain who ordered her death and who carried it out would bring the family some sense of peace. They want to know why she was killed.

All stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Great story-tellers know this and develop skill at constructing these basic elements, including character development, pacing and plot points, ledes, transitions and kickers.

Novelists and conspiracy theorists have a distinct advantage when it comes to story-telling — they can make up the “facts”. Journalists have no such option. All we can do is follow where the documentation takes us. And in the case of Betty Van Patter, therefore, all we can say is that it was not a fairy tale.

Nobody lived happily ever after.

***

Death of a Bookkeeper: Who Murdered Betty Van Patter?

Part Ten

Part Nine

Part Eight

Part Seven

Part Six

Part Five

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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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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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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Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 8)

After he returned from Cuba, with his Black Panther Party in tatters, Huey P. Newton was frequently sighted drunk and/or high on cocaine. He seemingly could turn violent in a flash, reacting to minor perceived insults. He had always bragged to his Panther security contingent that he was the baddest of the bad-asses on Oakland’s tough streets, even as he presented himself to others (including me) as a soft-spoken, charming intellectual.

My earlier experiences with him were memorable for brilliant conversations ranging from poetry to philosophy to politics and beyond. I genuinely liked him. Newton was the party’s main theoretician, extremely well versed in Marxism, even though he claimed that he had been illiterate until his junior year in high school. 

I found that claim hard to believe. But up until to this point I had only experienced Huey’s charming and brilliant side. Then came the occasion when I witnessed what the angry Newton could be like.

It was soon after the “Richmond incident.” On October 23, 1977, the Panthers head of security, Flores Forbes, by his own admission led a contingent of Panthers in the dead of night to a house where they thought a woman lived who was scheduled to testify against Newton in the murder of a prostitute, Kathleen Smith.

In his 2006 memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes wrote: “I was not bothered by the fact I was on my way to assassinating someone.“ He continued, “In the final analysis, what I really believed was that Huey P. Newton was my ‘prince.’ I would kill or die for him at the drop of a hat.”

But in Richmond, Forbes and his team got the address wrong and as they were attempting to break into the house, they awoke a middle-aged woman who heard her screen door being ripped off its hinges and then a shot outside. Thinking whoever was out there was trying to shoot off her lock, she grabbed her .38 revolver and fired.

When a hail of return fire came slamming back through her door she ran to another room and hid. When police arrived, they found a pool of blood and a shotgun. Following that trail of blood they found a dead man, but the trail continued, indicating a second assailant had also been hit. 

The police also found more abandoned weapons and ammunition. It didn’t take them long to find out who the intended victim was – a prostitute who rented an apartment behind the middle-aged woman’s house and who had seen Huey Newton shoot her friend, Kathleen Smith.

The dead man was a Panther squad member, and team leader Flores Forbes was the other wounded assailant. He’d been shot in the hand and, with a third Panther, had fled to Las Vegas. Forbes was eventually convicted in the case and sent to prison. 

Not long after this bloody event, Paul Avery and I interviewed Newton in a house in the Oakland hills as he sipped a glass of cognac. Newton’s lawyer, Sheldon Otis, was also present.

Newton denied any involvement in the Richmond incident and tried to convince us that Forbes and the other assailants had been only loosely associated with the Panthers, which was patently not true. He then claimed that they all had quit the party some weeks earlier.  As he kept drinking, his speech was becoming somewhat erratic.

At one point, I carefully repeated the chain of events and the trail of evidence leading back to the Panthers for a second time. At this Newton lost his temper. He jumped up and stalked out of the room.

Otis followed him and for an extended period of time, Avery and I could hear him shouting in the other room, “I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!” 

Avery and I debated whether it might be wise to make a hasty exit but we calculated that Otis would probably be able to calm Newton down. Eventually he did and Huey returned to finish the interview, still denying any knowledge of what the assassination squad had been up to that night in Richmond. He was subdued and no longer drinking the cognac, but he seemed emotionally flat and remote.

