Inside the Case File

How investigators hit a dead end in the Van Patter case

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 is 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 do know 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 along these lines, her attorney, Charles Garry, terminated the interview.

And that effectively concluded the most active part of the investigation into the case by the Berkeley Police. They did not have enough evidence to arrest Elaine Brown for the murder of Betty Van Patter. And in any event, she may well have been innocent. But it is reasonable to say from this distance that she 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. Thus it joined the many other cold cases that remain unresolved year after year, decade after decade, probably 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 unnecessarily.

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 not Elaine Brown but Huey Newton who had ordered Betty’s murder. But Newton himself couldn’t be questioned because he too had since been murdered.

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