My ignorance was dangerous to them and to myself. Finally, only the police had ever accused the Panthers of actual crimes. Everyone I knew and respected on the left—and beyond the left—regarded the police allegations against the Panthers as malicious libels by a racist power structure bent on holding down and eliminating militant black leadership. It was one of the most powerful liberal myths of the times.
One Friday night, a month or so after Deacon’s funeral, a black man walked into the Berkeley Square, a neighborhood bar that Betty frequented, and handed her a note. Betty, who seemed to know the messenger, read the note and left shortly afterwards. She was never seen alive again.
On the following Monday, I received an anxious phone call from Tammy Van Patter, Betty’s 18-year-old daughter, who had also worked for me at Ramparts. She told me her mother was missing and asked for my help. I phoned Elaine, but got Joan Kelley instead. Joan told me that Elaine had had a fight with Betty on Thursday and fired her. (Later, Elaine lied to investigating police, telling them she had fired Betty the previous Friday and hadn’t seen her for a week before she disappeared.)
When Elaine returned my call, she immediately launched into a tirade against Betty, calling her an “idiot” who believed in astrology, and who “wanted to know too much.” She said that Betty was employed by a bookkeeping firm with offices in the Philippines, and was probably working for the C.I.A. Then Elaine turned on me for recommending that Betty be hired in the first place. She noted that I was “bawling” at Deacon’s funeral and had not “come around for a long time.” Perhaps I was scared by the dangers the Party faced, she suggested. Then she asked why was I so concerned about this white woman who was crazy, when all those brothers had been gunned down by the police? White people didn’t seem to care that much when it was black people dying. I didn’t answer her back.
A week later, when Betty still had not turned up, I called Elaine one more time, and was subjected to another torrent of abuse culminating in a threat only thinly veiled: “If you were run over by a car or something, David, I would be very upset, because people would say I did it.”
I was visited in my home by the Berkeley police. They told me they were convinced the Panthers had taken Betty hostage and had probably already killed her. From her daughter Tammy I learned that the very small circle of Betty’s friends and acquaintances had all been questioned since her disappearance, and none had seen her for some time. She had left her credit cards and birth control pills at home, and thus could not have been going on an unexpected trip when she left the Berkeley Square with the mysterious messenger. Just to the rendezvous to which she had been summoned.
Betty was found on January 13, 1975, five weeks after she had disappeared, when her water-logged body washed up on the western shore of San Francisco Bay. Her head had been bashed in by a blunt instrument and police estimated that she had been in the water for seventeen days. She was 42 years old.
By this time, everything I knew about Betty’s disappearance led to the conclusion that the Panthers had killed her. Everything I knew about the Party and the way it worked led me to believe that Elaine Brown had given the order to have her killed. Betty’s murder shattered my life and changed it forever. But even as I sank into a long period of depression and remorse, Elaine’s star began to rise in Oakland’s political firmament. A white woman who worked for the Black Panther Party had been murdered, but—despite our rhetoric about police conspiracies and racist oppression—there seemed to be no consequences for Elaine or her Party.
The press made nothing of it. When Peter Collier approached Marilyn Baker, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for Channel 5 with the story, she said she “wouldn’t touch it unless a black reporter did it first.” No black reporter did. Betty’s friends in the Bay Area progressive community, who generally were alert to every injustice, even in lands so remote they could not locate them on a map, kept their silence about this one in their own backyard. Peter also went to the police who told him: “You guys have been cutting our balls off for the last ten years. You destroy the police and then you expect them to solve the murders of your friends.”
While the investigation of Betty’s death continued, Elaine ran for the Oakland City Council and garnered 44 percent of the vote. The following year, under her leadership, the Party provided the political machine that elected Oakland’s first black mayor, Lionel Wilson. Elaine herself secured the endorsement of Governor Jerry Brown and was a Jerry Brown delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1976. (Before making his run, Brown phoned Elaine to find out what kind of support the Party could provide him.) Tony Cline, a Panther lawyer and confidante of Elaine, was also a college roommate of the Governor and became a member of his cabinet. Using her leverage in Sacramento, Elaine was able to get approval for an extension of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, which had been blocked by environmentalists. On the basis of this achievement, she began negotiations with the head of Oakland’s Council for Economic Development to control 10,000 new city jobs that the freeway would create.
In all these successes, the Learning Center was her showpiece. Capitalizing on liberal concerns for Oakland’s inner city poor, she obtained contributions and grants for the school, and bought herself a red Mercedes. The Party’s political influence climbed to its zenith. It was an all-American nightmare.
While Elaine’s power grew to alarming proportions, I intensified my private investigations into the Panther reality that had previously eluded me. I had to confront my blindness and understand the events that had led to such an irreversible crossroads in my life, and ended Betty’s. I interrogated everyone I could trust who had been around the Panthers about the dark side of their operations, seeking answers to the questions of Betty’s death.
I discovered the existence of the Panther “Squad”—an enforcer group that Huey had organized inside the Party to maintain discipline and carry out criminal activities in the East Oakland community.33 I learned of beatings, arson, extortion and murders. The Learning Center itself had been used as the pretext for a shakedown operation of after-hours clubs which were required to “donate” weekly sums and whose owners were gunned down when they refused.
Many years after the publication of “Black Murder Inc.,” a member of the Squad, whom the police believed to be Betty’s probable killer, Flores Forbes, described its criminal activities, in particular its shakedowns of the afterhours clubs, while omitting the murders it committed in the course of the shakedowns, in a memoir called Will You Die With Me?, July, 2006
I learned about the personalities in the Squad, and about their involvement in Betty’s murder. One of them, Robert Heard, was known as “Big Bob” because he was 6'8" and weighed 400 pounds.44 Big Bob told friends, whom I talked to, that the Squad had killed Betty and more than a dozen other people, in the brief period between 1972 and 1976. The other victims were all black, and included the Vice President of the Black Student Union at Grove Street College, whose misfortune was to have inadvertently insulted a member of the Squad.
After the Party disintegrated in the mid-Seventies, Heard continued his criminal career and was eventually convicted of a non-Panther related homicide.
Betty’s children commissioned Hal Lipset, a private eye with connections to the Left (and to the Panthers themselves who had employed him during Huey’s trials) to investigate the case. Lipset confirmed the police conclusion that the Panthers had killed Betty. They also tried to get the case against the Panthers reopened, but without success.
In the summer of 1977, unable to stomach exile any longer, Huey suddenly returned from Cuba. He was given a welcome by the local Left, culminating in a ceremony and “citizenship award” presented by Democratic Assemblyman Tom Bates, husband of Berkeley’s radical mayor, Loni Hancock.
Not everyone was ready to turn a blind eye to the Panther reality. The minute Huey stepped off the plane, Alameda Country prosecutors began preparing to try him for the murder of Kathleen Smith, the 17-year-old prostitute he had killed three years earlier.
Huey made preparations too. One day before the preliminary trial hearings were to begin in Oakland, Squad member Flores Forbes and another Panther gunmen tried to break into a house in the nearby city of Richmond, where they expected to find the prosecution’s eye-witness, Crystal Gray, and assassinate her.55