Many years later, when Forbes published his memoir, he took personal responsibility for the botched assassination attempt, saying that he did it without Newton’s involvement or knowledge. That prompted me to wonder whether in fact Newton’s anger at my questions that day had been because he was indeed out of the loop on the assault after all.

***
In the early morning hours of August 22nd, 1989, a coked-out Huey Newton was shot to death by a low-level crack dealer, Tyrone Robinson, on the streets of Oakland. By then, the Black Panther Party had long since ceased to exist, as virtually every leader, from Bobby Seale to Elaine Brown to David Hilliard had fled from Newton’s side during his reign of terror.

Journalist Ken Kelley, who at one point or another was friends with virtually everyone involved in this case -– Betty Van Patter, her daughter Tamara Baltar, David Horowitz, Huey Newton and also me -- published the first of two articles about his relationship with Newton, including having acted as his de facto PR man for a while in the late ‘70s.

The first piece appeared in the East Bay Express soon after Newton’s death. The second came sometime later in California magazine, where I was working as Northern California bureau chief. I edited that second article.

In both pieces, Kelley claimed that Newton confirmed that the Panthers had killed Betty, and had told him: “They never should have found her body.”

Other memoirs from significant players would soon follow. First up in 1992 was Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power.” Brown opened her book by reprinting the speech she gave in August 1974, when she assumed control of the Black Panther Party in the wake of Newton’s escape to Cuba to avoid facing murder charges.

“I have control over all of the guns and all of the money of this party. There will be no external or internal opposition I will not resist and put down. I will deal resolutely with anyone or anything that stands in the way.”

Throughout the book, Brown recounted numerous violent acts she witnessed, including some that she ordered. "It is a sensuous thing to know that at one's will an enemy can be struck down," she writes at one point after describing how she threatened to blow a woman’s office “off the map.”

“We Black Panthers disregarded the law. We were, indeed, as newspaper headlines frequently suggested, outlaws.”

Brown said she “endorsed” the “kicked-in doors or shot-up facilities” of those business owners in Oakland who resisted the shakedown demands the Panthers made in order to get the funds needed to run the party’s programs.

When it came to Betty Van Patter’s case, Brown offered the following version of events. “The body of Betty Van Patter had just been found in San Francisco Bay. She had been reported missing for some time, during which, through Charles Garry’s office, I had to answer police questions about her disappearance. I had no idea where she was.”

Brown indicated that she also was concerned at the time of “intensified Internal Revenue Service surveillance of our bank accounts.”

“Betty (asked) Norma (Norma Armour, who also worked on the Panthers’ books), and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the source of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations. She continued. I knew I had made a mistake in hiring her.”

Brown stated, “There was no question that many of our money transactions could be ruled illegal.”

“Our accountants and tax lawyers could hold off the IRS,” Brown continued. “It was for the party to keep our affairs in order. Betty Van Patter was showing herself useless in that endeavor, her nose in our business more than our books.”

Then, in a curious entry, Brown wrote this: 

“Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty’s arrest record was a prison record – on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.”

This was an entirely false allegation – Betty had no such arrest record and was never involved in any drug trafficking activity. Her only arrest ever was a minor “disturbing the peace” citation many years earlier. 

So after receiving a letter from the Baltar family’s attorney to that effect, Brown’s publisher removed Brown’s statement that Betty had a prison record for drug trafficking from subsequent printings of the book.

Still, it was an odd and gratuitous decision by Brown to include it in the first place.

Brown claimed in her book that, after Betty’s body was found, many white supporters of the Panthers started to fear for their own lives and told her they’d heard she was under investigation for involvement in Betty’s murder. “All I could do was say, over and over, that while it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her.”

(Part Nine will appear tomorrow.)

Part Seven

Part Six

Part Five

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 7)

 Four days after Betty Van Patter’s body was identified in January 1975, Berkeley Police Officer Dave Frederick contacted John Conomos of the U.S. Geological Survey in an attempt to understand the probable drift of the body in the bay. 

