Letter to Robert Mallory

The letters sent to Robert Mallory are the Trawler’s extended, misleading correspondence with a person he called “the God”: affectionate in form, but built around surveillance, promised offerings, and a claim of intimacy with Robert’s circle. Sent from the summer of 1980 through the fall of 1981, they did not name victims or explain the home invasions, leaving Robert without the information needed to connect the messages to the violence around him. Their eventual release reframed the case: the writer was not Robert confessing to the crimes, but the Trawler declaring his own fixation on Robert and seeking credit for the acts he committed in Robert’s orbit.

Form and Timeline

The messages began after Katherine Latchford disappeared in the summer of 1980 and continued into the early fall of 1981. They were described as fan notes or love letters, a form that made the attention seem personal without making its purpose clear. The letters returned to the same ideas: Robert was being watched, the Trawler and his friends were nearby, and gifts would appear for him around the city.

The correspondence developed alongside the Trawler’s crimes, but withheld the information that would have made that relationship legible. It contained no names of victims and no references to the home invasions. Robert therefore received a continuing announcement of surveillance without an explicit account of what the watchers were doing. The gap between the letters’ intimate address and their concealed context is central to their effect: they told Robert he was the focus of attention while obscuring the danger that attention represented.

Gifts, Sacrifices, and the Trawler’s Claims

The Trawler called the promised items “treasures” and described them as gifts and sacrifices left for Robert. The letters referred to gifts for his classmates, including mementos, photographs, and posters. In the wider pattern later disclosed, the Trawler’s language of offerings connected the messages to crimes and to objects left behind, rather than to ordinary admiration.

The Trawler’s claims extended beyond Robert alone. He wrote that he had become intimate with many of Robert’s acquaintances, and that his friends had also spent time with them, without identifying those people. He also claimed responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death and presented her as another sacrifice offered to the deceased boy he called “the God.” The accompanying letter to the Los Angeles Times stated that the Trawler and his friends had soundproofed the basement of the abandoned Benedict Canyon house Robert sometimes visited, where Audrey had been held before her body was discovered. The correspondence thus made Robert the imagined recipient of the Trawler’s acts, not their author.

Robert’s Misreading and the Letters’ Release

The messages did not give Robert enough specific information to identify the victims or infer the connection between the letters and the crimes. According to Abigail Mallory, he at one point thought they might have come from a group of “psycho chicks” or from a girl he had dated and then left during his first months in California. He did not, as Bret had assumed, follow the broader pattern closely enough to connect the communications to the home invasions and killings.

After Leslie Slavin was abducted and the Trawler’s letter to the Los Angeles Times took credit for Audrey’s death, Abigail released the letters Robert had received. Their shared voice identified them as the Trawler’s communications and suddenly exonerated Robert as the author of the crimes. The letters also established that the surveillance had lasted nearly a year and a half and extended to the students closest to Robert after he arrived at Buckley. The revelation changed the meaning of the earlier messages: what had seemed like incomprehensible fan attention was evidence of a sustained campaign directed at Robert and those around him.

Narrative Consequences

The letters’ delayed disclosure exposes the danger of treating attention as proof of agency. Bret had assembled a timeline tying Robert’s presence in Los Angeles to disappearances and attacks, and had taken the correspondence as part of a larger case against him. Abigail’s release of the notes supplied a competing explanation: the Trawler had followed Robert, called him “the God,” and staged crimes as offerings to him. Bret’s suspicion had identified a real connection between Robert and the crimes, but misidentified its direction and meaning.

The messages also show how the Trawler built a narrative around Robert without giving him the means to understand it. Their promises of gifts, references to classmates, and insistence that Robert was being watched made him the center of a story whose actual violence remained concealed. Once the letters were made public, that story could be read as the Trawler’s own claim of authorship and obsession. It did not, however, rescue Bret from the consequences of his account: although Robert was no longer regarded as the killer, Bret’s forceful explanation of their November 7 encounter had already become the core version of events, and Bret was increasingly ostracized after the Trawler’s responsibility became apparent.