Los Angeles is the first major stop in C.J. Townsend’s search through William Rupert Bantling’s past, and its newspaper archives supply a crucial lead: reports of assaults by an unidentified attacker wearing a clown mask. The city’s role is both geographical and investigative. It is where Bantling spent much of the early 1990s, and where C.J. begins to recognize that crimes once treated as isolated incidents may belong to a wider pattern.

Bantling’s Years in the City

Bantling had lived at two Los Angeles residences from 1990 through 1994, spending the majority of his time there during those years. After his arrest, C.J. searched old newspapers in cities where he had lived, beginning with Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Times. She initially tried combinations of terms associated with the Cupid murders, but found no missing students or models, no apparently related ritualistic killings, and no reports of severed hearts. The absence of that kind of crime mattered: the first trail she uncovered was not a repeat of the murders under investigation, but a different category of violence.

Newspaper Leads and a Possible Pattern

Changing her search terms to women, rape, knife, clown, and mask produced three articles. One reported that a college student at UCLA had been assaulted in her off-campus apartment in 1991 by an unidentified intruder wearing a rubber clown mask. Another described a Hollywood bartender attacked in her apartment in 1993 by a man in a latex clown mask. A third concerned an assault in Santa Barbara, where the attacker had also worn a rubber clown mask. The reports described separate incidents, and the assailant had not been identified or captured.

The similarities led C.J. to suspect that the reports might concern the same attacker: strangers entering ground-floor apartments at night, victims taken by surprise, and a masked assailant. She found a further report from San Luis Obispo involving an alien mask. These resemblances formed an investigative hypothesis, not proof of the offender’s identity. C.J. widened her search to other cities where Bantling had lived and found additional reported assaults, including cases in Chicago and San Diego. She also compared the locations of victims’ homes with addresses in Bantling’s AutoTrack history; in those two cities, his former residences were within ten miles of the reported crime locations.

From Archives to Police Records

C.J. contacted records departments and obtained reports from six police departments. Their accounts supplied more detail than the newspaper articles: the cases shared a pattern of nighttime entry into first-floor apartments, victims restrained before the assault, and an attacker wearing a clown or alien mask. The reports also described differing implements and forms of injury, alongside the absence of physical evidence that could identify the assailant. Read together, the files strengthened the case-linkage hypothesis while showing why it had not been apparent from any single report.

For C.J., the most persuasive connection was not simply the recurring mask or method. The records contained intimate facts about individual women—such as preferences, schedules, and personal relationships—that the assailant appeared to know and used against them. Those details helped her move from broad similarities toward the belief that the reports were connected to Bantling. The distinction is important: resemblance suggested a link, while the private information in the files made that link feel specific to the case she was building.

A Local Search with Wider Reach

Los Angeles also became the starting point for a search that exceeded the city’s boundaries. C.J. extended her newspaper research to other places Bantling had lived, and later contacted an investigator at INTERPOL. The information returned from that inquiry included reports of similar masked assaults in South America and the Philippines. Those reports were not all independently confirmed in the conversation; they broadened the possible scope of the investigation rather than establishing every offense as Bantling’s.

The city’s importance therefore lies in how its scattered records alter the meaning of the past. The Los Angeles reports did not describe the Cupid murders, and the old cases had not been publicly connected to one another. Yet the search in the city gave C.J. a way to test whether Bantling’s history extended beyond the charges before her. Los Angeles becomes the first archive in a widening map of suspected crimes—and the point at which a prosecution centered on murder begins to reveal a longer, still partly unverified history of assaults.