Saturday, December 14, 2024

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 2)

Betty Van Patter was a 45-year-old Black Panther Party bookkeeper and idealist who deeply admired the party and its programs to fight racism and help the poor.

But somebody killed her and despite many clues and much evidence the mystery has remained unsolved for 50 years.

Meanwhile, over the course of my 59 years in journalism, I have worked on a lot of big stories. We got some of them, we didn’t get others. I have few regrets.

The Betty Van Patter case is one of those regrets. The Alameda County District Attorney, the Berkeley Police Department, several private investigators, and a number of other journalists are among those who have looked into the case and come up empty.

Some of the best work on the case was done by the late investigative reporter Kate Coleman, who published one plausible scenario for Betty’s murder in the now defunct magazine Heterodoxy in 1994. Coleman revealed that a private investigator named  David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, told his mentor, the legendary private eye Hal Lipset, who inside the Panthers ordered Betty’s murder and who carried it out.

Lipset was working for Van Patter’s family at the time. Both Lipset and Fechheimer have since died.

Nobody has ever been charged in the case, and now, 50 years later, interest by law enforcement and the media has all but vanished. The problem with this story is obvious. Historians, academics, young activists and old activists alike want to be able to celebrate the positive legacy of the Black Panthers, which includes exposing systematic racism, the harassment and illegal arrest of countless black people, as well as the poverty and oppressive living conditions endured by many to this day.

I too want to celebrate that legacy.

To honestly tell the story of what happened to Betty Van Patter may seem to some to run counter to the ideal narrative, because it brings up the Panthers’ internal corruption, violence, sexism, prostitution, drugs, shakedowns, weaponry and justification of gratuitous violence.

All of which are every bit as true as the good stuff.

Therefore, any honest appraisal of the group’s place in history must first be capable of holding both sides of the truth in one hand, both the good and the bad, unflinchingly.

Aa part of that, Betty’s case must be solved. Those responsible for her death need to be brought to justice.

So it's time to get back to her story…

(Part Three appears tomorrow.)

Part One

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Friday, December 13, 2024

Who Killed Betty Van Patter?


BERKELEY, CA — Exactly fifty years ago tonight, on Friday, December 13, 1974, 45-year-old Betty Van Patter, a twice-divorced mother of three, was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a local bar called the Berkeley Square.

That afternoon, she had 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 Brown and the party, had witnessed irregularities and the misuse of cash by party members. She had warned Brown that these practices were illegal and needed to be stopped to avoid bringing unwanted attention from law enforcement.

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. (The identity of this man, who was black, remains unknown.)

Later that night, Van Patter was again spotted at the Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The Lamp Post, a Panther hangout 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, an ex-boyfriend named Ken Baptiste, arrived to meet up with 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 cryptic message was the last time any of her friends or family ever heard from Betty Van Patter. Her badly beaten, decomposed body was found floating far to the south of Berkeley 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 common 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 unpleasant reality.

The BPP was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist director 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 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 Newton's major supporters was David Horowitz, a Berkeley radical, who got Betty Van Patter her job with the organization. He knew Betty from Ramparts magazine, the left-wing voice of the movement to upend racism and imperialism during the 1960s, where she had worked when he was an editor.

In the aftermath of Betty's murder, Horowitz underwent a long and very public political migration from the far left to the far 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 had 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 Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, Eldridge Cleaver and 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, 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 half-century since Betty's murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda County District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists, including me, have tried to solve her murder case.

To date, none of us has been successful.

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. According to some sources, 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 work citing this evidence was Kate Coleman’s "A Death in Berkeley," published in Heterodoxy in 1995. In it, Coleman reported that private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, 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 respectively as “E.B” and “F.F.”

To this day, Betty Van Patter’s murder remains a dark cloud hovering over 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.

(This is the first in a multi-part series. Part Two will appear here tomorrow.)

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Thursday, December 12, 2024

Speaking Up

NOTE: It has been exactly 50 years since Berkeley resident Betty Van Patter, who worked as a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party ,disappeared. My in-depth look at her unsolved murder case begins here tomorrow.

(Photo by Laila Comolli)

(I wrote this in 2020.)

Over the past few days, I've read several articles about the tragic death of Tony Hsieh, the entrepreneur who co-founded Zappos, the online shoe service, and who was known as a one-man “ambassador of hope.”

Among his many accomplishments, he reinvigorated a neglected area of downtown Las Vegas to become a vital center of commerce and culture, and was in the process of trying to do the same for Park City, Utah.

