Julie Selwyn’s Abduction and Murder

Julie Selwyn’s Abduction and Murder is the third killing later attributed to the Trawler, and the event that turns a poorly understood disappearance into evidence of a serial pattern. Julie vanished after leaving a party near Encino in late July 1981; her body was found at the end of September. At first, the public knew little about what had happened, and neither the killer’s identity nor the full connection between the cases was clear. The delayed disclosures make her case both a crime and a lesson in how a city’s story of violence is assembled from rumors, withheld facts, and clues whose meaning emerges only later.

Disappearance and emerging connections

Julie’s disappearance initially circulated as a vague, frightening story: a girl had left a party and was never seen again. The narrator and his peers did not know her, and with few details reported, she might have remained an urban myth. The case took on a different meaning when it was linked to the disappearance of Katherine Latchford in 1980 and Sarah Johnson in January 1981. Julie’s body was discovered at the end of September, and investigators and the press began to identify similarities among the victims and details connecting their deaths.

Those connections were not immediately available to the public. In 1981, readers knew that the girls had been abducted and were missing for months, and that Katherine’s and Sarah’s bodies had been found in remote locations. The person who reported those discoveries used a fake, groaning voice and asked why the bodies had not yet been found. The detail suggested a killer concerned not only with concealment but with the eventual discovery of his work; however, it did not yet disclose the full nature of the crimes or establish what had happened to Julie.

The pattern behind the case

The Trawler’s identity as a serial killer came into focus through a pattern that had begun before Julie disappeared. Home invasions in the hills above the San Fernando Valley were first reported in 1980 and seemed random: victims included men and women, young and old, couples, families, and people living alone. In some neighborhoods, pets went missing before an attack. Animals belonging to a targeted household and pets from nearby homes could disappear in advance, sometimes in groups of three. At the time, the connection between these disappearances and the later murders was not understood.

The emerging pattern also included silent or unnerving telephone calls and indications that someone had entered a victim’s home before an assault. The narrator describes the cases as a narrative being constructed by an offender, but stresses that the connections were not made at once. Julie’s case consequently belongs to a history whose individual signs were visible before their significance was known: the public could encounter separate disappearances, intrusions, and murders without yet recognizing them as parts of the same design.

Discovery and public knowledge

Julie’s body was found in September on a public tennis court in a park near Woodland Hills. The discovery established that she had been killed and brought her case into direct relation with Sarah Johnson’s, whose remains were later found in similar condition. The details of the injuries were not fully released. The Los Angeles Police Department kept its public descriptions vague, while anonymous leaks circulated partial information that was disturbing enough to intensify public fear without explaining the crimes fully.

The name Trawler itself emerged through an accidental route into public knowledge. Two investigators in the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department had privately coined the nickname as a lewd joke connected to fishing imagery and the crimes. A memo leaked to the press, and an unredacted reference appeared in a newspaper report. The label then became the name used in the few articles about the developing serial case. It was not an official public identity during the summer when Julie disappeared; the articles confirming the connections appeared only in late September, after her body had been found.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The case’s obscured details persisted well beyond the discovery. The matching alterations to the victims’ bodies were not fully disclosed to the press, and the narrator says that most of what had happened became known only almost a year after the last girl was found, through a lengthy article in the Los Angeles Times. Before then, the public had rumors and leaks, not a complete account. The book emphasizes the pre-digital conditions of this delay: information could remain secret, and secrecy was ordinary rather than exceptional.

Julie’s murder thus changes the status of the earlier disappearances. What had seemed like separate cases becomes a serial pattern, while the newly recognized pattern also casts earlier home invasions and missing pets as possible warnings. The account preserves the distinction between what was later understood and what people knew at the time. Julie is identified retrospectively as the Trawler’s third victim, but the narrative’s suspense comes from the interval in which her disappearance, the earlier murders, and the intrusions had not yet cohered into a public explanation.