Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive becomes the remote approach to the murder scene of Eldon Mate, a place where Los Angeles gives way to unfinished road and exposed soil. Its isolation makes the site difficult to reach, while the killer’s decision to leave the van in view makes that isolation part of a conspicuous display. The road is not merely a backdrop: its changing surface, warning signs, and sparse traces of passage shape how the crime is discovered and read.

Setting and Approach

A week after Mate’s murder, Alex drives to the site in the morning. From Beverly Glen he turns onto Mulholland Drive and continues four miles west, passing strained hillside houses and empty lots. The road coils upward through weeds, brush, and saplings; its surface changes from asphalt to packed ocher soil, while the paved continuation east is renamed Encino Hills Drive. At the top of the city, Mulholland has become a dirt road and an impasse. A county warning sign announces seven miles of unfinished road ahead and prohibits vehicles; a locked gate blocks the route. The distinction between a familiar city drive and a rough, restricted track arrives abruptly enough to catch Alex by surprise.

The location’s remoteness is established through the contrast between its earlier and present use. Alex had hiked there as a graduate student, when the brush and high grass offered glimpses of deer, foxes, and falcons, and the possibility of cougars. That remembered landscape is now the approach to a crime scene, not a recreational destination. Milo is already waiting in his unmarked car beyond the gate, at the rise above the site. The place sits close to the city in distance, but its unfinished road and gate sharply limit ordinary access.

The Murder and Its Discovery

Mate is murdered in the very early hours of a fog-laden Monday in September, in a van parked on a remote section of Mulholland Drive. Hikers discover it just after dawn. The vehicle’s placement makes the setting both secluded and visible: it stands along a road few people use, yet it is not hidden away from anyone who comes through. The van contains Mate’s own killing machine, a fact that becomes the most widely circulated detail of the crime in its first reports.

The murder briefly breaks through the usual short attention span of Los Angeles news. The Times and the Daily News publish headlines on Tuesday, television drops the story within a day, and Wednesday’s papers recap it. The coverage lasts four days. Most published accounts rely on biographical clippings, old photographs and quotations, and familiar debate about Mate’s ethics; details about the scene remain sparse. The remote road helps make the crime difficult for the public to see clearly even as the van’s discovery gives it immediate news value.

Traces at the Kill Site

When Alex follows Milo from the rise to the kill-spot, faint chevron-shaped tire tracks still corrugate the yellow soil. A scrap of yellow cordon tape lies nearby, dusty and unmoving. The quiet remnants make the elapsed week tangible: no one has disturbed the ground, but the scene has not yielded an easy solution. Milo explains that the police cast the tracks, though he doubts they will matter because investigators already know where the van came from. It was a brown Ford Econoline rented by Mate from the Avis branch in Tarzana on Friday, at the weekend rate, with a cargo area large enough for the killing.

The physical layout also informs the investigators’ reconstruction of the attack. Cardboard panels, cut to fit the van’s windows and streaked with arterial blood, had been used to block the view from outside while the body was cut. Alex argues that the killer later removed them, allowing the body to be seen. The removal changes the cardboard from a practical screen into a clue about presentation: concealment during the violence, followed by exposure after it. In that reading, the visible van and the geometric wounds belong to the same deliberate message, staged at a place where discovery was possible but traffic remained sparse.

Isolation and Display

Mulholland Drive holds the crime between concealment and announcement. Its remote stretch offers a killer time and privacy, while the road itself remains accessible enough for hikers to find the van at dawn. The scene’s relative stillness a week later—tire impressions in the soil, discarded tape, no movement—contrasts with the violence reconstructed inside the vehicle. Rather than simply hiding Mate’s body in the wilderness, the killer leaves the van where it can be discovered and removes the window coverings. The setting therefore gives the murder both a secluded working space and an audience, however small. Its transition from pavement to dirt makes that boundary visible: beyond the ordinary city route, the road becomes a rough threshold to a crime arranged to be seen.