If you think about it, we do not have many ambassadors of hope among us; that's a pretty rare quality. I sensed his impact when I was a tech industry blogger years ago and I interviewed a group of Zappos employees who seemed unusually inspired by working at his company.

I didn’t meet Hsieh or knew much about his mission to spread hopefulness but I definitely sensed its impact among that group of people who worked for him. They straight-out loved him.

But somehow, according to the recent profiles in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Hsieh pivoted from hope to hopelessness in recent years in a descent fueled by alcohol and drugs, which in turn caused him to isolate from his friends.

Among those friends was the singer Jewel Kilcher, who visited Hsieh not long before his death and was so deeply distressed by his condition that she warned him to seek help for his self-destructive tendencies, which apparently included (literally) playing with fire.

Not long afterward, Hsieh died in a suspicious fire in the home where he was staying on Thanksgiving night. As the fire broke out, he reportedly locked himself in his room, and died of smoke inhalation.

***

For any of us, hopelessness can grow in a void, and when you have to work too hard filling that void, addictive substances that are all too available tend to show up at just the wrong time. Once present, they speak in a seductive voice that urges usage like that which may have led Tony Hsieh to his death.

Even an ambassador of hope can fall victim to hopelessness and addiction.

The only thing any of us can do about this kind of problem, when the signs appear, is to pay attention. If you sense a loved one or a colleague is slipping into addictive behavior, try to find the way to say something. 

These are among the most difficult conversations you will ever have, but speaking out like Jewel Kilcher did to Tony Hsieh is the loving thing to do, because addiction can clearly be a terminal disease.

And much worse than one awkward conversation is not having it, and later realizing that you’ve lost a life that might have been saved. 

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Teams


When I think back over the past 50 years, one of the most notable changes in journalism was that reporters started to work in teams.

In school in the 60s, we were taught that the way it worked historically was that a series of great men -- and a few great women -- achieved journalistic success individually. Partnerships were rarely mentioned.

The big names were John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1912), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) ... and more recently Barbara Walters (1929-2022) and Tom Wolfe (1931-2018).

There were investigative reporters too, mainly lone wolves like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis in the early 20th century and then Jessica Mitford, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein in our time. (These are the famous ones, there were many others.) They too mostly worked alone.

Some modern scholars credit the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones for establishing the non-profit model of investigative journalism. (Note: Investigative Reporters and Editors deserves major credit as well.)

But concentrating on those two organizations, CIR and MoJo, which encapsulated so much of my own career, what's true is that we produced our muckraking reports in teams(*) much more than as individuals. Maybe this was a Baby Boomer thing; after all, we were such a huge generation numerically that we rarely did anything in life completely alone.

(*) As of earlier this year, 2024, CIR and Mother Jones have merged into a single team.

Woodward & Bernstein are a tad older than our generation, but they certainly are the most famous co-authors in American journalism history. But they didn’t work together very long, given the length of their careers.

Personally, I have published with many co-authors, both because I love working with collaborators and because we all uniquely bring different qualities to the partnership.

Some of us specialize in interviews, some in documents, some as investigators, some as writers or story-tellers. But what can be most valuable in a team is the ability to bring an unusual perspective on the story.

It’s not the kind of working style that suits every temperament. People who get too easily frustrated and who give up easily tend to drop off teams. People who worry more about process than results rarely work out in these kinds of projects. Egos can all too easily rear their ugly heads; competing egos are poisonous.

But for those of us who do stick it out, team stories yield a large percentage of the best journalism out there today.

(NOTE: I published the earliest version of this essay four years ago.)

***

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Tuesday, December 10, 2024

It's a Life


The holiday season brings with it the usual flood of sentimental Christmas movies presumably meant to provide balance amidst the flood of unrestrained consumerism. 

Among them is that exceptional, odd Frank Capra film, "It's a Wonderful Life." Until I read Zachary D. Carter's excellent essay in The Huffington Post (2018), there were many things I didn't know about that film or the Sicilian immigrant who made it.

Hoping to revive a career that had been disrupted by the war, Capra produced the film in 1946, but when it was released just before Christmas it bombed, losing a half million dollars at the box office. Critics panned it and Capra lost the rights and control of the film’s negatives.

His personal fortunes then proceeded to nose-dive, accelerated by the anti-Communist furor of the early 1950s. (His crime — like that of many thoughtful people — was that he had briefly flirted with Marxism when he was younger.) 

