Katherine Latchford’s disappearance and murder are the first known killing in the Trawler’s sequence and a turning point in the novel’s reconstruction of Robert Mallory’s past. Robert had dated Katherine shortly before she vanished, but Abigail Mallory says the relationship was casual and that Robert denied knowing anything about her disappearance. The distinction matters: the evidence links him to Katherine and to the period of her disappearance, while also revealing that someone else was responsible for the threatening calls, disturbances in Katherine’s bedroom, and the poster she suspected Robert of leaving.

The Disappearance and Robert’s Connection

In a later conversation with Abigail, Bret Ellis learns that Robert was at a Westwood theater on a Saturday in May with Katherine, whose nickname was Kathy. Bret had previously seen Robert there; Abigail’s confirmation establishes that his recollection was accurate and explains why Robert had denied being at the theater. Robert and Katherine had gone to movies and a concert, but Abigail describes their involvement as casual: Katherine was seeing other people, and Robert expected to return to Chicago in September.

Katherine disappeared in 1980, during the period when Robert was staying in Los Angeles with Abigail. Abigail says the disappearance preceded a change in Robert’s behavior: he began vanishing for days, sometimes as long as a week, and claimed that someone had started following him. In retrospect, she identifies Katherine’s disappearance as the point after which his paranoia began. Bret later connects the timing of the Trawler’s early home invasions and assaults to Robert’s periods in Los Angeles, but that chronology is his suspicion rather than proof that Robert committed the crimes.

Harassment and the False Suspect

Before Katherine vanished, she reportedly told Robert about a series of unsettling incidents. Someone called her and hung up; someone seemed to have entered her bedroom and rearranged a shelf of books and searched a drawer containing her clothes. She also noticed that several pairs of underwear were missing. Katherine suspected that Robert had left her a poster as a gift, a detail that later drew police interest, but Abigail explicitly says Robert had left no poster: someone else had.

That correction complicates the apparent connection between Robert and Katherine’s case. Robert had been seeing her, and he withheld that association after she disappeared, but the threatening calls and intrusion described by Abigail point toward another person’s attention to Katherine. Bret recognizes the poster as a Madness poster for One Step Beyond. The account does not identify the person who left it, but Abigail’s statement separates that act from Robert and makes the poster part of the Trawler’s developing pattern rather than evidence of Robert’s courtship.

Robert’s Silence and the Trawler’s First Victim

After Katherine went missing, Robert told Abigail that someone was following him. He also reported silent calls to his private telephone line and a sense of being watched in public. According to Abigail, the feeling continued through the summer in Los Angeles, while Katherine was missing and before her body was found. Robert sometimes joked about it, but Abigail understood that he was distressed. He later said the following stopped when he returned to Chicago, only to begin again when he came back to Los Angeles for the holidays; anonymous letters and renewed calls preceded another breakdown.

Robert did not come forward to discuss his relationship with Katherine or volunteer information to investigators. Abigail says he maintained that he knew nothing, and that she and Robert’s father agreed he should stay out of the inquiry because of his recent problems. She says she believed him. Bret, by contrast, understands Robert’s silence as an effort to prevent others from connecting him to Katherine after she disappeared. The account leaves both the reader and Bret with a consequential gap: Robert’s association with the victim is established, but the evidence presented here does not establish that he knew who killed her or that he took part in the crime.

Discovery, Records, and Narrative Significance

Abigail confirms that Katherine was the first victim associated with the Trawler. Her body was found in August, after the period in which she had been missing. In later recounting the case, Bret identifies her as the first girl killed and places her disappearance within the broader series of home invasions, assaults, and disappearances. That larger chronology makes Katherine’s case an origin point for the novel’s investigation, while preserving the difference between a documented relationship and Bret’s increasingly elaborate suspicions about Robert.

The case returns not only through recollection but through objects that preserve different versions of it. While searching an abandoned house associated with Robert, Bret finds newspaper clippings about Katherine in a notebook: reports on her disappearance, social and academic life, the weeks she was missing, interviews with those who knew her, the calls and bedroom disturbances, the discovery of her body, and subsequent coverage of the murder. A November 1980 issue of Los Angeles Magazine also contains an article about the case. The notebook holds no comparable clippings about the other girls Bret names, including Sarah Johnson, Julie Selwyn, and Audrey Barbour. Its concentration on Katherine records Robert’s attention to the case, but by itself does not explain why he collected the material or what he believed it proved.

The case is therefore reconstructed through delayed and partial disclosures: Abigail’s account corrects Bret’s memory of the theater and separates Robert from the poster, while the clippings establish how the disappearance and murder were reported over time. Katherine’s story exposes the danger of treating proximity as guilt. Robert concealed a real connection to her, and his silence helped sustain suspicion; yet the evidence Abigail supplies also indicates that the person harassing Katherine was someone else. The novel keeps that tension alive, using the first victim’s case to set the terms of an investigation in which records, recollection, and inference do not yield a complete answer.