David Horowitz, who passed away last month at 86, was the author of Radical Son, which charted his communist upbringing, his time on the New Left, and his dealings with the Black Panther Party. Those events have been making news of late.

January 17 marked 50 years since the body of Betty Van Patter was retrieved from San Francisco Bay. She was a colleague of Horowitz at Ramparts, which was the flagship magazine of the New Left. Horowitz recruited her to keep the books at Oakland Community Learning Center, a Panthers project Horowitz helped establish. Van Patter noticed some irregularities and brought them to the attention of Elaine Brown, who was party boss in the absence of Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton, then hiding out in Cuba.

Brown’s response to the accounting issues was to fire Van Patter. On Dec. 13, 1974, Van Patter repaired to the Lamp Post, an Oakland bar owned by Huey Newton’s cousin Jimmy Ward. A man handed her a note and she followed him out the door. The 45-year-old mother of three was then raped and beaten to death, and her body dumped in the bay. The killer or killers hoped she would sleep with the fishes, but it was not to be. The murder prompted Horowitz to leave the left entirely, and in 1996 he would have plenty to say about the Panthers in Radical Son.

The Panthers’ Oakland Learning Center received a $600,000 grant from California’s superintendent of education Wilson Riles, whose son worked for the Black Panther Party. Huey Newton used the grant to support the Panthers’ enforcer squad. As Horowitz recalled, “the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto.”

New York activist Marty Kenner had warned Horowitz that Elaine Brown was “crazy” and even dangerous, once threatening to kill Kenner. “Elaine killed Betty,” Huey Newton later told Horowitz, but “if you write that I’ll deny it.”  Elaine Brown denied this, writing in 1993 that “while it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her.” 

The dangerous Panther Party enjoyed strong support in high places.

“Jerry Brown was a political ally of Elaine Brown,” Horowitz wrote. “While she was under investigation for Betty’s murder, Brown became governor and appointed a trusted Panther lawyer, J. Anthony Kline, to be his legal affairs secretary.” In that role Kline oversaw all Brown’s judicial appointments. Rose Bird, Brown’s pick for chief justice of the California Supreme Court, was 40 years old and without judicial experience.

In 10 years as California’s chief justice, Bird heard 64 capital cases and never voted to uphold a death sentence. Even for staunch death-penalty opponents, including those on the court, it defied belief to think that every case was unfounded. Among those cases was that of Theodore Frank, convicted of kidnaping, torturing, raping, murdering, and mutilating two-year-old Amy Sue Seitz in 1978. Elaine Brown had nothing to fear from Bird, but her case never got off the ground. For David Horowitz, it was all about memory against forgetting.

As the 25^th anniversary approached, Horowitz authored “Who killed Betty Van Patter?” in the December 1999 issue of Salon. At the time of the murder, “the Panthers were still being defended, by writers like Murray Kempton and Garry Wills in the pages of the New York Times, and by then-Gov. Jerry Brown of California.” The governor “was even a confidant of Elaine Brown,” who at the time of Van Patter’s murder “was running for Oakland City Council and had just secured a $250,000 grant from the Nixon administration under a federal juvenile delinquency program.” J. Anthony Kline, the trusted lawyer to whom Brown turned “when the party’s enforcers got in trouble with the law,” had become a justice on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

In 1989, Huey Newton was shot dead on an Oakland street. That same year, Panther mainstay Eldridge Cleaver (author of Soul on Ice) passed away at the age of 62. Party survivors include Bobby Seale, 88, and 82-year-old Elaine Brown.

In 2008, Brown declared her candidacy with the Green Party, which she left because it was “dominated by white people.” The Panther alum has now become an icon for state Democrats such as Mialisa Bonta, member of the California Assembly and wife of attorney general Rob Bonta.

“Elaine Brown is a social justice advocate, story teller, trailblazer, accomplished musician and a strong advocate for communities of color especially when it comes to breaking barriers to employment,” Mialisa Bonta proclaimed in 2023. In 2024, Bonta donated $1.25 million to the Black Panther Museum in Oakland. The next year marked the 50^th anniversary of  Betty Van Patter’s death.

One of the few to look into the matter was David Weir of the Center for Investigative Reporting. On Jan. 17, 2025, Weir wrote “Betty Van Patter, the Black Panthers’ bookkeeper, was murdered 50 years ago. Who killed her?” At the time of the murder, David Horowitz told Tamara Baltar, Van Patter’s 24-year-old daughter, “I think the Panthers killed your mother.” She didn’t believe it but later changed her mind.

“I believe my mother was killed by the Black Panther Party,” Baltar told the East Bay Times in 2007. “The truth is, I believe they killed her. I know they killed her. The truth is the most important thing.”

As Weir has it, “the known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death.” According to some sources, the abductors tortured Van Patter before they killed her with a massive blow to the head. The case remains officially unsolved “but the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.”

Yale law alum Jerry Brown knows that is true, but in four terms as governor (1975-1983, 2011-2019), as mayor of Oakland (1999-2007), and California attorney general (2007-2011) Brown took no action on the case. J. Anthony Kline became presiding judge of California’s appeal courts, retired in 2021, served a term as a juvenile court judge in San Francisco, and now appears on various judicial boards and committees. Never a word from Kline on the Van Patter case that anybody can find.

With his wife such a fan of Elaine Brown, Rob Bonta shows no interest in the Van Patter murder case. With state officials looking the other way, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now under the leadership of Kash Patel, should take the lead. Special agents can examine the evidence with all the scientific tools at their command, and interview those with knowledge of the case.

As his appointment of Rose Bird confirms, Jerry Brown has no objection to the death penalty as long as it is applied by and not to violent criminals. In 1986, voters booted Rose Bird and Brown picks Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin by a margin of 67 percent to 33 percent. The voice of the people had no effect on Brown, who has a different standard for those he regards as oppressed minorities. For example, when AIM militant Dennis Banks fled to California, Gov. Jerry Brown refused to extradite the fugitive. 

As CalMatters noted in 2018, “since 2011, Brown has pardoned 1,332 inmates, nearly four times more than the previous four governors combined. It’s also more than three times as many pardons as Brown issued during his first stint as governor between 1975 and 1983.” In one of his final acts, Gov. Brown signed Senate Bill 1391, which allows anyone under 16 to murder any number of people, be tried only in juvenile court, and gain release at age 25. In his signing message, Brown spoke of “a path of redemption and reform wherever possible.”

For all but the willfully blind, Jerry Brown’s seminary stint was a draft dodge and his “simple lifestyle” antics nothing more than a pose. The San Francisco Democrat, a three-time presidential candidate, is now a multi-millionaire living on a sprawling 2500-acre estate in Colusa County. On the other hand, Brown hasn’t exactly retired.

In 2024, the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, similar to the 1978 People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation (Proposition 13), qualified for the ballot. Brown leveraged the state’s compliant supreme court to take it off the November ballot, a blatant disenfranchisement of the voters.

Californians will find it hard to think of a politician with more contempt for the people and more sympathy for criminals than Jerry Brown. Despite his wealth and prestige, the San Francisco Democrat often looks as though something deep inside is bothering him. All things considered, it could be the murder of Betty Van Patter.

What did Jerry Brown, close ally of Elaine Brown, know about Van Patter’s murder and when did he know it? What does J. Anthony Kline know about the murders committed by the Panthers’ enforcement squad? As Van Patter’s daughter said, “the truth is the most important thing,” and the people have a right to know.