His decline was such that he eventually reached a hopeless state and attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Rather like George Bailey.

Later, when he looked back on making the film that had helped ruin his career, he said: “I can’t begin to describe my sense of loneliness in making (it), a loneliness that was laced by the fear of failure. I had no one to talk to, or argue with.” 

As an aside, that probably describes what these holidays are like for many people, but for now let’s return to Capra’s story.

The Wonderful Life negatives lay forgotten and unvisited for almost three decades, by which time the film, considered worthless, had slipped into the public domain and was free for the taking. In the mid-1970s, the Public Broadcasting System did just that, becoming the first to air it since 1946. The commercial networks soon followed.

With that, a not-so-instant classic was (re)born. It’s now every bit as much a part of the season as Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Happily, Capra lived long enough to see this all come to pass before he joined the angels himself at the robust age of 94 in 1991. He had always maintained that “Wonderful Life" was the greatest film he ever made.

The main actors in the piece — James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore — are long since dead, of course. But recently, two surviving members among the children cast in the movie confirmed that Capra indeed controlled every detail of the filming down to the slightest detail of their expressions and movements.

The main point of the film — that each life matters — is always worth revisiting at this or any time of year when for so many, life feels considerably less than wonderful.

Depression is a widespread ailment in our society. And suicidal thoughts are no stranger to one who is deeply depressed. But as in the story, there could be hidden value in holding on, perhaps helped in low moments by an angel or two. 

So for now this is roughly as wonderful a life as we can make of it, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. And in any event, it wouldn’t be what it is if you and I were no longer a part of it.

With that, bring on Christmas! And maybe listen for someone’s bell ringing out there somewhere along the way.

(This one I originally published three years ago.)

HEADLINES:

  • Software developer arrested in connection with UnitedHealthcare CEO killing (Verge)

  • 'We knew that was our guy': Arresting officer describes capture of Luigi Mangione (CNN)

  • LGBTQ+ Americans stockpile meds and make plans to move after Trump’s win (WP)

  • Trump Just Provided Details for His Dystopic and Sweeping Presidential Agenda (Mother Jones)

  • Here’s How Many People Really Want Trump to Pardon January 6 Rioters (TNR)

  • Daniel Penny found not guilty in NYC subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely (CBS)

  • Europe’s economy needs help (AP)

  • Assad’s fall was swift and unexpected. But the signs were always there. (WP)

  • What to know about Assad's fall and what might happen next in Syria (NBC)

  • Israel says it struck suspected Syria chemical weapon sites (BBC)

  • South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been banned from leaving the country over a failed attempt at imposing martial law, a justice ministry official said, amid growing calls for him to step down and a deepening leadership crisis. (Reuters)

  • Trump calls for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine (AP)

  • CNN Anchor Announces Shock Exit On The Air That's Effective Immediately (HuffPost)

  • OpenAI launches Sora video generator (Axios)

  • Sam Altman Reveals This Prior Flaw In OpenAI Advanced AI o1 During ChatGPT Pro Announcement But Nobody Seemed To Widely Notice (Forbes)

  • How A.I. Can Revive a Love of Learning (NYT)

  • Americans Glad ISIS Defeated Or Something (The Onion)

 

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Monday, December 09, 2024

Relics

(Thanks to those of you who reacted to yesterday’s post about the fugitive suspect in the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. George notes that “Some aspects of this shooting have an uncanny correlation with the assassination that takes place during the last few minutes of the currently trending Netflix thriller series ‘Madness.’" Mary suggests the shooter “chose a light grey backpack as he originally planned to hide it between grey rocks in Central Park.” David asks “How did he know exactly where and when he could encounter and know it was the CEO? Is getting that kind of intel so easy?” All good points. The longer the suspect remains at large, the more mysterious this case becomes.)

(This is an excerpt from 2007.)

Today I was thinking that I should really be in the salvage business -- rescuing the old castoffs of this throwaway society, lovingly restoring them, and presenting them as the artifacts they truly are from former times.

After all, I've been collecting things for at least half a century. Old bottles, coins, stamps, magazines, books, photos, postcards, baseball cards -- the list goes on — not to mention facts, fantasies and memories.

Tonight's major find was this old "portable" typewriter -- the laptop of its time. I used to work on a machine like this, and in fact, I still had one until relatively recently, when it somehow found its way to the recycling bin. 

