Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (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. Today he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Colombia University.

Though he has done well in New York, Flores Forbes has not always been 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 had come 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 in charge of doing any dirty work required. Furthermore, legal investigator David Fechheimerindicated to his mentor, Hal Lipset, that Forbes was the Panther responsible for Betty’s death.

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 a 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 half-century since Betty Van Patter was killed, her murder has been mentioned in 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 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 this or 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 was still emotionally entwined with Betty 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 that the Panthers were at fault. But they could not build a plausible case based on solid evidence – -everything was circumstantial. Elaine Brown’s statements over the years have done little to exonerate her and the Panthers from suspicion, 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 probably 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, which concludes the series, will appear tomorrow.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

**********************

Gift Subscriptions: Holiday Special Offer: Please consider giving a subscription to someone who might appreciate it at a 25% discounted rate. That translates to roughly the cost of a cappuccino per month. Thank you. Those paid subscriptions help make this newsletter possible.

***********************

HEADLINES: 

• Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes He Has No Clue How to Govern (TNR)

• Elon Musk’s X Endgame (Atlantic)

• Government funding bill clears Congress and heads to President Biden, averting a shutdown (AP)

• What is the debt ceiling? Inside Trump's unprecedented demand to eliminate it. (NBC)

• With speakership on the line, Johnson is ever more reliant on Trump (WP)

• Drones spotted on America’s east coast highlight a bigger problem (Economist)

• The FAA temporary banned drone flights in parts of New Jersey. (WP)

• At least 2 dead, nearly 70 injured when car plows into German Christmas market: Officials (ABC)

• France’s military is being ousted from more African countries. Here’s why (AP)

• Russia struggles to tame inflation in ‘overheating’ war economy (Financial Times)

• China Unsheathes Its Doomsday Artillery (National Review)

• Why sea level rise is skyrocketing across the U.S. South (WP)

• AI Chatbots Can Be Jailbroken to Answer Any Question Using Very Simple Loopholes (Gizmodo)

• Is the Tech Industry Already on the Cusp of an A.I. Slowdown? (NYT)

• Ukraine's vast war data trove to train AI models (Reuters)

• OpenAI announces new o3 models (TechCrunch)

• Faded Outline Of Ex-Girlfriend’s Name Still Visible On Stocking (The Onion)

 

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 8)

By 1977, when Huey P. Newton returned from his exile in Cuba, the Black Panther Party was in tatters. Newton was frequently sighted drunk and/or high on cocaine and 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 conversations ranging from poetry to philosophy to politics and beyond. 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 particular claim hard to believe, probably part of the myth he and others had constructed about his rise to fame. But up until to this point I had only experienced Huey’s charming and brilliant side when meeting him in person. 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, 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 figure out that 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 man. 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 absurd. He then claimed that they all had quit the party some weeks earlier. As he kept drinking during our interview, his speech was becoming somewhat slurred and erratic.

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

His lawyer, Otis, murmured an apology and then followed him into an adjoining room. For an extended period of time, Avery and I could hear Newton 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 our 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, and he seemed emotionally flat and remote.

Many years later, when Forbes published his memoir, he took personal responsibility for the botched assassination attempt in Richmond, 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 and killed 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. 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 Van Patter, 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 the false charge 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 One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

**********************

Gift Subscriptions: Holiday Special Offer: Please consider giving a subscription to someone who might appreciate it at a 25% discounted rate. That translates to roughly the cost of a cappuccino per month. Thank you. Those paid subscriptions help make this newsletter possible.

***********************

HEADLINES:

• Mangione faces federal murder and stalking charges over UnitedHealthcare CEO killing (NPR)

• US government shutdown looms after House rejects Donald Trump-backed funding bill (Financial Times)

• Republicans scramble to avert shutdown after Trump scuttles spending deal (BBC)

• Musk’s dangerous, exaggerated conflation of social media and democracy (WP)

• Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms (NYT)

• Johnson’s speakership in doubt as possible government shutdown looms (WP)

• Trump calls for abolishing the debt ceiling (NBC)

• Immigration drives US population growth to highest rate in 23 years as residents pass 340 million (AP)

• Will The U.S. Ban TikTok? Here's The Latest—And What We Know (Forbes)

