Although I never met Betty Van Patter in person, I did speak with her on the phone once in 1972. She was working at Ramparts magazine 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.
All I remember about the phone call was a kind, thoughtful voice on the other end of the 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 in downtown Oakland.
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.
He recorded the call:
Horowitz: “I got a call from Betty’s daughter who says she hasn’t been home since Friday.”
Brown: “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 instead she called the most famous private eye in the Bay Area, Hal Lipset.
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 extensive investigation of her as a missing person. Only after Betty’s body was found did the police interview Elaine Brown, on January 23, 1975.
In the interview, which was conducted at the office of Panther attorney Charles Garry, 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 had to have been December 13th, the night Betty disappeared.
But at that point Garry 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 investigator Hal Lipset in his San Francisco office to discuss the case. She asked me to accompany her to this meeting.
Until this meeting, 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 reconsider that possibility.
On January 12th, 1984, Tamara officially hired Lipset to re-investigate Betty’s murder. I co-signed the agreement.
One of Lipset’s protégés was David Fechheimer, by then a successful 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 now 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.
***
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 long past time for justice to be served.
After all, the statute of limitations never lapses on murder.
(Part Four will appear tomorrow.)
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