Thanks to one of my neighbors, it didn’t get far. And today, following the local custom of putting whatever you don't want anymore out on the sidewalk for anyone passing by to claim, I now have retaken possession of this sweet portable Remington. 

It makes that old comforting sound, you know, clickety-click, that a century ago came from the open windows in Rudyard Kipling's compound in India, as he pounded out his stories on tropical nights.

Or Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, all warm-weather writers, take your pick. For many decades, this was the sound of literature and the sound of journalism. Even as recently as the Watergate scandal of 1974, the signature film made of Woodward and Bernstein's legendary reporting that ended Richard Nixon's presidency, closes with a series of headlines typed on an old manual typewriter.

Relics. If I ever write a memoir, I should do it on this. On second thought, strike that, but its photo might make a good book cover.

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Sunday, December 08, 2024

Finding People


One of the basic tasks investigative journalists have to excel at is finding someone who doesn’t want to be found. So when somebody becomes the object of a large-scale manhunt by authorities and yet eludes capture, that’s bound to trigger our interest.

We may, on occasion, begin our own searches and the results may change the course of our careers.

Patty Hearst, the Unabomber, Osama bin-Laden were among those who attracted our interest in the past, and the search for the man who shot the United Health Care CEO is obviously the current one.

Law-enforcement agencies could do worse things than form an advisory board of experienced investigative reporters to help in these matters but for multiple reasons they’ll never do that.

So just for kicks, here’s what struck me about the elusive fugitive in the Manhattan killing. First, he made sure those shell casings would be found at the scene. The video of the shooting shows him tapping the gun at several points and one explanation is the gun was jamming. That may be true and it’s also possible that he was tapping it to make sure that the casings fell out near the body.

As we know, the casings were labeled with words associated with controversial health insurance practices, which may indicate a motive for the killing. Or they may have been an attempt to confuse investigators about his actual motive but I lean toward the first interpretation — they probably reflect his motive, which is anger at United Healthcare.

Also on the video, I noticed the the shooter had a distinctive way of walking while holding the gun. He was clearly a trained shooter and his stance and the way he moved may be a characteristic of how and where he was trained.

As fas as the shooter’s escape plans and the decisions he made along the way during his escape, it’s possible that some of the other purported “clues,” i.e., the water bottle and a burner phone, were left to throw investigators off his trail.

As for the mistakes he made — there are always mistakes — lowering his mask to flirt with a clerk at the hostel where he was staying was among the more endearing. He’s just a guy after all, and probably not a professional paid assassin. 

He had to dump his backpack to help avoid easy identification after the crime but there was reportedly only a jacket in it when it was found. The whereabouts of other evidence is unknown. Most importantly, since the gun wasn’t in the backpack when it was discovered, that remains a mystery. If it’s not in the waters of Central Park it could be in a trash receptacle uptown.

Then again, O.J. Simpson’s murder weapon was never found.

I don’t think the New York shooter had an accomplice. This crime and getaway have the markings of a lone operator, even though he appeared to be talking on a phone minutes before the shooting — a contra-indicator if you will. But he may have had people willing to protect him, which was the case with the SLA fugitives, making him much more difficult for authorities to apprehend.

Also, a surprisingly large segment of the population supports the gunman taking action against the deeply unpopular health insurance industry and therefore, like in the Patty Hearst case, some may be willing to help him avoid the police.

Because authorities are circulating the photos of his face, he will no doubt be recognized by some who know him, including family members. This could well lead to his capture, as it did the Unabomber, although family members may also try to protect him. If he’s smart, he will avoid contacting family.

The latest phots show him masked in a taxi he took from 86th up to the bus terminal. But wearing a mask might have made him stand out when he was in transit away from New York, so he may not have remained masked. If so, he would have tended to cover the lower part of his face with his hands, or tried to shield it from view when moving about in public.

When somebody acts that way, people can sense it.

Finally, if you believe the Mayor of New York, the NYPD already knows his identity. Why the Mayor revealed this is beyond me but if true, it’s only a matter of time before he is captured..

I hope you’ll excuse these musings of an old investigator. After all, to this day, when certain people around these parts hear my name, they sometimes say “Aren’t you the guy who found Patty Hearst?”

That’s not exactly accurate, but I’ll take the complement. It will be 50 years next September since Howard Kohn and I published “The Inside Story” of Patty Hearst and the SLA in Rolling Stone. 

For what it’s worth, old investigators sometimes notice details that others miss. One other thing — the fugitive will likely repeat similar mistakes to those he’s already made. People have patterns.


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