Saturday, December 13, 2025

Cold Case: Betty Van Patter

At 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 then 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.

***

Roughly five weeks earlier, on the night of December 13, 1974, 45-year-old Betty Van Patter 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, this time 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 anything about Betty Van Patter until her body was found floating in the bay by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s helicopter.

(Part 2 tomorrow.)

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Friday, December 12, 2025

Bad Words

Yesterday I published an essay about words. Although it was mostly light-hearted, it made the point up top that words can hurt. And we live in a time when words are being used by certain people to cause a lot of other people a ton of hurt.

Now I flat-out love words — big ones, little ones, those with multiple syllables or the humble monosyllabic. Stringing them together is a challenge not unlike hanging Christmas lights. You must avoid tangling them up in the process, as the whole depends on each unit being able to shine on its own.

Setting that to one side, I’m particularly offended by those who abuse our language to injure people. And that is precisely what is happening in America.

Our Wordsmith-in-Chief is waging a war of words (and guns) to round up people and send them away. He is breaking up families, communities and demolishing the very idea that is America.

He’s been abusing words to accomplish this purpose for a long time. From his unfounded charges that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, during his last campaign, to his disparaging comments this week about Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, this guy has consistently spewed hateful, racist lies in support of his agenda to ethnically cleanse the U.S. of non-white people.

These human rights abuses of the most vulnerable among us are unprecedented by a President. And there are words for a that. 

Despot, authoritarian, dictator, war criminal, America’s Hitler. 

Take your pick.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025

Words

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words shall never hurt me. — children’s rhyme

______

That old kids’ rhyme may still be an effective retort to verbal bullies but it is not true in a literal sense. Words hurt, of course, and they hurt relentlessly, cruelly and sometimes irreversibly.

On the other hand, words also can bring pleasure as surely as food, drink, stories and sex.

Thus for many of us, word games are among our favorite daily habits.

The venerable Scrabble and the addictive Wordle are two of my personal favorites. For years, two of my sons competed in “Words With Friends.”

And then there are Semantle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, Nerdle, and hello wordl, among many others.

Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle says “What’s fun about Wordle, I think, is what you can tease out, based on what you know about language. What the word should be.”

Some of what goes wrong in our national and international dialogues can be traced to words and what they should mean. Political and military opponents often seem to be talking right past each other.

Certainly this is the case between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East.

But back to Wordle, where I’ve won 97 percent of the time, which is fairly good but not great.

During my recent trip to Arizona to visit my three sisters, one revealing moment found all four of us drinking coffee or tea and playing Wordle at the same time.

It must be in the genes.

(This is from 2022.)

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Teammates

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 the first half 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.

(*) In 2024, CIR and Mother Jones have merged into a single team.

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

I’ve worked with many partners. 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 collectively arrive at an unusual perspective on the facts.

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 five years ago.)

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Deana Carter - Strawberry Wine (Official Music Video)

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Tuesday, December 09, 2025

Mutual, Competing Truths

“You’re right from your side / I’m right from mine,” Bob Dylan wrote in One Too Many Mornings, which is among his lesser-known songs. Similar sentiments from many other artists try to capture the convoluted nature of mutual, competing truths.

And this raises a dilemma for journalists attempting to cover corporate and civic affairs. 

Comes now an incident from our “Circle of Poison” investigation in the 1970s and 1980s. At first we were focused on the moral aspect of U.S. companies shipping banned pesticides to Third World countries, which exposed farmworkers and their families to health risks, and polluted the environment.

At an international gathering sponsored by the UN about this issue in Mexico, a representative of Dow Chemical approached me and said, “I understand your concern but what’s wrong with helping a hungry world eat?”

His point was that even if the pesticides were considered too dangerous for us here in the U.S., food scarcity was such in poorer countries that such compromises made sense. After all, at least in the short term, pesticides boost food productivity.