Conomos told Frederick that the average net drift of anything caught up in the tidal action from the central bay region, which would include Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, would be about a mile and a half to a mile and three-quarters a day south towards San Jose.

That Betty’s remains were found near Foster City was therefore consistent with her body having been dumped somewhere in the central bay region.

Within days of identifying Betty as a murder victim, the Berkeley Police held an interview with Elaine Brown and Joan Kelley of the Black Panther Party, as well as their lawyer, Charles Garry. 

Kelley was the EOC official who supervised Betty’s work and issued her paychecks. She told police she generally saw Betty about once a week at the Panther school when she was dropping off or picking up papers related to her work.

For her part, Brown insisted to the detectives that she fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. The police noted in their files that this was contradicted by all known evidence. Strangely, Brown then added that she ran into Betty unexpectedly at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

The evidence indicated that Elaine fired Betty on the 13th, not the 6th. And it seems most likely, though not conclusive, that the night of December 13th was the time that Elaine would have seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoken with her. It also is logical to think that Betty would have gone there to meet Elaine, courtesy of the note handed to her by the man at the Berkeley Square.

These details matter. We do know Betty was at the Lamp Post the night of the 13th. That is the last place she was seen. But we don’t know why she went there.

Before the police got an opportunity to ask Brown more questions along these lines, her attorney, Charles Garry, terminated the interview. 

And that effectively concluded the most active part of the investigation into the case by the Berkeley Police. They did not have enough evidence to arrest Elaine Brown for the murder of Betty Van Patter. And in any event, she may well have been innocent. But it is reasonable to say from this distance that she at least could have been much more helpful in solving the case had she wanted to be. 

Over the weeks and months to follow, police did track down and interview many of the people who had known Betty over the relevant time period. The consistent picture that emerged was that she had seemed excited to be working for the Panthers, admired Brown, but was concerned about some of the financial irregularities she witnessed, especially at the Lamp Post, and was trying to get things cleaned up to save the party from possible legal troubles.

The police did not seem to delve very deeply into any alternative scenario – such as her love life or a stranger killing. They did follow various leads that went nowhere, such as the identity of the man who talked to Betty and handed her a note at the Berkeley Square the night she disappeared. Despite numerous conversations with witnesses, rumors and leads, they were never able to identify this man.

As the months went by, new entries to the case file started tapering off, and eventually all activity on the case ceased. Thus it joined the many other cold cases that remain unresolved year after year, decade after decade, probably forever.

David Horowitz, meanwhile, publicly completed his strange personal transformation from a prominent leftist into an outspoken advocate of ludicrous right-wing ideas, and in interviews, said that Betty’s murder had been a major precipitating factor behind his political conversion.

Perhaps he had good intentions, but Horowitz’s protestations hardly helped solve the case. Rather, he only succeeded in politicizing the matter unnecessarily.

Then again, almost single-handedly for decades, Horowitz kept Betty’s case from fading completely from the limelight. He mentioned it in his speeches and articles. And significantly, in 1995, he published a long article by Kate Coleman in Heterodoxy, a journal of his non-profit Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

In that article, Coleman named who she believed ordered the murder and who did it. She also described attending a bookstore reading in Berkeley, when Elaine Brown was promoting her autobiography, “A Taste of Power.” During the question period, Coleman asked Brown whether she was in touch with Newton while he was in exile in Cuba, including the period when Betty was killed.

“Quite a bit, in fact,” Brown answered after an initial hesitation. “And I have the phone bills to prove it because he would call collect. It was costing me three and four thousand dollars a month!” Coleman surmised this was a highly relevant admission when it came to who within the Panther hierarchy might have ordered Betty to be killed.

Given her statement, Coleman knew that it had to be entertained that perhaps it was not Elaine Brown but Huey Newton who had ordered Betty’s murder. But Newton himself couldn’t be questioned because he too had since been murdered.

