Betty Van Patter
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Betty Van Patter (c.1932 - December 13, 1974) was a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party and an aide to Panther leader Elaine Brown in 1974, after being introduced to the Party by David Horowitz.
Later that year, after a dispute with Brown allegedly over financial irregularities, she went missing on December 13, 1974 and some weeks later her severely beaten corpse was found on a San Francisco Bay beach.
Though the case remains officially unsolved, former Panther supporter David Horowitz has maintained for years that Elaine Brown was directly responsible for the murder and that it occurred because Brown believed Van Patter was about to "blow the whistle" on the misappropriation of funds by certain party members.
Brown's 1992 book A Taste of Power falsely claimed that Van Patter had a criminal past and had been convicted of drug trafficking. After protestations from the Van Patter family, these claims were removed from subsequent editions of the book.