1980–1981 Home-Invasion Period

The 1980–1981 Home-Invasion Period begins with a pattern of break-ins and assaults, then widens into disappearances and murders. As investigators and newspapers connect those crimes, the period becomes both a public crisis and the darkening backdrop against which Bret Ellis reconstructs his last years at Buckley. Its timeline matters not only for what happened, but for how scattered events acquired the shape of a single threat.

Escalation and Connections

The home invasions began during the summer of 1980, stopped, resumed in late spring 1981, and began again in the second week of September. By then, three teenage girls had been murdered. Reporting established that all three had described silent phone calls, furniture rearranged in their bedrooms, and mysterious gifts before disappearing. Missing neighborhood pets were also later connected to the crimes, though none of the girls had been attacked during the earlier intrusions.

The public understanding of the campaign came in stages. For about a year, break-ins and assaults preceded the disappearances; in 1980, the body of one missing teenage girl was found, and in 1981 a second missing girl’s body was discovered. The later reporting connected the murders to the invasions, turning a sequence of unsettling incidents into a broader pattern without resolving how every crime had been carried out.

A Threat Named

During the week Julie Selwyn’s body was found, the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed receiving two calls from the suspect or suspects. Reports described a disguised, drawn-out voice that claimed responsibility and threatened further crimes. A letter attributed to the perpetrator, written in childlike handwriting, admitted that he and his friends had abducted Julie as she walked to her car after a party in Encino. The name associated with the suspect was the Trawler.

The name did not answer the questions the crimes raised. The period’s accounts leave open where the victims were kept between abduction and discovery, when they were killed, how their bodies were preserved, and the cause of death. The gap between the information released publicly and the details known to investigators sustains the sense of a case assembled from fragments rather than explained in full.

Buckley and the Private Timeline

The public crisis unfolds alongside Bret’s account of adolescence. In 1981, Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds were the most popular couple at Buckley; after dating for about two years, their relationship began to falter that fall. Bret, who had been close to Susan since seventh grade and was secretly in love with both Susan and Thom, experienced the school’s social calendar as a separate, intimate chronology—one organized by relationships, concealment, and the prospect of leaving high school.

That prospect also shaped Bret’s connection with Ryan Vaughn. Ryan planned to leave Los Angeles for college and reinvent himself, and Bret recognized the same desire in himself. Their relationship had to remain concealed; Ryan described the necessary secrecy as a practical condition, while Bret later remembered a September weekend together as the last one untouched by what followed. In retrospect, the brief freedom of that weekend stands against the expanding threat outside the house and the narrowing future available to them at school.

Memory, Evidence, and Aftermath

Years later, Bret’s reconstruction of the period is mediated by objects that preserve or unsettle the past. A reproduction of the 1982 Buckley yearbook, ordered for ninety-nine dollars, brings him back to the classmates and friends he lost. Of the sixty seniors, five were missing; three appeared in the In Memoriam section. The yearbook’s cinematic presentation strikes the adult narrator as a forced brightness set against what happened.

Other objects turn recollection into uneasy investigation. In Matt Kellner’s room, Bret finds a phone number marked with the initials RM and associates them with Robert Mallory, though he cannot be certain whether the number was private or listed in a school roster. A cassette delivered to Bret later begins with recorded wind and distant waves before a voice becomes audible; its contents make sound itself an uncertain form of evidence. In December, an envelope holds roughly forty black-and-white photographs of Bret, including images of him with Robert and entering the Benedict Canyon house. One photograph, taken from a van, shows Bret leaving Matt at the pool house.

The period therefore survives in the narrative as more than a closed sequence of crimes. Its unresolved facts, recorded traces, and later recollections repeatedly complicate the boundary between what Bret witnessed, what he inferred, and what he could know. The public campaign of intrusions and murders runs alongside the private histories of desire and concealment, while the adult act of remembering exposes how incompletely either history was settled.