• US life expectancy rose last year to highest levels since pandemic (The Hill)

• Fani Willis disqualified from Trump election case by Georgia appellate court (WP)

• How the Assads used a civil war to turn Syria into a narco state (NPR)

• President Joe Biden's administration has set a new target under the Paris climate agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 61%-66% below 2005 levels by 2035. Officials called the goal achievable by states even if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on vows to reverse federal policies. (Reuters)

• Majority of Americans oppose Trump’s proposals to test democracy’s limits (WP)

• UK arts and media reject plan to let AI firms use copyrighted material (Guardian)

• Google reveals AI ‘reasoning’ model that ‘explicitly shows its thoughts’ (Verge)

• New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views (TechCrunch)

• Biden plan would encourage AI data centers on federal lands (WP)

• How OpenAI Hopes to Sever Its Nonprofit Roots (NYT)

• How AI Can Read Way Better than Humans Ever Will (Medium)

• Clarence Thomas Torn Over Case Where Both Sides Offer Compelling Scuba Trips (The Onion)

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (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 believe 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 that might have shed light on these matters, her attorney, Charles Garry, terminated the interview.

And that effectively concluded the most active part of the investigation into the murder case by the Berkeley Police. They did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone for the murder of Betty Van Patter. They suspected Elaine Brown knew more than she told them, but they couldn’t force her to talk. But it is reasonable to say 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 completely. Thus it joined the many other cold cases that remain unresolved year after year, decade after decade, perhaps forever.

David Horowitz, meanwhile, publicly completed his odd 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.

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 Huey Newton who had ordered Betty’s murder. But Newton couldn’t be questioned because he was dead, having been gunned down in 1989 by a young man trying to impress the Black Guerrilla Family, a narcotics prison gang, on the streets of Oakland.

(Part Eight will appear tomorrow.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

**********************

NOTE: Holiday Special Offer: Give a gift subscription to this newsletter to a loved one at a 25% discounted rate!

***********************

HEADLINES:

• Elon Musk leads charge to kill spending bill meant to avert government shutdown (NBC)

• CNN commentator Scott Jennings received swift backlash after he went on a tirade about Caitlin Clark's recent comments about white privilege. But why are conservatives so angered by the WNBA star's remarks? Experts weigh in. [HuffPost]

• Fed cuts interest rates a third time, points to inflation as challenge for 2025 (WP)

• Disney’s Decision to Settle Trump Defamation Suit Prompts Backlash at ABC News (WSJ)

• This year’s school shootings in numbers: 31,000 children affected across 21 states (WP)

• Key takeaways from MLB report on pitcher injuries (MLB.com)

• In reversal, key House panel votes to release Matt Gaetz ethics report (CNN)

• Trump pushes for FBI probe of Republican Liz Cheney over Jan. 6 panel (Reuters)

• Supreme Court to hear challenge to banning TikTok in the United States (WP)

• Behind Germany’s Political Turmoil, a Stagnating Economy (NYT)

• China’s Slowdown Has Changed the Trade War (Foreign Affairs)

• Russia detained an Uzbek man who had confessed to planting and detonating a bomb which killed a top general, Igor Kirillov. In a video, the unnamed suspect is shown saying he had come to Moscow at the orders of Ukraine's intelligence services. (Reuters)

• Does Trump want Putin to get Ukraine’s $26 trillion in gas and minerals? (WP)

• A third of psychologists won't take insurance: survey (Axios)

• ‘He kept going until he couldn’t’: why do boomer men refuse to slow down? (Guardian)

• OpenAI brings ChatGPT to your landline (TechCrunch)

• X Rolls Out Updates to Its Grok AI Chatbot (SocialMediaToday)

• CEO Motivates Self By Keeping Own Photo On Desk (The Onion)

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (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. 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 One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

HEADLINES: 

• Police ID 15-year-old girl as Abundant Life Christian School shooter in Wisconsin (ABC)

• Trump sues Des Moines Register, vows to pursue more defamation claims (Reuters)

• ‘Your poll made Trump mad’ is not a valid basis for a lawsuit (WP)

• Judge denies Trump’s request to advance suit against Bob Woodward (The Hill)

