Los Angeles Police Department

The Los Angeles Police Department is the principal law-enforcement agency associated with the Trawler’s crimes and their investigation. Its presence emerges not as a single, authoritative explanation but through scattered procedures and disclosures: officers respond to the desecrated Griffin at Buckley, investigators’ private nickname for the killer leaks into news coverage, and police information about Matt Kellner’s disappearance and death conflicts with details later examined by his father. The agency’s work helps connect apparently separate incidents, while its guarded and unevenly communicated findings leave characters and readers to distinguish evidence from conjecture.

Investigating the emerging pattern

The agency’s connection to the case begins before the killer has acquired a public name. In the early phase of the home invasions, investigators had not yet linked the intrusions to the later murders or to the disappearance of Katherine Latchford. The attacks appeared indiscriminate, affecting different kinds of households and both male and female victims. Clues involving missing pets and silent telephone calls would become part of the broader pattern, but those connections were not apparent to the public at the time. The narrative emphasizes the gap between events as they occurred and the pattern that investigators and the public would assemble later.

The name Trawler originated as a private, joking label used by two investigators in the Hollywood division. A memo from that division was leaked to the press with the nickname still visible, and newspaper coverage adopted it. The label was not an official public identification at the time the early crimes occurred; the victims were only beginning to be connected, and the Los Angeles Times would publish a confirming series of articles later in September. The episode shows how an internal designation can enter public circulation through a leak, turning an investigators’ shorthand into the name by which the city understands the emerging serial case.

As investigators gradually connected the crimes, recurring warning signs acquired meaning retrospectively. The account describes pets disappearing before attacks, sometimes in the victim’s household and sometimes elsewhere in the neighborhood, and says that several animals could be taken before an assault. Silent calls and indications that rooms had been altered also became recognizable as possible precursors. These details did not initially make the attacks predictable to residents or establish a complete account of the offender’s actions. Their significance depends on later comparison, and the narrative preserves the uncertainty that surrounded them when separate households first reported them.

Crime scenes and controlled disclosure

The agency appears on the Buckley campus after the Griffin statue has been desecrated. The narrator sees the head of maintenance and the head of school security conferring with two armed, uniformed police officers. He later learns that the officers are waiting for a crime-scene photographer. The scene is being handled as an investigation, even as the school grounds remain a place where students might encounter it: the narrator bypasses a barricade and approaches before staff notice him. When he is ordered away, the officers and security chief watch him grimly. The response establishes both the presence of formal police procedure and the school’s immediate effort to restrict access.

Police communication about the murders is also carefully bounded. Details of the victims’ injuries are withheld from the press, partly because officials and others who knew what had been found feared that fuller disclosure would intensify public alarm. Rumors and anonymous leaks nevertheless circulated, while the newspaper accounts remained incomplete. The investigation therefore reaches the public in layers: an official account can acknowledge a case or a connection without disclosing all the evidence, and leaked material can fill some gaps without becoming a complete or verified record.

After Julie Selwyn’s remains are found, the Los Angeles Police Department confirms that it received two calls from the suspect or suspects. Reporting later describes a deliberately altered-sounding voice and a caller claiming responsibility and promising further crimes. The week of the discovery also brings the Trawler nickname into the news through references in the leaked Hollywood-division file. A letter attributed to the suspect is reported as an admission that he and associates abducted Julie as she walked to her car after a party in Encino. The account notes that the public version omits information about the injuries that would have demonstrated the writer’s knowledge of the crime. The agency’s disclosures thus confirm key links while withholding information that is not made available in the newspaper report.

The Matt Kellner inquiry

The Los Angeles Police Department becomes involved in Matt Kellner’s disappearance after several days pass without anyone knowing where he is. His parents cooperate with the agency and file a missing-person report. Matt’s routines make the absence difficult to interpret at first: he sometimes spent time away alone, but he normally left a note, and this time he did not. His father last saw him on the Thursday before the disappearance became a concern, while school security had seen him leave Buckley the following day. The family’s account and the school’s recollections establish a last known sequence without resolving where Matt went afterward.