(Part Eight will appear tomorrow.)

Part Six

Part Five

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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Monday, December 18, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 6)

On December 20, 1974, one week after Betty went missing, the Berkeley Police Department issued the following APB:

MISSING PERSON. BETTY LOUISE VAN PATTER, AKA BETTY LOUISE BALTAR, WFA, 10-12-29, 5-3, 116, GRN, BRN, 2009-HASTE ST. APT-E, BERKELEY, CALIF. LAST SEEN WEARING DARK CLOTHING, POSSIBLY DARK COAT AND DARK GLASSES. HEAVY DRINKER. REPORTED MISSING ON 12-19-74.

The BPD also conducted an extensive search for Betty’s whereabouts. One of the investigating officers was named Dave Frederick. In his first report, dated December 20th, Frederick stated that he had checked all of the apartments in and around Betty’s building at 2009 Haste Street, “with negative results.” He also visited four nearby hotels, and found no trace of her.

Officer Frederick filed his second report the next day, December 21st. In it he described having conducted a further check of houses in Betty’s neighborhood, as well as calls to five taxi companies, Highland Hospital and Alcoholics Anonymous. He also interviewed two people who were associated with Betty professionally, and learned, apparently for the first time, of David Horowitz.

In his next report, Frederick described what he learned from interviewing Horowitz, which was that Elaine Brown claimed that she had fired Betty. But, Frederick added: “Horowitz stated to this officer that Elaine Brown and several other people were not telling him the complete story and that he is extremely upset over the matter.”

Later in the report, Frederick wrote: “He (Horowitz) states that she (Betty) is basically an honest person, but if she found some shady or underhanded dealings with regards to the Lamp Post or the EOC organization, she would probably have quit or requested to have a different job with the organization. He stated that probably the last thing she would do would be to expose the organization to any police agency.”

Finally, there is this: “I asked Horowitz point blank if Van Patter might have come to some harm within the organization. He stated he did not believe so and Elaine Brown was desperately trying to run for Oakland City Council person. He states that the last thing she would need would be any sort of implication in the disappearance of a white female.”

Throughout the rest of December and January, the Berkeley police continued their extensive search for Betty Van Patter.  Besides routine steps like dusting her car for fingerprints, putting stops on her bank accounts, and obtaining her telephone records, they continued to interview people, sometimes multiple times, about what they knew.

On January 3rd, they noted information from a confidential source (labeled CS-3) that Betty had “discovered irregularities in the form of ‘kick-back’ payments to Jimmie Ward…CS-3 stated that the victim had arranged to get an appointment to see Elaine Brown on 12-13-74 [the day of her disappearance] and that the issue to be discussed was the victim’s reluctance or refusal to misrepresent items on the Lamp Post account.”

Three weeks later, on the 20th, the BPD heard from Foster City Police that a Jane Doe whose body had been floating in the bay a few days earlier was Betty’s, based on positive identification from 34 points of comparison of “bite-wing” dental x-rays. 

The missing person case now turned into a homicide investigation.

(Part Seven will appear tomorrow.)

Part Five

Part Four

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Part Two

Part One

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Sunday, December 17, 2023

Death of a Bookkeeper (part 5)

 In the summer of 1974, Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper and divorced mother of three, was excited about starting a new job.

David Horowitz, one of the editors at Ramparts, the magazine where she’d been working previously, had recommended Betty for a similar position at the Educational Opportunities Corporation (EOC), which was operated by the Black Panther Party.

Horowitz was one of many white progressives in the Bay Area and beyond who supported the Panthers, their revolutionary political philosophy, and their community programs, which included a free school, a free breakfast program, and a jobs initiative.

Almost alone among black power groups of the era, the Panther leaders voiced support for women’s rights, Latino rights and gay rights, and formed alliances with white radicals. They also welcomed whites into their inner circle, an openness that quickly elevated the party to a kind of a rock-star-like status on the left. 