• Scoop: Top editors stiff the Washington Post (Axios)

• Trump Is About to Betray His Rural Supporters (Atlantic)

• In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream (WP)

• An important party panel picked Rep. Gerry Connolly over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to lead fellow Democrats on the House Oversight Committee when the next Congress takes over in January. [HuffPost]

• Luigi Mangione indicted on murder charges for shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (CNBC)

• German Government Collapses at a Perilous Time for Europe (NYT)

• Honda and Nissan to start talks on potential mega-merger (Guardian)

• Kyiv behind killing of Russian general in Moscow, Ukrainian official says (WP)

• Assad’s Fall Upends the Middle East’s Largest Drug Empire (WSJ)

• Nuclear bunker sales increase, despite expert warnings they aren’t going to provide protection (AP)

• Panel warns against vitamin D, calcium use to prevent falls in older adults (WP)

• I pitted ChatGPT search against Perplexity to see which was the best AI search engine, and the results surprised me (TechRadar)

• What are AI ‘world models,’ and why do they matter? (TechCrunch)

• Google’s new AI tool uses image prompts instead of text (CNN)

• Where the US-China trade war meets AI hype (Financial Times)

• FEMA Administrator Resigns After Accidentally Playing Porn On Emergency Alert System (The Onion)

 

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 5)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 4)

In the mid-1970s, when we were reporters at Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I decided to take am in-depth look into the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to disrupt progressive organizations. We focused first on the Black Panther Party.

In a 1967 memorandum, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had stated that the program’s intent was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.”

By September 1968, the Panthers had emerged as the leading edge of the black power movement in the U.S. A key FBI memo solicited suggestions from its field agents for new ways to “create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the (Panthers), as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.”

In another memo, in July 1969, Hoover declared that the Panthers were “without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Starting late in 1968, there were numerous police raids on Panther offices around the country, sometimes including federal law enforcement officials. Several Panther leaders were killed or wounded, many others were sent to prison, or fled into exile.

In the course of gathering documents under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing Panthers and ex-Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown, Bergman and I were able to document hundreds of actions taken by FBI agents in pursuit of Hoover’s stated goals.

Many of these involved “disinformation,” sending letters purportedly from Cleaver to Huey Newton, for example, or vice versa, promoting the growing paranoia and distrust that already was driving the two leaders toward an eventual split.

I interviewed Elaine Brown during this period. She was the acting head of the party while Newton was in exile in Cuba. She was smart, articulate and projected a sense of power.

“The government didn’t succeed in destroying us,” Brown told me. “We survived…These motherfuckers intended to kill every one of us. But it’s too late now. Our ideas are out there –- they cannot be erased from the minds of the people.”

After months of work, Bergman and I produced a story that presented an exhaustive catalogue of the federal government’s war against the Panthers. We also noted that the FBI’s relentless attempts to disrupt the organization “encouraged local police departments to harass the group” as well.

But the process of reviewing a huge number of law enforcement files had also exposed to us evidence suggesting there was a sinister side to the Panthers, including internecine violence that had nothing to do with government provocation but was more like ruthless gang activity.

In 1977, once we had founded the Center for Investigative Reporting and opened an office in Oakland, we received numerous complaints from people in that community that the Panthers were by then “out of control.” Several Panther sources stated that Newton in particular was wreaking havoc inside the inner-city neighborhoods by committing random violent assaults, often fueled by consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time.

We decided that CIR should look into these allegations, and the result in 1978 was a long investigative article called “The Party’s Over,” by a courageous Berkeley journalist, Kate Coleman, and a veteran police reporter, Paul Avery, published in New Times magazine.

(Avery was later portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 Hollywood movie “Zodiac” for his work on the unsolved case of a notorious serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Their article, “The Party’s Over,” documented dozens of violent incidents caused by Newton and his “security squad” against members of the party who had provoked Newton’s wrath, as well as non-party members, including a prostitute he killed, a tailor he pistol-whipped to the verge of death, and other random victims of his rage.

CIR was heavily criticized by the left for doing this story, but I’d long since grown used to such reactions. We were journalists, not political partisans, so naturally both political extremes hated us for exposing their dirty secrets. It came with the territory.

