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In Radical Son, David Horowitz charted his Communist upbringing, his service with the New Left, and his dealings with the Black Panther Party in Oakland. That account also provides an instruction manual for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now under the leadership of Kash Patel.

Before Patel was born, Ramparts editor David Horowitz raised money for the Oakland Community Learning Center, the Black Panthers school that became the Party’s base of operations. In 1974, David recruited colleague Betty Van Patter to keep the Learning Center’s books. Van Patter spotted irregularities in the records brought them to attention of Elaine Brown, who took over Party leadership when co-founder Huey Newton fled to Cuba.

On December 13, 1974, Brown fired Van Patter, who 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. On January 17, 1975, police fished Van Patter’s decomposed body from San Francisco Bay. Betty had been raped and beaten to death.

“I think the Panthers killed your mother,” David Horowitz told Tamara Baltar, Betty’s 24-year-old daughter. She didn’t believe David and neither did prominent politicians and journalists.

“At the time, 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,” wrote David in Salon in December of 1999, as the murder marked 25 years.

“At the time of Betty’s death, Elaine was running for Oakland City Council and had just secured a $250,000 grant from the Nixon administration under a federal juvenile delinquency program,” David recalled. “J. Anthony Kline, the consigliore to whom she had been able to turn when the party’s enforcers got in trouble with the law, was about to be appointed to Gov. [Jerry] Brown’s cabinet. Today Kline is a justice on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.” In Radical Son, David outlined the historical parallel:

Trotsky had described the Communist parties of the world as the frontier guards for the Soviet Union. Their function was to explain away Stalin’s crimes, put obstacles in the path of those who resisted his policies, and discredit witnesses who testified against them. The New Left had formed a similar frontier guard around the Panthers and their crimes.

As David learned, “the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto.” On the east coast, Panther leaders “tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.” Yale law students Hillary Rodham and Bill Lann Lee organized demonstrations “to shut down the university and stop the trial of Panther leaders” who killed Rackley.

“On a far smaller scale,” David explained in 1999, “the Panther killings were an American version of the ‘Katyn massacre,’ the infamous murder of Polish officers carried out on Stalin’s orders that the left had denied and kept hidden for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives settled the ‘dispute’ for good. It was much harder for me to understand why the Panthers should be able to get away with these murders in democratic America, and why the nation’s press should turn such a blind eye to a group that the nation’s law enforcement had made an object of its attentions.”

One of the few to look into the matter was David Weir of the Center for Investigative Reporting, who by 1999 had become an editor at Salon. On January 17, 2025, a full 50 years after the discovery of Van Patter’s body, Weir wrote “Betty Van Patter, the Black Panthers’ bookkeeper, was murdered 50 years ago. Who killed her?”

As Weir has it, “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.” Van Patter’s daughter has also had a change of heart.

“I believe my mother was killed by the Black Panther Party,” Balter 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.” In her 1993 A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown wrote: “While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her.” By contrast, in Radical Son, Huey Newton tells David,  “Elaine killed Betty,” but “if you write that I’ll deny it.”

In 1989, Huey Newton was shot dead on an Oakland street. That same year Panther mainstay Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice) passed away at the age of 62. Party survivors include Bobby Seale, 88, and 82-year-old Elaine brown, an icon for state Democrats such as Mialisa Bonta a 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,” Bonta proclaimed in 2023. In 2024 Bonta donated $1.25 million to the Black Panther Museum in Oakland and 2025 marked 50 since Betty Van Patter was found dead in San Francisco Bay. The case remains officially unsolved, notes Weir, “but the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.”

Yale law alum Jerry Brown knows that, 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. The former governor, a three-time presidential candidate, is now a multi-millionaire living on a sprawling 2500-acre estate in Colusa County.

Yale law alum J. Anthony Kline, the Panther’s trusted lawyer, became Brown’s legal affairs secretary, and presiding judge of California’s appeal courts. Kline 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.

Current Attorney general Rob Bonta, a Yale law alum, also knows that there is no statute of limitations on murder. A ballpark figure for the chance that he will take on the Van Patter murder is zero. It is long past time for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to examine the evidence with all the scientific tools now at their command. As “Forensic Files” and other shows confirm, many cold cases from decades past can now be solved.

According to David Weir, “private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Van Patter’s murder, told private eye Hal Lipset who ordered the hit and who carried it out.” Van Patter’s family reportedly has Lipset’s notes.

FBI special agents could take sworn depositions from Jerry Brown, J. Anthony Kline, just for starters. The agents should devote particular attention to Panther vets Bobby Seale, David Hilliard and “social justice” advocate Elaine Brown.

An FBI newly dedicated to criminal justice would reinvestigate all murders pointing to the Black Panthers. The struggle against leftist violence is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Let that be the message of Radical Son moving forward.