Murder of Betty Van Patter
Writer David Horowitz has accused Brown of ordering the murder of Betty Van Patter, a former Black Panther Party accountant and mother of three, in 1973. Horowitz alleges that Van Patter intended to go public with illegalities she had uncovered in the Black Panthers account books, and that Brown had Van Patter murdered because these allegations would have hindered Brown's city council bid. Brown's 1992 book A Taste of Power claimed that Van Patter had a criminal past and had been convicted of drug trafficking. After protests by the Van Patter family, these claims were removed from subsequent editions of the book as they turned out to be a fabrication by Elaine Brown.
Read more about this topic: Elaine Brown
Famous quotes containing the words murder of, murder, betty, van and/or patter:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“My chance, when it came, was due, literally, to the fact that I was slender.... You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will endanger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady’s sake.”
—Maria Jeritza (1887–1982)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“I can’t work without a model. I won’t say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Houndsditch was ... a crumbling and smoke-grimed necropolis in boarded windows, mummified everywhere by old railings, stagnant air, and cobwebs, where draughty hallways reek with the smell of stale cabbage, Blakean children weep soot, and merchants patter with Mammon and make God evanescent.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)