As they were pursuing their investigation, Coleman and Avery had come upon the unsolved murder of Betty Van Patter, and thanks to Avery’s connections, gained access to the Berkeley Police Department file on the case.

Quoting that file:

“11:30 a.m. January 17th, 1975: Sgt. R. Scofield, piloting San Mateo County Sheriff’s Helicopter 2-H-10, was on patrol above San Francisco Bay when he spotted a body floating about a mile south of the San Mateo Hayward Bridge, between markers 670 and 680.

“He immediately put out distress calls to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Foster City Police Department, and the San Mateo Coroner’s Office. Within 15 minutes, the Coast Guard was on the scene, recovered the body, and took it to Old Warder Pier, on the corner of East Hillsdale Avenue and Teal Street, where representatives of the police department and coroner’s office quickly gathered.

“The medical examiner observed that the body was that of an adult female in a state of “moderate to severe post-mortem decomposition.”

“The remains were transported to Chope Hospital for an examination and identification. The body was placed in container #7 and sealed at 2:05 p.m. An autopsy was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following morning.”

It took three days for the coroner to determine an identity through the use of dental charts, but there was little doubt about the cause of death. The victim had been murdered -- killed by a massive blow to the head -- a “fractured calvarium” is noted in the autopsy report.

There was no water in the woman’s lungs, which meant she was dead before her body got into the bay. The coroner estimated she was in the water for around three weeks, drifting on the currents, back and forth along the tide lines.

She was identified as Betty Van Patter.

(Part Five will appear tomorrow.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

HEADLINES: 

• How UnitedHealthcare and other mega-insurers came to dominate the $4.5 trillion health care industry that Americans both hate and rely upon (Fortune)

• Trump’s CDC pick wouldn’t let go of false theory vaccines cause autism (WP)

• Chris Christie says he saw drones above his home amid reports of strange lights in NJ, other states (USA Today)

• Elon Musk put $277 million into the election. Now he’s $200 billion richer. (WP)

• Syria After Assad (New Yorker)

• US in ‘direct contact’ with Syria rebels, Blinken says (Politico)

• Syria Shudders as Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light (NYT)

• • Syria Shudders as Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light (NYT)

  • Big Chinese naval exercise leaves Taiwan and US struggling for response (Financial Times)

  • Turkey using ‘war on terror’ tactics, such as abductions and secret detentions, on critics in other countries (WP)

  • Musk's xAI offers free access to Grok-2 AI chatbot (Reuters)

  • Sam Altman reckons with a growing threat to OpenAI: Elon Musk (Financial Times)

  • Exclusive: Major cloud providers could get key role in AI chip access outside the US, sources say (Reuters)

  • Years Of Inbreeding Causes Dog To Birth British Man (The Onion)

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 3)

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.)

Part One

Part Two

HEADLINES:

• ABC News settles defamation suit with Trump for $15 million (ABC)

• Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses (WP)

• Why hasn’t the US been trying to fix its health insurance problems? (CNN)

• The International Court of Justice Takes On Climate Change (New Yorker)

• President-elect wants his daughter-in-law in the Senate. DeSantis has a big choice to make. (WP)

• South Korea’s President Is Impeached After Martial Law Crisis (NYT)

• South Korea lawmakers vote to impeach President Yoon (Reuters)

• Obscurity awaits Bashar al-Assad in Moscow after Putin offered personal escape route (Guardian)

• Deception and despair: Assad’s final hours in Syria (Reuters)

• Could Israel’s Netanyahu be about to agree to a Gaza ceasefire? (Al Jazeera)

• Trump backtracks on promise to reduce grocery prices (WP)

• Drone sighting temporarily shuts down runways at New York airport (ABC)

• Polio survivor Mitch McConnell criticizes efforts to undermine vaccine (WP)

• The mysterious promise of the quantum future (Financial Times)

• Robot Rodents (Hackaday)

• ‘Do we exist?’ A robot news site shadows a Northwest town (Seattle Times)

• The latest housing scam: Using AI to impersonate your agent or lender (WP)

• OpenAI Fires Back at Elon Musk’s Lawsuit (NYT)

• Yes Lyrics To Be Added To New Testament (The Onion)