His comment got me thinking and back home at the Center for Investigative Reporting we started looking more closely into what crops the hazardous pesticides were being applied to. That research led to a breakthrough in our analysis, as almost all of the food crops sprayed in Third World countries did not go to local people at all but were exported right back here to the U.S.A..

This was the final piece of the “circle,” and it guaranteed the book would cause more waves than had we solely focused on the impacts overseas.

When I looked back on it, years later, that guy from Dow was right, but we were right too. And in this case of mutually competitive truths, I hoped that the pen would prove to be mightier than the sprayer.

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Monday, December 08, 2025

The Ghosts of Wounded Knee


Pine Ridge Reservation, site of the Wounded Knee massacre, was an eerily beautiful place of wind-swept plains that seemed haunted by the voices of the dead echoing from the Black Hills in the distance.

Home to the Lakota (Sioux) people, Pine Ridge was central in the 1970s to a concerted effort by Native Americans to demand their rights and reclaim their land from the U.S. government.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged as the leading voice of the activists in that uprising. I went to Pine Ridge to look into the unsolved murder of AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash, a 30-year-old mother of two and member of the Mi’kmaq tribe who had traveled from Nova Scotia to join the rebellion.

Aquash had organized demonstrations and spoke publicly on behalf of native rights. She also was AIM co-founder Dennis Banks’ lover at a time when AIM had been placed under FBI surveillance by President Richard Nixon.

“These white people think this country belongs to them,” Aquash wrote in a letter to her sister at the time. “The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.”

Violence haunted AIM and by 1975, more than 60 Indians had been killed, mostly in unsolved cases. Activists accused the U.S. government of waging a deadly war against their people. Tensions between AIM and the FBI on Pine Ridge reached a boiling point in 1975 when in an armed battle with AIM members, two FBI agents were killed.

(AIM’s Leonard Peltier was later convicted of these murders. His sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden — a move widely criticized by Republicans.)

During their investigation of this case, authorities detained Aquash and grilled her but then released her, leading some of her AIM colleagues to suspect she might be an informer.

In February 1976, her decomposed body was discovered by a rancher working his property line; she had been killed execution-style by a single shot to the head.

For Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman and I traveled to Pine Ridge to try and find out who was behind her murder. With investigative stories of this kind, sometimes you solve the mystery but usually you don’t.

In Anna Mae’s case, we did not solve the mystery. We did write a long story about the case, which may have helped raise awareness of the crisis at Wounded Knee.

Over the years, the mystery bubbled to the surface from time to time until finally (in 2004 and 2010) authorities were able to convict two low-level AIM members of her killing.

But according to a piece in the New York Times Magazine by Eric Konigsberg, these two were essentially the fall guys for the crime, which was in fact engineered by a group of AIM women known as the Pie Patrol.

Almost certainly, according to Konigsberg, higher-ups ordered the Pie Patrol to have Anna Mae murdered. If so, the guilty parties apparently went to their graves with their secret.

According to Lakota legend, when the body of a murder victim is moved, a strong wind will blow. When you stand out on Pine Ridge today, you can feel that wind and hear the voices of ghosts echoing around you.

One of those is that of Anna Mae Aquash.

(I published this originally in December 2020.)

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Sunday, December 07, 2025

Guitar Picker With a Smile


Molly Tuttle is one of those artists who catches my eye for her bluegrass-style guitar picking, sweet singing voice and her smile. Many people can perform but fewer seem so genuinely happy while they are doing it.

She first came to my attention a few years ago with her appearance at the Ryman in Nashville on New Year’s Eve, and again it was her smile that stood out. She was among a dozen or more musicians on stage on that occasion but she was the only one smiling.

Molly Tuttle was diagnosed with alopecia areata when she was three years old, which quickly progressed to alopecia universalis, resulting in total body hair loss.

She wears wigs during her performances, but sometimes before the right crowd she rips it off at the end, to cheers from her fans.

Here’s to Molly Tuttle and singing with a smile.

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Molly Tuttle - That’s Gonna Leave A Mark (Sailboat Sessions)

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