Katherine Latchford

Katherine Latchford, also known as Kathy, is the first murder victim in the Trawler’s series, although her connection to the crimes was not understood when she disappeared in June 1980. Her story brings together clues that initially seemed unrelated: a casual relationship with Robert Mallory, unsettling incidents around her home, neighborhood pets that vanished, and a distinctive gift later associated with the killer. The delayed recognition of those details makes Katherine a central figure in the novel’s changing account of how the Trawler’s pattern was assembled—and of how suspicion could settle on Robert instead.

Identity and Disappearance

Katherine was a young woman whose yearbook portrait later became familiar to the public: feathered hair, full lips, and half-closed eyes. In the summer of 1980, she was seeing Robert casually. They went to movies and a concert, but, as Robert’s aunt Abigail later explained, the relationship was not serious; Katherine was seeing several people, and Robert expected to return to Chicago in September. Other boys who had been involved with her were questioned after she disappeared. Robert was not, in part because his family believed his recent difficulties made it better for him to remain outside the inquiry.

Katherine disappeared in mid-June. Her body was found in August in a dumpster behind a gas station near Redlands, which had not been emptied for a month. At the time, neither the discovery nor the circumstances of her disappearance were publicly linked to the home invasions troubling Los Angeles. She was later identified as the first of the Trawler’s murder victims, but that classification emerged only after investigators and reporters began connecting crimes that had originally appeared separate.

Warning Signs Around Her Home

In the days before Katherine vanished, she told her parents that she had received strange telephone calls. The caller did not speak. The silence left her family without a clear explanation of what the caller wanted, while later accounts would establish that silent calls were among the recurring signs preceding attacks attributed to the Trawler.

Katherine also believed someone had entered her bedroom. A shelf of books seemed to have been rearranged, a drawer had been gone through, and several pairs of her underwear were missing. She suspected Robert had left a record poster for her, but Abigail later clarified that he had not. These details were not initially treated as a coherent warning. In retrospect, the calls, the apparent disturbance of her room, and the unexplained gift fit a pattern of advance surveillance and intrusion that only became legible after more victims and related incidents were known.

The warning signs extended beyond Katherine’s room. Her cat disappeared shortly before she did, and two dogs from the neighborhood were also missing. The novel later establishes disappearing pets as one recurring feature of the Trawler’s early operations: animals vanished from the neighborhood of a targeted victim before a home invasion or attack. That connection was not known when Katherine’s body was found. It became part of the larger pattern only after the crimes were compared, turning what had seemed like separate losses into evidence of preparation.

Robert Mallory and the Concealed Connection

Robert’s connection to Katherine mattered because he denied having been with her at a Westwood theater shortly before her disappearance. Much later, Abigail confirmed that the narrator had seen him there with Katherine on a Saturday in May. Robert had kept the relationship from others because Katherine disappeared afterward and he did not want anyone to draw a connection between them. His denial therefore had an explanation consistent with concealment and fear of suspicion, but it also made him appear more deeply implicated as the investigation’s story developed.

Abigail described Katherine’s relationship with Robert as casual, not a serious romance. She also recounted that Katherine had told Robert about the silent calls, her suspicion that someone had been in her bedroom, and the missing clothing. Katherine had wondered whether Robert had left the poster that later attracted police interest. Abigail emphasized that he had not. That distinction separates Robert’s actual, hidden association with Katherine from the signs left by the person stalking her: he lied about seeing her, but the evidence described by Abigail did not make him the source of the calls, intrusion, or gift.

The narrator eventually confronted Robert with the theater sighting and accused him of lying about being with Katherine in the week she disappeared. Robert challenged what the accusation proved and suggested that the narrator himself might have been the person following them. The exchange captures the uncertainty surrounding Katherine’s case: Robert’s false denial was real, but it could not by itself establish that he was responsible for what happened to her.

The Trawler’s Pattern and Its Revelation

At first, Katherine’s disappearance was not understood as part of a serial case. The Trawler had not yet acquired that name, and investigators had not connected the early home invasions, missing animals, and missing women. The nickname emerged privately among investigators in the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department and reached the press through a leaked memo. Reporting later connected Katherine with Sarah Johnson and Julie Selwyn, and placed their deaths within a larger sequence of attacks and warning signs.

The poster suspected by Katherine was a promotional poster for the Madness record One Step Beyond. Later accounts described the missing contents of her aquarium as another disturbing part of the case: the fish had disappeared about a week before she was abducted. The novel distinguishes rumor from confirmed knowledge about the crimes, noting that some early public claims about the fish were never verified at the time. It also explains that rubber cement, rather than the substance rumored in early accounts, was used in the killer’s treatment of Katherine’s remains. These qualifications matter: the public learned the case through leaks, incomplete newspaper reporting, and later corrections, not through a single definitive account.

Katherine’s case thus becomes a test of how evidence can be hidden in plain sight. The silent calls, the disturbed bedroom, the missing pets, and the poster were signs, but no one initially knew how to read them together. Even Robert’s concealed dates with Katherine offered an incomplete clue: they placed him near her life without proving that he was the killer. The eventual disclosures instead identify the Trawler as the person responsible and recast Katherine as the first victim in a pattern that had begun before the public could name it.