A bloodstained backpack bearing Matt’s name and address is found in a parking lot at Crystal Cove State Park and brought to the attention of Orange County police. The name matches the missing-person report filed with the Los Angeles Police Department. This discovery intensifies concern, but the school does not share the information broadly. Dr. Croft tells Susan Reynolds that the details are considered too upsetting to disclose to the entire student body, especially younger pupils. At assembly, Susan says only that Matt remains missing and asks anyone with information to contact the administration. The episode distinguishes police information from what the school chooses to announce, leaving students with a public statement that is less complete than the information available to adults.

After Matt’s death, Dr. Croft tells the students that it was an accident: Matt supposedly returned to the Haskell Avenue residence, slipped by the pool, struck his head, and drowned. The statement omits that he had been missing for a week and that his bloodstained backpack had been found away from home. The narrator initially feels relief that the death is being presented as unrelated to the Trawler, but doubts the account. The school’s simple explanation becomes the first public version of events, not a conclusion supported in the narrative by a disclosed police investigation.

Later, Matt’s father tells the narrator that the family does not know what really happened and shows him crime-scene photographs. He also disputes the idea that Matt drove a long distance before returning home. Before Matt disappeared, his father had taken the Datsun to a Nissan dealership in Encino for service and recorded its mileage; when the car was back at the guesthouse a week later, the mileage had not increased enough to support the claimed journey. The father’s comparison does not by itself establish who was responsible for Matt’s death, but it directly undermines the account that Matt had driven far down the coast and back.

Competing accounts and the case’s resolution

The narrator brings his suspicions to Dr. Croft, linking the dates of the home invasions and murders to Robert Mallory’s presence in Los Angeles. Croft calls the reasoning a substantial leap. The narrator also raises Matt’s death and the injuries he says are documented in the autopsy report, but Croft answers that Matt’s death was ruled accidental and suggests that Matt’s father may be too distressed to judge the matter clearly. These exchanges show how the case is shaped not only by police evidence but by disagreement over which sources merit trust: an official ruling, a parent’s observations, the narrator’s timeline, and information that has not been publicly explained.

After the attack at the North Canon Drive residence and Robert’s fatal fall at Century Towers, the narrator gives police an account that presents Robert as the assailant and himself as acting in self-defense. He repeats his theory that Robert was linked to the Trawler’s crimes, including Matt’s death and the disappearance of Debbie Schaffer. The account is taken down with few questions, and the narrator signs his statements while injured. This statement is a consequential act of narration within the investigation: it supplies the police with a coherent explanation, but the narrative identifies it as the narrator’s version rather than independently establishing every accusation as fact.

The later publication of a Trawler letter further revises what had seemed to be the case against Robert. The letter claims responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death, refers to Robert indirectly as the God, and denies that he was responsible for the crimes. Abigail Mallory then releases letters sent to Robert beginning after Katherine’s disappearance. Their voice matches the Trawler’s, and the letters reveal that Robert had been watched and sent messages over an extended period. The new evidence clears Robert of the suspicion that he was the Trawler, while leaving the agency’s earlier information, the narrator’s conclusions, and the killer’s claims in a complicated relationship rather than producing a wholly transparent account.

Institutional limits and narrative significance

The Los Angeles Police Department’s role is defined by an ongoing tension between investigation and disclosure. Its officers attend a crime scene, receive calls and reports, and its investigators contribute to the gradual connection of crimes; at the same time, sensitive details are withheld, information reaches the school unevenly, and the public sometimes encounters a simplified account before contradictory evidence appears. The book does not present every omission as proof of police misconduct. Instead, it shows how incomplete communication creates space for rumor, fear, and private inference, especially when families, school officials, and investigators possess different portions of the record.

That fragmented record makes the agency central to the story’s uncertain knowledge. A leaked memo gives the killer a name; confirmed calls and later reporting connect cases; a missing-person report helps identify Matt’s bloodied backpack; and the official description of his death is challenged by mileage evidence and the father’s doubts. Later disclosures about the Trawler’s letters change the interpretation of Robert’s apparent connection to the crimes. Across these shifts, the Los Angeles Police Department is both the institutional route through which evidence becomes legible and one part of a larger narrative in which no single early account settles what happened.