Thursday, December 19, 2024

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:

at No comments:

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

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: 

 

at No comments:

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 5)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.
at No comments:

Monday, December 16, 2024

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: 

at No comments:

Sunday, December 15, 2024

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:

at No comments:

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 1995. 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

HEADLINES:

at No comments:

Friday, December 13, 2024

Who Killed Betty Van Patter?


A little over fifty years ago, 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.

According to Coleman, Lipset’s notes were later obtained by Betty’s family.

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.)

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)