Betty Louise Van Patter (née Floyd; October 12, 1929 – c. December 13, 1974),[1] was a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, although she herself was white. Van Patter was murdered, a crime which remains unsolved.
Biography
After serving as a bookkeeper for Ramparts magazine, Van Patter became an aide to Panther leader Elaine Brown in 1974, after being introduced to the Party by David Horowitz.[2]
Disappearance and discovery of body
Van Patter went missing on December 13, 1974. Some weeks later, her severely beaten corpse was found on a San Francisco Bay beach.
There was insufficient evidence for police to charge anyone with van Patter's death, but the Black Panther Party was "almost universally believed to be responsible," wrote Frank Browning in 1987.[3] According to other authors, Huey Newton allegedly confessed to a friend that he had ordered Van Patter's murder, and that Van Patter had been tortured and raped before being killed.[4][5]Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 that: "There is no doubt now, and there was precious little then, of the Panther leadership's complicity in this revolting crime".[6] "While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her", Elaine Brown wrote in 1993. Brown said Van Patter was fired because she was too nosy about the Black Panther Party and was no longer of use to the party.[7] She had reportedly threatened to make public her discovery that the party doctored its books and had major tax problems.[7]