From San Francisco and New York to Hollywood, wealthy people in the legal, publishing, and entertainment circles threw parties and made donations that helped fund Panther programs and defend them during the numerous trials stemming from their violent clashes with police and rival black groups.

After a period of growth and global prominence, and under the relentless pressure of attacks by police agencies and the FBI, the Panthers had peaked as an international revolutionary organization by the early 70s. They needed to retrench so they ordered all their regional offices and branches to close down and the most important regional leaders to come back and work out of headquarters in Oakland.

Meanwhile, Horowitz recommended Betty to Elaine Brown, who, in the absence of the party’s charismatic co-founder Huey Newton, was now the head of the party. (Newton had fled to Cuba to avoid murder charges.)

A number of others chose to leave the party completely. In a phone call in September, Betty explained to her daughter, Tamara Baltar, that among those leaving were Audrea Jones and William Roberts.

The departure of Jones and Roberts had created a vacuum around the administrative and bookkeeping functions for the EOC and the party, which led to an immediate increase in Betty’s responsibilities. On August 31st, 1974, Betty wrote her mother, Venus Floyd, describing her new work opportunity: 

“They want and need to get things in order on a straight basis, and I can do that. The big thing I have going for me is that I know how to do it and have very few hang-ups about black people. I think they recognize that. 

Later in the letter, Betty addresses what she knew to be one of her mother’s major fears:

“Please don’t feel frightened for my physical safety. I am not in the least worried about that part of it. What I need to look out for is legal problems, not physical problems. If anything, I am super protected physically. There is no one in the whole organization who would lift a finger against me physically. 

Later that fall, Betty wrote her mother again:

“As of last Tuesday, I have been asked to take on the structuring of the books and supervision of the whole of the Black Panther Party operation.  After meeting Elaine Brown (the very lovely and articulate young woman who is now the acting head of the party) and hearing her proposal to me – and after talking to four attorneys and several other people, I met again with her Friday. 

“I told her I would like to help and she said she was so relieved she could cry. She has a mountain of responsibility on her shoulders right now. She is a dynamic, educated, intelligent, forceful person and she has given me her complete trust.”

Later in the letter she continued, “As I proceed with this whole thing I am becoming more and more aware that there is no need for fear.”

On October 22nd, Betty wrote to her mother again, indicating that she was becoming much more familiar with the inner workings of the Black Panther Party.

“All of their money has gone to help people in various ways. Medical, dental, food, clothing, car repair, rent, education, childcare – you name it. Very few people know of all the good they have done. Eventually, the Black Panther Party as such will not be called that but something else. 

Then she described the various party projects she was working on. “Aside from the party per se, I am taking care of the EOC and teaching and supervising things on the accounting end. There’s also the Lamp Post, which is taking more time as well.”

The Lamp Post was a bar run by Newton’s cousin, Jimmie Ward.

But suddenly, thIngs for Betty deteriorated in dramatic fashion. In a letter on October 31st, Betty for the first time expressed reservations about her co-workers. “My biggest problem and frustration is in getting the people I'm working with to do what they're supposed to be getting done on time.  It takes a lot of patience. They are never rushed about anything -- maybe I should take a lesson!"

Although she did not share it with her mother, Betty Van Patter was developing a deep concern about what she was witnessing as bookkeeper for the EOC and the Lamp Post.

By mid-November, Tamara, saw that Betty had become quite agitated, telling her that cash was being taken out of register at the Lamp Post and not accounted for. “They don’t understand that the register tape shows cash coming in and so when they just take cash out of the drawer, it shows up as not accounted for,” she says.

In her journal, Betty wrote: “Something very heavy is happening in my life right now…There will be a crisis point – I know it. It’s rapidly approaching – I can feel it. There is an imminent danger.”

Tragically, she was right. Within a few weeks, she would be dead.

(Part Six will appear tomorrow.)

Part Four

Part Three

Part Two

Part One

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