“Gifts” and Sacrifices

The Trawler’s “gifts” are not gestures of generosity but a system of stalking, coded communication, and murder, framed as offerings to Robert Mallory, whom the killer calls “the God.” Across the story, posters, letters, photographs, and other traces turn ordinary objects into messages whose meaning is difficult to establish. The eventual disclosure that the Trawler and his associates had been following Robert for nearly a year and a half reverses the apparent relationship between the supposed recipient and the crimes: Robert is the object of the killer’s fixation, not the killer himself.

A vocabulary of devotion

The Trawler describes Robert as “the God” and the crimes as gifts or sacrifices left for him. In a letter sent to the Los Angeles Times, the Trawler takes credit for Audrey Barbour’s murder and the earlier victims, insisting that Robert had no wrongdoing or suspicion attached to him. The language turns murder into an offering and the killer’s pursuit of recognition into a performance of devotion. It also casts Robert as an imagined recipient who is being watched and addressed, whether or not he understands the messages.

The letters began in the summer of 1980, after Katherine Latchford disappeared, and continued into the early fall of 1981. Abigail Mallory later released these fan notes, which were recognizable as coming from the same voice as the Trawler’s public letter. They contained no victim names and no clear references to the home invasions. Instead, they told Robert that he and his associates were watching over him, that he had been spotted around the city, and that “gifts,” “sacrifices,” or “treasures” were waiting to be found. Their omissions helped keep the letters from explaining the crimes to Robert even as they made his surveillance explicit.

Objects that may be messages

The gifts do not arrive as a single, clearly identifiable collection. A Foreigner 4 poster left in Matt Kellner’s mailbox later chills Bret when he sees an identical poster in Matt’s cleared room. There, among the few objects left behind, Bret finds Matt’s handwritten initials RM and a phone number on a notepad. The green rotary phone has no working connection, and Bret takes the paper with him, unsure whether the number belonged to Robert or whether his own suspicions are leading him to hear significance where there may be none. The objects create a trail, but do not immediately settle what it means.

Other media likewise preserve traces without making them easy to interpret. A cassette addressed to “Brett,” with the name misspelled, first appears to be an unwanted or possibly hopeful personal message. When Bret plays it, he hears recorded wind and distant waves before a faint voice becomes audible. Its contents make the tape part of the story’s accumulating evidence, while its obscure sound delays any confident reading of it. The pattern continues in December, when a manila envelope addressed to “BRETT” arrives with roughly forty black-and-white photographs, many taken with a telephoto lens. They show Bret with Robert at Gilley Field and at the abandoned house on Benedict Canyon, as well as moments connected to Matt at the pool house. The last image reveals that Bret himself had been photographed from a van. The supposed gifts are therefore also records of how closely the sender has watched the people around Robert.

The crime behind the offering

After Robert’s death, the discovery of Audrey Barbour’s body in the soundproofed basement of the Benedict Canyon house initially intensifies suspicion around him. The Trawler’s later letter changes the meaning of that discovery: Audrey, like the other murdered girls, was a sacrifice the killer claimed to have left for “the God.” The letter says that the Trawler and his associates soundproofed the basement, and that Audrey had been held there before her death and discovery. Bret realizes that she may have been in the house during his own visit. The revelation binds the supposed offering to a physical place Robert sometimes visited, without establishing that Robert committed the murders.

The Trawler also claims to have become intimate with many of Robert’s acquaintances, as had his friends, and mentions mementos, photographs, and posters left for Robert’s classmates. These statements widen the reach of the gifts: they are not only offerings to Robert but also evidence that his social circle has been infiltrated. The killer’s letters never identify the victims, however, and give Robert no direct explanation of the crimes. According to Abigail, Robert at one point suspected that the notes came from a group of obsessive girls or from a former date. The gifts’ coded presentation thus sustains the Trawler’s private narrative while leaving its recipient unable to connect that narrative to the violence.

Reversal and significance

The Trawler’s letter is both a claim of authorship and a correction to the story that had formed around Robert. The killer resents the suggestion that Robert was responsible, insists that the crimes and the “project” belong to the Trawler and his associates, and promises that Leslie Slavin will be the final Los Angeles County victim and the last offering to the deceased boy he calls “the God.” Abigail’s release of the earlier letters confirms the connection between the private messages and the public claim, and Robert is suddenly exonerated as the Trawler. The letters establish that the stalking began well before his arrival at Buckley and continued as the followers turned their attention to the students closest to him.

The motif’s force comes from the gap between an object and the story attached to it. A poster can be a clue or merely a poster; a phone number can imply a private connection without proving one; photographs can expose a surveillance campaign only after the recipient has been watched. Calling these things gifts makes them seem chosen and meaningful, but their meaning is controlled by the sender and disclosed only in fragments. The Trawler’s offerings therefore do more than connect crimes: they show how a killer can use attention, secrecy, and narrative to make other people into unwitting participants in a story they cannot yet read.